Ranking the defence of the gates

[AeonQuasar]

So maybe this have been done before, but I'm just ocationally in this forum so whatever. I'm doing one now anyway.

After now we have seen how all gates are protected and I do want to rank them in order of how good and well designed they where for defence. I add my take as my personal opinion, but I would love to see others take on it as well. No need to use my format. We don't fully know enough about Kragors gate, but we can at least take into account of how much we know about it.

Note: By mortal I mean human age where knowledge and power can be gone in a few generations.

C Tier:

5: Lirian's gate.
+ A virus destroying "all" living spellcasters that gets close to it. Making them spell-impotent.
+ Good alligned nature creatures in high numbers
+ Elven warriors and Lirian herself

- Basically no defence at all against the undead (what was she thinking?)
- Extremly weak to forest fires (or just if not given enough time to buff before)
- Weak to surprise attacks (apparantly nothing against teleportation or similar)

4: Soon's gate
+ Ghost warriors in high numbers as last defence
+ An entire city in first line of defence
+ Saphire guard able to remove threats as they come by

- Arrogant, makes themselves a target and easily corruptable
- Nothing beside their own force can defend it / weak to magic
- Mortal.

B tier:

3. Dorukan's Gate
+ Magic master in command
+ Inpenetrable castle
+ Tons of magic traps and protections

- Main defender can be lured out of its defence position
- Summoning allowance (for personal reasons) are a weak point
- Mortal (few defences once dead - no offspring)

A Tier:

2. Kraagor's gate
+ Remote hostile and hard to find location
+ RNG puzzle with dangerous monsters (that probably are a bluff)
+ Traps and amnesia poison available

- No (yet) ways of dealing with presistent strong targets
- RNG Puzzle can be cheesed with magic
- Last defence are very uncertain in power (yet to be seen)

1. Girard's Gate
+ Entire generations of dedicated spellcasting protectors
+ Riddled with tons of deadly traps, bluffs and illusions
+ Hard to find

- Can be located with logic and magic
- Entire defence can be wiped out by one (though very rare) spell (even on a basically unrelated person/monster)
- Mortal


If Lirian had a defence against the undead and fire she would probably be 1 or 2 ranked. The virus are quite powerful stuff. Girard might be lower on the list as we don't really know the true power of the traps and illusions. Kraagors gate are not yet completed so it can go up or down.

[BaronOfHell]

I recall reading Girard's gate also had no apparent anti-undead measures.
Of course we can't really know that for sure given the defenses were down at the time, but I do think all the gates are really well protected and their true weakness is within the personal flaws of those who protects them.

[Zarhan]

The key Aesop of this whole gate setup is that Scribble failed with the whole "monitor other gates only, no visits"-policy because they couldn't work together.

Fine, they had bad enough relationships that building common approach for defending the things was out of the question, but they really couldn't even be bothered to even set up an alarm effectively saying "gate threatened, I'm about to die, come and help NOW, you guys hate me but world might get nuked". The current setup only shows that gate has been destroyed. Even Lirian did not have any prepared panic button for Dorukan or apparently vice versa despite being lovers.

No points for effort.

[Synesthesy]

Are we sure Dorukan was still a mortal?


Said that, every Gate is defended with the forces every member of the Scribble thought was best, and it was defended against what every member thought it was the worst. It also seems that both Dorukan and Serini did not have a plan for what will happen after their death.
And the second important thing we can notice is that an undead epic lich and his team are out of their league despite them being epic too: Xykon literally destroys both Lirian's and Dorukan's (and the second was kinda easy for him), Girard's weak point are creatures immune to illusion, as for example an undead epic lich, and creatures who have Serini's diary, as again our favourite evil sorcerer. Kraagor has putting on a fight, but with Redcloak's summons it would be only a matter of time (if the Order wasn't there). Only Soon's gate was able to defend their gate and it would have ended the threat forever if given little more time.


If I have to rate the various gate, I would say:

E) Lirian's is too weak to anything who is immune to diseases. And non-magical fire could have worked too.
D) Dorukan's is weak to anything magic is weak against. Arrogance is one of them. But relying on just one living man, even if really powerfull, is not a good idea.
C) Girard's is very strong, but still can be defeated by anyone immune to illusion. In a world where undead are kinda common, this is a big weakness, even if not as big as Lirian's to fire.
B) Kraagor's can be defeated only by a combination of smartness and strength. Very often people rely only in one of them (just like team Evil). But can be defeated by a team high level enough who can spot traps (for example, an evil Order of the Stick).
A) Anything that can brute force Xykon to submission has the win to me. The secrecy of an holy order, the city investing money and soldiers to defend itself, and the strenght of the Spirits are a very good defence. Soon's project + Shojo execution were kinda perfect imho.

[Fyraltari]

It also seems that both Dorukan and Serini did not have a plan for what will happen after their death.

Serini doesn't seem to be necessary for her defenses to work, I don't see why that would change after her death.

Dorukan and Lirian don't seem to have a mecanism in place to take over after their eventual death (in fairness Lirian probably still had a long time to think about it) but it's not absurd to think both of them were grooming successors that TE murdered off-screen because they don't matter to the story.

[Wintermoot]

It's too soon to rank Serini's gate defenses because we still don't know where the gate it. However, just with what we are given, I'm rating it pretty darn high.

Girard's gates defenses are ludicrous to me. I keep hearign people go on about how Soon's knights were corruptible, well what about Girard's family of rogues, rapists and kidnappers? You can't possibly believe that every child and grandchild of this family have remained loyal and on point for the purpose of living out in the desert, casting illusion spells on schedule for generations. To be high enough level to cast those spells, they need to go out and adventure and gain experience and they don't strike me of the mindset of returning home when requested to do their duty. It's a ridiculous idea that could only exist in service to a story and falls apart when looked at logically.

I have to assume that for every one good-little-illusionist who did their job, there are 10 others who went out into the world and didnt' come back. And every one of them was a potential leak of information or another person who could decide "hey maybe I can use this for personal power and glory"

Even if you ignore all of that, Illusion magic is notoriously easy to protect against and get around, especially in a self-aware fantasy parody.

So I would rank his lowest, along with Lirian's. Because both were very easy to get around with a minimum of planning. (Protection from Disease and Truesight)

Dorokun and Serini both built formidible traps and defenses that I admire and respect so I would put them next. They took effort to shore up a second level of defense behind their gaping holes at least.

Soon built an entire city and culture around defending his gate. To me, that's the most formidable defense. As would seem to be supported by needing an entire hobgoblin invasion to get through to it.

[Peelee]

C Tier:

4: Soon's gate
+ Ghost warriors in high numbers as last defence
+ An entire city in first line of defence
+ Saphire guard able to remove threats as they come by

- Arrogant, makes themselves a target and easily corruptable
- Nothing beside their own force can defend it / weak to magic
- Mortal.

What? Soon's was objectively the hardest one to tackle - Xykon, an epic level undead sorcerer, needed a literal army in order to even have a chance to hold the Gate, attempted to bypass most of the defenses, and still would have lost and been completely destroyed (arguably the closest he's ever been to being destroyed), and his only saving grace was being saved by pure luck - an unhinged person who was lucky enough to escape prison, lucky enough to go to the throne room, lucky enough to miscontrue the situation in the throne room, lucky enough to neither see nor hear the founder of her entire order dealing the final blow to the lich she had been so terrified of and was basing all her decisions on up to that moment... Xykon only survived due to obscene luck.

"Arrogant" as a con? All of the scribblers were arrogant. They all thought they could hold it. The Gate wasn't a target due to the Azurites. Hell, the Gate and the entire Sapphire Guard was almost entirely unknown to virtually everyone in the world. And they weren't particularly weak to magic, unless you consider "absolutely immune to any and all magic" to be "weak to magic", in which case that's also a trait shared by all the Gates defenses.

This is a wildly inaccurate assessment of Soon's Gate, IMO.

[Fyraltari]

Girard's gates defenses are ludicrous to me. I keep hearign people go on about how Soon's knights were corruptible, well what about Girard's family of rogues, rapists and kidnappers? You can't possibly believe that every child and grandchild of this family have remained loyal and on point for the purpose of living out in the desert, casting illusion spells on schedule for generations. To be high enough level to cast those spells, they need to go out and adventure and gain experience and they don't strike me of the mindset of returning home when requested to do their duty. It's a ridiculous idea that could only exist in service to a story and falls apart when looked at logically.
It's only been 60 years, most of them probably knew Girard. Counting the dead at the lunchtables and comparing with the family tree, there can't have been more than a handfuk of deserters. The whole set-up implies a high degree of indoctrination among the family and it's likely that all the adventuring happened under the supervision of trusted, senior relatives, likely parents and elder siblings.

Edit: that said, I agree it was untenable in the long run.

Soon built an entire city and culture around defending his gate. To me, that's the most formidable defense. As would seem to be supported by needing an entire hobgoblin invasion to get through to it.
Soon did neither of those things, Azure City is much older than him. He built a paladin Order and a castle and handed them both to his liege lord when he died, that's it.

Edit: by the way, do you think he told his king about the gateway to a god-killing abomination inside his throne before or after giving him said chair?

[Metastachydium]

It's too soon to rank Serini's gate defenses because we still don't know where the gate it. However, just with what we are given, I'm rating it pretty darn high.

Yup. What we do know is that it's largely self-sustaining and it currently has 4+ layers of defenses (Serini&Sunny; the decoy dungeons; the backstage; and whatever's actually protecting the Gate). That's quite impressive as it is.


Girard's gates defenses are ludicrous to me. I keep hearign people go on about how Soon's knights were corruptible, well what about Girard's family of rogues, rapists and kidnappers? You can't possibly believe that every child and grandchild of this family have remained loyal and on point for the purpose of living out in the desert, casting illusion spells on schedule for generations. To be high enough level to cast those spells, they need to go out and adventure and gain experience and they don't strike me of the mindset of returning home when requested to do their duty. It's a ridiculous idea that could only exist in service to a story and falls apart when looked at logically.

I have to assume that for every one good-little-illusionist who did their job, there are 10 others who went out into the world and didnt' come back. And every one of them was a potential leak of information or another person who could decide "hey maybe I can use this for personal power and glory"

Add to that Girard's personal philosophy amounting to "authority is corrupt and it corrupts". Sounds like just the thing that breeds discipline!


Even if you ignore all of that, Illusion magic is notoriously easy to protect against and get around, especially in a self-aware fantasy parody.

Yeah, that too. And if the schedule's anything to go by, much of it wasn't even that strong.


So I would rank his lowest, along with Lirian's. Because both were very easy to get around with a minimum of planning. (Protection from Disease and Truesight)

Right, Lirian. The gal who hung her Gate on two living creatures vulnerable to fire in a forest she actively kept from being even mildly fireproof.


Dorokun

Dorukan. The arrogant wizard guy who hired all manners of folks with no professional experience to man his side projects and then allowed them to wander off on "very important missions" (not to mention the thing with Lirian).


Soon built an entire city and culture around defending his gate. To me, that's the most formidable defense. As would seem to be supported by needing an entire hobgoblin invasion to get through to it.

Soon didn't build the city, but making its ruler the head of the Guard must have sure helped with shoring up its defenses, so much so that yes, it took a literal army with heavy-hitters at the helm to break through and they still almost lost. The Ghost Martyrs also amount to a pretty damn neat invisible last line of defense, they are incorruptible and they are getting stronger with each passing generation.

As for the raids, yes, they ultimately did backfire, but the basic idea (be pre-emptive, tie up loose ends) was sound and the operation was apparently very succesful in expunging the records. We don't know of anyone other than the Oracle and the Church of the Dark One that managed to elude them.

[Dame_Mechanus]

What? Soon's was objectively the hardest one to tackle - Xykon, an epic level undead sorcerer, needed a literal army in order to even have a chance to hold the Gate, attempted to bypass most of the defenses, and still would have lost and been completely destroyed (arguably the closest he's ever been to being destroyed), and his only saving grace was being saved by pure luck - an unhinged person who was lucky enough to escape prison, lucky enough to go to the throne room, lucky enough to miscontrue the situation in the throne room, lucky enough to neither see nor hear the founder of her entire order dealing the final blow to the lich she had been so terrified of and was basing all her decisions on up to that moment... Xykon only survived due to obscene luck.

"Arrogant" as a con? All of the scribblers were arrogant. They all thought they could hold it. The Gate wasn't a target due to the Azurites. Hell, the Gate and the entire Sapphire Guard was almost entirely unknown to virtually everyone in the world. And they weren't particularly weak to magic, unless you consider "absolutely immune to any and all magic" to be "weak to magic", in which case that's also a trait shared by all the Gates defenses.

This is a wildly inaccurate assessment of Soon's Gate, IMO.

I also think Dorukan's gate is ranked far too highly here - the castle was hardly impenetrable, and out of the three gates where the primary defense was "lots of magic" only Dorukan mostly just filled the place with monsters and then sat around doing very little to reinforce his defenses. Once Xykon drew him out it was pretty easy to take over, and not one but two adventuring parties got in there just fine. Seriously, at least Girard's gate had traps, and most of them were placed more accurately.

Meanwhile, Soon's gate wasn't just protected by a city and an army but by being wholly inconspicuous. If you didn't know about the gate you could stumble around for ages without finding it. Heck, not only did Soon have protections while everyone was alive, he clearly had better defenses in place in the event of death; Girard's gate relied on a constant stream of illusion refreshers from his family while Soon made sure that even if something similar to Familicide hit the Sapphire Guard, they would still have defenses in place.

[Fyraltari]

We shouldn't forget that Dorukan's final defense is what held Xykon back the longest (so far, Kraagor's Tomb may break that record. Although, now that the heroes are her, I doubt it).

[Jasdoif]

5: Lirian's gate.
...(apparantly nothing against teleportation or similar)Not exactly.

The implicit assumption of several lines of Redcloak's dialogue is that he already tried everything he knows how to do. I just didn't show it all because I had limited space, and because I assumed that the reader would understand that if a smart, tactically-minded caster like Redcloak says, "X is the only way out," then he probably tried the easy ways first.

After all, Lirian would have needed to ward her prison against people coming in to rescue them, too, which means locking it down to plane shifts and stone shapes, even if she thinks her prisoners are incapable of them. A restored Xykon, however, is more powerful than Lirian could ward against.

[Resileaf]

I don't really have a horse in this race, but I wanted to comment on a single point.


- Entire defence can be wiped out by one (though very rare) spell (even on a basically unrelated person/monster)

This doesn't count. This is the equivalent of saying "Can be destroyed by a nuclear bomb". Like, yeah, obviously an epic spell is going to be trouble.

[Peelee]

I don't really have a horse in this race, but I wanted to comment on a single point.



This doesn't count. This is the equivalent of saying "Can be destroyed by a nuclear bomb". Like, yeah, obviously an epic spell is going to be trouble.

Seconded. Every Gate could be knocked out by a single, homebrewed epic level spell specifically engineered in the exact way to strip a Gate defenseless.

[Mike Havran]

Here are my 2 cp:
We don't know the full extent of Kraagor's Gate defenses, so I will not rank it now. But it's already well above the weakest one, which is Lirians.

Lirian neglected that a significant amount of villains are going to make themselves immune to any disease one way or another. The fire thing is also a big blunder.

Other three destroyed Gates were far better guarded and it was idiocy of their would-be defenders that was the reason they are gone.

Dorukan's castle was a tough nut to crack and Xykon got incredibly lucky that Dorukan cared for Lirian so much. Otherwise, the bad guys might have been still sitting at the Cloister's perimeter. Even after that, Team Evil was still thwarted by the final sigil. I'll grant that they would probably find a way around eventually, so they were in a similar situation as they are right now with Kraagor's gate.

Girard's defenses were destroyed by incredibly overpowered überspell. You can't do much against it, especially since even Girard himself likely didn't have epic spells. Otherwise, the bunch of spellcasters would probably made it a hell for any invader. It's not just that they had only illusions, they were a coordinated team of powerful mages bound by blood. It is hard to say how much Girard told them about the Gate's meaning and how likely is that somebody would try to betray them.

Soon's gate was the best one, IMO, and the circumstances of its destruction are on par with Oracle's theories about Belkar's prophecy fulfilment. Awfully contrived.

[Lord Torath]

Regarding Kraagor's Gate, we don't know how it is replenished. There could be an automated process, but I suspect that Serini re-populates each dungeon herself (with help from her friends). We don't know that it will keep going after she dies.

[Mike Havran]

Regarding Kraagor's Gate, we don't know how it is replenished. There could be an automated process, but I suspect that Serini re-populates each dungeon herself (with help from her friends). We don't know that it will keep going after she dies.I think it is automated somehow. If Serini has "friends" that can move monsters (even powerful enough for Xykon to get EXP from) into a small dungeon, then it's high time for them to show up and start kicking ass.

[Fyraltari]

Regarding Kraagor's Gate, we don't know how it is replenished. There could be an automated process, but I suspect that Serini re-populates each dungeon herself (with help from her friends). We don't know that it will keep going after she dies.

Serini left after it was finished and only came back a couple years before the comic started. That place ran itself without her help for five decades.

[brian 333]

Consider that all four of the destroyed gates did what they were designed to do.

1) Hold the rift they were built on together and prevent The Snarl from getting out,

2) Prevent anyone from using them for other purposes.

Redcloak has gotten zero use out of the gates. They have done their jobs.

Any sane person who attacked and destroyed a gate would soon realize what they were, and either flee the area allowing someone else to build another gate over the rift, or build another gate themselves out of self-preservation.

The fact that Redcloak has not yet realized that he and Xykon could have built a gate over Lirian's Gate and then used the ritual on it amuses me. He is the mastermind whose clever schemes have resulted in... nothing? He seeks four gates in a row, only to find the first useless, the next two destroyed before he got to them, and the last actively defended by the same crew that kept him out of the last two.

Yes, the world is unstable and ready to implode. But that is not a sign of a weakness in the defenses of the gates. Their primary strength was that anyone strong enough to seize one would quickly realize how stupid it would be to destroy them. In this regard, Redcloak is as stupid as Elan. He is causing gates to be destroyed, and his only backup plan is to move on to the next.

The problem is that none of the gates, built and guarded by relatively sane people, were proof against insane people who would see the destruction of the world, even if it included their own destruction, as a positive outcome.

[Elanfanforlife]

Any sane person who attacked and destroyed a gate would soon realize what they were, and either flee the area allowing someone else to build another gate over the rift, or build another gate themselves out of self-preservation.

The fact that Redcloak has not yet realized that he and Xykon could have built a gate over Lirian's Gate and then used the ritual on it amuses me. He is the mastermind whose clever schemes have resulted in... nothing? He seeks four gates in a row, only to find the first useless, the next two destroyed before he got to them, and the last actively defended by the same crew that kept him out of the last two.


Does Redcloak know how to build a gate? And even if he does, he might need to be epic level or something of that sort to build one.

[catagent101]

Yeah, that's a good point, the gates so far have indeed worked for their intended purpose.

As for ranking the gates:

5: Dorukan's Gate. I feel like the fact that Dorukan was a key linchpin in its defense while being an old guy kinda forces this one to be last. Like, Xykon could just move in after he killed him, not a good look. The ward was good, I'll give him that much though (if at the end of the day, bypassable). The fact that he randomly put a self-destruct rune though, not so much.
4: Lirian's Gate. An army is as good a start as any I suppose and is certainly more sustainable, but the gate's killer feature (the virus) is easily bypassed and also hanging the gate on treants looks cool but is pretty questionable defense-wise. Also Lirian, you really need to read up on your undead girl.
3: Girard's Gate: Like other people have mentioned, a lot of it can be bypassed by a spell that costs 250gp. That said, I do think it had some neat tricks and unlike Dorukan's and Lirian's doesn't have a self destruct mechanism. Girard turning his family into a cult to defend it is a mixed bag I guess. It undermines the keeping the gate's location secret but it also gives the gate a fighting chance if somebody does find it.
2: Kraagor's Gate (tentative); The fact that it has stupidly powerful monsters is good at least. The big question is how well is the actual gate protected/hidden. Can someone just stumble upon it and take control of it? I'd presume no but I doubt it has the defenses the fake gate has. The fake gate does require prior knowledge of the gates to work, but most people who would try to take control of it probably have that so I think it works.
1. Soon's Gate: I think the fact that the defenses of the gate grow stronger with each passing generation is pretty cool (though their vulnerability to Rebuke Undead is a notable weakness) and it probably has the most effective army of the lot. It would probably struggle against neutral or good opponents, but admittedly those would be unlikely to try to take the gate so I suppose it's a fair assumption. It's also cleverly hidden in the throne room inside the castle so it has a bit of a best of both worlds situation going on.

[Fyraltari]

In this regard, Redcloak is as stupid as Elan. He is causing gates to be destroyed, and his only backup plan is to move on to the next.
Redcloak is stupid because his actions might result in an outcome he considers positive?

Does Redcloak know how to build a gate? And even if he does, he might need to be epic level or something of that sort to build one.
:xykon: Can we build a new [Gate]?
:redcloak: Maybe, if we were both epic level, but we'd still have to research how to do so, and that could take years of study! Maybe decades!

The fact that he randomly put a self-destruct rune though, not so much.
It's not random, though. It's there to ensure the gate doesn't fall into the wrong hands. This may also be why Lirian put her gate between two treants (note that unlike Girard's or Soon's it simply broke, it did not explode).
Girard turning his family into a cult to defend it is a mixed bag I guess. It undermines the keeping the gate's location secret[/quote]
How so?

the fake gate
:mitd: What (fake) gate?

[brian 333]

Redcloak is stupid because his actions might result in an outcome he considers positive?

:xykon: Can we build a new [Gate]?
:redcloak: Maybe, if we were both epic level, but we'd still have to research how to do so, and that could take years of study! Maybe decades!

He is insane to believe his outcome would be a positive result. Based on nothing but wishful thinking he has decided a future world would be better for goblins than the current one. The reality is that in the next incarnation, goblins might be chewing gum and end up stuck to the bottoms of chairs, desks, and tables, or dropped on floors and sidewalks while elves get to be fried pies and dwarves get to be jawbreakers.

He is stupid because he does not re-evaluate his position with each failure. He does not even acknowledge them as failures from which he might learn.
An example might be that he controls a rift in Azure City. Instead of playing games with Xykon's phylactery, why didn't he look for the gate-making ritual in the Azure City Library? If he had, we might be watching him construct a gate about now.

[ZhonLord]

I would argue that Soon and Dorukan's gates need to be swapped in ranking.


1. You say easily corruptible, however any paladin who becomes corrupt would be banished by the Twelve Gods for their foolishness. Miko can't be the only Fallen paladin from the Sapphire Guard, there's going to be a history of others as well. She is, however, the first and only true traitor to the Guard. That's not nearly as potent a weakness from a risk-vs-severity standpoint as one might think.

2. Mortal is not a weakness as far as Soon's Gate is concerned, as that same mortality allows it to continue to build strength over time through the Martyr's Oath. Xykon almost LOST against the ghost army, and that was with only a couple generations built up; Miko's intervention saved him. What if there'd been another 30-50 years of ghosts added to the force? Just 1-2 more smites would have made all the difference in Xykon and Redcloak's hit points, let alone another 20+. Girard's Gate is maintained by mortals as well, but they're more maintaining a status quo than putting souls in the "bank" over time. Soon's Gate turns mortality into an asset, not a hindrance.

3. Soon's Gate also has secrecy and divination-protection on its side as advantages; Redcloak and Xykon originally had no idea where the Gate was or what shape it took; had they not overheard that the Throne itself held the Gate, they would have been searching the entire palace by hand to try and figure out what they were looking for - they might have even overlooked the gem multiple times in their search. The throne room couldn't be scried into, similar to Dorukan's dungeon, but this divination-blocker is sustained by the Twelve Gods themselves instead of being something that can be claimed by taking a single magic item. And knowledge of what the Sapphire is in the Sapphire Guard was only passed down by word of mouth from Soon to Shojo to Hinjo, never written or recorded. They would have had to find one very specific person in the whole city, assuming he even lived through the battle, and interrogated him to get the information. And he got away scot-free on a ship before anyone on Team Badguy could have a chance to figure out his importance.

[Xihirli]

Dorukan DID have measures in place after his death that Xykon and Redcloak seemingly had no way to bypass: his gate could only be accessed by someone Good-Aligned.

And, perhaps more importantly, he also kept this secret. It’s not in the diary. It’s probably not in his spell book or anything else Xykon would have free access to after killing Dorukan. The only hint he has is that this other area in the dungeon has a similar protection.

Now, once it’s figured out it’ll be easy to get around it. Any number of Good-Aligned people could be tricked or forced into dispelling the last defense, but it’s not like Dorukan had NO contingencies. Team Evil had the run of the place for… weeks? And couldn’t manage to even get to the gate, giving a ragtag band of adventures plenty of time to swoop in and save the day.

[dancrilis]

Think I will broadly stick with my previous answer:

Lirian's was the worst in my mind:

She attached it to living creatures who broke it (and could have gotten bored and done that at any time being free willed creatures), her defences were effectively dealt with by low level goblins - the only true threat was herself (who granted being a elf would live a while).

Soon's was the best in my mind:
A secret order of paladins dedicated to preemptively eliminating threats, linking the gate to the center of power so regardless of who held the thrown (even if they didn't know about the gate which may have happened if the leader got assassinated) so it would be protected, and situated in a prominent city which would not present a soft target for most, and than himself and a legion of all the deceased members of the paladin order to defend it.
It was a tough cookie to crack.

Where the other three lie?
We don't know about Dorukan's as his defense likely intended to include himself, but as such it had a single point of weakness (himself). I will say that his was second weakest.
Girard likely next as at least he had a clear plan for his death and if any individual died it would not be an issue.

For Kraagor I am not sure - for all we know Serini coded her diary to point to his tomb rather than the gate as a bit of misdirection in case it fell into the wrong hands (and had the other ones correct as it was her diary in case she wanted to find them). I am tieing it with Girard's at the moment - but could easily go up or down in my estimation.

I may be inclined to push Kraagor's into second place and it might take Soon's position as first subject to how things go - whatever else you can say about them it clearly lasted longer then the rest of them which is likely worth something.

[Ionathus]

I'll preface by saying that I think all of the gates are indeed Epic-level strongholds. They did their jobs, and the threat each one posed required extremely high levels of force to bypass. They're all at least B tier in my book. At the same time, none of them are perfect, because that's the point of the Scribble: they each tried to go it alone, rather than band together and create a stronger, more lasting defense.

I won't rank Kraagor's Gate because we haven't seen all of it yet. Based on what we've seen so far, I feel like its defenses are pretty solid, but I won't rank it.

Roughly in order from lowest (relative) defense to highest:

Lirian's - Without spellcasters, you'd have a hard time against her army of nature. The weakness against liches is bad, but pretty niche. The death of the treants via forest fire would've been solved by Lirian if she wasn't busy being murdered by Xykon at the time.
Dorukan's - Big dungeon full of monsters and an epic-level wizard calling the shots. Seems like the Sigil did most of the heavy lifting, though, and Dorukan didn't really have a strong backup plan.
Girard's - Secretive, ingenious, with numerous redundancies and a highly-regimented spellcasting defense system. Turning your family into a reclusive cult has its pros and cons and is a non-zero risk, but it should hold for awhile at least if you're careful about family size and your indoctrination. Even if your illusions can be countered, you've still got 7+ high-level wizards who can snipe spells as your intruders run the gauntlet. I honestly don't see any glaring weaknesses here, short of Familicide.
Soon's - Having the backing of an entire nation and its army, plus secret Ghost Paladin assassins nobody knows about, is about as strong a play as you can get. At the end of the day, this is the only gate that actually came the closest to stopping Team Evil (plus an ocean of hobgoblin soldiers).


"Arrogant" as a con? All of the scribblers were arrogant. They all thought they could hold it. The Gate wasn't a target due to the Azurites. Hell, the Gate and the entire Sapphire Guard was almost entirely unknown to virtually everyone in the world.

Seconded. The Order of the Scribble fell apart because of arrogance, on all sides. Soon just gets the blame because he's the paladin and therefore must have obviously had the biggest ego in the entire world, paladins amirite???? Arrogant chaotic types love to mock paladins (just watch Serini interacting with captive O-Chul and Lien), but for all of that, Soon's defenses got the farthest.

[Bacon Elemental]

While I don't quite think Soon's Gate was the best defended (For a start there was a real if unlikely long-term risk of the Gate being destroyed incidentally given that it was in the chair of the Lord of Azure City.)

However, it is probbably one of the best long-term prospects so far in terms of Gate defense, not being reliant on a single person's life to protect, and I think much better prospects than Girard's Gate had in the long run. Sooner or later one of them was going to get busted or run off, and being a mono-school fortress is a major weakness.

[Carl]

As for Lirian i'd point out that the only examples of the virus not working we saw involved a racial immunity and a divine artifact. Whilst Cure Disease and Break Enchantment did nothing.

The fire vulnerability is an issue, but it's in the middle of the forest and the gates seem pretty fragile given they can be taken down by a sword strike so even if supported by stone, if the rest of the forest caught fire the radiant heat might well have done it in anyway.


As far as the Scirbblers flaw, i'd say it was't so much arrogance as dis-unity. It's obvious at least 2 distinct groups existed with Dory+Lir and Giriad+Serrini, though serrini seems to have had a good opinion on everyone barring Soon. Krageors a big unknown and probably key to how they held together so long. Soon in some respects is pretty blank as well, the most we know is that he couldn't unite the diseperate PoV's into a cohesive force. He had the authority, but he wasn#'t a great leader. At least in his scribbler days. TBF to him though, his class really doesn't help foster the kind of flexibility needed. Roys got a big leg up there, his class lets him be flexible and he actually has the witherell to develop that flexibility.

[Resileaf]

Talking about whether Soon was a good leader or not is too soon (rimshot) considering we don't know what exactly caused the split. There's something about Kraagor's death that is yet to be revealed. It could be as simple as Kraagor pushed Soon out of the rift at the last second and the others did not believe him, or something like Soon, in a moment of cowardice, pushed Kraagor into the Snarl to save himself and the others never forgave him.

[hroþila]

something like Soon, in a moment of cowardice, pushed Kraagor into the Snarl to save himself and the others never forgave him.
Can't have been cowardice because paladins are immune to fear, right? So it would have to have been a calculated decision out of selfishness. Which would put Soon too obviously in the wrong, I think.

[Resileaf]

Can't have been cowardice because paladins are immune to fear, right? So it would have to have been a calculated decision out of selfishness. Which would put Soon too obviously in the wrong, I think.

Call it how you want, a desire to save his own soul at the expense of someone else's is still fundamentally cowardice.

[awa]

I feel a weakness of the last gate is it is essentially just a stalling game. It has thus far presented no ability to actually stop a high level threat. They can just keep going in killing monsters and getting levels. Now stalling could work fine if it was combined with a plea for assistance or strong allies that could come to your aid, but as it is it cant actually stop the problem.

All the others have a least some ability to punish a failed attack and/or adapt. The last gate just forces you into a 15 minute work day.

[Carl]

Talking about whether Soon was a good leader or not is too soon (rimshot) considering we don't know what exactly caused the split. There's something about Kraagor's death that is yet to be revealed. It could be as simple as Kraagor pushed Soon out of the rift at the last second and the others did not believe him, or something like Soon, in a moment of cowardice, pushed Kraagor into the Snarl to save himself and the others never forgave him.

It's obvious from the few other bits of info we got regarding their adventures that Soon wasn't popular with everyone well before Kraegors death. Don't get me wrong, i think learning more about Kraegor will help understand how they stayed together so long, but there where clearly cracks forming well before that point.

That isn't to say Soon was necessarily innately a poor leader, but rather his party besides him was composed heavily, of Chaotic and/or Neutral types. Paladins generally are going to have issue leading that kind of party and keeping within their oaths at the same time unless they're exceptionally good at both, (O-Chul is probably a good example of this done right though, Hinjo seems to be good at it too). Leading a bunch of mostly Lawful Good types is probably somthing Soon was fine at, and i get the feelign, (it's just a feeling mind), that he got a lot better as he got older at dealing with the difficulties involved.

basically Soon comes off as a square Peg in a round hole as Leader of the Scribbblers rather than an innately bad leader.

[Mike Havran]

While I don't quite think Soon's Gate was the best defended (For a start there was a real if unlikely long-term risk of the Gate being destroyed incidentally given that it was in the chair of the Lord of Azure City.)

