In an early session, my DnD group fought a yeti with the help of some guards atop a frozen pond. We were level 1 at the time, so our options were limited, but it worked out. When the yeti was on its last legs, it smashed the ice underneath it, causing it to fall into the freezing pond, taking with him a wounded guard. My character jumped in to save the guard and made it to shore only after receiving multiple levels of exhaustion and almost freezing to death due to the rapid accrual of said exhaustion. I want to go back and get the carcass to potentially craft items or sell parts, but I'm having trouble fathoming how to do so without risking my poor, squishy, 25 ft walking speed Bard's life.
Animate dead works only on corpses Medium or Small humanoid, and the only other way I could see this being done would be blindly throwing in a weighted rope and fishing until my DM rolls a favorable result or gives in due to boredom and frustration.
Notable statistics for help in answering the question are as follows:
- Lvl. 3
- 18 STR
- 14 CON
- College of Creation Bard
- Amphibious racial trait
- Can't swim due to lore reasons
- Effectively medium-sized
- My DM did say that he rules that resistance to an element would carry over to its related weather condition, i.e. cold resistance helping with freezing weather, fire resistance helping with scorching heat.
- My DM has also swapped to a different version of exhaustion as a result of the guard-saving kerfuffle. There are now 10 levels, 9 of which are non-lethal, with a gradual increase in negative modifiers (skill/save) and reduced movement speed, which should theoretically increase my boy's survivability.
- As a result of my DM's Homebrewed Mizzium Apparatus, my Bard has effective access to all spells he has spell-slots for. Of note, he also has expertise in Performance to that end, so the consideration of what spells he has is much less bounded than usual.