Best approach to making a horde?

[Tvtyrant]

What it says on the tin! What is the best approach to making an army/horde. Preferably capable of being relevant in combat, instead of sitting somewhere in a room making stuff.

[Silva Stormrage]

What it says on the tin! What is the best approach to making an army/horde. Preferably capable of being relevant in combat, instead of sitting somewhere in a room making stuff.

Well I think I am going to have to ask you to be more specific.

Is this for PC's or DM's.

By army do you mean an actual invading force like medieval armies or modern strike force based armies.

Any particular limits? The best way is to use planar binding and send in strike forces of cr 20 pitfiends to demolish everything.

In this setting are their defenses against teleportation?


Some general points though.
If you go for strike force tactics your groups need to be able to teleport its just to important. Either through a spell like ability or through a caster/magic item. Incorporeal undead make awesome guerilla forces. Undead in general are pretty good for army purposes.

[Tvtyrant]

Well I think I am going to have to ask you to be more specific.

Is this for PC's or DM's.

By army do you mean an actual invading force like medieval armies or modern strike force based armies.

Any particular limits? The best way is to use planar binding and send in strike forces of cr 20 pitfiends to demolish everything.

In this setting are their defenses against teleportation?


Some general points though.
If you go for strike force tactics your groups need to be able to teleport its just to important. Either through a spell like ability or through a caster/magic item. Incorporeal undead make awesome guerilla forces. Undead in general are pretty good for army purposes.
From a character's point of view.

I mean having a strike force capable of acting as active combatants at appropriate CR. So I guess the latter.

I'm hoping for something that you can do starting at level 1 and run through level 20 with. So like a Hordeificer, or a Necromancer.

I hadn't considered the need for teleport, but it does sounds important.

[Eldest]

Be a Bard. Keep Diplomacy as high as possible. Get Leadership. Three steps I can think of, there are many others possible.

[Ravens_cry]

Get Leadership and see if you can get the Mob (DMG 2) template applied to the Followers?

[Coidzor]

What it says on the tin! What is the best approach to making an army/horde. Preferably capable of being relevant in combat, instead of sitting somewhere in a room making stuff.

Relevant in combat against what? Other armies? Encounters of an appropriate level for the Party?

[Aharon]

Better yet, use the homebrew led unit template with yourself as leader: http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=143.0

[Tvtyrant]

Relevant in combat against what? Other armies? Encounters of an appropriate level for the Party?

For the party. Armies in 3.5 tend towards the ludicrous, since they are either so far under CR'd as to be worthless, or at appropriate CR and the ECL is up in the sky.

What I am asking is what is the best way for a character who wants to focus on fighting through minions to do so. Preferably without resorting to tremendous amounts of cheese (chain gating is out for instance).

The ways that I know of are Leadership, Thrallherd, Undead (usually Dread Necromancer or Cleric), Constructs, Calling, Binding (via Fiendbinder), pets controlled using Handle Animal, and Diplomacy. Which of those (or other options that I don't know of) is the best way for a character to fight in dungeons/party level combat via minions/a horde?

[Fable Wright]

Undead, probably. Spellstitched Undead with Animate Dead and Animate Dread Warrior can raise tons of powerful minions with minimal investment every day, making them more efficient than the time you have to invest in Constructs, require less protections and investment than Binded creatures, and it takes time to gather pets while a necromancer can stealthily kill off the highest level fighter in each town, Animate Dread Warrior them, and move on. Plus, it makes animating Dragons and such much easier. Thrallherd requires the least investment, as the people just keep coming, but the Believers are unbelievably weak and you can only have two thralls, as opposed to all of the dead behemoths you come across. Plus, Command Undead -> Shadow Apocalypse to wipe out a few towns would give you a bunch of minions to swarm foes and instantly reduce them to 0 strength with. If that isn't relevant in a dungeon, nothing is...

Also, Undead Leadership for all of the unimpressive undead goons that pop up to follow you, if you want to have an army of mooks.

[Hirax]

Necrotic cyst + necrotic tumor. Resident Evil 4 style hoard. :smallbiggrin:

[Coidzor]

Necromancy and Horedificer style Artificer I think are the usual methods employed.