However, it is probbably one of the best long-term prospects so far in terms of Gate defense, not being reliant on a single person's life to protect, and I think much better prospects than Girard's Gate had in the long run. Sooner or later one of them was going to get busted or run off, and being a mono-school fortress is a major weakness. I think the argument that Girard's gate had a weakness that somebody from the clan could betray the cause or go rogue or something like that should be compared to the fact that the very leadership of (living) Sapphire Guard was handed over to a secular leader of a large city full of corrupt aristocrats (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0414.html) who select the new leader in case the old one dies without a designated heir (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0586.html).

Just as the Girard's defenders were screwed over by bad luck of being related to a black dragon, Soon's were just lucky that Shojo was a good guy and the throne did not go to somebody like devil-allied Kubota. Top politics as it is, something like that was bound to happen sooner than a dangerous defection from the Draketooth mafia. The question what Soon would do with a legal but corrupt Lord is open for speculation, I guess.

[Laurentio III]

Can't have been cowardice because paladins are immune to fear, right? So it would have to have been a calculated decision out of selfishness. Which would put Soon too obviously in the wrong, I think.
Betrayal of allies is a no-no for paladins, no way around. You can find a way to lie, you can kill someone and rationalize later. But betrayal is a line you can't pass.
I assume it's a rule to avoid in-party killing by a zelous paladin.

[Kurald Galain]

Sapphire Guard was handed over to a secular leader of a large city full of corrupt aristocrats (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0414.html) who select the new leader in case the old one dies without a designated heir (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0586.html).
The obvious response to that, then, is to designate a heir. It's not that hard, you've got a church full of paladins so pick one that looks promising.

[Mike Havran]

The obvious response to that, then, is to designate a heir. It's not that hard, you've got a church full of paladins so pick one that looks promising. Don't forget the assassinations. Shojo narrowly escaped one, feigned senility to avoid more attempts, and Hinjo would have been killed heirless several times without the protagonists' intervention.

[dancrilis]

Can't have been cowardice because paladins are immune to fear, right? So it would have to have been a calculated decision out of selfishness. Which would put Soon too obviously in the wrong, I think.

It would perhaps depend on who Kraagor was as a person - if it comes down to a choice between saving himself and saving Belkar would Roy choose to save Belkar, particularly is a sacrifice was needed and Belkar was willing and able to make it?

If Belkar was better regarded by his party one could see such a decision made by the party leader to lead to a break in the party.

If Good people are allowed to prioritise the lives of Good people over Evil people then presumedly Good people can prioritise the lives of Good people over Neutral people - and as such Good party members could likely prioritise their lives over the lives of problematic party members.

[Liquor Box]

I also think Dorukan's gate is ranked far too highly here - the castle was hardly impenetrable, and out of the three gates where the primary defense was "lots of magic" only Dorukan mostly just filled the place with monsters and then sat around doing very little to reinforce his defenses. Once Xykon drew him out it was pretty easy to take over, and not one but two adventuring parties got in there just fine. Seriously, at least Girard's gate had traps, and most of them were placed more accurately.

Meanwhile, Soon's gate wasn't just protected by a city and an army but by being wholly inconspicuous. If you didn't know about the gate you could stumble around for ages without finding it. Heck, not only did Soon have protections while everyone was alive, he clearly had better defenses in place in the event of death; Girard's gate relied on a constant stream of illusion refreshers from his family while Soon made sure that even if something similar to Familicide hit the Sapphire Guard, they would still have defenses in place.


We shouldn't forget that Dorukan's final defense is what held Xykon back the longest (so far, Kraagor's Tomb may break that record. Although, now that the heroes are her, I doubt it).




5: Dorukan's Gate. I feel like the fact that Dorukan was a key linchpin in its defense while being an old guy kinda forces this one to be last. Like, Xykon could just move in after he killed him, not a good look. The ward was good, I'll give him that much though (if at the end of the day, bypassable). The fact that he randomly put a self-destruct rune though, not so much.



Dorukan's - Big dungeon full of monsters and an epic-level wizard calling the shots. Seems like the Sigil did most of the heavy lifting, though, and Dorukan didn't really have a strong backup plan.

I think people are significantly underrating Dorukan's gate.

It had the following layers of defence:
- The fact that its location was secret.
- The wards which meant Xykon had to lure Dorukan out to fight.
- Dorukan himself.
- Several dungeon levels filled with monsters and traps etc.
- The sigils which allowed only the good aligned to pass.
- The spells on the gate, which Xykon spent months trying (unsuccessfully) to bypass
- The self destruct button

I get that there's an argument that the Dorukan himself layer may have fallen away when Dorukan died. but I have two points in response. First, the gate held up longer than any other gate so far after his death. Secondly, if he had died of natural causes we have no idea whether he had a contingencies for the gate's continued defence - maybe he'd lich himself too.

My rating from least effective to most effective:
5. Lyrian's gate.
4. Girard's gate (the familicide only negated one layer of defence, and rest were a cakewalk).
3. Serini's gate (based on what we know of it so far)
2. Dorukon's gate (based on the above).
1. Soon's gate (the simple fact than an entire army was required and even after it had defeated the city, the gates defences still were succeeding but for Miko is hard to look past)

[Peelee]

I think people are significantly underrating Dorukan's gate.

It had the following layers of defence:
- The fact that its location was secret.


Was this not a defense of every Gate?

[Liquor Box]

Was this not a defense of every Gate?

Not sure about Lyrian's. If it was secret, how did Xykon find it? Just stumble across it?

Even if it is true for every gate, it's worth mentioning I think. It's an important part of the defence (likely the most important part for Girard's).

[Peelee]

Not sure about Lyrian's. If it was secret, how did Xykon find it? Just stumble across it?.

This is answered in Start of Darkness.


Redcloak knew about it because the Dark One knew about it because a goblin had happened upon the rift before it was a Gate. Which could have happened to anyone with any of the rifts.

[Ruck]

It's obvious from the few other bits of info we got regarding their adventures that Soon wasn't popular with everyone well before Kraegors death. Don't get me wrong, i think learning more about Kraegor will help understand how they stayed together so long, but there where clearly cracks forming well before that point.

Was it obvious? Girard is the only one I remember making cracks (the other kind) about him before Kraagor died. Although I do think there were cracks forming in the Scribble that split open when Kraagor died, we still don't really know the cause of the animosity or who really held it against whom (besides the aforementioned Girard toward Soon).

Anyway, back of a napkin guess, Soon's and Kraagor's Gates were best defended, Lirian's and Dorukan's were the worst, and Girard is in between.

And, yes, the point of their Gate's failures is that they split up rather than working together and each gate fell to a unique weakness of the particular defender's approach.

[Kurald Galain]

Don't forget the assassinations. Shojo narrowly escaped one, feigned senility to avoid more attempts,
Yes, but Shojo probably had his heir designated before the assassinations started. Hinjo might have done it off-screen because he's not stupid; it sounds like designating a heir is pretty much the first thing you should do as a ruler.

[Yendor]

Was it obvious? Girard is the only one I remember making cracks (the other kind) about him before Kraagor died. Although I do think there were cracks forming in the Scribble that split open when Kraagor died, we still don't really know the cause of the animosity or who really held it against whom (besides the aforementioned Girard toward Soon).
Note that Dorukan's defenses on his Gate would have kept out Girard, but not Soon.

[Metastachydium]

Dorukan DID have measures in place after his death that Xykon and Redcloak seemingly had no way to bypass: his gate could only be accessed by someone Good-Aligned.

And, perhaps more importantly, he also kept this secret. It’s not in the diary. It’s probably not in his spell book or anything else Xykon would have free access to after killing Dorukan. The only hint he has is that this other area in the dungeon has a similar protection.

Now, once it’s figured out it’ll be easy to get around it. Any number of Good-Aligned people could be tricked or forced into dispelling the last defense, but it’s not like Dorukan had NO contingencies. Team Evil had the run of the place for… weeks? And couldn’t manage to even get to the gate, giving a ragtag band of adventures plenty of time to swoop in and save the day.

The sigil is kind of overrated, if you ask me. What kept that Gate unwrapped was ultimately dumb luck and early installment weirdness. I mean, the Dungeon had Good-aligned goblin children and the oblivious Monster prowling around in the throne room and Xykon regularly instructed underlings (mostly goblins that are likely the descendants of peaceful villagers he abducted) to touch the Gate.

[Ruck]

I mean, the Dungeon had Good-aligned goblin children

Did it now?

I'm thinking of this (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0092.html), sure, but then I'm thinking "And then what happened? (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0100.html)"

[Resileaf]

Yes, but Shojo probably had his heir designated before the assassinations started. Hinjo might have done it off-screen because he's not stupid; it sounds like designating a heir is pretty much the first thing you should do as a ruler.

Historically-speaking, medieval rulers don't designate a heir until they have a child (almost always a son) or until it's obvious they won't have the time to have children and need to name another family member before they die. Otherwise, should you designate a heir and have a son later on, well...

Let's just say it tends to not end up well.

[dancrilis]

1. Soon's gate (the simple fact than an entire army was required and even after it had defeated the city, the gates defences still were succeeding but for Miko is hard to look past)

I do agree that Soon's gate was likely the best defended but I don't rate the fight against Xykon as a reason for it - Soon only stood a chance because Xykon didn't seem to think to box him, and only because Xykon broke with the battle plan, and seemingly only because Xykon didn't know about incorporeal creatures.
Xykon fought Soon to Soon's strengths and Soon with the entire Sapphire Guard and enough time for Redcloak to have an epiphany, withdraw and assemble his forces, capture the city, have a cleric duel and find the throne room in a large castle - still wasn't able to get the job done.

In contrast Lirian's gate which I have rated the worst was actually able to actual defeat Team Evil - and that defeat didn't rely on Team Evil messing up - if she had just killed them (or given them their own prison cells) she would have won.

[Metastachydium]

Did it now?

I'm thinking of this (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0092.html), sure, but then I'm thinking "And then what happened? (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0100.html)"

That's one juvenile goblin out of several. Notably, the one with the shoes wanted to help them get out of the dungeon, while the bespectacled one stayed helpful all the way through. Not to mention that even if they were still susceptible to temptation and whatnot, DCF!Haley qualified as being "of pure heart", so…

[Peelee]

I do agree that Soon's gate was likely the best defended but I don't rate the fight against Xykon as a reason for it - Soon only stood a chance because Xykon didn't seem to think to box him, and only because Xykon broke with the battle plan, and seemingly only because Xykon didn't know about incorporeal creatures.


Conversely, Xykon only got as far as he did because he had a goblin who is the emissary of his god, who managed to find a highly militarized city of combatants capable of posing a serious threat to Azure City and also distract most of the defenses from Xykon's attempt to bypass them all. Also that emissary only managed to even be alive due to having an actual artifact and they were only able to get to Soon's Gate regardless due to said artifact allowing the emissary to keep his spellcasting powers and also said emissary was able to turn his cohort into a lich (presumably an obscure technique, as presented).

Circumstances affect how things turn out. Looking only at the circumstances on one side and not the other does nothing.

[dancrilis]

Conversely, Xykon only got as far as he did because he had a goblin who is the emissary of his god, who managed to find a highly militarized city of combatants capable of posing a serious threat to Azure City and also distract most of the defenses from Xykon's attempt to bypass them all. Also that emissary only managed to even be alive due to having an actual artifact and they were only able to get to Soon's Gate regardless due to said artifact allowing the emissary to keep his spellcasting powers and also said emissary was able to turn his cohort into a lich (presumably an obscure technique, as presented).

Circumstances affect how things turn out. Looking only at the circumstances on one side and not the other does nothing.

I am not sure if you are agreeing with me or not.

My point (such as it is) is that I don't really rate the fights that highly when determining how well a gate was defended - the actual fight between Xykon and Soon or Lirian I don't think matter that much to viewing how well the Gates themselves were defended, except insofar as now much the gates relied on them specifically.

Soon was a very last defence of his Gate - the final desperate hurdle against an enemy that bypassed the other defences, if he and his ghost-martyrs hadn't been present it would have been a defence the gate was lacking but it would still have been one of the best of not the best defended gates in my view.

[Peelee]

I am not sure if you are agreeing with me or not.

My point (such as it is) is that I don't really rate the fights that highly when determining how well a gate was defended - the actual fight between Xykon and Soon or Lirian I don't think matter that much to viewing how well the Gates themselves were defended, except insofar as now much the gates relied on them specifically.

Soon was a very last defence of his Gate - the final desperate hurdle against an enemy that bypassed the other defences, if he and his ghost-martyrs hadn't been present it would have been a defence the gate was lacking but it would still have been one of the best of not the best defended gates in my view.

Agreeing, but with showing the other side of the coin as well. One side getting lucky shouldn't mean a defense wasn't good enough.

[Kurald Galain]

Historically-speaking, medieval rulers
Historically speaking, medieval rulers have strict succession rules that do not involve a council of nobles voting on them. If the ruler doesn't have a son, the crown goes to his brother or nephew or whatnot, in a strictly defined order.

Because otherwise, as you say, it tends to not end up well. The reason why a ruler of Sapphire City needs to establish a heir IS because SC has this council vote.

[Fyraltari]

Historically speaking, medieval rulers have strict succession rules that do not involve a council of nobles voting on them. If the ruler doesn't have a son, the crown goes to his brother or nephew or whatnot, in a strictly defined order.

Because otherwise, as you say, it tends to not end up well. The reason why a ruler of Sapphire City needs to establish a heir IS because SC has this council vote.

Strictly speaking, you can't generalize "madieval rulers" because every kindgom did its own thing according to its own customs. Many medieval monarchies were indeed elective monarchies or partially elective. The council of noble picking a new king when no obvious heir is available is hardly ahistorical. For example, that is exactly how France went from the Carolingian dynasty to the Capetian dynasty: Hughes Capet was elected king by the peers of the kingdom. It wasn't long until the ennemies of the Capetian took advantage of that to claim he was low-born (Dante's Divine Comedy claims his father was a butcher if memory serves), which isn't true, he was duke of modern-day Île-de-France.

Also, it's Azure City and Sapphire Guard, not Sapphire City.

[Peelee]

Historically speaking, medieval anything did not have wizards and sorcerers and dragons modern sensibilities.

D&D has vaguely medieval set dressing. That's about as close as it gets to historical medieval society. I am firmly against using medieval historical accuracy as any sort of benchmark for anything D&D related.

[Metastachydium]

Strictly speaking, you can't generalize "madieval rulers" because every kindgom did its own thing according to its own customs. Many medieval monarchies were indeed elective monarchies or partially elective. The council of noble picking a new king when no obvious heir is available is hardly ahistorical. For example, that is exactly how France went from the Carolingian dynasty to the Capetian dynasty: Hughes Capet was elected king by the peers of the kingdom.

(Meanwhile, in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the szlachta electing monarchs was the norm rather than the exception.)

[Resileaf]

Well I suppose I remember more the times when the lack of heir declaration went badly than the times where there wasn't really an issue. That tends to be the sort of stuff that gets retold more often since it's more juicy.

[Fyraltari]

(Meanwhile, in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the szlachta electing monarchs was the norm rather than the exception.)

Also, the Holy Roman Empire.

[spectralphoenix]

In Azure City's case, the Sapphire Guard and/or church of the Twelve probably played a big part in things too. Things might not have been so simple for Kubota if the paladins hadn't been practically wiped out.

Even if an evil ruler took the throne, though, a competent evil ruler would still be heavily incentivized to keep the Gates safe. It's really only crazies like the Holey Brotherhood or Baron Pineapple that would consciously try to destroy a gate, and only servants of the Dark One who (mistakenly) would try to control it. It seems pretty fair to assume the nobles wouldn't have voted in them.

[Liquor Box]

I do agree that Soon's gate was likely the best defended but I don't rate the fight against Xykon as a reason for it - Soon only stood a chance because Xykon didn't seem to think to box him, and only because Xykon broke with the battle plan, and seemingly only because Xykon didn't know about incorporeal creatures.
Xykon fought Soon to Soon's strengths and Soon with the entire Sapphire Guard and enough time for Redcloak to have an epiphany, withdraw and assemble his forces, capture the city, have a cleric duel and find the throne room in a large castle - still wasn't able to get the job done.

In contrast Lirian's gate which I have rated the worst was actually able to actual defeat Team Evil - and that defeat didn't rely on Team Evil messing up - if she had just killed them (or given them their own prison cells) she would have won.

To me it seems like in both cases Xykon was on the cusp of losing because he didn't understand an aspect of his enemies' defences. In one case it was the virus, in the other it was the immmunities of the ghists.

One thing that was very different between the two battles was that the Team Evil that challenged Soon was a lot more powerful than the Team Evil who challenged Lyrian the first time round. Apart from any levels gained or other changes, the lichification of Xykon was a step change in power for him. So much so that Lyrian wasn't even a threat to him in round 2.

[Ruck]

That's one juvenile goblin out of several. Notably, the one with the shoes wanted to help them get out of the dungeon, while the bespectacled one stayed helpful all the way through. Not to mention that even if they were still susceptible to temptation and whatnot, DCF!Haley qualified as being "of pure heart", so…

All right, fair enough. I had forgotten that the goblin teenagers were not all in cahoots on that one.

[Kish]

There's no such thing as Sapphire City and Soon was never the ruler of Azure City.

[Nymrod]

For me

1) Dorukan's Gate. Held by Xykon for months, could not penetrate the main defense of the gate. This is an epic level spellcaster with access to the strongest antimagic in D&D (superb dispelling) yet still could not penetrate the gate's defenses. Also do we know that Redcloak is actually right about a good aligned person being able to bypass it? I thought that was just an untested hypothesis. So very hard to access and was only destructible because Dorukan wanted it to be destructible.

2) Soon's Gate. Extremely hard to take and hold given there is an entire city and a truly epic level defense in Soon and the rest of the Ghost Martyrs (just imagine someone like Miko joining Soon as a deathless defender bound to the gate; Xykon would have been dead). I only rank it second because while the gate is hard to take, it's not hard to destroy. This is a throne room, monarchs hold court, a strong group could have gotten in there under false pretenses and sundered that gem before anyone could react.

3) Tie between Lirian and Girard's. Both are just stupid. Girard's defenses count entirely on his family. No matter the indoctrination after a while there would either not be enough in number or strength to keep those defenses all of which are completely negated by a single spell any high level adventuring group keeps access to (either true sight or mind blank) not to mention undead being unaffected by mind affecting effects. Meanwhile I guess Lirian never told Dorukan how she was defending the gate cause he'd have been forced to give her at least some pointers. Mid level npcs, destructible environment, a single major deterrent that can be warded with a low level spell, undead or paladins (seriously the sapphire guard could just strut there and take over the gate). Any group that would have probed her defenses/used divination could have countered her.
I do not mind Girard's being this stupid because the major deterrent was still impressive and it perfectly matched his own delusions. But Lirian's I consider a weak point in storytelling. Lirian should have known better.

Not ranking Kraagor's because too many unknowns. Not impressed with the teleportation trick. Most groups would have been using arcane sight/greater arcane sight and spotted the conjuration effect on each doorway. Even if that is hidden, the geometry of the caves makes no sense so you'd have to wonder if there was teleportation involved. A single errant dispelling of enough power near the gate would have shut down her teleportation traps for long enough that someone would notice something is up, something that could easily just happen by mistake. I am still waiting to meet whatever deepspawn buddy Serini has birthing all these monsters though. Expecting something major defending the last one (Tarrasque time?)

[Fyraltari]

There's no such thing as Sapphire City and Soon was never the ruler of Azure City.

Soon was never the ruler of Azure City. All of hiis sucessors as leader of the Sapphire Guard were.

[Peelee]

For me

1) Dorukan's Gate.....

only destructible because Dorukan wanted it to be destructible.

All the Gates seem to be easily destructible.

[brian 333]

Girard's Gate was defended by illusions, which are easily defeated by high level spellcasters. However, what is overlooked in this analysis is that the minions of such casters would be vulnerable unless the caster has lots of seventh level spell slots to spare. Meanwhile, the many Sorcerers who made up his family could snipe from concealed defenses and the higher level ones could have cast non-illusion based spells to strip the intruding caster of magical defenses until ordinary crossbows would penetrate the unarmored caster's hide.

It's weakness wasn't the family plan. That could have lead to stronger and more varied approaches to the defense over time. Stevie might have been a sorcerer/rogue while Tomi grew up to be a sorcerer/fighter, and Uwe grew up to become a ranger/sorcerer/red black dragon disciple.

Its apparent weakness was to a unique epic spell cast by a long dead spellcaster whose magical formula was not available to anyone, only castable by a very tiny group of people, and actually targeted at a seemingly unrelated,(no pun intended,) target.

[Carl]

For me

1) Dorukan's Gate. Held by Xykon for months, could not penetrate the main defense of the gate. This is an epic level spellcaster with access to the strongest antimagic in D&D (superb dispelling) yet still could not penetrate the gate's defenses. Also do we know that Redcloak is actually right about a good aligned person being able to bypass it? I thought that was just an untested hypothesis. So very hard to access and was only destructible because Dorukan wanted it to be destructible.

2) Soon's Gate. Extremely hard to take and hold given there is an entire city and a truly epic level defense in Soon and the rest of the Ghost Martyrs (just imagine someone like Miko joining Soon as a deathless defender bound to the gate; Xykon would have been dead). I only rank it second because while the gate is hard to take, it's not hard to destroy. This is a throne room, monarchs hold court, a strong group could have gotten in there under false pretenses and sundered that gem before anyone could react.

3) Tie between Lirian and Girard's. Both are just stupid. Girard's defenses count entirely on his family. No matter the indoctrination after a while there would either not be enough in number or strength to keep those defenses all of which are completely negated by a single spell any high level adventuring group keeps access to (either true sight or mind blank) not to mention undead being unaffected by mind affecting effects. Meanwhile I guess Lirian never told Dorukan how she was defending the gate cause he'd have been forced to give her at least some pointers. Mid level npcs, destructible environment, a single major deterrent that can be warded with a low level spell, undead or paladins (seriously the sapphire guard could just strut there and take over the gate). Any group that would have probed her defenses/used divination could have countered her.
I do not mind Girard's being this stupid because the major deterrent was still impressive and it perfectly matched his own delusions. But Lirian's I consider a weak point in storytelling. Lirian should have known better.

Not ranking Kraagor's because too many unknowns. Not impressed with the teleportation trick. Most groups would have been using arcane sight/greater arcane sight and spotted the conjuration effect on each doorway. Even if that is hidden, the geometry of the caves makes no sense so you'd have to wonder if there was teleportation involved. A single errant dispelling of enough power near the gate would have shut down her teleportation traps for long enough that someone would notice something is up, something that could easily just happen by mistake. I am still waiting to meet whatever deepspawn buddy Serini has birthing all these monsters though. Expecting something major defending the last one (Tarrasque time?)

Care to specify which low level spell your thinking of for negating lirians defences?

Also undead may be a major weakness, but there's not many undead that would be powerful enough to overpower the gates physical defences even without Lirian around. the same would apply if in a hypothetical scenario the Paladins had tried taking the gate.

Honestly barring whatever final trick is protecting Serreni's gate in terms of resistance to brute physical force and living creatures Lirian's was probably the best. It's too big flaws where it's location, (not much can be done about that), and the danger of undead, (although it has to be said the major weaknesses are high level vampires and Lich's, most other thing are within the realms of what the hard physical force countermeasures can deal with, plus non-intelligent).

[Elanfanforlife]

Care to specify which low level spell your thinking of for negating lirians defences?


They're probably thinking of Remove Disease, but given it's on the cleric spell list and Redcloak couldn't cure Xykon without turning him into a Lich, the virus can probably protect against it.

[Carl]

They're probably thinking of Remove Disease, but given it's on the cleric spell list and Redcloak couldn't cure Xykon without turning him into a Lich, the virus can probably protect against it.

RC specifically mentions he tried that and break enchantment AFAIK. I was wondering if it was somthing else.

[Laurentio III]

:redcloak:It's no use. I've tried everything from Remove Curse to Remove Disease.
:smallwink:Have you tried Heal?
:redcloak:No, because I'm not high enough level to cast Heal.

[Mike Havran]

Yes, but Shojo probably had his heir designated before the assassinations started. Hinjo might have done it off-screen because he's not stupid; it sounds like designating a heir is pretty much the first thing you should do as a ruler.I don't think either of your statements is correct.

Zhou Bo asks Hinjo if he's the heir to the Azure City's throne. Hinjo explains that he's not, but it's widely expected that Shojo will designate him as heir when he turns eighteen.

This means:
1. Shojo was cool with waiting ~2 years before designating Hinjo as his heir. The position was vacant, otherwise Hinjo would simply tell who the current "designated heir" was.
2. Heir to the throne is a legit talk among commoners in AC, so it's not a super secret that only gets revealed while reading the will of passed ruler.
3. Kubota wanted to kill Katos specifically to sway vote, which would have been useless if Hinjo had designated his heir.

[Laurentio III]

1. Shojo was cool with waiting ~2 years before designating Hinjo as his heir. The position was vacant, otherwise Hinjo would simply tell who the current "designated heir" was.
I assume that the reason is:
• Shojo designes Hinjo as his heir.
• Family rulers faces the possibility of Shojo retiring. They don't like the idea.
• Hinjo is targeted for assassination, and is not experienced enough to survive.

Instead:
• Everyone and their grandmothers know that Hinjo is the most probable heir, so he will eventually become leader anyway.
• No one is assassinated.

[Mike Havran]

I assume that the reason is:
• Shojo designes Hinjo as his heir.
• Family rulers faces the possibility of Shojo retiring. They don't like the idea.
• Hinjo is targeted for assassination, and is not experienced enough to survive.

Instead:
• Everyone and their grandmothers know that Hinjo is the most probable heir, so he will eventually become leader anyway.
• No one is assassinated.That's kinda bizzare scenario. So Shojo did not designate Hinjo immediatey because he was convinced the nobles like him as a ruler so much that they will murder his nephew so that he may remain on the throne longer?

[Laurentio III]

That's kinda bizzare scenario. So Shojo did not designate Hinjo immediatey because he was convinced the nobles like him as a ruler so much that they will murder his nephew so that he may remain on the throne longer?
It's my take, exactly.
Shojo is (fakely) senile, apparently malleable.
Hinjo is a paladin. Not know to be easy to manipulate.
And if you believe Shojo's ruse, you do expect him to became even more senile with passing time. So you'd want him on the throne as long as possible.

Obviously, it being my take, I could be wrong. Maybe Shojo just likes to have tuna sandwiches.

[woweedd]

The key Aesop of this whole gate setup is that Scribble failed with the whole "monitor other gates only, no visits"-policy because they couldn't work together.

Fine, they had bad enough relationships that building common approach for defending the things was out of the question, but they really couldn't even be bothered to even set up an alarm effectively saying "gate threatened, I'm about to die, come and help NOW, you guys hate me but world might get nuked". The current setup only shows that gate has been destroyed. Even Lirian did not have any prepared panic button for Dorukan or apparently vice versa despite being lovers.

No points for effort.

It's kinda a central theme of the whole story, there are countless moments where characters try to go it alone only to screwed over. V's attempt to take Xykon head-on comes to mind, as does Belkar's entire arc

[tomandtish]

Dorukan DID have measures in place after his death that Xykon and Redcloak seemingly had no way to bypass: his gate could only be accessed by someone Good-Aligned.

And, perhaps more importantly, he also kept this secret. It’s not in the diary. It’s probably not in his spell book or anything else Xykon would have free access to after killing Dorukan. The only hint he has is that this other area in the dungeon has a similar protection.

Now, once it’s figured out it’ll be easy to get around it. Any number of Good-Aligned people could be tricked or forced into dispelling the last defense, but it’s not like Dorukan had NO contingencies. Team Evil had the run of the place for… weeks? And couldn’t manage to even get to the gate, giving a ragtag band of adventures plenty of time to swoop in and save the day.

OTOH, we have to note that Nale and The Linear Guild apparently knew about this even before they reached the sigils. So I'm not sure how big a secret that was.

[Fyraltari]

It's my take, exactly.
Shojo is (fakely) senile, apparently malleable.
Hinjo is a paladin. Not know to be easy to manipulate.
And if you believe Shojo's ruse, you do expect him to became even more senile with passing time. So you'd want him on the throne as long as possible.

Obviously, it being my take, I could be wrong. Maybe Shojo just likes to have tuna sandwiches.

But at the time of HtPghS, Shojo wasn't acting senile yet.

[Xihirli]

OTOH, we have to note that Nale and The Linear Guild apparently knew about this even before they reached the sigils. So I'm not sure how big a secret that was.

Maybe Sabine figured it out talking to Dorukan’s outsider employees? I’m struggling to think of a way that Nale could have discovered this but Redcloak couldn’t.

I mean, early installment weirdness, but besides that.

[Fyraltari]

Maybe Sabine figured it out talking to Dorukan’s outsider employees? I’m struggling to think of a way that Nale could have discovered this but Redcloak couldn’t.

I mean, early installment weirdness, but besides that.

Loki and Hilgya knew about the Talisman. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0074.html)

[tomandtish]

Loki and Hilgya knew about the Talisman. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0074.html)

They knew about the talisman, but does that automatically mean they knew about the requirement for good aligned people to touch the sigils?

[Fyraltari]

They knew about the talisman, but does that automatically mean they knew about the requirement for good aligned people to touch the sigils?

Automatically? No. But it would explain how Nale knew when Team Evil didn't.

[tomandtish]

Automatically? No. But it would explain how Nale knew when Team Evil didn't.

Yeah, in rereading comic 97 Xykon specifically states that they learned the condition from watching The Linear Guild. So Loki seems logical....

Except that also implies that they knew ahead of time that the OOTS would be there as well.

[Mike Havran]

Yeah, in rereading comic 97 Xykon specifically states that they learned the condition from watching The Linear Guild. So Loki seems logical....

Except that also implies that they knew ahead of time that the OOTS would be there as well.Well, they might have planned to capture or charm the sylphs and make them touch the sigils.

[Fyraltari]

Yeah, in rereading comic 97 Xykon specifically states that they learned the condition from watching The Linear Guild. So Loki seems logical....

Except that also implies that they knew ahead of time that the OOTS would be there as well.

Xykon did hire them to kill them.

[brian 333]

OTOH, we have to note that Nale and The Linear Guild apparently knew about this even before they reached the sigils. So I'm not sure how big a secret that was.

Since Xykon didn't care about the talisman, it is unlikely he had any plan regarding the sigils. The only one that mattered to him was the one on the gate.

[SlashDash]

It's a problem because we lack a lot of information here.
We don't know the real defenses behind Kraggor's gate. Serini made it clear that the gate isn't in the tunnels. Considering Redcloak moved the statue and she isn't bothered by it, it's not there either.

Who knows what else she had planned?


Girard's gate - Same issue. We know the illusions were in place - Lots of traps too. People forget the traps...
But the place wasn't exactly empty. It also had a cult filled with spellcasters. The familicide blasted them all.
Remember that V managed to get into a secret passage that had spy holes in it. So it's likely to assume the place had a lot of those.
I assume if no Familicide was in play, the Draketooth clan would hide in the passages and start blasting intruders.


Soon's Gate - We don't know the nature of the spirits protecting the gate or the full extent of their powers. All we do know - is that Xykon was going to be utterly destroyed if Miko hadn't destroyed the gate.


Dorukon & Lirian - These two I feel are the weakest ones in particular for story reasons.
Lirian makes very little sense. Fire + Forest should be pretty obvious of a weakness. It was meant to be a joke that Redcloak destroyed it. (:redcloak: It was an accident, let it go)

The virus thing is great and all but surely there are more than enough beings that are immune to disease. Not to mention, the fight between Lirian and Xykon was solely for the sake of the story.
Druids being too op in 3e is even a running joke in the strip itself!

The fact that Liches have some resistances and damage reduction still wouldn't stop an epic Druid (or near to it). But he took her down so easy it was obviously forced for the story.


Dorukon - The fact is Xykon didn't make it to the gate and the dungeon already had plenty of other monsters and such in there. I'm assuming that was the whole point of the hall of outdated monsters.

The guy saw Xykon has his girlfriend and he dropped any sense of sanity and rushed towards him instead of sending his entire army of monsters with him. He opened up the gate to unleash those celestials or whatever, why not send all your monsters along the way?

[brian 333]

Dorukon - The fact is Xykon didn't make it to the gate and the dungeon already had plenty of other monsters and such in there. I'm assuming that was the whole point of the hall of outdated monsters.

The guy saw Xykon has his girlfriend and he dropped any sense of sanity and rushed towards him instead of sending his entire army of monsters with him. He opened up the gate to unleash those celestials or whatever, why not send all your monsters along the way?

