Finally got around to making the "master wizard" character I've been thinking of since .47 came out, whose magical powers come from repeatedly dying and being resurrected as various intelligent undead. After a few hiccups I found a system that works pretty well.
I started with two characters: the soon-to-be wizard (a mountain goat man named Kubuk Ramcrown); and his "apprentice" (the human Artuk Frosthand). Artuk would learn all the secrets of life and death available in the world, so that he could resurrect Kubuk in the different undead forms.
Then Kubuk had to die. The first death was easy: he drowned by swimming under a bridge, I switched to Artuk and resurrected Kubuk (who was still considered one of the party, and I could swap back into him). But after that dying is a little more finicky, since intdead can't suffocate or bleed out (the important consideration being to preserve bodily integrity: if the body is too smashed up, even minor wounds may kill an intdead). Initially I wanted to freeze Kubuk in ice, wait for the thaw, and resurrect the corpse... but for some reason it seems a freeze-killed corpse can't be raised, or even reanimated. Don't know why.
So I had to resort to the much slower process of having Kubuk "starve" in the wilderness (which is apparently possible for an undead...), ending the game; then (after two weeks) unretiring Artuk, journeying back to the site and resurrecting Kubuk, then retiring Artuk; then (after another two weeks) unretiring Kubuk and starving again. So every transformation takes a month... which is actually sort of cool; becoming a powerful wizard should take a while.
(I didn't actually call myself "Landraven the Elder"... I don't know why it says that. Kinda cool though)
The results are pretty great:
That's seven different intdead interactions, nine different powers. Sicken, Dizziness, Suffocate, and Blind are all good debuffs, equivalent to inflicting the same statuses through combat (though Suffocate and Blind don't last very long, I find). Paralyze is quite powerful, making a foe completely helpless for a time (it also seems to wear off relatively quickly), and is very useful for catching fleeing opponents. Propel Away is of course great fun, though I've yet to see it do any serious damage. And launching ice bolts, well...
Haven't tried Vanish yet, but having had intdead use it on me in the past I imagine it's pretty OP.
In addition, one becomes incredibly strong through successive resurrection:
I was also able to carry an entire cave dragon corpse without losing speed, so that's cool.
In fact, I actually got *so* strong that I think I broke the game's upper limit on strength: after my eighth resurrection I found that picking up anything - even a >1 weight amulet - dropped my speed to 0.099! I rolled back the save to the seventh resurrection, and that seems to be fine - that may, then, be the soft cap on multiple resurrections.
Also deserving of honorable mention (though unrelated to my wizard experiment) is Kubuk's faithful donkey, Rimtar - who, despite being a completely normal donkey (no undead shenanigans here) has turned out to be an absolute merciless
menace on the battlefield:
A kill list like that probably puts ol' Rimtar in, like, the top 50 most killingest creatures
of all time in this world. She's absolutely brutal: