monster summoning and a new idea

[SilentThief]

Here's a new one, lets say you were to make an Oriental Adventures mod, and you included some of the martial arts and thier weapons. So your uber-bad ninja sucessfully does a weapon-break on the samurai. Then, since the icon has the samurai with a sword you replace the samurai holding a sword with a samurai holding nothing.

The summoning/icon replacement works for some awesome ideas. The future of DC looks amazing.

ST

[nologgie]

It certainly sounds like it could be done with some major-league scritping.

Most of the uses I foresee are on the 'monster' side. One exception would be newly infected (character) lycanthropes who haven't mastered their changes.

Another I really like would be a character totally drained by a wight, who becomes a half-strength wight under the control of his slayer. (In this case, the combat AI.) The MM doesn't say how long the process takes, so I'd give it about a round. After all, what does time mean to the undead? It's about time these poor wights got some respect.

[manikus]

I like the idea of the half-strength wights.

[SilentThief]

Certainly puts more danger towards dealing with undead. Kinda like the old school zombie movies and/or resident evil movies.

It'd be a little unnerving when it happens to NPCs or friendly combatants, and it would effectively remove a players character from the party for good.

This would also be useful regarding the "Animate Dead" spell, altho I have no idea of how it would work. I mean, would animate dead have to bring up a scroll-down list of dead (while in combat) to choose from?

ST

[nologgie]

In the 1e PHB the only options are zombies or skeletons (1 per level) so it would be a short list. As for handling, I'd initially treat them like summoned monsters (duration of combat). If someone particularly deft at scripting wanted to expend the effort, it might be possible to get them to show up at succeeding combats (with HP tracked) until actually destroyed.

I don't expect to see the second option anytime soon, though.

[manikus]

Doesn't it take a long time for corpses to reach the zombie and skeleton stage? You would need to have access to a graveyard or a battle site from a week or two before...

I'm not familiar with how long this spell takes to cast, but it could be handled like a prep spell -> give the player options outside of combat, tracking everything with ASLs including the date so that if you did come back to the seen of a recent battle you could raise some undead. If one had a way to track who survived on the party's side and their HP, ASLs and some scripting could keep track of how many undead a mage has at her service. It would be pretty complicated though, at least for me.

[Uatu]

What's wrong with a fresh zombie?

(One would think zombies would get "demoted" to skeleton status after a few years of rotting, but...)

[manikus]

I was just thinking of the MM description of zombies about the rotting flesh and worms.

[Uatu]

Hmm - perhaps there is an interim stage that we can call "skeletal zombie" or "fleshy skeleton"

The worms could actually be an extra curse on a party of greenie adventurers - you could have them be rot grubs, bookworms, etc., instead of just your normal everyday worms

[manikus]

"Hey Clem, why is that zombie also quivery?"
"Oh no, Marcus. It's got worms!"