Villainous Competition LIII: Christmas Edition!

[H_H_F_F]

Ho, Ho, Ho! Happy Holidays!

Merry crooks revel in snowy streets. Naughty masterminds plot stealing Christmas. Terrible abominations rise to devour all of Santa's cookies, and grim mothers send the kids to bed early. Welcome… to the Villainous Competition - Christmas Edition!

Each round of the villainous competition, our conniving contestants need to build a villain showcasing a different theme, and following a different set of associated limitations. This round's villain is St. Nick's gruesome right-hand pal...



Elvish Evildoer!


https://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/d/d4/Elena_Kukanova_-_Nan-Elmoth.jpg

Limitations:



Quendë: Must incorporate elf-only options – the more (or more significant) the merrier.
Revenge is a dish best served frozen: The elves live for centuries, and plan long-term accordingly. Should be capable of initiating plans with long-term effects, and utilizing time-consuming preperations.
More than Mortal: This villain is not your everyday NPC threat. Must either be unplayable, or have an ECL higher than its CR.
Fickle Vileness: Must be CE.


Let the merriments begin!



Rules of the Competition:

Contestants:
It is highly recommended for a new contestants to look over a few entries from past rounds to understand what's the expected presentation. We're a little bit different than most optimization competitions. We use CR, not ECL. Each entry presents a villain going up to CR 20, with ability scores based on the elite array (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8).
The contestant is to give a stub of the build (EG "Drow weretiger ranger 4/ Cleric 10"), flesh out the full build progression using the table(s) found in the submission and deadlines section, give notes on what the villain does and how it is to be used throughout its CR range, and fully source every aspect of the build that can't be found in the SRD. But what are the allowed sources?

Secret Laboratory:
Competitors will be free to use any official 1st party (WotC) 3.5 rulebook in constructing their builds. Dragon Compendium is allowed, but individual copies of Dragon magazine are disallowed. Unupdated 3.0 materials, as well as web exclusives by WotC are expressly allowed, but take care to verify that an updated version did not appear in print elsewhere. Unearthed Arcana is allowed but limited: The variant character options (such as Wildshape Ranger and Thug Fighter) should not be penalized. Flaws carry a 1 point elegance penalty, and traits carry half of that. Item familiars, gestalt, alternate skill systems, alternate magic systems, alternate crafting rules, generic base classes, LA buyoff, fractional saves/BAB, and bloodlines are banned. Anything not mentioned here is up to individual judges.
Builds that are fully monstrous are allowed at no penalty. All class levels are to be added on as associated class levels – meaning, each class level adds 1 CR, with the exception of NPC classes. See clarifications for more details.
Leadership and similar abilities are completely banned. Undead Leadership and Dragon Cohort are likewise banned. Wild Cohort and Obtain Familiar are allowed. If you are not sure if a specific feat violates the 'no leadership' rule, err on the side of caution, or ask me.

Epic Rules:
We do not use epic progression for BaB and saves in this competition. Remember that four iteratives are still the maximum amount granted by BaB, even if it gets to 21 or more.
A villain is eligible to Epic feats from HD 21 and above, as normal, but Epic Spellcasting and all other Epic feats that affect spells, psionic powers, or item creation are not permitted.
As for other magical subsystems: for Incarnum characters, Epic Open Chakra feats are allowed; other Epic Incarnum feats are not. The Essentia Capacity increases for Epic capacity as described on p. 212. For warlocks, epic Eldritch Blast, Epic Extra Invocation, and Epic Fiendish Resilience are allowed. Other epic warlock feats are not. Epic binding feats are disallowed.

Submission and deadlines:
Contestants will have until Wednesday, January 17th, 12:00 GMT to create their builds and PM them to the Chair (H_H_F_F).
Put the name of your build and "Villainous Competition round n" as your PM subject. You may ask for an extension if required. The villains will then be posted anonymously – make sure that your PM does not include any identifying details. While waiting for the builds to be posted, please avoid speculation (see speculation rules below). A contestant may submit up to 2 entries.


CR
Class
Base Attack Bonus
Fort Save
Ref Save
Will Save
Skills
Feats
Class Features


1
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


2
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


3
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


4
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


5
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


6
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


7
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


8
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


9
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


10
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


11
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


12
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


13
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


14
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


15
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


16
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


17
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


18
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


19
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


20
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


Code immediately below (spoiler).

CR
Class
Base Attack Bonus
Fort Save
Ref Save
Will Save
Skills
Feats
Class Features


1
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


2
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


3
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


4
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


5
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


6
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


7
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


8
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


9
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


10
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


11
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


12
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


13
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


14
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


15
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


16
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


17
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


18
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


19
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities


20
New Class Level
+x
+x
+x
+x
Skills
Feats
New Class Abilities



Spells per Day/Spells Known
Spells per Day/Spells Known


Level
0lvl
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
6th
7th
8th
9th


1st
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


2nd
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


3rd
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


4th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


5th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


6th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


7th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


8th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


9th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


10th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


11th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


12th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


13th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


14th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


15th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


16th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


17th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


18th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


19th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


20th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


Code Immediately Below,
Spells per Day/Spells Known
Spells per Day/Spells Known


Level
0lvl
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
6th
7th
8th
9th


1st
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


2nd
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


3rd
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


4th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


5th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


6th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


7th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


8th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


9th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


10th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


11th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


12th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


13th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


14th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


15th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


16th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


17th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


18th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


19th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


20th
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-

More useful tables can be found here (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BG0-5sq4dL9Ooh7-QfXuyHzO4rXSz-CRcj29t6BeUVE/edit#gid=401538143), made by the immaculate Mattie_p.
Once the villains are posted, judges should strive to finish their judgement until February 2nd.

Judging:
Judging is how the competition keeps going! The judges score the entries, and we give medals to the top 3 scoring villains. Anyone can judge! It's how we score the points, and judges get to pick the theme for next round (from a list of options presented by the chair), and are nominees for being guest-chairs every 5th round.
It is highly recommended that prospective first-time judges read through Inevitability's Judging Handbook (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?662048-Build-Competition-Judging-Handbook), and perhaps some past judgements.
Judges are to give scores between 1-5 in the following four criteria: Originality, Power, Elegance and Memorable Villainy. Judges are not to use alternative criteria or score ranges. A 0 in elegance is permitted for strictly illegal or incomplete builds, but a score lower than 1 in other categories is generally not allowed.
Originality: Is the build creative? Was it surprising in the context of this round? On the other hand, does it use expected or well-known methods?
Power: Is it a powerful and threatening villain? On the other hand, does it have any glaring weaknesses?
Elegance: Is it mechanically pretty? Is it clever? On the other hand, does it have rules or presentation issues? Does it rely on shaky interpretations of text? If you find that you have trouble with this category, remember: "no issues" doesn't have to be a 5! Like all others, this category has positive criteria to follow, not just negative criteria to be avoided.
Memorable Villainy: Is this a villain with style and presence? Is it interesting to face against? Does it live up to the established theme and the spirit of the round? On the other hand, does it feel more like an encounter-of-the-week than a true BBEG?
Please try to follow the following judging guidelines:
This rule means that every source that has been declared legal for this competition is fair game. Using obscure sources, or a large amount of sources, is not by itself subject to a penalty in elegance; Similarly, using only a small amount of sources, or sources that are very well known, is not by itself subject to a penalty in originality.

Judges are only allowed to penalize once for a given mistake. If someone messes up their skills and doesn't qualify for a PrC, ding them as hard as you like. Once. In one category. You don't then get to declare that because they didn't qualify for that PrC, they don't get those levels, and thus don't qualify for anything else. If Ranger is a common ingredient, ding them for Originality. Once. Don't also take off points for Two-Weapon-Fighting being a common ingredient.

Non-exhaustive list of examples:

Skills

Allowed:

Giving a penalty for miscalculating the number of skill points gained
Giving a penalty for not having enough ranks to meet a prerequisite
Increasing the harshness of a skill miscalculation penalty if it affects critical skills including prereqs


Not allowed:

Giving separate penalties for miscalculating skill points and for non-qualification where the non-qualification is solely caused by the miscalculation



Prereqs

Allowed:

Giving a penalty for not meeting prereqs
Scaling the penalty depending on how important the item that the build failed to qualify for is
Not giving credit for (note: not the same as penalising for) tactics using feats or classes that were not qualified for (but see below)


Not Allowed:

"Cascading" failures to qualify - declaring that because a build doesn't qualify for a feat, for example, it also doesn't qualify for anything using that feat as a prereq
Treating a build as having fewer levels than it does because of FtQ for classes



Note that these are protections, not licenses. Deliberately taking a feat that you know you don't qualify for hoping to just suck up the judging penalty for a feat that you couldn't normally take is not okay, and may lead to your build being disqualified.
An important note on power, cheese, and CR appropriateness:
Being "too strong for your CR" is not by itself something a judge should penalize here. Using poorly supported cheese or cheese that isn't doing anything interesting in the build can and should get an elegance penalty. Using well-known or otherwise obvious and boring tricks can and should be penalized in originality – but power level by itself is not to be addressed anywhere other than the power category. Same goes for being too weak – that should not affect memorable villainy or anything outside of power by itself. If it helps, you can imagine low-powered villains used against low-op groups, high-powered villains against high-op groups, and TO nonsense villains pitted against TO nonsense PCs.

Speculation:
Please don’t post or speculate on possible builds until the reveal, in order to avoid spoiling the surprise if a particular competitor is producing a build along those lines.
Once builds are revealed, please do not comment on errors or rules issues on entries unless you are a judge. If you have such a comment, wait until the final reveal to post it.

Disputes and Conclusion:
Once judging is done, contestants are welcome to table disputes, through a PM to the chair. Disputes are to be civil, substantive, and objective. Meanwhile, the judges can pick between three theme options presented by the chair for next round. As disputes are resolved, the general public can vote for the people's choice medal, writing a short paragraph nominating the villain that mostly intrigued or excited them, even if it wasn't necessarily the most elegant, powerful, original, or memorable. Participation in the people's choice medal awards is mandatory for contestants, but all are welcome to join in. Once everything is concluded, we reveal the identities of our conniving contestants, award medals, and move on to the next round!

Round One: Leader of Armies (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?395046)
Round Two: Nature's Avenger (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?400517)
Round Three: Double Agent (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?406015)
Round Four: Grave Keeper (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?413480)
Round Five: Crime Lord (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?420704)
Round Six: Ultimate Predator (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?430650)
Round Seven: Wicked Witch (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?444478)
Round Eight: Master of the Tundra (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?461482)
Round Nine: The Power of Villainous Thinking (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?474230)
Round Ten: Henchman Are Villains Too (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?478068)
Round Eleven: The Higher They Rise The Harder They Fall (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?483052)
Round Twelve: Power Comes at a Price (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?488846)
Round Thirteen: The Gadgeteer - You Are Not Batman (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?491932)
Round Fourteen: The Thing That Should Not Be (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?496091)
Round Fifteen: The Horsemen Are Drawing Nearer (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?500829)
Round Sixteen: Burn Baby Burn (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?503974)
Round Seventeen: It's Alive! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?507768)
Round Eighteen: This is Heresy (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?511933)
Round Nineteen: He Slimed Me! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?516535)
Round Twenty: Elder Evil (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?521560)
Round Twenty-One: Yarr! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?527415-Villainous-Competition-XXI-Yarr!)
Round Twenty-Two: I Am The Night! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?531199-Villainous-Competition-XXII-I-Am-The-Night!)
Round Twenty-Three: Two Heads Are Better Than One! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?535437-Villainous-Competition-XXIII-Two-Heads-Are-Better-Than-One)
Round Twenty-Four: Wrong For The Right Reasons! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?541650-Villainous-Competition-XXIV-Wrong-For-The-Right-Reasons)
Round Twenty-Five: Keeper of the Gate (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?550139-Villainous-Competition-XXV-No-Solicitors!)
Round Twenty-Six: Get In MY BELLY (Swallow Whole) (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?556705-Villainous-Competition-XXVI-Swallow-Whole!)
Round Twenty-Seven: Multiple Personality Disorder (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?559748-Villainous-Competition-XXVII-Multiple-Personality-Disorder)
Round Twenty-Eight: Tiny Only! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?565176-Villainous-Competition-XXVIII-Bad-Things-Come-in-Small-Packages)
Round Twenty-Nine: Halloween Special (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?573496-Villainous-Competition-XXIX-A-Halloween-Special)
Round Thirty: One Feat to Rule Them ALL (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?577930-Villainous-Competition-XXX-One-Feat-to-Rule-Them-ALL)
Round Thirty-One: In Cold Blood (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?582492-Villainous-Competition-XXXI-In-Cold-Blood)
Round Thirty-Two: oh HELL NO! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586377-Villainous-Competition-XXXII-Oh-HELL-NO!)
Round Thirty-Three: The Do Over (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?589107-Villainous-Competition-XXXIII-The-Do-Over)
Round Thirty-Four: Sword and Board (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?600139-Villainous-Competition-XXXIV-Sword-and-Board)
Round Thirty-Five: I Shall Call Him Mini Me! (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?605444-Villainous-Competition-XXXV-I-Shall-Call-Him-Mini-Me!)
Round Thirty-Six: The Broken Man (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?612196-Villainous-Competition-XXXVI-The-Broken-Man)
Round Thirty-Seven: Yin and Yang (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?617485-Villainous-Competition-XXXVII-Yin-and-Yang)
Round Thirty-Eight: Spooks and Spectres (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?621069-Villainous-Competition-XXXVIII-Spooks-and-Spectres)
Round Thirty-Nine: Sorta Psuedo (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?625680-Villainous-Competition-XXXIX-Sorta-Psuedo)
Round Forty: Negative Nancy (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?629291-Villainous-Competition-XL-Negative-Nancy)
Round Forty-One: Gojira! (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?632587-Villainous-Competition-XL-1-Gojira!)
Round Forty-Two: Caine?! (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?635461-Villainous-Competition-XLII-Caine-!)
Round Forty-Three: The Big Dumb Brute (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?641088-Villainous-Competition-XLIII-The-Big-Dumb-Brute)
Round Forty-Four: The Sheriff (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?642229-Villainous-Competition-XLIV-It-s-The-Sound-of-The-Police!)
Round Forty Five: The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?643357-Villainous-Competition-XLV-Wolf-in-Sheep-s-Clothing)
Round Forty-Six: Nemesis! (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?644622-Villainous-Competition-XLVI-Nemesis!)
Round Forty-Seven: Fairy Queen! (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?647363-Villainous-Competition-XLVII-Fairy-Queen!)
Round Forty-Eight: Zealot! (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?648561-Villainous-Competition-XLVIII-Zealot!)
Round Forty-Nine: Controller! (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?649810-Villainous-Competition-XLVIX-Controller!)
Round Fifty: The Lovers! (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?655994-Villainous-Competition-L-L-O-V-E!)
Round fifty-one: This isn't even my final form! (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?658796-Villainous-Competition-LI-This-isn-t-even-my-final-form!)
Round fifty-two: Clockwork Terror! (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?660169-Villainous-Competition-LII-It-s-Alive!-(Again!))

[H_H_F_F]

Clarifications

Monster Advancement and Challenge Rating:
Unless granted by a template or other unusual means, advancement through racial HD is only allowed for monsters with an advancement clause allowing it, and must comply with the rulings and limitations thereof. For example, an Aboleth can only advance up to 24 HD through normal advancement, an Aranea cannot be advanced that way at all, and an Assassin Vine has no limit for such advancement.
Class levels always come after racial HD, unless using non-standard means of gaining HD (Acquired templates granting HD, monsters with special advancement rules or fluff, etc.) If you're not sure, comply with this rule or PM the chair for guidance.
CR increase from HD advancement happens at the first HD of each CR bracket. For example: fey add 1 CR for each 4 HD, so adding 1 HD to an unadvanced fey creature would increase its CR by one, while the following 3 HD would not. Adding a fifth HD would increase CR by another step, and so on.
While all PC classes increase CR on a 1 to 1 ratio, NPC classes follow the rules set out in the DMG. NPC class levels increase CR by n-1 (at least 1) when n is the total number of NPC class levels. That is, adding a single adept level to an entry would increase its CR by 1; Adding a warrior level, or another adept level, would not increase its CR; and adding further levels in any NPC class would increase its CR on a 1 to 1 ratio.

3.0 content updates:
Official Errata and 3.5 updates to 3.0 content are considered valid regardless of whether their sources would otherwise be legal. This includes the 3.5 update of Oriental Adventures given in Dragon Magazine.

Deriving Ability score modifiers:
For monsters or races that don't have explicit racial ability scores, remember that the system assumes monsters start with three 11s and three 10s. Simply decrease 10 from even ability scores and 11 from odd ability scores, and you'll have your modifiers! Watch out for monsters that explicitly already use the Elite Array, though – those are handled differently, of course.

On variant builds:
It's fine to note variant build choices for your villain at a dedicated portion at the end of the build, but only one version is canonical, and only that version will be judged. For example, if you picked feat X, but could also go with feat Y for a less cheesy option, you could say so in the variant section – but your build will be judged as having feat X, with all of the implications of that build's cheesiness.

Miscellaneous House Rules and clarifications
We'll be using the following Iron Chef house rules:

All creatures are proficient with any natural weapons they may have or acquire.
Bonus feats that are granted even if you do not meet the prerequisites do not require you to meet the prerequisites in order to use.
Feats that affect class skills or the buying of skill ranks apply to the level you take them.
Weapons from soulmelds are considered to be magic weapons for the purpose of overcoming DR.
Unarmed Swordsage grants Improved Unarmed Strike at level 1.
One dispute per entry (per judgement). Submit disputes by PM to the Chair.
Ghostwalk ghost is banned
Gold, silver, and bronze are awarded regardless of ties (e.g., 2 silvers does not preclude bronze)
Spelltouched feats are legal and can be taken just like any other feat when you meet the prerequisites and have the feat slot available.

[Inevitability]

Oh, that's some nice restrictions. I was afraid that 'elf round' was going to be too broad, or too tolerant of essentially-PCs, but this... just great! I'll be building for sure, already cycling through some ideas as we speak.

[AvatarVecna]

https://media2.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExbjJlcmVncGJsbG5uYXV1NXpwcjRxdGJ 6ZGV4ZTd4OWJ2YXU5Y2ZkdCZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfY nlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/x7gjmBuaHrWak/giphy.gif

Got an idea coming together...

Edit: hrm...generally running into a problem. Longterm villain plans need to be elminster proof cuz otherwise you're just being an idiot. But bbeg plans need to be thwartable by PCs, who are decidedly not epic level chosen of mystra in capabilities. "Elminster proof" and "not PC proof" is a venn diagram with no overlap.

[loky1109]

I have one idea maybe.

[H_H_F_F]

https://media2.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExbjJlcmVncGJsbG5uYXV1NXpwcjRxdGJ 6ZGV4ZTd4OWJ2YXU5Y2ZkdCZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfY nlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/x7gjmBuaHrWak/giphy.gif

Got an idea coming together...

Edit: hrm...generally running into a problem. Longterm villain plans need to be elminster proof cuz otherwise you're just being an idiot. But bbeg plans need to be thwartable by PCs, who are decidedly not epic level chosen of mystra in capabilities. "Elminster proof" and "not PC proof" is a venn diagram with no overlap.

Obviously, each judge will have their expectations when it comes to power, and I doubt most would be inclined to be harsher just because long term stuff is part of the theme.

That being said, there are whispered tales of settings that don't have Elminster.

[AvatarVecna]

Obviously, each judge will have their expectations when it comes to power, and I doubt most would be inclined to be harsher just because long term stuff is part of the theme.

That being said, there are whispered tales of settings that don't have Elminster.

Funnily enough my complaint isn't actually about elminster specifically, it's about people in that class of power and responsibility. Settings where PCs are swinging the biggest ***** magically and strategically exist, but like even in everron that's only true if you're not leaving khorvaire.

I've got a solid plan to destroy everything but it takes centuries to finish and even weeks just to advance noticeably. "Here's what can be done to stop it that only the PCs can do" is rough to work around. I might just Forge ahead assuming any DM that ran something like this would pretend epic npcs just don't exist I suppose.

Edit: I think I have an acceptable workaround.

[FactualArcher]

I like the round theme and will hopefully compete, though I do have a question. Isn't January 10th a Wednesday rather than a Sunday, and if so, when is the actual deadline?

[H_H_F_F]

Well, that's easy to answer: I forgot to change the day of the week.

The deadline is Wednesday, January 10th.

[FactualArcher]

Cool. I hope to be able to get an entry in, then.

[H_H_F_F]

Happy new year! How's everybody doing?

[loky1109]

Happy new year! How's everybody doing?

I have bare bones of entry right now. Should be on time.

[Inevitability]

One build in, one build nearly finished!

update: Both builds in.

[Inevitability]

Also, yet another suggestion for a future round: The One Ring. Every entry may choose a single artifact that the villain has somehow gained possession of. Artifacts don't really show up in any other optimization context (obviously), so this'd give optimizers a chance to showcase their favorite one.

