you should have bones in your inventory, drop em and animate it as your first corpse, also butchering humans tends to yield bones so you can carry animatable minion supplies with you. works even better as a gnoll since you can get 3 times the minions out of each kill of a human by butchering them but beware, not all races give bones when butchered, though it is very handy when starting out if you want a big undead army.

Originally posted by Zegian:

you should have bones in your inventory, drop em and animate it as your first corpse, also butchering humans tends to yield bones so you can carry animatable minion supplies with you. works even better as a gnoll since you can get 3 times the minions out of each kill of a human by butchering them but beware, not all races give bones when butchered, though it is very handy when starting out if you want a big undead army.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ didnt know you could animate bones, Gnoll necro ftw

Also, wild animals produce corpses which you can animate, and many of them don't fight back.

Well, animal corpses can be raised into zombies. So if nothing else, you can wander the woods chasing down raccoons. Fishmen by the rivers aren't too threatening either.

Although my last few necro runs, I started next to raided villages. The orcs are dangerous, but there are plenty of corpses on the ground. So I can just run around raising corpses.

But if you are really lucky... you start surrounded by three corpses + your bones. Easy peasey.