Perhaps Dorukon spent a little time watching his TeeVo in fast forward mode and saw that to beat Xykon and end the threat to his world forever he had to lose.

Given that his fight with Xykon was somewhat less effective than one would expect from an epic magic user with the resources Dorukon had at hand, and the fact that he and Lirian are together and safe, it is not a stretch to infer that beating Xykon was not his goal in that conflict.

[Laurentio III]

Given that his fight with Xykon was somewhat less effective than one would expect from an epic magic user with the resources Dorukon had at hand, and the fact that he and Lirian are together and safe, it is not a stretch to infer that beating Xykon was not his goal in that conflict.
But, killing Xykon and releasing the soul of Lirian to True Resurrect her would be better. Dying and being trapped forever in a gem is, at best, a Plan Z

[SlashDash]

Perhaps Dorukon spent a little time watching his TeeVo in fast forward mode and saw that to beat Xykon and end the threat to his world forever he had to lose.

Given that his fight with Xykon was somewhat less effective than one would expect from an epic magic user with the resources Dorukon had at hand, and the fact that he and Lirian are together and safe, it is not a stretch to infer that beating Xykon was not his goal in that conflict.

I'm assuming you're making an Endgame reference? (Haven't seen Dr Strange 2)
If so, then that is false. The idea that "there is only 1 way" thing is absurd as pretty much any narrative that is solely built on "look, some prophecy I got says it's the only way so just don't ask any questions, assume any other idea you have is somehow wrong even when it clearly isn't"

I mean I don't want to derail this thread, but there have been thousands of pages written on Infinity Wars\ Endgame and its countless amount of plot holes and other things that would have fixed the problem in 5 seconds.
The same applies to any show\movie that uses this terrible narrative.


If anything, Dorukon has in fact got the entire world closer to its doom because it was his battle with Xykon when he could have saved it with a single spell:
Him going one on one vs Xykon got Redcloak to kill his own brother and thus fulling ensuring that he would in fact stick to the plan all the way through because he can't get over what he did.

When he could have just obliterated Redcloak or destroyed the Crimson Mantle and thus preventing Xykon from even potentially have access to the ritual - thus removing him from this game entirely.
Which if he could see far enough into the future he would have known


I'm not saying Durokon acted "out of character" but to say his actions lead to the only alternative is absurd.

[Nymrod]

Care to specify which low level spell your thinking of for negating lirians defences?

Also undead may be a major weakness, but there's not many undead that would be powerful enough to overpower the gates physical defences even without Lirian around. the same would apply if in a hypothetical scenario the Paladins had tried taking the gate.

Honestly barring whatever final trick is protecting Serreni's gate in terms of resistance to brute physical force and living creatures Lirian's was probably the best. It's too big flaws where it's location, (not much can be done about that), and the danger of undead, (although it has to be said the major weaknesses are high level vampires and Lich's, most other thing are within the realms of what the hard physical force countermeasures can deal with, plus non-intelligent).

Suspend Disease is Lvl1. It has the following interesting advantage; Supernatural diseases (e.g. mummy rot) cannot just be removed by typical healing magic, they need Break Enchantment and they need you to pass a level check (Redcloak probably just could not pass that check against Lirian who was quite higher level than him). But by RAW they can still be suspended at the cost of a 1st level spell slot per day.
Periapt of Health costs 7400gp and just removes ANY disease. Alternatively at a higher level option and if you don't want to go track a periapt, use Planar Ally to bring a Night Hag and ask her to let you hold her heartstone or just use Greater Restoration; I assume Redcloak was not high enough level at that point for 7th level spells though.

[Carl]

Suspend Disease is Lvl1. It has the following interesting advantage; Supernatural diseases (e.g. mummy rot) cannot just be removed by typical healing magic, they need Break Enchantment and they need you to pass a level check (Redcloak probably just could not pass that check against Lirian who was quite higher level than him). But by RAW they can still be suspended at the cost of a 1st level spell slot per day.
Periapt of Health costs 7400gp and just removes ANY disease. Alternatively at a higher level option and if you don't want to go track a periapt, use Planar Ally to bring a Night Hag and ask her to let you hold her heartstone or just use Greater Restoration; I assume Redcloak was not high enough level at that point for 7th level spells though.

RC specifies Break enchantment did nothing. Characters in the comic are aware when they simply failed a roll. Also nothing would have stopped RC just repeatedly trying if it was a failed check, he has to roll well eventually.

I'm also not sure how suspend disease is supposed to help a random group that encounters this. I'm not familiar with the spell but i assume you allready have to be infected for it to work, Lirians custom diseise, (which is probably an epic disease), seems to shut down spellcasting as it's initial effect, so by the time you know your infected it's much too late. Remember RC is only able to continue casting because he's protected by a divine artifact. All the other clerics get immidietlly shutdown.

[Peelee]

Suspend Disease is Lvl1. It has the following interesting advantage; Supernatural diseases (e.g. mummy rot) cannot just be removed by typical healing magic, they need Break Enchantment and they need you to pass a level check (Redcloak probably just could not pass that check against Lirian who was quite higher level than him). But by RAW they can still be suspended at the cost of a 1st level spell slot per day.
Periapt of Health costs 7400gp and just removes ANY disease. Alternatively at a higher level option and if you don't want to go track a periapt, use Planar Ally to bring a Night Hag and ask her to let you hold her heartstone or just use Greater Restoration; I assume Redcloak was not high enough level at that point for 7th level spells though.

I just assume the homebrew magical disease made by an epic level druid is unable to be healed by any of those methods. If we're making assumptions about the disease, why not make assumptions that fit the narrative instead of one's that dont?

[Xihirli]

Really, Lirian's gate fell because she didn't just kill Xykon and Redcloak when she had the chance. The disease was awesome, but it wasn't the "and now I've won and don't need to take any additional steps" Lirian treated it as. Really, Lirian should have set up the gate's defenses exactly as she did, then left someone more ruthless than her, but trustworthy, in charge of the gate.

[Peelee]

Really, Lirian's gate fell because she didn't just kill Xykon and Redcloak when she had the chance. The disease was awesome, but it wasn't the "and now I've won and don't need to take any additional steps" Lirian treated it as.

There were additional steps, though.

[RatElemental]

Talking about whether Soon was a good leader or not is too soon (rimshot) considering we don't know what exactly caused the split. There's something about Kraagor's death that is yet to be revealed. It could be as simple as Kraagor pushed Soon out of the rift at the last second and the others did not believe him, or something like Soon, in a moment of cowardice, pushed Kraagor into the Snarl to save himself and the others never forgave him.

Pretty sure Soon would have fallen if he did the latter, and based on the fact he was with the rest of the martyrs he didn't die a fallen paladin.

[Laurentio III]

There were additional steps, though.
And they were inadeguate.
To start, the virus defence relies on surprise. If you know that spellcaster are going to be infected, you can easily defy the defenders.
Undead, golems, no-spellcasters, intangibility. If anything, long ranged magic from far.

Now, who ever loses to her is held prisoner and has no means to contact allies... unless allies contact them. Magic still works in the underground cell, so the prisoners can be contacted by external forces.

Sending "Here is Emperor Evil. Have you successed?"
"No, the elf harlot uses a virus which castrate magic users."
Sending "Say no more. Mechanical Goblin Army on the way."
"Thanks. Bring beer."

[Metastachydium]

Plus there's the thing where the whole premise is very flammable and the defenders can't get their priorities straight once it's on fire.

[Laurentio III]

Plus there's the thing where the whole premise is very flammable and the defenders can't get their priorities straight once it's on fire.
Or, the very frail gate is suspended on living creatures.
Why.
WHY?
WHY!?

[Carl]

And they were inadeguate.
To start, the virus defence relies on surprise. If you know that spellcaster are going to be infected, you can easily defy the defenders.
Undead, golems, no-spellcasters, intangibility. If anything, long ranged magic from far.

Now, who ever loses to her is held prisoner and has no means to contact allies... unless allies contact them. Magic still works in the underground cell, so the prisoners can be contacted by external forces.

Sending "Here is Emperor Evil. Have you successed?"
"No, the elf harlot uses a virus which castrate magic users."
Sending "Say no more. Mechanical Goblin Army on the way."
"Thanks. Bring beer."

Which is defended by a whole bunch of druids, and at least for the next few hundred years one of whom is low epic. The list of non-spellcaster things that can get through that much spellcasting is brutally low. Lirrians defences take brutal advantage of linear fighters quadratic wizards.

For that matter if you have a non-spellcaster solution to that problem that isn't "single undead super caster" then you don't need the gates to take over the world. So unless you want to blow them up for giggles you've absolutely no reason to go after them.

Lich Xykon is basically a tailor made threat that can take down her defenses but couldn't actually take over the world and do as he pleases afterwards because he's just one big powerful individual, he can only be in one place at once. So taking a gate is an actual thing he needs to do.


As for the gate being so easy to destroy. they're in a forest, you don't even need to get near it to start a massive raging wildfire, and if your actually determined to destroy them and have an army. Well an army with siege weapons can take out all but Dorukans, (until recently Serreni's didn't have an active defender so an army can take it's time). And his would become vulnerable once he died of old age.

Soon's is probably the best defended against an actual army out to just destroy it, but in reality none of them where really built with that in mind.

[Laurentio III]

Which is defended by a whole bunch of druids, and at least for the next few hundred years one of whom is low epic. The list of non-spellcaster things that can get through that much spellcasting is brutally low. Lirrians defences take brutal advantage of linear fighters quadratic wizards.
Where were this whole bunch of druids during the defence of the gate? Maybe they are mentionated in a line of dialogue?

The whole armies showed during the battle:

LIRIAN DEFENDERS:
Two pillars-treant
A treant
Two werebears
A very large wolf
Five elven archers
14 elven skirmishers (taking wounds from goblins, so no much strong)
A unicorn
A giant feline
A druid (less hitpoint than a treant)
A spellcaster (deputated to scrying, possibly druid)
A spellcaster (deputated to scrying, possibly arcane, 9 hit points)
Some pixies
Lirian herself

(Months later, after the jailbreak)
+ 5 treants

TEAM EVIL:
34 goblin warriors (some repurposed as zombie later)
Special character Right-eye
Special character Redcloak
Special character Xykon
3 demonic cockroaches bystanders.

Now, while obviously there could have been tons of dead goblins and druids offscreen, I very much doubt they could be strong ones.
Rational:
• Evil team has only goblins as soldiers. They could be numerous, but not a very strong army, as Redcloak simply doesn't have that many reserves;
• Redcloak has an unoptimized spells choice for the day;
• Xykon is helding back on his best spells to fight the rival boss.

Should Lirian have a very strong bunch of druids somewhere, the fight would have had a different end.
Heck, Lirian lamented that replacing the fallens would have required months.

Indeed. Take away the virus, and it's doable. Not just a walk in a park, as treant are CR 8 and werebeasts are around 5. But Lirian apart, a level 12 party of four could wipe the map. Not in the epic ballpark.

[Peelee]

And they were inadeguate.
To start, the virus defence relies on surprise. If you know that spellcaster are going to be infected, you can easily defy the defenders.
Undead, golems, no-spellcasters, intangibility. If anything, long ranged magic from far.

Now, who ever loses to her is held prisoner and has no means to contact allies... unless allies contact them. Magic still works in the underground cell, so the prisoners can be contacted by external forces.

Sending "Here is Emperor Evil. Have you successed?"
"No, the elf harlot uses a virus which castrate magic users."
Sending "Say no more. Mechanical Goblin Army on the way."
"Thanks. Bring beer."

Yes, if attackers know exactly how the defense is set up, they can try to bypass the defense. This is the case for the for most, if not all, of the Gates. As well as for most defended things elsewhere in the world. And elsewhere in real life.

Also, this is all the second line of defense, andter security through obscurity. Someone knowing about the Gate is unlikely to start with. Knowing about the Gate and her specific location even more so. That person also having vast resources that do not rely on magic even more so. That person specifically not using them to take the Gate right off the bat even more so.

Sure, you can construct an elaborate system where one could conceivably bypass all her defenses after having for knowledge of that those defenses are, but such generosity to the attackers doesn't do much to sway me. One might as well posit "well all an attacker needs is an artifact crafted by the gods themselves that lets one retain spellcasting, who can lichify the powerful sorcerer they are with". At some point you have to figure the defenses you have are good enough.

Lirian should have figured that after warding against fire, though.

[Laurentio III]

Lirian should have figured that after warding against fire, though.
I agree, the defences are adeguate until someone is determinate enough to move against her. But of all defenders, is the one that really is easier to get around.
You don't really need casters to conquer that gate, just brute strenght until you meet Lirian.
One of the weakness of the Lirian gate defence is that is openfield, particularly vulnerable from any kind of attack. Long range fire is just the simplest strategy, but there are plenty.
Other defences forces the invader to bottleneck somewhere, unless they can bypass defences alltogether (Xykon flying inside the throne room, to say).

[Peelee]

I agree, the defences are adeguate until someone is determinate enough to move against her. But of all defenders, is the one that really is easier to get around.
You don't really need casters to conquer that gate, just brute strenght until you meet Lirian.

The exact same can be said of Soon's. And even then, Xykon bypassed all the defenses and went straight to the throne room because he had the rare and mystifying powers of flight and invisibility.

In not saying Lirian's wasn't as strong as it should have been. I'm saying that a shocking number of arguments against it rely on knowledge about its defense in advance without any explanation of how one might get such knowledge.

[Carl]

Where were this whole bunch of druids during the defence of the gate? Maybe they are mentionated in a line of dialogue?

The whole armies showed during the battle:

LILIAN DEFENDERS:
Two pillars-treant
A treant
Two werebears
A very large wolf
Five elven archers
14 elven skirmishers (taking wounds from goblins, so no much strong)
A unicorn
A giant feline
A druid (less hitpoint than a treant)
A spellcaster (deputated to scrying, possibly druid)
A spellcaster (deputated to scrying, possibly arcane, 9 hit points)
Some pixies
Lirian herself

(Months later, after the jailbreak)
+ 5 treants

TEAM EVIL:
34 goblin warriors (some repurposed as zombie later)
Special character Right-eye
Special character Redcloak
Special character Xykon
3 demonic cockroaches bystanders.

Now, while obviously there could have been tons of dead goblins and druids offscreen, I very much doubt they could be strong ones.
Rational:
• Evil team has only goblins as soldiers. They could be numerous, but not a very strong army, as Redcloak simply doesn't have that many reserves;
• Redcloak has an unoptimized spells choice for the day;
• Xykon is helding back on his best spells to fight the rival boss.

Should Lirian have a very strong bunch of druids somewhere, the fight would have had a different end.
Heck, Lirian lamented that replacing the fallens would have required months.

Indeed. Take away the virus, and it's doable. Not just a walk in a park, as treant are CR 8 and werebeasts are around 5. But Lirian apart, a level 12 party of four could wipe the map. Not in the epic ballpark.

I'd have to double check but i believe it's mentioned/implied when she starts talking about the stuff she'd have to replace after they're defeated the first time.

Also remember the Giants comments about the battle with Dorukan. He's not necessarily showing everything Lirian had because the details of the battle mostly don't matter, they're present to show a battle is going on. I believe it's indicated that the battle has even been going on for several rounds or more before the virus goes off.

@Peelee thanks for covering the other angles. I tend to get bogged down in the details. Probably my ASD and/or engineering interests at work.

[Laurentio III]

The exact same can be said of Soon's. And even then, Xykon bypassed all the defenses and went straight to the throne room because he had the rare and mystifying powers of flight and invisibility.
Uhm, invisibility was just for sport. He could have landed on the top of the tower and progressed inside, out of the range of attacks.

But let's do a game. You have adeguate knowledge of all gates location and general defences, but no Xykon or Redcloak, just mundane armies of sacrificable soldiers, and a default party of level 12 adventurers.

Soon: it takes your whole army to (maybe) storm the castle, than your party have to fight the martyrs. Twice.
Lirian: some forest fire later, it's elf chick time.
Dorukan: just moving the army anywhere like the castle is a struggle. Inside, is quite well defended. High level mage resident is gating in devas.
Girard: we can't tell for sure because active defenders are dead already, but normal soldiers are unlikely to even pass the outer ring of defences.

So, the ultimate obstacle is always the boss. The Lirian one is were your army is more likely to be still alive and having a barbecue, instead of fertilizing the soil.

Now, without the army:
Soon: unless infiltration is possible, your party is defeated by a statistically sufficient number of natural-20 arrows.*
Lirian: your barbarian/warrior and thief/monk have to fight a flying caster while the wizard/sorcerer and cleric have an existential crisis.
Dorukan: As Soon, but with less chances of infiltration.
Girard: apparently, it's a luck-shot against magical defences.

Again, the Lirian defences is the one that relies only on the main owner withour even providing them a strategic advantage.

Do we want to estimate how every match would go after the dead of the resident hero, assuming no replacement? I say that the Lirian groove would work poorly.

* possible attack to the Soon's gate
• Scry as much as possible, which is not much as important room are secured.
• Flight very high until you are straight on the castle, then go down very fast to reduce the chance of lucky shots.
• Now you are inside, and the defenders are bottlenecked. They are still a bunch of paladins and hundreds of soldiers coming at regular pace, but it's doable.
• Martyrs spectre. I reckon, I've no idea how you beat them.


I'd have to double check but i believe it's mentioned/implied when she starts talking about the stuff she'd have to replace after they're defeated the first time.
Exactly. My point is, she doesn't even have reliable reserves, even if her army is the easier to assemble.


Also remember the Giants comments about the battle with Dorukan. He's not necessarily showing everything Lirian had because the details of the battle mostly don't matter, they're present to show a battle is going on. I believe it's indicated that the battle has even been going on for several rounds or more before the virus goes off.
Off course there must have been more fallen offscreen, I already said it myself. But, they can't be high level druids, or there wouldn't be a final line of goblins to fight some lame assembly of elves. You don't put the worst elements in the final defence, and those elfs were falling to goblins.

To be clear: I'm not objecting to other defenders to be present at the start of the battle. I'm objecting to A BUNCH OF HIGH LEVEL DRUIDS being present at the start of the battle.
If anything, the defence of Lirian's gate is mostly brute strength until Lirian is involved.

[brian 333]

All of the gates appear to be destructible. Why? The effort that went into making them could easily have included some form of indestructibility.

They all fell to mundane attacks.

There is a specific puzzle piece we lack.

It is almost as if there was intent by the makers to have the gates destroyed rather than fall into the wrong hands. In fact, Serini appears more worried about conflict around her gate than about the gate falling into Xykon's hands. 'Conflict endangers the gate,' or something like that.

The ease with which four gates were destroyed makes me think that's a feature, not a bug. The intention was to deny anyone who captures one any benefit from having it. Who would have expected anyone to go from gare to gate causing them to be destroyed faster than they could be replaced?

[Laurentio III]

The ease with which four gates were destroyed makes me think that's a feature, not a bug. The intention was to deny anyone who captures one any benefit from having it. Who would have expected anyone to go from gare to gate causing them to be destroyed faster than they could be replaced?
Assolutely. My main take is that they understood that the rift is immanipolable, while the gate makes it vulnerable. It's like freezing water: it makes it transportable with a liftfork. Anyway, as they wrote the ritual to make a gate, it's reasonable that they know the risk.

Anyway, it's possible that the gate can't be stronger that that. It must be cristalline in nature, and those are brickiest the bigger they are.

[Peelee]

Uhm, invisibility was just for sport. He could have landed on the top of the tower and progressed inside, out of the range of attacks.

But let's do a game. You have adeguate knowledge of all gates location and general defences, but no Xykon or Redcloak, just mundane armies of sacrificable soldiers, and a default party of level 12 adventurers.

Soon: it takes your whole army to (maybe) storm the castle, than your party have to fight the martyrs. Twice.
Lirian: some forest fire later, it's elf chick time.
Dorukan: just moving the army anywhere like the castle is a struggle. Inside, is quite well defended. High level mage resident is gating in devas.
Girard: we can't tell for sure because active defenders are dead already, but normal soldiers are unlikely to even pass the outer ring of defences.

So, the ultimate obstacle is always the boss.

Sounds like the ultimate obstacle is not the boss.

[Resileaf]

Pretty sure Soon would have fallen if he did the latter, and based on the fact he was with the rest of the martyrs he didn't die a fallen paladin.

Oh, he absolutely would have fallen. The fun thing about paladins though, is that they can regain their powers if they dedicate themselves to redemption.

As Soon himself said, redemption is a rare, special thing and not for everyone. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0464.html)

Maybe he was speaking from experience?

[Mike Havran]

Oh, he absolutely would have fallen. The fun thing about paladins though, is that they can regain their powers if they dedicate themselves to redemption.

As Soon himself said, redemption is a rare, special thing and not for everyone. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0464.html)

Maybe he was speaking from experience?If he had successfully finished redemption, he would have had more reasons for saying redemption is not such a rare and special thing.

Nothing in Shojo's tale suggests Soon needed to atone for anything during his life. If anything, his argument with Dorukan and Girard means Soon did not think he was responsible for Kraagor's death.

[Carl]

Exactly. My point is, she doesn't even have reliable reserves, even if her army is the easier to assemble.


Off course there must have been more fallen offscreen, I already said it myself. But, they can't be high level druids, or there wouldn't be a final line of goblins to fight some lame assembly of elves. You don't put the worst elements in the final defence, and those elfs were falling to goblins.

To be clear: I'm not objecting to other defenders to be present at the start of the battle. I'm objecting to A BUNCH OF HIGH LEVEL DRUIDS being present at the start of the battle.
If anything, the defence of Lirian's gate is mostly brute strength until Lirian is involved.

I never said high level, remember even a low level caster tends to have a major advantage over martial types. Also don't forget there where goblin clerics accompanying the attack besides C and RC and Right Eye whern't tiny lefels in OOTS terms. it's not surprising they managed to take a decent bite out of the defences before the virus got them even without Xykon factored in.

And yes it takes time to replenish losses, they're in the elven homelands, they don't have a huge population to choose from and recruiting wild creatures even as a druid or rnager uis no quick process.

As for a party of level 12's coming in and being able to handle everything but Lirian, i disagree, but more importantly a big party of level 12's is a huge deal in OOTS. Miko was the highest level NPC in the entire Sapphire Guard and was, (without checking the geek thread), i think level 13. I think O-Chul is 12 and the next closest is 10. A party with even one level 10+ character in it is a huge deal, an entire group of them is effectively a tactical nuclear arsenal in OOTS terms.

But that cuts in reverse, look at what V with just a few spell slots was able to do in the defence of Azure City until the Deathknight showed up. lirian only needs one or two higher level people helping with the defence to invalidate entire armies of basic mooks.

[Kish]

Or, the very frail gate is suspended on living creatures.
Why.
WHY?
WHY!?
I know this is a rhetorical question, but it does actually have an answer. Someone pointed out a while ago, when this subject came up, that this is Lirian's Gate's self-destruct mechanism. Dorukan dealt with runes; Lirian dealt with living creatures, especially trees. So: If anything gets past Lirian, it still has to avoid causing the treants to run in opposite directions. And they probably have orders to deliberately do so if they are aware that Lirian is dead and an enemy is in sight.

[Resileaf]

If he had successfully finished redemption, he would have had more reasons for saying redemption is not such a rare and special thing.

What, you think that he would have said "I did it, why couldn't you?" instead?


Nothing in Shojo's tale suggests Soon needed to atone for anything during his life. If anything, his argument with Dorukan and Girard means Soon did not think he was responsible for Kraagor's death.

Would you really be shocked if the leader of the Sapphire Guard kept out the detail that the founder of the order fell in the past?

[Murk]

For all of the gates, I'd be much more concerned with longevity.

Being able to defeat Xykon and Redcloak is cool and all, but these gates are supposed to last forever. There will be a next Xykon, and a next, and a next, and next...
Any line of defense that doesn't regenerate or replenish after being beaten is - on the long term - not useful.

Based on that alone I would probably put Girard's Gate at the bottom.
One day, someone's bound to come by who kills too many of the defenders for the whole "only family" defense to be sustainable.
And without defenders the pyramid is just a collection of finite illusionary traps, which - as shown by the comic itself - can be beaten relatively easily by a sufficiently high-level party.

Kraagor's Gate might be low tier or mid-high tier, but we don't know yet. How do the monsters replenish? Is this dependent on (mortal) Serini, or is there some kind of infinite monster supply involved?
If the monsters replenish quickly and endlessly that's a very solid defense (especially combined with portal trickery).
But if there's a finite supply of monsters (or replenishment goes slow enough to allow adventurers time to search all tunnels) I'm not a fan.

I'm fond of Lirian's idea, since ecosystems supposedly last. Coupled with the anti-magic virus, yeah, I can see it.
But the defense itself was very weak. It might stand the test of time, but it was still weak.

For me the strongest part of Dorukan's Gate were the runes that only well-intentioned people can use. It's also long-lasting and Xykon was stuck on it for months. So slightly better than Lirian, but still possible to get through.

I'd rank Soon's Gate highest. Building a city on top of your gate also guarantees replenishing defenders, at least for as long as the city lasts. That's not forever, but at least it's longer than one family.
But even better are the undead defenders. Presumably those won't ever disappear - and there's more of them every time an attack is tried!

[Nymrod]

I wonder with how much ease the Vector Legion would have taken down every single gate.

[brian 333]

So far the gates all failed before they could be of use to Team Evil. All of them.

Had, say, Soon's Gate been indestructible, (a relatively simple addition to magic items of all sorts, especially epic ones,) we would now be watching as the OotS struggles to defeat a hobgoblin army and stop the ritual that could lead to the end of the world.

The fragility of the gates is a defense, in my opinion. The idea that an epic bad guy can come along and destroy them does not preclude the idea that an epic level good guy can come along and build a new one.

Is it better to have an indestructible gate that can be used to rip the universe a new one? Or is it better that the gate is fragile enough that it can be destroyed before that happens?

The issue here is not the gate design, but the willingness of TE to destroy the world if they can't blackmail it. No gate design could stand up to that.

[Nymrod]

The fragility of the gates is a defense, in my opinion. The idea that an epic bad guy can come along and destroy them does not preclude the idea that an epic level good guy can come along and build a new one.

Heck it doesn't even have to be an epic level good guy. If Elan send to Tarquin and told him "Find a way to seal that gate we blew up with your friends or the gods toast the world and your empires" I think his near epic spellcaster team would probably be motivated to find a fix fast.

[Mike Havran]

What, you think that he would have said "I did it, why couldn't you?" instead?
Well, not in those exact words, but yes. Successful redemption involves acknowledging your misdeeds, accepting responsibility for them and repenting. Afterwards, you have little reason to hide the event from a colleague and every reason to use the experience to help others. Which leads to


Would you really be shocked if the leader of the Sapphire Guard kept out the detail that the founder of the order fell in the past? It is likely Soon would have wanted the story to serve as a memo. His successor would probably carry on with the tradition. Of course, it is also possible either of them would want to keep it hidden. What would really shocked me, however, would be to learn that Soon actually fell at all.

[WanderingMist]

So maybe this have been done before, but I'm just ocationally in this forum so whatever. I'm doing one now anyway.

After now we have seen how all gates are protected and I do want to rank them in order of how good and well designed they where for defence. I add my take as my personal opinion, but I would love to see others take on it as well. No need to use my format. We don't fully know enough about Kragors gate, but we can at least take into account of how much we know about it.

Note: By mortal I mean human age where knowledge and power can be gone in a few generations.

C Tier:

5: Lirian's gate.
+ A virus destroying "all" living spellcasters that gets close to it. Making them spell-impotent.
+ Good alligned nature creatures in high numbers
+ Elven warriors and Lirian herself

- Basically no defence at all against the undead (what was she thinking?)
- Extremly weak to forest fires (or just if not given enough time to buff before)
- Weak to surprise attacks (apparantly nothing against teleportation or similar)

4: Soon's gate
+ Ghost warriors in high numbers as last defence
+ An entire city in first line of defence
+ Saphire guard able to remove threats as they come by

- Arrogant, makes themselves a target and easily corruptable
- Nothing beside their own force can defend it / weak to magic
- Mortal.

B tier:

3. Dorukan's Gate
+ Magic master in command
+ Inpenetrable castle
+ Tons of magic traps and protections

- Main defender can be lured out of its defence position
- Summoning allowance (for personal reasons) are a weak point
- Mortal (few defences once dead - no offspring)

A Tier:

2. Kraagor's gate
+ Remote hostile and hard to find location
+ RNG puzzle with dangerous monsters (that probably are a bluff)
+ Traps and amnesia poison available

- No (yet) ways of dealing with presistent strong targets
- RNG Puzzle can be cheesed with magic
- Last defence are very uncertain in power (yet to be seen)

1. Girard's Gate
+ Entire generations of dedicated spellcasting protectors
+ Riddled with tons of deadly traps, bluffs and illusions
+ Hard to find

- Can be located with logic and magic
- Entire defence can be wiped out by one (though very rare) spell (even on a basically unrelated person/monster)
- Mortal


If Lirian had a defence against the undead and fire she would probably be 1 or 2 ranked. The virus are quite powerful stuff. Girard might be lower on the list as we don't really know the true power of the traps and illusions. Kraagors gate are not yet completed so it can go up or down.

Yeah, no. Girard's Gate was easily the worst, it's an inferior version of Soon's Gate.

Checklist:

Girard's Gate:

Difficult to get to: Yes (middle of desert, otherwise defenseless)
Protected by magic: Yes (illusions, can be dispelled)
Small number of people knowing: Yes (a single family, vulnerable to a single spell)


Soon's Gate:
Difficult to get to: Yes (middle of well-defended city, epic sorcerer required an army to even stand a chance)
Protected by magic: Yes (ghost paladins, capable of fighting back when things are attempting to destroy them)
Small number of people knowing: Yes (the chosen few from among the paladins, no single-spell vulnerability)

[brian 333]

Yeah, no. Girard's Gate was easily the worst, it's an inferior version of Soon's Gate.

Checklist:

Girard's Gate:

Difficult to get to: Yes (middle of desert, otherwise defenseless)
Protected by magic: Yes (illusions, can be dispelled)
Small number of people knowing: Yes (a single family, vulnerable to a single spell)


Soon's Gate:
Difficult to get to: Yes (middle of well-defended city, epic sorcerer required an army to even stand a chance)
Protected by magic: Yes (ghost paladins, capable of fighting back when things are attempting to destroy them)
Small number of people knowing: Yes (the chosen few from among the paladins, no single-spell vulnerability)

Except that we have a disease that can attack a spellcaster's ability to cast spells and a spell that can attack a specific family. Why not a curse that can wither the paladins of an order? There is no more protection in being a paladin than in being a spellcaster. They are both two failed savings throws away from being toast.

All who take an oath to serve in the Sapphire Guard shall wither by temporary loss of one level per failed save, which is made once per week until the oath is renounced or the character reaches Level One. Each week thereafter the failure of the save results in the permanent loss of a previously temporarily lost level. Gaining new levels is possible through advancement, but new levels force new saves versus the curse.

The curse cannot be lifted save by renunciation of the oath of the Sapphire Guard or by Atonement given by a cleric of The Dark One.
Once a character is freed of the curse, a successful weekly save results in the restoration of a temporarily lost level. Permanently lost levels can only be restored by The Dark One's intervention, and then only if the character becomes a Blackguard in his service.

[Mike Havran]

Yeah, no. Girard's Gate was easily the worst, it's an inferior version of Soon's Gate.

Checklist:

Girard's Gate:

Difficult to get to: Yes (middle of desert, otherwise defenseless)
Protected by magic: Yes (illusions, can be dispelled)
Small number of people knowing: Yes (a single family, vulnerable to a single spell)


Soon's Gate:
Difficult to get to: Yes (middle of well-defended city, epic sorcerer required an army to even stand a chance)
Protected by magic: Yes (ghost paladins, capable of fighting back when things are attempting to destroy them)
Small number of people knowing: Yes (the chosen few from among the paladins, no single-spell vulnerability) With that checklist, Dorukan's would be the worst because he did not have even any defenders besides aged himself.

[Carl]

Except that we have a disease that can attack a spellcaster's ability to cast spells and a spell that can attack a specific family. Why not a curse that can wither the paladins of an order? There is no more protection in being a paladin than in being a spellcaster. They are both two failed savings throws away from being toast.

All who take an oath to serve in the Sapphire Guard shall wither by temporary loss of one level per failed save, which is made once per week until the oath is renounced or the character reaches Level One. Each week thereafter the failure of the save results in the permanent loss of a previously temporarily lost level. Gaining new levels is possible through advancement, but new levels force new saves versus the curse.