For balance reasons, maybe emphasize that overreliance on the artifact's raw power is deserving of an villainy/elegance penalty, and the contest isn't about choosing the strongest artifact possible as it is about showcasing whichever one you pick well.

[loky1109]

One entry is sent. Have idea for one more. Maybe will make it.

[H_H_F_F]

Due to a request from a conniving contestant, the deadline will be postponed by one week. New deadline: Wednesday, January 17th.

Best of luck building!

[loky1109]

Aaaaaand second is sent!

Fun fact.
This one:

I have one idea maybe.
Wasn't first nor second.

[H_H_F_F]

Just a reminder, in case anyone's still working: the deadline is this Wednesday!

[H_H_F_F]

The reveal will be delayed, hopefully not by more than a few hours.

My apologies, folks!

[H_H_F_F]

Further apologies for the delay, friends!

Without further ado - here are your villains!

Please, no posting until I give the all-clear.

[H_H_F_F]

(Dead) God Rest, Ye Marry Gentlemen


Aren Godslayer

CE Star Elf Elven Generalist Wilderness Companion Martial Wizard 1/Entomanthrope Tangle Terror 6/Divine Crusader of Ghaunadaur 2/Seeker of the Misty Isle 2/Arcane Archer 2/Seeker +7

Str 8
Dex 14
Cont 14-2
Int 16-2
Wis 8+2
Cha 16+2
+1 to dex at 4th, the rest go to Charisma

Aren Willowbow, the elf who would one day be known as the Godslayer, was born on Aerenal when Galifar was still powerful. His family venerated the Deathless, like everyone did, but they had a secret. Millenia ago, their ancestors had been touched by a mysterious creature of ancient power, blessing them with the ability to turn into spiders and to drive others mad. While most of his family was ashamed of their heritage, and kept it secret, Aren was proud of it. He dangerously flaunted his powers while learning wizardry, causing him to be banished from the academy. After learning of his disgrace, his family cast him out, which suited Aren just fine. He blamed his exile on the Deathless, and swore his revenge on them. He moved to Sharn, where he gained a reputation for taking impossible jobs and accepting payment in poison.
After some time in Sharn, we believe he was contacted by a cult, specifically one that served the same ancient evil that “blessed” Aren’s family. Ghaunadaur, they called it. Aren took to the cult, and soon rose in its ranks, learning to channel his hatred into powerful magic. At some point after this, an unwise group of elves known as the Seekers of the Misty Isle recruited Aren. The Seekers were looking for an island of elves that was purported to be lost in the war with the giants. Aren didn’t truly believe in the goal, but the Seekers taught him new magic, new ways to kill. His powers grew stronger, and soon his kills involved spells that hampered his opponents and turned them against each other. A year later, his MO underwent its last major shift. Apparently, he learned how to make a poison that can kill immortal creatures. Whether he learned this from the Seekers or the Ghaunadaurians, it is unknown, but regardless, he started to kill deathless after deathless. Permanently. He soon turned to other targets, fiend, celestial and fey. He first came to our attention last year when he assassinated a celestial ally of the Esoteric Order and we were called in. He killed the squadron of Redcloaks went to apprehend him. A magic recording device on one of them, its message shown below, gave us some insight on his brand of insanity, but we still have no idea what his endgame is. However, the moniker he calls himself seems to indicate that his goal is to eventually kill the very gods themselves. While he is obviously insane, he is still incredibly dangerous.

The group of Redcloaks run into the room. Already, several bodies lie with arrows in them, but the culprit is nowhere to be seen from the vantage of the device. Suddenly, an arrow strikes the first soldier, and briefly a figure can be seen clinging to one of the beams on the roof before leaping out of sight. As the soldiers draw weapons, the one who was struck by the arrow swings out with his axe, hitting the next soldier in line, a heavily armored dwarf. The fighting spreads out from there, and before long half of the group is wounded and several are still attacking the others. The Captain prepares to shout out an order, but then she is struck by a blast of webs that pins her to a wall. She cuts herself free, but is immediately struck again. The soldier carrying the device goes to cut her out, but as he does she lashes out at him with a dagger, leaving a bleeding wound. The wounded soldier leaps back and sees her eyes filled with hate. Then, a Lieutenant with an arrow in his upper shoulder runs between them, screaming. The Captain cuts him down. From somewhere behind the carrier, a spell is cast and the captain puts away her weapon, her eyes clear of the madness that briefly consumed them. The bearer of the device casts a spell of his own, illuminating the figure in light. It hisses, and the soldiers that aren’t fighting one another fire at it, hitting several times. The creature fires back at the captain and suddenly the device stops recording.

It turns on an indeterminate amount of time later to show its bearer covered in webs slumped against a wall surrounded by bodies. Crouching on the ceiling is a strange, malformed figure in leather armor and with chitinous plates on his arms.
“I’m Aren, the Godslayer. I can see you’re wearing a recorder. I suppose this is as good a time as any to explain why I’m doing what I’m doing. The priests say that my crusade is unjust: what could the gods have done to me? They haven’t visited Eberron since before I was born. To them I say, your gods, not mine. The deathless hold Aerenal in stasis, caring not whether their subjects live or die and claiming everyone would have justice. Well, I know the justice they purport is false. My mother died of a disease they could have cured with a wave of their hands, and she wasn’t chosen to live on.”
The bearer of the device stirred. “You lie,” he groans. “We would never do such a thing!”
“Ah, so you’re the deathless Deathguard I was hired to kill. I figured this little rant would draw you out if I hadn’t killed you earlier. Don’t worry, I’ll come to you soon enough. Anyway, where was I?”
“Aerenal.” the bearer grunted.
“Ah, yes. So, in Aerenal, the so-called gods are corrupt. Fine, then, the clerics say, why do I hate the other gods? Well, if you think about it, all the gods have their issues. The Sovereign Host hates everyone they call monsters, even if they’re a family of farmers in Droaam. The Dark Six just want to kill everyone, which is understandable but hardly nice. The Silver Flame claims to protect the world from fiends but won’t do what it takes to end the threat forever. I offered them my help but they declined. They’re even worse than the vassals on those they call monsters too. The Blood of Vol don’t really do any harm, but they still just want everyone to die. So I ask you now, what have the gods done for? Why shouldn’t I just kill them and spare us all the trouble? I know you won’t listen, but maybe some others will.”
Then Aren drew back his bow and fired and the recorder went dark.

HD CR Class Base Attack Bonus Fort Save Reflex Save Will Save Skills Feats Class Features
1st 1 Elven Generalist Wilderness Companion Combat Wizard 0 0 0 2 Knowledge Religion 4 (+4), Craft (Poison Making 4) +4, Survival 2 (+2) CC, Concentration 4 (+4) Aereni Focus (Craft Poisonmaking), Point Blank Shot (B) Animal Companion, Generalist Wizardry
2nd - Vermin 1 0 2 0 2 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 5 (+1), Survival 2 1/2 (+1/2) CC, Concentration 4, Hide 1 (+1), Spot 1 (+1) Immunity to Webs
3rd - Vermin 2 1 3 0 2 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 6 (+1), Survival 3 (+1/2) CC, Concentration 4, Hide 2 (+1), Spot 2\ (+1) Poison Master, Weapon Finesse (B) Vermin Immunities
4th - Vermin 3 2 3 1 3 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 7 (+1), Survival 3 1/2 (+1/2) CC, Concentration 4, Hide 3 (+1), Spot 3 (+1) Poison Fort DC 20 2d6 Wis/1d6 Strength
5th - Vermin 4 3 4 1 3 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 8 (+1), Survival 4 (+1/2) CC, Concentration 4, Hide 4 (+1), Spot 4 (+1) Webs
6th - Vermin 5 3 4 1 3 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 9 (+1), Survival 4 1/2 (+1/2) CC, Concentration 4, Hide 5 (+1), Spot 5 (+1) Precise Shot Maddening Webs
7th - Vermin 6 4 5 2 4 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 10 (+1), Survival 5 (+1/2) CC, Concentration 4, Hide 6 (+1), Spot 6 (+1) DR 5/Silver
8th - Vermin 7 5 5 2 4 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 11 (+1), Survival 5 1/2 (+1/2) CC, Concentration 4, Hide 7 (+1), Spot 7 (+1) Alternate Form
9th - Vermin 8 6 6 2 4 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 12 (+1), Survival 6 (+1/2) CC, Concentration 4, Hide 8 (+1), Spot 8 (+1) Weapon Focus (Longbow0 Entopomanthric Command
10th - Vermin 9 6 6 3 5 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 13 (+1), Survival 6 1/2 (+1/2) CC, Concentration 4, Hide 9 (+1), Spot 9 (+1) Entopomanthric Immunities
11th - Vermin 10 7 7 3 5 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 14 (+1), Survival 7 (+1/2) CC, Concentration 4, Hide 10 (+1), Spot 10 (+1) Racial Skill bonuses
12th - Vermin 11 8 7 3 5 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 15 (+1), Survival 7 1/2 (+1/2) CC, Concentration 4, Hide 11 (+1), Spot 11 (+1) Weapon Focus (Warhammer) Curse of Entomanthropy
13th 7 Vermin 12 9 8 4 6 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 16 (+1), Survival 8 (+1/2) CC, Concentration 4, Hide 12 (+1), Spot 12 (+1)
14th 8 Divine Crusader 1 9 10 4 8 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 17 (+1), Survival 8, Concentration 7 (+3), Hide 12, Spot 12 Aura
15th 9 Divine Crusader 2 10 11 4 9 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 18 (+1), Survival 8, Concentration 10 (+3), Hide 12, Spot 12 Ranged Pin
16th 10 Seeker of the Misty Isle 1 10 13 6 9 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 19 (+1), Survival 8, Concentration 10, Hide 14 (+2), Spot 15 (+3), Move Silently 2 (+2) Extra Domain (Travel)
17th 11 Seeker of the Misty Isle 2 11 14 7 9 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 20 (+1), Survival 8, Concentration 10, Hide 16 (+2), Spot 18 (+3), Move Silently 4 (+2)
18th 12 Arcane Archer 1 12 16 9 9 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 21 (+1), Survival 8, Concentration 10, Hide 16, Spot 20 (+2), Move Silently 7 (+3) Craft Wonderous Item Enhance Arrow +1
19th 13 Arcane Archer 2 13 17 10 9 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 22 (+1), Survival 8, Concentration 10, Hide 20 (+4), Spot 20, Move Silently 8 (+1) Imbue Arrow
20th 14 Seeker of the Misty Isle 3 14 17 10 10 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 23 (+1), Survival 8, Concentration 10, Hide 23 (+3), Spot 23 (+3), Move Silently 9 (+1)
21st 15 Seeker of the Misty Isle 4 15 18 11 10 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 24 (+1), Survival 8, Concentration 10, Hide 24 (+1), Spot 24 (+1), Move Silently 14 (+5) Far Shot Swiftfooted
22nd 16 Seeker of the Misty Isle 5 15 18 11 10 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 25 (+1), Survival 8, Concentration 10, Hide 25 (+1), Spot 25 (+1), Move Silently 19 (+5) Corellon's Perceptipon, Surefooted
23rd 17 Seeker of the Misty Isle 6 16 19 12 11 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 26 (+1), Survival 8, Concentration 10, Hide 26 (+1), Spot 26 (+1), Move Silently 24 (+5) Find the Path
24th 18 Seeker of the Misty Isle 7 17 19 12 11 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 27 (+1), Survival 8, Concentration 12 (+2), Hide 27 (+1), Spot 27 (+1), Move Silently 27 (+3) Distant Shot Extra Domain (Magic)
25th 19 Seeker of the Misty Isle 8 18 20 13 11 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 28 (+1), Survival 8, Concentration 16 (+4), Hide 28 (+1), Spot 28 (+1), Move Silently 28 (+1)
26th 20 Seeker of the Misty Isle 9 18 20 13 12 Knowledge Religion 4, Craft (Poison Making) 29 (+1), Survival 8, Concentration 20 (+4), Hide 29 (+1), Spot 29 (+1), Move Silently 29 (+1) Arcane Sight

Level Class Wizard 0th Wizard 1st 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th
1 Wizard 1 3 2 - - - - - - - - -
2-13 Vermin HD 1-12 3 2 - - - - - - - - -
14 Divine Crusader 1 3 2 0 - - - - - - - -
15 Divine Crusader 2 3 2 1 0 - - - - - - -
16 Seeker of the Misty Isle 1 3 2 2 1 0 - - - - - -
17 Seeker of the Misty Isle 2 3 2 2 2 1 0 - - - - -
18 Arcane Archer 1 3 2 2 2 1 0 - - - - -
19 Arcane Archer 2 3 2 2 2 1 0 - - - - -
20 Seeker of the Misty Isle 3 3 2 3 2 2 1 0 - - - -
21 Seeker of the Misty Isle 4 3 2 3 3 2 2 1 0 - - -
22 Seeker of the Misty Isle 5 3 2 3 3 2 2 1 0 - - -
23 Seeker of the Misty Isle 6 3 2 3 3 3 2 2 1 0 - -
24 Seeker of the Misty Isle 7 3 2 3 3 3 3 2 2 1 0 -
25 Seeker of the Misty Isle 8 3 2 3 3 3 3 3 2 2 1 0
26 Seeker of the Misty Isle 9 3 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 2 1

At CR 7 Aren is basically a Tunnel Terror that can also function as a crappy poison archer. His Wilderness Companion gives him access to Con poison, and he can also use his natural Tunnel Terror poison. In addition, Magecraft cast outside of combat+Aereni Focus allows him to make DC 35 poisons by taking 10, enough to craft nearly anything, and he can coat his arrows with them. He usually starts by sniping from long range and then shooting confusing webs as his opponents close to hopefully disrupt them. In melee he has his natural poison and can climb to avoid some attacks, but he’s best at range. On days he’s going into combat, True Strike, Arrow Mind, and Guided Shot are his picks, to make his long range sniping more effective. His hide at this point is + 18 in hybrid form, his preferred form, making sniping difficult but not impossible at long range. His main equipment is leather armor and a bow, preferably elvencraft for when the PCs get close. Aeren’s next few levels go towards learning spells, specifically from the Hatred and Travel domains. Hatred first, from Divine Crusader. The granted power is sweet for a villain, though Doom and Scare are fairly underwhelming. Ranged Pin, which he picks up at this level, has no range limit, potentially allowing him to slow down the PCs even further. At CR 10, he enters Seeker of the Misty Isle and gets access to a better chassis and the travel domain. Longstrider and Locate object are meh, but Fly is quite nice, as is Bestow Curse from Hatred. Travel Domain’s power is great for a lone villain, allowing Aren to escape reliably. Next level (CR 11) brings nothing from Seeker, but Song of Discord is a pretty devastating spell when he can throw it at the party from long range. Aren’s main role is as an assassin, and he can sneak well and penetrate most DR with the right arrow. With his Star Elfiness he can even take on ghostly PRCs at night.

With some spells that are actually useful, Aren ducks out of Seeker to go into another elf PRC, Arcane Archer. The first level is quite lame, only bringing a +1 to ranged damage. However, he also gets Craft Wondrous Item. Allowing him to craft Kiss of the Grave. It’s quite expensive, but when a target is debuffed by several other poisons, they’re likely to fail the save, allowing Aren to theoretically kill anything. Next level of Arcane Archer has Imbue Arrow, allowing him to shoot spells like Song of Discord (not to be confused with Song of Skype), on his bow, vastly increasing their range and theoretically bringing two rider effects, the best poison he can make, such as Black Lotus Extract, as well as a Song of Discord which can incapacitate half a party. Two more levels in Seeker bring Aren up to sixth level spells, letting him use Righteous Might to buff pre battle, making Ranged Pin much stronger, and fire Forbiddances at range to stop people from escaping. Aren can also Teleport, letting him reach nearly anywhere in time. Swiftfooted is handy, allowing him to sneak more quickly. Rapid Shot extends Aren’s max range to 2200 feet, allowing him to hit parties that can’t get to him for several rounds. 5th level of Seeker doesn’t advance spellcasting, but it does bring a Surefooted, basically useless, and Corellon’s Perception, which makes extreme range shots much easier. By now, his hide modifier is a respectable +32.

Aren rounds out his power here with more spells. His caster level is too low to make Blasphemy particularly useful, but Greater Teleport and Find the Path once per day from Seeker are useful, helping him find and get to his quarry or escape from the PCs. CR 18 brings two exciting combos online. Magic Domain lets Aren cast Antimagic Field with Imbue Arrow, enabling the classic combo. In addition, Distant Shot extends his range to infinite, and should even apply to his webs. This means that depending on how mean the DM is feeling, Aeren can open up the battle with a shot from a mile away that pins the wizard to a wall and poisons him while preventing the party from teleporting or even using magic at all. Later on, Antipathy lets him make it hard for the PCs to approach his position, allowing him to keep shooting poisoned arrows at them while they struggle to shoot back. Wail of the Banshee is devastating, despite his fairly low DC, but it can be Imbued into an arrow, allowing him to kill whole armies at once. Arcane Sight comes at the same level and is quite underwhelming in comparison, but it does let him identify casters to antimagic field with great prejudice. Despite all of his power, Aren isn’t particularly tough, so if the PCs can get close, he can likely be defeated or at least forced to flee quickly.

Aren uses four elf specific things: Aereni Focus, Elf Generalist, Arcane Archer and Seeker of the Misty Isle. Aereni Focus helps with his poison making, but isn’t super important to the build. Elven Generalist is also nice for the mandatory level of wizard for Arcane Archer, but not essential. Arcane Archer and Seeker are more valuable. Arcane Archer enables his long range combos and Seeker triples his spell list while providing a good chassis for an assassin type. In terms of long term buffs and effects, killing immortal things should probably have long term effects, and making poisons takes Aren a long time. Entompantrhope makes Aren unplayable and speeds up his qualification for his various prestige classes while providing unique tricks. Finally, he is CE as that lets him be a Divine Crusader of Ghaunadaur and get access to the Hatred domain.

The actual Aren can’t kill gods but can take out just about anything short of them. With an alternate domain selection of Animal, Aren can shapeshift into Sertruous and remove the poison immunity that all gods have. Then, Kiss of the Grave can actually kill them. The variant is pretty much just classic cheese, so I didn’t put it in the main build. Ignore this when judging, as per the rules.

Star Elf: Unapproachable East
Hatred Domain: Player’s Guide to Faerun
Kiss of the Grave: https://web.archive.org/web/20161101074317/http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fey/20030411a
Entomanthropy: Entomanthropy Runs Wild Web Articles
Arcane Archer-DMG
Seeker of the Misty Isle- Complete Divine
Aereni Focus- Player’s Guide to Eberron
Poison Master, Tunnel Terror- Drow of the Underdark
Ranged Pin-Complete Warrior
Distant Shot- Epic Level Handbook
Magecraft- Eberron Campaign Setting
Races of the Wild- Elf Generalist Variant
Arrow Mind, Guided Shot- Spell Compendium

[H_H_F_F]

Souls of the Damned Roasting on an Open Fire

It's a hard entry to make. It started from random remembrance that banshee is an undead elf woman only. I went to the MMII and... No, not in the D&D 3.X. It's true in some other editions, but not this. But during my research I found the Keening Spirit template... It was a fixation. I wanted an entry with it, but... I didn't know what to make. It isn't banshee with her 26 HD, 17 CR and HD advancement, here classes were needed to be and... That was a problem. Yeah, it was easy to make Keening Spirit Drow Cleric 17, but... Keening Spirit would be overshadowed by class levels. I had a concept of Wu Jen with Body outside Body to spam with Keening, but I wasn't happy with such idea. I thought about Shadowcaster, Truenamer, Wilder, Dragonfire Adept - nothing fit. Yes, I at the very beginning found Lurking Terror, but it's only three levels (it could be good with banshee actually). I thought about a bunch of templates - she's a ghost, actually, if PCs kill her it'd not be a problem. I already told It was a fixation. I woke up and fell asleep thinking about this entry for about a full week. Don't like when such happens. I'm very happy that I came up with something interesting enough to suit me after all. And I hope you will like Disappointment, too.

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f317ae2977bbf6dae271f0e/1667276976229-0P4657PBT42B0BI2AHSN/LV-223_banshee_haunted_horror_movie_evil_and_bizarre_ morbid_mos_15788226-f52e-44c4-96e5-938f285d53e1.jpeg
"Disappointment!" - that's how mother always called her. "Tainted blood," - she added sometimes. Mother always told her it's her father's fault. He had dirty human among his ancestors. If she knew, she'd never... But what is done, is done and now she has an unfit daughter. Priestess of Lolth who can't cast spells... Such a disgrace...But even without spells she was a priestess, she channeled the Lolth's power and she was her daughter after all.


CE Evolved Undead Keening Spirit Karsite Drow Blasphemous Incantation Cleric 8/Drow Paragon 1/Defiant 12/Lurking Terror 3
Abilities Initial Drow Karsite Keening Spirit ASI Evolved Undead Total
STR 8 -
DEX 13 2 1 16
CON 10 -2 2 -
INT 14 2 16
WIS 12 12
CHA 15 2 2 4 3 2 28
CR Lvl Class BAB Fort Reflex Will Skills Feats Class Features
2 1st Blasphemous Incantation Cleric 1 0 2 0 2 20: {+4} Bluff: 4; {+4} Hide: 4; {+4} Knowledge (arcana): 4; {+4} Knowledge (religion): 4; {+4} Spellcraft: 4; Magic in the Blood (1), Lightning Reflexes (B) Blasphemous incantation, domains (Trickery, Drow), DR 5/magic, SR (10+lvl, 11+lvl), magic draining attacks, spell healing, spellcasting inability, darkvision 120 ft., light blindness, SLA
3 2nd Drow Paragon 1 0 2 2 2 7: Bluff: 4; {+1} Hide: 5; {+1} Intimidate: 1; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 5; {+1} Knowledge (religion): 5; {+1} Spellcraft: 5; {+2} Spot: 2; Improved spell-like abilities
4 3rd Cleric 2 1 3 2 3 5: {+2} Bluff: 6; {+1} Hide: 6; Intimidate: 1; Knowledge (arcana): 5; {+1} Knowledge (religion): 6; {+1} Spellcraft: 6; Spot: 2; Sudden Ability Focus (3)
5 4th Cleric 3 2 3 3 3 5: {+1} Bluff: 7; {+1} Hide: 7; Intimidate: 1; Knowledge (arcana): 5; {+1} Knowledge (religion): 7; {+1} Knowledge (the planes): 1; {+1} Spellcraft: 7; Spot: 2;
6 5th Cleric 4 3 4 3 4 5: {+1} Bluff: 8; {+1} Hide: 8; Intimidate: 1; Knowledge (arcana): 5; {+1} Knowledge (history): 1; {+1} Knowledge (religion): 8; Knowledge (the planes): 1; {+1} Spellcraft: 8; Spot: 2;
7 6th Cleric 5 3 4 3 4 5: {+1} Bluff: 9; {+1} Hide: 9; Intimidate: 1; Knowledge (arcana): 5; {+1} Knowledge (history): 2; Knowledge (religion): 8; {+1} Knowledge (the planes): 2; {+1} Spellcraft: 9; Spot: 2; Gift Of The Spider Queen (6)
8 7th Cleric 6 4 5 4 5 5: {+1} Bluff: 10; {+1} Hide: 10; Intimidate: 1; Knowledge (arcana): 5; {+1} Knowledge (history): 3; Knowledge (religion): 8; {+1} Knowledge (the planes): 3; {+1} Spellcraft: 10; Spot: 2;
9 8th Cleric 7 5 2 4 2 5: {+1} Bluff: 11; {+1} Hide: 11; Intimidate: 1; Knowledge (arcana): 5; {+1} Knowledge (history): 4; Knowledge (religion): 8; {+1} Knowledge (the planes): 4; {+1} Spellcraft: 11; Spot: 2;
10 9th Cleric 8 6 6 4 6 5: {+1} Bluff: 12; {+1} Hide: 12; Intimidate: 1; Knowledge (arcana): 5; {+1} Knowledge (history): 5; Knowledge (religion): 8; {+1} Knowledge (the planes): 5; {+1} Spellcraft: 12; Spot: 2; Widen Supernatural Ability (9)
12 9th Keening Spirit 6 6 4 6 - Lightning Reflexes Blasphemous incantation, domains, destructive touch, fear aura, keening, manifestation, rejuvenation, SR (13+lvl), turn resistance, undead traits
13 10th Defiant 4 6 8 4 8 5: Bluff: 12; Hide: 12; {+4} Intimidate: 5; Knowledge (arcana): 5; Knowledge (history): 5; Knowledge (religion): 8; Knowledge (the planes): 5; {+1} Spellcraft: 13; Spot: 2; Spell resistance (15+defiant lvl), divine resistance, divine damage immunity, divine cancellation, trades 3 levels of cleric
14 11th Defiant 6 7 9 5 9 5: Bluff: 12; Hide: 12; {+4} Intimidate: 9; Knowledge (arcana): 5; Knowledge (history): 5; Knowledge (religion): 8; Knowledge (the planes): 5; {+1} Spellcraft: 14; Spot: 2; Aligned strike, divine prevention, trades 1 level of cleric
15 12th Defiant 8 8 9 5 9 5: Bluff: 12; Hide: 12; {+4} Intimidate: 13; Knowledge (arcana): 5; Knowledge (history): 5; Knowledge (religion): 8; Knowledge (the planes): 5; {+1} Spellcraft: 15; Spot: 2; Ability Focus (Keening) (12) Nondetection, divine retribution, trades 1 level of cleric
16 13th Defiant 12 9 8 6 8 5: Bluff: 12; Hide: 12; {+4} Intimidate: 17; Knowledge (arcana): 5; Knowledge (history): 5; Knowledge (religion): 8; Knowledge (the planes): 5; {+1} Spellcraft: 16; Spot: 2; Divine interference, divine disavowal, trades 3 levels of cleric
17 14th Lurking Terror 1 9 8 6 10 7: Bluff: 12; {+3} Hide: 15; Intimidate: 17; Knowledge (arcana): 5; Knowledge (history): 5; Knowledge (religion): 8; Knowledge (the planes): 5; Spellcraft: 16; {+4} Spot: 6; Deathly power
18 15th Lurking Terror 2 10 8 6 11 7: Bluff: 12; {+3} Hide: 18; Intimidate: 17; Knowledge (arcana): 5; Knowledge (history): 5; Knowledge (religion): 8; Knowledge (the planes): 5; Spellcraft: 16; {+4} Spot: 10; Reverberation (Keening) (15) Improved darkvision
19 16th Lurking Terror 3 11 9 7 11 7: Bluff: 12; {+2} Hide: 20; Intimidate: 17; Knowledge (arcana): 5; Knowledge (history): 5; Knowledge (religion): 8; Knowledge (the planes): 5; Spellcraft: 16; {+5} Spot: 15; Hide in plain sight
20 16th Evolved Undead 11 9 7 11 - Fast healing, SLA (cloudkill)

Disappointment is just drow cleric without spells for now. She has Blasphemous Incantation for debuff (with Sudden Ability Focus and Widen Supernatural Ability), several ways to utilize her racial SLAs and her Karsite anti-magic abilities, but nothing dangerous enough for her CR. PC maybe meet her somewhere, maybe she was third drow in fifth row in some encounter. It's good for her, she has some ways to extraction.
Disappointment died. Maybe even killed by PC. As a ghost returned to her mother and what did she get? New reproaches: "You couldn’t even die normally! Infamy!" Of course mother didn't resurrect her and no one of Lolth's priestesses will. When she realized that, Disappointment let out a wail, she rejected her previous faith and vowed to destroy all who called themselves "gods." To make this she decided to destroy the substrate on which they parasitize - their worshipers. The first target was to be Lolth.

Disappointment became Keening Spirit and ex-cleric. She acquired her main weapon - the Wail. Yes, it's one per day, but she could apply Sudden Ability Focus and Widen Supernatural Ability to it instead of lost Blasphemous Incantation. Also she has rejuvenation - the best defensive ability in the game if somebody askes me. And fear aura, don't forget fear aura!
Disappointment got a level of Defiant four times. And thanks to unique prestige class mechanics also trade all her levels of ex-cleric for another eight levels of Defiant for twelve levels total. Trading levels in four steps gave Disappointment 432 hp of healing instead of 108 and six times per day +4 enhancement bonus to stats instead of three. And of course full basket of Defiant's goodies: Charisma to saves, another (fourth) source of SR, Nondetection, various anti-divine abilities and immunities.
Improving undead abilities via special prestige class and template. Keening's total DC is 36 now, 38 with enhanced Charisma. Plus Cloudkill should reduce Constitution and decrease Fortitude save. Also Disappointment acquired HipS (total Hide modifier is +31 - Keening Spirit got +8 to Hide, Listen, Spot and Search in PGtF Web Enhancement (https://web.archive.org/web/20161101150215/http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20040313a)) and fast healing - both are good for her.

Yes, Karsite Drow. Let's look at "Quick and Easy Karsites" sidebar (Tome of Magic, p. 84):

If humans aren’t prevalent in your campaign (or if including a subrace of humans doesn’t appeal to you), consider giving karsite abilities to half-elves or half-orcs, or even an elf or orc who has a half-elf or half-orc (and thus a Karsus-blooded human) in his family tree.

Also about CR calculation. Both Drow and Karsite has this wording:

Challenge Rating: Drow with levels in NPC classes have a CR equal to their character level. Drow with levels in PC classes have a CR equal to their character level +1.

Challenge Rating: The CR of a karsite with levels in an NPC class equals his character level. The CR of a karsite with levels in a PC class equals his character level +1.
Okay, I see, Disappointment has levels in PC classes and has CR equal to her character level +1. I got this first time, you haven't need repeat twice.
Jokes aside. My point is it isn't +1 CR from one template and +1 CR from another, it's hard calculation rule CR=Char Level+1 and if I get such rule twice it will not turn into CR=Char Level+2 or into New CR=Old CR+1.


Type Name Book Page
Race Drow Monster Manual 103
Template Karsite Tome of Magic 84
Template Keening Spirit City of The Spider Queen 126
Template Evolved Undead Libris Mortis - The Book of Undead 99
Class Cleric Players Handbook 30
Class Drow Paragon Unearthed Arcana 32
Prestige Class Defiant Planar Handbook 44
Prestige Class Lurking Terror Libris Mortis - The Book of Undead 54
Class variant Blasphemous Incantation Exemplars of Evil 20
Feat Magic in the Blood Player's Guide to Faerûn 40
Feat Lightning Reflexes Players Handbook 97
Feat Sudden Ability Focus Tome of Magic 74
Feat Gift Of The Spider Queen Drow of the Underdark 50
Feat Widen Supernatural Ability Tome of Magic 75
Feat Ability Focus Monster Manual 303
Feat Reverberation Savage Species 39

[H_H_F_F]

GREEN Christmas


Camus Ci'xot, the Greenbinder

https://cdn.openart.ai/stable_diffusion/756c7d7ee6484c4a44700d22cf865f5ed8a6121f_2000x2000 .webp

CE Greenbound Forestlord Half-Elf Ranger 3 / Fighter 2 / Wildrunner 2 / Divine Crusader 4 / Arboreal Guardian 3 / Seeker of the Misty Isle 4

We thought Camus was on our side.

Oh, sure, we denounced him. We went on and on about how this lone radical didn't truly represent the Guardians', how he had to be stopped, how we'd deal with the matter immediately. But we didn't, not really. Because in the end, did we really care about some dead poachers and loggers? Did we care when the forest swallowed yet another hamlet? Of course not: and those of us who did we silenced. Why not drag this out? Let the forest grow a little further, let the new borders settle in, and then join the hunt in full force?

Even when we discovered the pact with the yuan-ti, some of us still urged for neutrality. One swordsman could not destroy all of Manifest, they said. Let him try and fail: and even if he should impossibly succeed... would that not still be in our own interest? A second invasion of serpentfolk would spell disaster for us Spirit Trees: but in the end, their quarrel was with the city, not with us. If somehow, impossibly, Manifest were to be destroyed, would the forest not be safer for it?

Well, Manifest was destroyed, but I can't say the forest is looking much better. The nettle rain devastated all equally: I don't know how many trees perished, just that things have gotten much quieter in the past week. And quieter still: the few trees that survived are being picked off one by one: soon enough, his own will be the only one left.

Which was, of course, always the plan. A dead elf can choose from all the spirit trees to be their afterlife: only the darkest would ever join Camus's voluntarily. But remove that choice...

How many elves inhabit this world? How many die every day? Every week? Every year? How long can Camus keep pruning the Spirit Wood before a new tree matures at last? And oh, what if that slow trickle does not satisfy, and the monstrous elf is sent out to reap lives directly?

I can see the endpoint of that tree's plots now! Standing where Manifest stood, swollen with age and power, home to billions of souls. Its branches reach up into the heavens: its roots down into the deepest bowels of the earth, and upon it live creatures that never once touch the ground. What remains of the Arboreal Guardians worship it as a god. The Green Bond has been corrupted into an oath of fealty, and Camus's deformity is now inflicted deliberately upon its most loyal soldiers. There it stands, enormous, uncontested, eternal...

...The World Tree!

At first, the figure is hard to make out - a green shape against a green background. Humanoid, in the loosest sense: with smooth green skin, black eyes, and stray patches of brown and yellow: no hair, just thin strands of some mossy growth. What you suppose are its arms look more like branches whipping in the wind: there's three in total, each clutching a tarnished blade. It's hard to make sure with how well-camouflaged it is, but as it advances through the underbrush, you'd almost swear it's moving through the brush and branches, rather than pushing them aside.

Array: 15 strength, 12 dexterity, 13 constitution, 8 intelligence, 10 wisdom, 14 charisma.
Greenbound: +6 Strength, +2 Dexterity, +4 Constitution, +4 Charisma
ASIs: Strength, Wisdom, Constitution, Constitution
Final Scores: 22 strength, 14 dexterity, 19 constitution, 8 intelligence, 11 wisdom, 18 charisma.




CR
Class
Base Attack Bonus
Fort Save
Ref Save
Will Save
Skills
Feats
Class Features


1
Elf Ranger 1
+1
+2
+2
+0
Balance +4 (4), Climb +4 (4), Craft (Poisonmaking) +4 (4), Hide +4 (4), Knowledge (Nature) +4 (4), Move Silently +4 (4), Survival +4 (4)
Dragon Tail, TrackB
Elf Favored Enemy (Elves), Track, Wild Empathy


3
Greenbound Template
+1
+2
+2
+0
Balance 4, Climb 4, Craft (Poisonmaking) 4, Hide 4, Knowledge (Nature) 4, Move Silently 4, Survival 4
-
Plant Type, HD increase, +6 natural armor, Slam attack, SLAs, DR, Fast Healing 3, Grapple Bonus, Resistances, Tremorsense, +16 Hide/Move Silently in forests


4
Ranger 2
+2
+3
+3
+0
Balance 4, Climb +1 (5), Craft (Poisonmaking) 4, Hide +1 (5), Knowledge (Nature) +1 (5), Move Silently +1 (5), Survival +1 (5)
-
Combat Style (Two-Weapon)


5
Half-Elf Fighter 1
+3
+5
+3
+0
Balance 4, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) +2 (6), Hide +1 (6), Knowledge (Nature) 5, Move Silently 5, Survival 5
Darkstalker
Blade Focus, Hit-And-Run Fighting Style


6
Fighter 2
+4
+6
+3
+0
Balance 4, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) 6, Hide +1 (7), Knowledge (Nature) 5, Move Silently 5, Survival 5
Point Blank ShotB
Bonus Feat


7
Ranger 3
+5
+6
+3
+1
Balance 4, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) 6, Hide 7, Knowledge (Nature) +2 (7), Move Silently 5, Survival +3 (8)
EnduranceB
Endurance


8
Wildrunner 1
+6
+8
+5
+1
Balance +1 (5), Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) 6, Hide 7, Knowledge (Nature) 7, Knowledge (Religion) +2cc (1), Move Silently 5, Survival 8
Great Fortitude
Fast Movement, Trackless Step


9
Wildrunner 2
+7
+9
+6
+1
Balance 5, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) 6, Hide 7, Knowledge (Nature) +1 (8), Knowledge (Religion) +2cc (2), Move Silently 5, Survival 8
-
Primal Scream, Scent


10
Divine Crusader of Merrshaulk 1
+7
+11
+6
+3
Balance 5, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) 6, Hide 7, Knowledge (Nature) 8, Knowledge (Religion) +1 (3), Move Silently 5, Survival 8
-
Aura, Spells, Plant Domain


11
Divine Crusader 2
+8
+13
+6
+4
Balance 5, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) 6, Hide 7, Knowledge (Nature) 8, Knowledge (Religion) +1 (4), Move Silently 5, Survival 8
Green Bond
-


12
Arboreal Guardian 1
+8
+13
+8
+4
Balance 5, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) 6, Hide +3 (10), Knowledge (Nature) 8, Knowledge (Religion) 4, Move Silently 5, Survival 8
-
Bond's Call, Forestwalk


13
Arboreal Guardian 2
+9
+13
+9
+4
Balance 5, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) 6, Hide +1 (11), Knowledge (Nature) 8, Knowledge (Religion) 4, Move Silently +2 (7), Survival 8
-
Nature's Water, +1 Natural Armor


14
Arboreal Guardian 3
+10
+14
+9
+5
Balance 5, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) 6, Hide +1 (12), Knowledge (Nature) 8, Knowledge (Religion) 4, Move Silently +2 (9), Survival 8
Steadfast Determination
Unhindered Charge, Wood's Speech


15
Seeker of the Misty Isle 1
+10
+16
+11
+5
Balance 5, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) +1 (7), Hide +1 (13), Knowledge (Nature) 8, Knowledge (Religion) 4, Move Silently +3 (12), Survival 8
-
Travel Domain


16
Seeker of the Misty Isle 2
+11
+17
+12
+5
Balance 5, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) 7, Hide +2 (15), Knowledge (Nature) 8, Knowledge (Religion) 4, Move Silently +3 (15), Survival 8
-
-


17
Seeker of the Misty Isle 3
+12
+17
+12
+6
Balance 5, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) 7, Hide +3 (18), Knowledge (Nature) 8, Knowledge (Religion) 4, Move Silently +2 (17), Survival 8
Two-Weapon Rend
-


18
Seeker of the Misty Isle 4
+13
+18
+13
+6
Balance 5, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) +2 (9), Hide +1 (19), Knowledge (Nature) 8, Knowledge (Religion) 4, Move Silently +2 (19), Survival 8
-
Swiftfooted


19
Divine Crusader 3
+14
+18
+14
+6
Balance 5, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) 9, Hide +1 (20), Knowledge (Nature) 8, Knowledge (Religion) 4, Move Silently 19, Survival 8
-
Electricity Resistance 5


20
Divine Crusader 4
+15
+19
+14
+7
Balance 5, Climb 5, Craft (Poisonmaking) 9, Hide +1 (21), Knowledge (Nature) 8, Knowledge (Religion) 4, Move Silently 19, Survival 8
Prehensile Tail, Two-Weapon Rend -> Multiweapon Rend
-




Spells per Day/Spells Known


Level
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
6th
7th
8th


10th
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


11th
2
1
-
-
-
-
-
-


13th
3
2
1
-
-
-
-
-


15th
3
3
2
1
-
-
-
-


16th
4
3
3
2
0
-
-
-


17th
4
4
3
3
1
0
-
-


18th
4
4
4
3
2
1
0
-


19th
4
4
4
4
2
2
1
0


20th
4
4
4
4
3
2
2
1



Typical Spells Prepared:
1: Longstrider (3), Seething Eyebane
2: Barkskin, Locate Object (3)
3: Fly, Plant Growth (3)
4: Command Plants (2), Dimension Door (2)
5: Teleport, Wall of Thorns (2)
6: Find the Path, Repel Wood
7: Animate Plants, Greater Teleport
8: Evil Weather



CR 5
The essence of Camus' build is already present at this point: a stealthy warrior armed with two blades and some plant-related magic. His stealth is through the roof (+22 Hide and Move Silently in forests, more with masterwork tools or items), and he can make three attacks per round at a respectable +7/+6/+3 that all benefit from Hit-And-Run fighting. After ambushing the party and slashing away with poison-tipped blades, Camus can use the Forestlord Elf ability to teleport through trees and put some dense brush between him and his pursuers, then further complicate pursuit with at-will Entangle. After healing back up with fast healing, he can then leisurely track the PCs down with Track and Speak with Plants and do it all over again, while preventing the reverse thanks to continuous Pass Without Trace.

...or he can just drop a CL3 Wall of Thorns on the party, which is absolutely brutal at this level. It immediately deals up to 15 damage, then locks everyone in place for half an hour unless they succeed on a DC 25 strength check or can teleport out. At that point, he can just leisurely throw daggers at them while negating ranged counterattacks with DR 10/magic and slashing.

The elf ranger substitution level is taken because its Favored Enemy variant boosts more useful skills, it gives Balance, and the class grants more skill points overall. The particular favored enemy doesn't really matter: I selected elves for story reasons and because elves are most likely to have heavily invested Spot. The reduced HD gets increased back to d8 with Greenbound. Half-Elf Fighter is taken because it's strictly better than simply taking weapon focus (longsword) and because it grants us two more skill points.

CR 10
Camus doesn't change too much in those five levels. Endurance and Fast Movement make him better at evading pursuit, Wildrunner adds +6 dexterity and +2 strength that thus translates to +4 damage on each of his five attacks per round (it also added a bite), Scent makes him even harder to sneak up on, and lastly Divine Crusader lets us rebuke some low-level plant minions. Entangle is the only first-level spell on the list but also redundant with Greenbound, so just fill the slot with BoVD's Seething Eyebane: by holding the charge he can deliver it via natural weapon, and if he's casting the spell before combat anyway he might as well quaff some potions of lesser restoration to offset the constitution damage. If you're making Camus' spirit tree a classed NPC in its own right, adding some cleric or druid wouldn't be a poor idea for that reason.

Camus also has an extra use of Treewalk, so you can use one to enter and one to leave combat, or spread them out over multiple ambushes.

CR 15
Alright, here we go.

Arboreal Guardian allows Camus to 'pass unhindered through normal inanimate living plants and trees while taking an action'. Plant growth allows us to create huge zones of normal inanimate living plants and trees (seriously, read that spell). In an area where most people move at a speed of 5 ft., Camus moves at 60 (30 base, +10 wildrunner, +10 longstrider, +10 arboreal guardian). Sure, 10 ft. of that is conditional on being in the Spirit Wood - but who says you can't expand the Spirit Wood? Camus is strong enough to replant the brush and trees that plant growth needs to work, or his spirit tree can Animate some trees to walk over: and once those are in place, the entire area can be turned into overgrown jungle in one go.

This has several tactical advantages. Treewalk becomes a sort of pseudo-pounce: creatures need multiple rounds to move past even medium-sized trees, so Camus can zip over and be assured that he can emerge in position for a full attack at the start of his next turn. It all but guarantees he'll be able to 5 ft-step into cover any time. It lets him increase the area where his situational bonuses apply, thus making us more proactive than most environmental villains. And lastly, it lets him flee combat much more easily, and even foil attempts to pursue with teleportation (plant some trees so they completely enclose a narrow space, then run through the trees so you fully occupy this refuge; casters cannot teleport to your location if there's no free space to teleport into).

(Also, we can move through and into our own Wall of Thorns, catapulting it back to relevancy as a sort of on-demand bunker creator)

On the spellcasting front, the travel domain grants Camus some teleportation of his own, Locate Object to pick up trails more easily, and several corrupt spells with slow but nasty effects (Touch of Juiblex, Rotting Curse of Urfesta) that go great with hit-and-run strategies.

Lastly, Steadfast Determination synergizes with his weak Will and stellar Fortitude both.

CR 20
With Prehensile Tail and Two-/Multi-weapon Rend, Camus' tail attack is upgraded into something a bit more threatening, with an additional damage roll if any two of his weapons hit. A tail-blade can also deliver poison, unlike the tail itself. Swiftfooted makes us even more mobile by eliminating the movement penalties for Balance, Climb, Hide, Move Silently, and tracking - all skills we've invested ranks in.

Casting advances to 8th-level spells. Find the Path is a tracker's dream, and Greater Teleport means Camus can start growing forests wherever in the world he wants (he'll be slightly slower than in the Spirit Wood, but it's no huge loss). On the Plant side, Wall of Thorns gives us extra uses of a strategy that's been serving us well so far, Animate Plants means we no longer need the spirit tree to move trees around, while Repel Wood is sure to screw over most PCs in some way (the line shape perfectly covers whatever narrow path they managed to hack through the bush). Most importantly, the build obtains the ability to cast Evil Weather.

Using the Plague of Nettles option, a huge area becomes covered with vegetation, which Plant Growth can subsequently turn into a jungle. The spell explicitly also comes with built-in plant monsters, which Command Plants, Control Plants, and the rebuke ability can bring under Camus's sway. PCs will be at a huge disadvantage if they brave the jungle to find Camus - but they'll have to, because he's hardly got any reason to come out anymore.

The main constraint at this point is the spell's corruption cost: 19 is bigger than even the max result on 3d6, but several of the worse rolls do leave Camus incredibly frail for a few days. He would thus do well to keep some well-stocked hidey-holes to sleep off the damage, which should generally be doable within a week (which is, incidentally, the time it takes for plant monsters to show up in the newly forested region). Of course, something like a Rod of Bodily Restoration is only 3100 GP and can heal 12 points of constitution damage a day...

So that's it: a hit-and-run fighter who can ambush the party over and over and over again while being all but impossible to chase down, who additionally possesses the capability to spread his favored terrain over large swatches of land.

Out of interest, how quickly can Camus create forest?

At most, Camus can cast 16 Plant Growths per day. The optimal use of plant growth is the 150 ft. radius semicircle (35300 square feet), so let's assume we go for that. That's about 13 acres of land forested each day: concerning on a local level, and plenty to justify a mid-level adventure, but not enough to worry anyone

Of course, Evil Weather quite shakes up this calculation. It's 9 mile radius comes down to 254 square miles, or 162860 acres. Assuming an average of 6 days between castings (enough to heal 12 constitution damage with full bed rest, far more than the average of 10.5), that's 42 square miles per day: you could cover an area four time the size of Yellowstone National Park in a year.

Greenbound - Lost Empires of Faerun
Forestlord Half-Elf - Dragon Magic
Elf Ranger - Races of the Wild
Half-Elf Fighter - Races of Destiny
Wildrunner - Races of the Wild
Divine Crusader + Seeker of the Misty Isle - Complete Divine
Arboreal Guardian - Ghostwalk
Dragon Tail - Races of the Dragon
Darkstalker - Lords of Madness
Green Bond - Ghostwalk
Two-Weapon Rend + Steadfast Determination - PHBII
Multiweapon Rend - ELH
Prehensile Tail - Serpent Kingdoms
Merrshaulk - Complete Divine
Corrupt Spells - BoVD

[H_H_F_F]

O (WHY), Christmas Tree?!

“Just pick the bitch up.” The deep voice was sounded muffled as its owner tried to stem the blood flowing from his ravaged left cheek. “You know where to take her.” His croonies briefly looked in each others eyes as if to say. “He is definitely getting worse. She’s almost a child.” Still, it was better to just do what the lordling said or they would be the ones experiencing his wrath.

It could sense the feeders approaching and an anticipatory shudder ran through its leaves. A sense of disappointment spiked as the elves laid the body down out of its reach. They had learned quickly as the creeper had consumed one of them along with the gift. As its servants lumbered forward, the feeders fled from the scene.

They should have waited.

As its tendrils pierced the Elf maiden’s skull, they met something unexpected, something hungry. For vengeance. Both Robert and Irae – as she was now known – felt a pull towards each other and as the elf girl’s body was absorbed into the creeper, they merged until there remained only one.

Several days later Robert-Irae tentatively flexed their vines, a smile creeping over their face, whose beauty was accentuated by yellow and purple blossoms. They had realised it was impossible for them to enter Sildëyuir unnoticed and exact their vengeance themselves. The Elven High mages protected it like dwarves their beard. It would take a God’s wrath to break through their defenses. “Or something more powerful?” A few years ago a wandering bard had told the epic of the battle between Corellon and Gruumsh and the abomination born of their blood. Ithyak-Ortheel, the Elf-eater. ‘Sounds promising.’ Robert-Irae smiled wickedly.

And the Lordling never went outside without adequate protection and escape options. Irae had spent enough time in his household to know that before she had caught his attention and things went downhill after that. And everyone knew and looked the other way. “They have to pay. They all have to pay.” They muttered.

Help was needed, the type of help the plant zombies could not offer: intelligent one. They needed eyes and ears. And hands and rumours. They would bring his entire world tumbling down around the ****ing pervert. And then they would feast on his brain.

“Or we can do both.”

A melodious sussurus meandered through the silent woods. “We’ve got things to do. Places to be. Suffering to bring to the little Lordling.”
A young green wyrmling entered the clearing attracted by the strange sound. Robert-Irae bared their fangs. “But first we eat.”

CE Symbiotic {(dark wood element spellwarped yellow musk creeper-totemist 9-souleater 1)-(star elf bard 7- binder 1- lyric thaumaturge 2- sublime chord 4 – spellsinger 5)}




STR
DEX
CON
INT
WIS
CHA


Yellow musk creeper
10
16
21
-
10
9


Spellwarped
+4
+2
+4
+4




Total
14
18
25
4
10
9



Huge plant totemist 9-souleater 1
HD: 6d8
Initiative: +4
Speed: 15 ft (5 base +10 from dark template)
AC: (-2 size, + 4 DEX, +10 natural (6 from yellow musk, 2 from spellwarped, 2 from wood element)
Base attack//grapple: 11/2//21
Attack: Vine whip + 13 melee or musk puff +13 ranged touch
Full attack: 6 vine whip +13 melee or musk puff +13 ranged touch
Damage: vine whip 1d6+2+1 level drain
Space/reach: 15ft/15ft
Special attacks: Consume intelligence, musk puff (Fort DC 20), Energy drain 1, Spikes, meldshaping (5 active soulmelds, 2 bound, 6 essentia)

Special qualities: Blindsight 30ft, plant traits, elemental traits, regeneration 5, SR 17, spell absorption, superior low light vision, darkvision, hide in plain sight, resist cold 10, woodsense, wild empathy, illiteracy, totem chakra bind (+1 capacity, +1 meldshaper level), totem protection, chakra binds (crown, feet, hands, shoulders, arms, brow), rebind totem soulmeld 1/d

Saves: Fort +20, Ref +14, Will +7

Abilities: STR 14, DEX 18, CON 25, INT 4, WIS 10, CHA 9
Skills: 16 total (6 for HD, 10 for levels): 4 to hide, MS, spot and listen, +2 listen and spot (alertness), +8 hide, + 6 Move silently (dark)
Feats: weapon finesse, alertness, weapon focus vine whip
CR: 17 (4 yellow musk creeper + 1 dark + 1 wood element + 1 spellwarped + 10 class levels)
Language: Sylvan






STR
DEX
CON
INT
WIS
CHA


Base
8
10
12
14
13
15


Racial


-2


+2


Level



+1

+3


Total
8
10
10
15
13
20





CR
Class
Base Attack Bonus
Fort Save
Ref Save
Will Save
Skills
Feats
Class Features


1
Bard 1
+0
+0
+2
+2
32: conc 4, diplomacy 4, K. arcana 4, K. dung 1, listen 4, perform song 4, perform handharp 4, profession astrologer 4, SC 4, UMD 1
Mother cyst
Bardic music, Bardic knowledge, lore song, countersong, fascinate, Inspire courage, inspire awe


2
Binder 1
+0
+0
+4
+4
4: conc 4, diplomacy 4, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 4, K. dung 1, listen 4, perform song 4, perform handharp 2, profession astrologer 4, SC 4, UMD 1
/
Soul binding 1 vestige


3
Bard 2
+1
+0
+5
+5
8: conc 5, diplomacy 5, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 5, K. dung 1, listen 5, perform song 5, perform handharp 3, profession astrologer 5, SC 5, UMD 1
Melodic casting
/


4
Bard 3
+2
+1
+5
+5
8: conc 6, diplomacy 6, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 6, K. dung 1, listen 6, perform song 6, perform handharp 4, profession astrologer 6, SC 6, UMD 1
Soothe the beast
Inspire competence: Music of creation


5
Bard 4
+3
+1
+6
+6
8: conc 7, diplomacy 7, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 7, K. dung 1, listen 7, perform song 7, perform handharp 6, profession astrologer 6, SC 7, UMD 1
/
/


6
Bard 5
+3
+1
+6
+6
8: conc 8, diplomacy 8, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 8, K. dung 1, listen 8, perform song 8, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 8, UMD 1
Skill focus perform
/


7
Bard 6
+4
+2
+7
+7
8: conc 9, diplomacy 9, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 9, K. dung 1, K. religion 1, listen 9, perform song 9, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 9, Spot 1, UMD 1
/
Suggestion


8
Bard 7
+5
+2
+7
+7
8: conc 9, decipher script 1, diplomacy 9, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 11, K. dung 1, K. history 1, K. religion 1, listen 11, perform song 11, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 9, Spot 1, UMD 1
/
/


9
Lyric thaumaturge 1
+5
+2
+9
+9
6: conc 9, decipher script 1, diplomacy 10, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 13, K. dung 1, K. history 1, K. religion 1, listen 13, perform song 12, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 9, Spot 1, UMD 1
Improved counterspell
Bardic music, bonus spell slot


10
Lyric thaumaturge 2
+6
+2
+10
+10
6: conc 9, decipher script 1, diplomacy 11, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 13, K. dung 1, K. history 1, K. local 1, k. nature 1, K. religion 1, K. the planes 2, listen 13, perform song 13, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 10, Sense motive 1, Spot 1, UMD 1
Captivating melody
/


11
Sublime Chord 1
+6
+2
+10
+12
6: conc 10, decipher script 1, diplomacy 12, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 13, K. dung 1, K. history 1, K. local 1, k. nature 1, K. religion 1, K. the planes 4, listen 13, perform song 14, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 10, Search 1, Sense motive 1, Spot 1, UMD 1
/
Bardic music, bardic knowledge


12
Sublime chord 2
+7
+2
+10
+13
6: conc 10, decipher script 1, diplomacy 13, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 13, K. dung 1, K. history 1, K. local 1, k. nature 1, K. religion 1, K. the planes 6, listen 13, perform song 16, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 10, Search 1, Sense motive 1, speak language 1, Spot 1, UMD 1
Corrupt arcana
Song of arcane power


13
Sublime Chord 3
+7
+3
+11
+13
6: conc 10, decipher script 1, diplomacy 14, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 13, K. dung 1, K. history 2, K. local 1, k. nature 1, K. religion 1, K. the planes 7, listen 13, perform song 17, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 10, Search 2, Sense motive 1, speak language 2, Spot 1, UMD 1
/
/


14
Sublime chord 4
+8
+3
+11
+14
6: conc 12, decipher script 1, diplomacy 15, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 13, K. dung 1, K. history 2, K. local 1, k. nature 1, K. religion 1, K. the planes 7, listen 13, perform song 18, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 12, Search 2, Sense motive 1, speak language 2, Spot 1, UMD 1
/
/


15
Spellsinger 1
+8
+3
+13
+16
6: conc 14, decipher script 1, diplomacy 16, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 13, K. dung 1, K. history 2, K. local 1, k. nature 1, K. religion 1, K. the planes 7, listen 13, perform song 19, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 14, Search 2, Sense motive 1, speak language 2, Spot 1, UMD 1
Dark speech
Bardic music, compelling song, spellsong


16
Spellsinger 2
+9
+3
+14
+17
6: conc 15, decipher script 1, diplomacy 16, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 13, K. dung 1, K. history 2, K. local 1, k. nature 1, K. religion 1, K. the planes 7, listen 13, perform song 20, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 15, Search 2, Sense motive 1, speak language 2, Spot 4, UMD 1
/
Inspire greatness Haunting melody


17
Spellsinger 3
+10
+4
+14
+17
6: conc 15, decipher script 1, diplomacy 16, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 13, K. dung 1, K. history 2, K. local 1, k. nature 1, K. religion 1, K. the planes 7, listen 13, perform song 21, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 20, Search 2, Sense motive 1, speak language 2, Spot 4, UMD 1
/
Improved countersong


18
Spellsinger 4
+11
+4
+15
+18
6: conc 15, decipher script 1, diplomacy 19, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 13, K. dung 1, K. history 2, K. local 1, k. nature 1, K. religion 1, K. the planes 7, listen 13, perform song 22, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 22, Search 2, Sense motive 1, speak language 2, Spot 4, UMD 1
Dark whispers
/


19
Spellsinger 5
+11
+4
+15
+18
6: conc 15, decipher script 1, diplomacy 23, Intimidate 4, K. arcana 13, K. dung 1, K. history 2, K. local 1, k. nature 1, K. religion 1, K. the planes 7, listen 13, perform song 23, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 23, Search 2, Sense motive 1, speak language 2, Spot 4, UMD 1
/
Amplified music, song of freedom



Spells per Day/Spells Known
Spells per Day/Spells Known


Level
0lvl
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
6th
7th
8th
9th


1st
0
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


2nd
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


3rd
3
0
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


4th
3
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


5th
3
2
0
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


6th
3
3
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


7th
3
3
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-


8th
3
3
2
0
-
-
-
-
-
-


9th
3
3+1
3+1
1
-
-
-
-
-
-


10th
3
3+1
3+1
2
-
-
-
-
-
-


11th
3
3+1
3+1
2
2
1
-
-
-
-


12th
3
3+1
3+1
2
2
2
-
-
-
-


13th
3
3+1
3+1
2
3
2
1
-
-
-


14th
3
3+1
3+1
2
3
3
2
-
-
-


15th
3
3+1
3+1
2
3
3
2
1
-
-


16th
3
3+1
3+1
2
4
3
3
2
-
-


17th
3
3+1
3+1
2
4
4
3
2
1
-


18th
3
3+1
3+1
2
4
4
3
3
2
-


19th
3
3+1
3+1
2
4
4
4
3
2
1



Level 0 (6): detect magic, read magic, prestidigitation, ghost sounds, mage hand, dancing lights
Level 1 (4): expeditious retreat, silent image, grease, undetectable alignment, necrotic awareness
Level 2 (4): glitterdust, suggestion, mesmerizing glare, miser’s envy, necrotic cyst, necrotic scrying, Lahm's finger darts
Level 3 (3): scrying, sculpt sound, cure serious wounds, necrotic bloat, absorb mind, touch of juiblex
Level 4 (4): shadow conjuration, rainbow pattern, orb of force, modify memory, necrotic domination
Level 5 (4): greater dispel magic, shadow evocation, mass suggestion, investiture of the orthon, necrotic burst
Level 6 (4): greater bestow curse, geas/quest, otto’s irresistible dance, greater scrying, necrotic eruption
Level 7 (3): greater shadow conjuration, banishment, greater teleport, necrotic tumor, death by thorns
Level 8 (2): greater shadow evocation, conjure midnight construct, necrotic empowerment
Level 9 (1): Shades, necrotic termination



Huge chaotic evil aberration
HD: 6d8 (aberration/plant) + 9d8 (totemist) +1d8 (souleater)+9d6 (sublime chord + spellsinger)+ 19x7 (CON)
Speed: land 15ft
Initiative +4
AC: 22 (-2 size, +4 DEX, +10 NA), Touch 12, FF 18
BAB 11/2
Grapple 21 (+2 STR + 8 Size)
Saves: 20/19/18
Abilities: STR 14 DEX 18 CON 25 INT 15 WIS 13 CHA 20
Face/reach 15 ft
Feats: alertness, weapon finesse, weapon focus (vine whip), mother cyst, melodic casting, soothe the beast, skill focus (perform), improved counterspell, captivating melody, corrupt arcana, dark speech, dark whispers
Special qualities: blindsight 30, plant traits, regeneration 5, spell resistance 17, spell absorption, hide in plain sight, resist cold 10, low light vision, superior low light vision, darkvision, woodsense, elemental traits, bardic music 16/d, bind vestige (1), song of arcane power, song of freedom, countersong (55 feet), song of freedom, fascinate (165 feet), suggestion, lore song, bardic knowledge, compelling song, spellsong, improved countersong, otherworldly touch, immune to magic sleep effects
Skills: conc 15, decipher script 1, diplomacy 23, Hide 4 (+8), Intimidate 4, K. arcana 13, K. dung 1, K. history 2, K. local 1, k. nature 1, K. religion 1, K. the planes 7, listen 13 (+4 from Robert), Move silently 4 (+6), perform song 23, perform handharp 8, profession astrologer 6, SC 23, Search 2, Sense motive 1, speak language 2, Spot 4 (+4 from Robert), UMD 1
Language: sylvan, common, elven, abyssal, draconic, celestial
Attack: Vine whip + 13 melee or musk puff +13 ranged touch
Full attack: 6 vine whip +13 melee or musk puff +13 ranged touch
Damage: vine whip 1d6+2+1 level drain
Special attacks: Consume intelligence, musk puff (Fort DC 20), Energy drain 1, Spikes, meldshaping (5 active soulmelds, 2 bound, 6 essentia), spellcasting (including mother cyst line and corrupt spells), inspire awe, haunting melody, dark speech, dark whispers

