So, here's a setup. We have one of the level 20 lich spellcasters (unknown class-does it matter?) who for kicks decided to invade and occupy the modern world. Here's the thinking: he doesn't want to just waltz in and coup everyone and everything; this is for fun, so he opens a large portal connecting the outskirts of his highly magical kingdom of Leadership servants of all sorts-animated, built, summoned, bound, good ol' basic human stock, the works-and somewhere in the US (outside Las Vegas, perhaps?).
What he wants is a big, amazing campaign across Earth, so here's the question: how much does he have to reign in to get this, or are direct methods just not going to work?
Earth vs D&D Land: How badly are we curbstompted?
Moderator: Moderators
I think that the invasion could go one of three ways.
The lich pulls out all the teleport ambush, scry-and-die, and save-or-lose cheese he can find and takes the world in a coup.
The lich gets almost completely screwed by modern armies as he tries to win with zombies. The battle comes down to DR and whether an Abrams beats a zombie bulette.
The lich wins completely by demonstrating the advantages of being led by an undead wizard with no scruples. He uses magic "traps" and wish economy BS to improve everybody's standard of living and is chosen as leader of the world. Either of the earlier two scenarios may happen during the switch.
The lich pulls out all the teleport ambush, scry-and-die, and save-or-lose cheese he can find and takes the world in a coup.
The lich gets almost completely screwed by modern armies as he tries to win with zombies. The battle comes down to DR and whether an Abrams beats a zombie bulette.
The lich wins completely by demonstrating the advantages of being led by an undead wizard with no scruples. He uses magic "traps" and wish economy BS to improve everybody's standard of living and is chosen as leader of the world. Either of the earlier two scenarios may happen during the switch.
If the lich is using magic, you can bet your phylactery that eventually, someone from Earth will start investigating this strange power source. If the lich can tap into it - and we're assuming standard D&D, anyone-can-take-a-level-or-make-a-UMD-check magic - then at least a few Earthlings will figure out how as well. Then it's just a matter of whether they survive long enough to start chain-binding efreeti, or whether the lich uses divination to find them, then obliterates/converts them with his vast power.
Of course, a lot depends on the lich's build. If the world's being conquered by an undead madman, tactical nuclear fire may be appropriate, and I seriously doubt even a level 20 lich can survive that. Regenerate from his phylactery, sure...possibly avoid it with the right spells (and the knowledge to use them), absolutely. Survive the initial impact? Unh-uh.
...unless, of course, a nuke allows a Reflex save and the lich has evasion.
Of course, a lot depends on the lich's build. If the world's being conquered by an undead madman, tactical nuclear fire may be appropriate, and I seriously doubt even a level 20 lich can survive that. Regenerate from his phylactery, sure...possibly avoid it with the right spells (and the knowledge to use them), absolutely. Survive the initial impact? Unh-uh.
...unless, of course, a nuke allows a Reflex save and the lich has evasion.
MartinHarper wrote:Babies are difficult to acquire in comparison to other sources of nutrition.
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Reread the OP.zeruslord wrote:I think that the invasion could go one of three ways.
Specifically noted to not be used in the OP.The lich pulls out all the teleport ambush, scry-and-die, and save-or-lose cheese he can find and takes the world in a coup.
So, The Salvation War: Armageddon?The lich gets almost completely screwed by modern armies as he tries to win with zombies. The battle comes down to DR and whether an Abrams beats a zombie bulette.
If I've learned anything from the threads on how humanity is pretty damn awesome, I'd say it matters on how long we hold out. Given enough time, humanity would undoubted reverse engineer magical stuff, make magic-enhanced equipment, or go like Outlaw Star and have those anti-magic bullets.
Humanity is a horrible bunch of apes, but we almost always win the hunt in the long run. We're pursuit predators with a penchant for designing equipment to exceed our limits. Go ahead, undead hordes: we'll outlast you.
Edit: Link highly related.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_Eaters
Humanity is a horrible bunch of apes, but we almost always win the hunt in the long run. We're pursuit predators with a penchant for designing equipment to exceed our limits. Go ahead, undead hordes: we'll outlast you.
Edit: Link highly related.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_Eaters
Last edited by Meikle641 on Fri Nov 07, 2008 3:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
Name me one populated place on earth that has adequate contingency plans for an attack of propagating corporeal undead (Wights, Ghouls, etc.)
Incorporeal undead will just own everything in their path except for the occasional church with a holy water font. Of course, with enough numbers even that doesn't matter. That, and they can attack through the floor.
