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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Greenfield" data-source="post: 6152016" data-attributes="member: 6669384">I'm a rules guy, whether it's in my favor or not.  Bending the rules can be fun, but flat out ignoring them isn't my thing.Now I'll look in the dead-tree edition of the rules and see if that "can't create spawn" line is in there.  If it isn't,maybe I'll run with it.  Over all though, while it might make this particular scene work, the long term consequences in the game are too much.  You're handing a PC of relatively moderate level the ability to wipe out entire cities.I did the math once for a single Wight in a poor section of a city.  (They have a similar spawn rate, with their dead rising up within 1D4 rounds).  Undead enters a home, or a crowded bar or marketplace.  Two or three strikes and someone is dead.Presuming an average rise rate of 2.5 rounds (average on a D4), that means a new Undead every 4.5 rounds.Now the Wight kills commoners pretty much every hit, but since armor works against him and normal weapons can affect him, I think it's fair to call his respawn rate as being similar to the Shadow, who needs three hits to drop the average person.Allowing a brief spot of pursuit time between kills, let's call it six rounds between generations.So...Round 1 - 1 Undead.Round 4 - 1 undead, one fallen.Round 6 - 2 UndeadRound 8 - 2 undead, one fallenRound 11 - 3 Undead, one fallen.Round 13 - 5 Undead, two fallen.To make a long story short, presuming it takes five minutes for the competent authorities to arrive with the right spells and weapons to actually do anything, by the time they do arrive they're facing over a hundred.  Two minutes more and it's over 500.In short, far more than the "competent authorities" of any given town can cope with.  By morning, any major city in the world is undead.The spawn rate of some undead makes them the "nuclear option" of the game world.  It's one of those rules where we, as both players and DMs, have to simply say, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"  The world only exists as long as everyone pretends that that possibility doesn't really exist.Ironically, in the "Chain of Command" that would build in that scenario, the Greater Shadows would be at the bottom end of the pecking order.  They'd be the result of some higher level type being taken, and those are the ones who would be the last to fall, hence they'd have more generations of undead ahead of them, able to exercise direct or indirect control over them.</blockquote>

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