How to make a bunker a 20th level party could not break into

[King of Nowhere]

It is a matter of fact that in a D&D world there are people with the skill and will to take what they want. And that's highly detrimental to any sort of organization. Your large nation gathers millions in tax revenues? Somebody will come and take it. Your rich merchant has a wide assortment of magic items? Someone will steal them.
I wanted to make an organized world, so I introduced the concept of "bunker" as a place where even the strongest could not enter. Having one such place would let a nation grow past the size of a city-state without fearing a 20th level caster would come rob them of all the tresaury; it would let a merchant organization keep a vast assortment of magic items without fearing a 20th level rogue will pilfer them all. Those bunkers are incredibly expensive (we're talking about tens of millions) but once in place they pay themselves in the long run.
Back when I made the world, I was starting a campaign from level 1 with inexperienced players, so I assumed I'd never have to explain how exactly those bunkers worked. However the campaign went on for a long time, the party grew powerful, and some players started dibbling into metagaming and mild powergaming. A war is brewing between nations with bunkers, so I'm going to have to figure out how they are protected exactly.

We are mostly using core, but simply because none of us has the time and will to go look through all the splatbooks. Noncore material is normally accepted. Homebrewing is also fairly common, and since the existence of bunkers is literally the foundation of my worldbuilding, if I have to make a bunch of homebrewed spells to make bunkers feasible, I will. Still, I'd prefer to use existing material whenever possible. Active defenes are not practical. Even the most powerful constructs are a laughable threat for a 20th level party (except for a handful of homebrewed golems that were once made by a genius who left no notes behind, but these are few and cannot be replicated), and you can't afford to have a high level party defending the bunker at all times. However, if your defences can hold at least a few hours, then you can call all the high level people you can command or hire, so the bunker is effective.


- First problem is that with miracle/wish you can teleport somewhere and bypass local wards. I closed this hole by stating that you can also use miracle/wish to counteract this. Specific trumps general, and so if you wish "I want that nobody can teleport in this area, even if they are using miracle/wish to do so" it should work. So ethereal travel is pretty well covered. Well, unless I accept that with miracle/wish you can also wish those wards to be temporarily disabled, but in any case by adding a few more miracle/wish to make them dispel-resistant, you get the last word, because I need bunkers to work for my worldbuilding and therefore I say so. I'd probably say that you cannot use miracle/wish to disable those wards from a distance anyway; miracle/wish are powerful, but they don't do everything.

- high level people can still breach through any wall. To try and counter that, I devised a multilayered set of defences. A permanent antimagic field is enclosing a prismatic wall and a force wall protecting a magic-warded wall. Prismatic and force walls works into an AMF, but the spells needed to breach them don't. One would have to use disjunction on the AMF, and it has a 20% chance to suppress it for 1d4 rounds. So even if they get lucky with the disjunction, they still need several rounds to bring down the prismatic wall, and in that time the AMF will have been restored. Even if they manage to bring down the prismatic wall, the regular wall behind will make them waste time, and in that time both the AMF and the prismatic wall will pop up back online.
Yet this sytem is not perfect. A gang of mid-level wizards with scrolls of disjunction could reliably suppress the AMF, then destroy the prismatic wall in one round, then cast disjunction on the wall to strip it of whatever magical protection it had (saving throws of objects suck; the wall would at most have a +10, and even a poorly optimized disjunction will have a DC of no less than 28) and finish the job with disintegrate on the wall. It requires only three rounds and a bit of preparation. So I need improving on my perimeter defences.
One way to achieve it could be with multiple overlapping AMF. that way, you'd need to suppress all of them at the same time to start hacking at the prismatic wall. Problem with it is, how do you make such a system in the first place? I ruled oout items projecting an AMF because it would be too easy to throw one at a wizard. So the field has to be set in a location beforehand, and it prevents anyone from crafting other enchantments there afterwards. Stilll, I could find a way around that, and state that, for example, every section of wall is protected by 5 AMF, and you have to suppress all of them at the same time. This would seem safe enough, as you'd need an average of 25 wizards casting disjunction at the same time. Still potentially doable with scrolls, but vastly more expensive and less guaranteed. Another way would be to use miracle/wish to make the AMF immune to being suppressed. Still, it would only require other miracle/wish used to suppress those others. Again, I'd rather not turn this into a "who has more wishes to cast" contest. So, it can be fixed. Still I'm not 100% satisfied with it, though.
Another way to avoid this problem would be to make an extraplanar bunker. In that case it would sit into its own demiplane and it wouldn't have external walls. While this is the case for some bunkers (including the safest of all) I already established at least some of them exist in the prime material plane. I actually have no idea how one would even try to approach an extraplanar bunker, so some help in that regard would also be welcome.

- Now there is the problem of doors. Of course you could set a teleportation circle, but then the enemy would just have to capture the outside circle, so it would oonly move the problem. Also, I am uncomfortable with teleportation circles because they can wreak havoc with an economy (see tippyverse). And you can't set wards specific to certain people, because once you have a bunker in place, literally all of the most important things of a nation (leaders, tresaury, head of administration and all the clerks that those people need around them) will go inside it. So I envisioned long, straight, narrow corridors encased in permanent AMF and in the end wall a few holes that are exactly the size of a cannon. On the other side of the wall, several cannons loaded with shrapnel. +5 adamantine shrapnel, to be exact. There are no rules for cannons, but I'd say they'd deal 20d6 to 30d6 in all the area, and a few of those in a narrow corridor are enough to stop even a near-epic party. Doors are made like the external walls, and they don't have locks, they are barred. No matter how high your lock picking skill, you can't open a dor if it is barred from the other side. Make it thick enough that even a 20th level raging barbarian cannot break it. They look a bit like the doors of nuclear bunkers, except they have a prismatic wall in front. You can't put cannons like that around all the perimeter, but as long as you have a single entrance at the end of a narrow corridor, this system should work well enough. So, doors are safe.

- finally the problem of covert infiltration. And you can't have a disjunction trap to activate on every visitor, because many important people will have permanent spells on them you don't want to ruin. I address it by having a check-in station (outside of the entrance corridor) with improved arcane sight (possibly some homebrewed version that's even more powerful than the regular spell) to account for every spell. No magic disguise, no bag of holding full of enemies, no suggestion placed on an unwitting clerk will be missed by its scrutiny. For more mundane means of camouflaging, those entering must subject themselves to having their thought read. I don't know much of those specific things so I'm not sure if that would work or not.

I would like your opinions on the matter; what avenues of attack I'm missing, how the defences could be improved, and in general if there are practical options to keep a 20th level party at bay without having your own 20th level party to fight them.

[noob]

There is a simple way to make a bunker in which a 20th level party can not break into: have no defenses at all.
Now the adventurers will avoid it like plague and try to nuke it from another dimension rather than ever approaching it.
You could use dead magic instead of antimagic zones: the cost in px to break through a dead magic zone is absurd(the only way is to spam wish or lesser wish and at each time you remove some cubic foot of dead magic only).
On the last part avoid making an homebrew omnidetector spell: if it falls in the hands of the players it can be catastrophic.
However there is only one useful permabuff: mind blank. You can disjunct 100 times the person and cast mind blank in the same turn with spell traps.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Various extradimensional spells such as Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion flat-out prevent entry by anyone who isn't invited. Just research an epic spell that similarly no-sells any attempts to enter, exit, or remove items and creatures from it by anyone or anything that isn't approved of by the caster.

[noob]

Various extradimensional spells such as Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion flat-out prevent entry by anyone who isn't invited. Just research an epic spell that similarly no-sells any attempts to enter, exit, or remove items and creatures from it by anyone or anything that isn't approved of by the caster.

The problem is that the bunkers are already in the material plane.
If you discover they made super giant super defended buildings just to put a mordenkainen private sanctum that could not be breached in the first place it breaks the whole coherence of the setting.

