Pale Master

[airwalkrr]

I happen to have a bit of expertise on the matter of playing a character with an undead army as I play such a character. I used the death master base class from Dragon Magazine Compendium. First of all, one point that I don't see a lot of other people raising is that by the time you are a 10th-level palemaster, having feats or abilities from other classes that make you more undead-like are pointless. The palemaster basically turns you into a mummy by 10th-level and the prestige class itself gives you so many resistances to things undead are resistant to along the way that you are working at cross-purposes if your base class and feats are doing the same thing.

What I suggest is focusing on the Corpsecrafter feat chain. If you want to build an undead army there is no better way. How would you like all undead you create to have the following properties?
- +4 Str
- +2 hp/HD
- +4 turn resistance
- +1d6 cold damage on all natural attacks
- a death throes ability that heals your other nearby undead and hurts living enemies when one of them is destroyed
- +2 natural armor
- +4 to initiative
- +10' movement speed

For the price of six feats you can have all of this. As a human, you could have all of this by level 12. If you want to put some icing on the cake, add the following feats: Necromantic Presence, Necromantic Might. Whenever your undead are within 60' of you they will gain:
- +4 turn resistance
- +2 to attack rolls
- +2 to damage rolls

We're talking about a pretty fantastic undead army there.

Now if Leadership is something your DM will allow, then an undead cohort is nice, but not necessary. If the undead cohort is something your DM will allow you to create (like a mummy or a ghast), then all the better, since it will benefit from your Corpsecrafter feats. Either way, I would select a cohort with the ability to take levels in the cleric class. Have your cohort be a follower of an evil deity with domains like Destruction or Evil. If you want an undead cohort, I suggest a ghoul or a shadow since they can benefit from your Corpsecrafter feats and they have a low ECL so you have more levels you can use for cleric.

Good luck. The path of the necromancer is a rewarding one. Just ask my army of undead which is currently running amok in the Valley of Obelisks.

 

[NEXxREX]

I'm not familiar with the death master base class, and id love to read it. so depending on how kick-ass it is (i honestly dont know) wouldn't he want to go dread necromancer for creating an undead army?

What I suggest is focusing on the Corpsecrafter feat chain. If you want to build an undead army there is no better way. How would you like all undead you create to have the following properties?
- +4 Str
- +2 hp/HD
- +4 turn resistance
- +1d6 cold damage on all natural attacks
- a death throes ability that heals your other nearby undead and hurts living enemies when one of them is destroyed
- +2 natural armor
- +4 to initiative
- +10' movement speed

For the price of six feats you can have all of this. As a human, you could have all of this by level 12. If you want to put some icing on the cake, add the following feats: Necromantic Presence, Necromantic Might. Whenever your undead are within 60' of you they will gain:
- +4 turn resistance
- +2 to attack rolls
- +2 to damage rolls

We're talking about a pretty fantastic undead army there.

Everything you've said is true, but you forgot about desecration which gives +2 hp/HD (if the desecrated area has a shrine) and allows you to raise 4 HD/lv in stead of 2 HD/lv per cast of animate dead.

but the main reason dread necromancer is awesome is undead mastery, for the pure and simple point that it allows you to increase the undead you can control with animate dead and control undead. animate dead is usually 4 HD/lv undead mastery increases this to 4+Cha HD/lv which if you max it out (by lv 8) it would be 9 HD/lv without any item bonus'es effectively making your "army" an unstopable legion. and adds Cha bonus to control undead as well, and maxed out Cha would turn it from 2 HD/lv to 7 HD/lv.

and in addition to this youll get +4 Str(this bonus does not stack with corpsecrafter unfortunately, unless your dm rules it does), +4 Dex, and another +2 Hp/HD

and dread necro has access to rebuke undead further increasing the amount of HD of undead at your disposal. and the charnel touch attack AT WILL which you can heal your undead army with and with the tomb-tainted soul feat you can also heal yourself.

so with 8 lvs of dread necro, and use desecrate - you could have
- +4 Dex
- +2 hp/HD
- +2 hp/HD (for desecrate)

and easily control 2x as much undead per level. with Animate and Control Undead.

making your legion tougher, bigger and harder to hit.
plus heal them to full at the end of each battle for free.

