I’m running a PF2 campaign where the party are outlaws running around Alkenstar, robbing banks and seeking vengeance.
Every day begins with some newspaper headlines. One will be about them if they did something substantial or noticeable, but I have a ton of fluff ready to insert. Some is story related foreshadowing, some is just stuff like “Prices of apples are up 2% after news of heavy rain in Geb’s south has washed away too many skeleton fruit pickers”
Hmm.
The problem is getting an army of undead. If a level 20 wizard uses all their spell slots on reasserting Animate Dead every day, that’s 128 skeletons. They’d presumably be untrained laborers making 2 sp a day, so it’s 25.6 gp a day. You’d be the world’s poorest level 20 wizard.
If you want a proper army, your options are having a whole bunch of necromancers, a Lich using its Lair Actions to regenerate spell slots, the Wand of Orcus, or using Finger of Death to murder people for years. And that last one only gets you zombies.
Edit: It’s 142 skeletons if you’re a necromancer wizard thanks to Undead Thrall giving you an extra pile of bones.
Without going into homebrew or Wish territory (as the former is table-dependent and the latter is DM-dependent), Finger of Death creates an undead that is permanently under your command.
Being a 6th level spell, a 20th level caster can cast it six times per day (by spending all their higher level slots casting that spell exclusively), which means that, provided you have a steady supply of humanoids to cast the spell on, you could have six undeads per day, or 180 per month. In a year, that’s 2190 undeads, which is itself a small army. Give it some time, and you’d have a small country following your commands.
At that point there are only two problems: time itself (which can be solved with features that increase your lifespan, such as Boon of Immortality), and other people trying to stop you (which can be solved by using your spell slots to make them regret their decision).
I did list that, but doing the math is helpful. This is less useful for labor, but you could use executions or assisted suicide. If aging in their universe is anything like ours, I imagine there’d be no shortage of good people who’d rather go to heaven and donate their money to charity than spend it supporting themselves as they slowly and painfully die, but even in 3.5 where there were downsides to old age, the worst it got was +3 wisdom and -6 strength. Commoner was a class, so they’d roll ability scores and someone could have a Strength of 4, but they could also level up and improve their ability scores.
The other problem is that they’re making zombies, not skeletons, and there’s no rule that zombies decay into skeletons or anything like that. Though I suppose if we’re playing RAW, there’s no rule that zombies decay at all or are unsanitary.
Only if you send them to work somewhere else and have them give you their pay.
If you are their “employer” you can make much more than 2sp per day from them.
A good capitalist can make 10x or even 100x of what they pay their employees off their work.
You have to be a really good capitalist. If anyone could do that, they’d bid up the price of employees until the companies can barely turn a profit. And at that point, the skeletons barely help.
Depends on how many high-level necromancers are there who can provide skelettons.
If you can make ten times the employee’s pay, then human employees vs skeletons is just a question of 10% of your income. But high-level necromancers are going to be more expensive than just paying commoners.
Maybe skeletons can have some benefit over a regular human employee. For example, you don’t have to worry about workplace safety. If they get crushed, well, just summon another tomorrow. There’s no risk of them unionising or revolting. They will not abandon you for an employer who does care whether they live or not. You can use them to do all the gross and dangerous stuff where you’d actually have to pay humans more to do it. They don’t slack off, they don’t need breaks, they don’t need sleep.
I think it would be possible to capitalize on that.
All you really need is some boy skeletons, some girl skeletons, a lot of alcohol and some sexy music
army of skeletons to conquer the world: capitalism style
I did this for my Waterdeep: Dragonheist campaign. The paper was yellow journalism through and through: they misspelled PC names, misattributed actions, and obviously supported one of the factions. It was a lot of fun. I fully recommend it.
I’ve never even played DND but this sounds lit.
This is how you put your Blades in the Dark crew at war with the Ink Rakes.
definitely pitching this to my DM for the upcoming Eberron campaign; we’ve been watching Legend of Korra for vibes and inspiration, and the recaps in that show were perfectly fit for the setting
A tabloid that just exaggerates everything
its almost as if those that control the message control society
Awesome idea! I’m gonna do this the next time I run a campaign!
I would be willing to join any D as well as D group that would have me. The only caveat is that I would describe the players accurately.
