James Jacobs said:
Pardon my tmesis, but fan-friggin-tastic.
Surre, but now we're talking about adding a lot of cleric levels to a monster that's already CR 10. Even when factoring in the cleric levels as "unassociated class levels" you wind up with some really high CR creatures that aren't really all that challenging for a party of four PC's. Then again, as they are currently designed--with an average of 75 hp, low AC & saves, and scant little in the way of offense--it is hard to justify the avolakia as a CR 10 to begin with IMHO.
Conceptually, avolakia are cool as hell, but I've tried to design avolakia lairs for my players, and it quickly becomes apparent the actual pool of abilities they have at their command is somewhat disappointing. True, a single avolakia alone can create either a large coterie of zombie and skeleton flunkies or a couple of tough ones, but either way they're still just zombies and skeletons and even 6th or 7th level PC's can wrangle them without consuming significant resources.
Avolakias can create ghouls and ghasts too, but again without the ability to command them, they arre left relying on diplomacy and loyalty, and I think that's probably enough said right there.
Well, going by the MMII description of "Avolakia Society", which I thought was lifted directly from the Dragon article, avolakias "delight in creating and modifying undead of all sorts." Now, the text goes on to suggest that they actually have clerics going around casting create undead and create greater undead to field "mummies, spectres, vampires, and ghosts", but now we're talking about epic-level avolakias that are always conveniently out-to-lunch whenever the PC's come calling.
Of course, this is due to yet another problem stacked against the aspiring necromancer: ridiculously high levels of cleric are required to create even the most humble of post-zombie undead. Even a human cleric isn't all that effective at stocking his dungeon.
It just seems reasonable to me that if a 10 HD monster's supposed to have a flair for doing something, then it works a lot better for the monster to have some innate capacity for doing it without without having to rely on tacking on class levels. The rot reaver from MMIII is closer in design to what the avolakia is supposed to be in concept. Since the avolakias late write-up was several years past, a little reboot wouldn't hurt. Please consider.
Yep, I agree. I have to wonder why they just didn't give the MMII artists the Dragon mag illos to work from. Just looking at the results it's easy to tell the avolakia's artist was struggling to figurre out how to depict exactly what the text description was going for.
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