[Flickerdart]

You should check out the Stronghold Builder's Guide Book for pricing some of this stuff. Given how your answer to everything is "many overlapping AMFs" I would not be surprised to see the cost of this skyrocket into hundreds of millions of GP, and then your organization has no money left.

You're also putting all your eggs in one basket. Attrition to thieves is a cost of doing business; use distributed storage to minimize the loss. Disguise mundane objects as valuables, and valuables as mundane objects. Have plenty of shrink item'd or smoke bottle'd monsters so that if the adventurers try to spam disjunction, they get mobbed by angry dragons.

Demiplane is not optional. Entrances on the material plane should not exist, except as decoys and honeypots. Merchants would pretend to go in this way, but actually plane shift when nobody is looking.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

You should check out the Stronghold Builder's Guide Book for pricing some of this stuff.Or you could be a spellcaster and get almost all of it for free, rather than spending several nations' worth of GDP on it.

[flappeercraft]

The way I would go with this is the following

1. Make the room in a cubical form
2. Make the walls out of Adamantine
3. Get a Dweomerkeeper to cast as Supernatural spells Animate Objects, Permanency and Temporal stasis on the walls (They're basically invulnerable now)
4. Cover the outside with Walls of Force and Prismatic Wall
5. Cover the area and a bit further with Forbiddance
6. Make the walls Airtight and immune to ethereal via the SBH enhancements
7. Put a bottle of air inside as a replacement for vents
8. Cover the outside with various Orb of X spell traps that attack anything inside an AMF
9. Have the door inside be a template stacked Mimic (Opens automatically and only for those who are supposed to be there, plus can fight off attackers
10. Another door that is just a vault door (Opens from only the inside, adamantine affected by step 3)
11. Have Golems on the inside
12. The dweomerkeeper be Mindraped to forget everything about the Vault
13. Have a set of Mindraped + Monstruous Thralled guards on the inside

I only came up with this out of the top of my head, there is probably more to add

[Inevitability]

You need something to stop perpetually chained Time Stops. I suggest having two portals, both of which a traveler must venture through (because they link demiplanes that are otherwise inaccessible), but which are never open at the same time. This means any timestopped being has to enter real time for a non-infinitesimal moment, which is enough time for a readied action to go off.


Various extradimensional spells such as Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion flat-out prevent entry by anyone who isn't invited. Just research an epic spell that similarly no-sells any attempts to enter, exit, or remove items and creatures from it by anyone or anything that isn't approved of by the caster.

A 10th-level Silver Key (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20061106a&page=2) would still be able to enter. Something like a cleric of mystra 9/deepwarden 1/silver key 10 could enter the mansion carrying a number of corpses, then use Initiate of Mystra to cast Raise Dead and bring a group of specialized adventurers into being.

[Flickerdart]

Or you could be a spellcaster and get almost all of it for free, rather than spending several nations' worth of GDP on it.
Most of the things OP wants, a spellcaster could not provide, certainly not for free.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Most of the things OP wants, a spellcaster could not provide, certainly not for free.Much of the Stronghold Builder's Guide is geared for non-wizards. Any wizard worth his spellbook could provide the vast majority for the cost of nothing but spell slots and a few cheap spell components.

[denthor]

In a 2nd edition game loth Queen of the demon Web pits. In her moving spider she used greater dispel magic and permanency spells combination to make any magic item walking into it have a chance to be dispelled. Potions turned to water. Items became materials again weapons became masterwork. All this by just walking across a twenty foot hallway in a two way passage.

[King of Nowhere]

You should check out the Stronghold Builder's Guide Book for pricing some of this stuff. Given how your answer to everything is "many overlapping AMFs" I would not be surprised to see the cost of this skyrocket into hundreds of millions of GP, and then your organization has no money left.

I checked out the stronghold builder, and I was incredibly disappointed. They spend a lot of ink on how you can move about your fortress with teleport and have secret rooms that are inaccessible otherwise, but not a single word is spent on how to ward yourself against anyone else teleporting in. I'm so tempted to rant about it, and I did it just this morning (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22475274&postcount=645).
As for the price, yes, it is exceedingly high, which is tied up into the storyline. For millennia the world had no bunkers, and it was in anarchy; everytime a nation or organization consolidated some power, a supervillain came and took it all. Then 320 years a group of the world's most affluent individuals - all of whom could hardly sleep at night for worry someone may breack through their defences and steal their possessions - met and devised a plan: put together all their resources to build a bunker that would really be safe. Luckily most of them were powerful spellcasters (I mean, they needed some way to defend their money after all), so they could save a lot on the price. The cost in XP and material was still staggering, but they managed, and they formed the merchant union.
Once they had this bunker in place, they got complete monopoly on trade of non-minor magic items; for there was no other merchant who would dare buy one, least they made themselves a target. Not only, but they also went big on banking. Again, being the only one who could accumulate and safekeep cash in a way that was really safe got them huge money.
Once this bunker was in place, nations started to rent it to put their treasuries. That way, they also could grow bigger without fear. Once they had enough, some of those nations started their own bunkers. But with the high costs, only a few dozens were made.
Now the world is starkly divided. There are first world nations (and the major religions), which own a bunker. They are rich and advanced, they can command the loialty of high level adventurers and hire freelancers when they need more. They have high levels of instruction, plenty of low level spellcasters, and wages much higher than those stated in the DM handbook. they command enough resources that a high level party cannot take them over. Then there are second world nations, who don't have a bunker, but they have something valuable enough that they can become vassals to one of the first world nations. By having powerful friends, they can reach some level of prosperity. And then there is the third world, which is still in anarchy and looks a bit like the western continent in oots. All the time someone gains a few levels, raises an army and tries to take over a nation, only to fall to the next conqueror. Either that, or they try to move to a better place. The common people try to make their lives as best as they can, but they have very little security. Most of them has never seen a gold coin in his life.
As magic armies can also be accumulated (golems, scrolls, diamond dust), war between the major nations gradually stopped, as it became too expensive. The world is now locked into a cold war between several alliances of nations and religions. But under the surface there is still strife. Flash attacks and sabotages are made by one nation against the other all the time, in an attempt to leverage for advantage. And those are the most common kinds of missions the PC have to deal with.


You're also putting all your eggs in one basket. Attrition to thieves is a cost of doing business; use distributed storage to minimize the loss. Disguise mundane objects as valuables, and valuables as mundane objects. Have plenty of shrink item'd or smoke bottle'd monsters so that if the adventurers try to spam disjunction, they get mobbed by angry dragons.


Some of that is done: allied nations often divide their treasures through all their bunkers, so that an eventual thief would only rob some form each nation; this ensures that the perpetrator has now pissed off not one but several major powers, and each one retains enough money to retaliate. Powerful people ally themselves with a nation so they can use the nation's bunker.
Problem is, when your egg is an item worth 100k gp or more, it's very difficult to make a basket. And with spells like discern locations around, it would be fairly trivial to find one such "basket", teleport in and snatch it.


Demiplane is not optional. Entrances on the material plane should not exist, except as decoys and honeypots. Merchants would pretend to go in this way, but actually plane shift when nobody is looking.
If the merchants can planeshift in, why intruders cannot? Keep in mind that it is a large organization, it has many clerks working for it, and most of those who originally cast the spells are long since dead, so you can't just have a spell that works at the discretion of the caster.


In a 2nd edition game loth Queen of the demon Web pits. In her moving spider she used greater dispel magic and permanency spells combination to make any magic item walking into it have a chance to be dispelled. Potions turned to water. Items became materials again weapons became masterwork. All this by just walking across a twenty foot hallway in a two way passage.
Problem is that they would also risk accidentally dispelling the gear or permanent spells of friendly adventurers, coming to rest into the bunker.

