The Living Vault

[Shinarel]

So, for those of you who are not familiar with the living vault, it can be found here: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/livingVault.htm

My DM has made an alternate version, where instead of keeping it on the Material Plane, the vault stores items on the Astral Plane.

Here's the $100,000 question: How do I rob it?

My character is a thief and our party is currently helping a nation at war. She believes that it could help turn the tide of the war if the enemy nation's national treasures were to suddenly go missing, as morale would drop to horrendous levels.

My only solution so far would be to pay some lackey to sneak in an item with an Arcane Mark, and then go to the Astral Plane, cast Locate Object, or a similar spell, and follow it to the vault.

The ideal situation is to avoid fighting the CR 33 vault (My party is only level 14), but get away with something that would be morally damaging to the enemy nation.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[Big Fau]

Just FYI: Even in a fight with it, you can literally run circles around it without it being able to do jack if you are outside the melee reach or can prevent it's AoOs (summoned creatures work great for this if they can deal even 1 damage to it consistently).

Once you can trigger the two daily Imprisonment effects, you have nothing to fear of it provided you can stay out of it's reach and charging distance, then pelt it with ranged attacks that can deal at least 1 damage/hit. It will take a while to do so, but oh well. This really only matters if you have to kill it to steal the items.



Otherwise, a scroll of Freedom should be able to release some goodies.

[Ravens_cry]

Chum up with the person who owns it?
A few drinks and a hefty Diplomacy check later and your new "besht friend" will be giving you the keys to the vault.
Don't knock good old fashioned social engineering, my friend.

[Shinarel]

Thanks for the advice!

I think we'll roll with the diplomacy route, because my DM would make us fight our way through all 800 HP. 1 point at a time, it would eat up our entire session.

[Acanous]

if he made you chew through all the HP, you'd get XP for defeating a CR 33 monster at ECL 14. That'll ding you a level and a half.

[Ravens_cry]

if he made you chew through all the HP, you'd get XP for defeating a CR 33 monster at ECL 14. That'll ding you a level and a half.
As a DM, I would give full XP for the social engineering approach as well. After all, you solved the problem, robbing the vault. Just because you didn't kill something doesn't mean you shouldn't get full XP.