Fortifying the necropolis

[Velaryon]

Imagine for a second that you are a nearly-immortal being of extreme arcane power (I cannot say precisely what because at least one of my players frequents this forum), but that you have access to most if not all non-epic magic and probably some epic as well. Your base of operations is an underground city-state that formerly was populated by dwarves, but every single one of them has been slain and raised as mindless undead. In addition, the same powerful magical effect that killed them all has drawn nearly every undead in a radius of several hundred miles to your city. In other words, you are sitting on a bona-fide necropolis.

However, you are not yet ready to lead your army of the dead against the world of the living. For whatever reason (you need to build up or equip your forces more, the stars aren't yet aligned, whatever) you are still building up in your city and expect to be there for awhile yet.

How do you fortify your city? What spells, traps, and minions do you deploy to keep pesky adventurers from stumbling into your stronghold before you're ready to unleash the zombie apocalypse?

The main goal isn't to withstand a siege or repel a full-scale invasion (though suggestions in that vein are welcome as well), but mostly to keep out prying eyes and nosy adventuring parties. Not once but twice, you've had a team of plucky heroes sneak into your city under cover of hide from undead and snoop around, loot a few things, and run away before your intelligent minions could catch them. They haven't interfered with your plans in a major way yet, but you'd like to keep them (and anyone else) from waltzing in again and being a nuisance.

So what will you do? Assume that you have access to any non-epic mindless undead in 3.5 and most intelligent undead as well, but let's assume not anything with class levels. You have a city's worth of resources at your disposal, including anything that you could reasonably expect to find in a dwarven city-state of about 10,000 inhabitants.

Because this is intended for actual use rather than purely as a thought exercise, I ask that you please keep from going full Tippyverse. Thanks in advance!

[Zanos]

Assuming non-epic magic includes non-epic magic items, you could pick up a weirdstone from the player's guide to faerun. Cost 230k.

While active, it blocks out all of the following within a 6-mile radius (including into the air above and the ground below).
All astral and ethereal travel.
All divination (scrying) spells.
All conjuration (teleportation) spells.
Any spell-like, supernatural, or extraordinary abilities, psionic powers, or the like that mimic these effects.

After that, physically seal the city with a combination of stone shape and wall of iron. Layer stone and walls of iron to prevent people with burrow or similar abilities from bypassing the iron without effort.

[bookkeeping guy]

Well this sounds like an interesting thread.

If you are an necromancer king which is sounds like this person is. :)


Then first off you would have two big groups of undead. There would be your normal minions, then a few champ tanks, and you should also have your own circle of mage undead.

So you would set the mage undead to work booby trapping the hell out of the whole place. Have all kinds of turret stations and make them really suffer to get in. You would want hidden alarm like positions that would tip you off ahead of time before they got in as well. Make all kinds of defense stuff like a gauntlet they have to go through while being shot at just to get in. And since its a dwarf city like you said, he would have half of that already set up. Lots and lots of range weapon ammunition.

You would want illusions of the undead up too, to keep them from shooting your real undead. Explody traps would be kind of messy because half the time you'd blow up your own troops...but you could go that way if you want.

You would want escape routes that leave this area that wouldn't be possible to enter in. Maybe the escape route is going over a waterfall for example...so someone couldn't find it and use it for a back entrance. But the escape route would be for if they stormed your fortress and the fight wasn't going well...then you can come back and rebuild after they've left.

Also there should be some secret tunnels to use to go to the town graveyards nearby to collect more recruits. And very few places are going to guard their cemeteries.

If you are a necromancer king then you would also have undead dancer skeletons in front of you for show and entertainment. (if the necro king is undead he'd still be going by what his thought patterns were while he was alive.)

You would also do a false throne room on top of the real throne room with a doppelganger puppet for a last resort. It would need mind shielding items of some kind so they wouldn't figure out what's going on. Meanwhile you are actually directing traffic so to speak from underneath the fake ambush room throne room through telepathy to the doppelganger puppet etc.

[Incorrect]

Spread throughout the city are great, tower sized braziers filled with glowing embers. These are used to expend all oxygen from your hermetically sealed city. Only the living need oxygen.
As a bonus, if at any time a gate or tunnel is opened to the world, you would see the embers turn into flames as oxygen in the city is replenished, and thus warning everyone of the breach.
You could also fill the city with volcanic gasses, water, or another hostile element.

When the dead dwarves were raised, great care was taken to make the best engineers into intelligent undead. These dwarven engineers have continued their work in making constructs, that will be used as guards. These automatons are as dependable as undead, but are not fooled by the same magic means.

[Xgya]

Make the walls impassable by digging somehow.
Wall of Iron could work. So could covering the whole town in Permanent Walls of Force. Or Riverine, for that matter.

Fill all the halls with a layer of Black Sand.

Fill part of the halls with suicidal zom-bees. With the destruction retribution feat, or a minion with said feat, those bees/flies/wasps/*insert small flying thingie* could be programmed to suicide by violently crashing (thus, taking falling damage) when it meets an injured allied zombie. Total healing done is usually higher than the bee's total HPs. If it happened to be fighting something else, well, that's negative energy for THEM too.

Get the services of skilled group of greater Quells. Because nothing says "fark yew" to Turn attempts better than the incorporeal undead with the power to say "NO!"

Constantly shooting automatically repeating traps of Necrotic Skull Bomb means even the weakest of all weaksauce undead in the whole region still have at least 26 hit points, 20 of which are temporary, and get refilled at a rate of 12.5 per round.
Plus, compared to the exploding bee tactic, Tomb-Tainted Souls WILL be feeling the negative levels those things bring to the table.