(Undead) Leadership can grab you a bard cohort who serves as an inspire courage monkey or gives dragonfire inspiration or both or is bard/warchanter and gives sweet BAB to them in addition to nice damage.

[Dusk Eclipse]

Get a bard cohort and make him take DFI,Requiem feat and Dirgesinger levels to buff your undead army, because what is scarier than a neverending horde of zombies/skeletons? A never ending horde of flaming zombies/skeletons:smallamused:

[Slipperychicken]

Get a bard cohort and make him take DFI,Requiem feat and Dirgesinger levels to buff your undead army, because what is scarier than a neverending horde of zombies/skeletons? A never ending horde of flaming zombies/skeletons:smallamused:

Take as many Bard followers as there are DFI energy types (6), make them your highest-level followers, and have each take a different energy type. Even if each one is only rocking +2d6, then your minions are going to pack an extra +12d6 elemental damage per hit. If they optimize inspire courage at all (Bard levels, badge of valor, casting inspirational boost), this can quickly escalate to +18d6 or even +32d6. Your math-hammer-5%-chance-to-hit crossbowmen will be a lot scarier when they're throwing down 1d10+12d6, or 47.5 average damage per hit (more if they're optimized heavily).

Give the Bards war drums from Song and Silence so your whole army can hear your epic dragonborn drum sextet. If you don't need a radius of miles, have them pull out their Natural Horns (Wow that sounds dirty.. they're from Song and Silence) to boost IC by 1 more.

[Korivan]

I've always liked using Extract Water Elemental. Ramp it up with metamagic (with metamagic reducers), specifically chain spell. Then, use a few tricks to bend the action economy for about 4-5 of these in one round (we limit the infinite stuff). Then I can get about 80-100 short term allies for a 1 to 2 minutes, maybe 24 hours.

Limited to creatures that have blood. But hey, still nice combo.

[Strormer]

I always preferred running necromancers for my horde-lorde, but I admit that druids can do it quite well. Summoner also has a pretty good way of doing this with Broodmaster archetype from UM.

[Tvtyrant]

One thing that irks me about the undead vs. construct comparison is how much cheaper undead are. Even ignoring summoning undead or using SLAs to make them for free, a zombie costs 25 GP per HD. A Homunculus (which is a pretty pathetic construct) costs 2,000 GP per HD, and a Shield Guardian costs 5,000 GP per HD. The construct prices are fairly ludicrous (some of the really big things aren't as bad, but at that point you can planar bind).

Looks like Undead win this one.

[Psyren]

Undead army: "Just as strong, but they eat less." (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0037.html)

So yeah, I'd go with that. And that's before we get into spawn-recursion and the "absolute command" clauses.

[Silva Stormrage]

Okay then undead is definitly going to be the best option. Dread Necromancers are of course the best for this. As was stated earlier spell stitching animate dread warrior and animate dead is the easiest way to do this. It allows you to effectively animate anything that you need with class levels with no cap on the amount of undead. Have the zombies and skeletons act as the meat shields and bruisers and then animate caster dread warriors (Preferably clerics/wisdom based casters as dread warriors don't take a hit to wisdom) I suggest not going to the spawn recursion route as most DM's hard ban that and it can cause your army to fracture rather quickly.

[Igneel]

Might be a bit more trouble then its worth, but there is a 'Magical Event' found in DMGII on page #114 called 'Avatar of the Horde'.

Long story short(ish), got to start of by succeeding a DC 15 K.Arcana (or fluff-wise, get a dream-phone call from Gruumish) and set off on a quest. On this quest you need to single-handedly slay a single member of each race that can be added to the horde (choices of Eligible Bachelor creature types include humanoid (orc), humanoid (goblinoid), humanoid (gnoll), monstrous humanoid, and giant) followed by traveling to a holy site where Gruumish and Corellon Larethian fought. While there, you slay thirteen elves. Once you've done that you can bind a number of distinct races into the horde equal to 3 × Cha modifier. Got to keep killing things to keep the horde near you (I believe 1k+ deaths/month) but you get at least 100 individuals (doesn't count their HD/LA/ECL) per your HD. And of course the only way for it to end is to either kill you or for you to run out of people to kill.

It would seem to me a Dread Necromancer of Gruumish might make a very interesting character by doing this along with raising an army of undead to lead to battle.