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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mordane76" data-source="post: 1396070" data-attributes="member: 7172">Mechanically, this looks fine, but...What would the purpose of this incantation be?  Why would someone use this spell?It takes an hour to cast, can only be cast at night, it requires 12 other people to chant alongside the caster.  As it reads, it seems to hit any particular target once as it spreads out, so each person in the overall radius gets one negative level.  It raises those who die from this as wraiths, but these wraiths aren't controlled by the caster.This spell has almost no combat utilization -- the number of casters and time make it unusable in a standard fight, unless the casting was already going on for 59.9 minutes before the combat starts.While you could use this to kill loads of single HD ordinaries, they all rise as uncontrolled wraiths, which IIRC have 3-4HD and turn resistance... so... they go from 1 HD to effectively 5-6HD for the purposes of attempting to control them.  This makes it of incredibly limited use as a ritual for raising an army of undead, unless all the secondary casters are also potent acolytes capable of controlling portions of this newly created gaggle of wraiths.  Otherwise, casting this ritual would be suicide -- the primary caster couldn't control all the wraiths without some secondary means of controlling a large number of moderately powerful undead, or unless he has a means to render himself immune to their attacks.Failure on this ritual is of limited possibility at best, because of the limitations set on it -- a DC 20 check in either of these skills becomes almost a given for anyone who will be using it, because the only person this ritual would potentially appeal to is a very powerful acolyte (he's the only person that might actually pull it off and have a chance at controlling any of the created undead, as well as resisting the attacks of the uncontrolled undead).  Other people could attempt it, but as I said before it would be suicide from them without protection.I think you should consider the following...Make the undead controlled by the primary caster for some length of time (not necessarily permanent) -- this would GREATLY increase the usefulness of this ritual, but would also increase the DCs of the checks.  If such were the case, I could see people using this ritual; they could kidnap a group of bumkins, slaughter them with this ritual, and then use their wraiths to complete some other atrocity.</blockquote>

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