The curse cannot be lifted save by renunciation of the oath of the Sapphire Guard or by Atonement given by a cleric of The Dark One.
Once a character is freed of the curse, a successful weekly save results in the restoration of a temporarily lost level. Permanently lost levels can only be restored by The Dark One's intervention, and then only if the character becomes a Blackguard in his service.

Familicide was hideously powerful even by epic spell standards. Every estimation i've seen of it's difficulty implies someone way beyond anyone we've yet seen in the comic besides the spirit responsible for it in the first place. Something to go after as broad a target as an entire order of Paladins is going to have similar issues with requiring ridiculous character levels. And once you get upto that kind of level the only thing stopping you ascending to godhood or killing an existing god is weather your interested in doing it. Epic magic is entirely capable of affecting divine entities after all if you want it to.

By comparison Lirians disease is a lot milder though there's no official rules that i've heard of for creating a custom disease there is a psionic disease with similar effects so it's well within a low epic level threat range And a spell that infects anyone with a hostile intent within an area with no save isn't exceptionally powerful honestly by epic standards.

[brian 333]

It's a very narrow target: those who take the oath. It is also ridiculously easy to get rid of the curse: repudiate the oath.

The challenge would be for Redcloak to get an exact wording of the oath upon which to model his curse.

[Carl]

From an epic rules perspective it's the number of targets your trying to affect, the area they're spread over, and the duration of the effect.

Your right going after someone on the basis of an oath they've sworn would be easy and have a low difficulty. Trying to go after every paladin with that oath in existence requires a spell with an all targets in an area the size of the world with a permanent duration is insanely hard.

It's the exact same problem familicide has. The basic effect, (instant death on a target based on a familial connection), is easy, including every living being on the planet in the scope is really hard, (the fact that it is instant however possibly makes it easier to cast than the proposed RC curses necessary permanent effect. A permanent effect induces a massive difficulty multiplier.)

[RatElemental]

From an epic rules perspective it's the number of targets your trying to affect, the area they're spread over, and the duration of the effect.

Your right going after someone on the basis of an oath they've sworn would be easy and have a low difficulty. Trying to go after every paladin with that oath in existence requires a spell with an all targets in an area the size of the world with a permanent duration is insanely hard.

It's the exact same problem familicide has. The basic effect, (instant death on a target based on a familial connection), is easy, including every living being on the planet in the scope is really hard, (the fact that it is instant however possibly makes it easier to cast than the proposed RC curses necessary permanent effect. A permanent effect induces a massive difficulty multiplier.)

The estimation I saw once used an ad-hoc version of the contact seed to hop the effect from one target to the next based on that target's relation to the next one. Could adjust that a bit for paladins by having it hop from a paladin to the one who inducted them and then all of the paladins that one inducted and so on.

[Carl]

The estimation I saw once used an ad-hoc version of the contact seed to hop the effect from one target to the next based on that target's relation to the next one. Could adjust that a bit for paladins by having it hop from a paladin to the one who inducted them and then all of the paladins that one inducted and so on.

Oh i'm sure there are ways to reduce the effective difficulty a lot. The problem is even then the difficulty is still off the charts extreme. The pint is just because it uses a weird targeting system doesn;t make it easy. A good DM would probably give you a good chunk of the baseline costs, but it's still going to be insanely difficult.

[brian 333]

And familicide wasn't?

You may do it differently than I described, but an epic caster could do it.

In my discription I listed two or three factors that would mitigate the difficulty:
Bound to the oath
Saving throws apply
Not fatal
Effect is temporary and reversible

Familicide tracks by bloodline and hops from target to target. Redcloak's Revenge does not require any existing target to link to the next. Each target invokes the curse by taking, or having taken, the oath of the Sapphire Guard. Area of Effect is quite limited, though Range is not.
Familicide allows no save, is always fatal, and it's effect is permanent. Further, it potentially affected millions, while Redcloak's Revenge affects hundreds at the most.

The curse of a god, expressed through it's high priest, is a staple of fantasy fiction. It has, in other writings, been used to wipe out whole cities and countries. The curse I devised is far more limited in scope.

However, it was a rough sketch of an idea. If a player came to me with the idea I would allow his character to begin research, and we'd begin to tweak the costs and parameters over the course of the character's progress. The final result may not be exactly as I wrote, but in outline, as an epic spell that could be used exactly once, I'd let it work.

[gbaji]

Eh. I think super powerful spells like that are great stuff in storytelling, but pretty unworkable via actual player game mechanics. I would not allow a player character to research such a thing in my game. I would, however, as part of a plotline, introduce a one use item/ritual/whatever that might allow for such effects, in a very limited manner and in alignment with whatever plot is going on.

You need to find the super-whatsit and perform the ritual of whomever at the altar of another-whomever to eliminate the power base of some enemy and make it possible for them to be defeated? Great. Makes for a wonderful quest and supports a large number of adventures along the way. Once you introduce rules into a gaming system for players to create such things themselves, and actually give them the resources to do it (even once), you will be forced to endlessly backtrack yourself to prevent them from using it on every powerful foe in your game.

There's a reason why in OoTS, these things are always created by NPC characters "over there", who aren't around anymore, and only available via tangential procedures, or told to us past tense. They are storytelling devices, not rule mechanics to be applied to a game.

As to the defenses, I do think that Lirian's and Durukon's defenses are a bit "odd" in how they are presented. In both cases the primary reason they fell is because the defenders themselves really didn't adequately defend them. As a tie in to what I was just talking about, a large part of this is because those are "past tense" events in the main time frame of the story. We enter the main story with their defenses already having been beaten, and are presented with a story after the fact as to how it happened. So yeah, of course it's a bit contrived.

The reality is that an epic level druid should have had the entire forest completely locked down for even potential invaders, with tons of woodland creatures, elementals, treants, elves, and a horde of other lesser level druids all aiding in ensuring that no one ever even came within a hundred miles of the gate. The very air, ground, trees, and the world itself should reshape itself to prevent anyone from finding the gate. Period. High level druids are ridiculously powerful in their own element, epic level ones even more so. The reality is that while I suppose sufficiently powerful individual people could penetrate the forest's defenses, the battle as shown should simply not have happened. Every single goblin aiding Redcloak and Xykon should have been wiped out long before getting anywhere near the gate (druid abilities to just wipe large numbers of low to mid level opponents is frankly alarming, and that's just the midish level druids needed to do that).

The epic disease itself is more of a storytelling device as well. it's there to tell us a bit about the Crimson Mantle, and how Xykon becomes a lich. Obviously, if Lirian had behaved like a normal druid would have in response to a threat to the forest (and specifically to the gate itself), once they were magically trapped by the disease, they should have been strangled to death by roots and branches, their flesh eaten by bugs, and their bones swallowed by the earth. Cause that's how druids work.


Durukon's defenses were also pretty formidable. Although he seemed to be the only one who didn't account for himself getting old and dying at some point. it's odd that he didn't do something a powerful epic mage might do, like say creating an order of wizards tasked with defending the gate, take on some apprentices, train them in magic, appoint one to be successor, etc. Just living by himself in a dungeon, with some minor defenses and critters, but largely depending on him personally running the place to be truly effective seems a less than ideal choice. Maybe he was just anti-social? Who knows? At least his glyphs seemed to work well.

Again though, both of those failures work just fine as story telling elements. Good stories often include poor decisions made, especially in the "setup" portions of the story. We only have a story because those two gates weren't defended as well as they should have been, so it's kinda necessary. If Isildur had just tossed the ring into the fire when he should have, we wouldn't have the Lord of the Rings as a story, right? Or, put another way, stories like this are the stories of when someone in the past did make a terrible mistake that lead to what is happening now. We don't tell the story about the 5 gates that were well defended, no one ever breached them, and everyone lived happily ever after, do we?

[Carl]

And familicide wasn't?

You may do it differently than I described, but an epic caster could do it.

In my discription I listed two or three factors that would mitigate the difficulty:
Bound to the oath
Saving throws apply
Not fatal
Effect is temporary and reversible

Familicide tracks by bloodline and hops from target to target. Redcloak's Revenge does not require any existing target to link to the next. Each target invokes the curse by taking, or having taken, the oath of the Sapphire Guard. Area of Effect is quite limited, though Range is not.
Familicide allows no save, is always fatal, and it's effect is permanent. Further, it potentially affected millions, while Redcloak's Revenge affects hundreds at the most.

The curse of a god, expressed through it's high priest, is a staple of fantasy fiction. It has, in other writings, been used to wipe out whole cities and countries. The curse I devised is far more limited in scope.

However, it was a rough sketch of an idea. If a player came to me with the idea I would allow his character to begin research, and we'd begin to tweak the costs and parameters over the course of the character's progress. The final result may not be exactly as I wrote, but in outline, as an epic spell that could be used exactly once, I'd let it work.

First familicide is the creation of an unknown but massively powerful necromancer, not any current in story character. Realistically he's by far the most powerful non-god or Snarl entity we've seen in the comic so far. Xykon isn't even remotely in the same league as him. RC getting to an equivalent power level just isn't very probable. He'd eventually attract enough attention to end up like the Dark One most likely.

Second by RAW a permeant effect is far harder than an instantaneous effect. And both spells have to have unlimited target count or they might not be adequately successful. Doubly so for your proposed solution.

Third, limiting it to targeting along family lines would actually make familicide easier, not harder.


Eh. I think super powerful spells like that are great stuff in storytelling, but pretty unworkable via actual player game mechanics. I would not allow a player character to research such a thing in my game. I would, however, as part of a plotline, introduce a one use item/ritual/whatever that might allow for such effects, in a very limited manner and in alignment with whatever plot is going on.

You need to find the super-whatsit and perform the ritual of whomever at the altar of another-whomever to eliminate the power base of some enemy and make it possible for them to be defeated? Great. Makes for a wonderful quest and supports a large number of adventures along the way. Once you introduce rules into a gaming system for players to create such things themselves, and actually give them the resources to do it (even once), you will be forced to endlessly backtrack yourself to prevent them from using it on every powerful foe in your game.

There's a reason why in OoTS, these things are always created by NPC characters "over there", who aren't around anymore, and only available via tangential procedures, or told to us past tense. They are storytelling devices, not rule mechanics to be applied to a game.

As to the defenses, I do think that Lirian's and Durukon's defenses are a bit "odd" in how they are presented. In both cases the primary reason they fell is because the defenders themselves really didn't adequately defend them. As a tie in to what I was just talking about, a large part of this is because those are "past tense" events in the main time frame of the story. We enter the main story with their defenses already having been beaten, and are presented with a story after the fact as to how it happened. So yeah, of course it's a bit contrived.

The reality is that an epic level druid should have had the entire forest completely locked down for even potential invaders, with tons of woodland creatures, elementals, treants, elves, and a horde of other lesser level druids all aiding in ensuring that no one ever even came within a hundred miles of the gate. The very air, ground, trees, and the world itself should reshape itself to prevent anyone from finding the gate. Period. High level druids are ridiculously powerful in their own element, epic level ones even more so. The reality is that while I suppose sufficiently powerful individual people could penetrate the forest's defenses, the battle as shown should simply not have happened. Every single goblin aiding Redcloak and Xykon should have been wiped out long before getting anywhere near the gate (druid abilities to just wipe large numbers of low to mid level opponents is frankly alarming, and that's just the midish level druids needed to do that).

The epic disease itself is more of a storytelling device as well. it's there to tell us a bit about the Crimson Mantle, and how Xykon becomes a lich. Obviously, if Lirian had behaved like a normal druid would have in response to a threat to the forest (and specifically to the gate itself), once they were magically trapped by the disease, they should have been strangled to death by roots and branches, their flesh eaten by bugs, and their bones swallowed by the earth. Cause that's how druids work.


Durukon's defenses were also pretty formidable. Although he seemed to be the only one who didn't account for himself getting old and dying at some point. it's odd that he didn't do something a powerful epic mage might do, like say creating an order of wizards tasked with defending the gate, take on some apprentices, train them in magic, appoint one to be successor, etc. Just living by himself in a dungeon, with some minor defenses and critters, but largely depending on him personally running the place to be truly effective seems a less than ideal choice. Maybe he was just anti-social? Who knows? At least his glyphs seemed to work well.

Again though, both of those failures work just fine as story telling elements. Good stories often include poor decisions made, especially in the "setup" portions of the story. We only have a story because those two gates weren't defended as well as they should have been, so it's kinda necessary. If Isildur had just tossed the ring into the fire when he should have, we wouldn't have the Lord of the Rings as a story, right? Or, put another way, stories like this are the stories of when someone in the past did make a terrible mistake that lead to what is happening now. We don't tell the story about the 5 gates that were well defended, no one ever breached them, and everyone lived happily ever after, do we?

Got tio hard disagree on your evaluation of Lirian's defences there. A huge part of the gates defences was keeping anyone from knowing about them. Taking over an entire forest, even if it didn't bring the elven government down on her head, it would attract every adventuring party on the continent and probably a few on others as well. A small compact defence means people are very unlikely to find it by complete accident.

[gbaji]

Got tio hard disagree on your evaluation of Lirian's defences there. A huge part of the gates defences was keeping anyone from knowing about them. Taking over an entire forest, even if it didn't bring the elven government down on her head, it would attract every adventuring party on the continent and probably a few on others as well. A small compact defence means people are very unlikely to find it by complete accident.

Isn't "taking over an entire forest" (or maybe a specific portion of one in this case) kinda not what druids do anyway? Especially epic level druids?

She's also an Elf. She already had elven warriors with her. Other's around her and/or working with her already knew at least that there was "something powerful in the forest that needed to be protected". Any elven government in the area that got involved would have (should have?) been recruited to officially make this area of the forest "off limits" to random travelers, so as to allow for greater defense of the gate. Either the forest is well developed and managed by elves, in which case it should be easy for her to establish a perimeter around the gate without drawing any more suspicion than any other "holy grove, sacred site, etc" that elves might want to keep outsiders away from, or it's wild unmanaged forest, in which case a powerful druid setting up shop and using powerful magic to keep people away is just something that might happen.

Elves, and fiercely defending specific forest areas is not exactly an unusual thing. Could that draw adventurers? Maybe? If she's going about it in some "evil" way. But if folks wandering by are approached and politely told not to proceed in specific areas, but otherwise left alone, I'm not sure why. After all, those visitors are always bringing in picnic baskets that distract the local bears. And leaving wrappers everywhere. And otherwise spoiling the natural beauty of the forest, so it's perfectly natural and normal that a powerful elven druid might take up shop and protect it from them. As long as she's not creating some kind of blockage for normal travel through/around/whatever the forest for trade/travel purposes, I'm not sure how that would garner much attention.

And certainly, anyone who does push past the outer "politely direct people away" perimeter, can get totally unleashed on. Anyone specifically choosing to go and fight the powerful druid that's protecting the forest from people who are despoiling it, but otherwise leaves people alone if they're just peacefully passing by, would fall squarely in the "evil" category anyway, right? In this case, she knows what she's defending and how important it is. It just seems like she's failing to take advantage of the primary power of a high level druid, which is to recruit the local wildlife and other nature loving people/elves to her cause. She should have worked to establish the gate as a special protected place, and set up a group of elven druids and others to protect it as such. Which would have lasted pretty much forever. She certainly didn't appear to the of the antisocial variant of druid, so this should have been natural for her to do.

[Carl]

Isn't "taking over an entire forest" (or maybe a specific portion of one in this case) kinda not what druids do anyway? Especially epic level druids?

She's also an Elf. She already had elven warriors with her. Other's around her and/or working with her already knew at least that there was "something powerful in the forest that needed to be protected". Any elven government in the area that got involved would have (should have?) been recruited to officially make this area of the forest "off limits" to random travelers, so as to allow for greater defense of the gate. Either the forest is well developed and managed by elves, in which case it should be easy for her to establish a perimeter around the gate without drawing any more suspicion than any other "holy grove, sacred site, etc" that elves might want to keep outsiders away from, or it's wild unmanaged forest, in which case a powerful druid setting up shop and using powerful magic to keep people away is just something that might happen.

Elves, and fiercely defending specific forest areas is not exactly an unusual thing. Could that draw adventurers? Maybe? If she's going about it in some "evil" way. But if folks wandering by are approached and politely told not to proceed in specific areas, but otherwise left alone, I'm not sure why. After all, those visitors are always bringing in picnic baskets that distract the local bears. And leaving wrappers everywhere. And otherwise spoiling the natural beauty of the forest, so it's perfectly natural and normal that a powerful elven druid might take up shop and protect it from them. As long as she's not creating some kind of blockage for normal travel through/around/whatever the forest for trade/travel purposes, I'm not sure how that would garner much attention.

And certainly, anyone who does push past the outer "politely direct people away" perimeter, can get totally unleashed on. Anyone specifically choosing to go and fight the powerful druid that's protecting the forest from people who are despoiling it, but otherwise leaves people alone if they're just peacefully passing by, would fall squarely in the "evil" category anyway, right? In this case, she knows what she's defending and how important it is. It just seems like she's failing to take advantage of the primary power of a high level druid, which is to recruit the local wildlife and other nature loving people/elves to her cause. She should have worked to establish the gate as a special protected place, and set up a group of elven druids and others to protect it as such. Which would have lasted pretty much forever. She certainly didn't appear to the of the antisocial variant of druid, so this should have been natural for her to do.

Whilst i agree it's possibble druids routinely shut off entire forests we just don't know, there's no evidence either way. Also as evidanced by Soon and his wife randomly stumbling onto it, it's not exactly a super low traffic forest, people do randomly go in there, even from outside the elven homelands.

That said what your now describing, (sealing off a big piece of a forest off), is very different from the initial "seal the whole forest off". Depending on where the forest is, (and as i noted it seems to be somthing people at least randomly wonder through), that may or may not attract attention. Though either way it's worth remembering there are going to be types that hate druids and would still go after it just because there's a druid there.

Now the elven government, well there your forgetting the first and second rule of gate defence: "Don't tell anyone about the gates unless you absolutely have to". Avoiding creating a situation where a massive bureaucratic agency undoubtedly with foreign spies and possibble reasons to want to try to use the gate to their advantage knows about the gates is absolutely a massive problem. In hindsight i suspect most druids doing random glade protection in the elven homelands do coordinate with the government, a subconscious thought, (i definitely didn't think this through consciously until writing this), on this is probably what led to me raising them in the first place.

Remember, (i'm assuming you've read SoD), that Lirrian and company knew the moment the goblins had entered the forest, but it took a couple of days of straight marching with no detours for them to be sure of their destination. So they clearly have the means to monitor a huge swathe of forest, even if they're not using that to attack anything.

[gbaji]

Yeah. By "lock down", I didn't mean attack anyone entering the entire forest, but to maintain awareness and surveillance of anyone entering the forest and pay attention if they travel in directions you don't want them to go (and prevent them from doing so). I suppose this is very world specific (and I don't think we've gotten a lot of details about elves and how they manage forests in OotS), but if we're going with the standard Tolkienesque elves, they do this as a matter of course in any forest they have power in.

I'm admittedly starting with that assumption and then moving with it. Establish the gate as a "protected place" in the forest (just as I'd assume many elven forests do for special groves, grottos, great trees, etc). Keep tabs on folks moving through the forest (again, I assume any forest with elven presence in it already does this to some degree). And gently but firmly route travelers away from the gate (with amount of force increasing as folks seem to want to specifically fight through the more gentle methods).

Anyone who's progressed past the most basic (we put up signs telling folks where to go and not to stray off the path), and then past the more direct (our forest rangers show up and warn them that they're heading towards forbidden areas and to turn back to the allowed paths), and into the direct magical (we're making the paths twist back on themselves so they keep circling back unless they use special and specific means to keep going), and they are still doggedly determined to get to a spot we don't want them to go in our forest, they have earned a heaping helping of druidic nastiness. That's the point at which the earth, and trees, and plants, and air come alive and just start killing people. Given the number of days of travel the bad guys had to go, Lirian and defenders should have had plenty of warning that they were absolutely "bad guys" and not just folks who were lost, and should have had plenty of time to basically pick off every low to mid level member of their group, leaving just Redcloak and Xykon. And I'm not sure even they would survive an epic druid and followers in a forest environment long enough to get close to the gate. I've run NPC druids in forests defending against invaders before. They're darn near impossible to defeat if they make even semi-reasonable and intelligent preparations (and there's absolutely no reason for them not to given that it's more or less what their entire class is designed to do).


And as to the elven government thing, I really don't think it's an issue. Pretty much as you surmised. I'm again assuming that any elven forest will have a number of "protected places" in it. And that the "protectors" of those places are given latitude for doing so and the rank and file government types just follow their lead on those things. They have the entire history of their culture to work out the details of how such things are done, and have presumably done so already. Lirian doesn't have to re-invent the wheel here.


Again though, from a story point of view, this is all prologue. It's by design that she failed to properly defend her gate. It's also by design that she did so in a manner that actually forced one of the main bad guys to become a lich in order to escape her trap, thus making him even more powerful and dangerous. It's also by design that her failure and defeat lead to the next gate defender making poor choices as well, and also being defeated, which leads us conveniently to the start of the actual story where our heroes begin their tale. I'm just pointing out that "by the book", a druid defending a gate in the middle of a large forest should have been by far the most well secured of them all. She just had reverse plot armor on is all.

[Gandariel]

I feel like Lirian is a bit undersold in this thread.

Lirian had a Vietnam - style home advantage, plus denying any enemy's "helicopters/bombers", (magic) with the disease thing.

She has a large, self sustaining forest full of allies and DAYS to attack any enemy before they reach the gate? Even shooting 1 damage pings every 1 minute would have been enough to beat an army (and certainly not let any enemy caster regain spells)

Plus the gate and the main defense mechanism were secret.

I can't think of many forces in the OOTS world that would be able to beat this.

The only thing she was legitimately weak against was a surprise attack from a single very strong enemy who is immune to disease. (Which is exactly what happened)

And again, that's only if your target is reaching the gate. Even if you do get it and beat Lirian, you're surrounded by hidden enemies. You definitely can't just sit there and research the gate.


Tarquin's party is the kind of enemy that could have plausibly beat the gate's defenses so far. Massive resources to eventually locate the gate and discover the disease, strong casters to provide immunity and teleport, overall strong party to beat the unprepared defenses and probably kill Lirian.
Then, teleport the whole army, set up defenses, and sloooowly withstand the attacks and clear your way.

But I mean, it's one of the most powerful and resourceful forces in the world, and it took ALL of their assets.


(Ah, and the fire weakness is a plot device. Xykon would have legitimately lost to guerrilla tactics from the surviving allies of the forest. He'd be forced to teleport out, prepare larger forces and refresh spells, and teleport in, but in that time the gate defenses could have just destroyed the gate)

[Aquillion]

I feel like it's a bit silly to rank Soon and Lirian low given that they're the two that almost succeeded. In particular the Ghost-Martyrs were absolutely brutal.

Kraagor's Gate

I'm not going to rate Kraagor's gate because we don't know everything about it, but just based on what we know so far it would obviously take the top spot. This doesn't really need explaining, since Serini basically put absolutely everything in it - strongest monsters in the world, elaborate trickery, defenses against basically every sort of magic that could trivialize it, you name it. Obviously you're going to have the strongest gate when you have seemingly limitless budget.

Soon's Gate

It's worth pointing out that while Soon's obsession with loyalty and secrecy caused problems in some respects, it did actually work here - Redcloak and Xykon had absolutely no warning about the ghost-martyrs (they probably could have put together a countermeasure if they knew in advance, but they didn't), which is a big part of why they nearly died.

On top of that, the city itself and the institutions that defended the gate did matter - Xykon had to wage an actual massive war just to reach it (and even once he did he almost died to the trap at the end, which shows that Soon could be more flexible and cunning than people usually credit OOTS Paladins for. His other defenses weren't useless but they were, to some extent, decoys and distractions to wear people down and keep away insignificant threats so the ghost-martyrs would remain a powerful surprise to take out Big Bads at the end.)

Kraagor's gate aside, I'd say Soon's gate absolutely crushes all the others and it's not even close. It took vastly more time and energy for the villains to reach it (and partially hinged on them getting a giant hobgoblin army from nowhere, then Miko destroying the gate and saving them at the last moment.)

One small note is that Soon's Ghost-Martyrs would probably be less effective against someone who was Good- or Neutral-aligned. That said, someone like that is less likely to go after the gates in the first place, and "less effective" is not "ineffective" - a massive rush of Paladins led by an epic-level boss is going to pose a problem for anyone, especially if they take them by surprise. This contrasts sharply with several of the other gates, whose main defenses have failure states where they do nothing at all.

Another point to Soon's gate is that since its defenses consisted entirely of intelligent people, they were - mostly - more productively arrayed than those of the other gates that were encountered during the main story. That is to say, the Ghost-Martyrs didn't fight the OOTS, and the Paladins were mostly able to work with them.

Miko was the one exception, but I have trouble holding her against Soon - that was an extremely unlikely conjunction of circumstances. Even then, she only kept Xykon from being ended then and there.

One final note. Some people have suggested that Soon's Gate was weak to magic, or that Xykon could have forcecaged him. This probably would not have worked - if you look at the fight scenes, we see some of the ghost-martyrs casting arcane spells (Hinjo says everyone stationed in the Throne Room was a Paladin (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0449.html).) There were some Sapphire Guard members who practiced magic, either because they were dual-classed or because being a "paladin" for the purposes of the spell doesn't actually require levels in the Paladin class, just like how Miko could be a Samurai without levels in Samurai.

Either way, the entire point of having such Paladins would have been to cover their bases and have someone capable of eg. teleporting around or disintegrating / dispelling magical effects that the other paladins can't deal with.

Girard's Gate

Girard's gate is tricky to assess because we never saw its defenses in action. That said, while it isn't terrible, I would place it below Soon's, and possibly below Lirian's. At the end of the day, do you actually think it would have held up to Xykon and Redcloak in the long term if its defenders had been alive and no OOTS had been present? I'd say absolutely not. Too many of its defenses just fold outright to True Seeing, a lich's immunities, and a high will save. Having a lot of casters would help but there's no reason to think they were particularly high level and their spells would generally focus on illusions and targeting your will save. The trick at the end might slow people down but it's not going to stop them forever - eventually they're going to come back and search more closely.

And that leads to the real problem with Girard's gate: While he had some clever tricks and misdirections, there's no equivalent to the Ghost Martyrs - his gate feels almost like it's more intended to show off how smart Girard is rather than to actually keep the gate safe. Again, ironically, Soon had a better trap than Girard did. The epic-level illusions are the closest thing (presumably his people, if alive, would have killed you if you fell for it), but... it's one will save. Anyone actually capable of threatening the gate is likely to make it - or may even be outright immune to illusions and mind-affecting things, which, again, is such a glaring problem with Girard's gate that it's hard to give it a higher rating than Soon's objectively-more-successful one.

Even if the defenders had been alive when Xykon reached it, it would have been like Lirian's Gate all over again, except he was already immune to their big trick from the start. Do you think that Redcloak would have prepared True Seeing and Protection from Good before entering the gate specifically focused on illusions and mind-control? Gee, I wonder!

Lirian's Gate

Basically copy-paste everything about Girard's Gate, but replace "mind-affecting / illusions" with "disease." That said, I feel like from what we saw, she had a stronger military presence than Girard probably did (we don't know how strong his family was, but they were probably mostly illusionists, which leads to the problem I outlined above.) It's mostly a coinflip between the two gates, though, since you can only give so many points to a gate whose main defense just flat out fails on entire categories of opponents.

Actually, Lirian should probably be rated above Girard because she at least managed to keep her trump card a secret (whereas absolutely everyone knew Girard was an illusionist), which meant that it would take any spellcaster who wasn't immune to disease by surprise. This is why she, like Soon, was one of the ones who almost succeeded at taking Xykon down. I just don't see any plausible way Girard's Gate could have posed the threat that her or Soon's did, even with its defenders intact.

Dorukan's Gate

Honestly part of me feels like Dorukan's gate deserves to be dead last, for a very simple reason: Every indication is that his dungeon did nothing on its own. The only real threat there was Dorukan himself. Once Xykon lured him out and 1v1ed him, the dungeon was just a distraction at best and honestly helped him more than it hurt.

The spells on it that required a good-aligned person were... surprisingly effective, but it wasn't going to save anyone on their own, it was just a delaying tactic... and honestly nothing stopped Redcloak and Xykon from hiring some good-aligned commoner via intermediaries and having them deal with the rune. Either way, there's no indication that any part of the gate posed any threat once Dorukan was dead, nor was there any sort of alarm system or anything that we saw, so it doesn't really matter how long the spells took for Xykon to unravel - the only reason the weakness of Dorukan's gate didn't lead to Xykon's victory is because a random dude looking for revenge blundered in and his party randomly blew it up.

Note that Dorukan's Gate is the only one so far to have fallen into enemy hands. Lirian's was destroyed (and it's a fair argument that she intended for the ents holding it up to destroy it if necessary.) Soon's was destroyed by a Paladin (and while that was a mistake, it was clearly part of the strategy, since we saw another Paladin attempt to do so - having a bunch of people who could destroy it if things went badly was a feature.) The same was probably true for Girard's gate, even if Familicide left no chance to do so.

Dorukan's Gate is the only one where, if Dorukan died, that was it, the gate was now effectively in enemy hands. The self-destruct button was pointless with only one person to push it. The spells on the gate weren't worth much without someone to take advantage of the time they bought.

The dungeon was big and took the heroes an entire volume to travel through but doesn't actually seem to have served any purpose in terms of defending the gate. And while Xykon lured Dorukan out, it's just... hard to see what most of those defenses would have done. It was a fairly bog-standard dungeon crawl with no real ability to slow down someone like Xykon.

That said, Dorukan himself was an epic-level wizard, so in theory you could rate his gate above some of the others just because of that. But that would rely on him never screwing up and using that power intelligently in a fight, which... is demonstrably not the case. If you're going to hinge your gate's entire defenses on being an epic-level wizard, you have to actually be good at wizard-duels, which Dorukan definitely wasn't.

Again, it's worth comparing this to Soon's gate - Soon's obsession with honor and faith might seem dubious, but it worked in the sense that his gate had the most reliable, difficult-to-deal-with defenders. And, on top of that, Soon was the only member of the group (aside from Serini) who seems to have learned from his fellow party members and acted outside of his archetype - who would expect the Paladin's Gate to have a surprise trap at the very end? He also managed to do a better job than most of the others at keeping his big tricks a secret.

(Again, this contrasts sharply with Girard, whose biggest tricks were the most obvious things you could possibly expect an illusionist to pull, and something anyone who had time to prepare would go in expecting. Whereas the paladin's gate ending with a sudden ambush by reverse-undead has some great "I AM THE FIRE DRAGON OF THE ICE CAVE!" energy.)

[Carl]

Yeah. By "lock down", I didn't mean attack anyone entering the entire forest, but to maintain awareness and surveillance of anyone entering the forest and pay attention if they travel in directions you don't want them to go (and prevent them from doing so). I suppose this is very world specific (and I don't think we've gotten a lot of details about elves and how they manage forests in OotS), but if we're going with the standard Tolkienesque elves, they do this as a matter of course in any forest they have power in.

I'm admittedly starting with that assumption and then moving with it. Establish the gate as a "protected place" in the forest (just as I'd assume many elven forests do for special groves, grottos, great trees, etc). Keep tabs on folks moving through the forest (again, I assume any forest with elven presence in it already does this to some degree). And gently but firmly route travelers away from the gate (with amount of force increasing as folks seem to want to specifically fight through the more gentle methods).

Anyone who's progressed past the most basic (we put up signs telling folks where to go and not to stray off the path), and then past the more direct (our forest rangers show up and warn them that they're heading towards forbidden areas and to turn back to the allowed paths), and into the direct magical (we're making the paths twist back on themselves so they keep circling back unless they use special and specific means to keep going), and they are still doggedly determined to get to a spot we don't want them to go in our forest, they have earned a heaping helping of druidic nastiness. That's the point at which the earth, and trees, and plants, and air come alive and just start killing people. Given the number of days of travel the bad guys had to go, Lirian and defenders should have had plenty of warning that they were absolutely "bad guys" and not just folks who were lost, and should have had plenty of time to basically pick off every low to mid level member of their group, leaving just Redcloak and Xykon. And I'm not sure even they would survive an epic druid and followers in a forest environment long enough to get close to the gate. I've run NPC druids in forests defending against invaders before. They're darn near impossible to defeat if they make even semi-reasonable and intelligent preparations (and there's absolutely no reason for them not to given that it's more or less what their entire class is designed to do).


