Many Minions
Do you know why a zombie apocalypse is a nightmare scenario? It’s not just that the hungry dead are coming for you brains. It’s not that your loved ones have become hideous Romero monsters bent on making yet another sequel. It’s not even the stench of rotten flesh wafting around the countryside like an ambulatory fart. No my friends, the real horror is trying to finish your turn in under half an hour.
When you’ve got a boatload of minions following your orders, you wind up chewing through game time like an intellect devourer at a Mensa meeting. Between rolling to hit, rolling damage, tracking hp, remembering which minions have status effects and which ones don’t, and whether that one in the corner with the yellow cloak has already taken its action this round, even experienced necromancers cab be forgiven for flinging down the old knuckle bone abacus in disgust. In short, the playstyle is a bugger to pull off.
For my part, I’ve tried minionmancy exactly once. It was in a one-shot playtest game with some of my fellow Veranthea Codex developers. (To my surprise and delight, you can actually watch this game over here. I’d thought it was lost to the sands of time.) I was a goblin fighter pilot in that game, and the proud owner of a pseudodragon familiar named Gimmick. The little ball of scales and bad attitude was the source of my many minions. Thanks to the obscene amount of cash you can throw around in high-level one-shots, she actually had more magical gear than I did. Her tiny golf bag of wands and scrolls had enough firepower to make Sorcerer blush, but it was the wand of summon monster III that kept crapping out eagles. Every round without fail, another 1d4+1 feathered friends would take to the air, surround whatever hideous monstrosity we were pummeling at the moment, and proceed to annoy the shit out of it. They provided flanking bonuses, caused chaos, ate up attacks of opportunity, and did zero damage. (We were something like 16th level. Even if they managed to hit something they weren’t getting through DR.) It was an amusing tactic, but you know what I remember most about the experience? Feeling grateful when they all died. I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but I have a tough time piloting one stat block, much less a dozen.
What about you other minionmancers out there? I’m talking to all the summoners, druids, and wizardly types who like fighting with squads of dudes rather than single companions. How do you manage it? Does it stay fun throughout, or is it more bother than it’s worth? And to all the necromancers in the room: have you ever made Necromancer’s mistake and lost control of your own undead? I hear that’s something of an occupational hazard. Sound off with your tales of too many men on the field down in the comments!
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“Wait, how could you not notice that at some point every time you created a new minion another one would run away or try to kill you?”
“I though they were just jealous of their little brother!”
This guy necromances.
I have never mistakenly lost control of my own undead.
Mistakenly is the keyword there through, I once did it on purpose.
Why destroy perfectly fine bloody skeletons when you can just send them away and let them revert to their inherent hate for all living things next to the enemy city full of fools that deny the superiority of your goddess? Particularly since you are leaving anyway, so it’s not like it’ll harm you personally.
The reason I didn’t keep them was that I had just found this delicious Glazebu corpse (well it wasn’t a corpse when we found it) that I wanted to transform into a big main minion instead.
Being evil like that was quite refreshing.
For combat I placed small dice next to them to keep track of damage, and just had them swarm things with no great tactics, in part to speed things up.
I suspect it’s the combination of “I must use my minion tactics perfectly” and “analysis paralysis” that gives the tactic a bad name. If you’re a bit looser with things then “speed things up” is the name of the game. 🙂
It helped me that my minions had an INT of -, so it wouldn’t have felt right to have them use complex tactics, what with the chaos of combat and the limited possibility of shouting commands.
I enjoyed summon monster in 3.5 to get an army of celestial puppies to give flanking and help action. I never found it much of an issue; just add +4 to whoever they’re aiding and check whether they roll a natural 20 if they get an attack of opportunity. I also kept what I called an “astral deva summoning packet”, which consisted of a scroll of planar ally plus the gold to pay for their services. I kept it at 1d4+1 hounds and a standard summoning of 3 devas, so it never got out of hand.
I’d always wanted to try out undead minionomancy, but unfortunately our group prefers 5e to 3.5, making minionomancy far harder. Figuring out when 24 hours has past, how many spell slots you want to pour into animating dead, how many spell slots you want to pour into control undead… it’s just a real hassle to keep ’em controlled in 5e.
