[RPG] Can the Animate Dead spell be cast on a zombie

dnd-5espellstargetingundead

One of the players in my game is a Death Domain cleric and enjoys having a small army of zombies accompany him. We had come to a situation where it is not plausible for him to keep the zombies with him for the 24-hour period, but he spent the change (on a government writ) to get them locked up until his return, so he can try to regain control over his minions.

Is it possible to cast Animate Dead on a Zombie and have the spell work as normal? Is a zombie considered a corpse, technically?

Also, if you say that it should work in theory, here comes the sticky part. He also wants to use this spell on a Mummy Lord (that he doesn't know is a Mummy Lord, yet). Does it simply not work, since it's an undead creature and not a corpse?

Best Answer

From my understanding of the Rules as Written, once you lost control over a Zombie (or Skeleton) that you raised from the dead using Animate Dead, casting the spell again does not give you control again.

Note that killing the zombie/skeleton does not give you a new pile of raw material that you can re-raise. This is because only humanoid can be animated. The bones and flesh of an undead is considered to be undead, not humanoid. This was clarified in the Sage Advice Compendium (thanks to V2Blast's comment for pointing that out). (Note: this paragraph was updated; the previous version said that piles of bones and flesh from undead could be re-raised.)

As for the Mummy, you need to use the Create Undead with a spell slot of level 9, and that only works with regular Mummies, not Mummy Lords. The Create Undead spell also gives the Cleric the ability to reassert control over undeads. It is not clear, though, whether it would be undead you animated yourself or any undead. Only "re-"assert seems to mean that you had control over them before and thus most certainly means that you would only be able to control undead you created and not some that were created by other clerics.

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