So we've got a plant that takes a very active role in getting lunch on one side and an star elf bard bent on vengeance on the other. To combine the two the symbiotic template is used with the plant as the host and the elven maiden as a guest. But to get an EL 20 with this template we have to treat them as a mixed pair with CR 19 and CR 17.
It's easy to get this for on the elven side: just level up. Yet the yellow musk creeper sports a piddly CR 4. I could template it through the roof or...
give it class levels. But a mindless creature can't gain class levels. A suitable template that grants intelligence is spellwarped. Let's assume some ancient Netherese wizard had a penchant for advanced botany. So now Robert is an intelligent aberration with a bit of a dark side. Intelligence also means he can take feats for his HD.
Now we have the problem that aberrations can't take the symbiotic template. They just can't seem to find anyone that wants this type of relationship with something from the other side. This means Robert needs to become a plant again.
The wood element template states that if the campaign has no Elemental plane of Wood the creature type changes to plant. Guess what: no elemental plane of Wood in Faerunian cosmology.
As for the class levels Robert isn't the most studious type so wizard or archivist is out. He even hasn't read a book. What he does have are tons of immunities, several natural attacks and soulstuff in abundance. The most logical choice is totemist to enhance the natural attacks and his mobility – even granting etherealness while moving with phase cloak. Souleater seems appropriate, snatching portions of his victim's soul making them more vulnerable to a puff or two before lunching on their brains and creating minions/pod people on the side.
And then we have Irae. This is off course not her maiden name, but she is a bit miffed at the treatment she had received from the Lordling. So an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a lost future for everything that the lordling holds dear, including his home, Sildëyuir.
Irae was born with a mother cyst and presumably that interacted with Robert’s spellwarping to allow the symbiosis. It took both some time to get over the initial shock, even leading Irae to succumb to the influence of some grinning dog, but soon they saw the mutual benefits. We’ve already discussed Robert’s side, but let’s see what Irae brings to the table.
She sings like a nightingale. Irae has 16 uses of bardic music as a lvl 19 bard. Due to amplified song the range is very much increased. For fascinate it even goes up to 165 feet. With an increased DC due to compelling song. Combine this with soothe the beast and they can easily go for a midnight snack. Her music can also be used to debuff with inspire awe and haunting melody.
Irae also has access to level 9 spells, well spell to be precise. With a CL of 19 she can achieve a lot. Spells are chosen for multifunctionality (the shadow line), debuffing, enchanting. Conjure greater midnight construct is chosen because it feels in line with the story: enough soul stuff lying around to build a big punching bag.
The mother cyst comes in handy here as a multipurpose tool: scrying, walking plant zombie bombs, dominating star elves,…
Yet they realized that this was not enough to exterminate an extraplanar bubble and its entire population. They needed bigger guns. Enter Ithyak-Ortheel, the Elf-eater, born from the blood of Gruumsh and Corellon Larethian. Sure, only the power of a deity had summoned the bad boy from the Abyssal muck it dwelt in up until now, but there had to be another way.
In her search for a ritual to summon Ithyak, Robert and Irae stumbled over some decrepit tomes that opened a whole new world of pain: corrupt spells. Lahm’s finger darts refluffed as thorns being shot, touch of Juiblex could be an injected poison that liquifies it’s victim. Absorb mind fits with the consume intelligence-addiction from Robert. And death by thorns is reserved for the Lordling.
The grinning puppy helps dealing with the stat-damage from these spells and the dark speech/whispers Irae learned at the same time. I know the possibility of a hivemind looms around the corner, but we are mostly interested in the dread part to debuff enemies.
So Irae would sing, luring (fascinate + suggestion) their prey closer. Robert’s tentacles would obscure her beautiful face. The chivalrous hero wannabe would push them aside. If he is not wearing any gloves, that’s at least one negative level right there, lowering his saves. Diplomacy can make the prey more friendly (remember they don’t know they are prey). It can go several ways after that.
- The classic yellow musk zombie.
- The yellow musk zombie with a necrotic cyst as advanced radar system. (necrotic scrying)
- The yellow musk zombie with a necrotic cyst as kamikaze bomb (necrotic eruption)
- The prey with the above options. Off course modify memory is used to erase any trace of their encounter with Irae.
- The prey with a necrotic tumor completely loyal to Robert-Irae. They can be used to infiltrate Sildëyuir or they can help in the ritual to summon the Elf-eater.


yellow musk creeper: Fiend Folio p190
spellwarped template MM III p 162
Woord element Manual of the Planes p196
Dark template Tome of Magic p161
Totemist Magic of Incarnum p29
Soul Eater: Book of Vile Deeds p 66
Bard: PHB p26
Star Elf Unapproachable East p9
Inspire awe Dragon magic p13
Lore song, Dungeonscape p8
Binder, Tome of magic p9
Mother Cyst: libris mortis p 28
Sublime Chord, Complete Arcane p60
Corrupt arcana, Heroes of Horror p 120
Soothe the Beast, ECS p34
Spellsinger, Races of Faerun p185
Dark Speech, Book of Vile Deeds P32 and 48
Dark Whispers, Elder Evils p 12
Haunting melody, ECS p54
Symbiotic creature, Savage species p 131

[H_H_F_F]

There's no carol about worms? Wonder why.


Cestoda Cironess, the Worm that Waits

https://i.postimg.cc/Vkz7CdGr/OIG.jpg

Chaotic Evil Symbiotic Female Half-Drow Dread Necromancer 1 / Cleric 3 / Drow Paragon 1 / Seeker of the Misty Isle 7 / Yathrinshee 5 + Century Worm

As far as I've can remember (though I admit my memory is less reliable than it used to be), I've seen things that nobody else can.

Threads; thin, translucent things, strung between people and places and things, stretched with no regard for the barriers in the way. Some were short, and connected to things quite close by: others stretched off into infinity. Thick threads connecting me to my parents: thinner ones to my family and friends. The dense bundle that attached to my father, obscuring his whole body at times. The small handful that clung to old widow Lusa down the street. And the dozens, if not hundreds, that hung from my mother's tall form, the far majority pointing down, into the earth.

That's how I learned not to speak of my visions: the first and only time I saw her anger was I told her how she appeared to me. Later, I would understand that few refuge drow take kindly to being reminded of their roots, least of all those already facing heavy scrutiny. Her urging me to never speak of those things to another soul made perfect sense.

Of course, it might've had something to do with her being a double agent.

Her reason for fleeing the underdark was true enough: she did abandon Lolth's worship, and the priesthood had tried to kill her. But there are many gods other than Lolth, and many alternatives that are not a hair better. Lolth, at least, ends her torments at the moment of death.

Before I'd even come of age, I was being mentored in necromantic arts, taught to snuff out the life of rats and songbirds, to sing the Revenancer's threnody: all in deepest secret, of course. To say I had moral qualms would be giving my past self too much credit, but I certainly had practical ones - I walked a knife's edge between my mother's painful admonitions and the fear of outsiders discovering my practice.

So I ran. The Seekers of the Misty Isle are, all things considered, an accepting bunch: with how few elves are willing to throw their lives away in the first place, there's just not much of a point in having a strict selection procedure. We sailed into the sunset ocean, finding lifeless rock after lifeless rock: a boring, pointless life, but a safe one, at last. I don't remember caring about my new comrades, but I must have: each day I watched the threads between us grew stronger.

A storm put an end to all that. Our boat was driven far west and dashed on the cliffs: as I desperately crawled onto the beach, I watched my allies' threads snap one by one. I was alone again: alone in an uncharted, dangerous land, an island crawling with monstrous vermin. I lived like a mouse, darting in and out of my hiding spots to snatch up fruits and shellfish.

And with loneliness, I realized I still was not free of my fears. In my nightmares, my mother would appear, cruelly mock my escape attempt, drag me off to some unimaginable torture. Every twitch of her thread put me on edge, in every echo I heard the wails of her priesthood.

Perhaps when I finally dared delve into the jungle, it was death I sought. Instead, I came upon a great obelisk, standing tall amidst a lake of boiling tar. I had little time to appraise it before it did the same to me: a great presence reaching out, paralyzing my body, taking in my thoughts. It shattered my mind, sifted through the pieces, and took its time putting them back together.

Then, as I lay heaving in the dirt, the obelisk towering over me, the earth split and I plummeted into a wet, cavernous mouth.

NOTE: the following build table describes Cestoda while detached from her host. A CR progression is provided to aid in her use as a standalone creature. Cirona worships Kiaransalee and additionally serves Kyuss (no contradiction exists here - one of Kyuss's sample servants similarly is cleric of a death god).

Ability scores: 8 strength, 10 dexterity, 12 constitution, 14 intelligence, 13 wisdom, 15 charisma
ASIs: +1 wisdom at level 4, 8, 12, and 16.



CR
Class
Base Attack Bonus
Fort Save
Ref Save
Will Save
Skills
Feats
Class Features


1
Dread Necromancer 1
+0
+0
+0
+2
Concentration +4 (4), Intimidate +4 (4), Knowledge (Arcana) +4 (4), Knowledge (Religion) +4 (4)
Precocious Apprentice (Spectral Hand)
Charnel Touch, Rebuke Undead


2
Cloistered Cleric of Kiaransalee 1
+0
+2
+0
+4
Concentration +1 (5), Intimidate 4, Knowledge (Arcana) +1 (5), Knowledge (the Planes) +5 (5), Knowledge (Religion) +1 (5),
Evil DevotionB, Lightning ReflexesB
Domains (Drow, Evil, Knowledge), Lore, Master of Spiders


3
Cloistered Cleric of Kiaransalee 2
+1
+3
+0
+5
Concentration +1 (6), Intimidate 4, Knowledge (Arcana) +1 (6), Knowledge (the Planes) +1 (6), Knowledge (Religion) +1 (6), Survival +4cc (2)
Spell Focus (Necromancy)
-


4
Cloistered Cleric of Kiaransalee 3
+1
+3
+1
+5
Concentration +1 (7), Intimidate 4, Knowledge (Arcana) +1 (7), Knowledge (the Planes) +1 (7), Knowledge (Religion) +1 (7), Survival +2cc (3), Perform (Sing) +2cc (1)
-
-


5
Drow Paragon 1
+1
+3
+3
+5
Concentration 7, Intimidate +1 (5), Knowledge (Arcana) 7, Knowledge (the Planes) 7, Knowledge (Religion) 7, Survival +5 (8), Perform (Sing) 1
-
Improved Spell-Like Abilities


6
Seeker of the Misty Isle 1
+1
+5
+5
+5
Concentration +2 (9), Intimidate 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 7, Knowledge (the Planes) 7, Knowledge (Religion) 7, Spellcraft +2 (2), Survival 8, Perform (Sing) +4cc (3)
Verminfriend
Travel Domain


7
Yathrinshee 1
+1
+5
+5
+7
Concentration +1 (10), Intimidate 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 7, Knowledge (the Planes) 7, Knowledge (Religion) 7, Spellcraft +3 (5), Survival 8, Perform (Sing) 3
-
Necromancer, Rebuke Undead


8
Yathrinshee 2
+2
+5
+5
+8
Concentration +1 (11), Intimidate 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 7, Knowledge (the Planes) 7, Knowledge (Religion) 7, Spellcraft +3 (8), Survival 8, Perform (Sing) 3
-
Threnody


9
Yathrinshee 3
+2
+6
+6
+8
Concentration +1 (12), Intimidate 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 7, Knowledge (the Planes) 7, Knowledge (Religion) 7, Spellcraft +3 (11), Survival 8, Perform (Sing) 3
Master of Undeath
-


10
Yathrinshee 4
+3
+6
+6
+9
Concentration +1 (13), Intimidate 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 7, Knowledge (the Planes) 7, Knowledge (Religion) 7, Spellcraft +2 (13), Search +1 (1), Survival 8, Perform (Sing) 3
-
Death Ward


11
Yathrinshee 5
+3
+6
+6
+9
Concentration +1 (14), Intimidate 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 7, Knowledge (the Planes) 7, Knowledge (Religion) 7, Spellcraft +1 (14), Search +2 (3), Survival 8, Perform (Sing) 3
-
Curse of the Revenancer


12
Seeker of the Misty Isle 2
+4
+7
+7
+9
Concentration +1 (15), Intimidate 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 7, Knowledge (the Planes) 7, Knowledge (Religion) 7, Listen +3 (3), Spellcraft +1 (15), Search 3, Spot +3 (3), Survival 8, Perform (Sing) 3
Practiced Spellcaster (Cleric)
-


13
Seeker of the Misty Isle 3
+5
+7
+7
+10
Concentration +1 (16), Intimidate 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 7, Knowledge (the Planes) 7, Knowledge (Religion) 7, Listen +3 (6), Spellcraft +1 (16), Search 3, Spot +3 (6), Survival 8, Perform (Sing) 3
-
-


14
Seeker of the Misty Isle 4
+6
+8
+8
+10
Concentration +1 (17), Intimidate 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 7, Knowledge (the Planes) 7, Knowledge (Religion) 7, Listen +3 (9), Spellcraft +1 (17), Search 3, Spot +3 (9), Survival 8, Perform (Sing) 3
-
Swiftfooted


15
Seeker of the Misty Isle 5
+6
+8
+8
+10
Concentration +1 (18), Intimidate 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 7, Knowledge (the Planes) 7, Knowledge (Religion) 7, Listen +3 (12), Spellcraft +1 (18), Search 3, Spot +3 (12), Survival 8, Perform (Sing) 3
Mastery of the Dead
Corellon's Perception, Surefooted


16
Seeker of the Misty Isle 6
+7
+9
+9
+11
Concentration +1 (19), Intimidate 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 7, Knowledge (the Planes) 7, Knowledge (Religion) 7, Listen +3 (15), Spellcraft +1 (19), Search 3, Spot +3 (15), Survival 8, Perform (Sing) 3
-
Find the Path


17
Seeker of the Misty Isle 7
+8
+9
+9
+11
Concentration +1 (20), Intimidate 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 7, Knowledge (the Planes) 7, Knowledge (Religion) 7, Listen +3 (18), Spellcraft +1 (20), Search 3, Spot +3 (18), Survival 8, Perform (Sing) 3
-
Magic Domain



Cestoda's Vile feats from Elder Evil servitude are, in order: Evil Brand, Lichloved, Chosen of Evil, and Master's Will.
The Cestoda+Worm symbiote has more HD and thus receives more feats from elder evil servitude. In addition to the above four, it also obtains Willing Deformity, Abominable Form, Deformity (Eyes), Deformity (Face), and Deformity (Parasite) (wait, is that last one just Cestoda's elf body?).

The Century Worm hosting Cestoda is a statblock-standard century worm (Fiend Folio p31). Its intelligence, wisdom, and charisma are overridden by Cestoda, and it likewise obtains her special abilities. Feats and skill ranks are functionally just folded together.

Dread Necromancer Spells per Day


Level
1st
2nd


1st
4
-


8th
5
-


9th
6
-


11th
7
4



Cleric Spells per Day
Spells per Day/Spells Known


Level
0lvl
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
6th
7th


2nd
3
2+1
-
-
-
-
-
-


3rd
4
3+1
-
-
-
-
-
-


4th
4
3+1
2+1
-
-
-
-
-


5th
5
4+1
3+1
-
-
-
-
-


6th
5
4+1
3+1
1+1
-
-
-
-


8th
5
4+1
4+1
2+1
-
-
-
-


9th
6
5+1
4+1
2+1
1+1
-
-
-


11th
6
5+1
4+1
3+1
2+1
-
-
-


12th
6
5+1
5+1
4+1
2+1
1+1
-
-


13th
6
5+1
5+1
4+1
3+1
2+1
-
-


14th
6
6+1
5+1
5+1
3+1
2+1
1+1
-


16th
6
6+1
5+1
5+1
3+1
3+1
2+1
-


17th
6
6+1
6+1
5+1
4+1
3+1
2+1
1+1



Cleric Spells Prepared
0: Create Water (2), Detect Magic (3), Read Magic
1: Detect Good (2), Doom (2), Protection from Good (2) + Longstrider
2: Death Knell, Desecrate, Eyes of the Zombie, Silence, Resist Energy, Owl's Wisdom + Detect Thoughts
3: Adoration of the Frightful, Dominate Vermin (2), Love's Pain (2) + Fly
4: Absorb Strength, Consumptive Field, Restoration (2) + Dimension Door
5: Death Throes, Slay Living, True Seeing + Spiderform
6: Create Undead, Word of Recall + Antimagic Field
7: Bestow Greater Curse + Greater Teleport



I awoke changed.

My body was now two bodies: that of a great worm, pale and bloated, its gut-womb filled with wriggling larva, and my former one, encapsulated in this mass like an abscess or tumor. My heart no longer beat, my lungs drew no more breath, my gut was still and empty, but I needed them no more. The life-giving lymph of my new form pulsed through me, nourishing me more perfectly than I ever had been.

But greater still were the changes to my mind.

I no longer feared my mother. I understood now why I'd been afraid: because I cared for her. For her, for my father, for all those others. I feared disappointing them; believed that if I did disappoint them, I would lack any right to fight back. I feared that others' allegiances did not favor me as mine favored them: that my mother would put her church before me, my father his morals, my friends their mission. All this time, I had been afraid that I cared in vain.

So why care?

The ties that bind are restraints, puppet strings, a spider's snare. They are worse than useless: they're handholds for your enemies. My new master, I now knew, once reached for godhood - and when it demanded the death of all those he knew, he killed them without hesitation. He, more than any one, understood the perils of attachment: and he shared his findings freely.

If I had to describe the following weeks in a single word, I'd say 'cathartic'. Time after time I cast that beautiful spell he wrought, heedless of how it scoured my own mind. With every casting, I'd see a thread go slack. With every casting, I rid myself of someone who knew of me, who might come back to hurt me, to whisper my weaknesses or tug on my heartstrings. Only when the threads were all gone, when the spell hurt only myself, did I stop.

That was more than two hundred years ago.

I've been busy since.

Patience, in these things, is key.

The first wave was subtle. A few disappearances here, some increased cult activity elsewhere. Slightly more undead rising from the grave than you'd normally see - those did little damage but formed a nice scapegoat for the disappearances. A few dozen victims were important enough to warrant resurrections - those attempts universally failed, but nobody put the pieces together.

The nice thing about century worms is how consistently they grow. Infect a hundred bodies in the span of a week, and no matter the hundred-year wait, you can bet your life that they'll emerge within seven days of each other.

So that was the second wave. Enormous, unstoppable worms, each ravenous, popping up all over the world, feeding with impunity. That got the forces of good's attention, all right - and credit where it's due, they fought well. It took time, of course - to organize, to track down my offspring, put them to the sword, and then to dig up all the hosts they could find and purify their remains. But they did it: they minimized loss of life, they prevented things from spiralling out, and their power was such that even I could only act in secret. When one of them faltered, the others urged him to keep going. When one of them died, the others brought her back. They made it through, more or less unharmed.

And then they went home, tired and proud, only to find their loved ones had not been as lucky.

Spouses, children, star pupils, mentors - slain, missing, struck deaf and blind, laid low by disease, ostracized, enfeebled. While the heroes fought, I'd cast my spells in secret, working my magic through the threads that stretched back home and leaving them none the wiser. Some of the damage could be fixed, in time, but there are scars magic cannot heal. A man who remembers his own community turning upon him will never again be quick to defend it.

The world didn't lose a single hero in that century-old war. But it lost their successors. It lost its future. The heroes grew old, with no one to replace them. All sorts of monsters began creeping in at the frontiers, leaving the forces of good even more thinly spread. That was nearly a hundred years ago.

And all the while, I waited, along with the few choice corpses I stashed away. The worms they host close to fully grown now: and in the tumult of their emergence, I will at last free my master.

(Benchmarks are a little weird owing to the nature of symbiotic creatures: the 5, 10, and 15 benchmarks assume that Cestoda is being fought alone, while the CR 20 benchmark corresponds to an encounter with her atop her worm-host - at this point, she is individually CR 17 while the worm is CR 19)

CR 5
For the most part, this will be a fight against Cestoda and some vermin or wight allies (the latter easily healed with at-will negative energy). Note Eyes of the Zombie as a nice way to let a higher-level Cestoda fight the PCs at this level. Evil Devotion will grant DR to you and yours as an immediate action, plus the ability to overcome a common DR type, and with a lot of Rebuke Vermin/Undead uses it's quite spammable.

CR 10
Always-on Death Ward is nice now that enemy clerics have Slay Living. Cestoda's CL for necromancy spells is up to par thanks to Yathrinshee, letting her command quite the undead army (all of which get debuffing gazes thanks to Threnody). The Travel Domain provides temporary immunity to battlefield control and has a famously good list of spells to access.

Dominate Vermin is online and lets us control any vermin, even a century worm, for minutes per level: their Will is mediocre enough for this to potentially work, especially if we get a couple tries from a safe position. Verminfriend provides a theoretical layer of protection against these same worms, though we need Chosen of Evil and a good roll to actually affect a 40 HD worm. More likely, we'll be putting the feat to use to deal with the centipede swarms that Kyuss spawns across the world. Given how we're safe from mindless vermin and undead both, we're greatly incentivized to encourage the proliferation of those.

Being a cleric is also useful in the background. Normally, Century Worms are victims of their own success: anyone they swallow will probably be dead of bite, crushing, and acid damage long before the constitution damage of the larva wears them down. But as a cleric, we can buff those we're about to eat, fortifying them against these hazards for long enough for the constitution damage to be deadly (Bestow Curse and Poison can also reduce that constitution outright). Or in a slightly less RAW way, you can just... manually implant century worm larva into dead bodies. That's a lot of CR 19 monsters if you're willing to wait a while! Also note that anyone you implant cannot be restored to life, not even by spells like Wish.

CR 15
With Curse of the Revenancer, everything we kill immediately rises as a zombie. One hilariously cruel trick is to cast Love's Pain: kill your target's dearest love, while immediately animating that loved one and letting them rampage against whoever's near. It's a cruel enough tactic to begin with: but how about informing the PCs that this is what's going on, and that the wizard is one Greater Teleport away from keeping his dead spouse from tearing apart their children... though that would of course mean forfeiting the current battle.

Another option is to kill your own century worms (they have teeth and meet several definitions for having a skeletal system), and then controlling the resulting 80 RHD zombie with Master of Undeath, allowing for control far above your usual cap. This control is limited in time, but century worms are virtually free as long as you're patient. If black onyx is plentiful (sounds like the kind of thing that depends on the PCs success at lower levels), you can even use Create Undead to turn them into Corpse Creatures that keep their ability to swallow whole and infect corpses. Also, dead century worms make prime targets for the corrupt Absorb Strength, which gives a +8 enhancement bonus to strength and a +5 enhancement bonus to constitution.