I haven’t found to much trouble controlling large hoards of creatures. Just grab handful of d20s from your local Laura Bailey, determine what it takes to hit, and roll en mass. Then, roll a whole heap of damage. Movement is definitely the most difficult part, so for that its best to, instead of counting out the distance, just shove the miniatures what looks like a good amount and call it a day.
I’ve been watching a bunch of Age of Sigmar let’s plays lately, and I can’t but wonder if movement trays could have some applications for necromancers.
Typically when i am in a situation with multiple companions. i just have everything planned ahead of time and roll them out fast. Its never been that bad for me though, the worst i ever had was a time where i ended up getting a bard with a pegasus from find greater steed, a spiritual weapon, a staff of the python, a familiar, and a npc entrusted to me because im usually good at keeping track of things. For that i basically just rolled things out during the turn before mine and told the dm the results. I didnt actually plan to have so many effective companions that game, but i kept getting them or deciding something looked fun and just sorta gathered them as things went on. I did once make a necromancer too, but i dont like actually like being the guy who takes forever on turns with his own army, last character sorta being the exception, so i worked with the dm on deciding to make one super undead as my combat guy, and then some other undead who can still do useful tasks like fetching items, providing destractions or bait, triggering traps, or just standing in a hallway, but couldnt actually fight. That made everything go pretty smoothly. That was the evil manchild wizard i mentioned a few times while describing the evil alex jones elemental campaign.
Also my character did not give a damn if he lost control of some of his undead, which he saw as his friends, despite his treatment of them, because he tended not to stay in each town much, often wandering around, effectively spreading them out, and he was a high enough level that they werent much of a threat to him, so he didnt care. He was just happy to see them making their own way in the world once he had enough other friends to keep him company. Oke of my favorite things about being a 5e nevromancer, was that the skeletons had 6 int and no mental resistances, meaning they were just as vulnerable to fears or charms as anyone, suggesting they had fully fledged minds stronger then some other sapient creatures since 5 int seems to be the limit there with ogres. This added a nice extra layer of evil and horror to my control of them, as i often sent them to their deaths in my guys childish ideas.
I think that “childish glee” just about sums up the art of necromancy. It’s just so delightfully squicky!
I recently saw someone in a D&D 5E forum complaining that as a level 5 necromancer, they had a limited number of minions and couldn’t control a “proper undead army”. This being the edition where wizard familiars can’t attack and beast master rangers have to sacrifice one of their own attacks to get their companions to attack. Why they thought their level 5 character deserved an “army” was beyond me.
You can get an undead army. You just have to nail the Charisma check: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_4-rCROcsM
Meatspace has its limitations in such matters. True, the Interwebbal Plane is far from perfect, but it allows the use of a magnificent spell when it comes to minionmancy: Macro Copypasta.
I find that the phrase, “Wait… Did these guys already attack?” remains a problem.
[Laughs in token markers]
Alternatively, you could always go with the slightly less believable, but easier to handle method of all the minions delaying their actions so they can attack in unison.
Well sure, but even then you’ve got to go “left to right, top to bottom, wait I think I missed those two in the back.”
A trick I use for that, is to just count how many minions attack each foe, then one can just roll for them as a group without needing to keep track of whether it’s minion 2 or 17 that’s attacking currently, as long as 5 are attacking the orc warlord and 7 each of his ogre bodyguards.
I use the same trick as a GM.
3.5e: Malconvoker. Imagine the woes of summoning oodles of things, with different profiles because you do get Su and Sp and spells after Calling spells. Now imagine constantly having to pretend to be Evil in a Good party to keep your minions in line, and still having a good chance that they’re still trying to backstab you. At least you have an ace bluff mod and if you’re clever a dedicated bluff Succubus you know the true name of, but eventually bluffs fail.And then the horde of devils, demons and yugoloths call bullshit. Best to summon mostly demons and devils and set them at each other after the fight is done. But then the combat lasts even longer!
Blood War, the home game!
Spheres of Power helps mitigate the half-hour turns by including options to combine groups of individual creatures into ‘swarms’ or ‘troops’. This way you can have your horde of minions, while also not be hated by every other player or gm when combat comes around. This could probably be adapted to base pathfinder or other systems aswell with not much effort.
