How do you take over a magical island?

[Galethorn]

The trick is having the tallest flag...so, what you need to do is get your flag way up there, then trim the queen's flag. Just simple military tactics.

 

[MerakSpielman]

I thought about simulacra. That's an illusion spell. Wouldn't true seeing see through it?

Not if a person, using True Seeing so they could tell what they were doing, applied a non-magical disguise to the simulacra. With a skill-boosting item, and hiring a specialist, you could probably get a +30 on the disguise roll. How many wizards put significant ranks in Spot?

My current idea is that the evil mages do have sleeper agents - a number of them, including one aboard the PCs' ship. Just before the ship arrives, the evil mages' sleeper agents de-activate the dimensional locks in the castle, the mages teleport in and grab the Queen's husband and baby daughter. The Queen's crown, orb and scepter are magical artifacts that hold the key to the kingdom. The person who wears the crown controls the island's movement and so forth. You have to be good to wear it without suffering negative levels, but the wizards don't know that. They threaten to kill the Queen's family unless she co-operates by doing exactly as the cabal says. Now the Queen isn't stupid, and she's a powerful mage, and not likely to take this lying down. I figure, however, she decides to pick her moment carefully and so does nothing.
Enter the PCs. Their ship arrives and to get them onto the island, the Queen, being directed by her captors, invites the senior crew to dinner. This includes the PCs, including one who is a wizard who escaped from the cabal years ago and now works against them. While the PCs are away, our sleeper agent sneaks off the ship and onto the island.
The PCs will be able to tell something's wrong but not know what. While they're in the castle, the cabal places it in 'lockdown' mode - dimensional locks, walls of force, arcane locks and so on - nothing gets in or out. The PCs are now prisoners in the castle. The cabal wants the PC wizard to return to the fold, and lock the others up so he'll co-operate. Meanwhile, the sleeper NPC shows up, saying he is to be the new puppet ruler of the island. The Queen knows what will happen if he wears the crown, and by putting it on his head the new 'King' goes insane and gains negative levels. This doesn't concern the cabal, so long as he does as he's told.
The PCs therefore, have work to do. To save the day they have to take on each of the cabal, or defeat them some other way. They have to locate and secure the Prince and Princess so the cabal has no bargaining power. One of them has to resist coercion into rejoining the cabal, the others have to escape from their forcecage cell with an antimagic field around it. I also like the idea of the NPC 'king' actually starting to feel guilty about betraying them - the crown has made his mind go gooey but he still feels responsible. He offers to let them out if they take him back - they're unlikely to do this but it's good character stuff. I figure he could be the redeemed bad guy who gets killed by the cabal before the end of the adventure.

What do people think?

Sounds like a good adventure. Other forms of attack might be more reasonable in terms of "chances for success," but don't work as well as an adventure setup. And without an adventure setup, the game is pretty boring.

 

[Darkness]

1. Step onto the island, planting flag in ground.

2. ???

3. Rule.

Fixed your... typo.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Fixed your... typo.

Yes, yes, same thing in the end.

 

[sircaren]

It won't be easy, but here's how you take a floating island. First, you get a large battery of catapults that can fire a payload onto the island itself from their position. Then, you get Troll in a Jar. Troll in a Jar is exactly what it sounds like, except the cans are full of liquid Trolls. The Trolls are fired en masse onto the island, where the jars break open and the trolls rapidly regenerate from piles of troll goo into pissed off trolls, who totally flip out and kill anyone that drops a spoon. After about a day of constant trolljar attack, strafe the island with acid-admixtured Meteor Swarms. That should mop up any remaining opposition, and any remaining trolls from the first wave of attack.

All that's left is to stride in like a king and claim your burning, troll-spattered wreckage.

Best. Solution. Evar!

 

[Toras]

Golems in mass slaughter mode would make for a very effective anticaster army thanks to their virtual magical immunity. If you can alter them to possess flight (through alchemical, mechanical, or mystical means) they can strike anywhere at any time. My suggestion is to use multiple types of Golems (Iron, Stone, etc.) and shape them exactly alike. Apply an outer covering (cloth, paint and other material) to complete the illusion and you have warrior immune to almost all magics and those people who might know enough about them to stop them, have no way of determining which type of golem it is without engaging it. If flight is imfeasable, creating a few malestroms or having the mages pick off the flyer in air would work.
You'd have pockets of illusion or polymorphed resistance but mild amounts of carpet bombing with area spells or kill squads (2 mages with true sight, 10 golems) can take care of that. Make sure Dimensional Anchor covers the island before the attack begins and make sure to sustain it, as the last thing you need is people escaping.

