How Would You Defend A Mountain Fortress? (Volume II)

[mmadsen]

use a darkness generating spell that does allow darkvision, maybe something epic with a very large area of effect.

Odd, isn't it, that Darkness is opaque to Darkvision? Especially since there's already a Deeper Darkness spell out there. Anyway, an epic Twilight spell makes perfect sense.

With that in mind, perhaps we should arm our Darkvision troops primarily with missile weapons.

Fighting in winter when its very cold is an advantage for the undeads not to be underestimated (see WW2)

Unfortunately, the Valloreans have started their military campaign in spring. I doubt we can delay them until winter. Maybe some epic magic can change that.

 

[mmadsen]

Standard High-Level Magic vs. High-Level Magic Tactics

When we stop to consider the Vallorean Champions, we face one specific instance of a much broader, more general problem: how do high-level characters with high-level magic deal with one another? It all becomes so far removed from reality, that the tactics aren't very intuitive.

Teleport, for instance, removes the concept of distance -- and the concept of intervening space. How do you defend against someone who can literally appear anywhere -- without having to pass through any of your armies, any of your city walls, etc.? Can you defend your entire nation? I don't see how.

One limited counter to Teleport is Forbiddance. It keeps out anyone of the wrong alignment, and it prevents planar travel into the area (60-ft cube/level) -- and it's permanent. It doesn't keep people from teleporting right next to your fortress, but it's a start.

Dimensional Anchor can ruin a hit-and-run teleporter's day -- but what are the odds you have someone with a Dimensional Anchor ready when the magic commandos arrive? And is it worth anything if you don't have a locally superior force? Perhaps you can teleport into (or near) the enemy camp, draw out their Champions, Dimensionally Anchor them, then move on to your real objective.

So we fill our Mountain Citadel with Forbiddance, and we Unhallow it with something useful -- perhaps Invisibility Purge to detect spies, or Resist Elements to take away some favorite commando attacks. Then we Unhallow everything near our Mountain Citadel with Dimensional Anchor, so teleporting commandos get stuck fighting it out (or flying away).

Anyway, those are some of the issues with teleporting. I haven't even touched on scrying.

 

[mmadsen]

Re: Standard High-Level Magic vs. High-Level Magic Tactics

So we fill our Mountain Citadel with Forbiddance, and we Unhallow it with something useful -- perhaps Invisibility Purge to detect spies, or Resist Elements to take away some favorite commando attacks. Then we Unhallow everything near our Mountain Citadel with Dimensional Anchor, so teleporting commandos get stuck fighting it out (or flying away).

As smetzger pointed out, "Magically secure your fortress from teleport. But leave some holes in the defense with some nasty traps."

I enjoyed Crowe9107's follow-up: "The Chinese have a proverb that is something to the effect that a man with one illness is in better health than a man in perfect health. What it means is that a man with minor health problems is more health conscious, and takes better care of himself than a man who thinks everything is fine."

If we leave no openings, the Valloreans will find one, and we won't know where. If we leave a false opening, we can funnel them into a trap.

 

[mmadsen]

If we compare forces, our 100,000 scrubs are no match for the Valloreans 350,000 professional soldiers -- particularly since this is D&D, and 8th-level Fighters crush 1st- and 2nd-level Warriors and Commoners.

On the other hand, our Champions (including Wang-Liang, Giants, etc.) seem comparable to their Champions. Further, our specialists (Vampires, Lycanthrope) seem comparable to their specialists -- except that their specialists specialize in killing ours.

Then there's the fact that the Vallorean forces teem with high-level Clerics and Paladins. They can quickly recover from injury, disease, and poison.

It seems that we need to draw their Champions away, ideally kill them, but more realistically wipe out their mid-level Clerics and anti-Vampire specialists. Without them, the legions are vulnerable. Ideally we'd also take out all their means of seeing our invisible (and illusioned) soldiers. Then we can take them apart at our leisure.

 

[mmadsen]

Make a epic level dispelling spell with a large area of effect only for low levels spells... to disable these magical communication helmets, magical waterskins, and magical MRE (food ration) packs... i think they don't expect to bring along more food and water...

