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"Dread" undead templates from Advanced Bestiary

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Paris.Crenshaw

Well-known member
Has anyone done .user files for the dread undead (specifically, dread wight & dread zombie) from the Advanced Bestiary?

I'm trying to build "Revenge of the Kobold King" in Hero Lab and those templates are used. I used a combination of Zombie Lord and Brain-Eating Zombie for the Dread Zombie template, in the meantime, but I don't have anything to approximate the dread wight template.

Thanks!
 
I sent over Revenge of the Kobold King to Shadow last week, so that will probably be in his next update.

If you want it sooner shoot me a msg with your email.
 
OMG I totally forgot. Bad Shadow Bad! :( :p

I have a huge go-live this weekend for a client, actually its try 2, and it totally slipped my mind.

I did it now quick and its up and available at d20pfsrd under the Pathfinder Modules folder.

Thanks again chava for your hard work and contributions I know the community is grateful. :)
 
You guys are both awesome. Although I enjoy learning about Hero Lab's extensive capabilities, I greatly appreciate the work you both put in to make sure that I don't have to learn how to do everything, myself. ;)

And thanks for the offer, Chava. I'll send you an e-mail, because I'm impatient, but there's really no rush. I won't be running that particular adventure for quite some time. I've just been on a "put it in Hero Lab" kick for the past couple of days. :)
 
Thanks for sending the files, chava. Rather than just import them wholesale, I decided to try to use them as a guide to do some things, myself. I got most of the dread wight done and decided to move on to doing the dread zombie.

While most of the modifications work fine, I noticed two problems:

1) I have no idea how to implement the feature in dread zombie that limits the minimum intelligence to 0. The template applies a -4 to Intelligence, but doesn't allow it to go below 0. I looked for help on the forums and found this thread, but bodrin's code isn't working for me. It throws up an error telling me that the thing "aValue" doesn't exist.

That's a minor issue, but I'd like to know if there's a way to do this.

2) When these templates are applied to creatures with class levels, I get validation errors stating that the template precludes class levels, which isn't supposed to happen. I have looked at some of the other templates, like the Zombie Lord from Classic Horrors Revisited or the Skeleton Champion, but I can't find the differences between the templates that allow the undead to keep their class levels without the validation error. What am I missing?

Thanks!
 
I did the Dread Ghoul & Ghast for my Rise of the Runelords conversion. I went through the trouble to try and make the custom racial specials, but I can't claim anything as sturdy as what ShadowChemosh might put out. Let me know if you still want to see them and I'll post them when I get home.
 
Thanks, djc664. Those would be neat to see.

I've noticed that the editor is much more robust than it was when I first tried to do some of the templates from Advanced Bestiary. I usually don't have much trouble, but there's obviously something I'm doing wrong with the templates that change a creature's type while still allowing them to retain class levels.
 
Paris.Crenshaw said:
Thanks, djc664. Those would be neat to see.

I've noticed that the editor is much more robust than it was when I first tried to do some of the templates from Advanced Bestiary. I usually don't have much trouble, but there's obviously something I'm doing wrong with the templates that change a creature's type while still allowing them to retain class levels.
Click to expand...

Just off the cuff, that sounds like the first three options on the Template tab; Override Type, Augmenting Type, and Replacement Type.

Click on the gray question mark to the right of those three fields for more details - I can't really explain it better than reading that will do for you. :)
 
djc664 said:
Just off the cuff, that sounds like the first three options on the Template tab; Override Type, Augmenting Type, and Replacement Type.

Click on the gray question mark to the right of those three fields for more details - I can't really explain it better than reading that will do for you. :)
Click to expand...

LOL. Yeah. I tried reading those, but I can't figure out which of them is supposed to be the right one. Some of the templates use both, and the descriptions for Augmenting vs Replacement don't seem very different.

I'll need to fiddle with it a bit more this evening. I ran out of time before I had to get ready for work and get some sleep last night.

