Endblade — Necromancer Field Notes

Wizard · School of Necromancy · the essentials to keep in mind through the run

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📜The wizard superpower: scribe scrolls into permanent spells

Every other class burns a scroll once. You keep it forever.

You are the only class that can permanently learn a spell from a scroll. In your inventory, right-click any spell scroll → "Learn spell" and it gets copied into your spellbook for good — castable with your slots, every long rest, for the rest of the game. This is how a wizard's known-spell list grows far past what you pick at level-up.

The cost is gold (plus the scroll itself), scaling with the spell's level. Your Necromancy Savant feature cuts that in half for necromancy spells:

Spell level

Any wizard scroll

Necromancy scroll

Level 1

50 gold

25 gold

Level 2

100 gold

50 gold

Level 3

150 gold

75 gold

Level 4

200 gold

100 gold

Level 5

250 gold

125 gold

Level 6

300 gold

150 gold

✓ Two rules for scribing 1. The spell has to be on the wizard list (you can't scribe a cleric-only scroll).
2. You need a spell slot of that level unlocked — you can't scribe a level-3 spell until you have level-3 slots.

✓ Hoover up every wizard scroll you see Buy them from vendors, loot them, take them. Vendors restock when you level up and after long rests, so swing back through merchants (Arron in the Grove, the Zhentarim, tieflings, etc.) and clean out their scrolls. Even a scroll you'll "never use" is a cheap permanent option for the one fight where you suddenly need it.

⚠ Don't waste-cast a scribable scroll If a scroll is a wizard spell and you already have the slot, Learn it instead of one-time casting it — casting consumes the scroll for a single use, learning keeps it forever. (Save one-time casting for emergencies, or for scrolls you can't learn, like cleric/druid ones.)

🔄A huge spellbook only matters because you swap freely

Scribing fills your spellbook (everything you know). Each long rest you then prepare a subset of it — you can prepare (Wizard level + INT modifier) spells at once.

The payoff: you can re-prepare for free any time you're out of combat. So a deep scribed book means you walk into a fire area and prep cold spells, hit an undead crypt and prep radiant/fire, face a boss and load up control. Versatility is the whole point of being a wizard — the bigger the book, the more fights you arrive perfectly tuned for.

☠️Your Necromancy school — the parts that matter

Necromancy Savant — necromancy scrolls cost half to scribe (the table above).
Grim Harvest — once per turn, when you kill a creature with a spell you heal for 2× the slot level used (3× if it's a necromancy spell). Living things only — not undead/constructs. Leaning into necromancy literally keeps you topped up.

Undead Thralls — Animate Dead now raises an extra skeleton/zombie, and all your re-animated undead get +HP equal to your wizard level and your proficiency bonus added to their damage. This is when your little army starts actually carrying fights.

L10

Inured to Undeath — resistance to necrotic damage and immunity to anything that lowers your max HP. Late-game durability.

⚔️Why the necromancer loves our run

The more-enemies mod is your best friend More bodies on the field = more corpses to raise, and more clustered targets for your AOE (Fireball, Hypnotic Pattern, Cloud spells). Where a single-target build feels thin in a swarm, you scale up — your spells and your undead army both get better the more enemies there are.

How you split the work with the party

You = the artillery + crowd: AOE damage, a second source of control, and an undead frontline that stands next to Greta & Minthara.
Eila (bard) = heals/rez + hard-locks the single scariest target and buffs your beaters (Haste). She's the only healer, so don't expect a second one.
You own Counterspell and Haste natively — shut down the mini-boss's big spell, and you can Haste a different ally than Eila does.

💎Worth looking out for

📕 The Necromancy of Thay — the necromancer's holy grail

A unique tome in Act 1's Blighted Village (the apothecary's cellar). It's the iconic necromancer item — but a risky, multi-act puzzle, not a quick grab:

Opening it safely wants the Dark Amethyst from the Whispering Depths spider lair (also Act 1).
Reading it through is a gauntlet of rising Wisdom checks (DC 10 → 15 → 20); clear them and you gain Speak with Dead — interrogate corpses for lore, secrets and quest shortcuts (peak necromancer flavour).
Much later, with the Tharchiate Codex (Sorcerous Sundries, Act 3) and one more DC 20 check, it unlocks Danse Macabre — summon 5 ghouls at once, no corpse required.

