Prerequisite: 5th-level warlock
You can cast Animate Dead without using a spell slot. Once you do so, you can't cast it in this way again until you finish a long rest.
Undying Servitude: Working Stiffs
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Animate Dead defines necromancy in 5th edition. It's the foundational undead servant spell. For Undying or Undead warlock patrons, it’d be a home run thematically to have access to an army of skeletons and zombies under your control. Giving Animate Dead to short rest recharging spell slots does open up some problems, though. If you get to 10th level in a necromancer/warlock multiclass, you can have access to short rest Animate Dead, which can result in a coffeelock-like abuse case where you’re creating a massive army of long duration undead a bunch of short rests in place of a long rest using all your pact magic slots. A 10th level character with fourteen-sixteen undead servants on their control (one per pact magic slot over eight short rests instead of one long rest). That’s one way to get access to a robust army of the dead. Alternatively, if you’re not out here to abuse Pact Magic, Undying Servitude is a perfectly reasonable alternative, although it's WAY worse.
Animate Dead gives you a 24 hour undead zombie or skeleton companion that obeys your commands with your bonus action. Crucially, this doesn’t eat your concentration, meaning you’re free to command other summoned allies created by spells like Create Undead or Summon Shadowspawn while your undead servant meanders about. Additionally, because the duration is 24 hours, you can use this before you long rest, take a long rest, then use it again to maintain control over two zombies or skeletons with the same commands for eight hours. This is probably the best use case for Undying Servitude, and won’t necessarily be all that consistent depending on how your adventuring is going.
Troublingly, the undead servant kind of sucks. They tend to be really slow, hit poorly, and don’t scale particularly well. Skeletons have a ranged shortbow attack that makes them quite a bit better than zombies, who really only bring a mediocre undying fortitude trait. I’d highly recommend working with your DM to add some juice to your undead companions by carrying over racial traits their living forms had when you raise them to assist this feature as the game progresses.
Undying Servitude is a perfectly fine bonus summoning option for necromantic warlocks when you get it. As you get higher and higher level, these will start to feel closer to Unseen Servants in usefulness than actual summoned monsters through Conjure or Summon spells. Still, I’m a big fan. This is an approachable way to get access to cheap undead servants in warlock. It's about as fair as an invocation gets.
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