In the great Skeleton Wars, for which side shall you doot? Animate Dead asks the existential question, Zombie or Skeleton, to which many answer “whatever’s lying around”
Today we’re looking at Animate Dead, a 3rd level spell from the school of necromancy in DnD 5e. Available to Death Domain Clerics, Wizards, Circle of Spores Druids, and Oathbreaker Paladins, animate dead lets you create an undead servant to do your bidding.
A classic one-minute cast, meaning it’s not great for mid-combat, just grab some bones or a fresh corpse and make the toughest decision of your life… zombie (the corpse) or a skeleton (the boooones). Once they’re animated, use your brain and a bonus action to command them for 24 hours. Let’s get you armed with the knowledge you need to effectively use this spell, but before we do be sure to comment with your best skeleton puns to shout when casting this spell.
You’ll need to provide the armor and weapons if you want them to be helpful in combat, otherwise your undead butler is good to go.
I’ll say it up front, a school of necromancy wizard is going to give the best buffs for your undead amigos because they increase the HP and damage of the undead they animate. No concentration, 24 hour duration, your own bone brigade, no wonder players love animate dead.
Who Can Cast Animate Dead in DnD 5e?
Animate Dead is a 3rd-level spell that is available to Death Domain Clerics, Wizards, Circle of Spores Druids, and Oathbreaker Paladins. Basically anyone who can leverage spooky necromancy magic.
Rules As Written Explained for Animate Dead in DnD 5e
This spell creates an undead servant. Choose a pile of bones or a corpse of a Medium or Small humanoid within range. Your spell imbues the target with a foul mimicry of life, raising it as an undead creature. The target becomes a skeleton if you chose bones or a zombie if you chose a corpse (the GM has the creature’s game statistics).
On each of your turns, you can use a bonus action to mentally command any creature you made with this spell if the creature is within 60 feet of you (if you control multiple creatures, you can command any or all of them at the same time, issuing the same command to each one). You decide what action the creature will take and where it will move during its next turn, or you can issue a general command, such as to guard a particular chamber or corridor. If you issue no commands, the creature only defends itself against hostile creatures. Once given an order, the creature continues to follow it until its task is complete.
The creature is under your control for 24 hours, after which it stops obeying any command you’ve given it. To maintain control of the creature for another 24 hours, you must cast this spell on the creature again before the current 24-hour period ends. This use of the spell reasserts your control over up to four creatures you have animated with this spell, rather than animating a new one.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 4th level or higher, you animate or reassert control over two additional undead creatures for each slot level above 3rd. Each of the creatures must come from a different corpse or pile of bones.* – (a drop of blood, a piece of flesh, and a pinch of bone dust)
Player’s Handbook
This spell creates an undead servant. A boney boi to do your bidding! Sign me up.
Choose a pile of bones or a corpse of a Medium or Small humanoid within range. If you’re like the party in the game I run, you’ve always got bones in your backpack, so it’s likely that you could use this spell at any time. Key here is a Medium or Small humanoid, which is all humanoids except a Sahuagin Baron, unless you go back to the Humanoid Gargantua in 2nd edition. From Deep Gnomes to Yuan-ti, you SHOULD be able to find a medium or small humanoid corpse somewhere in your travels. RAW also doesn’t specify the number of bones you need to call it a pile, but as a DM if you called three bones a pile, I’d call those three bones an unstable skeleton incapable of holding weaponry of any sort. This also means that technically you could have a pile of all arm bones and make a skeleton ARMy. I’ll see myself out
Your spell imbues the target with a foul mimicry of life, raising it as an undead creature. The target becomes a skeleton if you chose bones or a zombie if you chose a corpse (the GM has the creature’s game statistics). [sarcastic] Look, saying it’s a foul mimicry of life makes it sound like raising an undead creature is a bad thing, but maybe you’re doing it to help out around the house. Either way, you should also get a sense for what the stats look like. What you choose is likely dependent on two things, one, what’s available around you, and two, what you’d like the undead to do
On each of your turns, you can use a bonus action to mentally command any creature you made with this spell if the creature is within 60 feet of you (if you control multiple creatures, you can command any or all of them at the same time, issuing the same command to each one). Keep your corpse within 60 feet of you and you can use a bonus action to boss them around. [borat voice] Go do this, go do this, but only one single command. It’s also as many skeletons or zombies as are under your command
You decide what action the creature will take and where it will move during its next turn, or you can issue a general command, such as to guard a particular chamber or corridor. If you issue no commands, the creature only defends itself against hostile creatures. Once given an order, the creature continues to follow it until its task is complete. Personally, the general command is the golden piece of animate dead. Nothing overly complex, but if you give a general command of “attack all enemies in a group until they are all dead” you then free up your bonus action until combat is over. Once they’re finished, they will stand in place, awaiting your next command. Skelly.exe has paused.
The creature is under your control for 24 hours, after which it stops obeying any command you’ve given it. This does not mean it necessarily becomes hostile toward you, it just means the mental link has been severed. If you forget to re-up on your undead during the 24 hour period, you have to start over again.
To maintain control of the creature for another 24 hours, you must cast this spell on the creature again before the current 24-hour period ends. MUST CAST which backs up the above note around starting over again. You’re back to square skeleton one. I hope you’ve got your watch on, because it could get dicey.
This use of the spell reasserts your control over up to four creatures you have animated with this spell, rather than animating a new one. Got it, so one cast gives you reassertion of control over 4 undead. But can I get more by upcasting? Yes!