And as to the elven government thing, I really don't think it's an issue. Pretty much as you surmised. I'm again assuming that any elven forest will have a number of "protected places" in it. And that the "protectors" of those places are given latitude for doing so and the rank and file government types just follow their lead on those things. They have the entire history of their culture to work out the details of how such things are done, and have presumably done so already. Lirian doesn't have to re-invent the wheel here.


Again though, from a story point of view, this is all prologue. It's by design that she failed to properly defend her gate. It's also by design that she did so in a manner that actually forced one of the main bad guys to become a lich in order to escape her trap, thus making him even more powerful and dangerous. It's also by design that her failure and defeat lead to the next gate defender making poor choices as well, and also being defeated, which leads us conveniently to the start of the actual story where our heroes begin their tale. I'm just pointing out that "by the book", a druid defending a gate in the middle of a large forest should have been by far the most well secured of them all. She just had reverse plot armor on is all.

When it comes to explaining somthing i allways look at any possibble factors for an explanation. And if there are multiple possibilities i assume at least one must apply. If somthing happens there's a reason, even if that reason isn't stated and it's usually not stupidity.

For me the only possibilities i can think of all boil down to "minimise the number of people who are even aware there's a protected place here". Secrecy is a huge part of all the gates defences in the end, it makes sense Lirian would focus on that as much as the others.


I feel like it's a bit silly to rank Soon and Lirian low given that they're the two that almost succeeded. In particular the Ghost-Martyrs were absolutely brutal.

Kraagor's Gate

I'm not going to rate Kraagor's gate because we don't know everything about it, but just based on what we know so far it would obviously take the top spot. This doesn't really need explaining, since Serini basically put absolutely everything in it - strongest monsters in the world, elaborate trickery, defenses against basically every sort of magic that could trivialize it, you name it. Obviously you're going to have the strongest gate when you have seemingly limitless budget.

Soon's Gate

It's worth pointing out that while Soon's obsession with loyalty and secrecy caused problems in some respects, it did actually work here - Redcloak and Xykon had absolutely no warning about the ghost-martyrs (they probably could have put together a countermeasure if they knew in advance, but they didn't), which is a big part of why they nearly died.

On top of that, the city itself and the institutions that defended the gate did matter - Xykon had to wage an actual massive war just to reach it (and even once he did he almost died to the trap at the end, which shows that Soon could be more flexible and cunning than people usually credit OOTS Paladins for. His other defenses weren't useless but they were, to some extent, decoys and distractions to wear people down and keep away insignificant threats so the ghost-martyrs would remain a powerful surprise to take out Big Bads at the end.)

Kraagor's gate aside, I'd say Soon's gate absolutely crushes all the others and it's not even close. It took vastly more time and energy for the villains to reach it (and partially hinged on them getting a giant hobgoblin army from nowhere, then Miko destroying the gate and saving them at the last moment.)

One small note is that Soon's Ghost-Martyrs would probably be less effective against someone who was Good- or Neutral-aligned. That said, someone like that is less likely to go after the gates in the first place, and "less effective" is not "ineffective" - a massive rush of Paladins led by an epic-level boss is going to pose a problem for anyone, especially if they take them by surprise. This contrasts sharply with several of the other gates, whose main defenses have failure states where they do nothing at all.

Another point to Soon's gate is that since its defenses consisted entirely of intelligent people, they were - mostly - more productively arrayed than those of the other gates that were encountered during the main story. That is to say, the Ghost-Martyrs didn't fight the OOTS, and the Paladins were mostly able to work with them.

Miko was the one exception, but I have trouble holding her against Soon - that was an extremely unlikely conjunction of circumstances. Even then, she only kept Xykon from being ended then and there.

One final note. Some people have suggested that Soon's Gate was weak to magic, or that Xykon could have forcecaged him. This probably would not have worked - if you look at the fight scenes, we see some of the ghost-martyrs casting arcane spells (Hinjo says everyone stationed in the Throne Room was a Paladin (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0449.html).) There were some Sapphire Guard members who practiced magic, either because they were dual-classed or because being a "paladin" for the purposes of the spell doesn't actually require levels in the Paladin class, just like how Miko could be a Samurai without levels in Samurai.

Either way, the entire point of having such Paladins would have been to cover their bases and have someone capable of eg. teleporting around or disintegrating / dispelling magical effects that the other paladins can't deal with.

Girard's Gate

Girard's gate is tricky to assess because we never saw its defenses in action. That said, while it isn't terrible, I would place it below Soon's, and possibly below Lirian's. At the end of the day, do you actually think it would have held up to Xykon and Redcloak in the long term if its defenders had been alive and no OOTS had been present? I'd say absolutely not. Too many of its defenses just fold outright to True Seeing, a lich's immunities, and a high will save. Having a lot of casters would help but there's no reason to think they were particularly high level and their spells would generally focus on illusions and targeting your will save. The trick at the end might slow people down but it's not going to stop them forever - eventually they're going to come back and search more closely.

And that leads to the real problem with Girard's gate: While he had some clever tricks and misdirections, there's no equivalent to the Ghost Martyrs - his gate feels almost like it's more intended to show off how smart Girard is rather than to actually keep the gate safe. Again, ironically, Soon had a better trap than Girard did. The epic-level illusions are the closest thing (presumably his people, if alive, would have killed you if you fell for it), but... it's one will save. Anyone actually capable of threatening the gate is likely to make it - or may even be outright immune to illusions and mind-affecting things, which, again, is such a glaring problem with Girard's gate that it's hard to give it a higher rating than Soon's objectively-more-successful one.

Even if the defenders had been alive when Xykon reached it, it would have been like Lirian's Gate all over again, except he was already immune to their big trick from the start. Do you think that Redcloak would have prepared True Seeing and Protection from Good before entering the gate specifically focused on illusions and mind-control? Gee, I wonder!

Lirian's Gate

Basically copy-paste everything about Girard's Gate, but replace "mind-affecting / illusions" with "disease." That said, I feel like from what we saw, she had a stronger military presence than Girard probably did (we don't know how strong his family was, but they were probably mostly illusionists, which leads to the problem I outlined above.) It's mostly a coinflip between the two gates, though, since you can only give so many points to a gate whose main defense just flat out fails on entire categories of opponents.

Actually, Lirian should probably be rated above Girard because she at least managed to keep her trump card a secret (whereas absolutely everyone knew Girard was an illusionist), which meant that it would take any spellcaster who wasn't immune to disease by surprise. This is why she, like Soon, was one of the ones who almost succeeded at taking Xykon down. I just don't see any plausible way Girard's Gate could have posed the threat that her or Soon's did, even with its defenders intact.

Dorukan's Gate

Honestly part of me feels like Dorukan's gate deserves to be dead last, for a very simple reason: Every indication is that his dungeon did nothing on its own. The only real threat there was Dorukan himself. Once Xykon lured him out and 1v1ed him, the dungeon was just a distraction at best and honestly helped him more than it hurt.

The spells on it that required a good-aligned person were... surprisingly effective, but it wasn't going to save anyone on their own, it was just a delaying tactic... and honestly nothing stopped Redcloak and Xykon from hiring some good-aligned commoner via intermediaries and having them deal with the rune. Either way, there's no indication that any part of the gate posed any threat once Dorukan was dead, nor was there any sort of alarm system or anything that we saw, so it doesn't really matter how long the spells took for Xykon to unravel - the only reason the weakness of Dorukan's gate didn't lead to Xykon's victory is because a random dude looking for revenge blundered in and his party randomly blew it up.

Note that Dorukan's Gate is the only one so far to have fallen into enemy hands. Lirian's was destroyed (and it's a fair argument that she intended for the ents holding it up to destroy it if necessary.) Soon's was destroyed by a Paladin (and while that was a mistake, it was clearly part of the strategy, since we saw another Paladin attempt to do so - having a bunch of people who could destroy it if things went badly was a feature.) The same was probably true for Girard's gate, even if Familicide left no chance to do so.

Dorukan's Gate is the only one where, if Dorukan died, that was it, the gate was now effectively in enemy hands. The self-destruct button was pointless with only one person to push it. The spells on the gate weren't worth much without someone to take advantage of the time they bought.

The dungeon was big and took the heroes an entire volume to travel through but doesn't actually seem to have served any purpose in terms of defending the gate. And while Xykon lured Dorukan out, it's just... hard to see what most of those defenses would have done. It was a fairly bog-standard dungeon crawl with no real ability to slow down someone like Xykon.

That said, Dorukan himself was an epic-level wizard, so in theory you could rate his gate above some of the others just because of that. But that would rely on him never screwing up and using that power intelligently in a fight, which... is demonstrably not the case. If you're going to hinge your gate's entire defenses on being an epic-level wizard, you have to actually be good at wizard-duels, which Dorukan definitely wasn't.

Again, it's worth comparing this to Soon's gate - Soon's obsession with honor and faith might seem dubious, but it worked in the sense that his gate had the most reliable, difficult-to-deal-with defenders. And, on top of that, Soon was the only member of the group (aside from Serini) who seems to have learned from his fellow party members and acted outside of his archetype - who would expect the Paladin's Gate to have a surprise trap at the very end? He also managed to do a better job than most of the others at keeping his big tricks a secret.

(Again, this contrasts sharply with Girard, whose biggest tricks were the most obvious things you could possibly expect an illusionist to pull, and something anyone who had time to prepare would go in expecting. Whereas the paladin's gate ending with a sudden ambush by undead has some great "I AM THE FIRE DRAGON OF THE ICE CAVE!" energy.)

I think it's worth remembering not a lot of things are actually innately immune to disease, (the only thing short of a divine artifact we know could defeat it), and the vast majority of those that are, (mostly undead AFAIK), aren't really capable of dealing well with spellcasters, (you pretty much have to have serious spellcasting abilities yourself). In fact Lich's and Vampires are the two most major ones.

Yes they were a weakness, (and it's clear from Lirrians fight with Lich Xykon that she had a major knowledge blindspot regarding undead), but they were a remarkably narrow weakness. Much more so than Girriad's or for that matter Dorukan's, (his biggest issue is that his defence was only good for as long as he lived).

Soons was by far the strongest we have a full picture on. But depending on precisely where Krageors gate really is that could be stronger. A lot comes down to how hard the true location would be to randomly find.

[gbaji]

When it comes to explaining somthing i allways look at any possibble factors for an explanation. And if there are multiple possibilities i assume at least one must apply. If somthing happens there's a reason, even if that reason isn't stated and it's usually not stupidity.

For me the only possibilities i can think of all boil down to "minimise the number of people who are even aware there's a protected place here". Secrecy is a huge part of all the gates defences in the end, it makes sense Lirian would focus on that as much as the others.

Yeah. As written in SoD, you are almost certainly correct. I guess I just have a hard time letting the world-builder in me go. I've been a long time GM, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how various structures and organizations must work in a game world to actually, you know, work. So to me, it's almost nails-on-the-chalkboard like to have an elven druid, in a forest that certain seemed to have elves in it, not actually take advantage of that fact to some degree. But yeah. Dismiss that as me idly speculating on "what should have been". Clearly, it's not what actually happened. She clearly did put secrecy above security in this case, only trusting the defense of the gate to her own followers and forest friends, and not leveraging anything else.

Having said all that, despite what I consider to be flaws in her method of defense (waiting far too long to attack), she still managed to defeat them in their first attempt pretty utterly. It's the lack of follow through that got her (which I still think, as a druid, she should have had no compunctions about "recycling" them once defeated by her disease, but that's just me).

I guess if I were to rate based on how the defenses were actually set up (which is not necessarily what actually happened in the comic), then I'd rate the following:

Kragar's gate. No clue. Can't rate yet. Defenses seem to be pretty good, and seem to be self-sustaining in some way. Monster hollow seems to replenish the monsters over time. Somewhat static in that way though. Also has some elements of misdirection as well (epic rogue involved, of course). But we still don't know the extent of that. Seems like we're presented with a straight up "fight through the monsters" dungeon, but it's clearly more than that.

1. Soon's gate. Best combination of defense against a variety of threats. Leveraging the entire power of the city and its defenses, and then adding in the paladins and their oaths (both to secrecy and to serve as ghost martyrs) made for a nearly unbeatable combination. It frankly would have worked despite the massive army attacking, except for an entirely unpredictable action.

2. Lirian's gate. Also very good combination defense. I've already spoken a lot about this, so I'll leave it at that.

3. Girard's gate. In theory, well defended. And he did at least make a plan for defense after his own death. But the defenses relied almost entirely on illusion and misdirection (and this was obvious, unlike the martyrs and disease of the first two gates). Having said that, I do think some folks are underestimating just how effective illusions can be when bolstered by a largish number of even middish level casters. I think team evil would have had quite a bit of trouble dealing with the defenses had they been actively manned. Not all illusions are mind affecting spells, and true seeing can be dispelled. And never underestimate the sheer spell casting advantage of "I'm hiding behind a wall in a secret tunnel you know nothing about and can see you via peep holes, and you can't see me". Home advantage would have been a huge factor for the defenders. You know, if they hadn't all been wiped out before anyone ever arrived.

4. Durukon's gate. He made a dungeon that was 100% dependent on his own power to defend it, and (apparently) made zero plans for said defense after his death. The only defense after that was the glyphs/sigils, which only coincidentally happened to delay team evil (because they were evil). I'd question the creation of a magical defense that just requires "someone of good alignment" to bypass, but I also put this into the prologue section of the story, so that's just the way things are. Again, the world-builder in me would have expected him to create an order of wizards to follow in his footsteps, train them, and key the gate glyph to only open for the highest ranked member(s) of that order. Would prevent anything short of a Saruman level betrayal from ever penetrating the gates defenses. But that's just what I would have done. Maybe he was anti-social and/or paranoid or something. But in any case, as actually implemented, his defenses were by far the least likely to actually protect his gate for any longish period of time. His gate basically had a relatively low MTBF even if no one powerful ever attempted to gain access to it.

[Aquillion]

I think it's worth remembering not a lot of things are actually innately immune to disease, (the only thing short of a divine artifact we know could defeat it), and the vast majority of those that are, (mostly undead AFAIK), aren't really capable of dealing well with spellcasters, (you pretty much have to have serious spellcasting abilities yourself). In fact Lich's and Vampires are the two most major ones.

Yes they were a weakness, (and it's clear from Lirrians fight with Lich Xykon that she had a major knowledge blindspot regarding undead), but they were a remarkably narrow weakness. Much more so than Girriad's or for that matter Dorukan's, (his biggest issue is that his defence was only good for as long as he lived).
Sure, maybe - like I said, her gate probably belongs above Girard's, though it's real hard to say because we can only guess how Girard's gate would have been defended if his people were alive. And we can't rate Lirian's gate too low given that, like Soon's, it nearly succeeded at neutralizing the villains.

But a weakness to Liches and Vampires is still a pretty huge problem given that those were two of the main villain factions in the present day (and this is something she ought to have anticipated - if there were gaps in her knowledge, that's a problem, especially since she had a good relationship with Dorukan. The two of them should have, together, been the expert on supernatural threats.

Note that Soon, by comparison, not only immediately knew what a Lich was but knew precisely how to kill one permanently, which is apparently fairly rare knowledge in the setting since nobody in the party knew it. I suppose that might be because undead are Knowledge: Religion? But given that he knew where Xykon's phylactery was, it's probably also because he set up his base in the throne room of a major population center - I suspect he was incorporeally and invisibly listening to every conversation there, that's why he was relatively well-informed when most of the other gate's defenders were not.

Either way, the order is still Soon > Lirian > Girard > Dorukan.


The exact same can be said of Soon's. And even then, Xykon bypassed all the defenses and went straight to the throne room because he had the rare and mystifying powers of flight and invisibility.
But in Soon's case it was a trap. The "mundane" defenses served their purpose - they got Xykon to leave behind his own mundane army and other things that couldn't be easily flown into the throne room, leaving him vulnerable to the ghost-martyrs. The mundane defenses weren't useless, they meant that he got to hammer Xykon alone for a while, like, fifty-on-one. His gate had the best defenses against scry-and-die / go-straight-for-the-king tactics. And even once Redcloak arrived it was with a bunch of spells and resources burned getting there.

Part of the reason the defenses on Soon's gate are impressive is because it shows a sort of tricky thinking one wouldn't expect from a Paladin. (Though I suppose it makes some sense in the sense that he's a martial expert and planned out his defense strategically, with multiple layers that worked together and which each prevented a different threat - as opposed to eg. Dorukan, who seems to have gone with "I'll just put up a bunch of wards and then cast spells at them I guess.")

[Liquor Box]

I thought I'd raise a bit of a defence for Dorukon's gate here


I feel like it's a bit silly to rank Soon and Lirian low given that they're the two that almost succeeded. In particular the Ghost-Martyrs were absolutely brutal.

Dorukon's gate was also almost successful, so seems a bit silly to rank it low too.

All three gates were destroyed. Soon's and Dorukon's came close to killing Xykon (Xykon himself says his battle with Dorukon was a near thing), and Lyrian's arguably came close to keeping him imprisoned.


Kraagor's Gate

I'm not going to rate Kraagor's gate because we don't know everything about it, but just based on what we know so far it would obviously take the top spot. This doesn't really need explaining, since Serini basically put absolutely everything in it - strongest monsters in the world, elaborate trickery, defenses against basically every sort of magic that could trivialize it, you name it. Obviously you're going to have the strongest gate when you have seemingly limitless budget.

You mention three things that Kraagor's gate had - trickery, monsters and magical defences. Dorukon's gate also had all three of those defences, and others besides. Arguably the monsters in Kraagor's were stronger (the Order being higher level now), but those monsters seem still mostly easy for Xykon.



Soon's Gate

Kraagor's gate aside, I'd say Soon's gate absolutely crushes all the others and it's not even close. It took vastly more time and energy for the villains to reach it (and partially hinged on them getting a giant hobgoblin army from nowhere, then Miko destroying the gate and saving them at the last moment.)

Soon's gate may have taken more resources, but Dorukon's gate is the one that had taken vastly more time than the others - and Xykon still hadn't cracked it when the Order showed up.


One small note is that Soon's Ghost-Martyrs would probably be less effective against someone who was Good- or Neutral-aligned. That said, someone like that is less likely to go after the gates in the first place, and "less effective" is not "ineffective" - a massive rush of Paladins led by an epic-level boss is going to pose a problem for anyone, especially if they take them by surprise. This contrasts sharply with several of the other gates, whose main defenses have failure states where they do nothing at all.

Agree about this - but also relevant to Dorukon's wards which required good aligned persons (so even narrower than Soon's good or neutral).


Dorukan's Gate

Honestly part of me feels like Dorukan's gate deserves to be dead last, for a very simple reason: Every indication is that his dungeon did nothing on its own. The only real threat there was Dorukan himself. Once Xykon lured him out and 1v1ed him, the dungeon was just a distraction at best and honestly helped him more than it hurt.

We have no way of knowing how difficult the dungeon was for Xykon - we didn't see that. We only know that Xykon vanquished it. As he has vanquished all Kraagor's dungeons and Lyrian's monster defences.

But putting that aside, the dungeon was not his only defence. But I expect we will come to those below.


The spells on it that required a good-aligned person were... surprisingly effective, but it wasn't going to save anyone on their own, it was just a delaying tactic... and honestly nothing stopped Redcloak and Xykon from hiring some good-aligned commoner via intermediaries and having them deal with the rune. Either way, there's no indication that any part of the gate posed any threat once Dorukan was dead, nor was there any sort of alarm system or anything that we saw, so it doesn't really matter how long the spells took for Xykon to unravel - the only reason the weakness of Dorukan's gate didn't lead to Xykon's victory is because a random dude looking for revenge blundered in and his party randomly blew it up.

A delaying tactic like Lyrian's virus or Serini's trickery at Kraagor's gate? As a delaying tactic it fared longer than Lyrian's virus, and much longer than Serini's trickery has so far. Who knows how long it would have kept him had the Order not intervened.

It also did have something that posed a threat to Xykon - Dorukon himself. A greater threat than anything we have seen at Kraagor's gate for sure. Granted Xykon did vanquish him, but Dorukon was probably the greatest threat to Xykon we have seen at a gate other than Soon's ghost paladins.


Note that Dorukan's Gate is the only one so far to have fallen into enemy hands. Lirian's was destroyed (and it's a fair argument that she intended for the ents holding it up to destroy it if necessary.) Soon's was destroyed by a Paladin (and while that was a mistake, it was clearly part of the strategy, since we saw another Paladin attempt to do so - having a bunch of people who could destroy it if things went badly was a feature.) The same was probably true for Girard's gate, even if Familicide left no chance to do so.

Good point that it may have been part of Soon's and Lyrian's strategy to destroy those gates. It was also part of Dorukon's, hence the self destruct.

Xykon got physical possession of the gate, but he didn't crack its defences. That is because Dorukon's gate is the only one we've seen so far to have defences that continue to apply after a baddy has captured it.


Dorukan's Gate is the only one where, if Dorukan died, that was it, the gate was now effectively in enemy hands. The self-destruct button was pointless with only one person to push it. The spells on the gate weren't worth much without someone to take advantage of the time they bought.

Nope. Dorukon was only one layer. Even after Droukon died, it had at least as many layers of defence as any other gate (for example, it still had monsters, trickery and magic defences like Kraagor's). And even after he died, it hold the record for the gate that held out the longest.


The dungeon was big and took the heroes an entire volume to travel through but doesn't actually seem to have served any purpose in terms of defending the gate. And while Xykon lured Dorukan out, it's just... hard to see what most of those defenses would have done. It was a fairly bog-standard dungeon crawl with no real ability to slow down someone like Xykon.

We didn't see what defences there were because Xykon probably killed them all. For all we know Dorukon's dungeon might have had equally strong monsters to Kraagor's but Xykon killed them. All we know is that Xykon was ultimately successful, but that is true at every direct defence of a gate so far.


That said, Dorukan himself was an epic-level wizard, so in theory you could rate his gate above some of the others just because of that. But that would rely on him never screwing up and using that power intelligently in a fight, which... is demonstrably not the case. If you're going to hinge your gate's entire defenses on being an epic-level wizard, you have to actually be good at wizard-duels, which Dorukan definitely wasn't.

Nope. The way he went about his fight against Xykon (whether you think it intelligent or unintelligent) he was a threat. Xykon said so. Who else has Xykon fought at the gate who he would say made it a near thing, other than the ghost paladins? He was even playing with Lyrian in their clash, and Serini is too afraid to engage him even with all her pets.


Again, it's worth comparing this to Soon's gate - Soon's obsession with honor and faith might seem dubious, but it worked in the sense that his gate had the most reliable, difficult-to-deal-with defenders. And, on top of that, Soon was the only member of the group (aside from Serini) who seems to have learned from his fellow party members and acted outside of his archetype - who would expect the Paladin's Gate to have a surprise trap at the very end? He also managed to do a better job than most of the others at keeping his big tricks a secret.

It is worth comparing Dorukon's gate to Soon's, because those two are the contenders for the best defended gate.

[hroþila]

The thing with Lirian's Gate is that its defenses weren't weak only against the undead, they were weak against any conventional army. They were weak against any non-caster. Tarquin for example would have crushed its defenses, even if he couldn't have taken on Lirian herself solo. Any regular warlord with a sufficiently strong army would have won that battle - and by the looks of it, the army in question wouldn't have needed to be all that big.

[Peelee]

But in Soon's case it was a trap.

No it wasn't. It was just one of many lines of defense.

[Aquillion]

Yes, Dorukan's wards slowed Xykon down. But I don't think this means much because as soon as Dorukan himself died, none of the defenses were actually capable of killing Xykon. It was complete luck that an adventuring party arrived to kill him (Roy was there because he wanted revenge, not because of anything Dorukan did.) There was no alarm system, no backups, etc.

If Roy hadn't randomly wandered in, Dorukan's other defenses wouldn't have mattered at all, because Xykon basically had as long as he wanted to analyze and dissect them. Dorukan himself was the only layer of defense actually capable of winning. The poorly-thought-out self-destruct button demonstrates this - you say it shows he had other plans, but, again, what use is the self-destruct button when there's nobody there to push it? As soon as Dorukan died all his other stuff went on autopilot and became mostly useless, capable of slowing Xykon down but not really doing anything meaningful beyond that (and, crucially, with no plans that we saw that could actually take advantage of the time they theoretically bought.)

I don't agree that he almost won. The fight we saw was pretty one-sided, and his defenses didn't actually do anything except make Xykon win more slowly. His gate is currently the only one that was captured by the enemy intact - that's the worst showing of any of the defenses we've seen.


The thing with Lirian's Gate is that its defenses weren't weak only against the undead, they were weak against any conventional army. They were weak against any non-caster. Tarquin for example would have crushed its defenses, even if he couldn't have taken on Lirian herself solo. Any regular warlord with a sufficiently strong army would have won that battle - and by the looks of it, the army in question wouldn't have needed to be all that big.
The Vector Legion also has a massive advantage in that the disease may not even work against a psion, at least based on how it was described. But even if it does work, a big enough army with some high-level maritals decked out in magic gear could probably take her gate, yeah - she suffers from the early-OOTS V thing where she only really considers casters worth worrying about.


No it wasn't. It was just one of many lines of defense.
My reading is that the way Soon laid out his lines of defense was intended to make the last line a trap (hence why it was such a big secret.) Anyone who tried to just teleport (or fly / ethereal / whatever) to the end wouldn't be able to bring an army with them, so they'd be vulnerable to getting unexpectedly ganked by the ghost-martyrs.

We can't know his exact intentions and thoughts, sure. But at least the practical effect is that his gate has far more bases covered than most of the others, and the ghost-martyrs ended up being much more effective than their individual CR would probably suggest because they were positioned in a way that got the enemy's strongest individuals alone if they tried to take a shortcut. I don't think it's that odd to suggest that Soon, a highly-talented martial guy who probably knew a lot of military strategy, would have done that deliberately.

[Eric the White]

So maybe this have been done before, but I'm just ocationally in this forum so whatever. I'm doing one now anyway.

After now we have seen how all gates are protected and I do want to rank them in order of how good and well designed they where for defence. I add my take as my personal opinion, but I would love to see others take on it as well. No need to use my format. We don't fully know enough about Kragors gate, but we can at least take into account of how much we know about it.

Note: By mortal I mean human age where knowledge and power can be gone in a few generations.

C Tier:

5: Lirian's gate.
+ A virus destroying "all" living spellcasters that gets close to it. Making them spell-impotent.
+ Good alligned nature creatures in high numbers
+ Elven warriors and Lirian herself

- Basically no defence at all against the undead (what was she thinking?)
- Extremly weak to forest fires (or just if not given enough time to buff before)
- Weak to surprise attacks (apparantly nothing against teleportation or similar)

4: Soon's gate
+ Ghost warriors in high numbers as last defence
+ An entire city in first line of defence
+ Saphire guard able to remove threats as they come by

- Arrogant, makes themselves a target and easily corruptable
- Nothing beside their own force can defend it / weak to magic
- Mortal.

B tier:

3. Dorukan's Gate
+ Magic master in command
+ Inpenetrable castle
+ Tons of magic traps and protections

- Main defender can be lured out of its defence position
- Summoning allowance (for personal reasons) are a weak point
- Mortal (few defences once dead - no offspring)

A Tier:

2. Kraagor's gate
+ Remote hostile and hard to find location
+ RNG puzzle with dangerous monsters (that probably are a bluff)
+ Traps and amnesia poison available

- No (yet) ways of dealing with presistent strong targets
- RNG Puzzle can be cheesed with magic
- Last defence are very uncertain in power (yet to be seen)

1. Girard's Gate
+ Entire generations of dedicated spellcasting protectors
+ Riddled with tons of deadly traps, bluffs and illusions
+ Hard to find

- Can be located with logic and magic
- Entire defence can be wiped out by one (though very rare) spell (even on a basically unrelated person/monster)
- Mortal


If Lirian had a defence against the undead and fire she would probably be 1 or 2 ranked. The virus are quite powerful stuff. Girard might be lower on the list as we don't really know the true power of the traps and illusions. Kraagors gate are not yet completed so it can go up or down.



I still think they all get F's for putting their differences ahead of the literal fate of every living creature on the planet. The 5 of them together would defeated Team evil easily. Every single gate so far has fallen because their own nearsightedness. Lirian couldn't imagine a living create choosing to become undead. Dorukan threw caution to the wind to save his love. That's nice, but he may have condemned everyone else's love to oblivion. Soon couldn't imagine that the honor of a paladin was indeed breakable. Girard thought perception was all that mattered and had no backup when it failed.

I know it would take away our actual story but... Imagine Lirian's gate has a regiment of paladins at it, and she has talisman to summon Dorukan, and even if they got past all that, it turns out the gate was actually an illusion and team evil just killed everyone who knew where it actually was- and there's an army coming of Paladins and high level monsters to pick up the slack, so you don't have forever to search for the actual gate.

[Peelee]

My reading is that the way Soon laid out his lines of defense was intended to make the last line a trap (hence why it was such a big secret.) Anyone who tried to just teleport (or fly / ethereal / whatever) to the end wouldn't be able to bring an army with them, so they'd be vulnerable to getting unexpectedly ganked by the ghost-martyrs.

We can't know his exact intentions and thoughts, sure. But at least the practical effect is that his gate has far more bases covered than most of the others, and the ghost-martyrs ended up being much more effective than their individual CR would probably suggest because they were positioned in a way that got the enemy's strongest individuals alone if they tried to take a shortcut. I don't think it's that odd to suggest that Soon, a highly-talented martial guy who probably knew a lot of military strategy, would have done that deliberately.
The Gate was a big secret. The Sapphire Guard was a big secret. The ghost paladins were a big secret.

"secret" does not mean "trap". It means "security through obscurity".

[Mike Havran]

I still think they all get F's for putting their differences ahead of the literal fate of every living creature on the planet.
That does not really address the point of the tread. If they peacefully cooperated together they might have created defenses far superior than what they achieved individually. Or perhaps they would go into the Tragedy of commons mode and cook up something lame, because they would not be forced to rely on their own skill.

[RickDaily12]

I'll add my agreement that Lirian's gate was left grossly undefended compared to the other Gates. First off, there was absolutely nothing in Lirian's army that could address an overwhelming force of martial non-magical combantants, or as mentioned, the undead. And even as for magical living creatures, an anti-magic virus surrounding the glade upon entry is a bit scary at first, but there is plenty of time for a sorcerer to literally cast a Cloudkill in enough time to devastate both sides of combat field. Dozens of other spells to cause even more devastation could have been chosen were this a known fact. Considering that Lirian must have used this virus as a basis to justify not slapping permanent resist-fire buffs all over the damn place makes me realize that this Gate was practically one bad Dry Thunderstorm away from lighting up and destroying itself. And attaching the Gate to the Treants- why??? The only reason I can come up with is because this appeared to have caused the least amount of damage to the surrounding forest when it shattered, as opposed to the explosions from every other Gate. This strikes me as a fail-save measure to cause less harm if she failed to defend her own Gate and gave her the option of destroying it. But when we're discussing something of literal global importance like planetary rifts whose seals need to be timeless and survive beyond your own death, fail-save measures such as this are just unacceptable considerations in my mind as they seem to acknowledge a reasonable degree of likihood of your defenses imploding upon itself. So Lirian failed on so many accounts here, it's just ridiculous.

My personal vote to next worst Gate is Girard's. A family of wizards defending a Gate in a hostile wide and vast desert, and whose exact coordinates are known to very few searching for that Gate is a reasonable line of defense. With that said, though, the Draketooth family was not being discreet enough in how it was operating in the Western Continent. Penelope managed to rely on Divination magic alone to locate where her child now was. If she hadn't died, can you imagine how problematic it would be for the Draketooth Family if the armies of the three largest Desert nations and their epic leveled rulers showed up demanding the father's head and the stolen child? How would you be able to explain the reason for such a well guarded fortress in the middle of nowhere to a party of epic adventurers? Trickery may have been the game for Girard and his family, but incognito and discreet behaviours were necessary as well. Without recruiting their mates into their families, the constant kidnapping of children was going to draw the attention of someone important and powerful on the Western Continent eventually, and it was certainly just about to. This is completely ignoring any discussion about the effectiveness of illusion magic and the vast trickeries of the final dungeon- though seeing how easy it was for the Undead to just ignore the final epic illusion was also concerning.