[Goaty14]

The way I would go with this is the following

1. Make the room in a cubical form
2. Make the walls out of Adamantine
3. Get a Dweomerkeeper to cast as Supernatural spells Animate Objects, Permanency and Temporal stasis on the walls (They're basically invulnerable now)
4. Cover the outside with Walls of Force and Prismatic Wall
5. Cover the area and a bit further with Forbiddance
6. Make the walls Airtight and immune to ethereal via the SBH enhancements
7. Put a bottle of air inside as a replacement for vents
8. Cover the outside with various Orb of X spell traps that attack anything inside an AMF
9. Have the door inside be a template stacked Mimic (Opens automatically and only for those who are supposed to be there, plus can fight off attackers
10. Another door that is just a vault door (Opens from only the inside, adamantine affected by step 3)
11. Have Golems on the inside
12. The dweomerkeeper be Mindraped to forget everything about the Vault
13. Have a set of Mindraped + Monstruous Thralled guards on the inside

I only came up with this out of the top of my head, there is probably more to add

You forgot a Thin Layer of Lead to block various dinivations. Now enemies don't even know if its worth stealing!

EDIT: Now I just had the wonderful idea of having a bunch of little magic items in christmas-boxes, each with a thin line of lead around it. :smallwink:

[Elkad]

I don't see a way to really keep high level people out. You want minor blocks to keep honest people from temptation, and low level scrubs out of course.

You want lots of detection. All the kinds. Everything from lifesense, touchsight, etc to basic mechanical triggers. And more detection to tell if those detections go offline.
Then you only need to stall the high-level types for a couple rounds while you sound the alarm.

Alarms are responded to by a giant reaction force of contracted Inevitables or something, who destroy intruders.
If someone does manage to get away with an item, the Inevitables hunt them down and recover the item.

So it'll be theoretically possible to get in and out. But nobody survives it. Well, there is the rumor of that one guy that was never caught, but if it's true the Inevitables are still hunting him.

[JustIgnoreMe]

The problem is that the bunkers are already in the material plane.
If you discover they made super giant super defended buildings just to put a mordenkainen private sanctum that could not be breached in the first place it breaks the whole coherence of the setting.
So say that the Epic Bunker Spell doesn't put the bunker off-plane: it creates a zone on the material plane that only those "on the list" can enter. Simples.

The Silver Key is an issue, but that's why you layer your defences: don't rely on a single effect.

[Deophaun]

You perimeter defenses are fairly trivial to break. To deal with the AMFs you just need something to block LoE, which is standard for any conventional siege where you want to get people up to a wall but don't want them riddled with arrows. So now you can use your disjunctions or rods of cancellation without issue.

And I have no idea how this stuff just pops back into place, but the restoration of the walls can be foiled by a semi-trained dog that listens to the "stay" command.

Edit: And now that we have your amf-resistant walls down with the actual amfs in-tact, whatever magical wards you have on the physical wall are nullified.

[Goaty14]

Spell Clock items X Y and Z to teleport object back inside. Hide the clock somewhere on the plane of mechanus or something. Now they can be stolen, but how long is that a success?

[Jack_Simth]

Safe list Wish: Transport travelers is explicitly "regardless of local conditions". Available at 17th directly, early via various methods. You'll want two: One to send your CL minions in to grab whatever they can, one to retrieve whichever ones survived the two rounds you gave them to grab everything they could.

So rather than preventing people from entering, what about making it a really not-nice place to be for those not invited?

Also: If Pathfinder material is available, a Trompe L'oeil (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/templates/trompe-l-oeil-cr-1/) can be made by anyone with Craft Construct and an urge to paint. Intelligent constructs with class abilities. Assuming the 100 gp/hd is a typo on the market price, they're stupidly cheap: 1,000 gp/hd market, plus the painting cost (2,000 gp for a medium humanoid). So a 20th level Cleric costs 22,000 gp market. And can be made by a 20th level Cleric with Craft Construct. If the Cleric making it makes a copy of himself, the minion can make more 20 HD minions, conceivably with full class levels. You'll still want to equip your construct minions, of course. So yes, you CAN afford a 20th level team full time. It's 88k plus equipment.

[Deophaun]

I have to say, the lore for this makes no sense.

So, we have a world where level 20 characters have nothing better to do than commit what is essentially petty theft against small kingdoms. At least, until someone developed the Bunker. What is the Bunker? Well, it's a no-expense spared super fortress. Great!

Now, how did these small kingdoms that had all their wealth stolen by bored mortal gods get the wealth to afford this? That's quite a catch, that catch 22.

Which means one of two things:
(a) The Bunkers are all red herrings. You're supposed to focus on breaking into them when the princess's tiara is in another castle.
(b) The Bunkers do not exist to store treasure, that's just the cover story for their existence. In fact, they're more like vaults (http://borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/The_Vault).

[King of Nowhere]

I don't see a way to really keep high level people out. You want minor blocks to keep honest people from temptation, and low level scrubs out of course.

You want lots of detection. All the kinds. Everything from lifesense, touchsight, etc to basic mechanical triggers. And more detection to tell if those detections go offline.
Then you only need to stall the high-level types for a couple rounds while you sound the alarm.

Alarms are responded to by a giant reaction force of contracted Inevitables or something, who destroy intruders.
If someone does manage to get away with an item, the Inevitables hunt them down and recover the item.


So there is this incredible mass of incredibly powerful beings that do nothing all day but stand there to react immediately in case your bunker is breached? And those incredibly powerful beings have literally nothing better to do, or they can be easily bound with a spell despite being much more powerful (as a group if not individually) than the caster?

No, that's the kind of things I want to avoid. Also, I'm not even sure inevitables exist in my universe; there are so many denizens of so many splatbooks that I can't keep track of them all and give all a place and a way to fit with the stucture.

Every powerful nation has a handful of loial high level adventurers, plus some allies that would lend them their loial adventurers, plus some freelancers they can hire. But that takes more than two rounds. Some of those adventurers will be sleeping, some will be on the toilet, some will be in mission somewhere. You need to give them time to put on their gear and their protection spells, and it takes time to contact them anyway - sending takes ten minutes, and I don't know an equally versatile mean of communication. So you need no less than half an hour to gather a counterstrike force, and the bunker must hold that long.
The "two-round bunker" also exists, but it is used by individual people for their own safety, and it gives them the time to teleport away in an emergency. I actually have an in-world bunker classification system based on the lowest level a party needs to be to breach into the bunker within respectively a minute, an hour, and a day. Your two round bunker would be calssified BXX, where the B means that a 15th level party could not enter in a minute, but a 20th level party might; if it could stop someone teleporting in with miracle/wish just long enough for the occupier to teleport himself out, it would be B+XX. Freelancer mages use those kinds of bunkers, as they are cheap enough that a single high level adventurer can afford one with his WBL. Nations however need to stop an incoming party for at least one hour, meaning it needs a minimal classification of AAX


You perimeter defenses are fairly trivial to break. To deal with the AMFs you just need something to block LoE, which is standard for any conventional siege where you want to get people up to a wall but don't want them riddled with arrows. So now you can use your disjunctions or rods of cancellation without issue.

And I have no idea how this stuff just pops back into place, but the restoration of the walls can be foiled by a semi-trained dog that listens to the "stay" command.

Edit: And now that we have your amf-resistant walls down with the actual amfs in-tact, whatever magical wards you have on the physical wall are nullified.

This seems useful to know. What is this LoE? I may have never heard of it. Is there some way to counteract it, or do I have to just rule that it doesn't exist in my world?

[Deophaun]

This seems useful to know. What is this LoE? I may have never heard of it. Is there some way to counteract it, or do I have to just rule that it doesn't exist in my world?
Line of effect. Yes, it needs to exist in your world. :smallbiggrin:

[noob]

Line of effect. Yes, it needs to exist in your world. :smallbiggrin:

Wow now I wonder what a dnd world without line of effect would look like.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Wow now I wonder what a dnd world without line of effect would look like.Like the elemental plane of earth, I imagine.

