Talk:Zombie Apocalypse (3.5e Spell)

Response to Rating
Tome of Necromancy discussed the nature of evil with regards to creating undead, and it's one I ascribe to. If you think it's evil, fine, but I don't think any spell should be considered inherently evil because Wizards of the Coast said making undead is evil. Given that this spell is essentially mass murder, it could probably have it, but I'm not going to limit its usage by assigning it that descriptor. If you think it's appropriate, add it for your games and let that be the end of it.

I also don't believe that disagreeing with the numbers should warrant such a condemnation as "hate the execution". What you're disagreeing with, to me, is just a matter of particular numbers, such a minor change that some people may not even notice it. And once you get to level 15, when this spell becomes available, commoner zombies aren't going to actually be of much help in a normal encounter anyway unless you use them as disposable meat shields, which won't work anyway since any credible foe can just fly over them and ignore their presence.

That said, a cleric with Divine Metamagic could persist this spell anyway, so the duration may as well be 1 hour per level to discourage people from doing that.

The goal of this spell is to make a necromancer a credible commander of a legit army of undead, making mass combat an option for them without making them spend a crapton of resources. I think it does that just fine, and the rest of it is just semantics. - TG Cid 16:28, 11 August 2012 (UTC)


 * It's evil regardless of which version of undead you subscribe to -- you're indiscriminately killing a whole lot of people. Surgo 16:36, 11 August 2012 (UTC)


 * What do you believe the Evil tag is for, Thundergod Cid, except as a way to prevent Good clerics from providing free laborers for the common people? --Foxwarrior 16:42, 11 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Very well, I yield. I added the evil descriptor. Apparently genocide doesn't fall into the gray after all. Shame I can't have my good cleric make an army of goblin zombies now. - TG Cid 16:49, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

A Bit Kamikaze
The burst is centered on the caster. By the spells description, the zombies are not under the casters control. The whole reason a zombie uprising works is beacause they literally swarm people by the hundreds and keep swarming until they get what they came for- brains, flesh, items that let them channel their zombie god, an evil McGuffin, etc. Thus, even with a high level caster that is needed to cast this spell in the first place, he effectively has to undue his spell manually (killing all the zombies he created) or die. And he can't simply run out of town because he is the center of the effected area, thus the zombies are always there.

In closing- this spell is worthless as written. Either hand partial control to the caster (maybe he can issue one order that all zombies will try to fulfill upon animation, like "kill the thief who stole my keys" or the more productive "return my stolen keys to me" or something) or allow the spell to center on something NOT the caster.--Change=Chaos. Period. SC 18:13, 15 September 2011 (UTC)


 * That doesn't in any way prove that the spell is useless. You're still creating a friggin army of (weak) undead and throwing out a mass negative level to everyone in a huge radius without a save and desecrating the area around you. Whether or not you control the zombies doesn't necessarily matter; if you cared to you could take control of them via other means or have provisions for them not to bone you but instead preferentially bone other people. Not to mention the fact that anyone who would be killed by the casting of the spell itself would be SO weak that in anything other than a mass combat minigame (or for roleplaying purposes) they are effectively useless and of no threat to a caster who is not a totally retarded sack of shit (in which case he deserves it).


 * That said, I'll humor you. They now have total control over anything animated by the spell until the end of its duration. I can do that because it's a level 8, and level 8's are boss. - TG Cid 20:14, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Worthless and useless are entirely different things. The spell was useful as written for your mentioned reasons, but had no worth-while effect as any measures to prevent your own spell turning on you were not included. That would have been passible as a lower level spell, but not as an 8th.
 * Still... I do like the idea of a spell were you create zombie armies for one purpose and lose control once the purpose if fulfilled, a necromantic devils bargain as it were. Any thoughts on making a lower level version of this with that limitation in mind?--Change=Chaos. Period. SC 03:48, 16 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Abusable. "Your purpose is to serve me forever."  Actually more to the point, what competence necromancer would have cast this without one of the many undead-nerfing abilities (Lichloved feat, hide from undead, being undead yourself, and so forth).  Undead don't auto-target you if you're a corpse-bro after all. -- Eiji-kun 13:41, 16 September 2011 (UTC)


 * And so, Eiji? Seriously, this is an 8, on a par with other 8s. Getting a bunch of low-end mooks is hardly the issue here. - MisterSinister 20:53, 16 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I was refering to Spaz's idea. -- Eiji-kun 22:33, 16 September 2011 (UTC)


 * It would have been fine as an 8th level even if the zombies were hostile. Any character that can cast this could easily avoid zombies of all things. Like really, overland flight, teleport, hide from undead, and invisibility are just a few examples. --Aarnott 23:18, 16 September 2011 (UTC)


 * True, but it's more helpful at least in the short term for them to be directly under your control and not having to worry about such a thing until after the spell ends. And it doesn't drastically swing the power level up either, so I think it's fine as is too. - TG Cid 23:27, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Love the Idea. But, this is not an 8th level spell
First off let me say that the concept in this spell is awesome. Simply awesome. But everything about this spell screams epic magic to me. The mile/level radius burst? A 15th level evil Cleric or Wizard could turn the entire world into a Zombie infested wasteland in a matter of weeks! Add in a little anti-divination magic and nobody would know what the hell was going on! Casting time needs to be increased to something past 1 minute. I'm thinking more like 1 day or 1 week. There must be material components, something to the tune of 500,000gp in black onyx or something. Casters should not be able to just turn entire towns into zombie-town for free. YES, I know there are other ways for a 15th level Wizard of Cleric to annihilate cities on a sunny afternoon, but this just seems a little too early (spell level wise) for them to get their hands on. I reccommend this be changed to an Epic spell.


