Can intelligent undead read?

[James the Newbie]

I was wandering, the undead should retain all abilities they had in life, so can an intelligent undead read?

I Planned on making my wizard cast explosive runes with non-lethal substitution. This makes a wight (who our mystery foe rose 70 of) perfect for reading them. Afterall what necromancer is going to notice a wight and think it out of place. Using sudden maximise will aid the plan further.

So if a wight where to have say 5-10 explosive runes on a sheet of paper, could he read them? I have command undead, so getting him to do so shouldn't be too hard.

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The rest of this post is a side note of why I plan on employing such a tactic, not part of the question itself. It is more for anyone interesting in what is going on in our campaign, or why I would be driven to planning what would normally be an encounter breaking strategy. So if your only interested in answering the question please disragard this, if you think the above stinks of cheese, you should probably read on.

Our DM is perfectly reasonable in planning encounters, he has never given us something unfair or which we could not handle. However, he has given us encounters we should not be able to fight our way out of, but instead we are meant to sneak our way out of. Instead we talked our way out, it wound up much more interesting.

Our campaign started with the 6 of our level 3 characters locked in a cell, in peasants garbs. We quickly found the guard captain in the fort disliked us, and we had all been accused of crimes, that to the best of our memory we didn't commit. Although we have a 30 day blind spot.

After escaping the cell when a mysterious but weak fireball burned off out bindings, blasted the cell open, and injured us a bit, we went down to find the fort had undead inside. We didn't want to let the guards die, to we slew the undead, and cast sleep on the guards.

With our bargaining chip that we had not killed anyone, we convinced the captain to let us help protect the fort, and told him we would let him imprison us after if we lived. This startled our DM, who has set 70 wights to over run the fort and kill the 20 guards stationed inside.

We willingly opened the gate, buffed our half orc fighter with enlarge person, protection from evil and something else our cleric had, cast entangle, which let the weeds halt all oncoming wights from even reaching the fort, and our fighter single handedly obliterated 30 of them, while arrows weakened the on comers, before re-enforcements came and slew the remaining 40.

Our DM ruled that we had won against all odds, and role played well, so due to this instantly bumped us from level 3 to level 4. Also the guard captain, while not fully trusting us, gave us the benefit of the doubt, took us to see the lord/duke (not sure which) of the area, who rewarded us with a royal pardon in his land only, the fort we saved, and 450 gold pieces each.

Now this enemy was capable of raising 70 wights, and we are a party of level 4's who want to take him down, so we need a long term strategy such as this one. And hey, what kind of necromancer looks at an undead and thinks 'huh, thats out of place'

I hope you found the overview of our first play session interesting and it made you think the munchkiness in this plan is a little bit more tame.

Also we expect to level up soon, so gaining explosive rune should be easy enough.

 

[kitcik]

Of course, they are better read than dead.

 

[Jacob Marley]

As long as it is an intelligent undead (and is not a single-classed barbarian) I don't see why it can't read.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Some intelligent undead are spellcasters- usually wizards or clerics- so reading would be an essential skill for them.

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

 

[Yora]

Does the rune actually have to be text? If it's written in a language you don't understand, can you even trigger it?

 

[James the Newbie]

It can also be a map as far as I know, but I would write it in common, since then I can fit a lot in a small space.

 

[Grogg of the North]

There's nothing in Libris Mortis one way or the other, but I would say that yes intelligent undead are literate if they were so in life. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to have a lich or a vampire wizard.

How are you going to get your explosive runes to the necromancer? Are you controlling a wight and forcing it to deliver them? Remember that wights, and all undead, are immune to nonlethal damage. Also, I don't know if you lose control of your undead if you're unconscious.

 

[James the Newbie]

The idea is, because undead are immune to non lethal damage, they wont take any damage from reading the rune. And I am going to order the wight to run up to the necromancer and read the runes, using the command undead spell.

The plan is to make the wight invisible, cast silence on it, tell the wight to run up to the end, and activate the runes next to the necromancer if they are a living creature. If the necromancer is undead or there are multiple necromancers, it is to leave and tell us that is the case.

Afterall, they rose 70 wights, these guys/this guy are something spectacular, or have a relic under their command.

 

[Jack Simth]

The idea is, because undead are immune to non lethal damage, they wont take any damage from reading the rune. And I am going to order the wight to run up to the necromancer and read the runes, using the command undead spell.

The plan is to make the wight invisible, cast silence on it, tell the wight to run up to the end, and activate the runes next to the necromancer if they are a living creature. If the necromancer is undead or there are multiple necromancers, it is to leave and tell us that is the case.

Afterall, they rose 70 wights, these guys/this guy are something spectacular, or have a relic under their command.

Raising Wights isn't hard - any source of negative levels + Sacrificial Commoners will do it. Controlling them can be. "Simple" control is a 2nd level spell - same one you're using - and it's just a matter of how many castings (or chained castings) do you need to control that many? At days/level, 70 undead could be a 7th level Wizard dedicating 5 3rd level spell slots per day to Extended Command Undead spells (or 4 3rd level slots and 2 2nd level slots, or 3 3rd level slots and 7 2nd level slots, and so on). Or just two 5th level slots each day, with Chain Spell.