Death is one of the eight Paths of magic, and one of the Sorcery paths.
It is a flexible path concerned with decay, disease, fear, darkness, creating and destroying the undead, and hindering and draining the living.
It has no in-battle boost spell, but Skull Staff is a readily-accessible item booster at 2 and 10.
Some commonly-used death spells that represent its themes are:
Spells that summon temporary undead in combat:
Animate Dead and
Raise Dead convert
corpses to zombie-like
Soulless
Animate Skeleton, Raise Skeletons, and Horde of Skeletons make Longdead, who can bog down or overwhelm living troops in large numbers
A wide variety of rituals that create undead of all shapes and sizes:
Reanimation, Carrion Reanimation, and Army of the Dead, which create weak undead from corpses in large numbers
Pale Riders, Revive Wights, and Legion of Wights, creating more elite undead troops
Behemoth,
Reanimate Archers (with
1), and
Ziz (with
2), creating specialized undead of various forms
Revive King, Revive Bane and Revive Bane Lord, making undead commanders
Summon Spectre and Summon Mound Fiend, which summon undead mages
Lichcraft and Call Wraith Lord, which summon powerful immortal mages and are a common late-game option for Death gems
Tartarian Gate, a specialized lategame spell that calls back a Tartarian from Hell – a defeated pretender god from an earlier Ascension War whose power is only matched by its need for therapy. See
Tartarian Gate for details.
Spells that destroy the undead:
Dust to Dust, which damages one tile of undead
Wither Bones, which does large damage to all undead in an area
Spells that deal armor-negating damage through the power of unlife but that can be negated by magic resistance:
Shadow Bolt and Shadow Blast, which may also paralyze their targets
Bolt of Unlife, Blast of Unlife, and Vortex of Unlife, which may reanimate victims to serve the caster
Disintegrate, which is Death's answer to high-HP targets
Spells that create darkness:
Darkness, which turns out the lights on a battle
Utterdark, a ritual which turns out the lights on the world
Spells that put off one's absolute death:
Skeletal Body and
Skeletal Legion, which confer
pierce resistance by making the body bony (though the latter is rather nasty)
Invulnerability,
Stygian Skin (with
1), and
Stygian Rains (with
2), which confer
invulnerability against nonmagical damage
Twiceborn, a ritual
with its own page that gives the caster a "second life" back at home
Spells related to decay and aging:
Decay, which makes one target age quickly
Weakness, which permanently steals a target's strength
Wind of Death (with
1), which makes a battlefield age quickly
Burden of Time, a global which makes all living things in the world age and die
Rigor Mortis, an oppressive battlefield enchantment that causes all living things to fatigue rapidly
Spells related to fear:
Spells that drain life to restore the caster's fatigue and health:
Spells that disease enemies (and sometimes friendlies):
Plague, which creates a contagious plague on the battlefield
Leprosy, a nasty ritual that can disease an army
Harvester of Sorrows, which creates a stealthy commander that can kill population and disease troops