Are you talking about these rules?
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/humanoids/troop/
Yes. By making groups of minions into troops and swarms (another template), you can dramatically reduce the time it takes for a minionmancer to act in combat.
The only time I’ve played a necromancer, I actually took advantage of the ‘can only control X undead’ thing. I was playing an undead Antipaladin and was the BBEG for several other groups that were playing semi-concurrently. I had a small army of orcs, a desecrated temple as my HQ, and the countryside to ravage. So I’d attack a village with my orcs and the max number of undead I could control, wipe em out, then raise a new batch of undead and leave the old ones wandering around uncontrolled. I also used them as free labour to build my HQ bigger. I mostly just ignored them in combat though, they were basically just there as a layer of ablative meat to protect me and troops I couldn’t just replace with a few gems and a spell slot.
You never had to worry about getting attacked by your own uncontrolled dudes?
Mindless undead don’t go after other undead unless they’re hostile. I lost a few orcs to them, but my reaction was ‘meh, more bodies.’
That common sense, but I’m wondering if you’ve got a source for that ruling. Does it say anywhere that undead don’t attack other undead?
Hmm. The closest thing I have to one is the Undead Bloodline capstone ability, One Of Us, where you get all sorts of undead traits, and mindless undead ignore you unless provoked. I always assumed that that was just another undead trait, but it could be an entirely separate ability. Though I can’t say I’ve looked into it a great deal, as I’ve only ever played two undead characters, and even that is probably more than the average gamer.
I mean, you were there with me the last time I did that. I thought I did alright with not bogging things down too much, and I had fun. You also seemed rather amused when I busted out the T-rex.
Oh shit! I thought I recognized that user name. 😛
I know you were all excited for a bulette submarine, but I still think our xenomorph gunnery platform won the goofiest minion prize.
Our life-link oracle realied heavily on summon monster throughout the whole my Kingmaker game.
It was fine on lower levels, but at some point the summons; with the help of lots of buffs from the party; just got too powerful and time consuming.
I straight up banned minion-mancing going forward in all my future campaigns.
What level did it start to get to be “too much?” Was it 11-12? I bet it was 11-12.
I’m honestly not quite sure, but 11-12 sounds about right.
Luckily my player pulled back abit on the summon monsters, and respeced his char to be not as “OP”.
We tend to shy away from minion masters because of this…
I do have one amusing anicdote from our playthrough of Divinity 2 Original Sin, where the party necromance managed to summon undead and they almost ALWAYS wound up in line with my fire breath cone. It became almost comical how he would summon another “baby” and it would imideatly wander into my firing line. So numbers were… “managed” 😉
What about our friendly neighborhood gnome tinker?
I know that feel bro: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/artillery
I once played a necromancer who was a physician and ambassador from another nation. In an effort to build useful relationships, he sent his (living) henchman to approach the assassin’s guild. The minion was rebuffed, beaten, and returned after having been tortured by way of a negative response/admonition. The good doctor subsequently divined all the exits from the guild headquarters, raised a small army of undead from the city’s crypts and vaults, and sent them in to utterly destroy the Guild by slowly hacking their way inward to the citadel. The great thing was that this action did not take place in game time – the GM ran this scenario outside of game play and reported/described the results in game (no massive dice rolling, time wasting, tracking problems, etc). It was a very satisfying solution to the problem, as well as providing player and character with the good feeling of “That will teach you not to insult me by torturing my minions.”
Stone cold, lol. Has there ever been a good-aligned ambassador in a game of D&D?
There’s at least one. My Dwarf Paladin was hazed by his fellow Paladins by being assigned to be an ambassador to elven lands. Like most Dwarven ambassadors he hated it due to the lack of quality alcohol (Elven wine is basically just sugary grape juice) and the fact that Elves don’t think that settling disputes by punching your fellow diplomats is appropriate conduct.
As a Construct Crafter (Craft Construct is the best feat) having extra unfeeling golems on the field has been extremely useful in most encounters. I’m already in a party with 5 other players so to make my turns shorter I don’t bring my entire robot army with me at all times, but instead whatever works for the current situation.
