Holy Water vs Incorporeal Undead

[Aetis]

My group and I were discussing low-level encounters, and shadow was brought up as an example of a really dumb monster to face, due to its incorporeal traits.

Then, one of the players pointed out that you can actually kill shadows with holy water, with surprising efficiency. (!?)


Treat this attack as a ranged touch attack with a range increment of 10 feet. A flask breaks if thrown against the body of a corporeal creature, but to use it against an incorporeal creature, you must open the flask and pour the holy water out onto the target. Thus, you can douse an incorporeal creature with holy water only if you are adjacent to it. Doing so is a ranged touch attack that does not provoke attacks of opportunity.

Each vial of holy water costs 25g to buy. Direct hit deals 2d4 damage, so a shadow (19 hp) would go down in 4 hits or so.

This is a game-changer. I used to think that encounters with incorporeal undeads at low levels was a dumb prank DMs pulled sometimes to make a joke argument about how our wizard should have prepared nothing but magic missiles that day.

Apparently, we can solve the problem by buying bunch of holy water.

[Kelb_Panthera]

That's just the most obvious option.

BoED has serren wood arrows that cost 80gp a piece. They function as though they had the ghost touch property.

Complete adventurer has ghostblight capsules which allow you to ignore incorporeal miss chance as long as the weapon is already magical for 3 rounds. 100gp per dose.

Ghostwalk has stabalized ectoplasm for 5gp + 1cp which allows striking incorporeal creatures when spread on a weapon. It has a fairly short shelf-life though, it only lasts 10 days after it's created.

Ghostwall shellac in dungeonscape costs 150gp a batch but can be used make a room or box you can trap an incorporeal creature in.

I think there are a couple more I'm forgetting right now but there's a goodly number of things to use against incorporeals at low levels. They just get overlooked along with most of the non-spell options for getting past obstacles.

[Aetis]

Yes, yes. There are bunch of weird and spooky materials in splatbooks that lets people touch ghosts.

But holy water is from the PHB! This is nuts! This fixes one of the fundamental problems I had with the world described by rules of D&D.

I thought WotC had utterly no idea what the **** was going on in their own game when they released 3.5.

This holy water interaction discovery came as a rather pleasant surprise, and it definitely made my day. :smallsmile:

[atemu1234]

Yes, yes. There are bunch of weird and spooky materials in splatbooks that lets people touch ghosts.

But holy water is from the PHB! This is nuts! This fixes one of the fundamental problems I had with the world described by rules of D&D.

I thought WotC had utterly no idea what the **** was going on in their own game when they released 3.5.

This holy water interaction discovery came as a rather pleasant surprise, and it definitely made my day. :smallsmile:

This is good because my party almost had a fatality when a pair of Shadows teamed up on a Warblade...

[Alex12]

Incorporeal foes are also affected normally (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/typesSubtypes.htm#incorporealSubtype) by positive and negative energy, so if you've got someone with Cure spells, that'll work too. Note also that Disrupt Undead is explicitly positive energy, and thus totally ignores incorporealness.

[RoyVG]

Some low level spells like Magic Weapon and Magic Fang give you weapons an enhancement bonus, making them magical, therefore able to hit incorporeal creatuers 50% of the time.

Magic Missile, being a force effect, also affects incorporeal creatures without fail.

Obviously if you are a party of mundanes or don't have these spells prepared/chosen, you are in big trouble.

[Sliver]

If you are a party of mundanes and the DM sprung shadows against you so suddenly that you didn't get a chance to get holy water or oils of magic weapon/bless weapon or w/e, maybe you have other issues...