Danse Macabre: Necromance If You Want To
Spell Level: 5
School: Necromancy
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 60 feet
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 hour
Components: V, S
Threads of dark power leap from your fingers to pierce up to five Small or Medium corpses you can see within range. Each corpse immediately stands up and becomes undead. You decide whether it is a zombie or a skeleton (the statistics for zombies and skeletons are in the Monster Manual), and it gains a bonus to its attack and damage rolls equal to your spellcasting ability modifier. You can use a bonus action to mentally command the creatures you make with this spell, issuing the same command to all of them. To receive the command, a creature must be within 60 feet of you. You decide what action the creatures will take and where they will move during their next turn, or you can issue a general command, such as to guard a chamber or passageway against your foes. If you issue no commands, the creatures do nothing except defend themselves against hostile creatures. Once given an order, the creatures continue to follow it until their task is complete.
The creatures are under your control until the spell ends, after which they become inanimate once more.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot‘ of 6th level or higher, you animate up to two additional corpses for each slot level above 5th.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Across the war-torn battlefield a lone wizard stands; she stares down the hobgoblin warlord and his remaining troops, marching across the field of bodies of her recently slain allies. Her eyes glow with a hazy purple; dark tendrils whip out from her fingers like puppet strings, linking to eight bodies of her former party surrounding the warlord. Their bodies rise up as undead under her command, and in one last effort, strike out together with their necromancer ally against the warlord and his terrified guardsmen.
Danse Macabre FINALLY gets the necromancer fantasy done right. Unlike Animate Dead, which is a long, convoluted mess of text to practically navigate, Danse Macabre is a simple, intuitive spell that gives you a bunch of zombies or skeletons to fight with with a snap of your fingers. One action, up to five corpses now fight for you. It does run into some utility problems when fighting outside of graveyards, battlefields, and larger scale encounters, but with an hour duration it can do a decent job mimicking conjuration spells.
Animate Dead asks you to manage a collection of more permanent servants while Danse Macabre gives you temporary servants with less to navigate. You don’t have to worry about repeated casts, saving slots, resting in time, or any of the other hassle Animate Dead can ask you to do. You may still want to be hauling around some body containers so you can keep your favorite corpses on reserve, but that is WAY easier to handle with one or two Animated Dead servants than trying to upkeep six or seven specific zombies.
Beyond even just being simpler to use, Danse Macabre helps your corpses scale. Adding your casting modifier to their hit and damage can majorly improve the damage output you’re getting as a necromancer. Paired with being able to reanimate non-humanoids, you have access to some nasty zombie and skeleton baddies agnostic of CR. As long as you’re reanimating a medium or small corpse, you have access to it.
If you have an itch to play a mid to upper tier necromancer but don’t want to have to work too hard to maintain your servants, Danse Macabre is for you. If you’re a traditional necromancer in the market for a tool for spontaneous servant generation, Danse Macabre is for you. Yes, it suffers from the classic necromancer conundrum of needing fresh bodies on hand, but if you can solve that problem with a parade of hearses or just are adept at murdering tons of critters, Danse Macabre can deliver the fantasy you’re looking for in a powerful way.
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