The Noctuary (D&D 3.5e, Level 20+ Adventure)

[chaincomplex]

OK, so: (i) I've added a character table to the OP, let me know if you're missing or something is wrong; (ii) I'll move the deadline down by a day so it's on a Friday by EST.

Ok without opening a whole can of worms
Where you allowed the 1 weapon enhancement from pathfinder all ready,, are we allowed to request, feats & enhancement from pathfinder?

I have in fact opened this can of worms knowingly. The answer is request first. Per my prior allowing of PF material, I am likely to OK it unless there's a 3.5e version.

FWIW, SBG has portals that can be crafted and built into strongholds. I'm assuming that if the stronghold is mobile, the portal within it would move with it, so that's at least one way of getting mobile portals, if this particular one isn't kosher.

Yeah, D&D is a little ambiguous here. Presumably they follow a planet's rotation or sit still relative to a ship's deck, so you may be able to give a portal a frame of reference with respect to a moving body. This of course is not the same as them moving with perfect independence but I'm willing to give this interpretation credence of the purpose of the game.

Spoiler: The Bus

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Sometimes, it's valuable to the education process to bring the students somewhere else, to observe a natural or magical phenomenon more directly while teaching about it. These field trips are uncommon, but tend to be quite dangerous, and so I've built myself a Bus that's more like a magic tank.

Components (1ss/10000 gp):

• 1ss/10000 gp: Auditorium, Luxury

Walls (60000 gp/ss):

• 60000/ss: Obdurium

Wall Augmentations (144500 gp/ss):

• 7500/ss: Airtight
• 12000/ss: Ethereal Solid
• 50000/ss: Magic Warding, Improved
• 12000/ss: Magically Treated
• 60000/ss: Prismatic Screen
• 3000/ss: Transparent

Every bit of the walls have had Hardening cast on it at CL 20.

Mobility (436500 gp/ss):

• 25000/ss: Incredible Locomotion
• 10000/ss: Burrowing
• 1000/ss: Crawling
• 15000/ss: Flying
• 3000/ss: Sailing
• 7500/ss: Submersing
• 125000/ss: Plane Shift 5/day
• 250000/ss: Teleport Without Error 5/day

Wondrous Architecture allows for a spell effect to work on everything within a stronghold space, continuously. Depending on how mobile it is, the base price is lowered from 2000 to 1000 or even 500, and there's no duration modifier. Also AFAICT there isn't a limit on how many of them you can have in a particular stronghold space, but I'm gonna assume a low limit to keep things reasonable.

Immobile Continuous "Fortify Metal Or Stone" (3000 gp)

Create Portal allows me to make portals between locations, up to whatever size I'd like as long as I can afford them. In this instance, I'm making a portal at the back of the bus that connects back with the main base (the small college). Two-way portal like that cost 150000 gp. There's also maybe a second portal on the outside bottom of the bus, which is one-way and costs 100k.

Conclusion

The outermost bus defense is the prismatic screen, which destroys all objects and effects unless they can tank all the saves or strip all the layers with magic. Even if the screen is taken down, the obdurium is still airtight and ghost-proof, so they'll have to teleport in or beat their way through. Beating your way through the obdurium means getting past Hardness 100/540 HP/Break DC 90. You could drop this bus in freefall from orbit and it wouldn't make a scratch. A bath in lava or powerful acids tickles. A tarrasque claw at maximum PA tradeoff and damage roll still couldn't scratch this stuff unless you gave it the ability to crit objects. If you do manage to scratch it, there's an epic artificer with at-will Repair Critical Damage sitting behind it. If you teleport past the walls to make trouble, or manage to cast a spell that just requires LoS and not LoE, everyone onboard the bus has SR 32. And of course if trouble starts brewing that the professor thinks will be a problem, SOP is for students to begin evacuating before someone teleports onto the bus, or breaks the wall.

The bus can sit up to 31 people total, and is highly mobile, at least by the standards of the time. 5/day Plane Shift, 5/day Teleport (or whateve the 3.5 equivalent is), and it can burrow, crawl, fly, sail, or submerse at 10 mph. Between Plane Shift and Teleport, you should be able to get pretty close to any destination in the multiverse, close enough that your 10 mph will be sufficient for local transportation. If anyone needs to use the restroom, or evacuate, or fetch some equipment, the portal at the back of the bus allows all-day two-way connection to the main stronghold.

654000 gp/754000 gp if I purchased it at market price (adjusted for climate/city modifiers). But I'm gonna be a Landlord and a nigh-epic artificer, so that number will be...a lot lower.

