Chapter 2: Character Options
There is another Lukacs art of Regdar getting torn apart by undead rats: True story: Regdar was forced upon the D&D artists because WotC officials wanted there to be a handsome, white human iconic, and Tordek was neither human nor white enough. So the game designers and artists conspired to kill off Regdar whenever they thought they could sneak it in. I wonder if that's what got the picture of Tordek in the dragons mouth but still fighting removed from the 3.0 book, because that picture was bad-ass. Also see the cover of Heroes of horror, or the exasperated look Mialee has when Regdar is addressing her in the art for the alternate crafting rules in Unearthed Arcana 3E.
The chapter starts out with feats.
Baleful Moan: Gives you an ability that makes your enemies shaken. As a prerequisite, it has a feat that also makes a target shaken. Both durations are measured in minutes. If it wasn't for the fact that this feat requires you to be an incorporeal undead, I'd say it was a nice little feat.
Contagious Paralysis: If something touches someone you paralyzed with an attack (so no stacking this to hold person), they have to save versus paralysis. Sounds like it could be hilarious in the right hands.
Corpsecrafter, et. al: For undead creation. This was reviewed much better
elsewhere, so I'm not going over it again. Basically, they all make your undead better in some way, but some of them aren't that good.
Corrupted Wildshape: I have been told by many people that the idea of an undead druid is "retarded". I disagree, and have had a couple druid liches as antagonists in my games. Anyway, this lets an undead druid continue to wildshape. It says you don't gain the animal's constitution score, which might not actually contradict any rules depending on what polymorph errata the DM is using at the time.
Daunting Presence: It lets you make something shaken for a minute. It's not quite as good as what a dread necromancer does, but the fact it lasts for a minute means the juggle combo is broken.
Death Master: Adds a fear effect to your critical hit. You can only take it if you're undead. I'm not sure I care.
Divine Accuracy: You set a turning attempt on fire, which gives you and all your friends the ability to re-roll missed attacks and failed miss chance rolls once every time you miss. That's quite good, especially if you're a paladin or you prestiged out of cleric and can't turn undead worth shit anymore. I like to give these feats to NPCs because PCs tend to not be undead anyway.
Empower Ability Damage: If you are undead and deal ability damage, it increases a numeric die roll by 50%.
Empower Turning: If this was 2e or below, this feat would be the cat's pajamas. Since we are using 3e numbers and you don't actually fight large numbers of mooks anymore, I argue that this feat actually sucks ass now.
Endure Sunlight: You can ignore the negative effects of sunlight for a number of rouns equal to your charisma modifier. It's a good fuck you ability to players.
Enduring Life: You can ignore negative levels for a couple minutes, and get +4 to save to remove levels. I don't like negative levels, mostly because for years I had a player that would record every single hp roll he made so he could argue he'd have more HP after taking his 5 damage. Maybe more sane groups don't have to deal with that.
Energizing Spell: I think this has to be a typo. It requires you to be nonevil, rebuke undead, but infuses your magic with positive energy that deals more damage to undead, less to the living. Then it says having the ability to rebuke undead makes you lose this feat. Yeah, gotta be a type.
Enervating Spell: Like energizing spell, but it damages living things more.
Eviscerator: This feat is like death master, except it affects all the target's allies. Yeah, still not taking it, and there's a long line of shitty feats behind it.
Fell Animate: For three extra spell levels, this will turn things you kill into zombies. Fun for the whole family!
Fell Drain: For two more spell levels, you bestow one negative level to the target. Wow-ee! Let me get my wallet! I would think that piling them onto magic missiles and scorching rays at high level to apply multiple negative levels might make this somewhat worth it, but I have a feeling there's some rule that prevents that.
Fell Frighten: For two more spell levels, your spells make something shaken. Wow, I thought Fell Drain was the cocksuckingest feat in the book...
Fell Weaken: For one extra level, your spells give -4 strength in addition to damage. I wonder, are there any 0 level spells that affect a huge area or number of targets? Maybe 1st level? Because I can actually see use for this...
Ghost Scarred: Also known as "I ain't scared of no ghosts!". Situationally kind of useful, but still underwhelming.
Ghostly Grasp: Lets ghosts use material items. Is there a demand for that? Material armor keeps you from flying through solid objects.