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 4th level or higher, you animate or reassert control over two additional undead creatures for each slot level above 3rd. Each of the creatures must come from a different corpse or pile of bones. People smarter than me have done the math already for this, so I’ll link to it in the description, but the reassertion of control is extremely helpful if you’re building femur friends.
If you have a DM that runs a table with minis, the more dead you animate, the more frazzled they will become, digging out every single skeleton they’ve ever bought, printed, or made out of paper. It sounds like a nightmare. One option I saw that I love is for every five or so skeletons or zombies commanded, morph them up into a higher CR undead, like a beefy bone man, or a zombie juggernaut. It’s not the best for everyone, so think about it a bit depending on the necromancer at your table.
What are the Best Uses of Animate Dead in DnD 5e?
- Form a small army of archers that can launch a volley of arrows at your foes every round. Using a shortbow, and lets say you have 4 skeletons, that’s 4d6 potential damage they’re doing as a bonus action for you (assuming they all hit). If you gave a more general command of “fire your arrows at our nearest enemy” you wouldn’t even have to use your bonus action any more. Remember, you yourself will need to arm the undead. Not trying to be humorous. Enough bone jokes.
- If you’re in a dungeon, send a zombie ahead of you with a command like “continue walking straight until you reach a dead end,” strap a torch or light to it and see if there are any traps between you and the next turn.
- You could have your undead act out famous plays from across the realm, though it would be like watching a silent film since they can’t talk.
- Have your zombies or skeletons form a macabre alarm system where you sleep peacefully and they alert you if anyone tries to attack. Nothing better than sleeping while several animated piles of bones stand silently next to your bed. Castin prior to a long rest still gives you 16 hours to leverage your undead buds.
- You could even have them go fetch firewood or create undead perpetual motion machines since they will continue to follow your command until their time with you is up.
- Mid-combat, you could have them form a shield wall and go retrieve the mcguffin that is difficult to get to, while you and your party deal with the enemies in the way.
- Remember too, unless you’ve got additional buffs to enhance the attacks of your undead, each individual undead is only doing 5ish damage each turn, but they also take up physical space. For every 8 undead, you could surround a medium or smaller creature, essentially shoving them into a meat grinder while you go about your business.
Now for some more chaotic uses and cheeses.
- A chest cavity is fairly large, which means it is well-sized for shoving a ton of explosives inside. Once that turkey is as stuffed as it can get with alchemical mayhem, have the skeleton or zombie march right into your enemy forces and trigger the bomb to go off. Long fuze, excellent archery shot, whatever it may be, No fuss, no muss.
- A lot of folks will point to keeping your undead inside a bag of holding, and you could probably fit 10-20 skeletons in there depending on your DM, but what about a boney backpack. There’s nothing saying that your skeletons, which have the same speed as most players at 30ft, can’t carry each other around or form some horrifying skeletal wagon wheel that traverses the landscape.
- Someone did the math and technically because of the ability to command 4 undead when you cast the spell, if you’re a level 20 wizard you can re-up each day for 1,440 days to form an army of 5,760 undead. We won’t go through all the other math, but if you’re burning all of your spell slots you could reasonably create an undead army of 60+ undead within a week, no problem. If you’re thinking about doing this, talk to your DM because this could be a pretty quick way to get nerfed at the table, or asked to never come back. I don’t know many players that would want to wait 1,440 in-game days for you to build this army up. There’s even more chaos if you use Create Undead to generate some Wights as sub-commanders who can then create even more undead. I definitely don’t have enough fingers for that.
If you’re a DM and you’re freaking out about this right now, consider having a roaming band of Clerics or Paladins that are hunting your necromancer since they’re either exuming, or taking the bodies of the dead, preventing them from getting a proper burial. A big ol’ bludgeoner, especially one that deals radiant damage, could make quick work of the skellies. Or, also a 3rd level spell, erupting earth does 3d12 bludgeoning damage, so say goodbye to your boney buds.
This is a spooky spell as a new DM, but there are definitely ways to combat it.
History of Animate Dead
Once a necromancy spell, always a necromancy spell, let’s take a look at the history of the Animate Dead Spell in DnD
1st edition gave very broad strokes to this spell, giving more detail to the types of hit dice the undead got once animated. It also included some statements about how Animate Dead was “not compatible with a good alignment,” etc, etc.
Very clearly stating “Casting this spell is not a good act, and only evil priests use it frequently,” 2nd edition allowed the caster to create one skeleton or one zombie for each experience level they attained, so an upper limit that increases with your level. This seems the most reasonable to me in terms of how many one can create. The duration was also PERMANENT 2nd edition also had a fun little twist with a 1st level spell called Animate Dead Animals, same idea, but animal skeletons and a level 1 spell.
Still permanent, but 3.5 forced you into having a black onyx gem worth 25gp for each undead you animate, but also gave you the ability to animate multiples, and multiples are best.
The 4th edition of DnD turned this into a 9th level wizard spell and kept most of the same rules.
5th edition seems to have the most flexible ruling, though the permanence in previous editions sounds pretty nice.
Final Thoughts on Animate Dead Spell in DnD 5e
Final thoughts, as long as your necromancer isn’t a real jerk I think this is a fun spell to use at the table. Plenty of shenanigans to be had and plenty of creative ways to leverage zombies or skeletons.