Spoiler: Orbital Bombardment

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...okay so this is gonna get stupid, and I don't have the actual building fully planned out yet but here's the concept:

The stronghold part is extremely simple. There is a deep pit with a building over it. At the bottom of the pit is a portal with a trapdoor over it. The building is essentially a small warehouse that serves as a breeding ground for a very specific kind of ooze. This is an ochre jelly that has both the Sentry Ooze and Mineral Warrior templates. Such a creature has been purchased from Neogi slave-traders, who would've had to track down or breed a very specific variant for this customer, and thus it is 4 times more expensive than usual for its CR: a total of 25600 gp, which cannot be reduced unless I'm gonna become a slime breeder.

These slimes have Int 1, and are capable of taking up to 3 feats. Those feats will be Final Strike, Improved Unarmed Strike, and Versatile Unarmed Strike. I can use magic to change whatever feats the one I purchased already had into these feats for pretty cheap, I imagine. For the next part I'll need some method of commanding/controlling/training the slimes, which should be doable.

There are two spots in the warehouse that are like...resetting healing traps, or maybe wondrous architecture granting fast healing to one specific square. In one of these spots is the ooze originally purchased (81 HP). It changes its unarmed strike to slashing, hits itself, takes no damage, and splits. Now there are two ochre jellies, each with 40 HP, each in a healing spot. Assuming this is like...resetting cure critical trap, that's 4d8+7 HP per turn, average 25. Any split oozes that aren't healing will help continue splitting until they can't split anymore (10 HP or less) and then they'll go crawl down the whole. I think they can run with a climb speed, but I'm not 100% sure.

Spoiler: Process

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Round 1
(1) 81 HP

Round 2
(2) 65 HP

Round 3
(2) 57 HP
(2) 32 HP

Round 4
(2) 53 HP
(2) 28 HP
(4) 16 HP

Round 5
(2) 51 HP
(2) 26 HP
(4) 14 HP
(8) 8 HP
Pit +8 oozes

Round 6
(2) 50 HP
(2) 25 HP
(4) 13 HP
(8) 7 HP
Pit +8 oozes

Round 7
(2) 50 HP
(2) 25 HP
(4) 12 HP
(8) 6 HP
Pit +8 oozes

Round 8
(2) 50 HP
(2) 25 HP
(4) 12 HP
(8) 6 HP
Pit +8 oozes

The part of the pit the slimes are filling up is 572 feet deep. Ochre jellies are 6 inches tall and so this fits 1144 of them in the pit, a vertical column of ooze. Going from a single ooze at full HP to 1144 oozes available for the pit takes about 147 rounds; with a bit of wiggle room added to allow those later ones to move into position, that's a ~15 minute recharge time, potentially longer or shorter depending on specific rolls for the resetting Cure Critical trap (although with how many casts there are, I'm assuming average will be pretty close). The last 4 ft are the trapdoor and the portal; the other end of this one-way portal is attached to the bottom of the Bus.

The bus positions itself at least 200 ft above a given target. The trapdoor is triggered (maybe remotely, maybe by taking the two-way portal back to base to pull a lever or something). The trapdoor pulls away, and 1144 oozes fall 576 feet in the first round. This has the last of them just barely touching the portal and going through, leaving an empty pit and a once-more-closed trapdoor over the portal. The oozes will be somewhat aimed based on Aerial Bombardment rules (HoB pg 67-68). This will involve an attack roll (at -4 penalty from normal, -2 extra for every 50 ft above target, presumably with no maximum range since it counts as thrown but talks about attacks aimed more than 250 ft down) against AC 5. Presumably, if we're 200 ft above target and only taking -12, that'll be a breeze for any nigh-epic character.

The oozes fall, and land. whatever was in the 10x10 area they landed on takes 20d6 damage, as does the ooze itself. Since the ooze has 10 HP at most, 20d6 kills it 100% of the time, which triggers Final Strike. This is a 60 ft radius explosion with a primary 6d6 bludgeoning damage (Ref DC 21 for half) and an Earthquake effect, as the spell, presumably only affecting the 60 ft radius. After that, the body is so destroyed that it takes True Rez, Wish, or Miracle to bring them back (so effectively they've been disintegrated, nothing remains behind). In the first round, 744 of the jellies will make impact; the other 400 instances will hit during the second round, giving you time to escape if you somehow barely survived.

1144 instances of 20d6/6d6/earthquake is going to wreck basically anything it hits in a 15 ft diameter circle (the diameter of an ochre jelly), and wreck structures in a 135 ft diameter. You drop that onto solid stone, and there's a 15 ft diameter hole going straight down 476 ft, with everything within 60 ft of the hole severely damaged by the massive number of earthquakes that just occurred. if you dropped it on a structure, then each of those jellies is also dealing 100 damage (bypassing hardness) to every structure within 60 ft of the impact zone. If you did that to the Bus while the prismatic screen was down, the Bus would be destroyed in just 6 hits.

