ESF: Necromancy

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Hazard
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ESF: Necromancy

Post by Hazard » Thu Sep 24, 2020 3:35 am

On Arelith, investing fully into a spell focus often gives you plenty of benefits and fun cookies.

Abjuration gives you the ability to shut down teleportation in the area, create a defensive ward, block scrying, an improved Holy Sword, better dispels, better elemental wards, better shield that protects against IGMS. With even one spell foci you can also dip into Spell Defense: Abj and be harder to dispel.

Conjuration gives you better stats on summons which also scale with epic CL and you get yoink.

Divination gives you a longer True Seeing, the ability the scry and know you are being scried, ability to use deck of stars, seeing auras when examining and getting more information from investigating.

Enchantment gives you an extra dominated monster, auto-success in some dialogue options when affected by a spell, longer duration dominations, and improvements to spells like dominations and mindfog.

Evocation gives you the glorious wombo-combo, without eating 30d6 backlash and improved evo summons.

Illusion gives you longer invis, a clone, ability to send messages every 10 min, better illusion summons.

Transmutation gives you improved zoo spells, teleport on a 10 min CD, ability to create portals, various modified/improved spells, and golemcrafting.

..

Necromancy gives you a stat increase to summons that do not scale with CL and as far as I know that's it. Many builds playing as necromancers skip over necromancy spell foci and just grab mummy dust because the stat increase is negligible. Since Clerics have essentially 1 useful necromancy spell that is DC based, it more benefits wizards/sorcs to take spell foci in it.

It would be nice if a full investment in Necromancy gave something significant, to set a master necromancer apart from someone who has only invested in 1 feat (mummy dust). Something both divine and arcane casters get equal use from.

I don't know what is and isn't possible, so I'm going to list a few changes that I think are realistic. I'm not suggesting they all get adopted. Likely just one.

1. Increasing from 3 minions to 4. What necromancer doesn't want more undead?

2. All 3 minions become the highest tier of minion, so 3 dread mummies instead of 1.

3. Bigger stat increases with each investment, because there is no scaling with epic CL, like conjuration and other summons get.

4. Some form of RP cookie/toy? Maybe casting animate dead on the skull of a PC raises them as a zombie henchman? This would finally give a cool and fun use to those skulls.

5. Some type of minion-crafting, similar to Golemcrafting for Transmuters. Maybe instead of a station it just needs more materials (bones), and you create zombies/skeletons that can be controlled just like the golems can. The golems are only used for RP and I suspect if these necro-creations are given similar/lower stats they'll only be used for RP too, but it would still be awesome.

6. -unbalance/-haunt ability (this one is my favourite). Druids get a -balance ability that puts an area back into balance. How about if necromancers (the enemy to druids!) got -haunt, which puts an area into a state of being 'haunted'. Whatever area is haunted gets some spooky fogs/darker lighting and chance of undead spawning instead of what normally does. Multiple applications of -unbalance/-haunt increase the amount/strength of the undead spawning. A druid can -balance, then rest and -balance again, or multiple druids can come, so I imagine a necromancer(s) would be able to do the same, but in opposite, stacking their spookiness to a point.

Thanks for reading!

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garrbear758
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Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2018 4:20 am

Re: ESF: Necromancy

Post by garrbear758 » Wed Sep 30, 2020 6:11 pm

1-3: Denied for balance reasons
4: Denied on raising PC zombies.

I love your last two ideas, and I'd really like to see them happen in some manner. I think -haunt especially could lead to some great conflict RP between druids and necros. With that said, the actual implementation for them is likely to change or have some caveats on where / how it can be used.
5: Approved for GSF necromancy
6: Approved for ESF necromancy
You've done it [Garrbear], you've kicked the winemom nest. -Redacted

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Sincra
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Re: ESF: Necromancy

Post by Sincra » Fri Dec 02, 2022 7:33 am

Complete with feat bonuses and new streams
Irongron wrote:I've literally never used -guard on anyone.

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