Idea to replace Animate Skeleton.

[Jeremiah]

Animate Skeleton is extremely strong for a level 1 spell as the power of the allies it provides scales up according to the strength of the monsters you are fighting. It is therefore still useful in Depths, Zot, and any branch with valid monsters, while requiring very little investment in skill.

Replacement suggestion: Skeletal Servant (level 1 Necromancy)
Creates an undead servant from a corpse or skeleton similarly to Animate Skeleton, except that instead of creating an ally with stats derived from the base monster, it would create a "skeletal servant" monster with stats determined by spell power. It would therefore be necessary to invest more skill in necromancy to get stronger allies, and the spell power cap could be set to avoid it becoming too strong.

The skeletal servants would still be permanent allies but unable to go up or down stairs, just as skeletons are now.

Something similar could be done with Animate Dead - "Shambling Corpses" or something, or it could just be removed and Twisted Resurrection used instead.

This would leave creating monster-dependent undead unique to Yred, which would help distinguish god-derived necromantic abilities from the necromancy spell type.

(Animating bodies with Yred would still be very powerful, but god choice is a much bigger investment/decision than learning a level 1 spell.)

[RBrandon]

I think that this proposal will fail if only because you recommended Animate Dead ever be removed before Twisted Resurrection.

On a more serious note, the power of Animate Skeleton has been brought up before. If it needs any change, though, I would suggest it be some thing like a spell level change rather than turning it into a summoning spell that needs a corpse.

[John Milferton]

Can't make any judgement on wheter it is too powerful or not, but I just wanted to say that I like how many level 1 spells keep being useful past the first few levels (for some situations, anyway).
In many other games all low level stuff becomes completely obsolete after the first few levels which is NOT good design.

[Quazifuji]

Another, simpler idea that could be applied to both animate skeleton and animate dead that keeps more of their current identity: give it a chance to destroy the corpse/skeleton without animating it based on the monster's HD that reduces with spellpower. No strict cutoff - there should always be a nonzero chance to animate anything, otherwise it gets absurdly spoilery - but make animating dragons and giants with any decent reliability require at least some non-trivial investment in necromancy.

The chance to destroy the corpse, rather than just fail, is important in two ways: it stops you from spamming the spell until you succeed (which you can already do pretty easily out of combat, making animate skeleton's investment to power ratio even more ridiculous), and it distinguishes a failure based on monster HD from a miscast (which would hopefully make it less spoilery and not just feel like the failure rate in the spell menu is inaccurate).

Can't make any judgement on wheter it is too powerful or not, but I just wanted to say that I like how many level 1 spells keep being useful past the first few levels (for some situations, anyway).
In many other games all low level stuff becomes completely obsolete after the first few levels which is NOT good design.

I agree that a level 1 spell being useful past the first few levels is nice. But there's a difference between useful and "extremely strong". Especially because Animate Skeleton is extremely strong even at fairly high failure rates. The amount of decreased difficulty in depths or vaults for some characters by just getting a level 1 spell to 50% failure is pretty ridiculous. It's way too much power for how little of an investment it is.

[Jeremiah]

Another, simpler idea that could be applied to both animate skeleton and animate dead that keeps more of their current identity: give it a chance to destroy the corpse/skeleton without animating it based on the monster's HD that reduces with spellpower. No strict cutoff - there should always be a nonzero chance to animate anything, otherwise it gets absurdly spoilery - but make animating dragons and giants with any decent reliability require at least some non-trivial investment in necromancy.
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I would really like this idea, except that HD is such a bad indicator of a monster's overall danger level. There are already a lot of situations where HD is treated as if it was this when it really isn't and adding another would make it worse. Maybe the whole HD scale needs to be rethought and an attempt made to give monsters HD scores more reflective of their actual power.

[Quazifuji]

Another, simpler idea that could be applied to both animate skeleton and animate dead that keeps more of their current identity: give it a chance to destroy the corpse/skeleton without animating it based on the monster's HD that reduces with spellpower. No strict cutoff - there should always be a nonzero chance to animate anything, otherwise it gets absurdly spoilery - but make animating dragons and giants with any decent reliability require at least some non-trivial investment in necromancy.
.

I would really like this idea, except that HD is such a bad indicator of a monster's overall danger level. There are already a lot of situations where HD is treated as if it was this when it really isn't and adding another would make it worse. Maybe the whole HD scale needs to be rethought and an attempt made to give monsters HD scores more reflective of their actual power.

I agree that HD itself is quite spoilery, I just didn't have a better idea. I couldn't think of a good non-spoilery measure for a monster's power that would be a good measure for how much spellpower it would take to reliably animate it.

Maybe just HP? There are powerful monsters with low HP, but many of them are enemies who are dangerous due to their abilities. HP might actually correlate very well with how strong a skeleton/zombie a monster makes, even in the cases where it doesn't correlate with how dangerous an enemy is.

[and into]

Another advantage of the skeletal servant idea in the OP is that the resulting ally could always just have normal (one move per aut) movement speed, regardless of the corpse type used. Overall I think Jeremiah's idea would be best, but Quazifuji's has its merits as well.

I agree that HD itself is quite spoilery, I just didn't have a better idea. I couldn't think of a good non-spoilery measure for a monster's power that would be a good measure for how much spellpower it would take to reliably animate it.

Maybe just HP? There are powerful monsters with low HP, but many of them are enemies who are dangerous due to their abilities. HP might actually correlate very well with how strong a skeleton/zombie a monster makes, even in the cases where it doesn't correlate with how dangerous an enemy is.

Yeah, max HP might be better. You don't know exactly how much HP enemies have, but it is easy to get a general sense of how robust they are.