My greatest creation is an Iron Golem with the Commando Template (the new construct handbook is so so good) that I attached a giant axe to. Irene kicks ass with power attack and awesome blow. My alchemist has stopped fighting for the most part because irene does all the work for me.
I also have a colossal animated object that can grapple anything that doesn’t have freedom of movement. It also doubles as the party’s transport because it’s an animated workshop.
And for when dealing with more brutish creatures, the Scythe Glass Swarm cannot be harmed by weapon attacks and its distraction ability disables anything that fails a fort save.
I have other utility constructs too but they aren’t really in the way much. Alchemical golem throws bombs every round, touch attacks for 8d6 is nice reliable damage… unless the target is resistant to anything. Lead golem protects us from divination so we can work in secret, and the clockwork servant does errands for me so I can keep crafting.
My only experience with Minionmancy came from a one-shot where I played a Druid. I used Conjure Animals to defeat the people who jumped us in a tavern with swarms of rats. It was horrifying, and a health-code violation.
I really like 5E’s system for managing undead horde size: You can use Animate Dead to either raise Sx2-5 undead that are under your control for 24 hours, or you can use the slot to re-assert control over Sx2-2 creatures Where S is the level of the slot expended. This means that your horde is as big as you’re willing/able to spend on it. If you want to blow literally all of your slots on an undead horde, then there goes all your other level 3+ spells.
That said, I really like the “Handling mobs” rule from DMG pg. 250 for how to prevent a horde of sufficient size from bogging down combat. Using the d20 result needed to handle a hit (If a creature with +4 to hit attacks AC 18 for example the needed result is 14) it lets you say that 1/X attacks hits. Using average damage also speeds up play.
Good tricks all the way down. 🙂
Practice makes the master for “If thou the forces of un death want to marshal, remember to caste Haste while throwing your minions dice”. Necromancy needs dedication, lacks of morals, hunger for power and and several minion accounting skill checks. On the other hand there is another path on full of dread, blood and death and that path is the one of just letting your minions do as they want while your wizard is safe and sound inside a magic circle. “Losing” control of your minions isn’t a bad thing always.
Once in a game our “brave” “honorable” and “noble” adventurers ended in a small town, nice and peaceful, too much peaceful, they didn’t got any problem or job for our adventures. So after a short trip to the local cementery our party was ready to start negotiating the job of putting an end to the undead plague. The town was nice, peaceful and poor, so we left the villagers to die at the hands of a bunch of undead minions 🙂
Side matter but still a important one. Who is the guy behind in the background? Sword and shield, spiky hair, is he a hero wannabe?
Obviously, that’s Doomed Guardsman from “Calling the Audible.”
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/calling-the-audible
Oh, i hope Doomed Guardsman is okay. If not that at least tells necromancer if he wants to be a zombie or a skeleton 🙂
“And to all the necromancers in the room: have you ever made Necromancer’s mistake and lost control of your own undead?”
I know what the words mean… but I don’t understand? Isn’t losing 9or rather releasing) control of your Undead minions rather the entire point of being a Necromancer?
Besides, in GURPS the only way to lose control is is have another necromancer cast Control Zombie and steal your precious babies away from you.
I’m no GURPS guy, but I would imagine that dying also results in loose undead. Weirdly, that makes resurrection especially inconvenient for necromancers.
Played around with a necromancer in 5e for a bit. Fun ones but yeah, it can be ridiculous managing such a large horde. The real difficulty though was disguising them. Unsurprisingly, nearly all civilization abhors the undead, so if I didn’t want myself and my party to be filled with crossbow bolts once my horse is downwind a moderately sized town, I needed to go out f my way to hide them. By just their appearance, but smell too. Turns out the undead smell like death and don’t bother to clean up after themselves.
More to the point, it did get to a point where there was so many skeletons running about that out party couldn’t position themselves at all during a battle due to my undead minions. Even though the DM sorta allowed two people a space, in certain dungeons a 2×2 space would be jammed packed with the dead bodies of our enemies. I played them for about three sessions before I figured it was too much trouble and rerolled for a more manageable chain pact warlock.
