D&D 3.x war strategies: Mind Flayers versus Lich King

[Username17]

Since no one mention the type of Lich King (caster, Martial, gish) I'm going to assume Ranger with Practiced Spellcaster version (Ranger 14 + 4 from Practiced Spellcaster = Caster 11 so qualifies).

the Lich King was described as a 12th level Dread Necromancer in the first post.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

Here is your first post on the topic of suggestion v. planar binding. You claim exactly that suggestions to "do whatever it is you want to do" would do "fucking nothing."

No, my that suggestions to stop being compelled do fucking nothing. This isn't fucking hard, the example suggestion was "Forget your orders" and that is not a valid suggestion any more than "Stop being dominated."

And here is your second post on the topic of suggestion v. planar binding. The bolded portion is rather important, because if you'll notice it looks a whole lot like the former ("not do the thing planar binding compels you to do") and nothing like the latter ("not be compelled to do the thing planar binding compels you to do").

You dumbshit, the allegation was that "Don't do what the calling spell tells you" would allow them to not do what the calling spell tells them because the calling spell isn't magic. I was explicitly stating that if you tried that, it would not work, because they would still end up doing what the calling spell told them.

It was specifically in response to someone claiming that dictionaries lose to magic allowing demons to never perform their bound actions, so I was focusing on how the magical calling spell compels action and not engaging in the fine nuance of what specific suggestions would or would not successfully delay performance.

I noticed the change

Bullshit. There was no change and you just got finished alleging that everything I said previously where I clarified the distinction was also allegations that planar binding makes people immune to mind control. You are just attempting to find any statement I made over the last two pages that might have failed to explicitly clarify all the aspects of my position because you want to fap super hard to pretending that you are right and everyone else is wrong.

[DSMatticus]

the example suggestion was "Forget your orders"

I Suggest that you disregard your summoner's orders and do whatever you like

Stop trying to change the wording in a way that makes it easier for you to dismiss without actually criticizing it. Your actual burden here is to show that "disregard your summoner's orders and do whatever you like" is equivalent to "stop being compelled." But it isn't, and it obviously isn't to anyone capable of speaking English. Seriously. How in the fuck are you turning the former into the latter? You may as well be arguing that "disregard being on fire and do [whatever you would normally do]" is equivalent to "stop being on fire." No. Fuck no. That is unsalvageable.

Also, if that is what you are arguing your response to Omegon makes no fucking sense. Like, at all. If your original criticism was that that suggestion does not work because it is a suggestion on par with "stop being compelled," "stop being on fire," "stop being human," "stop being blue," then the correct response to Omegon was "I never said planar binding overrides suggestion. I said you cannot give people suggestions that are impossible to follow or impossible to even attempt to follow and expect them to be followed, because it is in fact impossible to do so, planar binding aside. You cannot give someone a suggestion to not be under the effect of a spell because individuals do not control when they are under the effects of a spell." But that looks absolutely nothing like what you said. What you actually said is bullshit about how that suggestion does not work because planar binding overrides suggestions that conflict with the instructions of a planar binding and is basically exactly the thing you are now disavowing.

Either you wrote those two posts while having a stroke in the speech center of your brain, or you are completely full of shit.

[Kaelik]

Also, if that is what you are arguing your response to Omegon makes no fucking sense. Like, at all.

I completely stopped arguing about suggestion at all because whether or not Planar Binding compels service was infinity times more important.

[K]

Also remember that the Lich we are talking about is a Dread Necromancer, a class better suited to a villain from childrens' cartoons because of their profound lack of depth. This means that you can honestly Scooby Do a Dread Necromancer with a pit trap or a locked room because he doesn't have blasting powers or flight or shapechanging or anything else that lets him solve problems as complicated as "locked door" or "muddy pit that I don't have the Climb skill to climb."

They're not quite as bad as that - any DN can at least Summon Undead to get a zombie wyvern, and fly out of a pit. They could also smash their way out of any room that wasn't actually indestructable by the same means.

But they are pretty limited (except for wands / scrolls) and siege weaponry is a big enough threat I don't expect to see the Lich personally entering the battlefield.

Summon Undead gives you the actual MM example entry for Skeletons and Undead, so no template or customization shenanigans. Thus, no flying skeletons.

