Building undead

I have a friend who had a really interesting idea that I have been fiddling with for a too long and I've come to the conclusion that I have thought about it too much and I just can't make it on my own. So my first instinct is to go to the playground. So his idea is that he wants to actually make undead. Have to gather dead bodies and assemble them into the monstrosities he wants them to be. Not unlike making golems. I've had several ideas on how to do this: spells, soulmelds, psionics, artificer but for undead, feats. I definitely that I have to come up with a feat called craft undead. I've been using craft construct as a model and that is coming along slowly. Any thoughts on how crafting undead as a homebrewed class would work? As long as it's not a ToM subsystem then it'll be fine. The main goal of this should a good amount of reasonably strong undead and buffing capabilities. Any ideas?

What he's describing sounds more like a flesh golem (think Frankenstein's monster) than an actual undead.

Trouble with that suggestion, Yitzi, is that the D&D rules assume that an insanely powerful elemental is animating a Flesh Golem.

They just don't behave like undead.

For customisation, check out Xenoalchemy, which has days of different options. I don't think there is a monster customisation thing in there but there are's so many options.

Also, there's the Ashen Necromancer which has a lot of customisation, though none of it is geared towards actual piecemeal stuff.

Finally, there's a spell, an immensely long spell, in in the ain Ravenloft book called Stradh's Maelific Meld, which has rules for stitching all kinds of things together and animating it. The example is a gargoyle winged, werewolf torsoed drider with the Phase Spider's shift abiliities.

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Originally Posted by Mulletmanalive

Trouble with that suggestion, Yitzi, is that the D&D rules assume that an insanely powerful elemental is animating a Flesh Golem.

They just don't behave like undead.

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True...I suppose you could design something to fit it...even so, it would probably make more sense to make it a modification of a flesh golem than a modification of some type of undead.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mulletmanalive

Finally, there's a spell, an immensely long spell, in in the ain Ravenloft book called Stradh's Maelific Meld, which has rules for stitching all kinds of things together and animating it. The example is a gargoyle winged, werewolf torsoed drider with the Phase Spider's shift abiliities.

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Where is this? Sounds highly fascinating. I would like to keep this as much DND 3.5 as possible. But i'm open to most things.