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

[Avoraciopoctules]

The wargaming thread made me think of looking at the strategic layer in some of the campaigns I'm thinking about more carefully. In this instance, I'm looking at a conflict between Mori and Cephalos, city states ruled by a lich king and mind flayer cabal respectively.

Mori is centrally located, with multiple trade routes passing through it. They control lots of farmland, and are friendly with a small elven forest and some witches and lizardfolk on the edges of the Bane Mires. Mori's army consists of human career soldiers (level 3 warriors) with tower shields and light armor, hordes of skeletons, and elite ghouls in heavy armor, supported by a small number of level 3 to 5 cleric necromancers. The ruler is a Dread Necromancer 12 Lich, with a few Dread Necromancer apprentices of levels 3 to 5.

Cephalos is a defensible peninsula, that gets less trade in total but unlike Mori has a good port that allows them sea trade. They are somewhat friendly with a sahuagin trade outpost a few miles off shore, and have enslaved some chuul lurking along the coast. Cephalos has an army of brainwashed slave soldiers (level 2 warriors) in medium armor, some gnoll mercenaries with a level of barbarian, and some dopplegangers who share the ruling council's taste for brains. They also can deploy chuul if they can keep the monsters from drying out. Cephalos is ruled by no more than a dozen mind flayers, but only 3 are actively interested in the war. Some can cast level 3 arcane spells.

Objective-wise, Cephalos wants to cut in on Mori's trade revenue, and since it can block 2 of the 5 main routes and moving an army between the two states involves crossing a mountain range, they are impacting the lich-king's income with their efforts at embargo. Mori wants them to stop, preferably with a painful lesson that will discourage such behavior in the future. Both factions are skirmishing in borderlands, and occasionally raiding each other's home provinces.

What are some tactics that either side could attempt to tip the odds in their favor?

[Corsair114]

Tactics... hmm... after careful consideration, it seems the strongest tactic for either side would be...

...to hire a band of level 6-to-9ish murder hobos/fixers to topple the opposing kingdom before the opposing kingdom does the same.

[Winnah]

The Lich is singularly more powerful than anything the Mind Flayers have at their disposal. Even if the guy gets taken out, he can respawn a week later, providing the phylactery remains intact. As long as he retains a means of fast/instantaneous travel, and is not required elsewhere, he can take action against the Mind Flayer team personally and I doubt there would be much they could do to stop him running amok through their streets.

Information gathering on either side will probably be key when it comes to deciding who's army is more effective. The Mind Flayers have Charm Monster and telepathy, as well as telepathic dopplegangers that can act as infiltrators. The necromancers on the other hand, have a lot of troops resistant to those tactics, as well as access to things like Augury (is this trade route at risk today?) and Speak With Dead.

The major thing holding the team necromancy back is the desire to protect trade, so that means letting a horde of uncontrolled undead loose is not a preferred tactic for them. I suppose the Lich could conjure a bunch of Lacedon (aquatic ghouls) to make an amphibious assault, but that would probably piss off the Sahaugin.

[Username17]

Probably the most major issue is that Mind Flayers were written up by people who don't know how the rules work. Mind Flayer mental enslavement is supposed to work like dominate, but they actually are written up with charm monster. There is a huge disconnect between how Find Flayers are supposed to function in the fluff and how the rules say they are supposed to function with the crunch they actually have.

-Username17

[Grek]

I think Winnah has it pretty much right on the Lich King's side. His basic tactic is going to be one lich shock-and-awe runs against Cephalos's merchant class or even against the mind flayers themselves if he can get good enough intel on their locations and defenses. His various servants are going to try to protect the trade lanes and keep the Cephalosan caravans out. Cephalos, meanwhile, is going to be trying to kidnap and subvert those clerics and the apprentices using a combination of doppleganger and Charm Monster to put subverted-field-commander shaped holes in the defensive parameter and to gain access to the lich's phylactery.

