Summon Undead

[Doug McCrae]

With the various Summon Undead spells (from the Players Guide to Faerun) various sizes of undead can be summoned. Summon Undead III lets you conjure up a huge skeleton for example. What are the limitations on this? Surely it can't be any huge skeleton, such as a Cloud Giant Skeleton (17 hit dice)?

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Looks like they could summon such a skeleton, actually.

In fact, that's one of the example huge skeletons in the MM / SRD.

 

[Knight Otu]

As far as I know, the Summon Undead spell chain in PGtF was not updated to account for the fact that skeleton and zombie now are templates, instead of scaling monsters. The PGtF errata has this little piece:

Page 114: Summon Undead I Spell
Add the following sentence to the spell description: “No
undead creature you summon can have more Hit Dice
than your caster level +1.”

 

[Doug McCrae]

Thanks a lot.

I notice that by that rule a 5th level caster using Summon Undead III could summon 1d3 owlbear skeletons or bugbear zombies. A 7th level caster using Summon Undead IV could get 1d4+1 troll skeletons or 1d3 ogre zombies. This is still quite good.

 

[Staffan]

As far as I know, the Summon Undead spell chain in PGtF was not updated to account for the fact that skeleton and zombie now are templates, instead of scaling monsters. The PGtF errata has this little piece:

Anyone know what the Libris Mortis version does?

 

[Egres]

Anyone know what the Libris Mortis version does?

The old one, unfortunately.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Well, I've figured out how to break Summon Undead.

Given a 5th level caster using Summon Undead III, he gets 1 huge skeleton, 1d3 large skeletons or 1d4+1 medium skeletons. According to the errata none of them can have more than 6 hit dice. So what I want are six hit dice medium creatures that can be made into skeletons - hound archon, barghest, basilisk, succubus, bearded devil, bralani eladrin, janni genie, medusa or nymph. A lot of them are rather weak and feeble unfortunately so I think I'd go for 1d4+1 bralani eladrin skeletons with str 18 and dex upped to 20. I wonder if they come with their holy scimitars?