Epic Spell Help: "Baleful Lifebind"

[aarondirebear]

Wait... You hear the words "Epic" and "Wizard" in the same context and you think he "seems a bit overpowered"? Because his intellect is high? I kneel humbly in the presence of the Lord of Understatement.

Seriously, any mention of the Epic Level Joke Book guarantees that the game has already ridden a horse and cart straight into the middle of Crazy Town. Saying that an Epic Wizard "seems a bit overpowered" is like saying that a black hole "seems a bit on the heavy side". It's true, but it's not really representative of the full facts

Anyway, to address the OP, I happen to have my Joke Book to hand so I'll see what I can do....

You're right about there being no DC for "no save", but there's a modifier for penalising the saving throw. Maybe you could just apply that until the save modifier is so impossible that it's effectively a no-save spell... If your Epic wizard can flange any Spellcraft check (which is pretty easy) then you can just stick 100 on the Spellcraft DC to add +50 to the save DC.

As for the rest, well:

You need the Life seed which has a starting DC of 27.
You want it Quickened, which gives you +28 to the Spellcraft DC.
You want the undead returned to life whether willing or not: that's impossible with sub-epic versions, but in this case we can just allow a saving throw...

So your Spellcraft DC is 55, plus however much you want to add to increase the DC of the save. We'll assume you're going to add 50 to the DC, for a total Spellcasting DC of 155.

GP Cost: 1,395,000 (chump change to an Epic Wizard)
Development Time: 27.9 days
XP Cost: 55,800 (actually, it's - at most - 500Xp, not counting minion abuse, because your Epic caster can and will have made himself a Thought Bottle)

Assuming an ability modifier of +15, that's a save DC of 75 even if you haven't managed to give Kit some bullsh*t bonuses to the save DC's of his spells.

(And don't think I missed the Kit Carson reference either: how very frontiersman of you )

There's another - and in my possibly even funnier - way of dealing with this though. Use Polymorph Any Object (or an Epic version using the Transform seed) to turn the lich into a 51-year-old living gnome, which then immediately explodes.

That way you don't have to worry about the bringing-the-unwilling-dead-back-to-life clause. It's cheesy, but everything involving Epic level spellcasting is cheesy.

Ah that looks about right.
Actually, Kit was a former character of the player who wants to be the gnome that is doomed to be killed by Kit. He's the one that named the wizard, not I. Our grandmother used to call him Sir Kit because Carson is his middle name. I turned him into a quick "Go To" For when i need to change something in my setting, since I hate retcon a lot more than wizards "doing it".

For instance, I ran Tomb of The Forgotten Kings and didn't like the way the Runehound encounter went (CR 3 My ass), and so I changed it to be a meeting between a human bandit, a baby white dragon, and a hobgoblin)

As to how he became so epically powerful? LONG story. Let's just say it involved a LOT of "creating monsters with epic spells and fighting them", then starting a community of wizards to participate in the epic rituals once per year to refresh his epic intelligence buff, so that he can continue the cycle.

 

[Hughjefender]

why do you hate retcon?
plus, how do you retcon a game? Unless you use the same characters?

 

[aarondirebear]

I hate retcon because i consider it lazy and evil and poor storytelling.
I will take a wizard literally altering time over a frickin retcon.
I will take a sharp stick in the eye before i take a retcon.
I will watch The Human Centipede and the Anthropophageous Beast before I take a retcon.

To your second question, easy:
"That didn't just happen. It never happened that way, you did NOT read it differently in Volume I. No, The way It happened in Volume III is the way it ALWAYS happened." is a retcon.
whereas
"That DID happen, but Kit Nosrac owes the fates a favor, so he rewrote time a little bit in order to erase the death of Aeon." is not.

I'm looking at you, Chris Metzen and George Lucas.

But I only do the time altering thing if it is due to a DM screwup on my part (not realizing how level inappropriate the Runehound was, in this case...seriously whose the idiot that called it cr3?), and never if the PC's screw up or the rolls go bad.

 

[Hughjefender]

Rocks fall everybody dies. Man, if you could time alter that...
Though the DM might have words about that.
Technically speaking, isn't altering time in itself a retcon in terms of the continuity of the story? Like when Marty accidentally left the Almanac in the future and Biff took it to the 50's, Biff technically retconned history.
Sorry, I'm a back to the future fan.