[Flickerdart]

If the merchants can planeshift in, why intruders cannot?


So many reasons. They don't have the right tuning fork, they don't know where it's safe to go to (demiplane of lava, anyone?), they don't know which plane it is.



most of those who originally cast the spells are long since dead
Why? This is D&D, mortality is optional.

[Anthrowhale]

I'd suggest thinking of tiered security and low latency reactions.

The first tier is a primary outer building with rudimentary magical protections suitable for keeping riffraff of lower level away (say L15-). Several ideas in this thread are applicable. Inside the first tier there is a one-way portal (see Settings of Faerun) that is keyed by a controlled token (call it token Z) that operates on one creature/minute. The portal leads to three destinations:

If the key is missing all items of a creature are sent to dead magic plane A.
If the key is missing a creature is sent to dead magic plane B. The only way out is via death + true resurrection.
If the key is present a creature and items are sent to dead magic plane C. This is Tier 2.


In Tier 2, you arrive into a small 5x5 room and have 4 small-size doors. You must go through the correct door (via squeezing if medium size), close it, and pass a challenge from a guard who unbars the next doors. A sequence of chambers of this type exist, with each requiring creatures that are medium or smaller size to move about. All construction is out of Adamantium. The rooms are not air tight, so an active guard can and does challenge every entrant. If a test is not passed, the rooms are flooded. If someone tries to break through the Adamantium walls the room is flooded and Shadesteel Golems (or other medium size golems) are standing by directly opposite the walls and all adjacent rooms are flooded. Exit from Tier 2 to Tier 1 is via other one way portals. At least one goes into a Tier 1 system which triggers a relief system.

At this point, you've reduced the threats significantly---only (Ex) impersonators (via True Mind Switch) or possibly Wish[Transport Travelers]. (Does Wish beat Dead Magic? The DM decides.)

There is also a portal to and from Plane C to Plane D which is also dead magic and Tier 3. Plane D is a small plane full of Shadesteel golems that immediately attack on sight anyone who enters unless 2 designated people enter in the right order and say the right passphrase. The relevant portal transports creatures with the wrong key (call it key Y) to plane B as per Tier 1 to 2. The designated people never leave the Tier 2 secured zone and only enter plane D to place or remove treasure. There may be multiple plane D's each with a different key and different designated people.

[Anymage]

Just skimming, but wouldn't you have more shiny magical treasures somewhere like the city of brass or in an archdevil/demon lord's vaults than your average mundane merchant company could ever hope to make? For that matter, when the mortal merchant company makes enough money that their vaults contain more than pocket change for beings that can play with outer planar powers, wouldn't that just encourage them to try and establish a foothold in the planes themselves? The occasional vault in Sigil might get broken into, but someone who does that often enough to damage the economy will draw the attention of DM fiat level power.

I've found that having superhero/demigod level characters go off to bigger and better things in other planes makes more sense than twisting the material plane into contortions trying to deal with them.

[Inevitability]

Why? This is D&D, mortality is optional.

Getting hunted down and killed by rival mages is less avoidable, though. Unless a caster goes full Tippy, they will be killable with enough magic.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Getting hunted down and killed by rival mages is less avoidable, though. Unless a caster goes full Tippy, they will be killable with enough magic.Full Tippy? NEVER go full...!

Oh, wait. Yeah, go full Tippy.

[Anthrowhale]

Some of those adventurers will be sleeping, some will be on the toilet, some will be in mission somewhere. You need to give them time to put on their gear and their protection spells, and it takes time to contact them anyway - sending takes ten minutes, and I don't know an equally versatile mean of communication.

I expect 1 minute scale responses are feasible for some subset of the high level adventurers. Look into Permanency[Telepathic Bond], Interplanar Telepathic Bond, and Interplanar message to remove latency. Note that adventurers typically only use a few rounds to buff for major fights if they are already awake. (Some, which rely upon long term buffs don't even require that.)

[Elkad]

So there is this incredible mass of incredibly powerful beings that do nothing all day but stand there to react immediately in case your bunker is breached? And those incredibly powerful beings have literally nothing better to do, or they can be easily bound with a spell despite being much more powerful (as a group if not individually) than the caster?

No. They are on retainer. You pay a fee for them to simply go about their lives, and answer a call when needed. Which won't be often It's a rapid response insurance policy. Like a private fire department. You may never need them, but when you do, they show up in a hurry.

Contract would read something like...

For a retainer fee of x million gold per decade (or whatever currency you want to use - Wishes? Favors? Souls?), payable in advance, the responding party agrees that upon receiving an alarm signal, they will dispatch a reaction force of a minimum of 20? high powered creatures (pit fiends, advanced Maruts, their own high level wizards, etc) that will arrive within 12(?) seconds and secure/recover the contents of the vault using any means necessary. Throw in extra stuff about the vault keeper(s) will recover the life of any responder killed or otherwise destroyed, penalty clauses if responders are permanently lost (soul devoured), responders get to keep any items captured from intruders or otherwise not contents of the vault, more penalties if you sound the alarm for false reasons, etc.

When someone pushes the alarm button, whatever Lord/Duke/General/Demigod you made the deal with sends whoever is handy, or on his crap list, or whatever he finds suitable. Of course you need stuff in the contract to encourage him to send an appropriate response or be heavily penalized himself.

I said Inevitables because they fit the requirements best (LN enforcers) and are Core. But the deal could be with Devils or Solars or a Wizard Cabal or whatever you want. The contract might be one super-contract covering all the vaults with nations even openly at war working together on this one thing, or each vault might have it's own arrangement.

And I can see an Epic play for this. Player characters who find out about the contract and try to set off a bunch of false alarms to bankrupt the vault owner. Or get 2 vault reaction forces to fight one another. Or convince/bribe the responder force to break their contract. Or trick the responder into mutually conflicting contracts. Or finding out how the rapid response force gets in so you can disable it and/or use it to facilitate your theft.

[King of Nowhere]

I have to say, the lore for this makes no sense.

So, we have a world where level 20 characters have nothing better to do than commit what is essentially petty theft against small kingdoms. At least, until someone developed the Bunker. What is the Bunker? Well, it's a no-expense spared super fortress. Great!

Now, how did these small kingdoms that had all their wealth stolen by bored mortal gods get the wealth to afford this? That's quite a catch, that catch 22.

Which means one of two things:
(a) The Bunkers are all red herrings. You're supposed to focus on breaking into them when the princess's tiara is in another castle.
(b) The Bunkers do not exist to store treasure, that's just the cover story for their existence. In fact, they're more like vaults (http://borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/The_Vault).

You're seeing it the wrong way:
"level 20 characters have nothing better to do than commit what is essentially petty theft against small kingdoms." If we consider the kind of defences a small kingdom has in classic D&D, it's not like "having nothing better to do", it's more like "an afternoon's job, with enough time left to watch the superbowl". And if you consider that a 0th level character WBL is around 750k gp, then I'd say working an afternoon to take one fifteenth of the total whealt you ever earned in your life is time well spent. Whether you're trying to become immortal, ascend to godhood or take over the world, you need lots of money for your research, and it's unlikely losing a few hours will be a problem.

"Now, how did these small kingdoms that had all their wealth stolen by bored mortal gods get the wealth to afford this?" First of all, it's not many kingdoms, it was mostly individual people. Many of them were mid-high level wizards who made a living making and selling magic items (what? why does every wizard need some kind of overarching plot? they are essentially nerds, give them a work bench and enough trinkets to play with and most of them will be satisfied for his lifetime). Individually, they could not afford all those protections, but putting their efforts together, they could. Really, it's no different than two wizards in friendly terms deciding that instead of making one stereotypical wizard tower each they would make a bigger and better tower for both; except on a larger scale.