My middle gate goes to Dorukan. Dorukan had a dungeon filled with monsters, artifacts, and powerful wards. Even though he was the Gate's star goal-tender, he wins my first vote of acceptable competence of defense because his defenses would continue to persist even after his death. Xykon and Redcloak had more than six months after killing him to reach the Gate and manipulate it to their bidding, and miserably failed. While they were able to cease control of the automatic defenses, such as the monsters and the Cloister spell, the wards ultimately did their job in keeping the Gate out of reach. Dorukan's greatest weakness being his pride and his love for Lirian made him an easy target to eliminate, (at least for Xykon), but ultimately, his Gate held the line for as long as it needed to.

Now we have Soon's Gate and Kraagor's Gate. These two are a bit harder to gauge, as we don't know the full extent of which Kraagor's Gate is defended, but Haley being able to breach the first line as a teens-level rogue is of a matter of some concern. She and her party were able to outplay Serini, Sunny, and several architectural monsters and reach a level of neutrality. At face level, one might think this alone would rank Soon's Gate much higher in defense, as a force of some 30,000 hobgoblin soldiers were required to take Azure City, when they would likely overwhelm Serini in her Backstage- but in fairness, unless you are Redcloak or Laurin and can cast Gate, you are not going have enough rations or morale to march all those troops into the hostile regions (or foreign nations) surrounding the North Pole behind your rogue who just disabled the swapover.

It is a bit difficult to judge how successful these two Gates are at repelling all threats. On one hand, Soon was going to kill Xykon and Redcloak at the throne room, but even if he had done so, Azure City was lost, and it wasn't even close. At no point in time did it ever seem like Team Good had the advantage in that war, ever. Not that 30,000 hobgoblin soldiers is an easy thing to stand against, but these are the resources Team Evil has. Soon's Gate lost to this.

Meanwhile, imagine Xykon and Redcloak hire someone like Bozzok. If Haley could spot and beat the swapovers that easily, Bozzok could do it in his sleep. Redcloak Gates the 30,000 hobgoblin soldiers over to the North Pole. How long before the Gate falls? How likely is it that Bozzok has the trap disarming skills required to deal with any trap, and Xykon and Redcloak have the magic needed to assist, after throwing 5 hobgoblins or at each trap so just for good measure?

The Order of the Stick seem like a reasonable contending force to challenge Serini and plausibly reach Kraagor's Gate, from what we can tell so far. This is only because they are the more well rounded adventuring party compared to Team Evil, but Team Evil can summon any resources needed to fill their missing gaps. Even with the forces of an entire walled city behind them, the Order of the Stick failed to defend Soon's Gate.

That said, you would need to know about the Gates and where to find them in the first place. Kraagor's Gate being a big monster gauntlet in the North Pole by a bugbear village alone should not draw the attention of most, and others would likely balk at trying to challenge the forces of a capital city such as Azure City at Soon's Gate. These Gates also succeeded in keeping their true motivations top secret, away from the eyes of forces capable of seizing them with the interest in using the Gate itself. The only Gate on the verge of failing this task was Girard's.

However, given that the number one top threat to the Gates has always been the Crimson Mantle, let us suppose then that it would be more likely for a goblin ruler to rally a large goblin army behind them whenever possible for a Gate Invasion. It would be more difficult for that goblin ruler to come up with a balanced party to challenge any threat in a potential dungeon (as shown in SoD about Goblin Wizards being rare and incapable)

I suppose in that case, since a balanced party is theoretically required to challenge Kraagor's Gate, from what we've seen, whereas an army of massive size was required to challenge Soon's Gate, and that Dorukan's Gate held long after being seized, that gives us a much clearer answer of which Gate stood best against its top threat:

5. Lirian
4. Girard
3. Soon
2. Kraagor
1. Dorukan

Otherwise, if we're looking at the best overall Gate versus all possible threats:

5. Lirian
4. Girard
3. Dorukan
1. Soon = Kraagor

Dorukan's Gate would drop only mildly here, as I believe Xykon had figured out that the final wards protecting the Gate could be bypassed only if someone of "pure heart" (like Elan, and not Team Evil with its army of undead and goblins) touched the Gate first.

Anyway, there's some heavy disclaimers here. From monologing here I'm really realizing just how impressive Dorukan's defenses really were and just how long they were to survive and persist after his death, even while captured. I can also appreciate Soon's Gate demanding a lot of leadership/financial resources to capture, and Kraagor's Gate requiring a specific and specialized high level team to navigate. All three of these gates did their jobs well, I think, which I don't think could be said for how thinly protected Lirian's Gate was or how much attention Girard's Gate was grabbing.

[Peelee]

I'll add my agreement that Lirian's gate was left grossly undefended compared to the other Gates. First off, there was absolutely nothing in Lirian's army that could address an overwhelming force of martial non-magical combantants, or as mentioned, the undead.

There is absolutely nothing in almost all the Gate defenses that could address an overwhelming force of whatever, because by definition, regardless of the makeup of the force, it is overwhelming.

[brian 333]

That does not really address the point of the tread. If they peacefully cooperated together they might have created defenses far superior than what they achieved individually. Or perhaps they would go into the Tragedy of commons mode and cook up something lame, because they would not be forced to rely on their own skill.

That sounds like the over-arching theme of the story. Leadership, loyalty, teamwork, friendship. There's even a bit about people becoming better people by the influence of others.

No one is arguing that any given Scribbler set up the ultimate, can't do better than this, defense. They are comparing the Scribblers' individual defenses of the various gates. I think we all agree, (if we seem never to agree on anything else,) that a combined plan would have been stronger.

[RickDaily12]

There is absolutely nothing in almost all the Gate defenses that could address an overwhelming force of whatever, because by definition, regardless of the makeup of the force, it is overwhelming.

I agree to an extent. Obviously, a large scale army is difficult to defend even for an epic level character, but four Gates had possible defenses (location, fortifications) to make this a more arduous ask.

For example, Soon's Gate did have a response to a massive army. It had one of its own. It had walled defenses, it even had outposts with magical lighthouse alerts! It also had allies in the other Southern Lands. I hold the "massive army" as a guiding example of what is required to seize a Gate because that was the absolute bare minimum requirement to take Soon's. Team Evil without that army would have lost. And if Xykon wasn't destroying beacon after beacon (and barring other political chaos from Miko killing Shojo), I wonder if Azure City would have had more time to prepare their defenses and rally its political allies- if it could have been enough to save the city.

The other four Gates are at inconvenient locations, two of them in completely hostile environments (Girard's and Kraagor's). Like having an army being a tall ask, I also consider having a spellcaster able to cast Gate a tall ask. Without this, you can't march an army through desert or tundra without paying a high cost in the long term. But I still balk at Girard's tactics here because he was bound to garner the attention of someone powerful enough and unrelated to the issue of the Gates to stop his family from constantly kidnapping children all over a continent, which was absolutely about to happen. If Girard's family would just quietly absorb every spouse into their massive family, make each Draketooth do the work to determine who is worthy enough to come to the Gate, I would feel much better about this Gate's chances.

Dorukan's Gate gets a huge win on the army front. Even with it, Redcloak and Xykon lost. Six months later was still not enough time to crack it. They didn't have the necessary components to defeat his magic. He was long dead by this point- that is really impressive!

Lirian made a conscious choice to have her virus target only the living and only the spellcasters. It could have had an other effect, like making its victims fall comatose. That would repel an army of living creatures for sure. It still would do less for the Undead, but it certainly would have done more than it ended up doing.

So while I agree that "a large army" is a bit of a huge talking point to ask, given that it is required to defeat Soon, still managed to lose to Dorukan, and could have lost to Lirian if she actually tried, I don't think it entirely unfair to use for judgment purposes.

[gbaji]

The thing with Lirian's Gate is that its defenses weren't weak only against the undead, they were weak against any conventional army. They were weak against any non-caster. Tarquin for example would have crushed its defenses, even if he couldn't have taken on Lirian herself solo. Any regular warlord with a sufficiently strong army would have won that battle - and by the looks of it, the army in question wouldn't have needed to be all that big.

I completely disagree. One of the massive strengths of druids is that they can effectively wipe out virtually unlimited numbers of low to mid level opponents without even putting themselves in danger. Armies get eaten by druids, especially if they have to march any reasonable distance to get to where the druid is, and may be observed along the way (which was absolutely the case here). The combination of even simple spells like entangle, fog, and various spike and swarm spells will just wipe away most warrior types with them having more or less zero chance of survival. And that's before getting into some of the higher level druid spells that you'd save for the actual powerful opponents. You attrition an army down to nothing if they're coming for you. You don't wait for them to get on your doorstep.

Combined with many methods for even mid level druids to travel quickly and unseen through forested environments, set up spell combos and traps, and then disappear before anyone knows anything other than (OMG! Why is everyone in our formation/camp dying?), makes large armed forces a real no-no when coming after a druid. You just advertise your intent (can't hide an army), and you wont have one left once you get where you're going.

What percentage of Taquin's army was over 5th level? 1%? Probably lower. They all just die. All that's left by the time you get where you're going (the gate in this case) is your core group and maybe a small handful of folks lucky enough and with enough hps to survive. And you're probably depleted on spells by the time you get there. That's assuming 90% of your army didn't just fail a morale check and flee a day or two ago (which just allows the druid and allies to focus even more on hit and run on the more powerful folks remaining).

Now yes, apparently Lirian did just sit there and wait while the enemy wandered through the forest for two days getting to her, but that was frankly a startlingly poor showing for any druid (again, I'll point to reverse plot armor here). The tactics aren't even that hard to noodle out. Just look at the druid spell list and think about how you'd defend a single static location in a forest if you had say two days warning that an enemy force is coming for it. Protip: The answer is not "wait until they get here and then direct attack them with spells while my allies attack physically". That's how a wizard defends a static location. That's now how a druid should do it.

Again though. This was pre written prologue. Which is why it happened as it did. If we assess the defenses based on what they actually were, and not how they were actually implemented in the comic, her defenses *should* have been incredibly successful. They weren't, but purely because she basically ignored her own classes most powerful abilities.

[Carl]

Yeah. As written in SoD, you are almost certainly correct. I guess I just have a hard time letting the world-builder in me go. I've been a long time GM, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how various structures and organizations must work in a game world to actually, you know, work. So to me, it's almost nails-on-the-chalkboard like to have an elven druid, in a forest that certain seemed to have elves in it, not actually take advantage of that fact to some degree. But yeah. Dismiss that as me idly speculating on "what should have been". Clearly, it's not what actually happened. She clearly did put secrecy above security in this case, only trusting the defense of the gate to her own followers and forest friends, and not leveraging anything else.

Oh when doing my own worldbuilding i default to the same behaviour. But i also spent a good bit of my youth watching star trek and trying to come up with consistent internal explanations for the technobabble. So i have a fair bit of ability at both. Nothing wrong if thats not somthing your used to though.


But a weakness to Liches and Vampires is still a pretty huge problem given that those were two of the main villain factions in the present day (and this is something she ought to have anticipated - if there were gaps in her knowledge, that's a problem, especially since she had a good relationship with Dorukan. The two of them should have, together, been the expert on supernatural threats.

I'd assume from what happened that we saw that Durokan was as lacking in undead knowledge as Lirrian. That said yes the two biggest threats have turned out to be Lich's and Vampires. But as shown by how little anyone knows about them they're not common. It's a weakness but the odds of anyone exploiting it are incredibly low in reality.


I thought I'd raise a bit of a defence for Dorukon's gate here



Dorukon's gate was also almost successful, so seems a bit silly to rank it low too.

All three gates were destroyed. Soon's and Dorukon's came close to killing Xykon (Xykon himself says his battle with Dorukon was a near thing), and Lyrian's arguably came close to keeping him imprisoned.



You mention three things that Kraagor's gate had - trickery, monsters and magical defences. Dorukon's gate also had all three of those defences, and others besides. Arguably the monsters in Kraagor's were stronger (the Order being higher level now), but those monsters seem still mostly easy for Xykon.



Soon's gate may have taken more resources, but Dorukon's gate is the one that had taken vastly more time than the others - and Xykon still hadn't cracked it when the Order showed up.



Agree about this - but also relevant to Dorukon's wards which required good aligned persons (so even narrower than Soon's good or neutral).


We have no way of knowing how difficult the dungeon was for Xykon - we didn't see that. We only know that Xykon vanquished it. As he has vanquished all Kraagor's dungeons and Lyrian's monster defences.

But putting that aside, the dungeon was not his only defence. But I expect we will come to those below.



A delaying tactic like Lyrian's virus or Serini's trickery at Kraagor's gate? As a delaying tactic it fared longer than Lyrian's virus, and much longer than Serini's trickery has so far. Who knows how long it would have kept him had the Order not intervened.

It also did have something that posed a threat to Xykon - Dorukon himself. A greater threat than anything we have seen at Kraagor's gate for sure. Granted Xykon did vanquish him, but Dorukon was probably the greatest threat to Xykon we have seen at a gate other than Soon's ghost paladins.



Good point that it may have been part of Soon's and Lyrian's strategy to destroy those gates. It was also part of Dorukon's, hence the self destruct.

Xykon got physical possession of the gate, but he didn't crack its defences. That is because Dorukon's gate is the only one we've seen so far to have defences that continue to apply after a baddy has captured it.



Nope. Dorukon was only one layer. Even after Droukon died, it had at least as many layers of defence as any other gate (for example, it still had monsters, trickery and magic defences like Kraagor's). And even after he died, it hold the record for the gate that held out the longest.



We didn't see what defences there were because Xykon probably killed them all. For all we know Dorukon's dungeon might have had equally strong monsters to Kraagor's but Xykon killed them. All we know is that Xykon was ultimately successful, but that is true at every direct defence of a gate so far.



Nope. The way he went about his fight against Xykon (whether you think it intelligent or unintelligent) he was a threat. Xykon said so. Who else has Xykon fought at the gate who he would say made it a near thing, other than the ghost paladins? He was even playing with Lyrian in their clash, and Serini is too afraid to engage him even with all her pets.



It is worth comparing Dorukon's gate to Soon's, because those two are the contenders for the best defended gate.

All of that only matters if it almost destroyed Xykon. And aside from his duel with Dorukan none of it was important enough to even show to us. The wards slowed Xykon down, but they where never going to permanently stop him and there was nothing intentionally on it's way to come along to stop him.


The thing with Lirian's Gate is that its defenses weren't weak only against the undead, they were weak against any conventional army. They were weak against any non-caster. Tarquin for example would have crushed its defenses, even if he couldn't have taken on Lirian herself solo. Any regular warlord with a sufficiently strong army would have won that battle - and by the looks of it, the army in question wouldn't have needed to be all that big.

Tarquin would have been crushed. A treant, (or animated tree which treants can animate upto 2 at once at will), is pretty much the perfect creature for crushing his army, they can kill a couple of dozen tightly packed soldiers a round if they're low level and packed densly enough. That just leaves Tarquin and the rouge lady as actual threats. And the latter unless she has bracers like Right Eye did, (admittedly likely given how much into preparation Tarquin is), isn't much of a threat to a treant either.

It wouldn't take a lot of caster firepower to take down tarquin at that point.

Obviously malack being an immune spellcaster from a physically powerful race would be a hell of a trump card, (i think Lirian herself could have coped with him but probably not much else), but that circles back to the weakness to intelligent undead with spellcasting, which seems to be a rare thing to run into.

[brian 333]

The numbers say this and that, but the fact is, no perfect defense is proof against someone with both resources and time. Xykon had both. After supposed months occupying Dorukon's Dungeon he didn't find a way into the gate. It was far easier to destroy than unseal. We still don't know why.

The vaunted power of druids excludes the possibility of cadres of assassins and skirmishers mowing them down from hiding or from crossbow range.
The weakness of Ghost Martyrs is to anyone who can banish them. Ironically, had Xykon come equipped for dealing with incorporeal undead, the Throne Room battle would have gone differently.
The supposed weakness of illusions is discussed by V and Elan as they hold off the hobgoblins at the dock. Having living defenders would have made a huge difference in the pyramid's defense.

Any possible defense plan has strengths and weaknesses. Dorukon's was not fatal but nearly impervious to Xykon. Lirian's was fatal but fragile. I'm virtually certain nobody planned their defense with the idea that somebody would go from gate to gate blowing them up.

[Liquor Box]

Yes, Dorukan's wards slowed Xykon down. But I don't think this means much because as soon as Dorukan himself died, none of the defenses were actually capable of killing Xykon. It was complete luck that an adventuring party arrived to kill him (Roy was there because he wanted revenge, not because of anything Dorukan did.) There was no alarm system, no backups, etc.

None of any of the other gate's defences, except Soon's, has been shown to be capable of killing Xykon.


If Roy hadn't randomly wandered in, Dorukan's other defenses wouldn't have mattered at all, because Xykon basically had as long as he wanted to analyze and dissect them. Dorukan himself was the only layer of defense actually capable of winning. The poorly-thought-out self-destruct button demonstrates this - you say it shows he had other plans, but, again, what use is the self-destruct button when there's nobody there to push it? As soon as Dorukan died all his other stuff went on autopilot and became mostly useless, capable of slowing Xykon down but not really doing anything meaningful beyond that (and, crucially, with no plans that we saw that could actually take advantage of the time they theoretically bought.)
Again, if Dorukon was the only part of the defence capable of killing Xykon, than is still more than we've seen from Lyrian's, Kraagor's or Girard's.


I don't agree that he almost won. The fight we saw was pretty one-sided, and his defenses didn't actually do anything except make Xykon win more slowly. His gate is currently the only one that was captured by the enemy intact - that's the worst showing of any of the defenses we've seen.
Xykon himself says it was a near thing. From what we have seen nothing at Girard's, Kraagor's or Lyrian's came closer to killing him.

The gate being captured is meaningless if Xykon was unable to use it. Well not meaningless, because it puts it at risk of being destroyed, but then that is just like all the other gates.



All of that only matters if it almost destroyed Xykon. And aside from his duel with Dorukan none of it was important enough to even show to us. The wards slowed Xykon down, but they where never going to permanently stop him and there was nothing intentionally on it's way to come along to stop him.
The duel itself came as close to destroyign Xykon as anything else we've seen from the gates except the paladin ghosts.

People may differ as to whether barriers which don't come close to destroying Xykon, and only slow him down, matter. I was replying to someone who raised the monsters in Kraagor's dungeon as a positive of that gate defence, so i felt it appropriate to point out that Dorukon's gate had a dungeon too - although we haven't seen either seriously threaten Xykon. People have argued that the deception in Kraagor's gate or the virus in Lyrian's gate were postives in those defences, despite each only slowing Xykon down (the assumption being that he would solve all problems eventually unless there's a threat to him), so appropriate to point out that Dorukon's dungeon was at least as great of a problem for Xykon.

[Squire Doodad]

I think it's pretty clear that both Dorukan and Soon's gates were "successful" at stopping Xykon, with the failings not being a flaw of their own power.
Granted, Xykon could have probably gone and kidnapped some heroes then put them in appropriate prisons to "escape" such that they would end up unlocking it, but the fight with Dorukan almost got him killed and getting heroes to touch the seal almost got him killed by a mid-level party.
Soon on the other hand I would call a complete success with Xykon not merely needing an entire army to take the city and get to the room to begin with, but also struggling with and giving up against the army of Sacred Watchers present. Even assuming corruption/no attempt to stop it from Azure City itself and a worst case scenario, the Sacred Watchers being able to take out an Epic Lich and a high-level Cleric is very impressive, especially since I believe they would respawn daily if the walls fell and castle itself was put under siege.

Sure, neither of them actually stopped Xykon outright, but they only failed because of wild cards that could not have been realistically predicted and were independent of Xykon's own actions. (Miko's...thing and Elan hitting the self-destruct are not normal things to plan for, particularly the latter.)
Defenses of a gate can be perfectly capable and "a good defense" even if it ultimately fails.



Xykon wasn't present at Girard's Gate, though arguably his overreliance on illusions likely would have made it a lot easier for a Lich to storm even with a living clan of capable and class-diverse heroes to fend off (assuming none were Epic).
Meanwhile, Lirian's Gate is the only clear loser here with several flaws that, despite its impressive showing, fails terribly against an undead army which is a very common threat in this world.

[RatElemental]

4. Durukon's gate. He made a dungeon that was 100% dependent on his own power to defend it, and (apparently) made zero plans for said defense after his death. The only defense after that was the glyphs/sigils, which only coincidentally happened to delay team evil (because they were evil). I'd question the creation of a magical defense that just requires "someone of good alignment" to bypass, but I also put this into the prologue section of the story, so that's just the way things are. Again, the world-builder in me would have expected him to create an order of wizards to follow in his footsteps, train them, and key the gate glyph to only open for the highest ranked member(s) of that order. Would prevent anything short of a Saruman level betrayal from ever penetrating the gates defenses. But that's just what I would have done. Maybe he was anti-social and/or paranoid or something. But in any case, as actually implemented, his defenses were by far the least likely to actually protect his gate for any longish period of time. His gate basically had a relatively low MTBF even if no one powerful ever attempted to gain access to it.

Given the fact that Girard died of old age long enough ago to be a skeleton while Dorukan was still kicking it as recently as the in comic current year, I always just assumed he had found a way to become immortal. Even without going that far, epic magic does have built in legal ways to boost your maximum age, and once the DCs got too high to let him keep going with that he had an epic druid girlfriend who could reincarnate him as a young adult.

[brian 333]

Question: Why is the metric of a gate's defense now "Kill Xykon"?

Dorukon's defense held off Xykon without killing him. I consider that a successful defense.

[Sapphire Guard]

Lirian's defence being flammable is not a weakness, that's part of the defences, it prevents attackers from using literal scorched earth tactics if they want the gate. Every dungeon has factored in that it is better to destroy the gate than have someone seize it.

There is a weakness to undead, but everything in the Stickverse is weak to undead, high level undead mages are so rare that almost nobody has any knowledge of them, even a conclave of high level clergy didn't have perfect knowledge of what Durkula was.

It doesn't quite gel with also being a setting where characters can literally look up the rulebook, but here we are.

It's very difficult to judge many of them, because we don't get to see the defences operating at full capacity. Girard's dungeon's defences would depend on how his relatives were statted, we see how with a mid level party could set up a very effective ambush against a higher level one using an ambush in the right place, and that is without most of the illusions.

We don't get to see Dorukan's dungeon's defences in action. and we also don't see Kraagor's, because the dungeon crawls happen off panel. We don't see Girard's defenders because V killed them.

From what we see Soon's is the strongest, but there is a lot we haven't seen.

[Carl]

The numbers say this and that, but the fact is, no perfect defense is proof against someone with both resources and time. Xykon had both. After supposed months occupying Dorukon's Dungeon he didn't find a way into the gate. It was far easier to destroy than unseal. We still don't know why.

The vaunted power of druids excludes the possibility of cadres of assassins and skirmishers mowing them down from hiding or from crossbow range.
The weakness of Ghost Martyrs is to anyone who can banish them. Ironically, had Xykon come equipped for dealing with incorporeal undead, the Throne Room battle would have gone differently.
The supposed weakness of illusions is discussed by V and Elan as they hold off the hobgoblins at the dock. Having living defenders would have made a huge difference in the pyramid's defense.

Any possible defense plan has strengths and weaknesses. Dorukon's was not fatal but nearly impervious to Xykon. Lirian's was fatal but fragile. I'm virtually certain nobody planned their defense with the idea that somebody would go from gate to gate blowing them up.

Whilst the general point is true your examples are not the best honestly. Assassins and skirmishers would have suffered badly against Lirian and we saw another cleric besides RC try the whole turn thing and not be high enough level to make it stick.


None of any of the other gate's defences, except Soon's, has been shown to be capable of killing Xykon.


Again, if Dorukon was the only part of the defence capable of killing Xykon, than is still more than we've seen from Lyrian's, Kraagor's or Girard's.


Xykon himself says it was a near thing. From what we have seen nothing at Girard's, Kraagor's or Lyrian's came closer to killing him.

The gate being captured is meaningless if Xykon was unable to use it. Well not meaningless, because it puts it at risk of being destroyed, but then that is just like all the other gates.


The duel itself came as close to destroyign Xykon as anything else we've seen from the gates except the paladin ghosts.

People may differ as to whether barriers which don't come close to destroying Xykon, and only slow him down, matter. I was replying to someone who raised the monsters in Kraagor's dungeon as a positive of that gate defence, so i felt it appropriate to point out that Dorukon's gate had a dungeon too - although we haven't seen either seriously threaten Xykon. People have argued that the deception in Kraagor's gate or the virus in Lyrian's gate were postives in those defences, despite each only slowing Xykon down (the assumption being that he would solve all problems eventually unless there's a threat to him), so appropriate to point out that Dorukon's dungeon was at least as great of a problem for Xykon.


Question: Why is the metric of a gate's defense now "Kill Xykon"?

Dorukon's defense held off Xykon without killing him. I consider that a successful defense.

Pardon me for lumping you together but there's a common thread thats relevant for both of you. By and large we're using "kill" because it's the primary permanent way of ending a threat to a gate. Lirian had a non-lethal method that barring an extremly freak set of circumstances was as good as killing them.

There's a big difference between a defence that manages to have it's opposition at it's mercy and then has victory snatched away by a freak occurrence it never saw coming, and a defence that comes close but never actually has the opposition at it's mercy.

Lirrian and Soon fall into the first category, Dorukan falls into the second, Girriad is unknown to some degree, (more on that in a second), and Kraegors is yet to be determined.

The thing with Girriads is we might not know exactly how it would have performed but against anything but the most unknowledge-able of foes it comes down to a caster fight between a family of casters and whatever they're up against. it's straight force vs straight force with no fallback. They're biggest fanciest defence could be beaten by a simple mind blank spell. Lirrian and Soons required a lot more raw power to overcome, (remember Soon was so high HD RC couldn't touch him), and where a lot better hidden from discovery.


Given the fact that Girard died of old age long enough ago to be a skeleton while Dorukan was still kicking it as recently as the in comic current year, I always just assumed he had found a way to become immortal. Even without going that far, epic magic does have built in legal ways to boost your maximum age, and once the DCs got too high to let him keep going with that he had an epic druid girlfriend who could reincarnate him as a young adult.

It's certainly possibble but Sereni is also still around and we really don't know their relative ages. Where not so far from the Scribbler days that he couldn't have survived on his own as an old man.

[gbaji]

The vaunted power of druids excludes the possibility of cadres of assassins and skirmishers mowing them down from hiding or from crossbow range.

Those assassins and skirmishers would be hiding where exactly? In the bushes and the underbrush? From a druid?

You get that druids can literally use the plants as senses, as well as animals. They can pass undetected through the forest. They know where you are. You don't know where they are. You can set up all the physical defenses you want, but if you are traveling through their forest, the first sign you will get of a druid attack is when people start screaming and dying in large numbers. And even after that starts, you will never actually see the druid that's casting the spells at your army. All you can do is try to reduce the death rate. And in most cases, by the time you are even aware that and attack is happening, large numbers of people are already dead. Efforts to find and defeat whatever just attacked fail, because the druid is already gone, only to wait some random amount of time and repeat the process. Marching in formation, or camping in traditional military defensive positions, actually makes you more vulnerable to druids, not less.

It just surprises me when people suggest that a large army is a weakness for a druid. It's not. It's what they are best equipped to deal with. Single or small groups of very high level people are the thing that druids are most vulnerable to. And even then, in most cases, they can avoid direct conflict (obviously not the case here since she's defending a gate).

Large number of low to mid level opponents is literally what the druid spell set is designed to handle. Overwhelmingly in most cases.

[gbaji]

The thing with Girriads is we might not know exactly how it would have performed but against anything but the most unknowledge-able of foes it comes down to a caster fight between a family of casters and whatever they're up against. it's straight force vs straight force with no fallback. They're biggest fanciest defence could be beaten by a simple mind blank spell. Lirrian and Soons required a lot more raw power to overcome, (remember Soon was so high HD RC couldn't touch him), and where a lot better hidden from discovery.

I'll also point out about Girard's gate that just because Girard focused on illusions, and set up some powerful illusionary tricks and traps in his pyramid, and his family followed in his footsteps, does not mean that the only thing they can do is illusions.

Having specialization in illusion does not prevent you from casting other types of spells. And with enough different casters, even if we assume every single one also specializes in illusions, they can all pick different barred schools, meaning that literally any and all MU spells may be deployable. So folks saying things like "liches are immune to mind affecting spells", or "true seeing totally stops illusions" are really missing the point. The illusions are cover. The real power there was an entire group who could collectively cast a whole lot of different spells at any enemy who decided to show up. This is in addition to the epic illusion hiding the pyramid itself and the section in the canyon that the pyramid is even in. Heck. We can't even assume that every member of the family committed to a spell casting class. We know that at least some did (we saw the spell list), but there could very well have been members who were skilled at physical fighting as well. We just don't know.

I still think there were serious gaps in his defensive approach, but it's not nearly as weak as many assume.

[brian 333]

Those assassins and skirmishers would be hiding where exactly? In the bushes and the underbrush? From a druid?

You get that druids can literally use the plants as senses, as well as animals. They can pass undetected through the forest. They know where you are. You don't know where they are. You can set up all the physical defenses you want, but if you are traveling through their forest, the first sign you will get of a druid attack is when people start screaming and dying in large numbers. And even after that starts, you will never actually see the druid that's casting the spells at your army. All you can do is try to reduce the death rate. And in most cases, by the time you are even aware that and attack is happening, large numbers of people are already dead. Efforts to find and defeat whatever just attacked fail, because the druid is already gone, only to wait some random amount of time and repeat the process. Marching in formation, or camping in traditional military defensive positions, actually makes you more vulnerable to druids, not less.

It just surprises me when people suggest that a large army is a weakness for a druid. It's not. It's what they are best equipped to deal with. Single or small groups of very high level people are the thing that druids are most vulnerable to. And even then, in most cases, they can avoid direct conflict (obviously not the case here since she's defending a gate).

Large number of low to mid level opponents is literally what the druid spell set is designed to handle. Overwhelmingly in most cases.

It astonishes me how often I see arguments for this or that based on raw numbers with nothing else.

For about a decade I played a halfling ranger skirmisher/magekiller. No druid would have ever seen him without true sight, and even then he would have hard to not be hiding, which he almost always did. The perfect hard counter to high level spells is 6 melee attacks per round. Very seldom did any of his targets detect him before they were at sword point, and then it was too late.
Evrin Strongbow got his name because I tried to make a sniper character at the start. He had a crossbow that could hit a target at 150 yards. I could never get deadly poisons for the bolts, so I'd snipe, move, hide, wait, snipe...
Very effective. Casters never had a chance. But that success was based on actual gameplay, where planning, strategy, and exploiting the weakness of the enemy is possible.

[Liquor Box]

Pardon me for lumping you together but there's a common thread thats relevant for both of you. By and large we're using "kill" because it's the primary permanent way of ending a threat to a gate. Lirian had a non-lethal method that barring an extremly freak set of circumstances was as good as killing them.

There's a big difference between a defence that manages to have it's opposition at it's mercy and then has victory snatched away by a freak occurrence it never saw coming, and a defence that comes close but never actually has the opposition at it's mercy.

Lirrian and Soon fall into the first category, Dorukan falls into the second, Girriad is unknown to some degree, (more on that in a second), and Kraegors is yet to be determined.

The thing with Girriads is we might not know exactly how it would have performed but against anything but the most unknowledge-able of foes it comes down to a caster fight between a family of casters and whatever they're up against. it's straight force vs straight force with no fallback. They're biggest fanciest defence could be beaten by a simple mind blank spell. Lirrian and Soons required a lot more raw power to overcome, (remember Soon was so high HD RC couldn't touch him), and where a lot better hidden from discovery.

No problem with lumping us together, except in doing so I think you have misread my post. I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that destroying Xykon is the only way to stop him getting a gate, because given time he will very likely solve any other non-lethal obstacle unless another party intervenes.

My point is that it was only Soon's gate that came closer to killing Xykon than Dorukon's. If the criteria is how lethal the gate defences were, then Soon's is first, Dorukon's second and probably Serini's last from what we've seen.

To be clear about Lyrian's gate, it was not at all lethal to Xykon. It placed him in the prison without his magic, which was just another delaying tactic. It was just another problem for him to overcome, like Serini's deception, like Dorukon's wards on the gate. Xykon was not 'as good as dead', Xykon's escape was not a freak set of circumstances - it was no more difficult to for Xykon to get around Lyrian's disabling of him than Dorukon's wards (less difficult based on how long he spent on each).

Comparing Dorukon's defences directly to Lyrian's, Dorukon's outperformed hers both in the potential for their attacks to actually destroy Xykon, and in how effective the defences were at delaying. Whether you think lethality or delay is the gold standard - Dorukon outperformed Lyrian.