You want Fantasy Febreeze, for all your undead needs:
http://legacy.aonprd.com/advancedPlayersGuide/spells/negateAroma.html
I’m a big fan of one of the most overlooked, lesser-known minionmancy spells in D&D 3.5: Call Faithful Servants (from the Book of Exalted Deeds). It calls your choice of 1d4 lantern archons, musteval guardinals, or coure eladrin, who serve you faithfully for 1 year. Unlike Planar Binding or Planar Ally, there are no strings and no gp or xp costs attached—the only limitation is that you can’t have more than 2 HD per caster level worth of ’em at a time.
Here’s the thing. Mustevals have Magic Missile at will (CL 3rd). So if you’re a 9th level caster, you can just call up a pack of them and every turn be like, “Oh, and my mustevals blast the bad guy for 18d4+18 auto-hit damage, then pop back in my bag.” Which is, y’know, pretty overpowered. Maybe get some lantern archons in the mix to spam Aid and have a constantly-refreshing temp HP pool and attack boost for your whole party, because why not?
There is a catch. The spell has a celestial component, so you can only cast it if you’re an outsider with the [Good] subtype. But if you cast Lesser Holy Transformation first, that’s no problem. Alternatively, if you get it in a magic item, you can fake that requirement with Use Magic Device to emulate a race. Or you can take the Celestial Mystic prestige class to let you count as an archon when casting it.
Anyway, it’s really strong.
You remember the time my party fought that T-rex?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/race-to-the-finish
The lantern archon horde was a big part of it. There’s nothing better than ending a big fight with a friggin’ laser light show.
As a person who’s made multiple homebrew classes and archetypes around the idea of summoning monsters and put find familiar on all of the spell lists, I have no right to complain.
But also, as someone who does play by post games the issue is a non-issue for me. My post takes…. as long as it takes me to make it. How long it takes doesn’t matter to anyone else at all. The exception would be if I’m doing things that involve my minions acting on their own initiative. That could be an issue I suppose. Though still, pbp is a slow way to play. Unless I’m really slowing down the game, nobody is going to really care. shrug
I think the most I’ve had at once was character + 3 creatures to handle. One of which made something like four or five attacks a round. (Thanks for being a weird unexpected extra option on Conjure Elemental Xorn!)
Our of curiosity, how often do you post in a given game? A few times a day? More often during fights?
Once had a summoner. Got into a situation where we had 6 small buildings to check for a possible hostage. Used the summon monster SLA to get d4+1 celestial triceratops. Got 5. Told them “Ok boys, each of you pick a shed and pop open the wall for me.”
I like to imagine you guys doing a, “Ready? Break!” thing like a football team. Then tackling architecture.
The only minionmancer I’ve played was in 13th Age, and that entirely because of how the rules for them work in that game.
When you call up a skeletal minion, it only ever has the stats that the spell says it does.
You don’t have to cross reference a spell, the monster’s stat block, a skeleton template, and a handful of feats.
Not to go off on a tangent, but I’ve been really pleased with Starfinder in that regard. NPC type enemies might still have spells to sort through, but monsters are generally a ball of stats with 2-3 interesting and well-defined abilities to make ’em special. It’s been a bit of a relief after all my recent high-level play over in Pathfinder 1e.
Cinemeria Kemnebi was my favourite necromancer. I’ve dabbled a few times in the discipline, but she was the one I got particularly far with. 17th level in fact! (Sweet, sweet, 9th level spell slots…)
Honestly, while she did employ minions for key operations, she tended towards elite undead sought out and placed under her control by way of command undead, rather than hordes of self-made weak minions. Of course an apocalypse of minor zombies still has its uses, but it generally wasn’t the go-to solution for her.
Never did mistakenly lose control of my own undead. When control was lost, Cinemeria tended to ensure that it occurred deliberately in a place where the zombies would cause a big scare that wouldn’t be traced back to her. Bonus points of the party could “save” a bystander from these undead that we totally hadn’t just unleashed on the populace.