Add that to the fact that we don't know what these undead are; we don't know that ghouls only turn you into more of them if they bite you, but other fluid contact is OK (and you can recover from a bite). We don't know that Wights turn you into more of them very, very quickly.
It might look something like this:
Day 1: Lich teleports in to a suburb of Las Vegas, or New York, or really any city, and casts Enervation on one person sometime just before dusk. That person, having only one hit die, dies. That person rises as a wight.
The wight walks around the outskirts of town, hiding from lights (in the dark, it can pass for human) and looking for souls. Eventually it reaches the lovers lane, where it finds a car with a teenage couple inside. It smashes open the windshield and punches both of them, one after another. This part is important; every horror movie must have a teenage couple having premarital sex die.
There are now three Wights. Each one is tough enough to take a knife or (IIRC) a gunshot to the gut or face, and immune to nonlethal damage, pepper spray, and stunning (i.e. tasers); it can also kill anyone in one punch. This makes it practically immune to anything your average person might try to do in self-defense.
Day 2:
The former teenagers arrive at one of their homes at about daybreak; if they don't remember, they can attack anyone's house. The dog barks at them, and gets silenced by an energy-draining punch. The father comments, when they come in, that they "look like death." He is then punched and turned into undead, as is his wife.
The undead then break a few windows, rush some houses, and turn the occupants as they work their way toward the city. A homeowner shoots one in the face, and gets his family turned into undead for his efforts. Some of the undead drive, others walk. The ones that do drive find that their driving skills went away when they were turned, and drive like they're drunk. They also go 90 in the 55, since they're tougher than the average person (if a zombie's HP are body integrity, a wight is supernaturally tough) and their lives are meaningless anyway. A carload of undead gets pulled over; the police officer asking for their license and registration gets strangled through the window. His partner calls for backup and draws his gun; he manages to drop one of the wights before he is overwhelmed by their rush.
The undead vanguard reaches the city quickly; there, they scatter and find crowds, then, when they find the opportunity, each one punches someone in the gut and runs. He gets up a few seconds later, seemingly only knocked out by the punch (but also, of course, twisted and wrong; the initial wights didn't have this problem because they were wearing hoods held over their faces). He repeats it. In this way the plague propagates.
By nightfall, the news has commented on the spate of brief, unprovoked fights. The entire undead army, maybe about 100 by now, has entered the city. They continue their crowd-based modus operandi in bars, provoking drunk people into swinging the first punch, then turning them into undead. They also spread out to alleyways, mugging people for their souls.
Day 3: By daybreak, people have begun to catch on and become more paranoid. Also, a significant number of wights find themselves unable to disguise themselves as the living in the dawn's light. By evening, SWAT teams are called against the undead. They don't help. The undead population has increased to the low thousands
If wights keep superficial memories of who they were in life, then several of the new wights remember that they have tickets for flights out soon, or money to buy same. If they don't, then some of them, killed at home, find sufficient information and/or money to buy plane tickets.
Day 4: The undead plague begins to spread across the US. Some wights have stowed away on container ships bound for Asia and Europe. Patient zero is killed by a grenade, freeing all current spawn.
The initial city still has a majority living population, but those who can are leaving, and only the undead and heavily-armed walk the streets at night if they can help it.
Day 5: Most of the undead hide during the day, but some of them press the attack. By evening, the National Guard is mobilized to fight the undead.
During the night, the undead take to lighting buildings on fire to drive the inhabitants out. Additionally, rivalries between some of the initial spawn devolve to outright warfare. Some of the undead pile into cars and speed out down the freeway, ready to attack other nearby cities.
The aerial exodus is stopped by a National Guard presence at the airport preventing anyone who reads as "dead" on infrared from leaving, and shooting them with machine guns if they try to get close.
All activity in the city beyond the survival level grinds to a halt. From the undead perspective, the city has become a factory for producing carloads of undead to infect other nearby cities; undead also stow away in evacuee vehicles.
The cities that undead have flown to on Day 4 begin to show signs of the epidemic.
By day 14, the city has been turned into a giant undead-infested warren. About a month later, the President declares the city to be a lost cause and orders a nuclear strike on it. It is too late to save the country, or the world.
In about half a year, the US is taken over by the walking dead, as are the major port cities of Europe and Asia. A stowaway on an arms flight caused Israel and Palestine to unite, for a short time, against the undead invaders. They were soon overwhelmed. By the two-year mark, only a few isolated areas remain safe from the undead invaders.
