What are the best nasty tips to defend a place from sky attacks?

[VRkat]

I have this wonderful evil army that have set up this great ground level death trap for my players to harrow... but they want to fly over it and drop things from the sky. They plan to use invisible, fly, and teleport.

How can I thwart their plans, but still make it reasonable level/duration of magic for an army expecting an attack from any direction in the next 24hr?

[Nifft]

How about an illusion of some sort that puts a forest or hill over the location where the army actually is.

On the ground, you're interacting with the illusion, so you'd all get a save.

From the air, you're not interacting, so you don't.


If you can put an illusion of the army somewhere else, that's just gravy.

[BloodSnake'sCha]

I will have a watcher in the sky or a unit on flying mount.

Do you have more information on the army?
If I have spellcasters I will have some devinition expert that will look for attacks on the army and for stuff that will harm the army.

[Malroth]

Fog cloud is a pretty easy defense and should be standard procedure for anyone concerned against air scouting. If it's an Eberon Campaign dragonmarked with the mark of storms arent' too uncommon and should be able to leverage a control weather at an acceptably low level for an army to hire.

[Silva Stormrage]

See invisibility doesn't have a range limit. Being high up in the sky is super easy to spot.

Also dropping things onto an actual moving army is going to kill like... 5 people a round tops unless they are dropping bombs.

See Invisibility + Archer spam should work. Have the mage/person with a see invisibility item light up their position with Dancing Lights/Silent Image and have the archers take the 50% miss chance, 2000 arrows means SOME are going to hit even if they only hit 50% of the time on a 20.

This also lets the PC's continue their hit and run tactics if they can ID the spellcasters capable of casting see invisibility (Or the items that can grant it). Then after identifying their targets they can assassinate/steal the armies means of defending and then continue. Realistically though the army could just power march onwards to their destination if they are close enough, spread out so they aren't all marching 4 to a square and make it 1 every other square and dropping things suddenly stops working anywhere as efficiently.



Similar to the illusions mentioned earlier, you can also just cover the army in illusionary fog instead of a forest or something obviously fake.

[Acanous]

Ballistae. It’s an army, right? You say it’s lowish level, but Magic Weapon is a lv 1 spell. It’s believable enough that in an army of hundreds or thousands, there would be siege weapons. Ballista have a 180 foot range with a maximum range of 10 increments, so -9 to shoot it 1800 feet. Toss a Bless and Magic Weapon, suddenly it’s a -7 penalty. Have a pair of spotters assisting the siege engineer and you take -3. Assume the guy is a lv 1 wizard with 12 dex and EWP siege weapons, and you’ve got a -2 to hit... but he can cast True Strike.

Invisibility is a weird spell because it counts intent. You can use a dagger to carve a message in a board, but not stab a construct or undead. You can summon a monster that then attacks people, but can’t cast Stinking Cloud. You can’t drop weighted ammunition on someone, it’d kill your invisibility.

That, or just say that without an attack roll, the falling debris lands harmlessly by someone’s feet.

Anyway the point here is that with a wizard shooting a ballista you get 1/3rd of a mile range at +18 to hit, for offhand either 4d8 or 6d6 I forget which. Assuming a lv 1 army.

Armies fire in volleys. They get a surprise round to Derp around up there dropping things, then they get an initiative, another round of Derp while the ballistae are loaded and the casters buff up, then mayhaps a third round of acting before you just unload as many D20s as you figure these guys have ballistae, all at +18 to hit and bypassing DR/magic.

That’ll put the hurt on them in a way that might get them to want to close to melee. You can’t fire a ballista at someone if your own guys are in the way. (Well I mean, by the rules you can, but it really should be a line attack)
There’s no cover in the air and nothing to stop these guys from just launching 3 volleys of true striking ballista bolts, one every 2 rounds.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Dig in underground. There's a reason why the first word in the game's name is "dungeons," after all.

Utilize extradimensional space. A portable portal (or portal maker) to a demiplane large enough to comfortably fit your army would allow a single, powerful scout to move where you want, then open portals and unleash the army where they're deploying.