I find that figuring out how to implement these things is a bit addictive for me. ;)
 
The only difference between Augmenting and Replacing is whether the original Type appears in the Type listing, like a Human Vampire (Bestiary, pg 271):

Medium undead (augmented humanoid)

Or not, like a Half-Dragon Basilisk (Bestiary, pg 170):

Medium dragon

(that one leaves out the fact that the basilisk race itself is a magical beast)

No template should be choosing more than one of the ways to replace the type. The order in the editor is the order the code will check them in - so if it finds an "Override Type", it will ignore "Augmenting Type" and "Replacement Type"
 
Here's the file set I mentioned - I slimmed it down to the USER file with my code (unfinished overall, but hopefully it will be helpful) and the Portfolio with the creature I was trying to convert with to.

Let me know if you have any questions. I apologize in advance for my mess. :)
 

Attachments

Thanks! I'll let you know.

As an aside, I finally got the Dread Zombie to work. I don't know why, but starting with the Skeleton Champion template and making all the necessary changes worked fine. For some reason, starting with the zombie template and converting it to a Dread Zombie was forcing the system to give a "Template precludes class levels" validation error.

The only thing now is that I need to figure out how to have the template assign a bite natural attack, but only if the creature doesn't already posses one. As it is, the template gives a kobold "bite x2".

In the meantime, I'm moving on to using some of Chava's files and my lessons learned from the Dread Zombie to build the Dread Wight.
 
Oops. I haven't set a checkbox for that. I've added that to my to-do list.

On the Zombie template, press the "Tags" button at the top right. You'll see that one of the tags that's there is TemplHelp.NoClasses. I need to get the setting of that tag moved into a checkbox.
 
Mathias said:
Oops. I haven't set a checkbox for that. I've added that to my to-do list.

On the Zombie template, press the "Tags" button at the top right. You'll see that one of the tags that's there is TemplHelp.NoClasses. I need to get the setting of that tag moved into a checkbox.
Click to expand...

Ahah! That makes sense. I guess I missed seeing that in the tags area. I tried to do a "side-by-side" comparison on the templates, but I obviously wasn't thorough enough.

Thanks for pointing it out!

Is there a place where I might find the code that would tell a template to only add a certain kind of natural attack if the base creature doesn't already possess that attack?
 
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Paris.Crenshaw said:
Is there a place where I might find the code that would tell a template to only add a certain kind of natural attack if the base creature doesn't already possess that attack?
Click to expand...

I haven't figured out a way to do that yet. I tend to just assign the attack, and trust the user to figure out which version is correct (you get the same problem if a Half-Orc with the Toothy trait takes the Animal Fury barbarian rage power, takes enough levels in dragon disciple, or takes the Razortusk feat - the decision of which bite to use, from which source, is up to the user, since Hero Lab can't figure out which is better.
 
Okay, thanks. I'll have to look at it again. In my goofing around with it last night, I discovered that removing the bite natural attack from the template completely removed the attack from the character. I need to go back and look at why the stat block is showing "bite x2" for that attack. I'm sure there's something obvious that I just haven't seen.
 
Paris.Crenshaw said:
stat block is showing "bite x2" for that attack.
Click to expand...
The number of attacks is setup by the Value.? tag where ? is the number of attacks. So my assumption here is what you copied from something that had Claw attacks, which should be Claw x2, and you didn't change the Value.2 tag to 1. So you get two. :)

That would be on the Bootstrap of the wBite thing where you would find the tag Value.2.
 
ShadowChemosh said:
The number of attacks is setup by the Value.? tag where ? is the number of attacks. So my assumption here is what you copied from something that had Claw attacks, which should be Claw x2, and you didn't change the Value.2 tag to 1. So you get two. :)

That would be on the Bootstrap of the wBite thing where you would find the tag Value.2.
Click to expand...

You're a very clever person, ShadowChemosh. I do believe I just changed the wClaw tag from the Skeleton Champion template into a wBite. I don't even remember looking at the Value entry. :o

Shame on me. And thanks very much for setting me on the right course.
 
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