I am a minionmancer myself before my GM decided to put a stop to that nonsense. To her credit admittedly, as something of a natural munchkin I wasn’t going to be controlling myself so I’m glad that at least someone is doing something about it. Personally I had quite an easy time managing minions, but GM has allowed me to get used to handling them. The biggest thing about minions is that you should be aware of WHY you are summoning something. A minion, like a monster, might have a dozen different uses but when you bring a minion to the field you should have an idea of WHY you want them on the field and have a good idea of what they’re capable of. Are they there to flank? Look for flanking positions ahead of your own turn. Are they there to cast spells? Just keep the spells that you’ll actually use handy. Those who use minions need to trim a lot of fat ahead of time so it doesn’t bog down the game. You’re not calling in a lantern archon to grapple the enemy and you didn’t raise a skeletal dragon to stand at the back as support artillery and so that part of their stats just needs to be cleaved out. Once that is done, then playing a minionmaster is not significantly different from playing a two weapon fighter or a high level archer.
Sounds fair. But if that’s the case, why did your GM “decide to put a stop to that nonsense?”
It’s mostly a matter of pure power. Even for a system with level scaling like Pathfinder, some classes and build just scales faster than any other. I mostly controlled myself for most encounters because after the quite disastrous first session, our GM quite often undershot battles as far as difficulty goes. For one session however, we effectively had two combat characters at level 7 when we went hunting something we only knew to be big and dangerous. Assuming we would be up against something like an adult black dragon, I went out with literally the entire arsenal of undead. We were facing a bulette. With a party of two members, the bulette lasted exactly one round. It was only about 9:30 pm by then and so the GM decided to throw the Sandpoint Devil at us. It also lasted exactly one round. So long story short, a single lvl 7 character essentially soloed a CR7 and a CR8 encounter back to back in one turn.
Even if a minionmancer can manage their minions quickly, the ability to act twice or more when every other party member gets to act once often robs the spotlight. It’s why I personally think that druids are probably the strongest Pathfinder class. It’s why I think that despite not being as flashy as a summoner, Hunters, Rangers, and Spiritualists are also obscenely strong. It just gets worse for necromancers though. Every single enemy the GM has ever thrown at you becomes a part of your arsenal and, with blood money, that is an arsenal that essentially will never go away. Taking up too much time robs the other party members. Taking up the spotlight also does the same thing, and in a game like Pathfinder or DND that spotlight should be shared. Even if a minionmancer is a master of minion management, I would personally not allow it for the same reason I would not allow a minionmancer who spends half an hour on their turn.
Good analysis of the problem. Action economy often comes up in the case of solo boss monsters, but the standard solution there (give him some minions!) becomes a spotlight problem on the player side of the screen.
That’s why I like the idea of “one big companion” type classes. Animal companions as opposed to summoned hordes.
I once GM:ed a campaign that started with the PC:s leading a large posse into the wilderness in search of some lost children from the village. Werewolves were waiting. There were like 50 “Commoners” with horrible stats, but the sheer number of them meant occasionally someone hit something. They were a plot device: I wanted them to die horribly in front of the PC:s. Eventually one PC croaked and took over one of the Commoners and managed to level him up into a true hero over the campaign. Good times.
How ironic. I just finished a story about my Napping Necrolock for the last comic, so I guess I’ll talk about my bard instead.
Raven Queen Warlock gets a raven familiar that generally stays on your shoulder for passive bonuses, but can still be sent out to do its own thing. Pact of Chain gets an imp familiar.(that can take the form of a raven) Lore Bard gets magical secrets at level 6; Find Steed+Conjure Animals.
At the time, find greater steed didn’t exist, so my DM allowed me to summon a reskinned Giant Owl into a Giant Raven with it, and then Conjure Animals has an entire flock of Giant Owls (also reskinned to giant ravens) as an option.
Combine that all together at Character level 9 (11 in my case) and you have some light insanity.
Fortunately we were using fantasy grounds/roll20, so once we got things set up, turns took merely a few clicks to resolve. A LOT of enemies got grappled and dropped. The DM still ruled that we would NOT be sticking to the rule where each creature has its own initiative, getting it all over at once was the fastest way to get through that horde.
I have a character that summons animals to fight for him. Thanks to gestalt, he has a permanent leshy familiar. Thanks to the animal domain, he has a permanent animal companion. And thanks to the Cauldron of Overwhelming Allies, he’s guaranteed a minimum of 2 creatures per summon. I had to make flash cards for his most common summons so I’d have their stats on hand easily.