That makes sense because skeletons of certain monsters like outsiders are dramatically more powerful than other things on the list.

[Avoraciopoctules]

If you were going to project Mori's military might into near-impassable mountains with defensible caves, how would you alter your deployment? Having some flying zombies for aerial recon is possible, and the ghouls can climb pretty well, but the skeletal hordes are pretty vulnerable if they get crowded into dense groups, and they'd have difficulty removing themselves from pit traps or climbing anything harder than a ladder. Living legionnaires need to be fed, and you have relatively few clerics powerful enough to conjure food.

[Username17]

Summon Undead gives you the actual MM example entry for Skeletons and Undead, so no template or customization shenanigans.

True. But Zombie Wyvern is explicitly on both the Monster Manual zombie entry and one of the Summon Undead options for 4th level. He's a 12th level Dread Necromancer, so he explicitly has access to the Zombie Wyvern. Not all the weird theoretical optimization of outsider skeletons and shit, but Zombie Wyvern is definitely a go.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

If you were going to project Mori's military might into near-impassable mountains with defensible caves, how would you alter your deployment? Having some flying zombies for aerial recon is possible, and the ghouls can climb pretty well, but the skeletal hordes are pretty vulnerable if they get crowded into dense groups, and they'd have difficulty removing themselves from pit traps or climbing anything harder than a ladder. Living legionnaires need to be fed, and you have relatively few clerics powerful enough to conjure food.

In mountains, leave the legionnaires at home. Undead FTW. The thing to remember about weird biomes in DND is that the environment itself is a solid challenge for a low-level character. Since skellies are flat-out immune to most of the bad things a mountain can throw at you, you have a huge advantage. All you need to do is wait for your opponents to get in trouble and then nudge them over the edge.

First thing to do: set up a skeleton on every big snowy slope. When they see an army that fails to authenticate, they bury it in an avalanche. Immunity to cold and no need for food means you can just give them their orders and leave them there forever, and you could probably cover the entire mountain range with not more than a few thousand skeletons.

On top of that, station skeletons on mountaintops with mirrors and orders to pass on properly-sequenced flashes of light. Not as good as a Sending, admittedly, but the network is able to talk to the skeletons you have placed to trigger avalanches. Close passes to guide your opponents into advantageous engagements with your armies or to cut off retreats, flatten supply caravans, or clear out dangerous areas ahead of your own troops' advances.

Similarly, if you know where your enemies will be (that is, you know which pass they're taking), or if you just have a shitload of skeletons handy, you can have your skeleton army lay down on the ground and get a covering of snow. Then wait for the enemy to march over your buried army so they can pop up and start murderizing. Even better, your skeletons have darkvision: do the same thing at night. And remember, even if skeletons are vulnerable when packed together, complete whiteout negates that disadvantage quite thoroughly.

If you're planning on applying the Frostburn rules for cold, skeletons become even more effective. Humans will be automatically fatigued by altitude sickness, and will eventually fail a fort save and become exhausted for -6 STR and DEX. At that point they're not a threat to your skeletons one-on-one, much less en mass.

Cleaning out caves is a problem, but you're in mountains and you have troops that don't need to eat. Just lay siege and you're done. If you want to be really sure, your skeletons are able to do heavy labor despite the cold and altitude and won't have much trouble at all burying the entrances in snow, at which point your enemies suffocate.

[K]

Summon Undead gives you the actual MM example entry for Skeletons and Undead, so no template or customization shenanigans.

True. But Zombie Wyvern is explicitly on both the Monster Manual zombie entry and one of the Summon Undead options for 4th level. He's a 12th level Dread Necromancer, so he explicitly has access to the Zombie Wyvern. Not all the weird theoretical optimization of outsider skeletons and shit, but Zombie Wyvern is definitely a go.

-Username17

This is what I get for only checking the version of Summon Undead in Libris Mortis and not checking the MM.

This means that your pit should be 5' by 5' wide so that the Zombie wyvern can't be summoned inside it (since summoned monsters need to have room to be summoned into).

The rules are silent on whether a zombie wyvern can squeeze into the space of a 5' by 5' pit, pick up a lich, and then fly out. I'd guess the answer is "no," but killing a summoned Zombie before it can do that is a far easier proposition than tangling with a Lich.

