Swords & Wizardry: the Necromancer

On the Beyond the Black Gate blog, the author put forth a PDF of several variants to the Fighting-man class for Swords & Wizardry.  I was quite impressed with what he had done, and immediately set to work on creating variants for the Magic-user class following his examples.  The first I came up with was the Necromancer, which is presented below.

Please keep in mind that this is a work in progress.  I posted this on the Swords & Wizardry forums, but I did not receive much feedback.  Oh well, heh.  I have a similar variant in mind for the Demonologist; look for it to grace these “pages” soon.

Necromancer
The Necromancer is a Magic-user who focuses his arcane powers upon death and the dead. Necromancy is a taxing and challenging path to tread, and is not undertaken lightly. Necromancy is generally studied only by humans; while Elves are able to tread the path of the dead, there are no recorded instances of an Elvish Necromancer.

Prerequisites: Con 13+, non Lawful or Good alignment (if alignment is used.)

Banish Undead: Necromancers can banish undead as if they were a cleric of half their level (ignore fractions). “D” results are treated as if the Necromancer were Chaotic or Evil regardless of his or her actual alignment.

Servitor Zombie: Using a special ritual known only to necromancers (and unique to each necromancer), a necromancer can create a number of servitor zombies whose total hit dice do not exceed the necromancers level.  So a 2nd level necromancer could have one 2 HD servitor zombies, two 1 HD servitor zombies, four 1/2 HD servitor zombies or any combination thereof so long as his servitor zombie’s total HD did not exceed 2.

Spell Casting: Necromancers cast spells as per regular Magic-users, but because so much of the Necromancer’s studying is devoted to death and the dead, Necromancers use the Cleric tables to determine how many spells they can cast per day.

Designation of Open Game Content: all text in this post under and including the heading "Necromancer" is designated Open Game Content as outlined in section 1(d) of the Open Game License.