Verminfriend is more useful now: your two newest vile feats can give you a final charisma modifier of +14 and thus a 50% chance to make century worms unable to attack you. There's some minor damage involved, but you're a high-level cleric, you can heal that. Speaking of vermin, Spiderform lets you go from Gargantuan to Tiny in an instant... and back again as a single standard action, making for a great infiltration and surprise tool.

Anyway, we also grab Mastery of the Death, which is a really cool feat that lets us make CL checks (presumably including Yathrinshee's bonuses?) to return creatures we slay with Death spells as ghosts under your control. This makes for a great interrogation technique (Death Knell is a [Death] spell and real cheap to cast), a way to turn defeated casters into useful sources of utility magic - and of course a hilarious combat option. If someone in the party falls to a save-or-die, you get not one but two immediate allies out of the bargain.

CR 20
Casting is boosted further, the Magic domain has a nice granted power and some fun spells, and 1/day Find the Path. To keep up our 'Screw with the PCs' theme, Find the Path works perfectly well if you need to figure out where some pesky hero lives, and False Sending can lure PCs into a trap or just send them scrambling home. That Mastery of the Dead trick is great if you need a little extra intel to make the message believable.

Also, the yathrinshee CL boost starts pulling double duty with the help of Consumptive Field, which is cast at a CL of 21 (22 after Death Knell) and then gives us a +11 boost to CL. If you've got a lot of people to kill (Halaster's Fetch and other calling spells can slowly bring in victims if you lack those), you can reach a final CL of 29 for non-necromancy and 33 for necromancy spells, really pumping up duration and range as well as supercharging some spells' effects.

Given victims with high enough stats, you can Power Leech them to get over +30 to a stat of your choice for five and a half hours, and Death Throes hits for 33d8 and can be cast multiple minutes in advance. Unliving Weapon is still capped at 10d6 damage, but being able to cast it over a day in advance makes it quite a bit more versatile. And your Love's Pain strategy gives victims even less time to react, as they're now taking 10d6 as well. Extract Gift can theoretically get you up to a +8 ability boost or a +16 skill boost, though given Cestoda's dislike of being tied down, she should probably not be using the DC-increasing options.

All these resources are of course rather dependent on having sufficient prisoners and sacrificial victims: but again, that's a prime sub-goal for the PCs to foil.

Mostly, we're notable for being a big scary monster at this CR rate. Barring Freedom of Movement (which that shiny new AMF helps with), anything you hit is almost certainly going to be grappled, swallowed next turn, and then slowly digested. Creatures with claws can escape, as can anything that was holding a light slashing weapon - everything else is out of luck. And Curse of the Revenancer applies every time you kill someone, no matter the method, so those infected corpses will be ambulatory for a while (just spit them out, tell them to go join the current fight, and afterwards you can send them off to bury themselves somewhere). Also, basically every creature that sees you will have to make a DC 25 save or be shaken for six rounds (which spells like Doom can then escalate). Note that Adoration of the Frightful is a very cheap and easy way to effectively charm such creatures!

Lastly, it's worth noting that RAW, domains can be given up for devotion feats at any time. In the big climactic battle, when no Teleport spells have to be cast anymore and no battlefield control evaded, it might pay off to obtain Travel Devotion to get that little bit of extra movement, or Magic Devotion for a big ranged nuke.

Broadly, this section follows the plot given in Elder Evils. Cestoda can replace Edwin Tolstoff as a monstrous theurgic caster leading a cult and working to free Kyuss. In such a case, I would suggest replacing the default Herald of Kyuss with Hellen Honeyteeth (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25861059&postcount=26) from two rounds ago.

At low levels, PC actions probably involve disrupting Cestoda's supply chains of black onyx and warm bodies, while fighting wights, zombies, and those strange centipede swarms that have begun emerging around the world. At some point, they become entangled with the century worm infestation that took place a century ago: perhaps they simply find an infected body (which they cannot simply burn) and must track down someone able to purify it, or perhaps an old hero tries to mentor them and shares some backstory as he does.

Eventually, the PCs learn of plans to bring about something called the 'age of worms', but Kyuss's imperviousness to divine divinations make it tricky to directly learn of him. However, a PC who straightforwardly asks "What is the age of worms" will receive the cryptic answer: "For now, at least one-hundred".

Mid-levels sees the involvement of spawns of kyuss, avolakias, and other horrifying monstrosities. A fun detail to point out is that despite her liberal use of undead, Cestoda hates vampires and other beings that innately control their own spawn, so the PCs might even end up in an unlikely alliance with such a creature as it battles the cult of Kyuss. The climax of this arc might be the emergence of the first second-generation century worm: a terrifying behemoth that the PCs are massively underleveled to deal with, and must thus defeat through trickery before it reaches some major population center (simply kiting it to death from above won't work: century worms can burrow). Alternatively, Cestoda might use her teleportation magic to directly transport hatched worms into densely populated areas.

Finally, the PCs get on the trail of Cestoda herself as she quests to obtain the items required to free Kyuss. Cestoda will mock the PCs whenever they meet, speaking of how she can 'see the ties that bind them' and pledging to exploit their foolish love for their family and friends, as she did a hundred years ago.

It is then that Cestoda deploys a new weapon: Bestow Greater Curse. Per the BoVD, this spell can be used to target a PC and leave their relatives cursed or infected with disease (or target a PC's loved one and affect them, of course), and she can also use it on herself, to affect random century worms she spawned with the aging curse, instantly hastening their development to the point where they prematurely hatch. Suddenly, century worms begin emerging all over the realm, and the PCs are forced to pick between protecting innocents and continuing their pursuit of Cestoda.

It all comes to a head during the big climactic battle on Wormcrawl Island, where Cestoda is about to maneuver her Sphere of Annihilation into the Well of Many Worlds and Kyuss. A complicating factor is that artifacts (including her Sphere and the control amulet) are impervious to the effects of Cestoda's Antimagic Field, allowing her to perform the ritual while protected from magical assault. Sure, the PCs might have access to Disjunction by this point... but are they really willing to risk the fallout that comes with destroying artifacts? The alternative: closing in to melee the 400+ HP gargantuan worm with no magical support, is of course hardly more appealing.


Half-Drow - RoF
Century Worm - FF

Dread Necromancer - HoH
Cloistered Cleric, Drow Paragon - UA
Kiaransalee - FRCS
Seeker of the Misty Isle - CDiv

Precocious Apprentice, Practiced Spellcaster - CArc
Evil Devotion - CDiv
Verminfriend - DotU
Master of Undeath - CMage
Mastery of the Dead - PGtE

Eyes of the Zombie, Unliving Weapon - BoVD
Extract Gift - FCI:HotA
Adoration of the Frightful, Bestow Greater Curse, Consumptive Field, Death Throes, Spiderform - SC
Corrupt spells from BoVD

All vile feats from Elder Evils. Kyuss from Elder Evils.
Bestow Curse alternate uses from BoVD.

[H_H_F_F]

Deck the Halls!


https://gamefabrique.com/screenshots2/pc/pool-of-radiance-ruins-of-myth-drannor-04.big.jpg
Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth DrannorTM
If something happens once it is always possible the same thing will repeat again. Twice, thrice, even more. Or, if it was a really unique combination of circumstances which will never happen again until the end of time, well… the multiverse is infinite, it's a prism of endless possibility, where a single choice can branch out into infinite realities, creating alternate worlds from the ones you know.
You probably know Darcassan the Farseer, the Last Elder of Windsong Tower. He made himself part of the tower and in this state lived up to at least 1375 DR... That's what happened in the regular Faerûn. But in this version... Darcassan the Farseer was betrayed by one of barely former students in the most vital moment of his transformation. He was helpless for a short moment, but it was enough. Shalan Lightsoul was a corrupted by Shar young sun elf who studied in Windsong Tower less than year before Myth Drannor fell. He thought that Elders conceal their secrets of the might from him and wanted to take revenge and those secrets. He struck the helpless Darcassan and killed the Last Elder.
But it wasn't the end. Darcassan was a true scholar, he documented in detail all his research including research about merging with Windsong Tower. And Shalan got it. In a way, he actually got what he wanted - the secrets of power. Of course these secrets were made by the powerful wizard and for the powerful wizard. It would be strange to assume that a barely caster newbie could accomplish all needed rites correctly and survive. But Shalan had at his disposal a great library and the help of the goddess of night and mystery.


CE Tower-Merged Sun Elf Shadowcaster 7/Elf Domain Combat Wizard 1/Noctumancer 10

Abilities Initial Sun Elf ASI Total
STR 8 -
DEX 14 -
CON 12 -2 -
INT 15 2 3 20
WIS 10 10
CHA 13 1 14

CR ECL Class BAB Fort Reflex Will Skills Feats Class Features Mysteries (level, page)
2 - Tower-Merged Construct traits, DR 10/adamantine, immunity to magic, shadow projection, SLA, telepathy 60 ft.
3 1st Shadowcaster 1 0 2 0 2 20: {+4} Concentration: 4; {+4} Hide: 4; {+4} Knowledge (arcana): 4; {+4 CC} Sleight of Hand: 2; {+4} Spellcraft: 4; Shadow Weave Magic (1) Fundamentals of shadow (Arrow of Dusk, Umbral Hand, Sight Obscured), apprentice mysteries Carpet of Shadow (1st, 142)
4 2nd Elf Domain Combat Wizard 1 0 2 0 4 5: {+1} Concentration: 5; {+1 CC} Hide: 4.5; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 5; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 2.5; {+1} Spellcraft: 5; Improved Toughness (W) Generalist wizardry, summon familiar, arcane domain (abjuration)
5 3rd Wizard 2 1 2 0 5 5: {+1} Concentration: 6; {+1 CC} Hide: 5; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 6; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 3; {+1} Spellcraft: 6; Insidious Magic (3)
6 4th Wizard 3 1 3 1 5 6: {+1} Concentration: 7; {+1} Craft (calligraphy): 1; {+2 CC} Hide: 6; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 7; Sleight of Hand: 3; {+1} Spellcraft: 7;
7 5th Shadowcaster 3 (Wizard 2) 2 3 1 6 6: {+1} Concentration: 8; Craft (calligraphy): 1; {+2} Hide: 8; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 8; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 3.5; {+1} Spellcraft: 8; Shadow Familiar (Sh) Bonus feat; see text, umbral sight (darkvision 30 ft.) Bend Perspective (1st, 142), Quicker than the Eye (https://web.archive.org/web/20201108031054/http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20070307a) (1st)
8 6th Wizard 3 2 4 2 6 6: {+1} Concentration: 9; {+1} Craft (calligraphy): 2; {+1 CC} Hide: 8.5; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 9; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 4; {+1} Spellcraft: 9; Spell Focus (Illusion) (6)
9 7th Noctumancer 1 2 6 2 8 6: {+1} Concentration: 10; {+1} Craft (calligraphy): 3; {+1 CC} Hide: 9; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 10; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 4.5; {+1} Spellcraft: 10; Bonus fundamental (Caul of Shadow), capture magic’s shadow Black Fire (2nd, 142)
10 8th Noctumancer 2 3 7 2 9 6: {+1} Concentration: 11; {+1} Craft (calligraphy): 4; {+1 CC} Hide: 9.5; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 11; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 5; {+1} Spellcraft: 11; Innate counterspell 1/day Black Fire (2nd, 142)
11 9th Noctumancer 3 3 7 3 9 6: {+1} Concentration: 12; {+1} Craft (calligraphy): 5; {+1 CC} Hide: 10; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 12; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 5.5; {+1} Spellcraft: 12; Practiced Spellcaster (Wizard) (9) Clinging Darkness (3rd, 143)
12 10th Shadowcaster 5 (Wizard 2) 4 7 2 10 6: {+1} Concentration: 13; Craft (calligraphy): 5; {+3} Hide: 13; Knowledge (arcana): 12; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 6; {+1} Spellcraft: 13; Spell Focus (Illusion) → Path Focus (Dark Reflections) (CD), Greater Path Focus (Dark Reflections) (Sh) Apprentice mysteries (spell-like), initiate mysteries, sustaining shadow (eat 1 meal/week) Shadow Evocation (4th, 148), Shadow Evocation (4th, 148)
13 11th Noctumancer 4 5 8 2 11 6: {+1} Concentration: 14; {+1} Craft (calligraphy): 6; {+1 CC} Hide: 13.5; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 13; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 6.5; {+1} Spellcraft: 14; Bonus fundamental (Black Candle) Feign Life (5th, 145)
14 12th Noctumancer 5 5 8 2 11 7: {+1} Concentration: 15; Craft (calligraphy): 6; {+1 CC} Hide: 14; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 14; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 7; {+1} Spellcraft: 15; {+2} Conceal Spellcasting; Elven Spell Lore (Acid Breath) (12) Innate counterspell 2/day Feign Life (5th, 145)
15 13th Noctumancer 6 6 9 3 12 7: {+1} Concentration: 16; {+2} Craft (calligraphy): 8; {+1 CC} Hide: 14.5; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 15; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 7.5; {+1} Spellcraft: 16; Conceal Spellcasting; Eldritch disruption Shadow Evocation, Greater (6th, 148)
16 14th Noctumancer 7 6 9 3 12 7: {+1} Concentration: 17; Craft (calligraphy): 8; {+1 CC} Hide: 15; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 16; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 8; {+1} Spellcraft: 17; {+2} False Theurgy, Conceal Spellcasting; Bonus fundamental (Shadow Hood), innate counterspell (retain power) Shadow Evocation, Greater (6th, 148)
17 15th Noctumancer 8 7 10 3 13 7: {+1} Concentration: 18; {+2} Craft (calligraphy): 10; Hide: 15; {+2} Knowledge (arcana): 18; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 8.5; {+1} Spellcraft: 18; False Theurgy, Conceal Spellcasting; Favored Mystery (Shadow Evocation, Greater) (15) Apprentice mysteries (supernatural), initiate mysteries (spell-like), master mysteries, innate counterspell 3/day Grasping Shadows (https://web.archive.org/web/20201108031054/http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20070307a) (7th)
18 16th Shadowcaster 7 (Wizard 1) 7 11 4 13 7: {+1} Concentration: 19; Craft (calligraphy): 10; {+4} Hide: 19; Knowledge (arcana): 18; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 9; {+1} Spellcraft: 19; False Theurgy, Conceal Spellcasting; Favored Mystery (Shadow Evocation, Greater) (Sh) Unlimited uses of fundamentals Summon Umbral Servant (7th, 151), Shadow Plague (8th, 148)
19 17th Noctumancer 9 7 11 5 13 7: {+1} Concentration: 20; Craft (calligraphy): 10; {+2 CC} Hide: 20; {+2} Knowledge (arcana): 20; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 9.5; {+1} Spellcraft: 20; False Theurgy, Conceal Spellcasting; Bonus fundamental (Widened Eyes) Menagerie of Darkness (https://web.archive.org/web/20201108031054/http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20070307a) (8th)
20 18th Noctumancer 10 8 12 5 14 7: {+1} Concentration: 21; {+1} Craft (calligraphy): 11; {+2 CC} Hide: 21; {+1} Knowledge (arcana): 21; {+1 CC} Sleight of Hand: 10; {+1} Spellcraft: 21; False Theurgy, Conceal Spellcasting; Favored Mystery (Shadow Evocation, Greater) (18) Eldritch vortex, shadow’s persistence Black Labyrinth (https://web.archive.org/web/20201108031054/http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20070307a) (9th)
W - Wizard bonus; Sh - Shadowcaster bonus; CD - Creeping Darkness trade (ToM, p. 115).

Spells by level (Base + Domain + Stat + Elf wizard)
Level Class 0th 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th
2nd Wizard 1 3+1 1+1+1+1
3rd Wizard 2 4+1 2+1+1+1
4th Wizard 3 4+1 2+1+1 1+1+1+1
5th Wizard 2 4+1 2+1+1+1
6th Wizard 3 4+1 2+1+1 1+1+1+1
7th Wizard 4 4+1 3+1+1 2+1+1+1
8th Wizard 5 4+1 3+1+1 2+1+1 1+1+1+1
9th Wizard 6 4+1 3+1+1 3+1+1 2+1+1+1
10th Wizard 5 4+1 3+1+1 2+1+1 1+1+1+1
11th Wizard 6 4+1 3+1+1 3+1+1 2+1+1+1
12th Wizard 7 4+1 4+1+2 3+1+1 2+1+1 1+1+1+1
13th Wizard 8 4+1 4+1+2 3+1+1 3+1+1 2+1+1+1
14th Wizard 9 4+1 4+1+2 4+1+1 3+1+1 2+1+1 1+1+1+1
15th Wizard 10 4+1 4+1+2 4+1+1 3+1+1 3+1+1 2+1+1+1
16th Wizard 9 4+1 4+1+2 4+1+1 3+1+1 2+1+1 1+1+1+1
17th Wizard 10 4+1 4+1+2 4+1+1 3+1+1 3+1+1 2+1+1+1
18th Wizard 11 4+1 4+1+2 4+1+1 4+1+1 3+1+1 2+1+1 1+1+0+1

Spellbook and extras
Level Class Domain 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th
2nd Wizard 1 Resistance (0th); Shield (1st); Enlarge Person; Charm Person; Dead End; Fist of Stone; Nerveskitter; Mage Armor; True Strike;
3rd Wizard 2 Identify; Expeditious Retreat; Dispel Ward;
4th Wizard 3 Resist Energy (2nd); Invisibility; Wraithstrike; See Invisibility;
5th Wizard 2
6th Wizard 3 Owl's Wisdom; Eagle’s Splendor; Fox’s Cunning;
7th Wizard 4 Alter Self; Cat’s Grace; Arcane Turmoil;
8th Wizard 5 Dispel Magic (3rd); Weapon of Energy; Repair Serious Damage; Magic Weapon, Greater;
9th Wizard 6 Arcane Sight; Enhance Familiar; Fortify Familiar;
10th Wizard 5
11th Wizard 6 Acid Breath; Sign of Sealing; Haste;
12th Wizard 7 Remove Curse (4th); Otiluke's Dispelling Screen; Liquid Pain; Mystic Surge;
13th Wizard 8 Slashing Dispel; Know Vulnerabilities; Invisibility, Greater;
14th Wizard 9 Mordenkainen’s Private Sanctum (5th); Draconic Might; Permanency; Wall of Dispel Magic;
15th Wizard 10 Shadow Conjuration; Nightstalker’s Transformation; Death Throes;
16th Wizard 9
17th Wizard 10 Energy Shield; Wall of Stone; Spiritwall;
18th Wizard 11 Dispel Magic, Greater (6th); Tenser’s Transformation; Mental Pinnacle; Shalantha's Delicate Disk;
Additional spells I want to know Rouse; Mage Armor, Greater; Spellcaster's Bane; Scrying; Stoneskin; Stone Shape; Repair Critical Damage; Dweomer Of Transference; Imbue Familiar with Spell Ability; Hardening;
Spells to emulate with Shadow Conjuration Mordenkainen’s Buzzing Bee; Glitterdust; Cloud of Knives; Create Magic Tattoo; Stinking Cloud; Mage Armor, Greater; Sepia Snake Sigil; -
Spells to emulate with Shadow Evocation Darsson's Cooling Breeze; Darsson's Fiery Furnace; Darsson's Chilling Chamber; Combust; Theskyn's Hearty Heave; Blacklight; Sonorous Hum; Dweomer Of Transference; Wings of Flurry; Parboil; Wall of Coldfire; Wall of Fire; Damning Darkness; Bloodbriars; Mirror Sending; -
Spells to emulate with Shadow Evocation, Greater - Wall of Force; Streamers; Sending; Enchant, Contingency; Crushing Sphere; Entomb; Amber Sarcophagus; Forcecage;
Spells to use with Permanency Darsson's Cooling Breeze; Invisibility (on Wall of Stone for example); Darsson's Fiery Furnace; Darsson's Chilling Chamber; Stinking Cloud; Weapon of Energy; Otiluke's Dispelling Screen; Wall of Coldfire; Wall of Fire; Wall of Force; Mordenkainen’s Private Sanctum; Feign Life (Animate Objects);

Book Spells
Spell Compendium Master’s Touch; Dead End; Fist of Stone; Nerveskitter; Dispel Ward; Create Magic Tattoo; Mordenkainen's Buzzing Bee; Combust; Enhance Familiar; Fortify Familiar; Repair Serious Damage; Weapon of Energy; Acid Breath; Sonorous Hum; Mage Armor, Greater; Blacklight; Sign of Sealing; Repair Critical Damage; Know Vulnerabilities; Wall of Dispel Magic; Draconic Might; Spiritwall; Hardening; Death Throes; Nightstalker’s Transformation; Imbue Familiar with Spell Ability; Wraithstrike;
Complete Mage Arcane Turmoil; Spellcaster's Bane;
Player's Handbook II Rouse; Cloud of Knives; Mystic Surge; Slashing Dispel;
Shining South Darsson's Cooling Breeze; Darsson's Fiery Furnace; Darsson's Chilling Chamber; Streamers;
Lost Empires of Faerun Theskyn's Hearty Heave; Crushing Sphere; Bloodbriars; Shalantha's Delicate Disk;
Complete Arcane Otiluke's Dispelling Screen;
Expanded Psionics Handbook Dweomer Of Transference; Mental Pinnacle;
Book of Vile Darkness Liquid Pain; Mirror Sending;
Diablo II - Diablerie Energy Shield; Enchant;
Frostburn Entomb; Wall of Coldfire;
Book of Exalted Deeds Amber Sarcophagus;
Races of the Dragon Wings of Flurry;
Sandstorm Parboil;
Lords of Madness Damning Darkness;

