Defeating Shax, the Duke of Riches

[Conradine]

I'm thinking about a character utterly dedicated to defeat Shax ( from "The Gates of Hell" ).
That guy:

https://www.worldsofimagination.co.uk/monster%20devil%20Shax.htm

Long story made short, the character is one of the many descentant of a Shax's client, who's not simply trying to evade the curse but is determined to get bloody revenge on the Great Duke of Hell. He's already under Shax's curse, from his birth ( All skill checks related to work or earning money suffer a -10 penalty, and only produce half the earned result. Any savings they may have are reduced by one half every month, with this money going into Scax’s coffers. ) so he must deal with chronic lack of equipment.


I've already cooked up some ideas:

* Vow of Poverty ( feat ) : it's an Exalted feat and quite powerful, but it requires to be of Good alignment. There's any way to circumvent this?

* Forsaker ( prestige class from Masters of the Wild ): has many useful powers balanced by the requisite of forsaking any magical item; since the character is already cursed to be broken, it's a gain.


Other ideas, both about the build and roleplaying ?

[ExLibrisMortis]

I'm not 100% sure "adventuring equipment" (i.e. WBL) counts as "savings", but yeah, you could suffer a WBL penalty. To respond to that, you probably want a spellcaster with few wealth requirements--easy bake wizard or some kind of druid, say. Persistent Spell is your friend, because it lets you obtain all those magical effects that you would otherwise have to get from magic items/WBL.

Since Shax has decent casting and good SLAs, you want to make sure you're immune or resistant to some of the common nasty things he'll try to hit you with (e.g. fire damage, blasphemy, mind-affecting effects--all things that should be clear in-character as well, though you may call it "quench the fires of hell, silence the dark speech, and spurn the temptation" in character). His caster level is high, so SR isn't viable, but his save DCs are only about 30, which are pretty easy to beat. For example, a druid/prestige paladin 3 with Serenity (and throw in Devoted Tracker, why not) gets Wisdom to all saves, which can get you--with owl's wisdom--around +15 to all saves (a sorcerer can persist ruin delver's fortune three times for a similar effect). Throw in superior resistance and decent base saves, and you only fail on a 1.

At that point, you want to beat the Hide/Move Silently checks, invisibility, and so on (blindsight, true seeing), strong resistance to dispels, e.g. with a spellblade or three, and some form of devastating offense, probably in the form of SR:No spells or just straight melee damage. Oh, and dimensional lock. Don't want the guy to run away, do we?

Obviously I've been reverse-engineering the build from Shax's stats, but I think a lot of these choices make a lot of sense in character, especially if your stated goal is to destroy a high-level sneaky devil.

[Anthrowhale]

I'm thinking about a character utterly dedicated to defeat Shax ( from "The Gates of Hell" ).
That guy:

https://www.worldsofimagination.co.uk/monster%20devil%20Shax.htm

Long story made short, the character is one of the many descentant of a Shax's client, who's not simply trying to evade the curse but is determined to get bloody revenge on the Great Duke of Hell. He's already under Shax's curse, from his birth ( All skill checks related to work or earning money suffer a -10 penalty, and only produce half the earned result. Any savings they may have are reduced by one half every month, with this money going into Scax’s coffers. ) so he must deal with chronic lack of equipment.


I've already cooked up some ideas:

* Vow of Poverty ( feat ) : it's an Exalted feat and quite powerful, but it requires to be of Good alignment. There's any way to circumvent this?

* Forsaker ( prestige class from Masters of the Wild ): has many useful powers balanced by the requisite of forsaking any magical item; since the character is already cursed to be broken, it's a gain.


Other ideas, both about the build and roleplaying ?

A Cleric/Spelldancer with Initiate of Mystra and persistent spell can be amazing without relying on equipment. This is however incompatible with Vow of Poverty and Forsaker. The basic strategy is to be a self-buffer spelldancing a plethora of persistent buffs ending with an antimagic field that protects the buffs and defangs most magical attacks. Use Southern Magician and Arcane Mastery to eliminate uncertainty about penetrating AMF and consider the Arcane Disciple cleric variant in dragon #311 to put a bunch of helpful spells on-list.