How does Animate Dead work?

Creating Undead

Currently, you are permitted to create undead creatures during quests or arenas with the permission of the DM or using downtime (see: Downtime Rules for details). You cannot create undead inside of Luna Pine during RP. If you wish to convert a fresh corpse into bones, so that you may raise a skeleton instead of a zombie, this would typically require 1 hour worth of work by 1 creature.

You must adhere to the rules of the relevant spells : i.e. the corpse must be of a humanoid or beast of the appropriate size. This means any of your undead creatures that are reduced to 0 hp cannot be reanimated as their creature type has changed to “undead”.

Undead Stats / Equipment

Undead creatures use their published stat block. Individual DMs may allow undead to wear other non-magical equipment or use magic items during their quest / arena, but this is not the default. Undead not specified in the spell cannot be created - e.g. animating the bones of a minotaur does not create a Minotaur Skeleton.

Undead in Luna Pine and Towns

In general, undead creatures that are under the control of a necromancer are permitted in Luna Pine. You may RP with 1-2 undead creatures in the rp areas, however other player characters may justifiably believe undead to be innately evil creatures and wish to destroy them. Please be considerate and courteous to such player characters. 

We recommend necromancers either leave their undead outside of towns or have a means to hide / carry the undead creatures while inside towns, such as a bag of holding / portable hole or a specially designed homebrew item (make a request in #request-board to be considered to receive such an item). See table below for size capacity for each type of container:

Item	Zombie	Skeleton	Exit Speed
Bag of Holding	⅓ of the bag, max 3 / bag	⅙  of the bag, max 6 / bag	Can be turned inside out to empty as 1 action
Portable Hole	1/12 of the hole, max 12 / hole	1/24 of the hole, max 24 / hole	3 exit per round.

Stores of rotting corpses, or uncontrolled undead creatures are not permitted in Luna Pine. If you run out of spell slots to maintain your undead horde during a quest or an arena then it is assumed any undead in excess of those you can control are immediately destroyed.

Multiple timelines

It may happen that you create new undead or some of your undead may be destroyed in one timeline (quest / arena) while you have other undead in another timeline. Undead cannot travel through timelines, so any undead created in an arena while you are in a quest cannot be added to those you have in the quest, likewise undead destroyed in an arena does not affect the number you have on a quest that is already running. And vice-versa, undead destroyed in a quest don’t affect the number you have available for an arena until that quest ends. 

When quests / arenas end, you must update the number of undead you have available for any new scenes you may join. 

To track your undead available to you when you start a new scene / quest / arena, you must record the number of undead of each type you had at the start of each quest / arena before combat begins.  Then when any particular instance ends you compare your number undead at the end of that instance to the number of undead at the start. This is your net gain / loss of undead, e.g. if you started a quest with 5 zombies and finished the quest with 10 zombies you have a net gain of 5 zombies.

You then apply that net change to your current set of available undead.

Example 1: Wiz starts with 3 zombies and 3 skeletons. Wiz joins a quest and an arena.

During the arena: 1 zombie and 2 skeletons are destroyed.

The arena ends first, at which point Wiz has 2 zombies and 1 skeleton left.

During the quest: 3 zombies are destroyed.

When the quest ends, Wiz updates his total undead minions to be 1 remaining skeleton.

Example 2: Wiz starts with 3 zombies and 3 skeletons. Wiz joins a quest and an arena.

During the arena: 0 zombies and 1 skeletons are destroyed.

The arena ends first, at which point Wiz has 3 zombies and 2 skeletons left.

During the quest: 2 zombies and 2 skeletons are destroyed, and the Wiz animates 4 new zombies

When the quest ends, Wiz has 5 zombies and no skeletons left.

Create Undead Spell

When you reach the level where you can cast "Create Undead" then you can create more powerful undead creatures: wights, ghasts, ghouls, and mummies these follow the same rules laid out above, and are considered equivalent to zombies for storage purposes. Undead such as wights that are able to create permanent undead under their own control by killing other creatures can only do so during quests or arenas as such acts can have serious implications.