 

[Meadyaon]

I want him to become an undead who looks like character described below but with the features listed below. I know I want my necromancer to have an undead army. He will be NE or CE in alignment. I would like have access to other spells to help him out but have necromantic spells be his main bread and butter.

Features I want including the description below for my character (but with change to fit with the description below) to have when he is an undead:
1) Two vast bat-like wings protrude from his back. The joints of the wings are laced with razorlike joints. The wings crest three and-half feet higher than the shoulders and have a wingspan of thirty feet.
2)The right eye is crimson gem (undead graft).
3) The hands has five fingers and a thumb that each end in a large sharp claw that resembles a knife blade.

Thanatos is a figure in the shape of a nine feet tall humanoid with four arms. His icy cold body is bony and terribly thin with sickly yellow-green shriveled (mummy-like) skin tightly drawn across bones and thin muscles. His rotting head is monstrous in appearance and a nauseating sight to behold. The bones on the right side of the head are stripped of all flesh and muscle revealing bare bones. Solid yellow light glows from within the eye sockets with an cold, evil, unnatural light. The head has long powerful, jaws rimmed with six inch long sharp fang-like teeth. Eleven-inch dagger-shaped teeth protrude from the upper jaws of the head. These teeth are tapered to an edge on both the front and the back cusps. The head has worms crawling on it. The arms are covered in rotting, gangrenous skin with areas of bone showing through the skin. The armor he wears appears as a large rib cage complete with spinal column and shoulder blades. The bone the armor is made from appears to be human in origin, and is bleached white. He wears a billowing hooded black funereal robe over his armor with a belt of skulls. The left side of the robe is rotting and tattered.

 

[Meadyaon]

Would a Wish spell be the best way to turn into the creature in the description?

 

[Buugipopuu]

Meadyaon: What is your obsession with double-posting to bump months-old dead threads? Your obsession with thread necromancy is almost as creepy as your obsession with detailed and fetishistic descriptions of actual necromancy*. If nobody's posted in a thread for over a month, it probably means nobody wants to comment on your dubious character concepts.

*Okay, in some threads it's not necromancy, but it seems that every other post you make is "How can I turn myself into <insert long and disturbingly detailed description of some monstrous humanoid, probably half-bodybuilder and half of whatever magical body modification kink you've got this week>"

 

[kitcik]

I KNEW if I waited long enough someone else would say it...

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

Meadyaon: What is your obsession with double-posting to bump months-old dead threads? Your obsession with thread necromancy is almost as creepy as your obsession with detailed and fetishistic descriptions of actual necromancy*. If nobody's posted in a thread for over a month, it probably means nobody wants to comment on your dubious character concepts.

*Okay, in some threads it's not necromancy, but it seems that every other post you make is "How can I turn myself into <insert long and disturbingly detailed description of some monstrous humanoid, probably half-bodybuilder and half of whatever magical body modification kink you've got this week>"

or [MENTION=6671197]Meadyaon[/MENTION], to say in a less emotionally laden way...
I know, speaking for myself, that I find it difficult to help you with many of your questions. The reasons why I have a difficult time are:

1. Many of your questions are descriptions of cosmetic images, and I'm not sure how to give you mechanical, game-detail answers to descriptions. If you asked in a format that was more game mechanics pertaining to stats, job classes, creature abilities, feats, grafts, etc... I'd better know what you're looking for. Most of the time, a Disguise Self spell would be all you need to get the look of what you want.

2. I don't understand the context in which you ask these questions as it applies to the game. Are you a DM and trying to make monsters and NPCs? Are you a player who wants to make a character in a campaign? what's the campaign and what level are you starting from? Are you just imagining creatures for fun that will not ever me applied to a game and want to use the D&D mechanics to put it together? Since I don't understand what your creatures/characters are going to be used for, I don't know exactly what you need in terms of input.

Most of the other members of this forum take questions such as "Help me make X..." and answer with out-of-the-books, mechanical Stat/Class/Feat answers that never really address what the character Looks Like. Visual Imagry does not fall under the category of what most of the posters here specialize in, mostly because Visual Imagery is not something D&D as a game has concrete rules for.