also in amonkhet they have the undead do all the manual labour. farming, construction, embalming other undead. they even have necro-alchemists on innistrad who fuel their weapons on souls. mtg undead are fun.

He also missed that speak with dead is a spell in D&D

Thank you for this

Yes. TY! Was here to talk about the same thing. Tom would probably like it. Lee Pace is the 'necro' 😆

I like how he Described Gideon the Ninth in the whole "Indentured undead servants" thing

is it evil if their soul isnt in the body and the body is just a mindless automaton?

@@avlaenamnell6994 becoming a soulless husk and mindless automaton is the natural progression of working in retail so yes its still evil 😂

@@TheDreadedScotsman but if you as your spirit is in heaven and your bones are just doing manual labour then its fine :P

I mean if we sign a contract saying I will give you X amount of money per year/month for the right to use your body after your death for manual labor/ whatever else we agree in the contract is it really evil tho if you signed it with full consent?

@@avlaenamnell6994 ah but what if body and soul are intrinsically linked so that you're trapped within the body until it decomposes. Then you're trapped for eternity doing grunt work unable to escape or communicate 🤔😝

Love that series, and the Abhorsen look like they're basically Cops for Necromancers, as opposed to Necromancer-Cops

Read that series in secondary school, in the completely wrong order, i went Lirael then the third and first books

Would you like a berry?

Could you list some of the reasons you know?

In the old D&D setting Jakandor the Charonti would also reanimate their dead for work and battle.

This is a thing even in the 1e Pathfinder's Golarion as well. Just wanted to leave that note =)

@@ILuvKonata I know but 2e did shine some more light on it with Impossible Lands and Blood Lords.

I came here to recommend Hallowfaust as well. One of my favorite locations for a campaign :D

Yeah, it looks like it basically plays like Holocure, except with 3D-ish instead of pixels.

You can even sign one of these contracts yourself at the beginning of the game to make some money. And of course, they Dustin's can't collect because you are immortal.

Unseen servant only a strength of 2 while skeletons have 10. With a strength of 2 that servant wouldn't be able to pick anything up over like 10lbs or something. Not to mention you have to command the unseen servant every time, while skeletons can be given simple tasks they will continue to do until told otherwise You'd just use Animate Dead, and skeletons because zombies are slow (and smelly). Simple things like mining or hauling things from one place to the other are well within the bounds of what you could command undead to do. The whole not having a soul isnt a problem if your just using them for labour And Speak With Dead would work for detective work, it just animates a recent corpse for the sole purpose of asking it questions

@@dancinshroom7735 Strength of 2 means they can lift 60lbs. Unseen servant will do a task until it is complete. Both spells require a bonus action to command the servant. Unseen servant is formless, meaning it can move through walls to complete tasks and you have the bonus of not having a rotting corpse walking around your job site. Animate dead is also a 3rd level spell, which would require a stronger wizard than unseen servant who would charge more for the casting. And finally, the DM decides what the skeleton or zombies stats are, not the book. The books just have a template of the creature, but the dm could decide that corpse you used was so brittle that it's arms and legs turned to dust as you were casting the spell and the skeleton or zombie has a strength of 0. Unseen servant always has a strength of 2.

​@@Sinsults 60lbs isnt much to be able to carry, its like a rock thats ~21cm to a side (assuming rock density of 2.7g/cm3) Again use clean skeletons not smelly zombies. You can clean the bones before casting the spell Also the DM does NOT choose the statistics, its the statistics given in the monster manual. As the spell states Youd have to have a asshole of a DM decide your skeleton pet is worthless the moment you cast it. It has a strength of 10 in every other situation. A DM could decide a ton of things but to decide that what you worked hard to do is worthless is a huge dick move Yes animate undead is a higher level skill but its also way better then unseen servant which is why its higher Now where unseen servant is limited It only has a range of 60ft and ends if you ask it to move further or if you move more than 60ft away while its out doing a task It only lasts a hour and takes 10mins to ritual cast, so If you stayed up 24/7 you could at max have 5-6 ongoing servants moving within 60ft of you (and you cant move while ritual casting) It cannot go through walls like you say, because conjuration spells have to have "line of effect"' so if you break that by making it go through something solid the spell ends Now where animate undead works better at 3rd level you can have 4 skeletons under your control for 24hrs and it only takes 1min to set it up, not 10mins to set up a single one servant for a hour The skeletons can push, carry, move up to 300lbs (as per the monster manual, now if your DM is a dick and gives you shit stats thats on him, its more than reasonable to use monster manual stats) Skeletons have unlimited range so you could tell the 3 of them to dig at a mine, the 4th to clear rubble and then go chill at the pub Also its reasonable to assume the skeletons would understand more simple tasks as they actually have a INT and WIS score. Still "simple tasks" but more complex ones

@@dancinshroom7735 The DM *does* choose the statistics. The spell states specifically "The DM has the stats for the creature" not "the monster manual has the stats for the creature". Yes, some DMs pull all their creatures straight out of the monster manual and don't bother to alter them, but that is boring and predictable. You lose control of the undead from Animate Dead after 24 hours unless you cast the spell again. That means a level 5 wizard could have two undead that they would have to cast two level 3 spells on a day to keep under their control. Meanwhile Unseen Servant is a level 1 spell that can be cast by a level 5 wizard 9 times just using spell slots. Not being concentration, that means you could have an hour of 9 Unseen Servants, who could definitely get a lot more done than 2 skeletons could in triple that time. Then you could ritual cast that spell as many times as you want the rest of the day because ritual spells only take ten minutes to cast and you don't have to keep up the ritual after that to keep the spell up because Unseen Servant isn't concentration. So in a day, one wizard could have 2 skeletons or technically around 145 Unseen Servants. (24 hours, at 6 casts an hour using ritual casting, plus 9 from spell slots. Minus a few ritual casts due to time taken between casts to instruct still existing servants). You're getting, at minimum, 5 skilled but not very strong laborers every hour. Unless you're building a pyramid, they're going to be getting a lot more done than 2 skeletons could. You don't seem to actually understand how ritual casting works and you're using rules for conjuration spells that don't exist in 5th edition. There is no "line of effect" for any spells. Most spells require line of sight to cast, but once the spell is cast then unseen servant is free to move about even out of your sight, as long as it stays within 60 ft. I'm going to assume you're just talking about Pathfinder rules, or something, since that's the only source I could find that talked about rules for conjuration spells. I am, however, only talking 5e because that's the edition I am most familiar with.

Same. There's also an update to HoloCure that's planned for the end of January, so even more good times and hopefully that'll mean more Tom Lore shenanigans as well!

Thank you for reminding me that this game series exists. I must have played 100+ hours when the very first version came out.

Yeah my first thought as well! God the good old days of lightning + magic missile combo on the iPod and desperately trying to survive :D

As an Ace Attorney fan this is exactly what I thought about when Tom was doing his talking

A quarter of the games Tom plays are "survivors clones." There are hundreds on Steam alone.