E6 apocalyptic threats

[Tvtyrant]

Essentially what threats are available to characters in E6 which could be WMD or world threatening abilities.

So far I have Locate City Bomb and Wight'o'colypse from herding wights created by level draining attacks.

[CharonsHelper]

Essentially anything which is a lot of X.

In E6 worlds there isn't as much single individual/creature who is going to destroy all reality. It's much more about numbers & groups of bad things working together.

Any sort of monster which can create more of the same fit this easily. (vampires/werewolves etc.)

Really though - E6 doesn't fit apocalypse games as well. But that horde of orcs/hobgoblins etc. sure is going to do a number on the PCs home city and then pull a Genghis Khan - kill/rape/murder every man/woman/child/dog/cat in the city, and then send troops back two days later to kill anyone who was hiding in basements etc. and has emerged from the wreckage. Seems like a valid enough threat to get any E6 hero off their behind to fight against it.

[Fouredged Sword]

Angry old dragon someone ticks off.

"Band of how fast moving smart murdering psycos that attack farming villages and kill everyone/ salt the soil, then move on while covering their tracks" can be a deadly threat to a kingdom. A few years of bad harvest in a world that can't magically feed thousands... You dont have the divination to find them or the teleportation to intercept them. From a cost to damage measure this is hard to beat. You cant guard all the fields and livestock.

[Extra Anchovies]

Locate City Bomb

*sigh*

This doesn't work.

This metamagic feat can be applied only to spells that have the cold descriptor and that affect an area. A flash frost spell deals an extra 2 points of cold damage per level of the spell to all targets in the area.
Locate City doesn't have any targets, because it lacks a "Target(s):" line in its description.

It also doesn't deal any damage to begin with, and "an extra 2 points" increases existing damage but does not provide damage where there is none.


If a rogue can catch an opponent when he is unable to defend himself effectively from her attack, she can strike a vital spot for extra damage.

The rogue’s attack deals extra damage any time her target would be denied a Dexterity bonus to AC (whether the target actually has a Dexterity bonus or not), or when the rogue flanks her target. This extra damage is 1d6 at 1st level, and it increases by 1d6 every two rogue levels thereafter. Should the rogue score a critical hit with a sneak attack, this extra damage is not multiplied.

Ranged attacks can count as sneak attacks only if the target is within 30 feet.

With a sap (blackjack) or an unarmed strike, a rogue can make a sneak attack that deals nonlethal damage instead of lethal damage. She cannot use a weapon that deals lethal damage to deal nonlethal damage in a sneak attack, not even with the usual -4 penalty.

A rogue can sneak attack only living creatures with discernible anatomies—undead, constructs, oozes, plants, and incorporeal creatures lack vital areas to attack. Any creature that is immune to critical hits is not vulnerable to sneak attacks. The rogue must be able to see the target well enough to pick out a vital spot and must be able to reach such a spot. A rogue cannot sneak attack while striking a creature with concealment or striking the limbs of a creature whose vitals are beyond reach.

The rogue's sneak attack ability adds "extra damage" to attacks under certain conditions, but never requires that the attack deal damage to begin with. Can Endure Elements (or any other nondamaging touch spell or effect) deal sneak attack damage? If so, what type of damage would it deal?

Explosive Spell "can be applied only to spells that allow Reflex saves", and Locate City does not do that.

Also, the whole trick relies on having metagame knowledge of the exact wordings of the involved spell and feats. Why and how would you let a character know those?

[Mechalich]

Generally E6 can be assumed to disallow any sort of heavy cheese methodology as destabilizing, as that sort of thing is implicitly intended to not be present in the setting.

An apocalyptic threat in E6 is mostly any mechanism that allows the production of really, really big numbers of some unit. That includes opening a permanent gate between planes, because even if the outsiders that can come through are restricted in power, they're still endless, and enough dretches and you have an unstoppable horde. Mass necromancy is also a possibility. With enough necromancers acting together, you can build an army that actually gets bigger after each battle and gradually becomes and all-consuming force that marches across the world.

[Bucky]

WMDs are more likely to be rare magic items that circumvent the normal level 3 spell cap for specific wide-area destructive spells; this keeps the feel of real-world WMDs in that PC-level characters can handle them and set them off, but would need a lot of help to obtain one in the first place.

[Gemini476]

The thing about E6 is that the monsters aren't limited. If you want to have Atropus show up, you could - it's just that you shouldn't expect the players to be able to fight him. The recommendation for high-level threats is to cap them at CR13ish, IIRC, but you could go even higher than that if you want a less conventional fight.

Although Atropus is probably outside their reach even if they get allied with CR10-ish dragons and have an army of other high-E6 NPCs.


Explosive Spell "can be applied only to spells that allow Reflex saves", and Locate City does not do that.

That's what Born of Three Thunders was for. Change the cold damage into electricity, change the electricity into sonic+reflex save vs. knockdown, change that reflex save into TO damage. The rest of the trick is pretty solid - the argument is usually about whether or not you can add the extra damage in the first place and how on earth everything interacts with the unusual area: a flat circle, presumably meant for use on a map. Does it even hit anyone if it's so flat? Could you just be above/below the circle and avoid it? But what about flying/subterranean/mountainous cities - it detects those, doesn't it? (The "edge of a circle" argument is dumber and not that relevant - the planes are not edges, darn it.)


More relevantly to this thread, though, I don't know what variants of the LCB you could actually fit into the E6 constraints even if you assume that Flash Frost works with Locate City. The Fell Drain version, I guess? That's hardly apocalyptic, though - it'll kill off the area, but that's likely to include the caster since a 60 mile radius takes more than a day to get out of even with a light horse (48 miles/day) and dawn means that you get killed by wights 'cause you're not a Soul Eater and they have no obligation to not eat you.

It turns a large area into undeadburg and is devastating on a local level, but on a larger scale that's basically just a nastier hobgoblin invasion and is likely to have good and evil humanoids temporarily ally to fight off the horde of undead - probably successfully, because while Wights are nasty so are mundane armies with archers and catapults and clerics. Also, bugbears take three hits to kill with energy drain. It'll be a terrible war and hard to win, but it's beatable.

It warps the setting into a local living vs. undead war, but it's not really an apocalypse.

[Tvtyrant]

I am the DM BTW, not a player.

I like the horse archer horde, soft target warfare is always difficult to deal with.