Turn undead

The turn undead feature comes in two forms: as a spell, from a spellbook of turn undead or wand of undead turning, and as an extended command #turn.

The name comes from Dungeons and Dragons, where it is a specific supernatural ability for causing undead beings to turn and flee. There are some unfortunate linguistic ambiguities associated with it in NetHack; for instance, the #turn command has the description "Turn undead", which might make a beginning player assume that it causes their character to become an undead creature!

Turn undead spell

Turn undead is a level 6 clerical spell, and the special spell of the Knight. It causes undead monsters in a single direction to take damage and possibly flee, and will resurrect corpses.

A wand of undead turning has the same effects as the spell.

Turn undead command

Knights and Priests have the innate ability to turn undead. This can be invoked with the #turn extended command.

This command is quite different from the spell or the wand. In fact, it's a prayer to your god, not a spell.

Using the #turn command has the following effects:

• Exercises wisdom.
• Turns all hostile undead monsters that you can see with a base range of 5 squares. Range increases by 1 square every 5 levels. If your level is higher than 15, hostile demons are turned as well. Affected monsters have a chance to resist.
• These monsters are woken if they are sleeping.
• If you are lawful or neutral, certain undead monsters may be killed instantly. If you are chaotic, they may become peaceful. These monsters are, in increasing order of difficulty: zombie, mummy, wraith, vampire, ghost, lich.
• Demons and those undead who are not killed will flee. If you are confused, the command removes fleeing and paralysis effects from those monsters instead.
• You become helpless for 5 turns while you are praying. (Ouch!)

Unless one of the following cases are true:

• If you are polymorphed into an undead or a demon, bad stuff will happen. Not recommended.
• Your god isn't accessible in Gehennom, so it won't work there.

Strategy

The turn undead spell can be used to resurrect a dead pet, though you might need to tame it again.

The #turn command's helplessness side-effect limits this ability's usefulness, especially since it's only likely to kill undead less powerful than yourself. Use with caution. It would probably clear a graveyard pretty fast if you're high enough level, though.

References

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It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.4.3. Information on this page may be out of date.

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