The reasoning that the familiar needs to be given orders by the Necromancer is a thematic choice and has no basis in the rules. With that reasoning one could argue that the familiar also can't do anything if he's too far away from the Necromancer to communicate with, or Vyrah's falcon can't do anything if he's not in sight.

jjcole said:

Just what I was thinking. Raise Dead may be a skill of the Necromancer, but nothing in Raise Dead says that it is what allows the Reanimate to activate.

Other people seem to agree with me on the first point. The nature of the Reanimate is not clearly defined. You are assuming that it has to be given orders by a conscious hero. We are not making that assumption. It could be an independent entity that makes its own decisions (or in reality the player does). I am trying to make a distinction between what a hero does in the context of the game, and what the player does to play the game. I see activation as a player function, not a hero's "deed". It might have helped the game if FFG had included the word "deed" and defined it to mean anything a hero does -- skills, abilities, feats, etc. -- and then used that word consistently throughout, unless a rule only applied to a subset of those.

Ispher said:

By a strictly literal reading of the rulebook I might agree with you, but being too literal can cause problems -- see other threads in this forum. If I write "Frodo threw the One Ring into Mount Doom, and then returned to the Shire", does that mean nothing else occurred between those two events? The phrase "A then B" implies a sequence (it does not allow B to occur before A). Since the rules explicitly exclude actions, it is at least possible that non-actions (activations) could still occur.

Ispher said:

No, I would stack my vocabulary up against most people's in these forums. You used the word "deed", which as I said is not in the rules. Does it refer to things that the hero does (perform actions & feats, use skills & abilities), the player (activate monsters, move figures, roll dice, play cards, place tokens), or both. If it applies to both, deeds that a hero could not logically do because of their status -- knocked out -- do not restrict the deeds that the player can do (unless you knocked him or her out too).

From the official FAQ :

"Familiars
Q: Can a hero activate a familiar while knocked out?
A: Yes, a familiar can be activated before the knocked out hero performs a stand up action, but not after (because standing up immediately ends the hero’s turn)."

If the word "immediately" had been included in the rules it would have been clearer …

Triu said:

"The passed out Leoric ordered his Reanimate to knock the last Goblin out of the way."

That's how it will be written then…

I actually narrate the campaigns I play, so this ruling annoys me a little. Oh well, I'll just have to get creative.

"The Reanimate knew what his master would have told him to do. He went ahead and whacked the last Goblin out of the way."

Ispher said:

This ruling implies that the Reanimate is fairly self-willed.

Read some of Jim Butcher's Dresden books, then pretend the Reanimate is Bob with a skeletal body attached. You can have great fun with him wisecracking during the adventure.