And I find it much more consistent than what happens in more regular settings otherwise, where you go to the merchant with a +5 sword and he gives you 25k gp cash and there is no clear reason why somebody who is high enough level to disarm his traps and fight his golems don't just teleport in and take all his goods. I mean, some say that it may draw retaliation from good-aligned adventurers, but if you're a villain with a sinister agenda, then you're going to draw attention from good adventurers anyway; you might as well get free cash AND some magic items that they would otherwise buy and use against you. And so nobody would realistically sell anything worth more than 10000 gp, and once you're past level 10, money becomes essentially useless to you; you can't buy any of the items you should have, and you can only hope to find them in your quests; neither can you sell your extra loot. Mind you, this could be what happens in a low magic low level setting.
In fact, I started the whole "bunker" concept specifically because I wanted the merchants selling you +5 stuff to make sense. Then I realized the economical implications and made it a very important part of my worldbuilding.


Line of effect. Yes, it needs to exist in your world. :smallbiggrin: Oh, so you are saying that you can block an AMF by blocking its line of effect? I never considered that. Still, if you want to dispel the prismatic wall, you need to reach the prismatic wall in order to
get it out of the AMF. And as soon as whatever barrier you're using to stop the AMF touches the prismatic wall, it will get destroied. So not so simple. Also, if I postulate several overlapping AMF emanating each from a slightly different position (say, one amanating from each corner) then it will be virtually impossible to cover the line of effect of all of them. For the building part, I can just say that they have a way of creating an immobile AMF that only comes to effect one month after you finish casting the spells, so you have the time to set the others around it while it is still inactive.
And if worst comes to worst, I can just houserule that AMF in my universe is a spread instead of an emanation.


Just skimming, but wouldn't you have more shiny magical treasures somewhere like the city of brass or in an archdevil/demon lord's vaults than your average mundane merchant company could ever hope to make? For that matter, when the mortal merchant company makes enough money that their vaults contain more than pocket change for beings that can play with outer planar powers, wouldn't that just encourage them to try and establish a foothold in the planes themselves? The occasional vault in Sigil might get broken into, but someone who does that often enough to damage the economy will draw the attention of DM fiat level power.

I've found that having superhero/demigod level characters go off to bigger and better things in other planes makes more sense than twisting the material plane into contortions trying to deal with them.
I'm not well versed in planar mythology, and frankly I also never liked the whole of it, for a whole lot of reasons stemming from the desire to keep a small enough number of powers that players (And I) can reasonably keep track of, to not liking the whole "there are those big bunches of superpowerful creatures around that don't care about what happens in the mortal plane, even though it seems to be the focus for all sort of games they play there with mortals as pieces". to the fact that postulating bigger adventurers going to other planes simply moves the goalpost.

Regardless of any reason, when I made the setting, almost ten years ago, I knew nothing of those things, and so I tried to make the setting consistent without any of that.

@ Anthrowhale: good ideas, I will probably incorporate some of those in the setting.

EDIT: wow, thanks for all the answers, if nothing else you're giving me a lot of brainstorming material



Why? This is D&D, mortality is optional.
Well, as you guys probably have figured out by now, my world doesn't contain most of the stuff in manuals, because I wanted to keep it simple and focus on the depth of how human(oid) society would be affected by having magic flying around and having a few rare individuals with the power to level armies. I still prefer to worldbuild in that direction than introducing yet another new element that the players (being of the casual variety) will just see as something coming out of nowhere.
So, becoming immortal is fairly difficult. You can become a lich, but only if you are evil, and most who try fail horribly. There are a few dozens of those, but that's it. And for each one that makes the ritual, another one gets killed for good.
Or you could try becoming a ghost, but that's even trickier. Your level don't matter much, but you need a strong motivation to remain behind. And as a ghost, your capacity to interact with the world remains pretty limited, and you can only manifest every once in a while.
Vampires don't exist in my world because I'm tired of seeing them everywhere.
And that's pretty much everything I can think of. Regardless of the specifics, even the most powerful people will have troubles overcoming mortality. They also aren't very motivated, because the afterlife is very nice for them. Some who have an interest in long term plans killed themselves and left instructions to be resurrrected in case of dire need; most religions have one or two champions that they can resurrect in case of a large war, but they don't hang around otherwise.


No. They are on retainer. You pay a fee for them to simply go about their lives, and answer a call when needed. Which won't be often It's a rapid response insurance policy. Like a private fire department. You may never need them, but when you do, they show up in a hurry.

Contract would read something like...

Ok, that could have been a good explanation, if I hadn't already ruled it out in the setting. Mind you, they do have stuff like that in play, where people pay someone powerful (and reliable) in advance to help them under certain conditions. The most common is life insurances, where you pay a major religion in advance to resurrect you in case you are killed.


I expect 1 minute scale responses are feasible for some subset of the high level adventurers. Look into Permanency[Telepathic Bond], Interplanar Telepathic Bond, and Interplanar message to remove latency. Note that adventurers typically only use a few rounds to buff for major fights if they are already awake. (Some, which rely upon long term buffs don't even require that.)

Eh, possibly so. But I figure that high level people will want to sit down and relax every once in a while. They won't be all the time wearing their magical gears; they'll lounge and be comfortable most of their time, and only use the full of their buffs when going out of their bunkers, which will be rare. Most adventurers working for a state have a B+ class comfortable mansion-bunker where they live normally; if they get attacked, they teleport away (the purpose of a B+ bunker is to give you time for that) and go into the nation's bunker. If they are freelancers, when chased by someone more powerful than they are they generally ask protection to a nation in exchange for service. Anyway, they are not ready to fight most of the time. Even most buffs only last 10 minutes per level, so you can cast them and go out for hours, but you'll still spend most of the day inside.

Now, you could send a call to many high level people and be confident that a few of them will answer. But it's tricky. A powerful nation will have 5 to 10 adventurers above level 15 that are loial to them, so they need to gather all of them to repel a determined attack. And they can hire freelancers, but freelancers can also be hired by the enemy, or just promised a share of the spoils if they don't act. You may ask your higher level adventurers to be ready most of the times, but it risks bothering them; they'll see it as a waste of time and may want to get hired by another nation instead.

So, a response time of a minute may be feasible, but it's quite impractical to keep up forever.

EDIT2:

And I can see an Epic play for this. Player characters who find out about the contract and try to set off a bunch of false alarms to bankrupt the vault owner. Or get 2 vault reaction forces to fight one another. Or convince/bribe the responder force to break their contract. Or trick the responder into mutually conflicting contracts. Or finding out how the rapid response force gets in so you can disable it and/or use it to facilitate your theft

That's actually what one of my players is planning to do. He originally planned to increase tensions among nations to cause a full-fledged war, that would kill most of the world's high level population. At this point, the people who would come to defend the bunkers are no more, and getting into one would only be a matter of time. Although his plan may change in convincing the neutral powers to side with good, waging war to the evil coalition, and taking their stuff. He started to assassinate high level people loial to enemy states (with true resurrection that's only a mild inconvenient, but stealing all their gear from their body is a major setback), with the double intent of creating tension and weakening the other side for when a war will happen.
Basically it's because of him and his plans that I have to figure out all this stuff :smallsmile:

[Deophaun]

"level 20 characters have nothing better to do than commit what is essentially petty theft against small kingdoms." If we consider the kind of defences a small kingdom has in classic D&D, it's not like "having nothing better to do", it's more like "an afternoon's job, with enough time left to watch the superbowl". And if you consider that a 0th level character WBL is around 750k gp, then I'd say working an afternoon to take one fifteenth of the total whealt you ever earned in your life is time well spent. Whether you're trying to become immortal, ascend to godhood or take over the world, you need lots of money for your research, and it's unlikely losing a few hours will be a problem.
But now you have enemies. And as you go on to note, there are people who will work together to thwart you. And the scary thing is, until the invention of nuclear weapons, states don't die. Why are you needlessly provoking what is essentially an immortal enemy?

