How do I use cleric's Turn Unded?
I have Anomen in my party, and he has not special abilities, and I could's find a spell. named "Turn undead". He is level 14 cleric.

You have to press the turn undead botton and wait that the undead get close to your cleric. Then the effect will be different depending on the cleric's alignement: if he's good he will disintegrate the undead; if he's evil the undead will become your ally (green circle) for a certain period of time. The strenght of the effect depends on the cleric's level.
Remind that the cleric must do nothing except turning undead....if he attacks someone, the effect will stop immediatly.
Hope this helps....

The cleric's turn undead ability is only effective against undead creatures.
When you activate this ability, your cleric can move anywhere, but cannot do any other activity like spellcasting and attacking.
The effects of the turn undead spells are dependent of your level and your alignment.
If you are a good aligned cleric then your turn undead ability will destroy the undead. If you are one of the evil alignment clerics, then it will charm the undead.
If your level is high enough, then you can turn high level undead creatures like vampires or greater ghouls, skeleton warriors or else...

[This message has been edited by TIN_MAN (edited June 27, 2001).]

Just to make this clear:
The cleric's turn undead skill is activated by using the button on the bottom of the screen that looks like a skull (put in the same place as other characters' special abilities). When it's active, as has been said, the cleric can only move - nothing else (no casting, fighting, opening doors, or other special abilities if D/MC). Nothing will happen immediately, but every so often (once a round?) you will get a message "{name} is turning undead". Each undead in range, if the cleric rolls high enough for it, will either be repelled away from the cleric, or destroyed/controlled.

PS this ability often causes confusion if you also have the Party AI active. When the chracaters are using their own artifical intelligence rather than waiting for specific instructions from you, they tend to attack the nearest hostile creature. So this happens:

- You select turn undead ability
- undead creatures approaches cleric
- cleric's AI kicks in and he attacks the undead thus automatically stopping the ability to turn undead (as was explained in the previous posts)
- players gets confused and thinks turn undead doesn't work.

To overcome this turn off the AI by clicking on the little lantern icon in the bottom right hand corner before using turn undead. be careful though as your people will do nothing now unless you tell them.

PS there might actually be an AI script for clerics to turn undead when appropriate (accessed from the customise/scripts options in the NPC stats screen) but I can't be bothered to look this up now.

There is a big button on the bottom of the screen with a picture of a scull on it. I guess reading the manual and/or playing the tutorial can actually be useful for sime people.

That's true. But I have limited time for that, and I saw that it's easier to put a question in this forum. Sorry to bother, and thanks for tip.

dont forget to turn the Cleric's AI off..

In reply to Vicsun:

Not to say that the tutorial wasn't any good, but I found little help in using it when I first played (and I hadn't a clue about D&D or BG), and even now I don't know what the hell THAC0 is, but I know that the lower the better, right? Anyways, I don't think the tutorial helped me much, as I ended up going through the game without knowing much, and therefore getting confused, angry and eventually restarting.

IMHO, I think that forum's, with NO spoilers are the most useful way to learn some of the basics, and then some of the advanced.

Well, just my opinion, since you mentioned the tutorial.

Herr'Don

I can feel with you Herr'Don: THACO is indeed confusing. Here I found out about THACO (actually while typing it myself :D - it´s somewhere in the middle) :
http://www.sorcerers.net/ubb/Forum2/HTML/001673.html

I always wondered why my cleric's "turn undead" ability didn't seem to work properly. thanks for the tip on the A.I. I used aerie as my "resident" cleric for one game and had her in the back using her spell capability and tried to turn undead on numerous occasions with VERY limited success even at 14th level! Now I know why. Thanks.

Turn undead can be fun. I went to grab the scroll for Edwin, and ran into a group of ghouls and mummies. I just had Viconia come up front and turn while Korgan used his dwarven throwing hammer. She would control them, and then the undead would fight each other, and I just had Korgan smack whoever wasn't controlled, and eventually whittled them all down to one. Then turned off the turning and killed the one. An amusing combat.

I had fun in the graveyard district, in that room where loads of undead come out at you; the party stood by the door playing dice while Anomen went forwards and destroyed all the undead before they got anywhere near him.

It's normal that the undeads actualy atack the cleric who use TU? I thought that they run or die (it's a good aligned cleric). Please correct me if I'm wrong.