Libris Mortis: A Look back. (3E)

[Grek]

Don't undead all have darkvision as part of the undead type?

[Ted the Flayer]

That was a mistake, a lurking terror gets improved darkvision (out to 90' instead of 60')

[Prak]

I think I gave Tomb Warden levels to the mummy security guards of a museum/temple of Hades in one of my games... Oh, right. I gave it to the head security mummy, and just had him in telepathic contact with the others which all had Swarmshifter, with the undead sand (fly 90' [perfect]) form.

[Ted the Flayer]

Swrmshifter was one of the best things that came out of Libris Mortis in my opinion. I'll go into it later.

Basically, the plot was the players were doing a task for the local "legitimate businessmen's" organization and getting smuggled into a heavily fortified hobgoblin city. However, in transit a powerful wizard struck a deal with Doresain and became a templated ghoul, with the swarmshifter (biting flies) template. The players had a rough time. Not to mention that one of the warriors was a were-ape who decided that not that the town was overrun with ghouls he could go ape-shit (lol), infected a few lackeys, and went on a rampage. Did I mention he had a couple ogre slaves? Were-ape on an ogre is pretty brutal at low levels.

[Prak]

I made it a bit better.

[Ted the Flayer]

Alright, time for some more reviews. I will point out spells that interest me in some way, as I did for Draconomicon.

Avasculate: It's too high level for what it does, but the flavor text is awesome. It reduces your HP by half and stuns you, by fucking ripping your blood vessels out of your body. Jesus fucking fuck, that should be more impressive mechanically. There's an 8th level version that animates the vessels you yank out and they entangle everything around the target. Again, too low level but holy fuck.

Awaken Undead: I'm going to go against the grain and say this spell is absolute shit. You spend experience points to give a mindless undead intelligence and +2 turn resistance. Note that according to the spells, the undead doesn't get feats or skills back, just proficiencies and special abilities. I'm not sure it's worth a 7th level spell and some experience point loss to cast it. Ask your DM nicely to let your minion have at least undead skill points and a new set of feats even if it wasn't the feats the creature had in life. (Although you could do some interesting things by awakening something that had regeneration in life)

Clutch of Orcus: You have to concentrate on a spell that deals 1d3 points of damage per round. I can't imagine how many hours that would take to kill a mid-CR monster. Why is this third level?

Consumptive Field: Makes a field around you that casts Death Knell on anything in the negatives. Interesting spell to make persistent, but don't let your friends fall into negative HP near you...

Field of Ghouls: This spell looks awesome, but it sucks. It halves the amount of undead you can control with spells (normally 4 per caster level, now 2 per caster level). Maybe they meant ghouls to count like skeletons and zombies, maybe they meant for you to have 4 per level of zombies and 2 per level of ghouls. Who knows, I don't know any of the guys that wrote this book, so I can't ask them.

GhostformL For some reason, you can't pass through solid objects bigger than you are. No, it's not because you're lost, the spell grants you an innate sense of direction when you can't see. So who knows. Otherwise, makes you incorporeal.

Ghoul Gauntlet: Like Field of Ghouls, only lower level and fewer at a time. And it has the same asscrap that reduces your undead controlled.

Haunt shift: Converts undead to haunting presences. Not only is this key for budding necromancers to increase turn resistance in his lair, but the possibilities are endless! If you keep to mindless undead and have a way of fooling them into thinking you're undead yourself (through the lichloved feat or others), or if you ARe undead yourself, you don't even need to have the undead controlled to pile into your lair, but if you do have them controlled, you can have various haunted objects that move around at your command, or move to attack any nosy heroes that come murder-hoboing it up in your boudoir. The possibilities are merely limited by your imagination!

Kiss of the Vampire: Gives you some vampiric abilities. ould be useful in fooling your foes that you're a vampire, so when the come barging in your death fortress bearing holy water, garlic, and holy symbols the joke is on them.

Necrotic Cyst, et al: This spell puts a magic tumor in someone's body. From there, you have spells to scry on the victim, you can have the cyst expand, at higher levels you can have the cyst tear itself physically out of someone's body and start attacking other people, and at 9th level it can kill someone and eat their soul. The scrying part is intriguing, but I'm not sure it's worth being vulnerable to necromancy and undead (it gives undead +1d6 damage and it gives you a -2 to saves versus necromancy)

Night's Caress: Like Chill touch on steroids. It's evil for some reason (why casting night's caress to deal 1d6+2 con damage is evil but casting Poison and dealing 1d10 is not is beyond me.)

Plague of Death: A better version of Animate Dead, except higher level and less of a material component.

Wither Limb: I seem to remember this spell formerly being more available, but the Deathbound domain is pretty snazzy for a cleric necromancer. It's a nasty touch spell, permanently removes the use of someone's arms or legs.

Alright, that was relatively painless. Will be picking up Chapter 4 tomorrow.

[Echoes]

Awaken undead totally gives back feats and skill points. Feats and skills are a product of having an Intelligence score; that's why mindless things don't have them. If you make a skeleton intelligent, it gets feats and skill points according to HD commensurate with it's intelligence.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Then why does the spell specifically say you don't get them back?