[fallensavior]

How about enemy casters with Fly, Invisibility, See Invisibility, and Dispel Magic?

[VRkat]

Thanks.

They have already seen the camp (so it's a little late for an illusion, but I'll keep that in mind for next time):several hundred Gurillon protecting an evil temple.

...

Odds that by all means an intelligent person would say "nope" to fighting and plan to sneek in since they only need to kill the leader.

I'm going to keep to technology that makes sense in the jungle, but they have already started fires to make a thick cloud of smoke above the camp. This should help against any invisibility they have (they do have a potion or two of greater) and the fact that two of the characters have items that make see invisibility useless. I can also add some herbs to make the smoke dangerous and some floating traps. I'm spamming unhollow like crazy, but the radius limit was one of my problems since the characters can just fly over anything that has a range limit.

Now that's it been mentioned, I definitely can use some weather control. A particular lightning spell comes to mind that will make it hard to fly too high :)

[ExLibrisMortis]

Control winds is very powerful, even when cast at a low caster level, as it stacks with other wind speed increases. If you start with gust of wind, then you have severe 50 mph wind to start with. At minimum caster level (9), you upgrade that by three categories, which gives you a 175+ mph tornado.

A tornado destroys all non-fortified buildings, including your camp, but the area affected by the spell is only 40' high (and 40'/level radius). If you have a caster fly up, cast Quickened gust of wind, and then control winds, you can have a 360' radius disk of tornado-strength winds that lasts for 90 minutes. It won't harm anyone content to stay above or below the wind, but you can't fly through, nor aim anything you throw down. It looks totally rad, too.

[BowStreetRunner]

One of the nice things about illusions is that the spells don't tend to limit the CR of the creatures you can make appear. So if a bunch of really nasty high-CR monsters start to gather in the airspace above the army, it might make the ground attack look more appealing by contrast.

[Nifft]

One of the nice things about illusions is that the spells don't tend to limit the CR of the creatures you can make appear. So if a bunch of really nasty high-CR monsters start to gather in the airspace above the army, it might make the ground attack look more appealing by contrast.

There really ought be a spell which makes people absolutely certain that there's an invisible flying death dragon right up there where they can't see it, and therefore they voluntarily choose to not fly.

[Provengreil]

It's an army, right? Most have bows or crossbows? Blot out the sun in their general position, they'll get the message.

[Gingaroth]

Even if players have already seen the camp, you could still try to make it seem as if the temple is , say, 100 feet to the right of its actual position, and have the players make an intelligence check to see if they notice anything off. (Assuming your players have no precision navigational instruments, and need to work from memory.) The British used similar tactics in WWII, with some success, even though the German air force knew where their cities and airports were located.

If you want to limit the amount of magic your army uses, the cover does not need to be an illusion. Actual existing cover like forests, caves and tunnels makes an army hard to spot from above too, especially in combination with camouflage. Jungle is a perfect environment for that. A few low-level druid spells, or even just some cut-off branches could make the temple virtually invisible under a layer of greens.

A bunch of cleverly constructed scarecrow-soldiers can provide temporary distraction until the pc’s come close or interact with them. And since your army is evil, they might even have forced p.o.w.s or local civilians to dress up and be decoy. Even if the players see through the disguise, they still can function as a human shield.

Against fly, use earthbind or wingbind. Nets with weights on them are a good mundane alternative.

Against teleportation, use anticipate teleportation, greater anticipate teleportation, or, if your casters are of high enough level, Halastar’s teleport cage. It would make perfect sense for an army expecting an attack to have prepared them.

If see invisibility doesn’t work on the pc’s, use blindsight. Then glitterdust or faery fire their arses, or use (greater) dispel magic. Alternatively, release flying creatures with blindsight or blindsense from the temple to attack them, like the Desmodu bats from MMII.

Create walls of force above vulnerable and important parts of the camp. They’re invisible , so players will waste time and ammo before they notice.

I also wanted to suggest spells like acid fog, stinking cloud, caustic smoke , cloudkill, and murderous mist besides the fog cloud, but I think your idea of harmful smoke is even better.