[Vebyast]

Mori's military, Warrior 3s with tower shields and light armor, sounds a lot like the Roman Legions to me. Back that up with skeletons for shock troops and strategery and with ghouls for filling holes and you've got something that would eat any real-life military for breakfast. The Morian legions are, both individually and as units, better than anything that Cephalos can field.

The necromancers can use Summon Swarm to great effect in combat; Lv5 DNs can use Crushing Despair to effectively destroy an entire unit in one go. Plus, as Winnah said, the lich leading them can single-handedly annihilate whatever army he decides to.

Skeletons can travel like nothing alive. Even the brainwashed soldiers will only be able to march 15 or 20 miles a day, and that with difficulty; the Skeletons can probably manage closer to 60 or 80. That's huge. First, there is no retreating from an army of skeletons. If you try to run, you will only die tired. Second, attempting a war of maneuver against skeletons will end in disaster. Unless you manage to seriously outwit their generals, the skeletons will always have favorable terrain, they will always attack the weakest part of your army, and you will almost never be able to force an engagement. If the skeletons decide to start burning villages and raiding caravans, they will be unstoppable; think Nathan Bedford Forrest or Erwin "You Magnificent Bastard" Rommel. They'll also tend to attack in the middle of the night, in horrendous weather, where you least expected them to be. If the war moves back to the mountains or into the swamps, the skeletons will go from heavily advantaged to utterly dominant; not having to deal with supplies or wet or cold means that they just plain win.

Cephalos has its own advantages, though. Chuuls are absolute monsters. Normal units can only hurt them with a nat 20; conversely, +12 attack bonus means they will murderize anything in front of them. A chuul will break your opponent's lines. Mori probably keeps its ghouls in reserve and equipped to deal with chuuls, both to kill the things in the first place and to hold the lines until the regular units can get back in order. If the ghouls fail, the Morian DNs cast Fear spells and attempt to drive the chuuls back into the Cephalian lines. Basically, elephants but more so.

Skeletons can be defeated by sniping the guy that controls them. Expect Cephalos to load up its army with specialist whose job is to shoot anything in robes, and Mori to do its level best to make its skeleton controllers impossible to distinguish from normal units. The primary goal of a chuul assault will be to penetrate to and kill the skeleton controllers. In a mostly-skeleton army, the controllers will be in a cluster where they can talk to each other, slightly back from the engagement and heavily protected.

Similarly, dopplegangers are key. Unless Mori knows precisely what it's getting itself into and is incredibly paranoid from the start, expect the war to kick off with a wave of assassinations. The military will be effectively decapitated; depending on how many and how suicidal the dopplegangers are, Mori might have to start the war without a single senior officer or noncom. Mori might lose its entire force of skeletons, which both makes large regions uninhabitable and means it'll have to build those armies back up. If a battle starts going badly - and, given that skeletons only engage at 4 in the morning and the Morian Legions are quite superior to the brainwashed cephalian troops, every battle goes badly - the dopplegangers will remove officers and noncoms in key locations.

Anyway, that's a really interesting matchup. The Morian military has huge strategic advantages, big enough that the Cephalian military is basically there to slow the Morians down until a doppleganger or chuul can kill whoever's in charge. Very nice narrative. Until the Lich King gets there, and then it's game over.

[K]

The Mind Flayer faction does have decent infiltration and conversion abilities, but the problem is that the Lich faction has access to planar binding (even if you completely bar efreeti wish shenanigans).

So when the mind flayers start converting commanders or impersonating others with dopplegangers, then one of the Lich's glabrezu uses it's true seeing and at-will dispel magic to cleanse any affected armies, probbaly in less than an hour since it can teleport anywhere.

The ability to produce small numbers of high-end troops that are highly mobile and possess a wide variety of abilities means that the Lich faction dominates any style of conflict. For example, the Lich gets three 6th level spells at base, so that's an average of three glabrezu a day or six succubi and they'll work for you for twelve days before needing replacement.

