This spell temporarily creates an undead servant. Choose a pile of bones or a corpse of a Medium or Small humanoid within range. Your spell imbues the target with a foul mimicry of life, raising it as an undead creature. The target becomes a skeleton if you chose bones or a zombie if you chose a corpse (the DM has the creature's game statistics).
On each of your turns, you can use a bonus action to mentally command any creature you made with this spell if the creature is within 60 feet of you (if you control multiple creatures, you can command any or all of them at the same time, issuing the same command to each one). You decide what action the creature will take and where it will move during its next turn, or you can issue a general command, such as to guard a particular chamber or corridor. If you issue no commands, the creature only defends itself against hostile creatures. Once given an order, the creature continues to follow it until its task is complete.
The creature is only animated until this spell ends and you can end this spell at any time.
At Higher Levels. If you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, you may temporarily animate an additional undead creature for each slot level above 2nd. Each of the creatures must come from a different corpse or pile of bones.
* - (fresh blood)Previous Versions
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5/31/2021 5:57:34 AM
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Posted Jun 1, 2021This is a new version to make the spell available to warlocks and to give it some better scaling. Originally I made this spell not available to them because Animate Dead wasn't available to them unless you took the Eldritch Invocation for it. The reason for that, I believe, is Animate Dead is fairly unique and awkward with the warlock spell slot amount/level. But I've been re-considering since the more recent stuff that has been released, mainly Summon Undead, is available to warlocks. So since this doesn't have the same awkwardness that Animate Dead has I'm changing the availability. As far as better scaling goes I felt like it should be reasonably balanced. You still need a giant pile of corpses available to make it work which is it's best balancer alongside the fact that its still just making zombies and skellies which are pretty low impact and they are only temporary. It does outscale Animate Dead at 3rd level as far as immediate impact goes, making three undead, but of course Animate Dead has much higher long term effectiveness and Animate Dead actually adds two additional undead per slot level above 3rd so it outscales it when your talking medium to high level spell slots.
There's a small amount of commentary on the previous version.