Using Thomas’ excellent point conversions as a guide, and his inspiration, I whipped yet up an alternative necromancer idea.
Divine 4
Swap out all of the special abilities Thomas mentioned, and replace with:
Lvl 1: Dark Soul -16 cpe
Inexorable 16 cpe
Flesh Runes 48 cpe
Inhumanity 1 (-1 to reactions, +1 to undead reactions) 0 cpe
Lvl 2: Secrets of the Dark Arts 13 cpe
Lvl 5: Necromantic Research 30 cpe
(note: no potions or scrolls)
Lvl 8: Across the Veil 21 cpe
(a lesser transformation into undead, equivalent to Wholeness of Body, Divine health, Longevity and Inhumanity 2)
Lvl 9: Sanctum & Construct Dungeon as mage 3 cpe
(note: no magic items)
Lvl 13: After the flesh 2 cpe
For 117 cpe, as described by Thomas.
This could probably be optimized with other swaps and things, but I think it more or less does what I think of when I think necromancer
Divine 4 has a slightly smaller list of trades available than arcane 4. Notably, it doesn’t have crossbreeding or dungeons, which are part of the 117 cpe total. Divine 4 comes out to 102 cpe for the non-standard swaps:
If you keep the ability to create undead, that drops from 102 cpe to 90 cpe.
Divine can also trade turn/control undead for 16 cpe per divine built point (64 at divine 4) (Player’s Companion, p. 81), but I’m not sure the master of undeath should lose that ;-).
Oops, I don’t know how I did that. I definitely meant Arcane 4, since I included the ability to control indeed at half level, like the warlock. The undead creation should probably be at level 6 so he’d have a better chance of controlling it.
