Animate Skeleton

Version 0.19: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Animate Skeleton

Animate Skeleton is a level 1 Necromancy spell that animates a single non-animate, non-demonic skeleton to serve you as a mindless undead slave. The caster must be standing on a skeleton or skeleton-bearing corpse in order for the spell to work. Because the spell is capable of summoning a skeleton directly out of a corpse, producing a pile of chunks in the process, it is essentially a faster, superior method of butchering. Manually butchering a corpse only occasionally produces a skeleton, so casters with Animate Skeleton should only do so if they have no intent of creating a minion. If there are multiple corpses at your feet when you cast the spell, one of them will be chosen at random.

Strategy

As a means of reanimating corpses, Animate Skeleton is cheaper than but inferior to Animate Dead, since the latter can produce stronger zombies and attempts to animate everything in sight. Necromancers, especially worshipers of Kikubaaqudgha that can receive corpses reliably, may benefit from its synergy with Simulacrum by creating multiple simulacra of large monsters from the chunks.

As a level-1 spell however, Animate Skeleton is a cheap strategic addition to any character not forbidden from Necromancy. It produces long-lasting minions, some of them weapon-carrying, without forgoing chunks from their corpses. This could be especially relevant for characters who are not otherwise benefiting from minions (who can be LOS blockers to protect from ranged attacks, enable distraction stabs, aid in escape, and generally take some attention off the player).

Many physical specials are retained: skeletons of constricting monsters can constrict, hydra skeletons multibite, elephant skeletons trample, etc.

Control-F 'corpse' will find all possible targets for this spell that currently exist, both corpses and skeletalized remains.

See Also

• Derived undead

History

Prior to 0.16, it was cominable with Sublimation of Blood to rapidly turning fallen foes into MP mid-fight.

Prior to 0.12, this spell was quite useful for characters wielding cursed blunt weapons, blunt weapons of vampiricism, or blunt weapons of distortion.

Prior to 0.8, the spell took longer than the 1 turn it now takes to butcher and animate the skeleton.