Hell, stationing a guy with Magic Circle against Evil cast on him at the mouth of the pit will prevent the Lich from using his summoned undead at all for hours. That's more than enough time to fill the hole with burning debris.

[fectin]

12th level DN has DR 6/-, so most attrition doesn't work on him. That's why I suggested force damage instead of regular bows or simple blanket-beating.

[Winnah]

A 12th level DN has DR6/Bludgeoning and Magic. It does not stack with the same ability as granted by the Lich template, but may be relevant should the character have a means of altering their form.

[K]

The undead army is easily the best-themed. I mean, even the living troops should be riding giant undead beetles or something less crazy like tireless skeleton horses, but there is an absolute requirement for stuff like uncontrolled shark-zombies with spider legs grafted to them that are buried in chokepoints like landmines to kill the attacking army.

The flayer army has problems. They should be rocking a weird hodgepodge of troops from various mind-controlled enemies, but I could see a whole Roman-Empire theme mixed with armies bred in slave pits.

[fectin]

...my bad. I misread it because the actual text looks like

She gains DR 2/
bludgeoning and magic.

But either way, DN's are tough suckers, and you pretty much need to bypass or overwhelm that DR. Low-level characters are unlikely to overwhelm it at range, and him being undead nixes most of the easy ways to bypass it (looking at you, asphyxiation).

The other half of the problem is that you want any tactic you use against the lich to be generally useful for dealing with other threats as well, whether it's 1000 kobolds or one dragon. Obviously, there are no silver bullets, but massed ranged attacks are generally a good option, with massed magic missiles a good (albeit expensive) fallback.

[Vebyast]

The flayer army has problems. They should be rocking a weird hodgepodge of troops from various mind-controlled enemies, but I could see a whole Roman-Empire theme mixed with armies bred in slave pits.

Actually, that might be the solution to the lich problem at the same time. Instead of having a normal stand-up-and-fight army, the flayers have a giant special forces organization made out of adventuring parties that got visited by a flayer on their second night in the inn. When the Morian Legions show up to fight, they're greeted not with an army, but with sabotage, assassination, poison, and insurgency. If the lich king appears, he eats turn undead and fireball. The human legionnaires can't get anywhere because their supply caravans keep getting blown up and the skeletons can't get anywhere because the necromancers controlling them keep getting shanked in the middle of the night. If Mori somehow manages to get an army to the point where it has to be stopped instead of dispersed, it gets ground up by fireballs, ice webs, cones of cold, and turn undeads.

[Wiseman]

The flayer army has problems. They should be rocking a weird hodgepodge of troops from various mind-controlled enemies, but I could see a whole Roman-Empire theme mixed with armies bred in slave pits.

MM5 has some additional stuff to flesh out the mind flayers by having them worshipping some Far Realm entity called Thoon. They have all sorts of weird awesome looking constructs. Or you could just go with the idiotic brain golem from FF.

I think there's also voidminds for mind flayer slaves or thoon disciples from MM5.

[Meikle641]

I had mindflayers use goblinoid troops in my campaign. I just rolled with the idea of goblinoids reproducing quickly already, then add in tampering from Flayers... hordes of minions, all the time. Goblins as hordes, bugbears as commandos, and hobgoblin casters. Occasionally more highly trained HK units were trained, but normally it was "We have reserves."

[Winnah]

If the Mind Flayers want to hurt trade, a blockade may not be the best way they could go about it.

They are sneaky, have mind control and have access to Dopplegangers, so they have other means at their disposal to impact trade.

Mercenaries and bandits can be 'hired' to harass trade routes, leaving the bulk of their army to defend their peninsula.

[K]

The Thoon and Far Realms stuff for flayers always left me cold.

The various bio-magical and psionic stuff stuff that you see in the video games and supplements is pretty neat, but a bunch of rogue flayers running a surface nation don't really seem to fit that much because small amounts of flayers means no purple living architecture or anything cool. Plus, being a squid-face horror race is a public relations nightmare.

It seems like you would do a whole police state thing where prisoners vanish in the prisons to feed the hidden flayer population and it's a big secret that flayers run the place. Then you do the nation as a merchant-nation or something and sometimes you get some bit of flayer tech popping up to support their armies.