A player of mine is going to play a Dread Necromancer. She obviously wants a huge army at her fingertips, but wants to be subtle about it until she is sufficiently powerful. Through turn/rebuke undead, you can use a standard action to give a command to a maximum of 1HD/lvl of undead. Now, I was wondering, is it possible to have more undead following you because of this effect, but you can only give orders to the aforementioned 1HD/lvl?
For instance, let's say there is a lvl 6 Dread Necromancer or Evil Cleric. Could they order 6 HD worth of undead to "Lay in ambush here" or "dig yourself into the ground and stay there" etc in one turn, then then in another turn you give the same or another order to another group of undead, but the first group remains as they were, still obeying the last command you gave them?
[RPG] Can you have more undead slaves than you can technically command
dnd-3.5enecromancyundead
Best Answer
It is generally assumed that when you relinquish control over the undead (which you can do, per Nox’s answer), they aren’t compelled to obey the last orders they were given, and therefore they don’t. Actually, it’s generally assumed they start terrorizing the populace and attempting to sate their particular hungers.
Strangely, however, nothing outright says this. Skimming the relevant sections of Libris Mortis, it’s stated that spawn gravitate towards their creators and will automatically return to servitude if a cleric disrupts that bond, but spawn are different from rebuked undead. No mention is made of necromancers’ control here.
That does, however, indicate the traditional approach here: delegated control. Through the use of the appropriate undead minions, one can effectively lead an army by controlling creatures who in turn control more creatures.
But since you are the DM, you could easily rule that this isn’t entirely necessary and that the player can try to use clever temporary applications of rebuke undead to effectively control more undead at once. It sounds like you find this interesting, which is the usual reason I wouldn’t recommend it: personally, I’d find it a headache to keep track of as a DM. But if you wouldn’t, then you certainly can do this. It does make the necromancer more powerful, but in a complicated and involved way, that should lead to more a more interesting game (unlike usual routes to extra power, which lead to a more boring game because it eliminates challenges).