The few zones without the Skull Bombs? They're dispelling zones, targeted with constant dispels, disjunctions, none of which leave any visual cues (so, they look like safe zones, and then, suddenly, your whole slew of buffs (and magical items, if Disjunction is used) is gone. *poof*. Not so safe anymore.

[Braininthejar2]

All hail Lord Ainz!


With that out of the way, I see someone has already suggested unbreathable atmosphere. You could go for diseases too - they take a while to work, but they're not immediately obvious, and less commonly protected from than poison.

1 if reaction time of your intelligent servants is an issue, invest in some sort of survaillance system. - a bunch of magic stones set in statue eyes keyed to a magic mirror in the HQ, with another mirror giving free view of anywhere within the city. The more you can afford, the better, just make sure to put proper exceptions in your divination wards.

2 Flood some unneeded tunnels, as a surprise to tunnelers.

3 You can work around the intruders' protections by creating guards that aren't undead. - can you bind an earth elemental to your service? set it on an earthgliding patrol route. A nimblewraight is a construct, but smart enough to coordinate your other minions. Perhaps use some bone-themed constructs to troll enemy clerics?

4 Magic mouth is a good alarm spell, hard to detect until you walk into it. Can be combined with undead ("sit here. pull this lever once if the magic mouth speaks")

[TheifofZ]

Non-Undead guards are good. Summoned elementals that can work in a hostile environment (And the environment should be hostile to the living) and constructs are big choices.
Especially constructs; there's several that look Undead.

Otherwise, you, the king, are the only non-sacrifice-able unit in this place.
Anti-magic checkpoints and zones of Glitterdust or similar revealing effects should be coupled with large minions that obey first, and think never.

There's alot more options, but really it boils down to: If you limit their options of egress to one point, you know where they'll be every time.

[Vizzerdrix]

Even dwarves have livestock, and I remember a sheep like critter that under races kept. They may even have dogs or something similar. If they arent dead then create darkenbeast can give you some non undead flying minions that work sort of like spell batteries.

Id also replace the left hand of every mindless undead with a stump knife, and cast create crawling claw on the severed hands. (Bonus points if you can get enough poisoned fingerblades to equip each crawling claw with something) this gives you a few swarms of weak constructs to move around.

Cover large areas of the floor in blacksand. Set up catapults all over filled with the stuff too so you can blanket areas at a moments notice. This will hurt living intruders, heal the undead, and mess with any daylight spells.

Go hunting for some monsters with good burrow speeds and make them undead.

[Extra Anchovies]

Depending on how much wealth and time you have, Bags of Holding, Portable Holes, and Enveloping Pits could be used to conceal the numbers of the mindless undead. People can crowd together rather tightly (http://www.macleans.ca/general/how-many-journalists-can-you-fit-into-one-square-metre/); using that nine-per-square-metre figure, about 420 humanoid skeletons or zombies could fit into a 50' by 10' space while maintaining an orderly arrangement. If you install a second floor (a flat sheet of metal, fixed to the sides by a few patches of sovereign glue?), that's 840 Medium-sized undead per Enveloping Pit.

[Jowgen]

Unhallow Effects with things like "protection from positive energy" fixed to them seem like a good addition. Takes care of Turning, which can ruin your day real fast if optimized.

If the weirdstone won't do, Forbiddance is the next best thing afaik.

Draconomicon has Lair Wards, which are drawn from a larger selection of Wondrous Architecture in SBG. Lots of useful stuff in there.

Since you're underground, you should be able to grow Sussur aka. Deeproot trees (Und. p. 108) for all your AMF needs.

Name your necropolis the Great Tomb of Nazarick.

[Xar Zarath]

So I will echo some of the suggestions posted here.

First off, keep everyone out by building only one exit/entrance. if they cannot come in then you're safe. Make the exit/entrance the only possible one. As for yourself keep a handy escape route in your own personal palace that you can reach. Maybe its in the middle of some negative energy zone or something like that.

As for general defenses of the city, no air is good. Maybe make the air into poison or something like that. Have constant patrols led by at least 2-3 intelligent undead. Good if you have large amounts of wights and ghouls to throw around. Would be also good if you can keep the place negative. Maybe custom spell to let the negative energy plane "leak" into your necropolis.

Constant forbiddance zones keep out errant teleporters. Maybe a Weird stone or 6 just to keep the mages out. Routes that can accessed only by your undead, maybe underwater or through routes liberally coated with black sand are good. The roads can be paved with the stuff. Maybe a few portals into the world so you can raid cemeteries and graves for fresh materials.

Priority must be given to those dwarves and free willed undead with class levels, if any. Make sure they get good use or if you're able to, give them intelligence. The more the better your efficiency. A bucketload of mages and artificers would make things easier long run with created constructs and being able to manufacture more undead is good.

Last but not least you gotta have a big red button/self destruct sequence. Maybe a delayed Gate spell or some device that will tear into the fabric of reality, negative energy plane to let loose a tide of death energy. That way you still win.

[Braininthejar2]

Has the living wall ever been updated from 2e?

[Name1]

Has the living wall ever been updated from 2e?

I think its in Dragon Mag. 343.

[Segev]

Mordenkainen's private sanctum (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magesPrivateSanctum.htm) can be expanded to cover the whole city, as well. Put teleportation circles at the entrances such that trying to get in sends them far away. Dimension lock the whole place, and the only way anybody's getting in is a wish or by digging through the walls. Put a giant prismatic sphere around the whole thing, embedded in the cavern walls, and you should also be pretty secure from even that kind of chicanery.