Bottom line: pick the book up in Act 1 even if the quest takes ages to finish — and know there's a keep-it-or-destroy-it choice with real story weight.

💀 Withers — already met back in Session 1 (the sarcophagus behind the hidden button in the Dank Crypt). The death-robed butler now lives at camp and is the party's safety net:

Respec any character for 100g — rebuild class, subclass and stats from scratch. Handy while you're still learning the wizard and might want to re-tune the build.
Revive a permanently-dead companion for 200g — the backstop for when even Eila's Revivify isn't enough.
Hire extra mercenaries for 100g each.

🎒Reading loot in our modded run

Heads-up — our loot is modded. We're running Ancient Mega Pack (a 600+ item overhaul, most likely with its randomised "REL" loot turned on) plus Fade's Equipment Distribution (380+ hand-placed items). Two things follow:

The fixed story items — Necromancy of Thay & Withers (above), the Mirror of Loss & Hag's Hair (just below) — aren't loot-table drops, so they should still be right where the wiki says.
Regular equipment won't be. With randomised loot a "find ring X in chest Y" map is worthless — so the rest of this is about recognising a good necromancer item on sight, wherever it happens to drop.

Grab or keep anything with these — rough priority order for a Necromancy wizard:

+Intelligence / +spell save DC / +spell attack — the top prize. It's how often your control actually lands, and INT also sets how many spells you can prepare. Nothing else comes close.
Spell-slot recovery ("regain a slot", Pearl-of-Power types) — effectively extra casts of your biggest spells per rest.
Summon boosters — anything adding HP, damage, or numbers to summoned/undead creatures feeds the army directly.
Spell & necrotic damage, and "on-kill" riders — with Grim Harvest + AOE you rack up kills, so on-kill effects fire constantly.
Concentration protection (advantage / bonus on concentration saves) — keeps your one big control spell from dropping.
Clothing-slot defence — wizards can't wear real armour, so value robes/bracers that add AC or wards while unarmoured.
+Initiative — acting earlier lets your AOE land before the swarm gets going (matters a lot with the more-enemies mod).

✓ The two fixed +ability boosts (not random — these stay put)

Mirror of Loss (Act 3, a Shar shrine) — permanent +2 to a chosen ability (send it to INT). Praying needs a tough Religion check, and since Religion runs off Intelligence, the wizard is the party's best bet to pass it.
Auntie Ethel's Hair (Act 1, the Hag fight) — permanent +1 to a chosen ability. Only one exists, and Eila's page already eyes it for CHA — a party call on who gets it.

📜 Your scribing is the ultimate RNG hedge In a randomised-loot run, every other class is at the mercy of what drops. You aren't. Scrolls are sold by vendors and scattered everywhere, and scribing turns them into permanent power that doesn't depend on a lucky armour roll. Buy every wizard scroll the traders carry (they may restock) — in a randomised-loot run, that's your most reliable source of new power. → See the loot & gear guide for the necrotic / +INT / on-kill effects to grab on sight.

⚠ Not every scroll is yours to keep Scribing only works on wizard-list spells. If a scroll's right-click menu shows no "Learn spell" option, it's off-list (e.g. Revivify is a cleric spell — that's Eila's department). You can still one-time cast those; just don't expect to bank them.

Good to just know:

Animated undead last until your next long rest — they don't carry over through resting.
Grim Harvest's self-heal only triggers on living kills — finishing an undead or a construct gives nothing.
Speak with Dead isn't only from the Thay book — a scroll or the right amulet grants it too. It's a quiet info goldmine for a party with a necromancer in it.

🎴Keep-in-mind list

Keep a gold cushion for scribing — don't blow it all on gear; a stack of scrolls is a stack of permanent spells.
Long rest = restock + re-tool — vendors refresh their scroll stock, your slots come back, and you can re-prepare for whatever's next.
One concentration at a time — pick your one big concentration spell (a control AOE or summon), then fill other turns with no-concentration stuff (Magic Missile, Counterspell, scorching ray, cantrips).
Raise after the first fight in an area — corpses to animate are everywhere once a battle ends; keep your army stocked before moving on.
INT is your everything — spell save DC, spell attack, and how many spells you can prepare. Pump it (and grab the Mirror of Loss / Hag's Hair / +INT gear when you find them).