The Gaming Den

I've been running a campaign using some Tome material and one of my players is playing a Necropolitan Puppeteer. The party just hit level 12, so Life Anew came online, which allows the Puppeteer to create corpse creatures with their lightning. I have a few questions:
1. Is this intended to be an upgrade to the existing puppet abilities (so now instead of zombies, they create corpse creatures) or a new, separate ability, where they can choose to create corpse creatures in addition to zombies?
2. Do the corpse creatures decay after 24 hours like the zombies did, or are they "permanent"?
3. Do the corpse creatures obey the puppeteer, or are they free-willed?
Thanks in advance!

The author of the class isn't going to respond, but here's my take.

1) The ability references Create Undead. Create Undead has a casting time of 1 hour. He can use this ability to create constructs that are otherwise like ghouls, ghasts, mummies and mohrgs. He cannot use this ability to animate a corpse simply by doing damage. Puppet the dead is a combat ability, Life Anew is an out-of-combat ability.

2) My take is that creatures created with life anew are 'permanent'. They exist until they are killed; they are not just temporary animations like the corpse puppet ability. There are both semantic reasons for this and it is consistent with the spell descriptions referenced by the ability.

3) Create Undead references animate dead. Creatures you create with animate dead follow your spoken commands and remain under your control unless/until you create more undead than you can control (4 HD per level, usually). Until/unless the puppeteer animates more creatures than he can control, they obey him. If he creates more creatures than he can control, the oldest essentially become free-willed.