Graft flesh: Oh no, this feat again. Lets you graft freak flesh to your hot, firm young body. Seems useful if you can find a way to get it for free. Undead grafts coming up later.
Heighten Turning: A bit more useful than empower turning, this helps you turn one really big undead monster. Except it adds to your turning roll, not your turning level. Which means undead who have more than your level +3 hit dice basically can't be turned without other shenanigans (and if you're a high level cleric that's still turning things effectively, you probably have enough crap on you that level +3 isn't going to be a noticeable difference).
Improved Energy Drain: Gives you +1 to rolls when you drain energy. Looks shitty, but that +1? Untyped. Chickens are really cheap, and if you're a vampire you can get rats for free.
Improved Paralysis: The save DC for your paralysis attack improves by +4. Requires Ability focus: Paralysis, but doesn't over-write it. Which means your paralysis attack is at +6.
Improved Toughness: +1 hp per hit die. I've had undead monsters take this feat, as undead monsters tend to have a lot of hit dice.
Improved Turn Resistance: You add +4 to your existing turn resistance. You know, because turn resistance wasn't invented because turning is a broken mechanic and a monster's challenge is only slightly related to its hit dice.
Lasting Life: You set a couple feats on fire, and it lets you purge negative levels with a will save and can try once a round until it works. That's good, but you aren't going to be setting half your total feats ever on fire to get it. Try to snag it through other, more devious ways.
Life Drain: Adds some bullshit vampiric healing to your energy drain attacks that you won't care about ever.
Lifebond: You become an undead pimp daddy, you take this feat once per living minion and you get a stackable turn resistance and saving through bonus. If someone kills one of your stable of hos, you get a -2 to your saving throw. Honestly, I think the ability is neat but I would just write that as part of the challenge that said undead mastermind uses handwavium to transfer some of the vitality of his living minions, but killing them weakens him due to asspullium.
Lifesense: This feat is worded so constructs can take it too, but you can see living things as if they gave off light. I like this feat. It gives you a significant ability, it is interesting from a flavor standpoint, the only problem is it requires you to not have a constitution score and no PC will put up with that shit, ever. Still a good NPC feat in my opinion.
Mother Cyst: This gives you some new spells that you have to have a cyst to cast. I will review them in the spell chapter, as I don't remember what they do right now. I remember infecting a PC with one and it freaked him right the hell out (I am often asked to not run undead encounters because I tend to do that).
Necromantic Presence/Might These are two feats. the first gives turn resistance to undead around you, the second gives a bonus to attack. I won't be taking this feat, but you're goddamn right all my lieutenants in my undead army will have these two feats.
Necrotic Reserve: Like diehard, but only for undead that have eaten recently. My experience is this buys the undead one more round and I doubt that it's worth it.
Necropotent: It lets you sacrifice life for new spells. Wait, wrong WotC game. It's a fighter feat. It gives you an additional +4 damage when you use a weapon you're specialized with against undead. It sucks.
Positive Energy Resistance: It gives you resistance 10 against positive energy attacks. And yes, you have to be undead, so no taking this feat so you can go nail chicks living in the positive energy plane (I'm assuming there's hot monster chicks that want to eat/sex you there because D&D).
Profane Lifeleech: I find that at lower levels, this is a really good feat to give to evil clerics. It lets you burn two rebuke attempts to deal 1d6 damage to all living things around you, and it the heals you the total amount of life lost. At high levels, 4d6 healing is chump change.
Profance vigor: You spend a rebuke attempt to heal a target 2 hp per cleric level. This is a waste of a feat.
Quicken Manifestation: You can pop into the material plane as a free action. You can also manifest into a wall if you don't want people whaling on you the second you pop into reality. Pass.
Quicken turning: Your rebuke/turn attacks are now a free action, although it says you can't do it more than once per round. I think this feat would be awesome to get in a way that doesn't involve you taking it as one of your 6 feats.
Requiem: Lets you use bardic music abilities to hinder/help undead things. It's not a bad feat at all, actually. Great for the herald of your unholy army of the night.
Sacred Vengeance: Spend a turning attempt to have an undead bane weapon for one round. Undead are all over the fucking place in D&D, which might sound like a reason to take the feat, but it isn't. An undead bane weapon is something that most characters should keep in their golf bags.