[OgreBattle]

Evasculate: It's too high level for what it does, but the flavor text is awesome. It reduces your HP by half and stuns you, by fucking ripping your blood vessels out of your body. Jesus fucking fuck, that should be more impressive mechanically. There's an 8th level version that animates the vessels you yank out and they entangle everything around the target. Again, too low level but holy fuck.

Can you cast it on an ooze

Clutch of Orcus: You have to concentrate on a spell that deals 1d3 points of damage per round. I can't imagine how many hours that would take to kill a mid-CR monster. Why is this third level?

I think this is for villains to use in some James Bond type slow death device giving you time to break out.

Wither Limb: I seem to remember this spell formerly being more available, but the Deathbound domain is pretty snazzy for a cleric necromancer. It's a nasty touch spell, permanently removes the use of someone's arms or legs.

How does it affect regenerating creatures?
You could wither somebody's penis off. PC's will fight very hard to get their penis back, or just ragequit.

[Ted the Flayer]

Avasculate does in fact work on anything that's not immune to Necromancy [Death, Evil]

Wither Limb can only target humanoids, and I'm not sure there are any regenerating humanoids, but since it doesn't deal damage I don't think regeneration affects it. Also, you can "arm" or "leg" to wither.

[Maxus]

Wither Limb: I seem to remember this spell formerly being more available, but the Deathbound domain is pretty snazzy for a cleric necromancer. It's a nasty touch spell, permanently removes the use of someone's arms or legs.

How does it affect regenerating creatures?
You could wither somebody's penis off. PC's will fight very hard to get their penis back, or just ragequit.

So that'd make it a badtouch spell.

[Koumei]

Wither Limb can only target humanoids, and I'm not sure there are any regenerating humanoids, but since it doesn't deal damage I don't think regeneration affects it.

There's the Regeneration spell (or was that Regenerate?), which specifically makes limbs grow back, even though the rules are generally silent on what might make a limb fall off.

[K]

Awaken Undead is supposed to be used on troll skeletons to give them back weapon profs, rend, and regen, but in practice you will probably use it on some of the more exotic Ex users.

I like Hellwasp Swarms for their ability to make zombies bigger than animate dead normally allows and/or mind control people as an Ex ability.

[OgreBattle]

Awaken Undead is supposed to be used on troll skeletons to give them back weapon profs, rend, and regen, but in practice you will probably use it on some of the more exotic Ex users.

"wait a minute, how does a skeleton regenerate??"

But then I remembered:


Ah, a Bowser's Castle themed castle would be fun, lava pits, regenerating skeletons, and occasional giant bullet.

[K]

Making ghouls is basically designed for you to hand them magic items for them to do interesting things before they get wiped by AoEs. They are smart enough to actually use tactics.

Consumptive Field and the bigger version is oddly designed to be used on cages full of rats to boost to insanely high caster levels.

[K]

Awaken Undead is supposed to be used on troll skeletons to give them back weapon profs, rend, and regen, but in practice you will probably use it on some of the more exotic Ex users.

"wait a minute, how does a skeleton regenerate??"

But then I remembered:


Ah, a Bowser's Castle themed castle would be fun, lava pits, regenerating skeletons, and occasional giant bullet.

I wonder how they get poison since they lack poison glands, but I guess "magic" is good enough.

[Prak]

Alright, time for some more reviews. I will point out spells that interest me in some way, as I did for Draconomicon.

Avasculate: It's too high level for what it does, but the flavor text is awesome. It reduces your HP by half and stuns you, by fucking ripping your blood vessels out of your body. Jesus fucking fuck, that should be more impressive mechanically. There's an 8th level version that animates the vessels you yank out and they entangle everything around the target. Again, too low level but holy fuck.

Also stuns on a failed save. I'd agree that it's maybe a bit too high level, though. Though, it's also just a ranged touch, no save to drop an enemy's hp in half. Cast it twice, or twin it, and combat just got loads easier.

Clutch of Orcus: You have to concentrate on a spell that deals 1d3 points of damage per round. I can't imagine how many hours that would take to kill a mid-CR monster. Why is this third level?

It also paralyzes for Concentration duration, which is pretty nice, especially with some other spells up in advance or allies. Try Flaming Sphere+Clutch of Orcus.

Field of Ghouls: This spell looks awesome, but it sucks. It halves the amount of undead you can control with spells (normally 4 per caster level, now 2 per caster level). Maybe they meant ghouls to count like skeletons and zombies, maybe they meant for you to have 4 per level of zombies and 2 per level of ghouls. Who knows, I don't know any of the guys that wrote this book, so I can't ask them.

Ghoul Gauntlet: Like Field of Ghouls, only lower level and fewer at a time. And it has the same asscrap that reduces your undead controlled.

I have no clue. I checked errata of LM and PHB, and neither say anything about Field of (Ghoul) Gauntlet or Animate Dead. I'd say that ghoul HD count double against your undead control pool.