 * I'm getting ahead of myself, but as a bit of hivemind I was going to ask Cid if I could rip this more or less verbatim when I get to the revamped epic spells for CE. -- Eiji-kun 17:42, 11 August 2012 (UTC)


 * For those of us who don't believe the game even goes past 20 (waiting to be proven wrong), here's some additional justification for this being a weird 8.


 * To pull EL 13 worth of zombies, which is what you could get with the Cid's Summon Monster variant from the same spell slot, you'd need 128 of them (ignoring the EL breakdown over that stretch for now). You you can get with a 35' radius if each space was occupied, which is probably probably not a reasonable approximation even if you cast it in a densely populated area. A 50' radius would get you that number if only 2 in 5 squares were occupied (and if they're more densely occupied it's just more CR 1/2 2HD zombies with a level 8 spell so who cares). The "killing people" part is a lot like Circle of Death with a larger damage potential but a 1HD cap with a similar burst range but no range, and combining it with the animating thing probably keeps it at a 6 because of the EL breakdown for what you get out of it and the unlikely population density consistency. An area increase to 100' probably keeps it as an 8.


 * The desecrate add on is for half the duration but enlarged a crap ton, and is probably better than an 8 on its own. Capping it at a mile keeps it pretty close to an 8 on its own.


 * The conversion field is something I lack a reference spell for. That shouldn't go anywhere though, since it's not really an apocalypse unless they get to generate more zombies. 1 mile radius "dead things come back as zombies" seems pretty reasonably for an 8 though, but I wouldn't mind being corrected if I forgot something.


 * What I think we have is a few better than 8th level effects wrapped up into a single 8th level slot package with a slightly longer casting time. Even if they were all brought down to their 8th level versions (mile-ish animation zone, mile-ish desecrate zone, 100'-ish kill 1HD burst; the ish is for minor scaling changes), you still get to save 2 slots for other things by spending 3 times as long as if you'd cast them individually. Which is a huge benefit actually, and one that I don't think properly accounted for here. So while I would want to see the effects brought more into line with 8th level effects, I'd also want to see the casting time increased to 10 minutes or an hour. - Tarkisflux Talk 18:49, 11 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Strongly with Tarkis as far as thinking the game doesn't really go past level 20, so as far as this incarnation of the spell is concerned I'm hoping to keep it at an 8 or perhaps bump it to a 9 at the maximum; most of my landscape-changing spells seem to level 8 so this spell was almost here by default.
 * I'm game to increase the casting time for something as monumental as this; the 1 minute was to at the very least insure that it was not something that could really be busted out in the middle of combat. One hour sounds fine to me and it has been changed accordingly.
 * Homebrew spells have, by my estimation, strongly suggested that desecrate is cheaper than the SRD gives it credit for. Tasha's tomb tainting, while at a much smaller AoE, gives the heightened level of desecration at a longer duration as a level 1 spell. Making it a massive AoE is not something that I believe necessarily justifies a level 8 spell of its own accord.
 * I suppose that a mile could be a suitable AoE, given that it can still be the archetypal catalyst for a zombie apocalypse by starting in a small area and working outwards. If zombies were to be made self-spawning (which is another side project I have wanted to do for some time), the additional animation clause wouldn't be necessary. But as of yet, zombies don't make other zombies in D&D, which is a staple of any zombie apocalypse scenario, so that bit is probably the only thing that justifies a larger AoE. Unless there was a clause added that anyone killed be a zombie created by the spell also becomes a zombie, in which case it's covered. - TG Cid 19:44, 11 August 2012 (UTC)


 * TTT is a weird comparison, since it has a rather expensive material component that keeps it out of common use for a few levels. But I'm with you on area by itself being a weird thing to charge a high spell slot for, it's just that there's no guidelines for spells that large out of Epic and I reached it by repeated application of metamagic (and being generous with final level adjustment because of said weirdness). A 1 level drop in starting spell level doesn't buy you that much by that metric.


 * I would be fine with removing the zone and instead inflicting each of the zombies with a magical disease (for mechanical reasons, fluff it however you want) that caused wounded or sufficiently intact corpses to rise as zombies a short time later. It gives a couple of thematic ways to stop the growth of the zombies and also means that a brief attack is potentially as scary as a mauling. - Tarkisflux Talk 20:19, 11 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Cid: An undead creature that's relatively sturdy and converts living peasants into more of itself with a single swing of an arm. They're slightly tougher than normal people and not particularly fast, too, although I guess the above-average intelligence is slightly problematic. You can already cause a Wight apocalypse out of small woodland creatures by casting Locate City Drain in a forest. --Foxwarrior 01:52, 13 August 2012 (UTC)