And I find it much more consistent than what happens in more regular settings otherwise, where you go to the merchant with a +5 sword and he gives you 25k gp cash and there is no clear reason why somebody who is high enough level to disarm his traps and fight his golems don't just teleport in and take all his goods.
I have never, not once, ran a campaign where this occurs (except for Eberron to mid-level, because it's Eberron). And I don't constrain my players' purchases.

Oh, so you are saying that you can block an AMF by blocking its line of effect? I never considered that. Still, if you want to dispel the prismatic wall, you need to reach the prismatic wall in order to get it out of the AMF. And as soon as whatever barrier you're using to stop the AMF touches the prismatic wall, it will get destroied.
It doesn't need to touch the prismatic wall. You need at least a 1' square for LoE. I get my rickety covered cart within an inch of your wall, I can open a hatch and cast whatever I want on it. Also, prismatic wall only does its nasty stuff to creatures, not objects.

Or, I can just tunnel. Tunnels work too.

Also, if I postulate several overlapping AMF emanating each from a slightly different position (say, one amanating from each corner) then it will be virtually impossible to cover the line of effect of all of them.
I have a box on wheels. Done.

And if worst comes to worst, I can just houserule that AMF in my universe is a spread instead of an emanation.
At which point I'm going to just come out and say you're cheating. That's fine, but if you're going to cheat, be upfront about it. "Here are these bunkers. You cannot steal from them. They're like the Lady of Pain. You try, you fail. They're backed by an epic-level spell that's been lost." Don't stat it out and then patch on houserules to make it invulnerable in retrospect.

Anyway, I found it amusing that a security system that costs millions of gold could be defeated by a dog and a tarp.

[Elkad]

No static security system will work. Non-intelligent defenders (golems, skeletons, etc) still count as static defenses, they are just traps with better logic processing.

It MUST be defended by creatures of intelligence. Patrolling, responding, repairing, calling for help, etc.

[Doctor Awkward]

I think perhaps you might need to consider a fresh approach:


To begin, start with Genesis (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/spells/genesis.htm). Using this spell you can create a permanent personal demiplane 180 feet across. You can increase the size of it with successive castings but one should suffice for your needs. You can use the Manual of the Planes to assign traits to it as you see fit, but you likely don't need to.

Next ward the entire plane with overlapping Permanent (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/permanency.htm) Alarm (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/alarm.htm) spells, and Permanent Mage's Private Sanctum (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magesPrivateSanctum.htm). That won't necessarily keep people out, but it will stop them from looking inside, and tell you if anyone does get in.

You can either hire a cleric for the next step, or do the following:

Using the Create Magic Tattoo spell from SpC, the Karma bead from the set of prayer beads (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/wondrousItems.htm#strandofPrayerBeads), an orange ioun stone (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/wondrousItems.htm#iounStones), and emulating the Consumptive Field spell from SpC using Limited Wish (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/limitedWish.htm#), a 20th level wizard can boost his caster level to 36, which is enough to Gate (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/gate.htm) in an Elder Titan (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/titanElder.htm). Then he can cast Simulacrum (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/simulacrum.htm) on it in order to have a permanent duplicate as a loyal servant. In addition to the final step below, the Elder Titan can also do bodyguard duty, on account of having 36 hit dice, casting as a 29th level cleric with the Magic and Knowledge domains, the Epic Spellcasting feat with access to three epic spells, the Ingore Material Components feat, and Craft Contingent Spell, as well as a whole slew of useful Spell-like abilities, such as Astral Projection and Contact Other Plane.

This friendly cleric (or Titan) can then cover the entire Demiplane with a single casting of the Forbiddance (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/forbiddance.htm) spell after the caretaker leaves. Whenever he wants to return, he contacts the cleric with a Sending (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/sending.htm) spell and asks him to dispel the forbiddance and then recast is after he is finished there. Aside from this, no one can ever enter or leave the demiplane, including the caretaker himself (barring direct intervention from a deity).

Assuming you skip the Titan, everything else about the process is off the SRD.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Another thing I like to do with a secure genesis demiplane is to fill it full of riverine shaped like an anthill's maze-like inner workings, such that the passages will allow a Fine-sized creature but nothing larger than that. There's a separate portion not filled with riverine that is large enough for a Large creature* (or large enough for a Huge creature to squeeze into) that is filled with quintessence; anything that somehow manages to 'port in past your anti-teleportation measures simply cannot fit anywhere else, and as such, it will find itself in the only place available -- covered in quintessence and pulled outside the timestream, and will shortly find itself shoved into a portal to a second demiplane filled with nothing but quintessence. Anything that is supposed to be there will be pre-shrunk via polymorph/metamorphosis/glove of storing to prevent being shoved into quintessence. Just make sure that this particular safety measure is kept top secret by any means necessary.



*This means that multiple Medium and smaller creatures can fit in there, which helps you take care of groups.

[Crake]

The best way to protect a bunker from a 20th level party is to have a BIGGER 20th level party defending it. Given enough time and resources the 20th level party will be able to penetrate anything unless you have people actively defending it and restoring any damages made. Your biggest concern is making sure that destroying your defenses costs them more than it cost you to put up in the first place, because otherwise they will simply win a war of attrition by destroying your defenses over and over until you're out of resources. Note that in this circumstance, time is a resource, because magic items take time to make.

[King of Nowhere]

It doesn't need to touch the prismatic wall. You need at least a 1' square for LoE. I get my rickety covered cart within an inch of your wall, I can open a hatch and cast whatever I want on it. Also, prismatic wall only does its nasty stuff to creatures, not objects.

Or, I can just tunnel. Tunnels work too.

Sometimes posting here makes me feel like an idiot, because you guys are generally so much more knowledgeable than me about the game, even though I played it for years.It's good to see that even you guys can make mistakes about rules.


Violet 7th Energy field destroys all objects and effects.1
Creatures sent to another plane (Will negates).
So, no, prismatic wall does nasty stuff to objects too, and your cart will be destroied if it touches it.

And that part about the 1 ft square makes no sense. I don't care about what the RAW says if you project stuff on a grid, which squares are affected or not. If the effect is blocked by a wall, then the effect still exist in front of the wall, even one inch in front, even one millimeter in front, even an atomic radius in front of the wall. That's clearly RAI.

As for tunnels, I already establishe at least one bunker as fluctuating. Others have defences on the underground side too.




At which point I'm going to just come out and say you're cheating. That's fine, but if you're going to cheat, be upfront about it. "Here are these bunkers. You cannot steal from them. They're like the Lady of Pain. You try, you fail. They're backed by an epic-level spell that's been lost." Don't stat it out and then patch on houserules to make it invulnerable in retrospect.

That's not cheating, that's worldbuilding. I'm making an homebrewed system that would allow some things to exist, so I can tweak the rules. It's not cheating if the rules are established beforehand and are the same for everyone. Anyway, your cart won't work if one looks at how things are supposed to work instead of applying an approximated grid and abusing that approximation to interrupt an area of effect where it should not be interrupted, so I don't need it.
Actually, on second thought I do: if the AMF are emanating from behind the prismatic wall (and wall of force and regular wall) then it needs to be a spread, or the wall would block it. So that's it: those permanent AMF are spreads instead of emanations. They are houseruled anyway, the manual only says that maybe they could be made permanent at the DM's discretion.

And last, I don't want to say that bunkers are invulneable. No, with enough effort and resources, and possibly some cleverness, they can be overcome. And I prefer it that way, complete invincibility is boring. Heck, I already had the PC breach into a bunker to rescue a prisoner (albeit a lower security one) with nothing but a nonmagical disguise and nonmagically forged papers. The point is not to have complete invulnerability, but simply to prevent people from saying "I just cast spell X and get in" without putting somebody even more powerful than them inside. Because, as I said, having someone or something even more powerful to protect the bunker just moves the goalpost.


