Please Tell Me I'm Wrong

[Corlon]

Okay, the spell Summon Undead from Libris Mortis, or more specifically Summon Undead III.

Alll these spells are like summon monster, except the list is different.

The table has things like Skeleton, Medium and Zombie, small for SU I.

It doesn't seem to specify which skeleton or zombie, so I'm assuming you just choose one?

With that assumption, at level 5 (3rd level spells), you could soummon any huge skeleton.

Breezing through the MM, all hyrdras are huge creatures, therefore you could summon a 12 headed skeletal hydra. Hydras may have changed a bit in 3.5 (I don't know, I don't have the 3.5 MM), but that's still a lot of power for a 3rd level spell.

Perhaps it means a skeletal version of a monster you could normally summon with summoned monster?


What do you guys think?

BTW: With a 3.0 hydra, that'd be something like CR 10 creature summoned by a 5th level character, scary.

 

[drnuncheon]

Cut and paste strikes again. The spell descriptions are unchanged from 3.0, where "small skeleton" was a creature and not a template.

J

 

[Tiberius]

Speaking as someone who is playing an Augment Summoning-posessing conjurer, levels 2&3 of these spells are broken in the 3.5 environment as written. Being able to summon a CR 5 creature at level 3 is a bit nutty. IMO, they could all do with being bumped up a level.

 

[Corlon]

Cut and paste strikes again. The spell descriptions are unchanged from 3.0, where "small skeleton" was a creature and not a template.

J

I didn't know there was a summon undead in 3.0...

Yeah, this would have worked perfectly as a not very powerful spell in 3.0, BUT now it can be really really broken (imagine fighting a creature with 12 attacks per round, whether it moves or not, and this can be summoned one per round, at level 7 they could get two of these instead of a higher version).

So guys, how should we solve this? HD or CR cap? Something else? perhaps it goes against your animated undead HD, so you have to keep slots open to summon, but the summoning can be performed out of nowhere, without corpses and such...then again this could cause a host of problems with things like the pale masters summoning shadows and such.

What do you guys think?


(I guess this would make this house rules, moderators, if one of you could move it, that'd be great).

 

[Henrix]

No, no, this is still a rules question.

The spell appeared in Player's Guide to Faerûn, and was errataed before Libris Mortis was out, but evidently noone told them.

Add the following sentence to the spell description: “No undead creature you summon can have more Hit Dice than your caster level +1.”

 

[Corlon]

sounds good.