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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zappo" data-source="post: 1426564" data-attributes="member: 633">[continue]  Enter the alienist summoner. I can't even remember all of his blunders; every fiend with a decent Intelligence rating either screwed him outright or at least got incredibly good conditions for the bargain.  - in order to try and stop the army from leaving the city where it was assembled, he called a balor in the city center, with the only order being "cause as much havoc as possible". The balor immediately summoned another balor. A not indifferent portion of the city was razed before the Good dragons in the army could intervene. The summoned balor was killed, but the called one escaped and not much later was contacted by the BBEG and given a better reward if he would kill the PCs. Further, the BBEG (obviously) used the attack as proof that the army's intervention was urgently needed. Any parallels with RL events are astonishingly coincidential. So they got a balor on their heels for nothing.  - to slow down the army, he called an erinyes and told her - again - to obstacle the army in whatever way she desired. As a reward, she asked the alienist to be called again when the spell's duration expired, and to have sex with him. Unfortunately, this creeped out the player too much and he didn't make good on the promise. But it wouldn't have mattered too much anyway, because...  - when he saw that the erinyes wasn't terribly effective in blocking an entire army, he summoned a succubus and gave her the same instructions. Confused on the difference between demon and devil, he didn't mention to the tanar'ri that there was a baatezu doing the same job at the same time. The two met, and after a short and small blood war episode there were none. More wasted magic.  - balor fest resumes. Another top tanar'ri is called, I can't remember the exact details but it ended up hunting the PCs for some reason. Party got nothing effective.  - another fiend is called, again can't remember the details but he was assembling a fiendish army for invasion around the end of the campaign. Party got nothing effective.  - yet another balor. This times, he wants a tough, 20-HD one. So I have a top servant of Lolth appear in drow form. A few minutes later, the alienist has sold the soul of one his comrades to the Spider Queen, and he has asked the balor to "stop that army before it reaches the stone circle". The army still had two weeks of marching before arrival, and with no details the fiend just did nothing for 13 days and then showed up with an entire drow army. Except that by that time the party had already managed to kill the BBEG and persuade the army to return home and defend their borders from the following BBEG instead. By this time, the alienist was dead, too. Party goes to the balor and says "uhm, we no longer need you to destroy that army". Balor grins and says "too bad". Huge battle ensues.  - last big act of the alienist (this was after summoning the Lolth balor, but before it came back) is to decide that tanar'ri are unreliable (duh) and that he's probably better off dealing with baatezu instead (!!!). So he calls for "the biggest pit fiend I can call". Enter Baalzephon of the Dark Eight. The rest of the party teleports away as soon as they hear the name. Shortly after, the alienist has been granted certain destruction of the puny mortal army if only he reads a certain scroll which the pit fiend has given him, in a certain place, at a certain time two days from now. The world has no idea of its luck when, one day after the summoning, a fire dragon incinerates the alienist and the scroll, which would have opened a permanent portal to Baator right in the middle of one of the most strategic positions of the continent.  That's why I think that planar bindings were good and balanced spells in 3E. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> </blockquote>

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