Another thing I like to do with a secure genesis demiplane is to fill it full of riverine shaped like an anthill's maze-like inner workings, such that the passages will allow a Fine-sized creature but nothing larger than that. There's a separate portion not filled with riverine that is large enough for a Large creature* (or large enough for a Huge creature to squeeze into) that is filled with quintessence; anything that somehow manages to 'port in past your anti-teleportation measures simply cannot fit anywhere else, and as such, it will find itself in the only place available -- covered in quintessence and pulled outside the timestream, and will shortly find itself shoved into a portal to a second demiplane filled with nothing but quintessence. Anything that is supposed to be there will be pre-shrunk via polymorph/metamorphosis/glove of storing to prevent being shoved into quintessence. Just make sure that this particular safety measure is kept top secret by any means necessary.



*This means that multiple Medium and smaller creatures can fit in there, which helps you take care of groups.

I don't know what this quintessence is, but a similar system is used in lesser bunkers to prevent teleportation with miracle/wish: a set of forcefields filling the room, programmed to adapt to fill the room without damaging the content, and to move to accomodate the motion of the occupants; but there is no space in the room to teleport another creature from the outside. Less comfortable, but less expensive than miracle/wish if you don't need to cover a large area.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

I don't know what this quintessence is, but a similar system is used in lesser bunkers to prevent teleportation with miracle/wish: a set of forcefields filling the room, programmed to adapt to fill the room without damaging the content, and to move to accomodate the motion of the occupants; but there is no space in the room to teleport another creature from the outside. Less comfortable, but less expensive than miracle/wish if you don't need to cover a large area.Quintessence. (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/quintessence.htm)

[rferries]

Seconding/thirding genesis. But apart from that (and assuming you ultimately want the PC's to succeed):

-Multiple NPC characters with the Landlord feat working together, to make investing in the Bunker cost-effective (e.g. they don't use up all their money building the Bunker).

-Anti-teleportation (dimensional lock, forbiddance etc.), antiscrying (false vision, mage's private sanctum etc), both (antimagic field), made permanent via Landlord funds.

-If you go Epic, get a stone colossus (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/colossus.htm)("only" CR 24, but 100-foot antimagic aura). Use it for the aura alone, if not to actually fight.

-Once magic is out of the way, mundane locks/sentries/social skill checks to force the PCs to be creative to get in. :)

[Deophaun]

And that part about the 1 ft square makes no sense. I don't care about what the RAW says if you project stuff on a grid, which squares are affected or not. If the effect is blocked by a wall, then the effect still exist in front of the wall, even one inch in front, even one millimeter in front, even an atomic radius in front of the wall. That's clearly RAI.

An otherwise solid barrier with a hole of at least 1 square foot through it does not block a spell’s line of effect. Such an opening means that the 5-foot length of wall containing the hole is no longer considered a barrier for purposes of a spell’s line of effect.

That's not cheating, that's worldbuilding.
Putting a bajillion AMFs around something without regard for cost is not worldbuilding. Having AMFs and prismatic walls and walls of force respawn with no mechanism in place for them to do so is not worldbuilding. Changing the rules mid-game to make your construct work is not worldbuilding.

It's not cheating if the rules are established beforehand and are the same for everyone.

Heck, I already had the PC breach into a bunker to rescue a prisoner (albeit a lower security one) with nothing but a nonmagical disguise and nonmagically forged papers.
So, which is it? Were the AMFs emanations when the PC breached the bunker, or are you just deciding that now?

[flappeercraft]

Why don't you make the AMFs be regular AMFs that are affected by the Sculpt Spell metamagic from CArc? It works by RAW and does exactly what you want to do without requiring to change AMFs as a whole in your world.

[Anthrowhale]

Just to reiterate, the only efficient way I know to create large volumes of AMF effect is via Genesis (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/spells/genesis.htm)[Dead Magic (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/planes.htm#deadMagic)]. It has the volume of 24k 10'x10' cubes.

[rferries]

Just to reiterate, the only efficient way I know to create large volumes of AMF effect is via Genesis (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/spells/genesis.htm)[Dead Magic (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/planes.htm#deadMagic)]. It has the volume of 24k 10'x10' cubes.

Can genesis assign planar traits like that?

I'll reiterate getting an epic colossus too - AMF almost as large as the dead magic genesis, while keeping the bunker on one's home plane.

[Anthrowhale]

Can genesis assign planar traits like that?
It's plausibly implicitly (but not explicitly) allowed by the spell so it varies with the DM.

[rferries]

It's plausibly implicitly (but not explicitly) allowed by the spell so it varies with the DM.

I think in pathfinder it's explicitly allowed, I'd permit it in 3.5 too (provided no temporal high jinks of course :D).

[ryu]

I think in pathfinder it's explicitly allowed, I'd permit it in 3.5 too (provided no temporal high jinks of course :D).

I mean... If all you want is a free time creation button all you need is a standard demiplane with a construct tended flower garden and the teleport through time spell. That's not even questionable either. Just using the spell purely for things it can explicitly do you can basically make time for yourself.

[Anthrowhale]

Dead Magic doesn't prevent a being from being transported in or out by Reality Revision or Wish, because the two effects can move beings "from anywhere on any plane and place those creatures anywhere else on any plane regardless of local conditions." However, you could fill the Ethereal volume parallel to the bunker with a self-sustaining network of one-shot and automatic reset traps that are of Fine size. The traps would cast or manifest Contingency on themselves, then Reality Revision or Wish, and spam the last two effects whenever an intruder is present.
Neither AMF nor Wish list an explicit exception for Wish, so there is a rules conflict. Whether you want to regard AMF as the more special case or Wish [Transport] as the more special case does not seem to have a canonical answer so the dominance is the DMs choice.

For a little bit of added security you might also add static (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/planes.htm#static) to the dead magic treasury plane.

[Psyren]

Just have them Wish that the bunker can't be penetrated even by another Wish. That is absolutely a greater effect than Wish can safely grant, but that just makes it dangerous, not impossible. You're the GM, so you can rule for complete fulfillment (as opposed to partial or undesirable.)

[King of Nowhere]

Putting a bajillion AMFs around something without regard for cost is not worldbuilding. Having AMFs and prismatic walls and walls of force respawn with no mechanism in place for them to do so is not worldbuilding. Changing the rules mid-game to make your construct work is not worldbuilding.


So, which is it? Were the AMFs emanations when the PC breached the bunker, or are you just deciding that now?

Permanent magic items restart working after 1d4 rounds if dispelled. I assumed a permanent AMF or a permanent prismatic wall would work in the same way. As for costs, I am not ignoring it, only major nations and religions can afford one.

As for emanation vs spread, we simply never found ourselves in a position where it mattered. We never had to decide if an AMF was blocked by a physical barrier because we never found ourselves in that situation. If we had, I'd probably have ruled for emanation anyway, because at the time I didn't even knew the difference and it would have made the more sense to me. I did say we are on the casual side of the gaming spectrum.
I understand that you don't like my worldbuilding concept, and I understand that someone who is more knowledgeable of the rules than I and my players are will likely manage to find a hole in it, but you don't need to be so disparaging because of that.
Consider especially our gaming situation. The DM of a casual group creates a setting for a campaign. He considers the interactions between magic and society, and with his limited knowledge comes to certain conclusions shaping how the world and scieties work. The group plays a few years in those conditions. Everyone becomes more experienced while at it, and they start learning new stuff. Stuff that would invalidate some of the postulated reactions of society to the world. So what is the DM supposed to do?
1) Oh, right. This thing has totally existed before, and even while the existance of this thing makes the whole behvaior of the world nonsensical, the world has worked that way anyway. Just because. Let's just pretend everyone has been an idiot up until now.
2) Ok, this changes how the world would work. Let's retcon the whole story of the world, and therefore the whole working of societies. Basically, let's scrap the whole setting we've been using for years and make a new one. And as soon as we learn something new, we'll scrap that setting too, and make another.
3) Ok, this new thing ddoesn't exist/doesn't work in this campaign world because houserule, or because an homebrewed spell counters it. We keep playing in this world where we invested so much of our energies.
Now, wouldn't you agree that 3) is the best answer to keep having fun at our table?


