"Clone" undervalued as a Raise Dead substitute?

[Felix]

Seriously, Clone is the second cheapest "bring 'em back to life" spell second only to Reincarnate, and you don't have to worry about being brought back as a badger.

-- 1000gp material component, 1/5th the price of Raise Dead.
-- 500gp arcane focus, but you can re-use this.
-- Wizards can do it, without the possible divine intervention you have when dealing with clerical spells.
-- This spell can bring back things that were undead.
-- This spell has no "died too long ago" time limit, only needing a cubic inch of flesh from the body.
-- You can clone elementals and outsiders.
-- Backup clone replacements can be made ahead of time, so would work like a contingent Raise Dead; all you need to do is keep the bodies fresh... coffins of Gentle Repose anyone?

Is it me, or has this spell been completely passed over because it's a) Necromancy and that's Eeeeeevil, or b) it's a Sor/Wiz spell, and everyone knows they can't bring the living back!

Oh yeah, and it's a favorite with DM's! Think of it: a necromancer looking way forward into the future saves a piece of his flesh to grow a clone from. Then he works on his lich's phylactery. He grows his clone, and stores it in some deep forgotten demi-pocket-plane whereever for all time to come. Then he goes about being a lich. And of course some snot-nosed adventurers come along and kill him (multiple times), and destroy his phylactery. Immediately his soul transfers to the clone, and with this last resort can either marshall his forces for a death-strike at the PCs, or decide to let the heroes think him dead and gone forever, only to strike back at them once he has regained his former power! Can't beat that!

 

[mikebr99]

Except for the fact that you are here, and all your stuff is way back there with your killers... YMMV


Mike

 

[Thanee]

I have used clone with an archvillain once, who has proven to be a real pain in the butt.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Felix]

Except for the fact that you are here, and all your stuff is way back there with your killers...

Wouldn't that happen to you if you were Raised, Ressurected, or Reincarnated? And you can't cast those spells on yourself... Clone you can self-administer.

And think of this! You're a wizard and you get killed and your allies are still fighting. You wake up in your cloned body one round later. One Teleport later and you've got the naked drop on the baddies to save your companion's day!

 

[UltimaGabe]

I agree, Clone is a very nasty spell, with quite a bit of potential. I also agree that, for the most part, it seems to be underestimated, as I've never seen anyone use it.

Although, I had an idea for an Epic-level adventure in one of the last campaigns I played in... it was a group where we all switched up DMing periodically, but we ended the campaign before I got a chance to use it. You see, my character- a Human Barbarian- was arguably the most powerful in the group. True, there were a couple spellcasters that could pretty much do whatever they wanted to, but in terms of head-on combat, my character was unbeatable, and all the other players knew it. So I had this idea...

You see, my character, Ichi, was an Undead Slayer, and was know all over the world for defeating and royally pissing off a huge cult of Kiaransalee (Forgotten Realms- basically, we went through the City of the Spider Queen adventure, and the other players pushed all of the credit to my character). They had tried a couple times to get back at us, but all attempts failed. (We were some resourceful little buggers.) So, I figured... when we were all Epic Level, we had pretty much gone our separate ways for the most part... and my character decided to start exploring the planes. The idea was as follows:

By this point, a couple decades after Kiaransalee's first defeat at the hands of us, she was pretty pissed off at Ichi. So some of her higher-level followers send a bunch of lower-powered undead guys to bait Ichi into some sort of trap. (He hated undead, and wanted nothing more than to destroy them all, so he could very easily be lured into something like that.) So they lure him onto some little pocket demiplane or something, and as soon as they get a chance, a bunch of spellcasters jump out and Imprison him (with the Imprisonment spell).

So my character's out of the picture for the time being. As for the rest of their plan, I was going to have it be that several years before, during one of our escapades in the underdark fighting these guys, they at point acquired an amount of Ichi's flesh or hair or blood or whatever (considering he's the front-line fighter and took a beating pretty much every opportunity, this isn't very hard to imagine). They immediately started cooking up their own Ichi-clone... Ichi, the unstoppable raging barbarian, was steadily growing in a pod in their basement. All they needed was a soul to inhabit it... and with all of the fiends and whatnot that deities have at their disposal, I figured that wouldn't be too difficult to do. Once he's done growing, put some soul into him, give him some amazingly powerful magic items to duplicate the real Ichi's, and once Ichi is incapacitated, they send their Chaotic Evil duplicate out there to wreak some havoc. Heck, they could even probably use a Wish or two to make it so all (or most) Divinations regarding the real Ichi instead go to this clone instead. Thus, the real Ichi is still alive, and therefore can't be raised or resurrected or found on any of the upper planes, and even if they did get off a Discern Location on him, and it somehow managed to find the real Ichi, since he's on a Demiplane, all it would reveal is the name of the Demiplane.

So the rest of the characters get a call one day because this barbarian that they were at one point partners with has been tearing up some town. They teleport in, and see Ichi- destroying buildings and killing civilians and causing all sorts of mayhem- and delighting in it. As far as they can tell, he's got no enchantments controlling him, he's not an illusion, and as far as anyone or any magic is concerned, it IS Ichi. And he'd take no more pleasure than to slay each and every one of his "allies".

Oh well. Sorry, I kinda went a little off the subject. However, that's just one example of how a high-level Clone spell could be very easily made into a party-killer. Just an idea.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Oh yeah, and it's a favorite with DM's! Think of it: a necromancer looking way forward into the future saves a piece of his flesh to grow a clone from. Then he works on his lich's phylactery.

I've got a variant of this IMC. The now-lich lived in a time when the gods were cruel and to keep their souls from being collected they made clones of themselves. Contingency->Soul Jar may sound wrong but its a great way not to go to an unpleasant eternity.

Since, IIRC, clone only brings you back to one level behind the point your sample comes from, they had regular samples taken. This wizard would occassionally pull out a very old sample to make a young body - best way to go undercover is to be someone else, even better when it's you 50 years ago. So you may only be 5th level wizard again, what does that matter when you portray yourself as your own apprentice/nephew/etc?

Now the lich is using clones of clones to occasionally wander around alive when dealing with those who would have issues with his undead state. Sure, the copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy bodies only last for a few weeks before rotting away and his magical power is limited during that time, but when he pops back to his phylactery he's back to full strength.

 

[the_mighty_agrippa]

My character has a clone hidden away that has a stash of magical combat scrolls right next to the beir. One of them is Time Stop, so I can get back into the fight that much quicker.

 

[Artoomis]

A few of points from the spell:

1. "... treat the clone as if it were the original character raised from the dead, including the loss of one level..."

2. .... If the original creature has lost levels since the flesh sample was taken and died at a lower level than the clone would otherwise be, the clone is one level below the level at which the original died..."

3. ...A duplicate can be grown while the original still lives, or when the original soul is unavailable, but the resulting body is merely a soulless bit of inert flesh, which rots if not preserved..."

So this only really works if you also have a way to preserve the "soulless bit of inert flesh." A wizard has trouble with this, I think. A wish would probably work (more XP gone). Maybe something else is out there that I don't recall, but I think the flesh-preserving spell (meant for corpses) is a clerical one.

It's got potential, though.

 

[AuraSeer]

Wizards have no problem preserving corpses; gentle repose is Clr2, Sor/Wiz3.

 

[Stockdale]

I had a character utlize Clone as a life insurance policy. He was also looking toward lichdom and had considered this a "last resort" as suggested in Felix's initial post.