Recent content by PrandletheBold

Ditto. There's a huge difference in duration between (A) the undead you create yourself, and (B) those which were either animated by other casters or came into being by other means. In the case of "B", control over the undead lasts for essentially just several rounds.

I agree with you. I tend to draw inspiration about what is evil from psychology professor Dr. Robert Hare's work, summarized in his book "Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us." Dr. Hare has spent decades studying psychopathy. These people, without conscience...

My mistake - it would have been more technically accurate to say "destroy". In our game, the "control undead" ability of the caster can be used to cause their own undead to collapse into simple piles of mundane bones - "the plug has been pulled", so to speak. Success of controlling undead is...

Where is this written up? According to the 1e PH write-up re Animate Dead "This spell creates the lowest of the undead monsters, skeletons or zombies, from the bones or bodies of dead humans." I couldn't find anything in the DMG adding in additional undead types. In our game, skeletons and...

Question: If (1) the Animate Dead spell creates "non-Evil undead", such as 1e skeletons and zombies which are Neutral; (2) the spell has no negative consequences to the spirit which once inhabited that empty shell, e.g. it still proceeds happily off to the expected afterlife of its chosen...

Question from a D&D newbie: Are these positive and negative planes necessary in a D&D campaign? Or can the magic system of D&D be run without them, with perhaps a different "cosmology" behind it? Can undead by run as opponents in D&D without a negative energy plane being in the DM's multiverse?