So the Lich out-converts, out-impersonates, has better and drastically more shock troops, better intelligence-gathering, and access to a large number of effects ranging from producing high-end weird armors for free like Wildwood plate with a djinn's special minor creation to destroying city walls with thoqqua, a factor that gets even more dramatic as you add additional Monster Manuals to the mix. For example, Rejkars from MM3 have fabricate at will, so turning piles of stones into basic fortifications is just a thing that happens in minutes for Team Lich if they spent a few days preparing for it.

Basically, the only tactic that Team Flayer has is mass-converting entire populations with charm monster and bum-rushing the Lich capital before the Lich knows what is happening because any prep-time on the side of the Lich is game-ending. It's not a particularly great tactic since there are only three flayers interested in doing it and that makes the scheme vulnerable to collapse if you nail the flayers while they are in the field doing the converting.

The flayers need to be very sneaky so that the Lich is more interested in summoning demons to build cities and not summoning demons to check his armies for dopplegangers and charmed commanders.

[Avoraciopoctules]

The Lich King is certainly safer summoning and deploying powerful demons and undead. If he runs amok in the enemy city, there is a risk he'll fail a save against Command Undead or a similar effect, and that might be the whole war over right there, especially if he gets the whole enemy cabal's attention.

Then again, clerical support could probably dispel control effects on their leader if some were present as backup. Maybe apprentices spamming Command Undead on their boss could help if he actually trusted them that far.

Fiends can be unreliable, especially when you are using lots at once. Does the Lich King have any good ways of making sure his glabrezu and succubi behave?

Can he do anything to prevent a magically disguised mind flayer and its doppleganger escort from sneaking up and stealing his summoned superunits?

What kind of tactics would the Lich King use in a battle where he is supporting living troops? Cloudkills and Black Tentacles are great when you are behind a wall of expendable skeletons immune to poison, but collateral damage becomes more of a concern working with mortal legionaries.

[Wiseman]

I know your only considering the Mind Flayers in the MM but what about the psionic ones from EPH?

If each mind flayer (at minimum) is a 9th level caster manifester, then would their tactics or chance of victory change?

[Winnah]

If they were the psionic variant, then yes, their tactics would be different. Day long buffs like Detect Hostile Intent give them a chance against teleporting fiends. Plus they would actually have (psionic) dominate, which means they can get real-time information from agents in the field, as well as bestowing the ability to send orders to those agents.

I don't know how this would increase their odds of victory, but it would make directing coordinated strikes and skirmishers possible.

[virgil]

If the cabal was part of a larger colony with access to an elder brain, even if it personally wasn't interested in attacking Mori, things would look different.

[OgreBattle]

Tactics... hmm... after careful consideration, it seems the strongest tactic for either side would be...

...to hire a band of level 6-to-9ish murder hobos/fixers to topple the opposing kingdom before the opposing kingdom does the same.

In a world run by MegaKingdoms, where the line between man and magic is blurred, there are those who run in the dungeons through their contacts known as 'MR. CAVERN'...

DUNGEONRUN

[Corsair114]

Tactics... hmm... after careful consideration, it seems the strongest tactic for either side would be...

...to hire a band of level 6-to-9ish murder hobos/fixers to topple the opposing kingdom before the opposing kingdom does the same.

In a world run by MegaKingdoms, where the line between man and magic is blurred, there are those who run in the dungeons through their contacts known as 'MR. CAVERN'...

DUNGEONRUN

Geek the wizard first.

[icyshadowlord]

Doesn't the Lich have the advantage of being wholly immune to most of the Mind Flayers' usual tricks?

Edit: Also, someone else pointed it out as well, but where is the Elder Brain in this equation?

[K]

The Lich King is certainly safer summoning and deploying powerful demons and undead. If he runs amok in the enemy city, there is a risk he'll fail a save against Command Undead or a similar effect, and that might be the whole war over right there, especially if he gets the whole enemy cabal's attention.