Some of the undead take to farming the living to allow them to continue to drain energy and replenish their numbers; many, however, simply hunt them in the wild until they are hunted near to extinction.
Some of the wights stumble across a magical ritual that the lich planted in books across the world in preparation for, and during, the invasion, and attempt to summon the lich to earth to be their god.
----
In this scenario, the Lich disables a city within a week and has the world taken over just outside of the length of a US presidential campaign by casting a single 4th-level spell. The world becomes like a zombie movie, with zombies that are fast and smart.
There are other scenarios. The lich could, for instance, run for president, making campaign signs with Illusory Script that give a suggestion of "tell your friends, acquaintances, and family to vote for the lich." He might not actually need reasons for people to vote for him; people will like him just because they don't want to think that they were wrong to tell everyone they know to vote for him all of those times. Of course, if he took meaningless compromise positions on every issue, then people would be able to give reasons to vote for him. Even taking extreme, crazytown positions it could get people to argue for it.
Throw on some Charms to news/talk radio personalities, and Wish-economy money to buy campaign ads, and it's got practically a guaranteed electoral win.
Once there, he can declare war on the rest of the world and use undead to augment living troops and replace casualties.
---- Edit:
In response to the OP's desired scenario, the Lich could arrive early in the first scenario (in this post), once the Wights have siezed control of one city, bringing his legion of other undead.
From there, he'd be able to build his wights into an army. His phylactery is safe in the D&D world, so he can recover from anything thrown at him.
If he wants to use the D&D world, he can use pairs of Gates to move his troops rapidly. If not, they're vulnerable to strafings as they march. Of course, undead in cars are less vulnerable because they're faster, but can be slowed down by roadblocks (until enough of them can just press through).
D&D characters don't handle modern-level aircraft very well, unless they can get their own, or modern antiaircraft weaponry. Zombies and Skeletons can use small-arms, while wights, ghouls, and such are not proficient. None of them are proficient with heavier weapons (tanks and artillery).
If the scenario the Lich wants is World War 2 with undead, he can have it here, except that he can't get air superiority (at least, not until he mind-controls or blackmails some pilots; using suggestion to get them to tell him where their families live would be a good one, as, of course, would a Geas). Likewise, he can't get nuclear superiority until he's taken over the US, so he needs living hostages wherever he concentrates the undead, until he manages to take over a nuclear base and is able to threaten the US with MAD.
Once he conquers the US with his combined undead/mind-controlled force, he can then move on to the rest of the world.
He would probably want to hold back on the undead infiltration, if he's going for a WW2, rather than zombie apocalypse, feel.
Incorporeal undead will just own everything in their path except for the occasional church with a holy water font. Of course, with enough numbers even that doesn't matter. That, and they can attack through the floor.
Add that to the fact that we don't know what these undead are; we don't know that ghouls only turn you into more of them if they bite you, but other fluid contact is OK (and you can recover from a bite). We don't know that Wights turn you into more of them very, very quickly.
It might look something like this:
Day 1: Lich teleports in to a suburb of Las Vegas, or New York, or really any city, and casts Enervation on one person sometime just before dusk. That person, having only one hit die, dies. That person rises as a wight.
The wight walks around the outskirts of town, hiding from lights (in the dark, it can pass for human) and looking for souls. Eventually it reaches the lovers lane, where it finds a car with a teenage couple inside. It smashes open the windshield and punches both of them, one after another. This part is important; every horror movie must have a teenage couple having premarital sex die.
There are now three Wights. Each one is tough enough to take a knife or (IIRC) a gunshot to the gut or face, and immune to nonlethal damage, pepper spray, and stunning (i.e. tasers); it can also kill anyone in one punch. This makes it practically immune to anything your average person might try to do in self-defense.
Day 2:
The former teenagers arrive at one of their homes at about daybreak; if they don't remember, they can attack anyone's house. The dog barks at them, and gets silenced by an energy-draining punch. The father comments, when they come in, that they "look like death." He is then punched and turned into undead, as is his wife.
The undead then break a few windows, rush some houses, and turn the occupants as they work their way toward the city. A homeowner shoots one in the face, and gets his family turned into undead for his efforts. Some of the undead drive, others walk. The ones that do drive find that their driving skills went away when they were turned, and drive like they're drunk. They also go 90 in the 55, since they're tougher than the average person (if a zombie's HP are body integrity, a wight is supernaturally tough) and their lives are meaningless anyway. A carload of undead gets pulled over; the police officer asking for their license and registration gets strangled through the window. His partner calls for backup and draws his gun; he manages to drop one of the wights before he is overwhelmed by their rush.
