How to deal with a Devine Oracle and his friends.

[Mordante]

Recently I have started to DM a party of lvl 16 characters, but I have very little rules knowledge. For story telling this hasn’t been much of a problem yet. However now I have a small problem. One of the characters is a Devine Oracle. He has a supernatural ability or at least I think it is, that lets him do some kind of astral projection. He leave his body, going to the astral plane and looks at the material plane.
He has been using this ability for a long time, before I became DM. So even if this ability is breaking the rules I will do nothing about it. He often uses this to scout a potential hazardous area or gain info. Now he has a mind link with some of the characters in the group.
They are planning for the following the wizard has the mind link with the devine oracle (DO). The DO does his think wizard sees what he sees through the mind link. Thus they scan a remote location. Next the wizard knows what the location looks like and uses greater teleport to teleport the whole group to that location.
Now how do I stop this, or at least make it hard. Would an anti-magic field solve this? Or some anti-scrying field. Maybe some Astra Plane creatures making things difficult. I don’t want to use the same every time I want to stop this.
I’m not saying I want to stop this every time but I do want to make things more difficult for the DO.
Anyone with tips, ideas or divine inspiration how to deal with this?

[DeTess]

You can have dimensional lock cast on importunate locations to prevent teleportation into or out off the place. However, if you're uncertain about the rules yourself it might be a good idea to end this campaign sooner or alter and start over at lower levels so you can learn how the game works a little bit at a time, rather than having to deal with all the tricks a pair of T1 casters have at high level all at once.

At this level, some powerful entities might also have actual guardians in the astral toi protect their holdings from this trick.

[Illidatch]

Is the telepathic link without any kind of range/planar restriction? If they cannot communicate from different planes or at more than X miles that could be a pretty severe nerf.
Also some random encounters in the astral plane could at least make the party oracle spend some more resources for his scouting.
Finally, if this kind of scouting is a known method among the elite groups in your world, some places could have alarms or defenses laid out to counter such methods. There are many possibilities.

[Mordante]

You can have dimensional lock cast on importunate locations to prevent teleportation into or out off the place. However, if you're uncertain about the rules yourself it might be a good idea to end this campaign sooner or alter and start over at lower levels so you can learn how the game works a little bit at a time, rather than having to deal with all the tricks a pair of T1 casters have at high level all at once.

At this level, some powerful entities might also have actual guardians in the astral toi protect their holdings from this trick.

The reason I am a DM currently are twofold.

1) I want to give DMing a chance never done it before.
2) The previous DM has been doing it for over a decade and has never played a character. I wanted to give him a break.

I think we want to retire the whole party around level 17/18 and start over at level 4.

The group wants to teleport into the lair of a dead Green Dragon which they just killed. It's not the action that I appose but for the story it's better if it would take them a few days to get there. Also I want to make it difficult for them to do this. since it's too easy.


Is the telepathic link without any kind of range/planar restriction? If they cannot communicate from different planes or at more than X miles that could be a pretty severe nerf.
Also some random encounters in the astral plane could at least make the party oracle spend some more resources for his scouting.
Finally, if this kind of scouting is a known method among the elite groups in your world, some places could have alarms or defenses laid out to counter such methods. There are many possibilities.

It's not really common in the world we are in. I have to check if the link has any restrictions to it.

[DeTess]

The reason I am a DM currently are twofold.

1) I want to give DMing a chance never done it before.
2) The previous DM has been doing it for over a decade and has never played a character. I wanted to give him a break.

I think we want to retire the whole party around level 17/18 and start over at level 4.

The group wants to teleport into the lair of a dead Green Dragon which they just killed. It's not the action that I appose but for the story it's better if it would take them a few days to get there. Also I want to make it difficult for them to do this. since it's too easy.

Is there any reason the green dragon couldn't have set up dimensional lock over his lair in advance? It last a day per caster level, so the spell would persist couple of weeks after the dragon's death if it had cast is just a bit before. Otherwise, is there a way to speed up the other things so that the story doesn't get derailed by the players getting to the lair? Or alternatively, maybe you could design the lair in such away that the players need to stick around for awhile to get what they want.

[Illidatch]

Another way to address the issue would be that, since it seems they have been using this tactic for some time, opposing parties/factions start to notice this.
Other than developing countermeasures in the astral plane, in the case of pesky opponents they could try the same tactic on the PCs.
After hitting them once with a group of opponents who used the same method, you could even see how they take countermeasures against it and incorporate their countermeasures into yours.

[Xervous]

What strikes me as funny is the ‘viewing the location from the astral’ as per 3.5 there is absolutely nothing innate to the astral relating to viewing other planes from it. Astral projection (the spell proper and any effects that refer to it) allows the caster to reenter the material plane in an expendable copy-body. They’ll be on the material plane proper, there’s no rules for where they’ll end up on the plane (presumably random), but they’ll be free to scout at negligible risk because of how few things can kill them through astral projection. Oh, and Astral Projection is a 9th, accessible earlier than 17th level via planar binding and other shenanigans, but part of me suspects we’re not actually dealing with astral projection.

If there’s other forms of divination magic involved just hunt down some of the typical scry proofing abjurations. Mage’s Private Sanctum is a 5th and can be permanencied, blocks ALL scrying. If a place is important and private and the owner/caretaker has the means then that location should be scry proofed. MPS also blocks all vision from outside the area. The Astral is certainly not the material plane, so short of an effect that is explicitly not scrying or physically being there vision will be denied.

[Calthropstu]

Dimensional lock works as has been stated.
The wizard sees what the oracle sees. Just have things there the oracle can't see. Magic traps, teleport misdirection, teleport detection and a counter squad ready to teleport in behind them, illusions masking what's really there, Astral projections defending the place, an astral dragon guardian, ghosts which are ethereal, not astral so neither sees the other, cover every square with unseen servants so the teleport puts them outside... Or even better it pits them in the room below and triggers a slow descending cieling trap.
A couple of these will see this trick stop pretty quick.