They seem quite vulnerable to Mordenkainen's Disjunction. Granted, 9th-level spells aren't cheap, but the magic items they take out don't come back the next day; they're even less cheap.

 

[Nifft]

Ingredients:

1) Several sets of Ring Gates

2) Several very high level mages with two levels of Arcane Archer (looks like elves & half-elves only -- any evil half-elves? drow? satanic fire elves?)

3) Several very high-flying mounted troops


Recipe:

High-flyers take one Ring Gate ring each, leaving the others in the hands of the Arcane Archers.

Flyers go very high above the army of do-gooders, then signal to Archers to begin, then turn their Gate Rings pointing straight down.

Arcane Archers imbue very nasty area-effect spells into arrows and shoot through their half of the Ring Gates, and repeat for several rounds.

When the flyers see the spells starting to take effect, they signal the Archer/Magi again, and turn their Rings to face themselves.

The Magi each reaches through his or her Ring, and casts Teleport on him/herself & the flyer (& the mount). They all teleport to The Heavily Guarded Featherfall Room(tm).

By the time the Valorians figure out where all those Wails of the Banshee, Cloudkills, Horrid Wiltings and Meteor Swarms are coming from, your guys are already home.

Now put on some Necklaces of Adaptation, render your arrows immune to fire (somehow), and do it again from orbit.

-- Nifft

 

[dave_o]

What is this...this magic you speak of?

Admittedly, I know as much about spells in DnD as Anna Nicole Smith about creating quality television, but it seems to me most people are forgetting the traditional, mundane tactics (albiet a bit magically enhanced) for wild, manicial plans. While this makes for a cool game, it's akin to that scene in Indy: Temple of Doom where he calmly shoots the crazy swordsman.

Namely, pretty things die easily.

Some thoughts to consider:

*As I recall, there's an Earth to Mud, Stone or Mud, or some other such spell (it's sad how little I know about DnD magic). Given the fact that hundreds of people, and even worse, stocked for war weigh just a bit, a well placed Earth to Mud sort of spell could be very decisive. Especially after a well placed area effect spell.

*With the considerable amount of manpower available, digging massive amounts of pitfalls isn't a very difficult task. Aided by magical Darkness, and such, skilled men could dig thousands of pitfalls throughout the field of battle. There could even be magically enchanted against detection. Suddenly, most of the force is moving very, very slowly and carefully. And suddenly, you've got all manner of hell raining upon them.

*Fashionable Hats.

 

[DDK]

Have you ever played Myth (I think this scenario was in Myth II)? There's a scenario where all you have is a bunch of dwarves and you have to "keep" a hill. It was the single most satisfying experience of any game I've ever had after all my strategies for keeping the hill worked. So... I'd use dwarves!

 

[mmadsen]

An example of an ambush, combining the ideas of CRG and SHARK (as described by SHARK):

Dire Tigers or Dire Bears can make quite an impact on that scouting cavalry patrol, or a small foraging party, not to mention a infantry unit on the march. One or two such animals may not seem like much, but imagine an ambush where you have two dozen Dire Tigers and two dozen Dire Bears, supported by archers that have been hiding previously in a line of fortified, camoflauged Portable Holes, that all rise up and smash into the marching line of legionnaires, attacking with great ferocity and determination, and fighting to the death! With a spell or item of Nondetection, the archers and the Dire Tigers and Dire Bears, will avoid any kind of evil or undead detection spells that the Valloreans are sure to saturate the area in front of them as they march, searching for ambushes. With this kind of ambush, it remains practically undetectable, and invisible--until it's too late.

 

[willpax]

I believe the previous thread mentioned something in general about trying to take out the communications mages, but here is tweak of two existing plans:

Using scry to find the lower level comm specialists, try to mount several raids whose purpose is to dominate the communicators, then hide that fact. After you have several different units with your "moles" in place, you can spring several false alarms about attacks together with real ones. At the very least, the champions will have to take time to figure out where the real problems are; at best, they spread themselves thinly, improving the odds that the real raid will succeed.

After feeding false information, have the sorcs go crazy on people, hopefully taking a few out while they get themselves killed; they won't be trusted after one false report, and better to have them down than have some cleric dispel our domination.