I am roughly willing to allow both. Caveats:

• The magic schoolbus is just the standard endgame caster superbase, playing stronghold rules straight but with a lot of wealth. Not allowing it would be more ad hoc than I want to be. But the same is true for grabbing Leadership and building a straight Artificer companion, and the same principle applies: excepting special circumstances, the companion/stronghold should be relegated to a party support or fluff role, and the player should try to find a reason for this to be so. I don't think this should be hard for the magic schoolbus, it's basically designed to be a party support base, but just bear this in mind. Especially for the next caveat...
• The concept of orbital bombardment—once we work out details of details and logistics—would be oddly thematically consistent with the second half or third of this campaign if we ever get to that point. So I want to allow some version of this. Problems: (i) how are you getting Final Strike onto slimes without DCFS; (ii) the process is simple enough we must ask why NPCs in the world aren't using the slime air strike, and whatever excuses and limitations we think up should apply to you as well; (iii) as before, these projects should play a support role. Orbital bombardments do have a place in larger campaign-level discussions, but the player should come up with some excuse (once we satisfy (i)–(ii)) as to why they're not replacing adventuring wholesale with orbital strikes, excepting again special circumstances.

@chaincomplex How are we doing buy offs for bloodlines?

EDIT: Requesting extending enhancement from dragon magazine 302, page 84.

• Standard bloodline rules. I don't think there's any buy off for it.
• OK on extending.

The Wondrous Magic Item
Collar of umbral metamorphsis 22,000 gp -> grants the Dark Creature Template, my question here is where it is granted by an item am I able to ignore the normal LA+1 assignment of the Dark Creature Template ??

Yes. You are given the template, you aren't taking in a build, no LA.

Where I am building what is a 4 armed creature, Magic Item slots become a question
Head, Headband, Face, Throat, Shoulders, Body, Torso, Waist, Feet, Slotless <- these should remain unchanged
Arms, Hands, Rings <- these could gain additional slots
So the question is for those 3 normal slot areas would you grant extra slots?

IIRC RAW is that none of them get additional slots.

LAST
were you allowing multiple magic items of the same slot to be combined with the lesser valued at additional 50% cost ?

Yes.

@chain, how would you feel about a custom item based off Collar of umbral metamorphosis, by changing the template?

No.

also requesting Girdle of Hate, i can't for the life of me find where it's actually from, but it's definitely an item. I think it's from DrM136, but couldn't find it. Found references to it here
EDIT2: someone informed me it's in dragon compendium on page 136. (so i assume it's already approved)

Yep.

@chaincomplex
Are Leadership + derivatives allowed, or do you harbour animosity against those?

As I mentioned above, things like Leadership should outside of special circumstances be relegated to support or RP, with the player finding an excuse to make it so.

1. How do you feel about Dragon characters? Either using the rules in the Dracomicon or Oslecamo's Monster Classes?

2. From the (now defunct) Mind's Eye series:

• Crystal Master PrC
• Meditant PrC
• Educated Wilder Variant

3. Radiant Creature Template from Dragon Magazine 321.

4. If someone took the Tashalatora Feat, would they need a level in Monk to stack with their Psion levels? Or does 20 + 0 = 20?

5. This Vow of Poverty fix.

1. Draconomicon rules are OK, are they broken in some way that you'd prefer Oslecamo's monster classes though? I don't remember the Draconomicon well.
2. OK.
3. OK.
4. I am willing to read it as not explicitly requiring monk levels. Obviously you still need those monk class features from other sources though.
5. No. VoP does need a fix and this one seems fine. Buuut it so happens a character from the precursor game was given VoP for free on the premise that VoP really is a downgrade to not having VoP. I don't want to break that premise in two by fixing VoP.

Requests:
Dragon Magazine 324, pp. 96: Chivalrous Courtesy and Code of Arms (flaws)
Dragon Magazine 358, pp. 39-43, "Master's Forge": Segmented Armor and Reinforced Armor, specifically

OK on all.

How are we to create cohorts?

Use the starting array 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, and 8. Average each HD, rounding up (per HD).

Questions/asks:
1. Deity: I''m going with Heironeous. But I'd like to re-fluff it as the Light Eidolon.
2. Could I re-fluff the Sunblade to make it a Longsworrd instead of a Bastard sword? This is because I'm thinking about Finding a way to grab Hammer's Edge (the feat) But it's not that relevant.

1. Uhhh what is the Light Eidolon?
2. Rather than re-fluff, let's just say the sun blade enchantment can apply to longswords as well. So I guess, pay (or save) the difference in base costs, which would include the costs of said weapons.

How much point buy for cohorts?

Answered.

For the main scrub, I'll request the following flaws;
Code Of Arms (-4 on enemy with no weapon)
Living Faith (no turn or rebuke undead)

OK on both.

The only dragon magazine material I request is from dragon 340, the greater combat reflexes chain which lets me get iterative attacks on my AoOs

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