While it's up to DM at which level Shalan Lightsoul merged with Windsong Tower, it's highly likely this didn't happen at least until CR 12, but it isn't a strict limitation.
Shalan has two main goals. First - his own security. To achieve this goal he lures careless adventurers into his tower and uses them as a source of Liquid Pain which is used for creating various traps via Permanency spell. Second - as a faithful servant of Shar he wants to destroy the Weave. To achieve this goal he searches for well-known Nether Scrolls using Sendings and his projections to employ adventurers and look for traces of the lost scrolls. Ironically, Nether Scrolls he searching so stubbornly are right under his nose in Windsong Tower converted in the form of tree - Quess'Ar'Teranthvar - hidden from his sight by its permanent custodian - Tyvollus Aluviirsan.
Equivalent of Wizard 5/Shadowcaster 8 with two Dispel oriented abilities of Noctumancer: 1/day immediate counterspell and CL booster. Second could be abused through purchase of a lot of Continual Flame or even Heightened Continual Flame items to dispel them when necessary (Dispel Magic check is +10). In addition, Shalan has two Shadow Evocation mysteries which give him very good versatility, some damaging and crowd control mysteries, and wizard spells. Most of them are about direct fighting with weapons. Not the best choice, but it's forgivable for never really grown up resentful to consider himself a hero elf. He is sure he's best at everything including swordplay. He is lucky he could get a lesson and stay alive - thanks to his projection nature.
Speaking of projections. All four at this moment are more or less similar. Yeah, they could slightly differ in appearance, but their memorizes are almost the same.
0: Detect Magic, Message, Mending, Prestidigitation, Resistance (D)
1: Enlarge Person†, Nerveskitter, Fist of Stone†, Mage Armor†, Shield† (D)
2: Fox’s Cunning†, Wraithstrike*2, Resist Energy (D)
3: Weapon of Energy, Greater Magic Weapon†, Dispel Magic, Dispel Magic (D)
† already cast
0: Detect Magic*2, Message, Prestidigitation, Resistance (D)
1: Identify, Dead End, Fist of Stone, Mage Armor†, Shield (D)
2: Invisibility, Wraithstrike, Alter Self, Resist Energy (D)
3: Weapon of Energy, Greater Magic Weapon, Dispel Magic, Dispel Magic (D)
† already cast
Equivalent of Wizard 8/Shadowcaster 11 with second immediate counterspell per day and minor CL debuff. Shalan's Dispel Magic check is +12 (+15 but DM has CL cap). He has two Animate Objects (Feign Life mystery) and his first Greater Shadow Evocation another great versatility mystery.
At this CR Shalan has enough different spells to select different memorizes for different projections.
1: Dead End†, Nerveskitter, True Strike*2, Mage Armor†, Mordenkainen’s Buzzing Bee, Shield (D)
2: Fox’s Cunning†, Arcane Turmoil, Alter Self, See Invisibility†, Resist Energy (D)
3: Arcane Sight†, Haste, Greater Magic Weapon†, Dispel Magic, Dispel Magic (D)
4: Know Vulnerabilities*3, Greater Invisibility†, Remove Curse (D)
† already cast

1: Enlarge Person, Nerveskitter, True Strike*2, Fist of Stone, Mage Armor†, Shield† (D)
2: Fox’s Cunning†, Wraithstrike*3, Resist Energy (D)
3: Weapon of Energy†, Haste†, Greater Magic Weapon†, Dispel Magic, Dispel Magic (D)
4: Slashing Dispel*3, Greater Invisibility†, Remove Curse (D)
† already cast

1: Charm Person*3, Dead End, Nerveskitter, True Strike, Mage Armor†, Shield† (D)
2: Fox’s Cunning†, Eagle’s Splendor†, Wraithstrike, Arcane Turmoil, Resist Energy (D)
3: Acid Breath (Sonic), Acid Breath (Cold), Acid Breath, Haste†, Dispel Magic (D)
4: Slashing Dispel*3, Greater Invisibility†, Remove Curse (D)
† already cast

1: Identify*3, Charm Person, True Strike, Mage Armor†, Shield† (D)
2: Fox’s Cunning†, Eagle’s Splendor, Cat’s Grace, Owl's Wisdom, Resist Energy (D)
3: Enhance Familiar, Fortify Familiar, Repair Serious Damage, Haste†, Dispel Magic (D)
4: Slashing Dispel*3, Liquid Pain, Remove Curse (D)
† already cast

Memorize #1 is for scouting projection. If somebody enters Windsong Tower this projection will go and look at them. Memorizes #2 and #3 are for different kinds of fight: more close combat and more spellcasting respectively. Memorize #4 is mostly for utility and backup purposes.

1: Charm Person*2, Dead End, Nerveskitter, True Strike, Mage Armor†, Shield (D)
2: Fox’s Cunning, Wraithstrike, Alter Self, Eagle’s Splendor, Resist Energy (D)
3: Haste, Greater Magic Weapon, Acid Breath*2 (varies), Dispel Magic (D)
4: Slashing Dispel*3, Greater Invisibility, Remove Curse (D)
† already cast
Equivalent of Wizard 11/Shadowcaster 17 with full set abilities of Noctumancer 10: one more immediate counterspell, area CL debuff and immunity to spells Shalan countered. His Greater Dispel Magic check is +18, +19 with Create Magic Tattoo, +20 with Mystic Surge (thanks to projection nature, Shalan could appear in the fight with this spell already casted on himself) and with additional CL improvement from Capture Magic’s Shadow ability (up to +4) if it's needed.
His repertoire of mysteries at this CR significantly improved. He has eight Greater Shadow Evocations, four regular Shadow Evocations, four Feign Lives, Summon Shadow Elemental, cold analog of Incendiary Cloud (Shadow Plague mystery), ability to dominate all close animals or vermin - it could be useful in case of enemy Druid (Menagerie of Darkness mystery), Evard's black tentacles with permanent blindness (Grasping Shadows mystery) and the Black Labyrinth! Oh, it's rules changer! One-mile-radius area 9-days-long debuff and Shalan could cast it four times per day!
Plus, his projections' memorizes improved (and differed) more.

1: Enlarge Person, Nerveskitter, Charm Person, True Strike*2, Mage Armor, Shield (D)
2: Fox’s Cunning†, Alter Self*†, Eagle’s Splendor, Invisibility, Resist Energy (D)
3: Enhance Familiar, Fortify Familiar, Haste†, Weapon of Energy†, Greater Magic Weapon†, Dispel Magic (D)
4: Shadow Conjuration*3, Slashing Dispel, Remove Curse (D)
5: Energy Shield†, Death Throes, Nightstalker’s Transformation†, Mordenkainen’s Private Sanctum (D)
6: Tenser’s Transformation†, Shadow Conjuration†, Greater Dispel Magic (D)
† already cast
*- there are some interesting combat forms with good NatAC or mobility and bonus feats, for example Varag (MM4), Asabi (Monsters of Faerûn) and Tren (Serpent Kingdoms WE)

Shalan the Striker is the first line of tower defense or, more precisely, the first line of tower offense. He appears in the middle of a group of intruders and furiously attacks. His Greater Shadow Evocation mystery and all apprentice mysteries are supernatural abilities now and therefore both Transformations don't limit ability to use them (it's also not clear could transformed person use initiate mysteries SLAs or not, RAW answer is clear yes, but I'm not sure about RAI), but Shalan the Striker rarely uses mysteries and focuses on his melee weapon attacks, he could, however, apply Clinging Darkness to take advantage or Combust somebody via Shadow Evocation. Also he could use Greater Shadow Evocation to emulate Enchant - +18 (one Shadow Conjuration is used to mimic Create Magic Tattoo) fire damage for every attack is good bonus. He also uses some light armor, it could be an elven chain for example.

1: Dispel Ward, Nerveskitter, True Strike*2, Charm Person, Mage Armor, Shield (D)
2: Identify, See Invisibility, Alter Self, Resist Energy, Resist Energy (D)
3: Arcane Sight†, Haste†, Repair Serious Damage, , Dispel Magic, Dispel Magic (D)
4: Shadow Conjuration*2, Know Vulnerabilities, Greater Invisibility†, Remove Curse (D)
5: Energy Shield†, Death Throes, Draconic Might†, Mordenkainen’s Private Sanctum (D)
6: Shadow Conjuration, Mental Pinnacle, Greater Dispel Magic (D)
† already cast

Shalan the Philosopher doesn't appear right in the battle. Shalan creates him somewhere behind the corner of enemies in order to pre-casting spells and prepare for the battle. Philosopher's main weapon is Mental Pinnacle. With it he became imitation of powerful psion-telepath. Only issue is low PP pool - only for 3 full augmented manifests. This could be solved with help of Dweomer Of Transference spell (via Shadow Evocation or if Shalan obtain this spell in his spellbook in some way, in this case it will be memorized instead of Know Vulnerabilities) and burning some amount of spells or high level mysteries into power points.

1: Enlarge Person, Nerveskitter, True Strike*3, Mage Armor, Shield (D)
2: Eagle’s Splendor, Alter Self, Wraithstrike*3, Resist Energy (D)
3: Greater Magic Weapon, Haste†, Haste, Acid Breath (sonic), Acid Breath (electricity), Dispel Magic (D)
4: Mystic Surge†, Slashing Dispel*2, Greater Invisibility†, Remove Curse (D)
5: Draconic Might, Energy Shield†, Death Throes, Mordenkainen’s Private Sanctum (D)
6: Nightstalker’s Transformation, Shalantha's Delicate Disk, Greater Dispel Magic (D)
† already cast

Shalan the Swashbuckler's tactics is some less straightforward variation of Striker's tactics. He isn't created directly in the middle of enemies and he doesn't use Nightstalker’s Transformation from the very beginning, letting himself take advantage of some of his spells in the fight. He highly likely Alter Self into Varag to use hit-and-run tactic with its Spring AttackB feat and great speed even before Haste. He has low BAB, but also has Wraithstrike and True Strike and if it's needed he could be summoned right before high AC foe with both this spells pre-casted (instead of Mystic Surge and Greater Invisibility), strike and flee. And of course he could be created somewhere behind the corner of enemies to make some preparations like the Philosopher could.

0: Mending*4, Resistance (D)
1: Enlarge Person, Identify*2, Dispel Ward, Charm Person, Mage Armor†, Shield (D)
2: Fox’s Cunning†, Invisibility, See Invisibility*2, Resist Energy (D)
3: Sign of Sealing*3, Repair Serious Damage, Arcane Sight, Dispel Magic (D)
4: Otiluke's Dispelling Screen, Liquid Pain, Shadow Conjuration*2, Remove Curse (D)
5: Wall of Stone, Permanency, Spiritwall, Mordenkainen’s Private Sanctum (D)
6: Permanency*2, Greater Dispel Magic (D)
† already cast

Shalan the Architect is... an architect. He uses his spells and (Greater) Shadow Evocations/Conjuration to rebuild the Tower. He broadly uses Permanency when he has free XP, summon Walls of Stone to seal off significant passages or whole rooms, blokes doorways with Signs of Sealing or Otiluke's Dispelling Screens. Places Spiritwalls, Darsson's spells, Sepia Snake Sigils, Stinking Clouds, Invisibility on some obstacles or whole walls, Walls of Force, Fire and Coldfire. And of course Mending, in the big old tower always is something to mend. Plus, there should be placed several Mordenkainen’s Private Sanctums. One at the room with Shalan's main body and a few additional in some random places. Maybe even in the blocked rooms.

1: Charm Person, Dead End, Nerveskitter, True Strike*2, Mage Armor†, Shield (D)
2: Fox’s Cunning, Eagle’s Splendor, Alter Self, Arcane Turmoil, Wraithstrike, Resist Energy (D)
3: Arcane Sight, Haste, Greater Magic Weapon, Acid Breath (varies)*2, Dispel Magic (D)
4: Slashing Dispel, Greater Invisibility, Shadow Conjuration*2, Remove Curse (D)
5: Draconic Might, Energy Shield, Death Throes, Mordenkainen’s Private Sanctum (D)
6: Greater Dispel Magic*2, Greater Dispel Magic (D)
† already cast

We have an interesting thing here. Shalan's main body is a Huge construct and huge masters have their own list of familiar options (DMG, p. 203). I selected Leopard for Shalan. With dark creature template, familiar abilities and familiar buff spells it became a serious ambusher. Also it could be buffed for a fight with Tenser’s Transformation or Mental Pinnacle and if Shalan was managed to find Imbue Familiar with Spell Ability spell, it also would be great.
I told some in the Shalan the Architect description, and it is a very well-known optimization topic, but I'll remind you of something. Shalan automatically disbelieves or voluntarily fails his save against his own illusions - depends on what is more advantageous. He could at the same time freely pass through his (permanent) shadow emulations of Wall of Force and enjoy benefits of Create Magic Tattoo or Cloud of Knives.
Shalan is a Shadow Weave user (https://web.archive.org/web/20200314182423/http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd%2Ffrcc%2F20070725) and with Insidious Magic his spells are hard to notice. It could be fun, if PCs stuck before an invisible wall and can’t see it with See Invisibility and Detect Magic. The same about invisible Shalan himself.
Shalan could use shadow copy of Contingency to combine some useful buff spell with spells which forbid spellcasting (Nightstalker’s Transformation, Tenser’s Transformation, Mental Pinnacle).
These two spells are methods to utilize excessive spell slots and uses of not needed right now high level mysteries, first is free hit points (trade Black Labyrinth for 54 hp, or Menagerie of Darkness for 48 hp, or both!), second is free power points, both are good and useful.
Projections are just projections. They are replaceable tools. It looks like great final move to explode projection's dead body for 16d8 damage for everybody in 30 ft. after losing one.

Quendë. Let's start with the unproblematic part.
Elven Spell Lore feat isn't totally exclusive for elves, but close to that and it's very significant for Shalan. He has limited CL and very Dispel oriented tactics. Every +2 matters. Plus, with the capture magic’s shadow he could reach CL cap, in that case this +2 became even more significant.
Elf Wizard substitution level also is a great option for Shalan. First of all, he has only 1+D 6th level slots and another one is great. Secondly, the third spell known per level is very useful, especially with the combination of creeping darkness which lets Shalan get three levels of Wizard twice.
And go to the problematic part... Tower-merged "template". Well, Anauroch the Empire of Shade book actually doesn't contain a direct description of this template. What it does change, who could be the base creature. I had to use some reverse-engineering to make Shalan and where I wasn't sure I got less than more (for example, Darcassan's projections have stats surplus from 13 to 19 - I didn't take it into account), but something couldn't be reverse-engineered: what is base creature restriction? Could this template be applied to any corporeal creature? Any corporeal live creature? Any humanoid? Any elf? Sun elf only? Only sun elf with levels of wizard? Mystery... But by fluff it looks like an elven exclusive "option."
Revenge is a dish best served frozen. Oh yes. Shalan is ready to wait as long as it will be needed and he’s got things to do - Windsong Tower won’t rebuild itself and Liquid Pain won’t collect itself.
More than Mortal. Tower-merged template even doesn't have clear applying rules, no way it could be playable.
Fickle Vileness. Yes. Plus CE is one of allowable alignment of Shar worshipers.

Type Name Book Page
Race Sun Elf Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting 16
Template Tower-Merged Anauroch the Empire of Shade 12-16, 33, 39, 45
Class Shadowcaster Tome of Magic 111
Class Wizard PHB 55
Prestige Class Noctumancer Tome of Magic 125
Class variant Combat Wizard Unearthed Arcana 59
Class variant Domain Wizard Unearthed Arcana 57
Class variant Elf Wizard Races of the Wild 157
Feat Shadow Weave Magic Player's Guide to Faerûn 43
Feat Improved Toughness Monster Manual V 205
Feat Insidious Magic Player's Guide to Faerûn 40
Feat Shadow Familiar Tome of Magic 138
Feat Spell Focus PHB 100
Feat Practiced Spellcaster Complete Arcane 82
Feat Path Focus Tome of Magic 137
Feat Greater Path Focus Tome of Magic 136
Feat Elven Spell Lore Player's Handbook II 78
Feat Favored Mystery Tome of Magic 136
Skill Trick False Theurgy Complete Scoundrel 86
Skill Trick Conceal Spellcasting Complete Scoundrel 85

[H_H_F_F]

Hey look, this one made the reference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Tannenbaum) for me!


Woe Tannenbaum
CE Spirit TreeGhost Binder 1/Ur-priest 4/Master Alchemist 5

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The Spirit Wood, described in Ghostwalk, is part of the spiritual lifecycle of elves and half-elves – rather than passing along the titular Ghostwalk after death and through the Veil of Souls, they are drawn to the trees around its entrance. When multiple powerful elven souls of similar personality inhabit the same tree, it can awaken as a treant-like gestalt creature.

Spirit Trees have a number of interesting abilities – blindsight, freedom from multiclassing penalties, limited 1 mile telepathy, multiple SLAs, and being surprisingly stealthy for a Huge creature. But what we’re looking at is “Potion Sap”, which grants them a unique way of crafting items.

I had a backstory here about knowledge from different elves connecting in a way which made the tree go mad and pledge itself to Father LlymicEE in an attempt to freeze the world and destroy the cycle of life and death, but I didn't have time to flesh it out. In any case, this build likely works better as a lieutenant than a climactic final boss.




CR
Class
Base Attack Bonus
Fort Save
Ref Save
Will Save
Skills
Feats
Class Features


–
Plant 1
+0
+2
+0
+0
16: Bluff 2CC, Kn[arcana] 4, Kn[religion] 4, Kn[planes] 4
Iron Will
Elder Evil: ApostateEE
Flaw: Cloak of the ObyrithFC1
Flaw: Keeper of Forbidden LoreFC1

Flaws: Shaky (-2 ranged attacks), Vulnerable (-1 AC)
Blindsight 30ft
Plant traits
Plurality of Minds (no multiclassing penalties)
Potion Sap
SLAs (CL 7; 1/day - charm animal, create water, cure light wounds, cure moderate wounds, entangle, faerie fire, goodberry, light, move earth, speak with animals, speak with plants, summon nature's ally IV)
Trample
Tree Leader
Wood Speech (1 mile)
Str 30, Dex 10, Con 24, Int 14, Wis 20, Cha 16


–
Plant 2
+1
+3
+0
+0
4: Kn[arcana] 5 (+1), Kn[planes] 5 (+1), Spellcraft 2




–
Plant 3
+2
+3
+1
+1
4: Kn[religion] 6 (+2), Bluff 3 (+1CC)
Brew Potion



–
Plant 4
+3
+4
+1
+1
4: Sense Motive 2, Spellcraft 4 (+2)
Wis +1
Str 30, Dex 10, Con 24, Int 14, Wis 21, Cha 16


–
Plant 5
+3
+4
+1
+1
4: Bluff 4 (+1CC), Spellcraft 6 (+2)
Elder Evil: Chosen of EvilEE



–
Plant 6
+4
+5
+2
+2
4: Kn[religion] 8 (+2), Sense Motive 4 (+2)
Spell Focus (evil)



10
Plant 7
+5
+5
+2
+2
4: Bluff 5 (+1CC), Spellcraft 8 (+2)




11
BinderToM 1
+5
+7
+2
+4
4: Bluff 6 (+1), Craft [alchemy] 1, Spellcraft 10 (+2)
Wis +1
Soul binding (1 vestige; 1st)
Str 30, Dex 10, Con 24, Int 14, Wis 22, Cha 16


12
Ur-PriestCD 1
+5
+7
+2
+6
4: Craft [alchemy] 5 (+4)
Magical ArtisanPGtF (Brew Potion)
Ur-priest spellcasting (1st)

Required: Bluff 6, Knowledge (arcana) 5, Knowledge (religion) 8, Knowledge (the planes) 5, Spellcraft 8


13
Ur-Priest 2
+6
+7
+2
+7
4: Craft [alchemy] 9 (+4)
Elder Evil: Dark SpeechFC1
Rebuke Undead 3+Cha/day
Ur-priest spellcasting (2st)


14
Ur-Priest 3
+7
+8
+3
+7
4: Craft [alchemy] 10 (+1), Concentration 3

Ur-priest spellcasting (3rd)


15
Ur-Priest 4
+8
+8
+3
+8
4: Kn[religion] 10 (+2), Concentration 5 (+2)
Skill Focus (Craft [alchemy])
Wis +1
Divine Spell Resistance 15
Ur-priest spellcasting (4th)
Str 30, Dex 10, Con 24, Int 14, Wis 23, Cha 16


16
Master AlchemistMoF 1
+8
+8
+3
+10
4: Concentration 9 (+4)

Brew 2/day
Ur-priest spellcasting (5th)

Required: Craft (alchemy) 10, Spellcraft 10


17
Master Alchemist 2
+9
+8
+3
+11
4: Concentration 13 (+4)

Brew Potion (4th)
Ur-priest spellcasting (6th)


18
Master Alchemist 3
+9
+9
+4
+11
4: Concentration 17 (+4)
Planar TouchstonePlH
Elder Evil: Vile Natural AttackEE
Brew Potion (5th)
Ur-priest spellcasting (7th)


19
Master Alchemist 4
+10
+9
+4
+12
4: Concentration 19 (+2), Kn[religion] 12 (+2)
Wis +1
Brew Potion (6th)
Ur-priest spellcasting (8th)
Str 30, Dex 10, Con 24, Int 14, Wis 24, Cha 16


20
Master Alchemist 5
+10
+9
+4
+12
4: Concentration 20 (+1), Kn[religion] 15 (+3)

Brew 3/day
Ur-priest spellcasting (9th)




CR 11 – Spirit Tree, Binder 1

We only have 1 level over a standard Spirit Tree, so we play much as they do – a Huge bruiser with a bunch of added utility, including minor healing/divination abilities and the option to trap enemies via entangle or summoning a giant crocodile to grapple them. We are also sworn to an Elder EvilEE (Father Christmas Llymic), granting us bonus feats from a short list as we progress. We have two flaws, but only for the sake of picking up future prerequisites; if you’re okay with retraining then feel free to remove them and drop Brew Potion and Spell Focus (evil) from the build until higher levels.