Then again, clerical support could probably dispel control effects on their leader if some were present as backup. Maybe apprentices spamming Command Undead on their boss could help if he actually trusted them that far.

The Lich isn't showing up up for battles since small children with buckets of holy water are a viable threat. Liches are just too fragile for any kind of war that might include ten guys with scrolls of magic missile nailing him at extreme range or single slinger squad who had the benefit of greater magic weapon on a pile of rocks.

I know a war-lich is totally metal, but it doesn't add up from a tactical standpoint.

Fiends can be unreliable, especially when you are using lots at once. Does the Lich King have any good ways of making sure his glabrezu and succubi behave?

Can he do anything to prevent a magically disguised mind flayer and its doppleganger escort from sneaking up and stealing his summoned superunits?

There is no way to steal a summoned monster through impersonation. They only follow the orders of the caster because the spell works that way.

This means that summoned fiends AREN'T "unreliable." At worse, they are just fire-and-forget missiles that you aim at tactical objectives until one of them comes back to report success so it can fuck off back to whatever Lower Plane it came from.

They don't form the backbone of your organization and you don't worry about discipline or anything. They are expendable mooks and intelligence assets only.

---------------------------------

Psionic Mindflayers are even less interesting than regular mind flayers since they trade awesome at-will spells for substandard and limited psionics.

If you don't give illithid class levels like Illithid Savant, they just aren't that impressive in any incarnation.

[Username17]

The power engine takes some wind up, but it hits really hard. Probably the best thing for the Mind Flayers to do is to frame a third party for something or other to direct the Lich's ire elsewhere.

-Username17

[Grek]

Doesn't the Lich have the advantage of being wholly immune to most of the Mind Flayers' usual tricks?

So do his hit-ghouls, though. And any skeletons he decides to send out.


I think another thing in the lich's favour that's being overlooked is his familiar. Dread Necromancers get to pick between imp, quasit, vargouille, or ghostly visage. While obviously they're not going to pick vargouille, an Imp or Quasit gives the Lich King access to 6 questions of Commune each week and unlimited detect magics, while the Ghostly Visage gives him a ridiculous paralysis gaze thing.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Well, here's both a general and topical question: how does a "war lich" work? What steps does a D&D lich take to become effectively invincible?

In before "become demilich and fill dungeon with unfair traps".

[Avoraciopoctules]

Well, here's both a general and topical question: how does a "war lich" work? What steps does a D&D lich take to become effectively invincible?

In before "become demilich and fill dungeon with unfair traps".

Either make the base class a tough divine caster who can wear heavy armor, or play a versatile arcane caster who can pick defensive spells that cover vulnerabilities lich doesn't protect you from. Shield spells and globes of invulnerability can do a lot to remove the threat posed by massed low-level mages. Some damage reduction/piercing or slashing lets you laugh at people who thought ahead and packed magic maces. Preferably slashing, in case morningstars show up.

Liches are immune to lightning, so you can drop scintillating spheres at your feet without worry. A level 3 wand should be within your budget.

A druid lich with high STR, a Spikes-buffed club, and something for cleaving attacks can do a lot of damage in melee.

[Avoraciopoctules]

There is no way to steal a summoned monster through impersonation. They only follow the orders of the caster because the spell works that way.

This means that summoned fiends AREN'T "unreliable." At worse, they are just fire-and-forget missiles that you aim at tactical objectives until one of them comes back to report success so it can fuck off back to whatever Lower Plane it came from.

They don't form the backbone of your organization and you don't worry about discipline or anything. They are expendable mooks and intelligence assets only.

Let's take a look at the text for planar binding.

Casting this spell attempts a dangerous act: to lure a creature from another plane to a specifically prepared trap, which must lie within the spell’s range. The called creature is held in the trap until it agrees to perform one service in return for its freedom.

To create the trap, you must use a magic circle spell, focused inward. The kind of creature to be bound must be known and stated. If you wish to call a specific individual, you must use that individual’s proper name in casting the spell.

