Primal Conundrum

Outlaws of Varisia Pathfinder Campaign Interest Check

Heck, if we all cast Magic Stone and just pelted a guard, there's a good chance we could kill him at range- especially considering we could make enough to hand some off to the non-clerics, meaning that suddenly everyone is throwing rocks that do 1d6+1 damage at the guard, then as soon as he's dead I can mage hand the keys over and let us out. If we're lucky we could even put him down in the first volley before he could sound the alarm, and for an attack like that he WOULD be flat footed, no question.

Outlaws of Varisia Pathfinder Campaign Interest Check

It potentially IS dangerous to the caster- the only reason it's not REALLY dangerous is because the wording of the spell is such that they can't attack. The commands that force them to move stop them from taking other actions, but I'll point out that in moving and obeying the spell, they have taken an action and thus are not flat footed, even if they weren't the ones to decide on the action. They are still aware of what's happening, and as soon as you stop chain casting the spell to attack them they're going to be able to react because it's clear by then that you're hostile.

Also, sleep isn't one of the things that command lets you do. It's very clear about what actions you're allowed to command: approach, drop, fall, flee, halt.

I'll also mention that if you cast it six times, there's a pretty good chance that it'll get resisted at least once during that time, letting him shout for help. Also, Command DOES have a verbal component.

Outlaws of Varisia Pathfinder Campaign Interest Check

You don't keep them from acting by using command, you simply dictate what one of their actions will be, if they fail a save. The rest of what they do on their turn is still up to them. They can yell for help, a free action that counts as acting. They can draw a weapon as you force them to advance, an action. Command is a first level spell for a reason, it's not THAT powerful.

Also, the undead domain ability lets you get healed by negative energy, but it doesn't say that it makes you look dead in the slightest. Pretending for a moment that it DID make you actually look dead, it still only lasts for 1 round per caster level, so about six seconds. That wouldn't be long enough to get their guard down and get them in there with you.

EDIT:
Also, I'd actually consider being manipulated by a spell like that to count as taking an action during combat. The idea of the flat-footed mechanic is that you get the drop on someone, that they didn't expect something to happen. Think of what the term "being caught flat-footed" means. If you found yourself being forced to march towards a malevolent spellcaster, you wouldn't be flat footed for very long- certainly not long enough to end up in the same cell as him and allowing him to strangle you.

Outlaws of Varisia Pathfinder Campaign Interest Check

I don't see anywhere that the command spell leaves him flat footed, and he could still sound the alarm. A shank with Magic Weapon will do 1d4+1+str damage, which is more than "not much" by a fairly decent margin, I'd think- or I hope at least, depends on your stats. Though, if your strength is low enough that it won't do much damage, then your odds of out-grappling a guard are also not very good.

Also, as for faking your death, do you mean with Bleeding Touch? Dude, we're level one clerics and it does up to six damage, that could easily take out over half your health in round one. That seems incredibly risky.

I guess I'd be able to evaluate your tactics better if I knew what your character's stat allocations were. A decent number of your tactics seem to rely on physically overpowering someone enough to strangle them, which kinda demands a decent strength stat- I know Sujurak is okay for that with a 14 str, but I don't know what yours is.

Outlaws of Varisia Pathfinder Campaign Interest Check

I think you're underestimating how hard it would be to strangle an armed and armoured guard... also, that requires him to already be holding the keys, not just have them on his person.

Rather than strangling, which seems like a longshot at best (keep in mind that Command doesn't leave them helpless, they could still fight back) you'd be better off making a prison shank (Sujurak could help carve you one using his claws). Lure the guard over by feigning sickness, cast magic weapon on the shank, and try to stab the guard to death. Might get a bonus of him being flat footed or something if you're lucky.

This has the advantage of not relying on the guard failing his saving throws and leaving you exposed as a dangerous caster if it fails- if it looks like you're having a hard time with the guard, you can always try to pull the keys off him and throw them into one of our cells, forcing him to either rush over to stop us letting ourselves out and giving you a chance to shank him in the back as he turns to deal with the new threat, or else he can ignore it and soon have more people attacking him.

Outlaws of Varisia Pathfinder Campaign Interest Check

Due to the cost of having a static anti-magic field, such prisons are going to be super high security and pretty much exclusively for powerful spellcasting criminals. We're all level one. For lower end casters, taking away their spellbook / familiar / holy symbol will pretty much clip most of what magic they can do, and individuals who are a problem beyond that can be handled by simply waking them up after about five hours of sleep, having them jog a distance to wake up, then send them back to sleep for the rest of the night- interrupting their rest like that would mean they couldn't prepare spells.

Fact is if we're on a chain gang, then we're clearly not considered the super dangerous casters who require and antimagic field, they're letting us out enough to work on roads and handle tools and such. As such, some level of plan could be made that does involve magic, especially if us clerics don't draw enough attention to ourselves that they realize we actually are casters / make them need to stop us from preparing spells. Sujurak could pretty easily pass for a thug of some sort, and it's entirely possible that they don't even realize that he's a spellcaster and not just some superstitious brute who likes to carve little totems out of scraps of wood- not realizing that such totems constitute his holy symbol. I don't know what your necromancer's holy symbol is or why he was imprisoned, but it could be a similar thing.

EDIT:
Just reviewed how prepping spells works in Pathfinder, apparently resting doesn't influence it, but clerics need to pray for an hour to prepare their spells, and that would be easy to train guards to spot and interrupt. It would likely come down to setting things up so that we could get an hour to prep spells, since once we do that we have a lot of options.

Outlaws of Varisia Pathfinder Campaign Interest Check

Really I guess it depends what the DM wants to do- if he wants to get out of the jail part fast or if he wants to play around with it for a bit. I'm good either way, but currently I'm planning around it being a bit harder to break out of. I figure if I plan for it being hard and it turns out easy I'm set, but if I assume that it'll be easy and it turns out being hard then I might be in trouble.

Outlaws of Varisia Pathfinder Campaign Interest Check

Chain gangs are only put into the chains when they're brought out to do work, outside of "work hours" they're in their own cells like normal prisoners.

Outlaws of Varisia Pathfinder Campaign Interest Check

Undead Lord with Corpse Companion? Okay, fair enough that you'll have one- the ritual takes 8 hours to turn it into a zombie though, pretty sure you'd get caught before you got even close to completing that.

Outlaws of Varisia Pathfinder Campaign Interest Check

Actually, what could work is kill someone else as you said, wait for them to pull the key, then cast Burning Disarm on the key to get them to drop it. From there we have a few options, from Sujurak grabbing the keys from a distance with Mage Hand while the closer person keeps the guard busy for a few rounds and unlocks the others, or something else.