Just to reiterate, the only efficient way I know to create large volumes of AMF effect is via Genesis (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/spells/genesis.htm)[Dead Magic (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/planes.htm#deadMagic)]. It has the volume of 24k 10'x10' cubes.
There are no epic spells in my world, though I let miracle/wish replicate some of the lower epic spells since 5000 XP cost is no joke (and there are no ways to avoid or reduce an XP cost in my world). Now, that volume looks really big, but I may houserule that with miracle/wish you can make permanent AMF with a somewhat lower cost than you'd face using the regular spell. As AMF is about one-third of the bunker's price (see calculations below) even a small saving here would go a long way.

Speaking of price, I made some calculations. The defence bunker of tal calel is a large prismatic sphere hanging in midair in the middle of a main city square. I never established an exact size, but a radius of 20 meters should be enough to fit everything you need inside, if you're not going for luxury. That translates to a surface area of roughly 5000 square meters, for a volume of approximately 35000 cubic meters. According to the stronghold builder handbook, a section of 20 ft x 20 ft (roughly 44 square meters) of prismatic wall costs 60000 gp, so covering the whole surface totals a bit shy of 7 millions.
There is no statted price for permanent anti magic fields, but considering it's a 6th level spell and prismatic wall is 8th, it's bound to be lower. Let's say you can have three overlapping AMF on every section for a price equivalent to that of the prismatic wall, we are at 14 millions total. You can probably save money if you use widen spell, but I doon't want to make the calculation; let's just call it 14 millions.
A stronghold space is some 130 cubic meters, and it costs 15000 gp per space to make a flying mobile fortress. Since this one does not move but just hovers, there's bound to be a discount; let's call it 10000 gp per space. there are 270 stronghold spaces inside the cube, for a total of 2.7 million gp. So let's call 17 millions total so far. You still need anti-teleportation and scrying buffs, a smattering of miracle/wish and everything, but the total cost will be between 20 and 30 millions. Definitely a huge sum, but a large nation (a few tens of millions of citizens) can totally afford it, especially considering that you only have to build it once and it lasts centuries.
Even a collection of a few dozen individuals, like those who mad the first bunker, can afford to make one by piling their resources together and using their own spellcasting to save on costs.

[Calthropstu]

I actually came up with a fairly decent defense.
First, make the entire bunker a massive teleport field. Any creature entering is immediately teleported out. Wrap the entire thing in a quadruple prismatic sphere backed with a wall of force. Three walls of stone, the middle one turned to flesh, with a layer of lead and adamantine between each.
This stops nearly all entry methods. Only the person holding the key is not teleported out immediately. Add 1000 resetting contingencies to cast targeted dispels at anyone entering without the key and managing to stay in the room, and you pretty much get rid of everyone.
It's the instant teleport out that proves extremely difficult to overcome. As for the key, it is actually an extremely closely guarded secret known only to two people both of whom are very well guarded.

[Anthrowhale]

There are no epic spells in my world...
Just to be clear, Genesis is a 9th level spell which happens to appear in the ELH, not an epic spell. (There are also multiple reprintings of it in other sources, often with slightly different wordings/effects.)

[gkathellar]

Having a big vault that powerful characters can't break into doesn't really lessen the impact of those characters on the wider world, so long as the vault can be simply ignored. When the world is ending, "make like a turtle" is only a valid defensive strategy insofar as you lack interests beyond your shell. Unless your vault can project sufficient power of its own, it can't really counteract the power of others over the wider world. It doesn't really matter how tight the locks on Fort Knox are if you can't get the gold safely through the front door.

OP, I think in setting design, you can either play the "we're taking this to its logical conclusion" game, or you can choose not to. In the former case, you get something like Tippyverse or Planescape or Tower of God or One Piece or Watchmen or any given Zelazny novel. In the latter case, you get the majority of speculative fiction, including cases like Astro City or Atomic Robo or WH40k where the writers said, "I'm not doing that because those aren't the types of stories I want to tell." Treading the line in between, though? That tends to get weird, and I feel like this bunker idea goes to that place. You've said that this bunker will allow you to have powerful characters and a normal non-Tippyverse world, but haven't really explained why that should be the case. Putting aside whether the bunker can be built, it doesn't really follow that it would have the effect you claim. If you're happy to handwave that, just skip the bunker altogether and handwave the effects of jerks with superpowers in general.

I mean unless what you're interested in is "superhumans and bunkers," the setting, in which case more power to you, I guess.

[rferries]

Perhaps it would be helpful if OP listed the levels and classes of the PCs, so we could try to build a bunker for them that would be challenging (but not impossible) to crack?

[King of Nowhere]

OP, I think in setting design, you can either play the "we're taking this to its logical conclusion" game, or you can choose not to. In the former case, you get something like Tippyverse or Planescape or Tower of God or One Piece or Watchmen or any given Zelazny novel. In the latter case, you get the majority of speculative fiction, including cases like Astro City or Atomic Robo or WH40k where the writers said, "I'm not doing that because those aren't the types of stories I want to tell." Treading the line in between, though? That tends to get weird, and I feel like this bunker idea goes to that place. You've said that this bunker will allow you to have powerful characters and a normal non-Tippyverse world, but haven't really explained why that should be the case. Putting aside whether the bunker can be built, it doesn't really follow that it would have the effect you claim. If you're happy to handwave that, just skip the bunker altogether and handwave the effects of jerks with superpowers in general.



It seems to you that I'm doing things halfway because you see it now. I have always tried to go with "logical conclusions", though. It's just that there are many things in the game that I ignore, and I was even more ignorant at the time I made the setting. So what I came up with WAS perfectly logical within the limits of the stuff I knew at the time (within the limitation of my making logical connections). Now I know more stuff, and some of it is coming to chafe with the setting.
But now we've been playing the setting for years, it would destroy immersion if I had to make major retcons to keep stufff consistent. If I were to start it all over, I'd probably go with a variation of a tippyverse, which is the best logical conclusion I know of. Or maybe not; after all, a nice perk of DMing is that you get to explore concepts when making a setting, so I'd try to twist and tweak some things to come to a different result. Sort of wht I'm doing now, but doing it intentionally from the start rather than by accident.

So now my goal is to keep the established setting logically consistent when following the implications of everything. Which sometimes requires coming up with creative justifications for why some things don't happen or don't work, and some other times it requires straight out banning or houseruling some content - which is fine, because most DM do ban or houserule stuff in. (if nothing else to ban all the unlimited wish chains, and to ban permanent teleportation circles with unlimited capacity, least you end up in a tippyverse).

I also wouldn't say that mine is a "normal non-tippy universe, but with bunkers", or that having bunkers nullifies the impact of high level people. In fact, my universe shares several similarities with a tippyverse. In both cases there are huge concentrations of power meant to stop an assault by high level forces. In both cases power and wealth and magic are limited to a certain few areas, and most other places are stuck in something more similar to the fantasy stasis.
As for high level power, what a bunker does is providing equilibrium. The way I see it, without bunkers, any confrontation between high level powers is going to end quickly and decisively by whomever can field the most power. intensive use of miracle/wish to chase enemy high level groups and kill them by surprise will go on until one side is out of high level people. A bunker, however, gives an advantage to a defender. Now the defenders can stay safe almost at will. And sure, you can go ravage the countryside while they stay holed up, but if you do that, you are making yourself a target if they decide to try and attack you. This creates a situation of equilibrium, provided that one side isn't badly outmatching the other. High level people still shape the world. they just do it in a less obvious way.

Re: genesis: well at least that explains how one goes about making a demiplane; it's also cheaper, as you save all the money for prismatic walls. In retrospect, I should have made all bunkers extraplanar, except I already established most aren't. Luckily I already have some handwaved explanations for it.