I am looking to take my Bjornaer down a darker path, I was thinking of creating a line of spells to animate animal corpses and control them in a zombie-like fashion. However I noticed the following.....

Under the general guidelines for RegoAnimal and RegoCorpus there is a tendancy for RegoAnimal spells to require a higher base level to acheive the same effect that a corpus spell would acheive. I think this is fair since RegoAnimal spells affect both the body of the animal and its "mind". It could be argued that the nature of an animal is more closely tied to its behavior than a human.

However to affect only one aspect, as in the body, should we use the Corpus guidelines instead?

Would RegoAnimal spells using the Animal guidelines (and having a higher level) make the undead animals have a more life-like behavior?

//However to affect only one aspect, as in the body, should we use the Corpus guidelines instead?//

I would allow that, with the argument, that the Rego Animal Guidelines explicitly state (ArM5 p.120): "You may further refer to Corpus for ideas *and guidelines* on controlling an animal's body, ...". (Emphasis mine, of course.)

The base individual sizes for both An and Co forms are +1. So there is no real hidden benefit in animal zombies unless one would - against intuition - allow a dove zombie to fly or such. I can hence not see why an SG would wish to make animal zombies more difficult to animate.

Kind regards,

Berengar