Sacred Vitality: Set a turn attempt on fire to make yourself immune to energy drain, ability damage, and ability drain for one minute. It's not a bad feat for a paladin to take.
Spell Drain: If you successfully energy drain someone that prepares spells, you snag the spell they lose when drained. If it wasn't random, I'd say it's a good way for a living necromancer to spread spells to her minions. I can see some unintended uses of this feat still.
Spurn death's touch: Set a turning attempt on fire to heal some ability damage or negative levels, that have to be specifically caused by undead. Not a bad feat really.
Stitched flesh Familiar: Turns your familiar into an undead patchwork version of itself. It grants you the ability to control 4 more hit dice of undead with both rebuking and with animate dead (8 total if you have both), but that's not a big deal. Spellstitching your familiar is a pretty cool bonus (one time I sent my players on an adventure to capture a spellstitched undead familiar, but not kill it. Fun times). I believe the Spellstitched template is most recent in Complete Arcane, and it gives an undead creature spell-like abilities based on wisdom, among other bonuses.
Tomb-Tainted Soul, et al: There's a series of feats that lets your character act like more of an undead creature. The first in the line causes you to take damage from positive energy and heal from negative energy. If you're a dread necromancer, you take this feat so you can touch yourself. The rest of the chain has limited use and I don't recommend taking them,
Undead Leadership: Remember Draconic Leadership? Well, this feat sucks even more than that does! First off, undead have the same ridiculous LA's that dragons do, except undead hit dice are worse (bad BaB, fewer skill points, only one good save). Furthermore, Draconic Leadership reduced the LA of the dragon by 3. Undead leadership gives you +2 to leadership score, which an astute reader will determine is not nearly as good. Although it does let you lead around a small army of useless skeletons (well, you can always use the couple dozen 1 and 2 hd skeletons to trigger traps and such). Still, I consider the feat of limited utility.
Unquenchable Flame of Life: With an epic name like that, it should be a whopper of a feat? Wait, nope, it's another +2 to something feat. It substitutes favored enemy bonus to saves instead of +2 if you have favored enemy, which you don't care if you do.
Vampire Hunter: This feat wins super hard any time you fight vampires and doesn't when you aren't. You can tell if a vampire is within 30 feet of you with a move action (which is better than most divination spells), and it makes you immune to the dominate ability of vampires. What's the cost for making an item that grants a feat again? Because this would make a pretty good set of goggles.
A sorry lot, that.
Next in the chapter is undead in the party. This is another place where the author shows a surprisingly high level of awareness of how things work in 3.5, and then grabs the idiot bar by the end of the section. It describes that undead possess a lot of positive qualities, but accurately describes why undead don't make good PC's (lack of hit points, death at 0 rather than -10, being annihilated or being made a bitch by NPC clerics), as well as pointing out that walking around town as a ghoul or wight is not a good idea. Then it says that they need a level adjustment because they're too powerful. Here is where I have diarrhea.
It has a whole list of bullshit undead with ECLs higher than Tommy Chong. You know Mohrgs? Yeah, a Mohrg out of the monster manual is equivalent to a 20th level wizard according to this. The party wizard probably has a mohrg butler making zombies full-time for him that he doesn't take on adventures because a 14 hit die undead can't survive in the environment 20th level character find themselves in. They're all stupid, but I'm picking what I perceive as the biggest shit here. It's like shit took a shit.
There's a section on undead mounts, which despite being not quite as good as riding a living mount is surprisingly free of mechanics that kick you in the nuts. Surprising, usually WotC's policy is to bust down the door screaming "STOP HAVING FUN YOU GUYS!". But there's one option that's kind of funny. Blackguards can attract an undead horse or pony as a mount. You have to have enough levels in paladin to have an undead companion to prevent your mount from being turned. That's hilarious to me, having the Blackguard Count Repugsive ride up to you, and turning his ass-rest and having it run off with him.
There's a section on Monster classes for various undead, in case your players want to self-flagellate starting at level 1. I won't elaborate because reading these classes gives you cancer.
Thus ends the chapter. I will pick this up next time with Chapter 3.
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