The undead vanguard reaches the city quickly; there, they scatter and find crowds, then, when they find the opportunity, each one punches someone in the gut and runs. He gets up a few seconds later, seemingly only knocked out by the punch (but also, of course, twisted and wrong; the initial wights didn't have this problem because they were wearing hoods held over their faces). He repeats it. In this way the plague propagates.
By nightfall, the news has commented on the spate of brief, unprovoked fights. The entire undead army, maybe about 100 by now, has entered the city. They continue their crowd-based modus operandi in bars, provoking drunk people into swinging the first punch, then turning them into undead. They also spread out to alleyways, mugging people for their souls.
Day 3: By daybreak, people have begun to catch on and become more paranoid. Also, a significant number of wights find themselves unable to disguise themselves as the living in the dawn's light. By evening, SWAT teams are called against the undead. They don't help. The undead population has increased to the low thousands
If wights keep superficial memories of who they were in life, then several of the new wights remember that they have tickets for flights out soon, or money to buy same. If they don't, then some of them, killed at home, find sufficient information and/or money to buy plane tickets.
Day 4: The undead plague begins to spread across the US. Some wights have stowed away on container ships bound for Asia and Europe. Patient zero is killed by a grenade, freeing all current spawn.
The initial city still has a majority living population, but those who can are leaving, and only the undead and heavily-armed walk the streets at night if they can help it.
Day 5: Most of the undead hide during the day, but some of them press the attack. By evening, the National Guard is mobilized to fight the undead.
During the night, the undead take to lighting buildings on fire to drive the inhabitants out. Additionally, rivalries between some of the initial spawn devolve to outright warfare. Some of the undead pile into cars and speed out down the freeway, ready to attack other nearby cities.
The aerial exodus is stopped by a National Guard presence at the airport preventing anyone who reads as "dead" on infrared from leaving, and shooting them with machine guns if they try to get close.
All activity in the city beyond the survival level grinds to a halt. From the undead perspective, the city has become a factory for producing carloads of undead to infect other nearby cities; undead also stow away in evacuee vehicles.
The cities that undead have flown to on Day 4 begin to show signs of the epidemic.
By day 14, the city has been turned into a giant undead-infested warren. About a month later, the President declares the city to be a lost cause and orders a nuclear strike on it. It is too late to save the country, or the world.
In about half a year, the US is taken over by the walking dead, as are the major port cities of Europe and Asia. A stowaway on an arms flight caused Israel and Palestine to unite, for a short time, against the undead invaders. They were soon overwhelmed. By the two-year mark, only a few isolated areas remain safe from the undead invaders.
Some of the undead take to farming the living to allow them to continue to drain energy and replenish their numbers; many, however, simply hunt them in the wild until they are hunted near to extinction.
Some of the wights stumble across a magical ritual that the lich planted in books across the world in preparation for, and during, the invasion, and attempt to summon the lich to earth to be their god.
----
In this scenario, the Lich disables a city within a week and has the world taken over just outside of the length of a US presidential campaign by casting a single 4th-level spell. The world becomes like a zombie movie, with zombies that are fast and smart.
There are other scenarios. The lich could, for instance, run for president, making campaign signs with Illusory Script that give a suggestion of "tell your friends, acquaintances, and family to vote for the lich." He might not actually need reasons for people to vote for him; people will like him just because they don't want to think that they were wrong to tell everyone they know to vote for him all of those times. Of course, if he took meaningless compromise positions on every issue, then people would be able to give reasons to vote for him. Even taking extreme, crazytown positions it could get people to argue for it.
Throw on some Charms to news/talk radio personalities, and Wish-economy money to buy campaign ads, and it's got practically a guaranteed electoral win.
Once there, he can declare war on the rest of the world and use undead to augment living troops and replace casualties.
---- Edit:
In response to the OP's desired scenario, the Lich could arrive early in the first scenario (in this post), once the Wights have siezed control of one city, bringing his legion of other undead.
From there, he'd be able to build his wights into an army. His phylactery is safe in the D&D world, so he can recover from anything thrown at him.
If he wants to use the D&D world, he can use pairs of Gates to move his troops rapidly. If not, they're vulnerable to strafings as they march. Of course, undead in cars are less vulnerable because they're faster, but can be slowed down by roadblocks (until enough of them can just press through).
D&D characters don't handle modern-level aircraft very well, unless they can get their own, or modern antiaircraft weaponry. Zombies and Skeletons can use small-arms, while wights, ghouls, and such are not proficient. None of them are proficient with heavier weapons (tanks and artillery).
