Excruciating Wounds
Excruciating Wounds
Excruciating Wounds is a level 5 Necromancy spell that temporarily infuses a weapon with the pain brand, but prevents you from unwielding the weapon and penalizes your spell success rate for the duration.
Effect
A wielded non-artefact melee weapon will gain the pain brand, temporarily overriding any existing brand. Launchers and unarmed attacks are not affected. While this spell is active, you are unable to unwield your weapon, and spells will be harder to cast.
Casting the spell at higher spell power will increase the effect's duration.
Strategy
In the hands of a skilled Necromancy practitioner, the pain brand can render a fast weapon extremely deadly to most natural monsters, and by the time a character is capable of casting Excruciating Wounds, they certainly qualify. Followers of Kikubaaqudgha can choose to permanently brand a weapon of their choice with pain, but this spell allows Kiku worshipers to instead choose to learn several extremely powerful Necromancy spells, or for characters not worshiping Kiku to take advantage of the brand without having to find a good weapon of pain lying around somewhere. Just be aware that this brand is useless against opponents with any negative energy resistance: this includes all demonic, undead, nonliving, holy, and plant-type opponents.
Casting the spell is also quite loud, making it unwise to cast it while trying to sneak around sleeping opponents.
