What would the hardness and hitpoints of a 12-foot diameter sphere of flesh be?

[Lonely Tylenol]

Two things

1 - according to customer support (yeah, not the most reliable of sources), Stone to Flesh makes bones in addition. The example we asked about was a statue (that was NOT a petrified person, but an actual statue), stone to flesh, then animate dead. The response was positive, that this would create a zombie, or even a skeleton if the animator wanted, with the flesh falling off the bones of the corpse created by the stone to flesh. I tend to disagree, mind you.

This spell turns the bones or bodies of dead creatures into undead skeletons or zombies that follow your spoken commands.

A statue is not a creature. It's still not a creature when it is made flesh by magic. It's certainly not a dead creature. Otherwise you could Resurrect it.

Customer support should never be consulted for rules clarification questions. If it can't be found in the books, CS will make something up, and their rulings are not official and generally stupid. See "Halfling Outrider." You're better off just making the call yourself.

Back on topic, even if your big ball o' flesh has bones in it, since it has no discernable anatomy, there's nothing that says that the bones are going to be arranged in such a way as to gird up the meat so that it can survive its trip down the hill intact. It's not shaped like a creature, so even if the bones would be present and arranged in the way customer support suggests (which I challenge them to provide a RAW reference for), any arrangement of bones will be purely arbitrary.

Theoretically, I suppose that in this case the caster could specify where the bones are, how big they are, etc. However, the intention is to destroy the sphere, right? So if you have control over the number and arrangement of bones, specify "zero" and "nowhere" and win the competition.

(edit)

I suppose if you cast a permanent Animate Object on the statue, it would be a creature from that point on. Then if you cast Stone to Flesh on it, it would be a construct creature made of flesh. You could kill it, and then you would be able to animate it, because it would be a dead creature.

 

[HellHound]

A statue is not a creature. It's still not a creature when it is made flesh by magic. It's certainly not a dead creature.

Interesting... according to the SRD & the 3.5 PHB

(For example, this spell would turn a stone golem into a flesh golem, but an ordinary statue would become a corpse.)

That's what caused the debate in the first place - I agree that the statue becomes a human-shaped blob of flesh that is anything but a 'dead creature', but the rules state that it becomes a corpse.

And now, for a footnote about the whole thread:

You can affect an object that fits within a cylinder from 1 foot to 3 feet in diameter and up to 10 feet long or a cylinder of up to those dimensions in a larger mass of stone.

So the whole 12' diameter sphere is going to be something very hard to transmute with this spell.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

That's what caused the debate in the first place - I agree that the statue becomes a human-shaped blob of flesh that is anything but a 'dead creature', but the rules state that it becomes a corpse.

Being a corpse makes you a legal target for the spell, but does it satisfy the criteria for being animated? I submit that you cannot be animated unless you are a dead creature. Being a corpse does not make you a dead creature unless you were previously an alive creature, if what we mean by corpse is an arrangement of flesh that resembles a dead creature, rather than being acutally a dead creature. And we must take that as our definition since the Stone to Flesh spell can make a corpse that is not a dead creature.

Which means that a corpse created by Stone to Flesh is a legal target of Animate Dead, in the same way that a Phasm is a legal target of Baleful Polymorph. However, since it is not a dead creature, the corpse is unaffected by the spell, in much the same way a Phasm is unaffected by Baleful Polymorph despite being a legal target of the spell.

Besides, aren't you supposed to need a soul to corrupt with negative energy, or something?

So the whole 12' diameter sphere is going to be something very hard to transmute with this spell.

Aww. Now that's a crying shame. Can't even Widen the spell.