If the scenario the Lich wants is World War 2 with undead, he can have it here, except that he can't get air superiority (at least, not until he mind-controls or blackmails some pilots; using suggestion to get them to tell him where their families live would be a good one, as, of course, would a Geas). Likewise, he can't get nuclear superiority until he's taken over the US, so he needs living hostages wherever he concentrates the undead, until he manages to take over a nuclear base and is able to threaten the US with MAD.
Once he conquers the US with his combined undead/mind-controlled force, he can then move on to the rest of the world.
He would probably want to hold back on the undead infiltration, if he's going for a WW2, rather than zombie apocalypse, feel.
Last edited by IGTN on Fri Nov 07, 2008 4:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
Replace Wights with Shadows and they're pretty much unstoppable.
A single level 20 lich will own an entire d20 modern setting with next to no effort.
[edit followup]A lich would probably both be underwhelmed at the resistance a non-magic using foe would put up. In D&D terms, our military achievements are low to high level evocations and some decent communication, transportation and divination capabilities.
In a proper warfront, corporeal undead would stand no chance against modern military. But the moment a spellcaster decides to do anything funny, it's game over for modern forces.
I like IGTN's summary of a wight invasion, but I think it would be even more grim than that in an urban setting due to the exponential rate at which they could spread. In an urban setting, it would take a lot less than a week for a city to be overrun by wights. They can convert people on hand into wights faster than 1/minute. Assuming a wight can get its hands on a person once a minute, that's about 1 million wight conversions in half an hour... granted it will be harder to find prey as the number of wights increase, but their exponential growth ensures that things get out of hand fast in a city packed with hundreds of thousands of people.
In 1-2 days any city would fall to an intelligent and aggressive vector like wights... and the 2nd day is really just "clean-up", with mobs of wights converting the few remaining stragglers of humanity.
High population density is crack cocaine for a wight epidemic.
A single level 20 lich will own an entire d20 modern setting with next to no effort.
[edit followup]A lich would probably both be underwhelmed at the resistance a non-magic using foe would put up. In D&D terms, our military achievements are low to high level evocations and some decent communication, transportation and divination capabilities.
In a proper warfront, corporeal undead would stand no chance against modern military. But the moment a spellcaster decides to do anything funny, it's game over for modern forces.
I like IGTN's summary of a wight invasion, but I think it would be even more grim than that in an urban setting due to the exponential rate at which they could spread. In an urban setting, it would take a lot less than a week for a city to be overrun by wights. They can convert people on hand into wights faster than 1/minute. Assuming a wight can get its hands on a person once a minute, that's about 1 million wight conversions in half an hour... granted it will be harder to find prey as the number of wights increase, but their exponential growth ensures that things get out of hand fast in a city packed with hundreds of thousands of people.
In 1-2 days any city would fall to an intelligent and aggressive vector like wights... and the 2nd day is really just "clean-up", with mobs of wights converting the few remaining stragglers of humanity.
High population density is crack cocaine for a wight epidemic.
Last edited by erik on Fri Nov 07, 2008 8:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Username17
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Unless some of the stuff that we have that D&D world does not happens to affect them. It's very plausible that magnetic fields, lasers, or radiation might cut a shadow in half, in which case the battle is liable to be rather one sided in the favor of Earth as our daily industrial output is greater than the combined fabrication production of every magician in D&D land that has ever lived or persisted beyond death combined.RandomCasualty2 wrote:Yeah, anything incorporeal is basically going to roll over a nonmagic setting in no time.clikml wrote:Replace Wights with Shadows and they're pretty much unstoppable.
Remember also that D&D land is incredibly small. All of the Forgotten Realms, and I mean all of it, fits inside the United States. You could take out the entirety of Krynn with a single Russian Bear Bomber, and you wouldn't even have to pass within LOS of a wizard tower to do it.
I mean honestly, there is a very real chance that a D&D land invasion would consist of a group of self-perpetuating undead getting loose in Rio-Paul and racking up hundreds of thousands if not millions of kills, making a huge army... and then France goes "Holy shit wtf!" and nukes the place and that's the end of that. Total losses: Earth 10 million, D&D land 20 thousand. Earth shrugs and moves on, and that's that.
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Now I can just picture atomic bombs being dropped on (D&D setting of choice), and everyone gets wiped out...
Except for 1/2 the casters who put Greater Blink on (unharmed: miss chance).
