army of skeletons to conquer the world: capitalism style

oof ouch what did you do to my bones

definitely pitching this to my DM for the upcoming Eberron campaign; we've been watching Legend of Korra for vibes and inspiration, and the recaps in that show were perfectly fit for the setting

Only if you send them to work somewhere else and have them give you their pay. If you are their "employer" you can make much more than 2sp per day from them. A good capitalist can make 10x or even 100x of what they pay their employees off their work.

Also, they work 24/7. Even if they worked for someone else, they'd do at least double or triple shifts, depending if they're 12h or 8h, netting far more than 2sp.

Without going into homebrew or Wish territory (as the former is table-dependent and the latter is DM-dependent), Finger of Death creates an undead that is permanently under your command. Being a 6th level spell, a 20th level caster can cast it six times per day (by spending all their higher level slots casting that spell exclusively), which means that, provided you have a steady supply of humanoids to cast the spell on, you could have six undeads per day, or 180 per month. In a year, that's 2190 undeads, which is itself a small army. Give it some time, and you'd have a small country following your commands. At that point there are only two problems: time itself (which can be solved with features that increase your lifespan, such as Boon of Immortality), and other people trying to stop you (which can be solved by using your spell slots to make them regret their decision).

A quick greater restoration should fix that

The problem comes in when the necromancers promise skeletons for manual labor stuff to make society better, then they take public funding and ultimately the skeletons start making soulless derivative art and writing plays/stories that barely (or don't) make sense.

OOF OUCH NOT THOSE BONES

They're called "broadsheets."

All you really need is some boy skeletons, some girl skeletons, a lot of alcohol and some sexy music

This is functionally what Fellmarrow is doing in Narrative Declaration's Kingmaker 2e actual play.

You have to be a *really* good capitalist. If anyone could do that, they'd bid up the price of employees until the companies can barely turn a profit. And at that point, the skeletons barely help.

Do they? In 3.5, undead didn't need to sleep, but 5e doesn't seem to have rules for that. Even if you're making 85.2 gp a day, that's a pittance for a level 20 wizard.

We are working on making it better, we just need to use up more and more mana to train the skeletons

I did list that, but doing the math is helpful. This is less useful for labor, but you could use executions or assisted suicide. If aging in their universe is anything like ours, I imagine there'd be no shortage of good people who'd rather go to heaven and donate their money to charity than spend it supporting themselves as they slowly and painfully die, but even in 3.5 where there were downsides to old age, the worst it got was +3 wisdom and -6 strength. Commoner was a class, so they'd roll ability scores and someone could have a Strength of 4, but they could also level up and improve their ability scores. The other problem is that they're making zombies, not skeletons, and there's no rule that zombies decay into skeletons or anything like that. Though I suppose if we're playing RAW, there's no rule that zombies decay at all or are unsanitary.

I would be willing to join any D as well as D group that would have me. The only caveat is that I would describe the players accurately.

Depends on how many high-level necromancers are there who can provide skelettons.

I did one of these! not a consistent every session thing but they made a big ruckus in town fighting the Mafia who happen to have an influence over the paper

If you can make ten times the employee's pay, then human employees vs skeletons is just a question of 10% of your income. But high-level necromancers are going to be more expensive than just paying commoners.