[RatElemental]

It's certainly possibble but Sereni is also still around and we really don't know their relative ages. Where not so far from the Scribbler days that he couldn't have survived on his own as an old man.

Halflings can live to be 300 years old. And she's looking venerable, so Dorukan would definitely have been dead by then if he wasn't boosting his max age somehow.

I should also point out that Soon also died of old age long enough ago for a young child to get old enough to start worrying about his maximum age too.

[Gurgeh]

Halflings have a maximum age of 200 in 3.5 (100 + 5d20).

There is some overlap in the venerable age ranges for humans (70-110) and halflings (100-200); it's also clear that Dorukan was younger than the rest of the scribblers, so it's not out of the question for him to have "only" been thirty or thirty-five years older than Shojo and nearing - but not exceeding - the maximum human lifespan by the time he's killed.

[Carl]

It astonishes me how often I see arguments for this or that based on raw numbers with nothing else.

For about a decade I played a halfling ranger skirmisher/magekiller. No druid would have ever seen him without true sight, and even then he would have hard to not be hiding, which he almost always did. The perfect hard counter to high level spells is 6 melee attacks per round. Very seldom did any of his targets detect him before they were at sword point, and then it was too late.
Evrin Strongbow got his name because I tried to make a sniper character at the start. He had a crossbow that could hit a target at 150 yards. I could never get deadly poisons for the bolts, so I'd snipe, move, hide, wait, snipe...
Very effective. Casters never had a chance. But that success was based on actual gameplay, where planning, strategy, and exploiting the weakness of the enemy is possible.

What your describing is a relatively well leveled character, an extreme rarity in OOTS verse. A group of skirmishers or assassins is going to have an even lower average level.


No problem with lumping us together, except in doing so I think you have misread my post. I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that destroying Xykon is the only way to stop him getting a gate, because given time he will very likely solve any other non-lethal obstacle unless another party intervenes.

My point is that it was only Soon's gate that came closer to killing Xykon than Dorukon's. If the criteria is how lethal the gate defences were, then Soon's is first, Dorukon's second and probably Serini's last from what we've seen.

To be clear about Lyrian's gate, it was not at all lethal to Xykon. It placed him in the prison without his magic, which was just another delaying tactic. It was just another problem for him to overcome, like Serini's deception, like Dorukon's wards on the gate. Xykon was not 'as good as dead', Xykon's escape was not a freak set of circumstances - it was no more difficult to for Xykon to get around Lyrian's disabling of him than Dorukon's wards (less difficult based on how long he spent on each).

Comparing Dorukon's defences directly to Lyrian's, Dorukon's outperformed hers both in the potential for their attacks to actually destroy Xykon, and in how effective the defences were at delaying. Whether you think lethality or delay is the gold standard - Dorukon outperformed Lyrian.

I hard disagree on Lirrians imprisonment just being a delaying tactic. Not only does the caster need to eb of a fairly high level, but they have to know how. Without RC around Xykon would never have known how to do it. Likewise a less powerful caster wouldn't have been able todo it, (i think the giant still fudged some stuff btw, i doubt they had 120,000GP of items just lying around). Knowledge of Lich's is clearly pretty rare too.

The key difference between Lirrians setup and Dorukans is that with Dorukans Xykon had full access to his abilities, outside access to whatever resources he wanted, (research text, GP supply, minions, e.t.c.). With Lirrians he had to rely on what was at hand and if RC wasn't such a nerd he'd have been boned, (pun intended).

[Liquor Box]

I hard disagree on Lirrians imprisonment just being a delaying tactic. Not only does the caster need to eb of a fairly high level, but they have to know how. Without RC around Xykon would never have known how to do it. Likewise a less powerful caster wouldn't have been able todo it, (i think the giant still fudged some stuff btw, i doubt they had 120,000GP of items just lying around). Knowledge of Lich's is clearly pretty rare too.

All it did was delay him, so it was absolutely just a delaying tactic.

We don't know whether there were other ways out of the prison, or for Xykon to recover his powers - lichdom was just the solution they thought of first. If Redcloak wasn't there, Xykon might have thought of another idea.


The key difference between Lirrians setup and Dorukans is that with Dorukans Xykon had full access to his abilities, outside access to whatever resources he wanted, (research text, GP supply, minions, e.t.c.). With Lirrians he had to rely on what was at hand and if RC wasn't such a nerd he'd have been boned, (pun intended).

The difference is that Lyrian's gate delayed him four months before he solved it. Dorukon's gate had already delayed him six months (and hadn't been solved in that time) AND there was a lethal threat Xykon in addiiton (Dorukon himself)

If Redcloak hadn't been there, we can only guess how long it might have taken Xykon to solve Lyrian's prison. Just like we can only guesshow long it might have taken Xykon to solve Dorukon's ward if the Order hadn't arrived. Or whether he would have been able to in either case. All we can go on is how big of a challenge each gate's defences actually presented - and the wards were a greater challenge to him than losing his powers and being imprisoned - before you even take account of the Dorukon battle.

[Carl]

All it did was delay him, so it was absolutely just a delaying tactic.

We don't know whether there were other ways out of the prison, or for Xykon to recover his powers - lichdom was just the solution they thought of first. If Redcloak wasn't there, Xykon might have thought of another idea.



The difference is that Lyrian's gate delayed him four months before he solved it. Dorukon's gate had already delayed him six months (and hadn't been solved in that time) AND there was a lethal threat Xykon in addiiton (Dorukon himself)

If Redcloak hadn't been there, we can only guess how long it might have taken Xykon to solve Lyrian's prison. Just like we can only guesshow long it might have taken Xykon to solve Dorukon's ward if the Order hadn't arrived. Or whether he would have been able to in either case. All we can go on is how big of a challenge each gate's defences actually presented - and the wards were a greater challenge to him than losing his powers and being imprisoned - before you even take account of the Dorukon battle.

Without magic he wasn't getting out of Lirians prison, ever. Turning himself into a creature type that was immune to disease or getting a healing spell of adequate power where his only ways of doing that. Without something like the Crimson Mantle and a powerful enough caster wearing it, (which RC wasn't), the latter isn't an option, and Lich is the only way to do the former i can think of without a vampire allready on hand.

That the difference. Without outside interference Xykon would eventually have figured out a way through the wards, (in fact he already had by the time the OOTS showed up, he just needed to arrange for it to actually hapen), but without outside interference he was completely at the mercy of the pure random luck of having a major nerd travelling with him who knew of what was the only way out.

It's a huge difference in the threat level presented. One of them was never going to permanently stop him. The other could have and only didn't because of sheer hapstance.

[Liquor Box]

Without magic he wasn't getting out of Lirians prison, ever. Turning himself into a creature type that was immune to disease or getting a healing spell of adequate power where his only ways of doing that. Without something like the Crimson Mantle and a powerful enough caster wearing it, (which RC wasn't), the latter isn't an option, and Lich is the only way to do the former i can think of without a vampire allready on hand.

That the difference. Without outside interference Xykon would eventually have figured out a way through the wards, (in fact he already had by the time the OOTS showed up, he just needed to arrange for it to actually hapen), but without outside interference he was completely at the mercy of the pure random luck of having a major nerd travelling with him who knew of what was the only way out.

It's a huge difference in the threat level presented. One of them was never going to permanently stop him. The other could have and only didn't because of sheer hapstance.

There is no basis for thinking that Xykon would never have solved Lyrian's prison if RC hadn't thought of Lyching him. The story implies a Heal spell would have worked had RC only been higher level. If Xykon had already been undead, it wouldn't have worked. A clever crafter might have been able to craft an explosive or acid from the pharmacy of plants in the prison. The many goblins might have chiseled their way out. The only thing we know about the prison is that it was made of stone, and many people have escaped from stone prisons plenty of times without magic (usually by digging through the stone).

Your 'huge difference' is literally just a guess by you that the prison was harder to solve than the wards. And a guess that is contrary from what actually happened in the comic where Xykon did solve the prison, and not the wards.

[gbaji]

It astonishes me how often I see arguments for this or that based on raw numbers with nothing else.

For about a decade I played a halfling ranger skirmisher/magekiller. No druid would have ever seen him without true sight, and even then he would have hard to not be hiding, which he almost always did. The perfect hard counter to high level spells is 6 melee attacks per round. Very seldom did any of his targets detect him before they were at sword point, and then it was too late.

First off, let's recall that I specifically said that groups or single high level characters are the threat that druids have the most problem with. So you're not really countering anything at all. Anyone with a "special set of skills" is going to be difficult to deal with. That's not what you get with an army though. That's a large number of mostly low level mooks who are only powerful because there's a large number of them. I was responding to the idea that any random warlord who could raise a large army would just smash Liriran's defenses. I find that laughable. Druid spells and abilities are almost tailor made to repel large numbers of relatively low level folks from their forests. The last thing you want to do if you're going after a druid on their home turf is to bring an army. Unless, I suppose, the entire point of the army is just to distract the druid while you and a small group of people attempt to sneak in from another direction.

I'm not just looking at raw numbers, stats, spells, etc. I'm looking specifically at how those would be used, if the character is at all using them intelligently. I suspect in your example character, you the PC were using your abilities maximally, while the NPCs were not. Which is why you were so successful. And yes, while I agree that a stealthy character is hard to stop (in either direction), I'd still say that even a stealthy character alone would have a hard time penetrating a well defended druids territory. It would certainly be more difficult than breaking into someone's castle/dungeon/whatever.

Yeah. You can hide. You can conceal yourself. But you have to sleep, right? You're still walking through the forest for two days to get to the gate. Druids have animals and plants that act as their spies. That fern you passed 5 minutes ago? Just reported your position. Random bird flying by? Might be a spy. There's no way to know *what* you need to be hidden from. Unless you're completely invisible 100% of the time, you will be detected. And even if invisible, your character never urinates or defecates for the entire journey? Never stops to eat? Doesn't disturb the underbrush while moving? It's not enough to just look at a druids spell list, but think about the fact that druids will use them over time to actually mold the forest into a defense itself. They will intentionally set up sections of forest with heavy underbrush and steep terrain, with no way around, and drop an animated plant/tree friend there to use a detection systems. They will intentionally set up areas that look like great places to stop and rest, but are designed for druidic style scry and die positions (if needed).

And the closer you get to the druids actual center of power (in this case, the gate she's defending), the harder it will be to have any chance at all of approaching undetected. Only very powerful magical means of travelling and/or bypassing the terrain along the way will work. And once detected (even very vaguely), spells like commune with nature allow them to know exactly who's in a given area (fairly large area in fact). They can hide in the trees and plants and spy on *you* figuring out who you are and what you are doing, and if they decide you are a threat, you will never see them. And no amount of hiding will protect you from large area affect spells that will blind you, slow you down (or just stop you cold), and deal ridiculous amounts of damage to you over time). Doing this to a single stealthy person is not an efficient use of druidic power, but can still be employed.


Evrin Strongbow got his name because I tried to make a sniper character at the start. He had a crossbow that could hit a target at 150 yards. I could never get deadly poisons for the bolts, so I'd snipe, move, hide, wait, snipe...
Very effective. Casters never had a chance. But that success was based on actual gameplay, where planning, strategy, and exploiting the weakness of the enemy is possible.

It's admittedly an interesting comparison. Super stealthy assassin type character against a druid in the middle of a forest. But I suspect that even if you managed to get far enough in to get that first shot at the main druid, you'd better take them out in that one shot. There is no "move, hide, wait" once a druid is aware of your presence and you're in their forest. Druids spend a lot of time and effort making friends of the plants and animals in their forests (or creating/activating them). It's not like taking a shot at a wizard while studying rare tomes in his home, or something. The druid, if not taken out, will escape immediately (there's a ton of spells they will have to do this), and you'll be immediately targeted and attacked by dozens of angry treants, animated trees, animals (some could be *very* large), human/elf followers, etc. Druids are not solitary like a lot of high level casters may be. They build communities around them. You have to deal with that as well.

It's interesting because it's really only if you just look at the direct on paper skills/spells that a druid appears weak. Give them an environment they are protecting any a length of time to set up the protections, and they are insanely difficult to attack. If it's just you and a druid on an empty plane with nothing else just dropped into place to fight? You'll win every time. In the druids own forest? I doubt it. Not if the GM is playing the NPC druid even semi intelligently.



I hard disagree on Lirrians imprisonment just being a delaying tactic. Not only does the caster need to eb of a fairly high level, but they have to know how. Without RC around Xykon would never have known how to do it. Likewise a less powerful caster wouldn't have been able todo it, (i think the giant still fudged some stuff btw, i doubt they had 120,000GP of items just lying around). Knowledge of Lich's is clearly pretty rare too.

The key difference between Lirrians setup and Dorukans is that with Dorukans Xykon had full access to his abilities, outside access to whatever resources he wanted, (research text, GP supply, minions, e.t.c.). With Lirrians he had to rely on what was at hand and if RC wasn't such a nerd he'd have been boned, (pun intended).

Yeah. And I think I mentioned this before. Lirrian's defense *should* have killed them. She chose to imprison them instead. Durukan never had the opportunity to make that choice. He was just straight up defeated (admittedly because he was foolish, but that's another issue). She straight up defeated Team Evil, and then decided to let them live which gave them time to escape and come back after her (more powerful than before as it happened).

And even with that mistake on her part, when you look at the sheer unlikely set of circumstances that had to be involved, it's something we really can't chalk up to a "weakness in the defense". You had to have not just a powerful cleric who knew how to create a lich, but he also had to be wearing an artifact that allowed him to still cast spells despite the poison she'd afflicted them with, so he could do it in the first place. If they had just found a way to escape, they'd still be back to the same issue as to trying to attack her and capture her gate. It was only the combination of the cloak and making Xykon into a lich that worked.

One can also argue about "post defeat" defenses, and conclude that Lirrian's worked better. Her treants destroyed the gate. One can actually argue that short of another powerful druid she had actually made it completely impossible for her gate to ever actually be captured (if we're assuming "destroyed" was considered preferable to "captured", which does seem to have been the case). While Durukan left in some pretty large holes in his gates defenses. It was only due (again) to a fairly improbable set of circumstances that Xykon was not able to capture the gate.

[brian 333]

Anyone who has an army will have skirmishers, snipers, and troubleshooters. As for high level characters, let's look.

A squad is 3-5 troops (level 1) lead by a corporal (2) or sergeant (3).

A platoon is 3-5 squads lead by a sergeant (3-4) and a 2nd or 1st lieutenant (1-3)

A company is 3-5 platoons lead by a senior sergeant (5) and a captain or major(3-5).

A battalion is 2-5 companies lead by a major or lt colonel (5-7).

A regiment is 3-5 companies + support units of various kinds such as quartermaster, artillery, signals, etc. lead by a colonel (8)

A division is 3-5 regiments + support units lead by a brigadier or lt. general (9-10)

A general leads 4096 troops plus support equaling another 1000 or so troops, with a minimum of 3-5 level 8 characters in the chain of command. This is a band of raw recruits. As battles progress they will be gaining levels.

It is not unlikely that elites will be noticed and placed in special units which are given more difficult tasks, such as Forgotten Realms' Royal Corps of Monster Hunters in the army of Cormyr. In a very short time, the army will consist of at least one company outside the normal chain of command which gets all the really juicy exp. Such a unit might have dozens of characters over level 10.

Redcloak and Xykon are horrible generals. They think of troops as cannon fodder rather than assets which can be grown. Most military generals aren't that stupid. (Political generals, however...)

[Aquillion]

The only reason Lirian's defenses didn't kill Xykon is because Lirian specifically chose not to kill him. That's clearly far better than Dorukan's gate.

But more importantly - even with her choice to keep him alive, Lirian's gate would have held him forever absent an extremely unusual freak set of coincidences that allowed him to become a Lich, which had little to do with anything Lirian did.

Dorukan's gate would have inevitably fallen eventually outside of an extremely unusual freak set of coincidences that resulted in the arrival of an adventuring party capable of beating Xykon, which had little to do with anything Dorukan did.

By the time the OOTS arrived Xykon had already figured out the key element of the gate's magical defenses (ie. he needed a good person to touch it.) He decided to use the OOTS for that because they happened to be there, but if they hadn't been it would have been easy enough for him to grab someone good and harmless from elsewhere.

Like I said, Dorukan's gate was the only one that fell into the hands of the villains for any appreciable length of time. You can't even really say that his magical wards were unique - possibly the other gates had similar wards to prevent magical interference; we don't know because none of their defenses failed spectacularly enough to let Xykon get to that point.

Dorukan's gate is dead last, fullstop. The only thing that could possibly salvage it is giving more credit to Dorukan himself (ie. viewing Xykon managing to bait him out or defeat him 1v1 as a one-off.) I don't think the wards give it any points at all, and the fact that they were exposed to Xykon for so long, with absolutely nothing stopping him from examining them at his leisure, is a huge negative.

[Liquor Box]

The only reason Lirian's defenses didn't kill Xykon is because Lirian specifically chose not to kill him. That's clearly far better than Dorukan's gate.

Sure, every gate would have performed differently had its owner made different choices. Lyrian may have prevailed had she attacked Xykon and Reddy immediately upon executing her virus. Dorukon may have won if he has stayed inside his tower instead of coming out.


But more importantly - even with her choice to keep him alive, Lirian's gate would have held him forever absent an extremely unusual freak set of coincidences that allowed him to become a Lich, which had little to do with anything Lirian did.

Dorukan's gate would have inevitably fallen eventually outside of an extremely unusual freak set of coincidences that resulted in the arrival of an adventuring party capable of beating Xykon, which had little to do with anything Dorukan did.

By the time the OOTS arrived Xykon had already figured out the key element of the gate's magical defenses (ie. he needed a good person to touch it.) He decided to use the OOTS for that because they happened to be there, but if they hadn't been it would have been easy enough for him to grab someone good and harmless from elsewhere.

As I said to Carl, you have no basis for thinking that Xykon would never have solved Lyrian's prison if RC hadn't thought of Lyching him. The story implies a Heal spell would have worked had RC only been higher level. If Xykon had already been undead, it wouldn't have worked. A clever crafter might have been able to craft an explosive or acid from the pharmacy of plants in the prison. The many goblins might have chiseled their way out. The only thing we know about the prison is that it was made of stone, and many people have escaped from stone prisons plenty of times without magic (usually by digging through the stone).

You are just guessing by you that the prison was harder to solve than the wards. And a guess that is contrary from what actually happened in the comic where Xykon did solve the prison, and not the wards.


Like I said, Dorukan's gate was the only one that fell into the hands of the villains for any appreciable length of time. You can't even really say that his magical wards were unique - possibly the other gates had similar wards to prevent magical interference; we don't know because none of their defenses failed spectacularly enough to let Xykon get to that point.
It falling into hiss hands is meaningless if he can't use it. I see it as a positive for Dorukon's gate. All of the other gate's would have ben Xykon's to use if he had seized them, Dorukon's had an extra layer of defence whcih was, in the end, what saved the day.


Dorukan's gate is dead last, fullstop. The only thing that could possibly salvage it is giving more credit to Dorukan himself (ie. viewing Xykon managing to bait him out or defeat him 1v1 as a one-off.) I don't think the wards give it any points at all, and the fact that they were exposed to Xykon for so long, with absolutely nothing stopping him from examining them at his leisure, is a huge negative.

Saying 'fullstop' doesn't make you right. You have yet to demonstrate (other than your guess) why the virus and prison was any better as a delaying tactic than the wards. You have yet to address the fact that Dorukon himself was actual the second biggest threat to Xykon outside Soon's paladins, you have yet to give any reason at all why Kraagor's gate or Girrard's gate should be rated higher than Dorukon's gate.

[Ruck]

As I said to Carl, you have no basis for thinking that Xykon would never have solved Lyrian's prison if RC hadn't thought of Lyching him. The story implies a Heal spell would have worked had RC only been higher level. If Xykon had already been undead, it wouldn't have worked. A clever crafter might have been able to craft an explosive or acid from the pharmacy of plants in the prison. The many goblins might have chiseled their way out. The only thing we know about the prison is that it was made of stone, and many people have escaped from stone prisons plenty of times without magic (usually by digging through the stone).

You are just guessing by you that the prison was harder to solve than the wards. And a guess that is contrary from what actually happened in the comic where Xykon did solve the prison, and not the wards.

I think it helps to think in terms of probabilities here. Lirian's prison only didn't work because one of her prisoners both had a magical artifact that protected him from her virus and knew enough about the Lich-ification ritual to be able to improvise it from the materials on hand. That's almost certainly a very rare and unlikely confluence. We don't know how unlikely, but higher-level knowledge of undead seems pretty rare in OOTS-world from what we have seen. (Indeed, I think a better case against Lirian is how apparently unprepared for and un-knowledgeable she was about the undead.)

It's not irrelevant that it happened, but it makes more sense to think about how likely it was to happen in terms of evaluating how strong a Gate's defenses are.

(Maybe it's the poker player in me, but you put your money in as a 90% favorite, you lose 10% of the time. Doesn't mean the 10% you lost made it the wrong play.)

[RatElemental]

I think it helps to think in terms of probabilities here. Lirian's prison only didn't work because one of her prisoners both had a magical artifact that protected him from her virus and knew enough about the Lich-ification ritual to be able to improvise it from the materials on hand. That's almost certainly a very rare and unlikely confluence. We don't know how unlikely, but higher-level knowledge of undead seems pretty rare in OOTS-world from what we have seen. (Indeed, I think a better case against Lirian is how apparently unprepared for and un-knowledgeable she was about the undead.)

It's not irrelevant that it happened, but it makes more sense to think about how likely it was to happen in terms of evaluating how strong a Gate's defenses are.

(Maybe it's the poker player in me, but you put your money in as a 90% favorite, you lose 10% of the time. Doesn't mean the 10% you lost made it the wrong play.)

Haven't read SoD myself, but I imagine if Redcloak and Xykon were unsupervised enough to manage a complex magical ritual then they were unsupervised enough to dig through the walls or improvise something else.

[BloodSquirrel]

What? Soon's was objectively the hardest one to tackle - Xykon, an epic level undead sorcerer, needed a literal army in order to even have a chance to hold the Gate, attempted to bypass most of the defenses, and still would have lost and been completely destroyed (arguably the closest he's ever been to being destroyed), and his only saving grace was being saved by pure luck - an unhinged person who was lucky enough to escape prison, lucky enough to go to the throne room, lucky enough to miscontrue the situation in the throne room, lucky enough to neither see nor hear the founder of her entire order dealing the final blow to the lich she had been so terrified of and was basing all her decisions on up to that moment... Xykon only survived due to obscene luck.

"Arrogant" as a con? All of the scribblers were arrogant. They all thought they could hold it. The Gate wasn't a target due to the Azurites. Hell, the Gate and the entire Sapphire Guard was almost entirely unknown to virtually everyone in the world. And they weren't particularly weak to magic, unless you consider "absolutely immune to any and all magic" to be "weak to magic", in which case that's also a trait shared by all the Gates defenses.

This is a wildly inaccurate assessment of Soon's Gate, IMO.

I agree. Soon's gate easily had the strongest defenses.

Especially considering that, unlike most of the other gates's defenses, they were designed to outlive Soon himself. Lirian and Dorukan's gates relied too heavily on the power of the Scribblers themselves. Kraagor's gate, without a scribbler, has no active measures to defeat an intruder (unless they're careless enough to get killed while dungeon diving), nor the ability to adjust to new threats or changing conditions. It can delay, but it will inevitably fall.

Other that Soon's, only Girard's gate had a plan to maintain an active defense once Girard was gone, and its defenders were fewer in number and weaker in resources.

Of the rest, Lirian's were easily the weakest. Yes, she almost defeated Xykon before he became a lich, but once he did she went down with barely a fight, and neither Dorukan nor Soon's defenders got the chance to face a pre-lich Xykon. Lich Xykon had the most trouble with Soon's gate, the second most trouble with Dorukan's gate, and the third most trouble with Kraagor's gate. Girard's gate is an unknown- by the time the Order showed up, they were already dead, and the illusions that required active maintenance had gone down.

Overall rank:

1. Soon
2. Girard
3. Dorukan
4. Kraagor
5. Lirian

[Liquor Box]

I think it helps to think in terms of probabilities here. Lirian's prison only didn't work because one of her prisoners both had a magical artifact that protected him from her virus and knew enough about the Lich-ification ritual to be able to improvise it from the materials on hand. That's almost certainly a very rare and unlikely confluence. We don't know how unlikely, but higher-level knowledge of undead seems pretty rare in OOTS-world from what we have seen. (Indeed, I think a better case against Lirian is how apparently unprepared for and un-knowledgeable she was about the undead.)

It's not irrelevant that it happened, but it makes more sense to think about how likely it was to happen in terms of evaluating how strong a Gate's defenses are.

(Maybe it's the poker player in me, but you put your money in as a 90% favorite, you lose 10% of the time. Doesn't mean the 10% you lost made it the wrong play.)

Putting aside the fact that one happened and one did not, what reason is there to think that solving the wards was a more likely outcome than solving the prison?

In answering, I encourage you to bear in mind two points:
- First, just because the solution Xykon/Redcloak came up with depended specific precursors doesn't mean that was the only solution, I expect there were many others, and I have suggested some others which may have been available.
- Second, the solution to the wards seems obvious to us because we were told about it and know what it was. Xykon did not, and I don't think it would be any more obvious to him than how to find his way through Serini's deception, or Lyrian's prison.

I mean I agree with you, that if he had a higher chance to solve one than the other within a given time than it was easier, but I just don't see any basis for saying the wards were more likely to be solved than the prison.


Haven't read SoD myself, but I imagine if Redcloak and Xykon were unsupervised enough to manage a complex magical ritual then they were unsupervised enough to dig through the walls or improvise something else.

I mean, yes! This is the most obvious answer. They were not supervised at all, and people who are supervised by guards still frequently manage to escape from stone prisons without the slightest use of magic.

Just because the story required an explanation for Xykon's lichdom, doesn't mean that complicated answer was the only way out of a stone prison.

[Carl]

Haven't read SoD myself, but I imagine if Redcloak and Xykon were unsupervised enough to manage a complex magical ritual then they were unsupervised enough to dig through the walls or improvise something else.

I'm going to reply to liquor box here and i'm going to invoke something pelee said previously.

But first for your benefit they're in an artificially constructed cave buried somwhere, (presumably under the glade), with a built in supply of water and plants to both eat and provide oxygen. It's a sealed room with no natural way in or out. They were either teleported in or stone shaped in.

Now i said i was going to invoke pelee from earlier. And by which i mean from a narrative standpoint it makes no sense to assume Lirrian would have deliberately built a cardboard prison. She left them with most of their gear which means attempting to dig their way out was absolutely somthing they could have attempted, which means it stands to reason she'd have allowed for that. Digging or blasting your way out isn't going to work in that case. And that same "assume lirrian actually did her best within the limits of her knowledge" really puts the kibosh on damm near anything i can think of that doesn't involve getting your magic back

[Liquor Box]

I'm going to reply to liquor box here and i'm going to invoke something pelee said previously.

But first for your benefit they're in an artificially constructed cave buried somwhere, (presumably under the glade), with a built in supply of water and plants to both eat and provide oxygen. It's a sealed room with no natural way in or out. They were either teleported in or stone shaped in.

Now i said i was going to invoke pelee from earlier. And by which i mean from a narrative standpoint it makes no sense to assume Lirrian would have deliberately built a cardboard prison. She left them with most of their gear which means attempting to dig their way out was absolutely somthing they could have attempted, which means it stands to reason she'd have allowed for that. Digging or blasting your way out isn't going to work in that case. And that same "assume lirrian actually did her best within the limits of her knowledge" really puts the kibosh on damm near anything i can think of that doesn't involve getting your magic back

A stone prison that delays someone for a long time, but is ultimately escapable (eg, by digging out) is not narratively useless. It is just about as useful narratively speaking as you can get, because it allows the tension of figuring out a way to escape. Also, blasting explicitly would work - Xykon says so.

The "cardboard prison makes no narrative sense" idea applies equally to both Lyrian's prison, and Dorukon's ward anyway. In both cases it makes no sense for the villain to simply be able to waltz past the obstacle. In both cases it makes sense for there to need to be some challenge involved, and in both cases there is.

[Emanick]

Putting aside the fact that one happened and one did not, what reason is there to think that solving the wards was a more likely outcome than solving the prison?

In answering, I encourage you to bear in mind two points:
- First, just because the solution Xykon/Redcloak came up with depended specific precursors doesn't mean that was the only solution, I expect there were many others, and I have suggested some others which may have been available.
- Second, the solution to the wards seems obvious to us because we were told about it and know what it was. Xykon did not, and I don't think it would be any more obvious to him than how to find his way through Serini's deception, or Lyrian's prison.

I mean I agree with you, that if he had a higher chance to solve one than the other within a given time than it was easier, but I just don't see any basis for saying the wards were more likely to be solved than the prison.

I think one reason why other people may be doubting the feasibility of escaping from Lirian's prison is that they may have read this post (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=13836013&postcount=9) from The Giant, in which he basically says that Xykon becoming a lich was the only way they could have escaped. It also explicitly shuts down some other theories, like the idea that somebody could have teleported in to rescue Team Evil or that they could have used stone shape to escape.

[Carl]

I think one reason why other people may be doubting the feasibility of escaping from Lirian's prison is that they may have read this post (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=13836013&postcount=9) from The Giant, in which he basically says that Xykon becoming a lich was the only way they could have escaped. It also explicitly shuts down some other theories, like the idea that somebody could have teleported in to rescue Team Evil or that they could have used stone shape to escape.

I wasn't explicitly thinking of that, but my subconscious was probably prodding me about it.


@Liquor Box: Your missing the point. Yes in an open ended narrative it provides tension like you described. But this isn't an open ended narrative. It's an origin story thats part of a larger narrative that emphasises how each gate defence has a weakness that it's creators didn't allow for that is tied to some aspect of their core character. The point of the prison is that within the constraints of Lirrians way of thinking it's virtually inescapable, but it has this big weakness due to her blindspot regarding intelligent undead. Thus it demonstrates her weakness when the villains escape and serves as a rationale for why Xykon became a lich. Having other weakpoints doesn't really serve that purpose.

[Liquor Box]

I think one reason why other people may be doubting the feasibility of escaping from Lirian's prison is that they may have read this post (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=13836013&postcount=9) from The Giant, in which he basically says that Xykon becoming a lich was the only way they could have escaped. It also explicitly shuts down some other theories, like the idea that somebody could have teleported in to rescue Team Evil or that they could have used stone shape to escape.

The Giant doesn't say lichdom is the only way out (and nor does Redcloak), he says readers should assume Redcloak tried all the easy ways first. That is in the context of Redcloak suggesting lichdom within a couple of days of being imprisoned (they had only just suggested using the cacti to harvest water, so would have died of thirst if had been longer than a couple of days).

Chipping away through the stone is not an easy solution. It is something that probably would have taken months (as I understand it does in real life prison escapes). Indeed Right Eye already suggests the method of smashing through the rock, but only a few panels later Reddy suggests his lichdom solution. I agree get that there was no easy way out, but that doesn't mean there was no difficult way out.


@Liquor Box: Your missing the point. Yes in an open ended narrative it provides tension like you described. But this isn't an open ended narrative. It's an origin story thats part of a larger narrative that emphasises how each gate defence has a weakness that it's creators didn't allow for that is tied to some aspect of their core character. The point of the prison is that within the constraints of Lirrians way of thinking it's virtually inescapable, but it has this big weakness due to her blindspot regarding intelligent undead. Thus it demonstrates her weakness when the villains escape and serves as a rationale for why Xykon became a lich. Having other weakpoints doesn't really serve that purpose.

There is nothing in the narrative to suggest the only possible weakness in Lirian's prison is that she didn't consider intelligent undead. Indeed, that is not true because Redcloak suggests that Heal (a divine spell, which Lirian can herself cast) would have worked if he had been high enough level, so intelligent undead was not the only weak point.

Also if you apply the 'narrative demands only a single weak point', then you must apply it DOrukon's dungeon as well. If his weakpoint was his love for Lyrian, by your logic there would be no other weaknesses in his defence.

[BloodSquirrel]

This. The implicit assumption of several lines of Redcloak's dialogue is that he already tried everything he knows how to do. I just didn't show it all because I had limited space, and because I assumed that the reader would understand that if a smart, tactically-minded caster like Redcloak says, "X is the only way out," then he probably tried the easy ways first.

After all, Lirian would have needed to ward her prison against people coming in to rescue them, too, which means locking it down to plane shifts and stone shapes, even if she thinks her prisoners are incapable of them. A restored Xykon, however, is more powerful than Lirian could ward against.