 

[aarondirebear]

Rocks fall everybody dies. Man, if you could time alter that...
Though the DM might have words about that.
Technically speaking, isn't altering time in itself a retcon in terms of the continuity of the story? Like when Marty accidentally left the Almanac in the future and Biff took it to the 50's, Biff technically retconned history.
Sorry, I'm a back to the future fan.

No, including actual time travel and time magic is not a retcon. Changing the story arbitrarily IS a retcon.

 

[Hughjefender]

Apart from Lucas ruining the prequels, how did he retcon stuff?

 

[aarondirebear]

Apart from Lucas ruining the prequels, how did he retcon stuff?

He ruined the trilogy by changing lore established in the original films. Retcon was the tool he used to ruin it in the first place. The FOrce? Retconned as a scientific phenomenon. Anakin? Went from "A great pilot" to "an annoying SPORE" Things that were established in the EU were also retconned away. What Lucas SHOULD have done was do his damn homework and kept track of what his characters said. If I made a prequel that contradicted something in the original, I would go back and fix the PREQUEL so that it matches the ORIGINAL, and NOT the other way around (which is what Lucas did).

 

[Hughjefender]

Actually Lucas has stated the EU and his ideas are more or less at odds with each other. While I don't apporve of the quality of the prequels, they more or less fit in, in terms of continuity with the originals. The lore itself has actually developed vastly since the prequel trilogy. We have new exciting eras of the Star Wars universe including the Clone Wars and the Old Republic era. All of this experimentation wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for Lucas playing around with the source material of the prequels. And I use the movies as the final source material in regards to canon. While I dislike the midiclorians immensely and I hate Anakin as a character (I consider Vader to be distinct), I still think the movies are the backbone for which the franchise is based. There's a ton of stuff in the Star Wars canon I hate, but I can simply choose to focus on what I like. All things considered, the prequels get a bad rap, for good reasons too. But as a Star Wars geek, I'm impressed with how this franchise has developed in the previous decade.

Sorry for the long post
TL;DR, While he may not be the smartest author, Lucas created this universe and he can do what he wants with it, it may not be pretty, but there is some good to come out of it

 

[aarondirebear]

Actually Lucas has stated the EU and his ideas are more or less at odds with each other. While I don't apporve of the quality of the prequels, they more or less fit in, in terms of continuity with the originals. The lore itself has actually developed vastly since the prequel trilogy. We have new exciting eras of the Star Wars universe including the Clone Wars and the Old Republic era. All of this experimentation wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for Lucas playing around with the source material of the prequels. And I use the movies as the final source material in regards to canon. While I dislike the midiclorians immensely and I hate Anakin as a character (I consider Vader to be distinct), I still think the movies are the backbone for which the franchise is based. There's a ton of stuff in the Star Wars canon I hate, but I can simply choose to focus on what I like. All things considered, the prequels get a bad rap, for good reasons too. But as a Star Wars geek, I'm impressed with how this franchise has developed in the previous decade.

Sorry for the long post
TL;DR, While he may not be the smartest author, Lucas created this universe and he can do what he wants with it, it may not be pretty, but there is some good to come out of it

Except that as a writer he sucks. he should have let competent writers, like the ones who wrote the EU and the scripts for the OOT and even some FAN FICTION, do the writing for the prequels. I do believe in "death of the author", and he died the moment he made Greedo shoot first...he may have created the world but he has lost his credibility and his right to say what is canon anymore.

 

[Hughjefender]

I'm frankly not sure you know what the death of the author truly means as a concept. It refers mainly to literary criticism and how the audience should not take the author's intentions and beliefs into account when critiquing their work. It seems like you're using it to say that authors can write how they like until they anger you at some point.

Another thing you also have to consider is that perhaps some EU and fan fic writers have an even looser understanding of the lore and may degrade the product even worse than what Lucas himself has done. Even then, Lucas would still have okay everything and thus he still has full creative control, bringing us back to square one. There have been some serious blunders even in the EU. The entire Yuuzahn Vong era is a complete trampling of everything the franchise is, moreso than the prequels.