NPC Lord said:
anybody know any mass undead making spells? one zombie at a time is WAY too slow. i nedd meatpuppets
If you are trying to create 'night of the living dead' style "zombie" hordes, I would go the 'Barbarian 1 Ghoul' route. As ghouls they actually
eat their foes, and the increased speed along with the ability to rage (and the extra 12 hp from the level of barbarian) makes them notably more interesting in combat - especially when you have 5-10 of them roaming in bands, raging whenever they stumble upon or otherwise notice a live one. For a more interesting undead, consider both removing the elven immunity to ghoul paralysis and changing the ghoul's fever so that those dying of it rise 1d10 minutes after dying or upon the next sunset, whichever comes first - rather than the next midnight.
As for mass undead creation spells, I can't think of any off hand, but recall that any PC can research a new spell - so why not any NPC as well?
But you really don't need to go this route. Instead, just create a ghoul and up the DC of its fever and its paralysis; they are based off the same stat, so increasing Cha by +2, +4, etc will be enough to affect both. Given a +4 boost to Cha, the DCs for a 3HD ghoul (2 HD racial, 1 HD bbn) becomes DC 14 - one less than a ghast (don't want to take too much away from the ghast, after all). Take a feat to further increase it by +2 (I forget the name of the feat) and it becomes DC 16.
Should the above come upon a small town during the night, it could conceivably create a score or more more of itself. Within a few days everyone would be dead or an (enhanced) ghoul. There's your army. It's not controllable, granted, but a mass of ghouls wandering the countryside is a notable challenge for your party all by itself. Best yet, if a single one escapes it could recreate the horde in just a few days. So say that the scourge starts in a frontier town and is now moving inwards towards more highly populated lands. Your PCs have been called upon to deal with this terror - or to help deal with it, if they are not high enough in level to deal with ~100 such horrors in a day or two (in groups of 2d10 at a time, of course).
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Do you have Libris Mortis? Perhaps your BBEG has several Necropolian (or whatever it is called) leutinants or an Undead Leadership style feat - with only clerics as followers, all having created the maximum number of undead they can control (boosted by that feat that doubles? their number of controllable undead). The remaining followers are 1 HD undead - zombies, skeletons, etc. The higher level followers might even have Undead Leadership themselves - further increasing your BBEG's ranks.
Or perhaps your BBEG is actually part of a party of BBEGs - each undead or nearly so, each with spells, PrCs, feats, etc that increase the number of undead under their control (&/or held as followers, if each has Undead Leadership). The highest level BBEG is technically the leader of the army. Creating in-fighting between the members of the BBEUP [Big Bad Evil Undead Party] could be a useful strategy, although potentially dangerous to implement.