And a reasonable number of rogues (Evasion... I see the damage being huge, but the save DC wouldn't be crazy high).
And anyone with Fire Immunity (barring debates on what radiation does in game terms).
...there was a story on /tg/ about the Imperium landing on Earth. Current Earth. They met, of all people, Putin, who upon being told "Yeah, you'll need to send sacrifices all the time." informed them they can fuck right off.
In the ensuing war, Russia defeated the Imperium*. It was pretty epic, and made Putin even more awesome than he is already. Which is quite the achievement.
*Who only had guardsmen, a few of their aircraft, a whole heap of "lol WWII" tanks and the regular guardsman equipment. No titans or spess morans.
Except for 1/2 the casters who put Greater Blink on (unharmed: miss chance).
And a reasonable number of rogues (Evasion... I see the damage being huge, but the save DC wouldn't be crazy high).
And anyone with Fire Immunity (barring debates on what radiation does in game terms).
...there was a story on /tg/ about the Imperium landing on Earth. Current Earth. They met, of all people, Putin, who upon being told "Yeah, you'll need to send sacrifices all the time." informed them they can fuck right off.
In the ensuing war, Russia defeated the Imperium*. It was pretty epic, and made Putin even more awesome than he is already. Which is quite the achievement.
*Who only had guardsmen, a few of their aircraft, a whole heap of "lol WWII" tanks and the regular guardsman equipment. No titans or spess morans.
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I'm fairly certain that a nuke-zone is not fun for longer than a couple of minutes.Koumei wrote:Except for 1/2 the casters who put Greater Blink on (unharmed: miss chance).
...Koumei wrote:... but the save DC wouldn't be crazy high
What?
There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.
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Yea, the entry vector of a feast-breeding undead into high-density society is the end unless the place gets nuked (which may happen).
Corporeal undead are extremely poor against just about everything, so you pretty much have to use fast-breeding.
Incorporeal undead, however, have a very real chance for the World of Shadows endgame. Even with the most generous assumptions that they can't stand any kind of EMF/electricity, there are enough options (ground and roof entry into homes) to assume that all of New York is shadows by nightfall. Hell, they don't even have to hide themselves because they run faster than humans. Bonus points: keep most of your control limit of shadows as the commanding army and you can probably even HAVE CONTROL of the entire world.
Corporeal undead are extremely poor against just about everything, so you pretty much have to use fast-breeding.
Incorporeal undead, however, have a very real chance for the World of Shadows endgame. Even with the most generous assumptions that they can't stand any kind of EMF/electricity, there are enough options (ground and roof entry into homes) to assume that all of New York is shadows by nightfall. Hell, they don't even have to hide themselves because they run faster than humans. Bonus points: keep most of your control limit of shadows as the commanding army and you can probably even HAVE CONTROL of the entire world.
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I'm not a fan of this topic. If we take the D&D rules as RAW there are several monsters that are immune to damage from the Modern-day world. So Earth has no chance unless your DM houserules.
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"Real Sharpness Comes Without Effort"
"Real Sharpness Comes Without Effort"
It seems that there are three basic "backgrounds" that can apply here.
Earth is Magic-Dead. This would explain why we have no native wizards. The lich is basically restricted to raising undead/summoning beasties in D&D-land, then sending them through the portal to attack Earth. I'm confident we can handle the Ex abilities of such an invasion, so Earth wins. It may take a while, but Earth would win.
Earth is Magically Normal. Once people become aware that magic exists, it gets researched and we have wizards of our own to fight back. In this case, it depends how long nonmagical Earth can hold off the lich, which depends on what tactics he employs. Once we get some moderate-level wizards/clerics of our own, the playing field becomes
Earth is d20 Modern. We're screwed.
Oh, and as an aside: given that a nuclear explosion can, y'know, vaporize buildings, I don't see Evasion cutting it. Heck, I'd say there's no save at all for a good distance out from ground zero.
Earth is Magic-Dead. This would explain why we have no native wizards. The lich is basically restricted to raising undead/summoning beasties in D&D-land, then sending them through the portal to attack Earth. I'm confident we can handle the Ex abilities of such an invasion, so Earth wins. It may take a while, but Earth would win.
Earth is Magically Normal. Once people become aware that magic exists, it gets researched and we have wizards of our own to fight back. In this case, it depends how long nonmagical Earth can hold off the lich, which depends on what tactics he employs. Once we get some moderate-level wizards/clerics of our own, the playing field becomes
Earth is d20 Modern. We're screwed.