Haunt shift: Converts undead to haunting presences. Not only is this key for budding necromancers to increase turn resistance in his lair, but the possibilities are endless! If you keep to mindless undead and have a way of fooling them into thinking you're undead yourself (through the lichloved feat or others), or if you ARe undead yourself, you don't even need to have the undead controlled to pile into your lair, but if you do have them controlled, you can have various haunted objects that move around at your command, or move to attack any nosy heroes that come murder-hoboing it up in your boudoir. The possibilities are merely limited by your imagination!

I think I would seriously mainly use it for spook-ifying my tower. Doors that open with no doorman but a ghastly moan, attentive dressers, etc, and just scare the crap out of visitors. Especially since there is apparently no way to convert them back (at least with the same spell).

Necrotic Cyst, et al: This spell puts a magic tumor in someone's body. From there, you have spells to scry on the victim, you can have the cyst expand, at higher levels you can have the cyst tear itself physically out of someone's body and start attacking other people, and at 9th level it can kill someone and eat their soul. The scrying part is intriguing, but I'm not sure it's worth being vulnerable to necromancy and undead (it gives undead +1d6 damage and it gives you a -2 to saves versus necromancy)

That's the penalty for targets of Necrotic Cyst. The feat gives you a mother cyst, and it never says that you are affected as if being the victim of Necrotic Cyst, so I'm pretty sure you don't receive the same penalties. The scrying and detection are actually really nice and thematic, and with the fact that the feat gives you ten spells on your list for free makes Mother Cyst really nice.

Making ghouls is basically designed for you to hand them magic items for them to do interesting things before they get wiped by AoEs. They are smart enough to actually use tactics.

Ghouls make fairly nice archers, too.

[Echoes]

Then why does the spell specifically say you don't get them back?

I honestly couldn't tell you. It doesn't make any sense, that's for damn sure. You get skill points and feats as a consequence of not being mindless. Having an intelligence score but not having feats or skills is like having a BAB but not getting iterative attacks.

[K]

Wither Limb: I seem to remember this spell formerly being more available, but the Deathbound domain is pretty snazzy for a cleric necromancer. It's a nasty touch spell, permanently removes the use of someone's arms or legs.

You are probably thinking of the spell Wither Limb from BOVD that is second-level, Wiz and Cleric, and only lasts 1 round per level. Both only work on arms or legs, so no peni dropping off.

This just proves that writers of DnD content can't be bothered to do a Google search.

[Username17]

Both awaken undead and ghoul gauntlet made a "reappearance" in the Spell Compendium, where they were completely rewritten. It seems even WotC was embarrassed by the level of editing on those spells.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

If you awaken a Nymph corpse, you can make people blinded with its very sexy bone structure.

[K]

Both awaken undead and ghoul gauntlet made a "reappearance" in the Spell Compendium, where they were completely rewritten. It seems even WotC was embarrassed by the level of editing on those spells.

-Username17

There is also a different version of awaken undead in Savage Species.

You'd think that any of those versions would be good.

[ishy]

Awaken Undead: [. . . ](Although you could do some interesting things by awakening something that had regeneration in life)

Actually regeneration requires a con score, so it wouldn't do anything for most undead.
Can you use the spell to turn animated party members into clerics or other player characters again?

GhostformL For some reason, you can't pass through solid objects bigger than you are. No, it's not because you're lost, the spell grants you an innate sense of direction when you can't see. So who knows. Otherwise, makes you incorporeal.

You probably can't because incorporeal creatures can't (see the subtype).

[Prak]

You'd think that any of those versions would be good.

The Spell Compendium version only sucks because it costs (minimal) XP, and it caps the gained Int at average for type. It does give skills and feats. I would point out, however, that it awakens all undead in close range around you, so that xp cost is even more minimal. Basically, I would use it to negotiate for playing intelligent skeletons and such at the cost of paying the XP personally.

Awaken Undead: [. . . ](Although you could do some interesting things by awakening something that had regeneration in life)

Actually regeneration requires a con score, so it wouldn't do anything for most undead.
Can you use the spell to turn animated party members into clerics or other player characters again?

That's weird, because the Curst, in Monsters of Faerun has Regen, and the monster update doesn't change it or take it away. But then, WotC's editing and such is only marginally better than WW's.

GhostformL For some reason, you can't pass through solid objects bigger than you are. No, it's not because you're lost, the spell grants you an innate sense of direction when you can't see. So who knows. Otherwise, makes you incorporeal.

You probably can't because incorporeal creatures can't (see the subtype).

Yeah, it's a weird thing about incorporeality in D&D.

[Slade]

You probably can't because incorporeal creatures can't (see the subtype).

Wait, what does this mean:
"An incorporeal creature can enter or pass through solid objects, but must remain adjacent to the object’s exterior, and so cannot pass entirely through an object whose space is larger than its own."

So unless the object is the same space it can't pass through? So it can't go through a wall unless the wall is 5 foot width to get to other size (assuming it is medum size incorporeal creature)?

Can it pass through a door if the door is taller or does the width only matter?