Summon Monster Spells Variant

[yipwyg]

I have always thought the summon monster spells, while cool, where far to limited in what they can do. What I mean is I always wanted someone to expand on the list that you can summon, or give guidelines on the sorts of things one can summon with the individual spells.

I recently got Castles and Crusades recently and love how they handle the spell.

The spells are

summon lesser monster
summon monster
summon greater monster

Each one has a list of the monster types you can summon with these spells, like:

aberation
animal (including dire variety)
elemental
and others

Each spell had a limit to the amount of HD you can summon. For instance summon lesser monster might be the following (forgive me I do not have the book in front of me)

Summon Lesser Monster
summon a monster up to your level in HD, maximum 3 HD.

So with this spell, at 3rd level you can summon the following:

3 1 hd creatures
2 1 hd creatures and 1 1 hd creature
1 3 hd creature


What, if anything, would make these spells work well with 3.x. If I implemented these spells I would get rid of summon monster 1-9.

Thanks for any info.

 

[Sound of Azure]

Hey, I like your idea!

Firstly though, I would advise you to add to the spell description that no templates are allowed, or restrict it to the higher levels versions, as templates add power without necessarily adding hit dice.

Either that, or have specific versions of the spells that summon templated versions (Summon Lesser Fiendish Monster, for instance).

 

[Ilium]

Or just base the limits on CR rather than HD.

Then maybe they'd look like this:

Lesser Summon 1st Level Creatures up to your caster level in CR, max CR 3
Summon 4th Level Creatures up to your caster level in CR, max CR 10
Greater Summon 7th Level Creatures up to your caster level in CR, max CR 15

Something like that. Or you could say "EL" instead of "CR" but that would let you summon a lot more. It would probably also be too powerful.