Oh, and as an aside: given that a nuclear explosion can, y'know, vaporize buildings, I don't see Evasion cutting it. Heck, I'd say there's no save at all for a good distance out from ground zero.
Last edited by Talisman on Fri Nov 07, 2008 4:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
MartinHarper wrote:Babies are difficult to acquire in comparison to other sources of nutrition.
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TarkisFlux
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So what, "Nukes fall, everyone dies"? That's not a very satisfying ending to the storyFrankTrollman wrote:I mean honestly, there is a very real chance that a D&D land invasion would consist of a group of self-perpetuating undead getting loose in Rio-Paul and racking up hundreds of thousands if not millions of kills, making a huge army... and then France goes "Holy shit wtf!" and nukes the place and that's the end of that. Total losses: Earth 10 million, D&D land 20 thousand. Earth shrugs and moves on, and that's that.
The wiki you should be linking to when you need a wiki link - http://www.dnd-wiki.org
Fectin: "Ant, what is best in life?"
Ant: "Ethically, a task well-completed for the good of the colony. Experientially, endorphins."
Fectin: "Ant, what is best in life?"
Ant: "Ethically, a task well-completed for the good of the colony. Experientially, endorphins."
Your later argument's BS as well. The initial impact of a nuke isn't meaningfully different from a fire storm. Oh, wait, it's worse: fire storms are shapeable. Rogues can ignore explosions at ground zero, period (don't ask me how, the rules say they figured it out and I didn't, which actually makes a lot of sense).Talisman wrote:...unless, of course, a nuke allows a Reflex save and the lich has evasion.
Shut the fvck up, illusion exists (and I'm not talking in power level terms, I swear).Psychic Robot wrote:A smart lich would use cunning rather than force. A fun lich would rather use evocation spells.
That, of course, if you assume holiness' consensual instead of an objective force (while most of D&D seems to assume the former, I can see grounds for disagreement), because the only chance Earth churches have of being holy' if just people believing they are's enough.IGTN wrote:Incorporeal undead will just own everything in their path except for the occasional church with a holy water font. Of course, with enough numbers even that doesn't matter. That, and they can attack through the floor.
How come? The closest D&D equivalent's a magic item created via ridiculously wide circle magic.Koumei wrote:And a reasonable number of rogues (Evasion... I see the damage being huge, but the save DC wouldn't be crazy high).
Doesn't planar adaptation solve that as long as some plane resembles our sun (which's said to be the case in many a setting)?SphereOfFeetMan wrote:I'm fairly certain that a nuke-zone is not fun for longer than a couple of minutes.
Why'd it be generous? Incorporeals aren't resistant to energy specifically.SunTzuWarmaster wrote:Even with the most generous assumptions that they can't stand any kind of EMF/electricity, (...)
Do you even know all the types of damage available in Earth?Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp wrote:I'm not a fan of this topic. If we take the D&D rules as RAW there are several monsters that are immune to damage from the Modern-day world. So Earth has no chance unless your DM houserules.
You mean impossible? Not that I don't respect RoW fighters as individual combatants perhaps even able to take thousands of modern soldiers at once, but D&D without magic doesn't have any technology needed for the most basic of logistics.Fwib wrote:Why is Earth not a Dead Magic Zone? That would make conquering it with magic a little harder.
Anyway, I'm not seeing enough talk of warblades telling EMFs to GTFO, among other things, in the scenarios where Earth might've been assumed to win. And come on, we're assuming stereotypical game-breaking conjuration/necromancy here - not like being liberal with iron heart surge wording makes things especially crazier; more like just "showing warriors as being worthy talking about".
So fvcking what, if we're being asked what happens?TarkisFlux wrote:So what, "Nukes fall, everyone dies"? That's not a very satisfying ending to the story
Last edited by Bigode on Fri Nov 07, 2008 5:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Hans Freyer, s.b.u.h. wrote:A manly, a bold tone prevails in history. He who has the grip has the booty.
Huston Smith wrote:Life gives us no view of the whole. We see only snatches here and there, (...)
brotherfrancis75 wrote:Perhaps you imagine that Ayn Rand is our friend? And the Mont Pelerin Society? No, those are but the more subtle versions of the Bolshevik Communist Revolution you imagine you reject. (...) FOX NEWS IS ALSO COMMUNIST!
LDSChristian wrote:True. I do wonder which is worse: killing so many people like Hitler did or denying Christ 3 times like Peter did.