The target creature is allowed a Will saving throw. If the saving throw succeeds, the creature resists the spell. If the saving throw fails, the creature is immediately drawn to the trap (spell resistance does not keep it from being called). The creature can escape from the trap with by successfully pitting its spell resistance against your caster level check, by dimensional travel, or with a successful Charisma check (DC 15 + ½ your caster level + your Cha modifier). It can try each method once per day. If it breaks loose, it can flee or attack you. A dimensional anchor cast on the creature prevents its escape via dimensional travel. You can also employ a calling diagram (see magic circle against evil) to make the trap more secure.

If the creature does not break free of the trap, you can keep it bound for as long as you dare. You can attempt to compel the creature to perform a service by describing the service and perhaps offering some sort of reward. You make a Charisma check opposed by the creature’s Charisma check. The check is assigned a bonus of +0 to +6 based on the nature of the service and the reward. If the creature wins the opposed check, it refuses service. New offers, bribes, and the like can be made or the old ones reoffered every 24 hours. This process can be repeated until the creature promises to serve, until it breaks free, or until you decide to get rid of it by means of some other spell. Impossible demands or unreasonable commands are never agreed to. If you roll a 1 on the Charisma check, the creature breaks free of the binding and can escape or attack you.

Once the requested service is completed, the creature need only so inform you to be instantly sent back whence it came. The creature might later seek revenge. If you assign some open-ended task that the creature cannot complete though its own actions the spell remains in effect for a maximum of one day per caster level, and the creature gains an immediate chance to break free. Note that a clever recipient can subvert some instructions.

When you use a calling spell to call an air, chaotic, earth, evil, fire, good, lawful, or water creature, it is a spell of that type.

The creature needs to agree to perform a service, but I don't see anything keeping it from changing its mind later. Lawful creatures would probably stick to their promises, but even they have a clause that allows them to misinterpret orders freely.

Now, the spell would kind of suck if you had to layer suggestion spells and geases on whenever you bound a Chaotic outsider, so I'm hoping I'm wrong here. Does the word "compel" have special meaning I'm not seeing in this context (I think [Compulsion] is a tag for some spells)?

[Wiseman]

I'm pretty sure once it agrees to the task it is magically compelled to obey, although it can deliberately misinterpret the orders or be overly literal minded.

[Kaelik]

Does the word "compel" have special meaning I'm not seeing in this context (I think [Compulsion] is a tag for some spells)?

No, it has it's standard English meaning, to force someone to X. In this case, when you compel it to perform a service, you force it to perform the goddam service, you idiot.

[Winnah]

The thing with a lich is that they have a fear aura. This is a mixed blessing, as while it will send enemy soldiers fleeing in a panic, it will also effect the liches own forces. You're looking at DC 16 + Charisma (the casting stat). This should run concurrently with the Dread Necromancer fear aura and they both should be improved by any dilate aura effects or spells the lich can call upon (Aura of Terror comes to mind, SpC).

In fact, as written, it makes interaction with underlings a challenge unless the lich turns the aura off, specifically in order to deal with them.

It makes the lich effectively immune to hordes of low level mooks. It does not even need to engage them, just perform a flyover on a zombie hippogryph in order to single out fear immune, higher level or lucky units.

[Username17]

The Fear Aura only goes out to 60 feet. It makes him auto-win any fight that happens indoors, but won't have much effect on a battlefield. The Illithid mind blast is pretty similar. Terrifying in a walled environment, but not actually that useful in any situation where you are concerned what the range increment of a projectile might be.

-Username17

[fectin]

A one-charge wand of magic missile is 7.5 gold. Equipping 350 experts with one rank each of UMD costs 2625 gold, and will usually kill a level 12 lich from 110 feet away, on the first round. Liches are certainly nasty, but there are some very low-level counters.

Edit: I skipped SR. The numbers change; the concept doesn't.