What would you guard a gate to the Abyss with?

[Bagpuss]

D&D you have a lot of cash at your disposal and are most likely a high level Paladin.

You can use outside help, but only for making suitable traps and defense, you can't have outsiders bound to defend the place or recruit an army of troops, since...

a) The gate will last forever, long after your death,but you've found no way to destroy it an it needs regular attention to keep it closed.
b) The less people knowing about it the better. Because you are naturally paranoid and suffer the sin of pride thinking anyone else left to guard it will eventually be corrupted.

Point B eventually leads you to losing your paladinhood becoming Lawful Neutral and finally being a ghost bound to the location of the gate.

Yes, I know this sounds like a rip off of the OotS current storyline....

 

[Jeremy757]

D&D you have a lot of cash at your disposal and are most likely a high level Paladin.

You can use outside help, but only for making suitable traps and defense, you can't have outsiders bound to defend the place or recruit an army of troops, since...

a) The gate will last forever, long after your death,but you've found no way to destroy it an it needs regular attention to keep it closed.
b) The less people knowing about it the better. Because you are naturally paranoid and suffer the sin of pride thinking anyone else left to guard it will eventually be corrupted.

Point B eventually leads you to losing your paladinhood becoming Lawful Neutral and finally being a ghost bound to the location of the gate.

Yes, I know this sounds like a rip off of the OotS current storyline....

You don't need to bind an outsider to get them to help guard a location, nor does an army of troops need to know the real reason they are guarding an area. You can create a layer of interdiction without the interdictors knowing of the gates existence or having to guard the gate directly.

My first thought would be to invite a group of LN, CN, or TN creatures to make their layer in the area. Maybe a pack of territorial wolves, lead by an awakend Dire Wolf druid, studiously guard the countryside around the gate from all intruders. They don't need to know about the gate or even where it is to want to guard the territory.

A single undead Kobold constantly setting and resetting traps for all eternity would be interesting. He is bound to the site and can't leave the area, but can't enter the area where the gate is either. He is already corrupted but because of his Lawful nature fears what’s on the other side of the gate so would never try to approach it or open it.

Superstition and fear are also your best allies. If you have ways of haunting the area or making it seam haunted would help.

Placing some kind of non intelligent guardian, like a golem, at the gate site that kills anyone who gets near the gate would help with that "all who go their never return" bit.

On the flipside you could place the gate in a region that is so peaceful and boring that no adventurer would ever go there.

And I think the laws of storytelling demand that there must be a secret society that knows the truth of the gate and the paladin in plotlines like these (i.e. The Mummy, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade)

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hey there Bagpuss mate!

Just build a big, magical adamantine iris door right in front of the gate. Then build a military base castle around the door.

 

[Land Outcast]

Superstition and fear are also your best allies. If you have ways of haunting the area or making it seam haunted would help.

Placing some kind of non intelligent guardian, like a golem, at the gate site that kills anyone who gets near the gate would help with that "all who go their never return" bit.

On the flipside you could place the gate in a region that is so peaceful and boring that no adventurer would ever go there.

And I think the laws of storytelling demand that there must be a secret society that knows the truth of the gate and the paladin in plotlines like these (i.e. The Mummy, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade)

Ok... so you're making it an adventurer's eye-candy?

 

[Celebrim]

You aren't going to be able to hide the existance of the gate, at least not from anyone that counts. You also aren't going to be able to do this yourself (nor as a Paladin would you normally try). You'll need your church.

As long as the demons know where the gate is, they'll use back channels to get the information in the hands of fools and worshipers on the prime, and then any attempt at obfuscation is doomed. Also, thier are alot of powerful divinations that make a mockery of the 'the best defense is no one knows where it is' plan.

My suggestion, build your tomb around the gate, build a dungeon around your tomb with a false tomb in it, build a church atop the dungeon. You have two layers of defence. The outer layer is the false tomb (which guards the gate to the inner defenses). The church gaurds this and they gaurd it zealously, and in particular they can do things like several layers of Hallow, lots of glyphs of warding, a few magical traps, and constructs and so forth - and the best part is they'll guard, upkeep, and maintain this if only to perserve the sanctity of the site. You want an outer defense like this because you want a dungeon that survives multiple forays, and you want an outer layer that easily heals itself and is active in protecting the site so that the enemy doesn't use the Belloch approach (dig it all up) rather than the riskier Indiana Jones approach.

The inner layer is lethal traps - teleport circles, compacting rooms, poisonous gas, triggered fireballs, triggered disentigrates - and constructs. You'll need typical anti-breaching, anti-scrying defenses to stop unauthorized teleporters.

And I don't see why you can't get Outsiders in on the project. Just because good outsiders are busy doesn't mean that they are unreasonable. As a player, it always annoyed me when you saved the universe and people still treated you like a leper and a criminal, so I try to avoid the 'NPC's are unhelpful to you just because' style of DMing. In this case, it seems to me like enternally gaurding an unclosable Abyssal gate is the sort of thing LG outsiders will practically fight each other over the honor of doing the duty. Even Celestia doesn't have unlimited resources, but one or two archons in the inner layer keeping an eye on things is not out of the question given the importance of the site. This also has the advantage of having someone who can teleport out for help (and teleport back in with it) should the inner layer be breached in force.

In the very very inner layer, you can use defenses that can't be easily repaired. Permenent walls of force, one shot Greater Planar Binding traps bringing a Solar in for the occasion, one shot imprisonment traps, polymorphed nastiness that is released by triggered greater dispelling traps. Etc. You may assume that a breach of this seriousness will be noted on the outside (everyone in the church is dead, for instance), and heroes will be looking into it and picking up where you left off.

 

[Land Outcast]

Celebrim got the right of it.

Also:
See the subsection Unavoidable Traps on the Traps section of the DMG? well, include many of those, but instead of silly things like "water filling" and "compacting stone walls", make it "acid filling" and "compacting wall of force"

Wouldn't you have to find a way to stop demons from entering through it? or is it a one-way thing?

 

[Torm]

Open a permanent Gate that goes right back to the Abyss IMMEDIATELY in front of it?

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Open a permanent Gate that goes right back to the Abyss IMMEDIATELY in front of it?

Open a permanent Gate that drops them 10,000 feet below the surface of the Silver Sea of Celestia IMMEDIATELY in front of it.

Demon meet the planar ocean of holy water

 

[Ed_Laprade]

Open a permanent Gate that drops them 10,000 feet below the surface of the Silver Sea of Celestia IMMEDIATELY in front of it.

Demon meet the planar ocean of holy water

I was gonna say Walls of Stone. Lots and Lots and Lots of Walls of Stone. But this is just so much better!

 

[Slife]

Open a permanent Gate that goes right back to the Abyss IMMEDIATELY in front of it?

Or even better, one that opens to the positive/negative energy plane.


This assumes you do, in fact, have a lot of cash.

As for traps, hire someone who took the master trapsmith feat (halves the cost of traps), and then buy hundreds of automatic reset CL1 Magic missile (or ray of frost/acid splash. Mix in some disrupt undead as well for more damage) traps on the outer perimeter (set up so enemies get stuck in the crossfire), and a thousand or so one-shot traps in the inner perimeter. 1d4 +1 per round isn't much, but 10d4+10 per round is decent, and 100d4+100 per round is deadly. And disarming them? A rogue might be able to disarm one of them, but would still take the damage from the 99 other traps.

Spending all of your Level 20 WLB, you can afford slighly over fifteen hundred auto reset cantrip traps. First level spell traps cost twice as much, non-resetting ones cost a tenth of the price. This assumes CL1.