Today we take a look at the conceptual designs for first Necromancer Units. As we posted in our last dev journal, the Necromancer can turn many types of living units into Ghoul variants using the Great Transformation spell, but of course, the Necromancer comes with its own unique unit roster. Today we’re going to take a look at the first lower tier Necromancer units.

The Lost Souls

These are the souls of troubled people who are not able to find rest, even in death. Lost Souls are incorporeal, making them hard to kill with physical damage, and have the Exploit Despair ability, which allows them to deal extra damage against units with low morale. When fielded with higher level Necromancer units that can reduce the morale of living units, the effectives of the Lost Souls can be greatly enhanced. Defeating a Lost Soul during combat is tricky, as it also has the Undying ability. Undying units automatically return from the dead after a few turns in tactical combat. Lost Souls float, and can be summoned onto the world map, making them great scout servants.

Concept Art: The Lost Souls float as in Zero-G

The Reanimator and Creeper

The Reanimator is the main support unit for the Necromancer. It is able to heal undead units, which is vitally important as most of them don’t naturally regenerate. The Renanimator has a Black Bolt ranged shot and a melee attack with its staff which doubles as a shovel. His attacks Inflict despair, giving him the chance to lower the morale of enemies.

The ability that gives the Reanimator its name allows it to reanimate bodies of the fallen, into undead puppets called Creepers. These cadavers crawl over one another like the maggots they contain. The soulless bodies know no fear, are resistant to many types of damage and can be used to tie up enemy units while the more powerful necromancer units get into position. After the battle, the Creepers disintegrate.

Necromancers will need to make careful tradeoffs using fallen units, as they have other uses as well! The Creepers can devour corpses to rejuvenate themselves and regain lost hitpoints, for example, while the Corpus Furia spell causes dead bodies to detonate, damaging every nearby enemy.

Lost souls that refuse to die, and mindless horddes of reanimated corpses can make like difficult for the living. Of course we are developing counters that help the dead find their peace for good. Some of these abilities will find their way in the new specializations that we will be announcing soon.

Concept Art: The Reanimator helping out some dead folks