These have several advantage of Troll in a Jar.
1) Standing Army (controlable)
2) Very Manuverable (flight)
3) Can act as guard
4) Holding positions (take an hold a fort or stragetically valuable area)
5) Using Scrying or Project Image, you should be able to direct their actions (non programmed) from a considerable distance/safety and direct any additional assests in the air to assist.

Cost and Time for building up and testing would be the main downsides of something like this, though a high enough caster to have shapechange could become a guerilla nightmare. So they are your priority targets.

Forgot about the sleeper agents, as they would make for great target painters and likely would be "laser sights" for scry and fry type attacks as well as locking down the castle and distrubting communication. They need to make sure to cut command off completely.

The PC's can fit into plan by killing Cabalists, and take their "uniforms" , "symbols" or learning the pass keys for Golem friend/foe indentification. They can then try to break out of the castle, save the Queen (now in a exile) and wage a guerilla campaign against the cabalists superior force.

How does this sound?

 

[MerakSpielman]

Remember to bombard the place with Silenced pebbles, too. It's a real pain being a spellcaster when there are globes of silence scattered everywhere.

 

[The_Universe]

Remember to bombard the place with Silenced pebbles, too. It's a real pain being a spellcaster when there are globes of silence scattered everywhere.

Hire a bunch of rogues to run in before a significant invasion (make a deal with a neighboring powerful [and evil] thieves guild?) with scrolls of Mordenkeinen's Disjunction - timing the disjunction to coincide with the beginning of a mundane invasion should leave many spellcasters tempoararily powerless, and has a decent chance of obliterating any magical defenses already in place.

 

[STARP_President]

Thanks for all your suggestions, lords, ladies, stable boys and unstable boys.

Golems are a bit much for this party, plus I already did a golem adventure earlier in the season (about golems granted sentience by an insane wizard, but that's another story). So I'm going to go with the sleeper agents plan. The idea I outlined earlier will be my basic running plot, altered of course by what the PCs decide to do.

I've decided to add an extra twist. The island's Queen was prepared for the attack, not being stupid, and so cast simulacrum on herself. Now her duplicate, outfitted with misdirection spells, has taken her place while the Queen herself roams free around the castle. Her royal regalia, however, remains in the possession of the duplicate, and thus the evil mages. The mages still have her family somewhere in the castle, and if they suspect for an instant something's up they'll be killed. The Queen therefore has to be extremely careful. She also wants intelligence on the mages, wants to know who they are and who they work for, so she holds off on any counteroffensive. She has the statue spell - I figure she hides in the Hall of Statues disguised as her own exhibit. The Queen being there means the PCs can have high-level help if they're in over their heads, plus a little extra mystery to solve as they try to figure out who their mysterious benefactor is. The Queen's goal and task is merely to watch, plot and intervene if the PCs are in serious trouble.
At the end of the adventure the PCs will also get hold of the various magical items the cabal had, plus any little parting gifts from the Queen. My players always whinge about not having enough magical items. Come to think of it, they whinge about everything? Has someone come up with a way of DMing the game without players? That'd be a big help sometimes...

 

[MoonZar]

My campaign has a magical island that floats around the place. It's populace consists entirely of magic-users (arcane only, plus a few clerics of the goddess of magic.). There is also an organisation of evil mages which is devoted to, among other things, world domination. Now, my question is - how do they take over the island with a handful of people(it can't be too many cos the PCs have to fight them)? Bear in mind the island's queen is a 20+ level Wizard and EVERYONE on the island is magically active. They can't charm or dominate the queen because there's too many people who can see through it or dispel it - ditto for killing or capturing her and replacing her in some fashion. How could they do it logically? My only thought is that they actually coerce her in some way - they aren't using magic to control events at all - though the baddies are all wizards (or sorcerers or warlocks or whatever) they are controlling the Queen, and events, simply though tried-and-tested blackmail, extortion and other mundane methods.

Suggestions, comments?

Hello,

Well, why they don't simply cast a huge reverse gravity spell who will crush the island on the land. Then they could take over the place by taking advantage of the confusion and many of the island habitant will die on the crash anyway...

You could make a quest to build the ritual that will give them the power to crush the island on the land.

I think this very realistic if the quest to do it require a good level of difficulty, like find an artifact who could to the job or else.