The tradition of Necromancy was established for the purpose of subverting the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth to enable mortals to extend their existence beyond their normal life span—in direct defiance of the will of Father Death.

The original makers of this magic sought the secrets of longevity and wanted to safeguard their sense of selves from the ennui and dissolution experienced in the Underworld. It was their efforts at teasing out the secrets of life and death that introduced the undead to the world. Many Necromancy spells awaken corpses and bind them to the will of their makers so they become as slaves. Students of the tradition tend to surround themselves with unliving servants and lie low in dark, gloomy places where they have easy access to the bodies and body parts they need to conduct their foul experiments.

Control Limits: Many Necromancy spells enable you to control undead by causing them to become compelled when you create them. The maximum number of undead you can have compelled with Necromancy spells is equal to your Power score. If you create a new undead that exceeds your limit, you remove the compelled affliction from the undead you have controlled for the longest time.

Creating Undead

From animated corpses to grave thralls, nearly all undead exist because a necromancer somewhere discovered the means of creating them. One could conclude that there exists a Necromancy spell for almost every undead creature and that could be the case in your games. Although some such spells already exist, as noted in the Spell Index, creating spells for all the undead would be an endless process, since new forms of undead appear all the time. You can, with the help of your GM, create certain spells you want to add to the game by using the following guidelines.

The Undead Creation table gives the minimum rank a spell must be for it to create an undead creature of a particular Difficulty. Because Difficulty is a flexible concept, geared more toward expressing how a creature interacts with player characters, the GM might decide that some undead require spells of higher rank than the table indicates, if spells for creating those creatures even exist at all.

The table also shows you how many creatures the created undead counts as for the purpose of how many undead you can control.

Undead Creation

Difficulty	Minimum Spell Rank	Count As
1	1	1 creature
5	1 or 2	1 creature
10	2	1 creature
25	3	1-1/2 creatures
50	4	1-1/2 creatures
100	5	2 creatures