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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dykstrav" data-source="post: 5610223" data-attributes="member: 40522">Well, to fit your theme...For a 2nd-level party, strong contenders for the undead include skeletons and skeletal champions. Since you've got two divine casters and a paladin, I'd advise you include some undead that they can easily blast or control with a channel energy or two--do something to make them feel smart for making the character choices that they've made. The skeletal champion could be the necromancer's lieutenant over the skeletons, a bodyguard, or on patrol to find the group once they've started making a dent in the undead there. You might also consider ghouls. They're really scary at low level because they can paralyze you, so that'd be a great way to capture a character alive if the necromancer has something nefarious in mind for them.For the plants, the assassin vine, mandragora, vegepygmy, violet fungus, and xtabay all immediately come to mind. The yellow musk creeper is a great recommendation--since the "zombies" look and act like undead zombies, it's a great "gotcha" monster when the clerics try to channel energy on them. They're all plant creatures and around CR 2 or 3. A phycomid (CR 4) would be a real challenge at level 2, but seems to fit into the necromancer/corruption theme since it can spawn new phycomids from the adventurers it kills (like many undead).I'd also advise you to consider broadening your theme a bit to add more variety to your encounters. Perhaps you could have small or medium earth elementals and describe them as originating from special soil sanctified to holy gardens of the deity, now active and roaming the complex in an attempt to put down the undead. We all think of earth elementals as being made of rocks, but you can easily describe them as being made of soil tangled with vines and branches with small trees or shrubs protruding from them, or covered in herbs or flowers sacred to the deity.You could also use a single dryad (CR 3) that was once a druidic liason with the temple, bound to a sacred tree within the temple and driven violently mad with the necromancer's arrival. If you make the dryad dangerously insane (at least when the characters first arrive), there may be some hope of redeeming the creature. If the characters can complete some story-related task (such as re-sanctifying a particular altar or image of the deity), the dryad recovers and can provide them with a safe place to rest, information on the temple's invaders, the location of a secret treasure cache, or some other reward. If the characters simply attack and kill the dryad, they players are likely still satisfied with facing a challenge and feel like they've given a tortured soul some sort of peace. Either way, they feel like their choices matter in the grand scheme of things.Hope that helps. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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