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TarkisFlux
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Well, I was just making a bad "rocks fall" joke since I didn't feel like contributing meaningfully to the conversation, but sure, get all defensive, that's cool.Bigode wrote:So fvcking what, if we're being asked what happens?TarkisFlux wrote:So what, "Nukes fall, everyone dies"? That's not a very satisfying ending to the story
The wiki you should be linking to when you need a wiki link - http://www.dnd-wiki.org
Fectin: "Ant, what is best in life?"
Ant: "Ethically, a task well-completed for the good of the colony. Experientially, endorphins."
Fectin: "Ant, what is best in life?"
Ant: "Ethically, a task well-completed for the good of the colony. Experientially, endorphins."
It's more that I think it'd be funnier with just the first sentence than me actually being defensive about anything.TarkisFlux wrote:Well, I was just making a bad "rocks fall" joke since I didn't feel like contributing meaningfully to the conversation, but sure, get all defensive, that's cool.
Hans Freyer, s.b.u.h. wrote:A manly, a bold tone prevails in history. He who has the grip has the booty.
Huston Smith wrote:Life gives us no view of the whole. We see only snatches here and there, (...)
brotherfrancis75 wrote:Perhaps you imagine that Ayn Rand is our friend? And the Mont Pelerin Society? No, those are but the more subtle versions of the Bolshevik Communist Revolution you imagine you reject. (...) FOX NEWS IS ALSO COMMUNIST!
LDSChristian wrote:True. I do wonder which is worse: killing so many people like Hitler did or denying Christ 3 times like Peter did.
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TarkisFlux
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Heh, fair enough. Back to the regularly scheduled hypothetical conversation then 8)Bigode wrote:It's more that I think it'd be funnier with just the first sentence than me actually being defensive about anything.TarkisFlux wrote:Well, I was just making a bad "rocks fall" joke since I didn't feel like contributing meaningfully to the conversation, but sure, get all defensive, that's cool.
The wiki you should be linking to when you need a wiki link - http://www.dnd-wiki.org
Fectin: "Ant, what is best in life?"
Ant: "Ethically, a task well-completed for the good of the colony. Experientially, endorphins."
Fectin: "Ant, what is best in life?"
Ant: "Ethically, a task well-completed for the good of the colony. Experientially, endorphins."
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Quantumboost
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Pretty sure planar adaptation doesn't protect you from non-planar effects. So the fact that somewhere, there's a plane composed entirely of fire doesn't render you immune to fire on the Prime Material. Likewise, I'm pretty sure the Earth isn't one gigantic planar nuclear explosion, so no, planar adaptation won't do much.Bigode wrote:Doesn't planar adaptation solve that as long as some plane resembles our sun (which's said to be the case in many a setting)?SphereOfFeetMan wrote:I'm fairly certain that a nuke-zone is not fun for longer than a couple of minutes.
I think I mistook it for some PrC ability where you could choose a plane and become immune to stuff like it. Planar champion perhaps, some other, or I'm just on crack?Quantumboost wrote:Pretty sure planar adaptation doesn't protect you from non-planar effects. So the fact that somewhere, there's a plane composed entirely of fire doesn't render you immune to fire on the Prime Material. Likewise, I'm pretty sure the Earth isn't one gigantic planar nuclear explosion, so no, planar adaptation won't do much.
Hans Freyer, s.b.u.h. wrote:A manly, a bold tone prevails in history. He who has the grip has the booty.
Huston Smith wrote:Life gives us no view of the whole. We see only snatches here and there, (...)
brotherfrancis75 wrote:Perhaps you imagine that Ayn Rand is our friend? And the Mont Pelerin Society? No, those are but the more subtle versions of the Bolshevik Communist Revolution you imagine you reject. (...) FOX NEWS IS ALSO COMMUNIST!
LDSChristian wrote:True. I do wonder which is worse: killing so many people like Hitler did or denying Christ 3 times like Peter did.
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angelfromanotherpin
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RandomCasualty2
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The problem is that while WMDs are nice to hit centralized targets, D&D has the advantage of teleportation and other mobility tactics. Really, the lich would probably end up teleporting to several areas and releasing wights or shadows or whatever.FrankTrollman wrote: I mean honestly, there is a very real chance that a D&D land invasion would consist of a group of self-perpetuating undead getting loose in Rio-Paul and racking up hundreds of thousands if not millions of kills, making a huge army... and then France goes "Holy shit wtf!" and nukes the place and that's the end of that. Total losses: Earth 10 million, D&D land 20 thousand. Earth shrugs and moves on, and that's that.
And this doesn't even consider what the lich could do with actual planar binding stuff.