This right here is the most important point, which I stated earlier. It wasn't just that Lirian's defenses failed against one highly specific, highly unlikely outcome. It's that once Xykon became a lich he became a significantly greater threat, one that she could no longer handle.

It's pointless to compare how pre-lich Xykon fared against Lirian's gate to how lich Xykon (plus whatever power, of all kinds, he gained in the decades following, including a higher level Redcloak in tow) fared against the later gates.

[pearl jam]

The Giant doesn't say lichdom is the only way out (and nor does Redcloak), he says readers should assume Redcloak tried all the easy ways first. That is in the context of Redcloak suggesting lichdom within a couple of days of being imprisoned (they had only just suggested using the cacti to harvest water, so would have died of thirst if had been longer than a couple of days).

Chipping away through the stone is not an easy solution. It is something that probably would have taken months (as I understand it does in real life prison escapes). Indeed Right Eye already suggests the method of smashing through the rock, but only a few panels later Reddy suggests his lichdom solution. I agree get that there was no easy way out, but that doesn't mean there was no difficult way out.



There is nothing in the narrative to suggest the only possible weakness in Lirian's prison is that she didn't consider intelligent undead. Indeed, that is not true because Redcloak suggests that Heal (a divine spell, which Lirian can herself cast) would have worked if he had been high enough level, so intelligent undead was not the only weak point.

Also if you apply the 'narrative demands only a single weak point', then you must apply it DOrukon's dungeon as well. If his weakpoint was his love for Lyrian, by your logic there would be no other weaknesses in his defence.

This glosses over the fact that the only reason Redcloak can cast Heal at all, even had he been high enough level for it to cure to the virus, is that he had a artifact with greater than epic power that allowed him to cast spells at all. It's almost literally a Deus Ex Machina, though I don't mean that in the pejorative sense. Essentially she failed because she did not discern the power of the mantle and the threat it presented and confiscate it or just kill them then and there.

[Liquor Box]

This glosses over the fact that the only reason Redcloak can cast Heal at all, even had he been high enough level for it to cure to the virus, is that he had a artifact with greater than epic power that allowed him to cast spells at all. It's almost literally a Deus Ex Machina, though I don't mean that in the pejorative sense. Essentially she failed because she did not discern the power of the mantle and the threat it presented and confiscate it or just kill them then and there.

The mantle just happened to be the magic item that protected Redcloak from the disease. There are lots of ways to get immunity from disease - magic items, feats, class features, creature types (not just undead either) would all block diseases. Lots of potential threats to the gate (not just undead) would not be vulnerable to the disease. Creatures protected from disease would generally not need the heal spell at all for themselves, but they could still use it on others if needed.


This is all a bit of an aside on my main point. Which is that there are probably mundane ways to escape from the prison - such as chiselling ones way out they way people do without magic in real life prison escapes.

[Peelee]

This glosses over the fact that the only reason Redcloak can cast Heal at all, even had he been high enough level for it to cure to the virus, is that he had a artifact with greater than epic power that allowed him to cast spells at all. It's almost literally a Deus Ex Machina, though I don't mean that in the pejorative sense. Essentially she failed because she did not discern the power of the mantle and the threat it presented and confiscate it or just kill them then and there.

It also glosses over that Redcloak does not actually know Heal can work, he only thinks it can, but he also thought everything before lichifying Xykon might work. Meaning that not only is it completely unknown if Heal will actually work (and I think it highly unlikely, given that it is a standard spell, not even a 9th level spell and the Guardian Virus was designed by an epic level druid specifically to counteract even epic level spellcasters), but also ignores the likelihood that even if it did work, once Healed and escaped, the mage would immediately lose all powers again because the Guardian Virus is still there.

The mantle just happened to be the magic item that protected Redcloak from the disease. There are lots of ways to get immunity from disease - magic items, feats, class features, creature types (not just undead either) would all block diseases. Lots of potential threats to the gate (not just undead) would not be vulnerable to the disease. Creatures protected from disease would generally not need the heal spell at all for themselves, but they could still use it on others if needed.
We ee don't have reason to suspect normal protection from disease would work. The Crimson Mantle is an artifact crafted by a deity. That is not a mundane protection from disease.

[Liquor Box]

It also glosses over that Redcloak does not actually know Heal can work, he only thinks it can, but he also thought everything before lichifying Xykon might work. Meaning that not only is it completely unknown if Heal will actually work (and I think it highly unlikely, given that it is a standard spell, not even a 9th level spell and the Guardian Virus was designed by an epic level druid specifically to counteract even epic level spellcasters), but also ignores the likelihood that even if it did work, once Healed and escaped, the mage would immediately lose all powers again because the Guardian Virus is still there.

We ee don't have reason to suspect normal protection from disease would work. The Crimson Mantle is an artifact crafted by a deity. That is not a mundane protection from disease.

We do have reason to think heal or items/features that protect from disease would work. The game rules say they would. Remove disease description explicitly says that it doesn't apply to certain high level magical disease (hence it not working), periapts of health, divine health, heal, being a constuct etc etc do explicitly apply to all magical diseases.

Sometimes the Giant changes the game rules to suit his story, but there's no reason to suspect that happened here. He didn't say he did, or hint he did, and the story works fine narratively without any rule tweaks. Redcloak doesn't say anything about the specialness of the mantle when speculating how he can cast, he just says it protects him from disease. The probable reason the Giant had Redcloak explain he couldn't cast Heal, was to answer the obvious question from fans about why he didn't cast it. If hadn't wanted Heal to work, he could have indicated that instead.

Do you have any actual reason to think that disease immune classes, items, feats or creature types work differently in OotS?

Edit:
As an aside, do we know whatever magic Lyrian wove into the spell was epic anyway? The Giant confirmed that the spell Girard cast to suck the Order into that illusion was not epic, so not all the Scribble spellcaster's capstone gate defence spells were epic. Lyrian's description of the disease said it was a magic infused hybrid of real diseases - which doesn't really emphasis the magic element. Are we just guessing it's epic?

[Carl]

The Giant doesn't say lichdom is the only way out (and nor does Redcloak), he says readers should assume Redcloak tried all the easy ways first. That is in the context of Redcloak suggesting lichdom within a couple of days of being imprisoned (they had only just suggested using the cacti to harvest water, so would have died of thirst if had been longer than a couple of days).

Chipping away through the stone is not an easy solution. It is something that probably would have taken months (as I understand it does in real life prison escapes). Indeed Right Eye already suggests the method of smashing through the rock, but only a few panels later Reddy suggests his lichdom solution. I agree get that there was no easy way out, but that doesn't mean there was no difficult way out.



There is nothing in the narrative to suggest the only possible weakness in Lirian's prison is that she didn't consider intelligent undead. Indeed, that is not true because Redcloak suggests that Heal (a divine spell, which Lirian can herself cast) would have worked if he had been high enough level, so intelligent undead was not the only weak point.

Also if you apply the 'narrative demands only a single weak point', then you must apply it Dorukon's dungeon as well. If his weakpoint was his love for Lyrian, by your logic there would be no other weaknesses in his defence.

The point is the whole narrative leading upto the lichedom is supposed to demonstrate the efficiency of Lirrians defences. Having another way out undermines that.

Also Dorukans weakness wasn't his love for lirrian but his belief that his immense magical power alone was the best defence. Once he was dead it only took team evil a matter of months to figure out how to get at the gate. Xykons Ego combined with the OOTS ultimately prevented them from achieving a victory outright. But Dorukan's defences ultimately weren't the reason they didn't win. They just couldn't hold up on a permanent basis without him.


This right here is the most important point, which I stated earlier. It wasn't just that Lirian's defenses failed against one highly specific, highly unlikely outcome. It's that once Xykon became a lich he became a significantly greater threat, one that she could no longer handle.

It's pointless to compare how pre-lich Xykon fared against Lirian's gate to how lich Xykon (plus whatever power, of all kinds, he gained in the decades following, including a higher level Redcloak in tow) fared against the later gates.

I took that as a sign that Xykons then level, (Epic or near Epic) was enough to overcome any caster checks induced rather than a strict powerup. Lichedom definitely gives him a boost but it's mostly in all the things it makes not work against him rather than making him massively more powerful offensively.

That said it's also exactly what was needed to let Xykon beat Lirrian. Her complete lack of knowledge of undead meant she wasted multiple rounds on ineffective attacks and her final strategy wasn't exactly great for fighting a sorcerer lich.

[Liquor Box]

The point is the whole narrative leading upto the lichedom is supposed to demonstrate the efficiency of Lirrians defences. Having another way out undermines that.

No, it wasn't. THe Giant told us what it was supposed to demonstrate in the post Emanick quoted - that the easy options wouldn't work, so they had to use a more novel option. Lichdom was the one they chose. But that does not mean that there were no other options available.

If Redcloak,smart, a "smart tactically-minded caster" couldn't solve Dorukon wards in six months does that suggest there was no solution? Of course not. Just like Redcloak not thinking of another way out of Lyrian's prison in the couple of days before he hatched the lichdom plan, doesn't mean there was no other way.


Also Dorukans weakness wasn't his love for lirrian but his belief that his immense magical power alone was the best defence. Once he was dead it only took team evil a matter of months to figure out how to get at the gate. Xykons Ego combined with the OOTS ultimately prevented them from achieving a victory outright. But Dorukan's defences ultimately weren't the reason they didn't win. They just couldn't hold up on a permanent basis.


That's simply wrong on the face of the comic. His gate had lots of layers other than himself. Using himself ultimately failed as defence. But after he was gone the rest of his defences succeeded in holding Xykon off for six months (and who knows how much longer beyond that) - longer than any other gate so far. Even if Dorukon had been been on holiday when Xykon attacked, his remaining defences were still stronger than Lyrian's. So he certainly did not rely only on his own abilities as a caster as a defence.

I get your point that his remaining defences didn't actually threaten to kil Xykon. But as already mentioned, that is true of every gate except Soon's.

[Peelee]

We do have reason to think heal or items/features that protect from disease would work. The game rules say they would.

If we pretend, for the moment, that is correct (it says it removed the diseased condition, which the game describes as doing damage, and thus does not fit the Guardian Virus), then all that would need to happen would be for the GV to be in the cave as well, which would make any casting of Heal remove it only for it to immediately reapply itself again. Of course, we don't even need to go to that step, since Heal doesn't work the way you claim it does and also the author has said both, "if Redcloak says lichification is the only way to escape then you should believe him" and also "if you make assumptions about the text then assumptions that fit the narrative make more sense than assumptions that don't". Instead of assuming that Lirian was so mind-bogglinglt stupid that the left a major loophole in her spell such that a single spell which she not only knows about but has access to herself could be bypassed by the trump-vard virus that she herself designed, why not just assume that she's not mind-bogglingly stupid and that normal abilities allowing healing or disease immunity would not work? The outcome is the same either way, and the only thing your argument accompolishes is to make Lirian droolingly stupid.

[Liquor Box]

If we pretend, for the moment, that is correct (it says it removed the diseased condition, which the game describes as doing damage, and thus does not fit the Guardian Virus), then all that would need to happen would be for the GV to be in the cave as well, which would make any casting of Heal remove it only for it to immediately reapply itself again.

I don't know what you mean by the bolded part.

It's true though that, if the disease is in the prison as well (which we don't know- Lyrian says it's in the glade which may or may not include the prison). But it took quite some time for the virus to stop Xykon from casting, so even if the virus is in the prison, he may have been able to cast enough to free himself before being reinfected.

Also, none of this effects the viability of items and class abilities, and creature types and feats that actually render one immune to all diseases (explicitly including magical disease).


Of course, we don't even need to go to that step, since Heal doesn't work the way you claim it does and also the author has said both, "if Redcloak says lichification is the only way to escape then you should believe him" and also "if you make assumptions about the text then assumptions that fit the narrative make more sense than assumptions that don't". Instead of assuming that Lirian was so mind-bogglinglt stupid that the left a major loophole in her spell such that a single spell which she not only knows about but has access to herself could be bypassed by the trump-vard virus that she herself designed, why not just assume that she's not mind-bogglingly stupid and that normal abilities allowing healing or disease immunity would not work? The outcome is the same either way, and the only thing your argument accompolishes is to make Lirian droolingly stupid.

Is the bolded text in quotation marks a direct quote from somewhere? If so, please reference it. Or is it a misquote of where the giant said "Redcloak says, "X is the only way out," then he probably tried the easy ways first."? Because I'm sure you can see the difference between Redcloak "trying the easy ways first" and "the only way to escape".

As for the quote about making assumptions that fit the text - I quite agree. But either scenario fits the text here. It is not mind bogglingly stupid to cast a spell that would delay a large number of potential enemies just because it doesn't delay all of them. In fact it's smart to delay a high percentage of her enemies.

The Giant makes the very same point himself with respect to Girard's ilusion spells:

There is a big jump from knowing that illusions don't affect undead to being able to do anything about it—or expecting every defense to affect every possible creature type.

Unless you're proposing he should have said, "Gosh, I could use this ultrapoweful illusion to stop 99.9% of all possible invaders, but what about that 0.1% that are undead powerful enough to get through my other traps and smart enough to actually do anything with my Gate? I guess I shouldn't bother casting it at all because it's not perfect."
https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=15415705&postcount=341

The percentage of enemies that would still be disabled by Lyrian's spell would be a lot lower than 99.9%, but it would still be the majority, and Lyrian may not have been able to do much about the rest. so the principal still holds true. So my assumptions are perfectly consistent with the text.

[brian 333]

What measure do you use when ranking the importance of a defense installed prior to contact with an enemy?

Defense engineers attempt to build defenses that have proven successful against the strategies they think the enemy will use. They tend to have greater success against known enemies than unknown ones.

(Compare the success of trench warfare from the later 1800s to the early half of the 1900s, and it's complete failure after the development of combined arms tactics.)

Absent known enemies, how does a defense designer know what to defend against? A defender designs defenses against what he would do. Every textbook warns against this, with many examples of perfect defenses that did not even prove to be speed bumps to the enemy.

We are beginning with results and working backwards. Xykon and Redcloak are the only enemies against whom we are ranking the defenses, but neither of them were even on the radar when the gate defenses were built, and by that time the Scribble had already implemented a non-interference rule, so they could not even compare notes on what did or didn't work.

If our standard is Xykon and Redcloak, then all of the gate defenses either failed or would have failed. None achieved better results than the other.

Soon's defense almost beat Xykon. So did Lyrian's. Dorukon's defense failed to prevent Xykon from seizing control of the gate's location. So did Soon's. Every single gate so far had to be destroyed to prevent Xykon and Redcloak gaining access to it.

By that metric, all of them get an F. What we're arguing here is which gets an F+ and which gets an F-.

[Peelee]

I don't know what you mean by the bolded part.

Then I would imagine it would be helpful to review Heal's spell description, as the bolded part is taken directly from that.

Again, the idea that an epic level druid having a virus as one of her ultimate defenses against magic users that can be nullified by a myriad of relatively low-level mundane and naturally occurring circumstances is patently ridiculous, and simply stating "well I don't think it goes against the narrative" does not make it so.

All that having been said, I doubt you will change your mind, and if you say that you don't know what I mean when I talk specifics about the most fundamental aspect of your own arguments, then I do not think I would be able to continue discussing with you without being continually frustrated at needing to provide citations explaining the things you yourself are using to prop up your position.

[Metastachydium]

Oh, wow. I'm just re-reading the bit with Lirian's Gate from SoD, and, damn,

she left Team Evil go through an eleven day victorious march decimating her forces;
only engaging when their warriors were not only mere meters away from the Gate itself, but hers were also just running out;
and when Lich!Xykon ambushes her in the end, she's reading. A letter. From Dorukan. Explicitly referencing the Gates.

Oh, my.

[BloodSquirrel]

I took that as a sign that Xykons then level, (Epic or near Epic) was enough to overcome any caster checks induced rather than a strict powerup. Lichedom definitely gives him a boost but it's mostly in all the things it makes not work against him rather than making him massively more powerful offensively.

That said it's also exactly what was needed to let Xykon beat Lirrian. Her complete lack of knowledge of undead meant she wasted multiple rounds on ineffective attacks and her final strategy wasn't exactly great for fighting a sorcerer lich.

Beside the point, really- to quote the man himself, "Power is power". Xykon's lichdom is not uniquely an advantage against Lirian and nobody else.

Hell, if he wasn't a lich, he'd had been killed for real when Roy threw him into the gate.



Absent known enemies, how does a defense designer know what to defend against? A defender designs defenses against what he would do. Every textbook warns against this, with many examples of perfect defenses that did not even prove to be speed bumps to the enemy.


This is why a good defense requires an active element- or, in other words, "The best defense is a good offense". This is why I rank Soon's as the highest- the Sapphire guard, for all its faults, was an active force that sought to preemptively eliminate threats to their gate, and could also react intelligently and had the resources of a large, rich city available to help.

This is also why I rank Kraagor's near the bottom- it's a purely static defense (as far as we've seen). Even if it delays the immortal lich and his nigh-immortal cleric for a few years while they try to figure it out, in the grand scheme of things, it can't actually defeat them.

[Gurgeh]

All four destroyed gates had something happen that was "yeah nah, this kind of BS only happens because it's a story". Lirian ran afoul of Redcloak's one-of-a-kind magic item and of Xykon's total depraved ruthlessness making him willing to embrace lichdom in the first place; Soon's gate had Miko smash the gem from wrongheaded Protagonist Syndrome, Girard's clan were wiped out by dead caster's signature spell. Dorukan's got blown up by Elan because of course it did. The difference is that if there had been no "oh yeah it's a story, let's keep things interesting" moments, then those first three gates would still be standing - but Dorukan's would be under Xykon and Redcloak's control, because the big "just nod and go along with it" moment in its defence was Roy getting one up on Xykon and chucking him into the wards.

[Liquor Box]

Then I would imagine it would be helpful to review Heal's spell description, as the bolded part is taken directly from that.

I did read the description when I first mentioned Heal, and I see that the bolded part is a paraphrasing of the spell description. What I didn't understand was how it related to our discussion. Was it just a precursor to your later point that Xykon might get reinfected? If so, fair enough, but I thought you might have meant it as a stand alone point?


Again, the idea that an epic level druid having a virus as one of her ultimate defenses against magic users that can be nullified by a myriad of relatively low-level mundane and naturally occurring circumstances is patently ridiculous, and simply stating "well I don't think it goes against the narrative" does not make it so.

Me saying I don't think it goes against the narrative doesn't make it so. You saying it's patently ridiculous doesn't make it so.

That's why I went beyond merely stating my opinion, and quoted the Giant's own comments in an analogous situation. The Giant was clear that an epic level illusionist's ultimate defence was able to be nullified by some (lower level characters.

Another example, is Serini's teleport trap. Very effective so far against Xykon's party, but quickly circumvented by a relatively low-level rogue.

So no, Lyrian's defences weren't ridiculous. They would not have been able to be avoided by most characters, only those few who had disease immunity from a feat, item, creature type or spell. Low level characters who had disease immunity would probably still have been defeated by her other defences (like all her animal guardians, and by her).

Which is what happened - Redcloak had it from an item, and Xykon got it from having his creature type changed to undead.


All that having been said, I doubt you will change your mind, and if you say that you don't know what I mean when I talk specifics about the most fundamental aspect of your own arguments, then I do not think I would be able to continue discussing with you without being continually frustrated at needing to provide citations explaining the things you yourself are using to prop up your position.

The only thing I asked for a citation of was where you put a statement from the Giant in quotation marks, that I suspect may not have actually been a direct quote (a request I notice you chose not to fulfil).

But other than that, I agree with you. If you find yourself being frustrated when someone doesn't immediately accept your assertions about what makes narrative sense, then probably a good choice to opt out.


Oh, wow. I'm just re-reading the bit with Lirian's Gate from SoD, and, damn,

she left Team Evil go through an eleven day victorious march decimating her forces;
only engaging when their warriors were not only mere meters away from the Gate itself, but hers were also just running out;
and when Lich!Xykon ambushes her in the end, she's reading. A letter. From Dorukan. Explicitly referencing the Gates.

Oh, my.

If it takes 11 days for the virus to take hold, that would have left ample time for Xykon to escape before being re-infected, had he been cured.

[BloodSquirrel]

All four destroyed gates had something happen that was "yeah nah, this kind of BS only happens because it's a story". Lirian ran afoul of Redcloak's one-of-a-kind magic item and of Xykon's total depraved ruthlessness making him willing to embrace lichdom in the first place; Soon's gate had Miko smash the gem from wrongheaded Protagonist Syndrome, Girard's clan were wiped out by dead caster's signature spell. Dorukan's got blown up by Elan because of course it did. The difference is that if there had been no "oh yeah it's a story, let's keep things interesting" moments, then those first three gates would still be standing - but Dorukan's would be under Xykon and Redcloak's control, because the big "just nod and go along with it" moment in its defence was Roy getting one up on Xykon and chucking him into the wards.

Real life has a tendency to work out that way, though. We even have a cool name for it: Murphy's Law.

If you build a system that has a single point of failure that relies on an operating assumption that may not be true, and something will eventually go wrong. Redcloak's mantle may be one-of-a-kind, but the oots world is full of one-of-a-king magic items. And who else would have such a think but someone who is the chosen of a god who is interested in the gates?

The exact sequence of any set of events that occurs is always wildly improbable because there are so many possibilities that turn on so many tiny things. Each one may look impossibly unlikely in hindsight because of all of the random coincidences and unexpected events along the way, but life is always full of those things, and so whatever happens is going to be a product of whatever they happen to be.

Sure, Xykon become a lich in her prison was unlikely, but he could have become a lich before getting trapped in her prison, or Hel could have wound up with a vampire dwarf then instead of last book, or someone could have sent an army of golems that they obtained in some unlikely way...

[Liquor Box]

Real life has a tendency to work out that way, though. We even have a cool name for it: Murphy's Law.

If you build a system that has a single point of failure that relies on an operating assumption that may not be true, and something will eventually go wrong. Redcloak's mantle may be one-of-a-kind, but the oots world is full of one-of-a-king magic items. And who else would have such a think but someone who is the chosen of a god who is interested in the gates?

The exact sequence of any set of events that occurs is always wildly improbable because there are so many possibilities that turn on so many tiny things. Each one may look impossibly unlikely in hindsight because of all of the random coincidences and unexpected events along the way, but life is always full of those things, and so whatever happens is going to be a product of whatever they happen to be.

Sure, Xykon become a lich in her prison was unlikely, but he could have become a lich before getting trapped in her prison, or Hel could have wound up with a vampire dwarf then instead of last book, or someone could have sent an army of golems that they obtained in some unlikely way...

I couldn't agree more. Just because the particular idea they had to get past Lyrian's trap required lots of ducks to be in a row doesn't mean they couldn't got past it a different way with different ducks.

[Peelee]

I did read the description when I first mentioned Heal, and I see that the bolded part is a paraphrasing of the spell description. What I didn't understand was how it related to our discussion.

If you tell me that you do not understand how the way Heal works is related to your assertion that Heal would work, then I can only reaffirm solidly my extreme disinterest to continue to debate you.

[Liquor Box]

If you tell me that you do not understand how the way Heal works is related to your assertion that Heal would work, then I can only reaffirm solidly my extreme disinterest to continue to debate you.

Oh I understand. It says it removes the diseased condition. What I don't understand is why you think that doesn't apply to the guardian virus. But, given your extreme disinterest, I am going to have to remain oblivious to whatever interpretation you were putting forward. Unless one of the other people involved sees the same way you do and decides to say why.

[RatElemental]

If our standard is Xykon and Redcloak, then all of the gate defenses either failed or would have failed. None achieved better results than the other.

Soon's defense almost beat Xykon. So did Lyrian's. Dorukon's defense failed to prevent Xykon from seizing control of the gate's location. So did Soon's. Every single gate so far had to be destroyed to prevent Xykon and Redcloak gaining access to it.

By that metric, all of them get an F. What we're arguing here is which gets an F+ and which gets an F-.

Xykon and Redcloak did not sieze the location of Soon's gate, and Soon's gate did not need to be destroyed to prevent them from getting it. It being destroyed is what saved them from being killed by Soon.

[Gurgeh]

If you build a system that has a single point of failure that relies on an operating assumption that may not be true, and something will eventually go wrong. Redcloak's mantle may be one-of-a-kind, but the oots world is full of one-of-a-king magic items. And who else would have such a think but someone who is the chosen of a god who is interested in the gates
I don't think you've quite understood my point. It's a story, at the end of the day, and realistically we were always going to be down to one standing gate and no successful gate rituals for Team Evil (which logically means that four gates had to go kaboom).

My point is that Soon's, Lirian's, and Girard's gate defences were set up to succeed and only failed because of plot contrivances; on paper they were powerful and effective, and in two cases they got very close to permanently ending Team Evil's campaign (i.e., Miko not turning up and/or reading the room correctly, Lirian confiscating the mantle or imprisoning Xykon separately from Reddie or deciding actually maybe killing is okay this time or making any number of counterfactual choices). Contrivance undid otherwise solid plans.

Dorukan's, however, was only saved from being suborned by that same level of contrivance. On paper, it was already a losing prospect against Team Evil.

ps, is it some weird unspoken forum trend to misspell the scribblers' names? I'd normally put it down to typos but the misspellings have been so consistent that it feels deliberate.

ps ps: peelee, if you're relying on a partly unspoken argument (that the Guardian Virus doesn't inflict ability damage and therefore cannot be inflicting the Diseased condition, and therefore would not be fixed by Heal) it seems petty to get snippy with the people who don't parse your argument instead of just unpacking it and explaining it clearly - especially since you're insistent on them re-examining the wrong part of the rules (nothing in Heal's description makes it clear that the Diseased condition in 3.5e is more narrowly defined than natural language would imply).

[Liquor Box]

ps, is it some weird unspoken forum trend to misspell the scribblers' names? I'd normally put it down to typos but the misspellings have been so consistent that it feels deliberate.

I suspect I am a consistent miss-speller, and in my case it is just laziness. I'd also hazard a guess that if one person misspells others just copy that misspelling, and it becomes ingrained.


ps ps: peelee, if you're relying on a partly unspoken argument (that the Guardian Virus doesn't inflict ability damage and therefore cannot be inflicting the Diseased condition, and therefore would not be fixed by Heal) it seems petty to get snippy with the people who don't parse your argument instead of just unpacking it and explaining it clearly - especially since you're insistent on them re-examining the wrong part of the rules (nothing in Heal's description makes it clear that the Diseased condition in 3.5e is more narrowly defined than natural language would imply).

Ah so the argument is that it is not a diseased condition at all, because it doesn't do ability damage. I'll check the rules later, when I get home. But I'm not sure it's a winning argument when Redcloak refers to it as a disease, thinks that spells like heal and remove disease might work, says that its the ability of his cloak to protect him from disease that stops him getting it.

Edit:
Still not sure I see why something that does not cause damage can't be a disease. All the diseases in the DMG cause ability damage, but there are diseases in the Book of Vile Darkness that cause non-dmg effects.

[gbaji]

We are beginning with results and working backwards. Xykon and Redcloak are the only enemies against whom we are ranking the defenses, but neither of them were even on the radar when the gate defenses were built, and by that time the Scribble had already implemented a non-interference rule, so they could not even compare notes on what did or didn't work.

Exactly. There are two ways of looking at this, and ranking the gates defenses:

1. How well they were set up and *should* have worked against an array of potential threats.

2. How they *actually* stood up against what actually happened in the comic.

I think that examining method number 1 allows us to rank them in an objective manner. It's what I'm trying to do at least. Again, it's an intellectual exercise. Did they plan well when building their defenses? They don't know what might try to defeat them, so they had to be prepared for a lot of different possibilities. Some were (IMO) better at that than others.

I'm not sure how much value there is in examining method 2 because it's part of story writing. I mean, it's interesting, but we've read what happened. Stories will tend to have contrivances that could not have been planned for, so you end up with a lot of "so-and-so couldn't have known about that", followed by "well so-and-so2 couldn't have planned for X either". There's no way to make that sort of analysis objective.

However, if we are to do so, this point is pretty relevant:


My point is that Soon's, Lirian's, and Girard's gate defences were set up to succeed and only failed because of plot contrivances; on paper they were powerful and effective, and in two cases they got very close to permanently ending Team Evil's campaign (i.e., Miko not turning up and/or reading the room correctly, Lirian confiscating the mantle or imprisoning Xykon separately from Reddie or deciding actually maybe killing is okay this time or making any number of counterfactual choices). Contrivance undid otherwise solid plans.

Dorukan's, however, was only saved from being suborned by that same level of contrivance. On paper, it was already a losing prospect against Team Evil.

Some contrivances are more "out there" than others. Durukan's was just him being defeated directly by Xykon. All the others required contrivances prior to that being possible (although, to be fair, said contrivance completely eliminated Girard's defenses, so we can't really assess it well).


I'll also respond to several posters talking about how there were other ways for Team Evil to get out of Lirrian's prison. Even if we assume there were, they would still have been right back where they started, with no greater ability to defeat her and her forces *and* still being completely vulnerable to the anti-magic virus. It was only because Xykon was turned into a lich that they were able to defeat her.

And yeah, we could also examine what would have happened if Xykon had been a lich prior to the initial attack. I suspect though, if she'd detected a powerful undead caster coming her way with Team Evil initially, she'd have taken the time to prepare something to stop him. We can speculate as to whether she would have been successful, but it would not have been the total mess that happened.

[Kalirren]

Each of the individually conceived protections has failed. Each individual approach is weak in its own way.

Dorukan believed in the power of magic.
Lirian believed in the power of great creatures and not in people.
Soon thought only honor and tradition and a great city could defend a Gate.
Girard thought only family could be trusted and tried to use misdirection to fool everyone else.
Kraagor embodied brute strength.

In contrast, Serini believed in the power of cooperation.
Her gate uses -ALL- of the approaches combined, and may be the only one to succeed.
Magic to misdirect (Dorukan),
monsters in dungeons that don't matter (Lirian),
a family that lives Backstage (Girard),
and, in all likelihood, 100 tons of concrete to bury the gate wherever it is, forcing a brute-force search (Kraagor).
Heck, Oona's bugbear tribe are probably Serini's version of Soon's Sapphire Guard, making sure that no one else lives near Monster Hollow.

[gbaji]

Oh, absolutely. That's all part of the story writing though. It's by design, in order to show that no single method worked.

Durukon's dependence on the power of magic was defeated by a more powerful/determined spell caster.
Lirrian's dependence on the power of nature was defeated by an unnatural being.
Soon's dependence on the power of the paladin's honor was defeated by a fallen paladin.
Girard's dependence on the power of family was defeated when his entire family was destroyed.
We don't yet know the full extent of Kragor's defenses (since Serini actually built them), but I suspect strongly that they will be defeated too.

Again, this is all part of the story. If the defenses put in place by the Scribblers actually worked, then there would be no need for the OotS to be in the story. And then, well, we kinda don't have a story. It's an absolute requirement for the story to work that these defenses will not hold unless the OotS shows up. That at least a couple of the defenses actually failed *because* of acts by members of the OotS is also part of the story, too (it's a classic "we broke it, we have to fix it" story, right?). And hey, it wouldn't be as interesting if the protagonists didn't make grave mistakes along the way. It's part of character development.

Nothing wrong with that (and a whole lot right in fact) as part of storytelling. But that doesn't tell us much in terms of how well put together the actual defenses were from an objective (any random thing that might come along) way.

[Liquor Box]

I'll also respond to several posters talking about how there were other ways for Team Evil to get out of Lirrian's prison. Even if we assume there were, they would still have been right back where they started, with no greater ability to defeat her and her forces *and* still being completely vulnerable to the anti-magic virus. It was only because Xykon was turned into a lich that they were able to defeat her.

It depends how they get out. If they had/found another way to avoid/remove the disease they'd be able to attack the gate after getting out (it seems to take more than a week before the virus takes hold).
Even if they just dug their way out, they could retreat, pay someone to heal the disease, and try again. This time either attacked more quickly (so they win before the disease takes hold), or with a tactic to counter the disease (like using a magic item that renders them immune.


And yeah, we could also examine what would have happened if Xykon had been a lich prior to the initial attack. I suspect though, if she'd detected a powerful undead caster coming her way with Team Evil initially, she'd have taken the time to prepare something to stop him. We can speculate as to whether she would have been successful, but it would not have been the total mess that happened.

No, on page 54 she asks if they know anything about the villains attacking, and her scryers say not because of blocking magic. That is 11 days after they entered the glade. The Xykon caught her by surprise after he did escape.