On top of all that, we have DR 2/lawful from our abyssal heritor featsFC1 to make up for our below-CR Hit Dice, and ApostateEE gives us a +4 bonus on saves against divine spells. At this level we’ll mostly be binding Amon, giving us a third natural attack that deals 2d6+15 damage (plus 1d8 on a charge) – a decent addition to our two 2d6+10 slams.



CR 14 – Spirit Tree, Binder 1/Ur-Priest 3

This is where Potion Sap comes into play – it’s a (Su) ability which allows a spirit tree to spend 8 hours creating a potion of any of their spells or SLAs up to 3rd level, with the same gp cost as Brew Potion... but instead of losing XP the tree takes only Con damage.

Ur-priest has excellent synergy with this, both providing accelerated access to cleric spells and allowing them to be crafted more cheaply due to its low minimum caster levels. The Dark SpeechFC1 feat lets us take things even further by granting a free +1 CL to evil magic items; depending on interpretation this lets us reduce the base CL even more, crafting potions of 3rd level spells at CL 1 rather than CL 5 (i.e. an 80% discount, albeit one that’s not practical for all spells). We can create any item as an evil item by sacrificing prisoners as part of its creation (Book of Vile Darkness p27), which also covers some of the gp cost for us. Oh, and we have Magical ArtisanPGtF reducing our costs by another 25% on top of that.

The reason we entered as a Binder was partly because we needed a level in something with a good Will save (or a type change to Dragon or Outsider) and partly because we can bind Naberius to recover more quickly from all the Con and Cha damage we take while crafting – leaving us less vulnerable and making it more feasible to craft multiple potions in a day. The rapid healing also means we can spam Chosen of EvilEE for a +3 bonus on many types of rolls (notable uses include Strength checks, and the Knowledge [religion] check while sacrificing creatures).

While we’re a moderate threat on our own, where we really shine is as an ally to other evildoers (particularly those with the Green BondGhost feat, whom we can communicate with from long distances). The usefulness of our incredibly cheap potions is multiplied many times over when we have forces to share them with, and we can even ask them to provide us supplies and sacrifices for crafting them.



CR 20 – Spirit Tree, Binder 1/Ur-Priest 4/Master Alchemist 5

The Master Alchemist PrC allows spells of higher than 3rd level to be crafted into potions, and the wording of this ability allows it to be combined with Potion Sap. Not only do we have potions of 6th level cleric spells through ur-priest, but our access to the Spell domain (via Planar TouchstonePlH: Catalogues of Enlightenment) gives us anyspell and greater anyspell, letting us brew with 5th level spells from the wizard/sorcerer list as well.

[S]Our final Elder Evil feat is the flavorful Harvester of SoulsEE, an anti-resurrection effect which ties into both our use of sacrifices and our status as a cluster of souls merged together. Scratch that, we don’t have the BAB for it without using the fractional rules; take Vile Natural AttackEE instead. Gaining another vile feat also increases our bonus from Chosen of Evil to +4.

And of course, we’re a Huge creature with 9th level spells, so that’s always threatening.




In theory, the MindsightLoM feat would let us sense everything within 1 mile. Trying to qualify for Mindsight with our limited form of telepathy seems kind of sketchy, however. In any case we already cover some of that utility by having blindsight 30ft.
If it’s ruled that we can use the Potion Sap ability to qualify for things based on Brew Potion without needing the feat, then we free up an extra feat slot for stuff like Extraordinary ArtisanECS or Improved BindingToM. This certainly isn’t RAW, however.
Up to three levels of ur-priest could be replaced by PrCs which advance casting, if you can find anything decent to use. A level of ContemplativeCD would grant easier access to the Spell domain and free up another feat slot, but its fluff requirements might pose an obstacle.

[H_H_F_F]

And that's that! Seven Elvish Evildoers for your merriment. I've gotta say, I was a bit worried about turnout and diversity for this round, and was very glad to be proven wrong.

As a reminder, next round will be a guest-chair round.

Over to you, judges!

[Battlechaser]

Let's send Camus to the Amazon forest. Problem solved.

[FactualArcher]

Lot of cool and interesting builds. It’ll be hard to choose a people’s choice this round.

Also, I just noticed a mistake in my entry that, while not completely build destroying, is pretty bad. Ah well. I suppose it needed another round of edits.

[loky1109]

We have a Frozen tree, a Dark tower, a Collosal worm, a Hungry bush, an Ecological extremist, a Revenging ghost, and a God-fighting were-spider.

Far from everything of this was expected for elf-themed round.

[AvatarVecna]

Venerable Grey Elf (Prodigy/Spellwarped)
Wizard 5 (Elf ACFs)/Elf Paragon 3/Olin Gisir 10

A mage who devoted their life to sealing away dangerous knowledge from the past, stumbled across secrets that warped their body and mind, and drove them to see the world drowned in snow and madness.

Olin Gisir is a 3.0 elf-only lore master focused around keeping dangerous ancient knowledge from falling into the wrong hands. The history bonus it gives would've been enough for this guy to be able to hit DC 50 comfortably by the time he got 8th lvl spells, which is enough bonus for him to get suckered in by The Killing Frost Of Ghulurak. Basic villain plan:

1) Get an almost-finished ice statue set up and frosty in every major city, with three scrolls of Symbol Of Insanity on hand.

2) Get someone locked up near each statue, with restraints self-releasing on new year's eve (or whenever), and use buff spells to infect them with KFoG knowledge/geas.

3) Starting on new year's eye, pop around the world creating new statues in random places.

End result: in every major city, there pops into existence a lethally-cold storm that infects the minds of any who survive. If the sculpture at the heart of the storm is destroyed, the super-cold mile-radius part that geas's people into making more statues sticks around for another 90 years and can't really be dispelled (maybe powerful weather magic could make it go away? I don't recall, but I don't think so). Meanwhile, more bubbles of super-cold/madness are popping up around the world. The way the villain figures, even if he personally gets killed before creating a bunch of areas, he just mass-murdered most of the currently-living humanoids. And because all of the really big cities tend to be in spots that are really convenient for trade (mountain passes, river mouths, that sort of thing), that area being permafrosted for another century makes them close to unusable, which makes civilization's recovery much harder. And if he doesn't get stopped because the big-boy mages are too busy trying to keep society from fulling collapsing, then in a few hundred years the whole planet will be overtaken by the madness snow and this world will be Ghulurak's.

Scrapped for a few reasons. First, build felt like just another mage build, which I don't really like having in these. I just took a wizard, and a full casting PrC, and stuffed it full of Int bonuses. It's not that interesting on its own. Second, the length of time it takes for KFoG to actually threaten the world, along with the seriousness of that threat, means it's hard to pull off in any world with other nigh-epic/epic mages running around, so he has to settle for just killing a lot of people in one burst and crippling the economy for centuries, which was betraying the original intent behind the villain. Granted, that still requires a lot of setup and pre-planning, so still works for the requirement, but it leads into the third reason.

Namely, for this to be the villain, the bombs going off has to be the campaign failstate, so the whole campaign takes place before that. So the PCs aren't really fighting him, as much as uncovering all the prep work he's done. Finding out someone's buying up all the scrolls of symbol of insanity, tracing some missing persons, learning about Ghulurak without succumbing to his madness, getting in contact with the Olin Gisir organization to try and find out who's behind this, arranging with various cities to raid these sculpture houses all at once so that he doesn't panic and try to trigger armageddon early (like might happen if PCs tried to shut them down personally, one at a time). It's an interesting campaign, but it's one where the villain is less the BBEG and more the inciting incident, a figure in the background pulling strings that the PCs can't really mess with because this story only works if he's a nigh-epic caster prior to getting geas'd by Ghulurak, and nigh-epic casters with insane Int and capacity for long-term planning don't get murked that easy.

So the entry would've ended up either reading like the last paragraph (summarizing the cool campaign that could take place with very few actual details), or could get into the weeds (which would be a lot of effort showcasing stuff that isn't the villain himself). As the build didn't feel very inspired, and the story would either be nonexistent or require a monumental effort on my part, and as the original intention had been determined too infeasible to actually work, I decided against continuing.

[Battlechaser]

One of my idea's was a Szarkai (albino drow) sleeper agent in a major city. A dread necro/cloistered cleric /runecaster/Yathrinsee with mother csyt and a max profession (baker-patissier) who would make the most heavenly elven sweetbreads. She also was a known philantropist feeding the poor.
The plan was to use permanent runes of necrotic cyst above the dooropening that would trigger when passed thus increasing the chance of infection. One-time use runes could be written upon the sweets.
Where I live, when you go to the baker with a young kid, they always offer a sandwich for the young one. Kids have abysmal saves. So we're gaining more and more possible minions, bombs, scrying points over the generations until you reach a critical mass and then you can take over the city using necrotic tumor to keep the the useful ones and bloat/burst the others who automatically rise as zombies.

The main problem was the subterfuge part: not enough skills or abilities to bluff everybody, hide alignment or magical aura's. In a gestalt build that could be solved by adding spymaster.

[Inevitability]

Some great entries, looking forward to the judgements!

An idea I had but didn't end up submitting would've been a Baelnorn lich; elf-only liches that get Turn Undead and can create up to three projections with half their HP but full spellcasting ability per day. Go Dread Necromancer to get unlimited healing in-between projections and send them in so the PCs have to deal with three glass cannon full casters before the actual encounter even starts, then flavor the whole thing as a Christmas Carol 'spirits of christmas past/present/future' thing.

But with the benefit of hindsight, I think I'd have been stepping on Shalan's toes a lot going down that route, so I'm glad I went with something different. Also, making explicitly good creatures into villains always has some question marks surrounding it.

[loky1109]

Table finally.

# Name Alignment / Race Class Levels Chef Total Place
1 Aren Godslayer (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25948227&postcount=21) CE Were-Tangle Terror Star Elf Elf Wilderness Companion Martial Wizard 1/Divine Crusader of Ghaunadaur 2/Seeker of the Misty Isle 7/Arcane Archer 2
2 Disappointment (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25948229&postcount=22) CE Evolved Undead Keening Spirit Karsite Drow Blasphemous Incantation Cleric 8/Drow Paragon 1/Defiant 12/Lurking Terror 3
3 Camus Ci'xot (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25948230&postcount=23) CE Greenbound Forestlord Half-Elf Elf Ranger 3/Half-Elf Drow Fighter 2/Wildrunner 2/Divine Crusader of Merrshaulk 4/Arboreal Guardian 3/Seeker of the Misty Isle 4
4 Feed the Tree (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25948236&postcount=24) CE Symbiotic Dark Wood Element Spellwarped Yellow Musk Creeper // Star Elf Totemist 9/Souleater 1 // Lore Song Inspire Awe Music of Creation Bard 7/Binder 1/Lyric Thaumaturge 2/Sublime Chord 4/Spellsinger 5
5 Cestoda Cironess (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25948238&postcount=25) CE Symbiotic Century Worm // Half-Drow Dread Necromancer 1/Cloistered Cleric of Kiaransalee 3/Drow Paragon 1/Seeker of the Misty Isle 7/Yathrinshee 5
6 Shadows of the False Elder (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25948241&postcount=26) CE Tower-Merged Sun Elf Shadowcaster 7/Elf Domain Martial Wizard 1/Noctumancer 10
7 Woe Tannenbaum (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=25948243&postcount=27) CE Spirit Tree Binder 1/Ur-Priest 4/Master Alchemist 5

[H_H_F_F]

Do we have any prospective judges for this round?

[Inevitability]

Would anyone be willing to judge this round?

[NotInventedHere]

Eh, I'll toss my hat into the ring to judge the round. The Villainous Competition was the reason I finally signed up the board, I'd rather it not die from lack of judges. It'll take me a little while to whip up a full round of judgements, though, just to set expectations.

[Inevitability]

Eh, I'll toss my hat into the ring to judge the round. The Villainous Competition was the reason I finally signed up the board, I'd rather it not die from lack of judges. It'll take me a little while to whip up a full round of judgements, though, just to set expectations.

Thank you for pledging to judge!

[H_H_F_F]

Eh, I'll toss my hat into the ring to judge the round. The Villainous Competition was the reason I finally signed up the board, I'd rather it not die from lack of judges. It'll take me a little while to whip up a full round of judgements, though, just to set expectations.

Thanks a lot, NotIventedHere! Hope you enjoy judging.

[NotInventedHere]

Hey folks, sorry for the delay on this, I've had a big IRL crisis take over my life for the last couple weeks, but I've managed to carve out enough time to do a first read-through and note taking of each build, and I'm hoping to have the judgements up some time either at the end of this week or next week.

[Inevitability]

Hey folks, sorry for the delay on this, I've had a big IRL crisis take over my life for the last couple weeks, but I've managed to carve out enough time to do a first read-through and note taking of each build, and I'm hoping to have the judgements up some time either at the end of this week or next week.

No need to apologize: real life comes first! I hope you can weather the crisis - take whatever time you need and best of luck with your personal circumstances.

[H_H_F_F]

Hey folks, sorry for the delay on this, I've had a big IRL crisis take over my life for the last couple weeks, but I've managed to carve out enough time to do a first read-through and note taking of each build, and I'm hoping to have the judgements up some time either at the end of this week or next week.

It's all good! Thanks for the update, and best of luck with the IRL stuff.

[Inevitability]

How's the judgement coming along?


Also, for a possible future round, how do we feel about a supervillain theme?

Masked Menace!
-Must be capable of concealing their identity somehow, whether through illusions, polymorphing, mundane disguises, or anything else.
-Must possess and focus on the use of a single supernatural 'power' or thematically linked group of powers. A villain with fire powers is fine. A villain with gravity, attack deflection, and teleportation effects who flavors it as a single ability to fold spacetime is fine. A villain who summons demons and throws orbs of force and creates illusions and turns foes into frogs probably does not.
-Larger-than-life persona, capable of robbing banks and getting into tense standoffs with their evenly matched heroic nemesis.

[Prime32]

That has me pondering a "Master Criminal" round where you need to do something illegal and get away with it... followed by a "Master Detective" round where entrants must try to identify and arrest as many of the Master Criminals as possible. The second one could potentially be a crossover round for another contest like Iron Chef or Monster Mash.

Though going through the archives it looks like previous rounds have already had Crime Lord (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?420704) (two entries) and The Sheriff (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?642229) (five entries).

[NotInventedHere]

How's the judgement coming along?

Hi Inevitability and other folks. News is, I am continuing to have an escalatingly Bad Time IRL, sorry. :smallfrown: Still trying to sort out the judgements among all the other stuff though. No ETA at the moment.

[H_H_F_F]

Hope everything works out in the end... Best wishes!

[Battlechaser]

Same here.

[Inevitability]

Anyone other than NotInventedHere who might be able to judge?


Also, another future competition idea:

Blood War Heroes
-Must be either a Chaotic Evil outsider or a Lawful Evil outsider.
-If Lawful, must possess and showcase lawful-only classes or feats.
-If Chaotic, must possess and showcase chaotic-only classes or feats.

If this is too generic, you can add a line mandating abilities that specifically target the opposing alignment along the law/chaos axis, like being able to cast Chaos Hammer or use Smite Chaos.

[loky1109]

Round theme idea.

Reversed Clarke's third law.
It's direct form:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Reversed form should be:

Any magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology.
Task: get D&D rules and make Sci-Fi villain. He could be some known villain or just have a recognizable Sci-Fi vibe.

[Tohron]

Round theme idea.

Reversed Clarke's third law.
Task: get D&D rules and make Sci-Fi villain. He could be some known villain or just have a recognizable Sci-Fi vibe.

I've already had a villain idea floating around that would fit really well with this, so I'd definitely be interested.

[NotInventedHere]

Just to keep everyone updated, I have half the judgements done now, and the other half will be done soon. Apologies again for the delay.

[loky1109]

Bumping thread.
NotInventedHere, how is it doing?

[Battlechaser]

Bump. How do we proceed?

[Beni-Kujaku]

I will judge these entries in the following weeks. Probably will not have time before 06/08 or so, but expect something by mid-June, if InventedHere does not show sign of life.

[Inevitability]

I will judge these entries in the following weeks. Probably will not have time before 06/08 or so, but expect something by mid-June, if InventedHere does not show sign of life.

Thanks a bunch, that's great to hear!

[Battlechaser]

Thanks a lot!

[H_H_F_F]

Thanks Beni, greatly appreciated.

[FactualArcher]

Thanks Beni. I'm glad to have a judge.

[NotInventedHere]

Hi folks. I am in fact alive, although 'alive and well' is probably a stretch. It's good that we've got Beni looking to judge as well, but I have finally managed to complete my own judgements (if only by way of Beni's impending judgements spurring me to simply discard my attempt to make any sense out of the section I was stuck on).

My judging criteria should hopefully be clear enough from the judgements, but just to lay them out:
Generally, I start from a baseline of 3, and adjust up or down as necessary.
For Originality, I did my best to clear my mind of the actual builds, and came up with a quick off the top of my head list of prestige classes, ACFs, etc., that seemed like "obvious" Being Super Elf-y choices - racial substitution Elf Wizard, Seeker of the Misty Isle, Champion of Corellon Larethian, Arcane Archer, etc., and a similar quick list of "stuff we see all the time at VC". For Power, I used the standard benchmark points of 5/10/15/20 to divide up the build and evaluate how well it keeps up its power throughout different levels of the campaign. For Elegance, I should note that I've assigned a full +/- 0.5 for good sourcing; it's both my personal opinion and my experience throughout putting these judgements together that good sourcing makes a judge's work exponentially easier and that bad sourcing likewise makes the work of judging the entry unnecessarily difficult.
For Memorable Villainy in particular I've diverged from the "baseline of 3, adjust up/down" standard of the others, on the basis that somewhere in this scoring there needs to be an evaluation of whether the requirements of the round have actually been met; there are therefore up to 2 points available in Memorable Villainy for making a villain that is the correct type of villain for the round, and another 3 points available based on an entirely subjective judgement of how memorable and how villainous the entry is, and how well a hypothetical reader could actually use the villain in question as the villain of their campaign, or at least of part of their campaign.

And now, the judgements.


Aren Godslayer:
Originality:
Star Elf: unusual elf sub-race choice. +0.25.
Elf Generalist Wizard: pretty much the most expected thing possible in this particular comp. -1.
Seeker of the Misty Isle and Arcane Archer are both on my shortlist of “extremely classic elf PrCs”. -0.5.
Divine Crusader is a moderately common CharOp trick to squeeze in 9ths in fewer levels than usual, but Divine Crusader of Ghaunadaur is interesting enough to balance that out. Always nice to see obscure little deities get a resurgence. -0.
Entomanthropy is a very standard VC template to pack a lot of ECL into a small boost in CR. The Tangle Terror being an interestingly original pick to cross with and the fact that you’re actually using the Tangle Terror specifically and not just piling on the free HD helps to soften the blow, though. -0.25.

Originality total: 1.5

Power

Start of campaign: Basically N/A. Aren doesn’t really exist between CRs 1 and 7. -0

Low-mid levels: A Tangle Terror with the ability to turn into a hybrid form is basically fine, and while I’d appreciate a little more clarity on “His Wilderness Companion gives him access to Con poison”, like specifying what your animal companion actually is, you generally have access to a good array of poison options, and can harass the PCs at range for a while before hopefully making an escape while they’re tangled up in webs or slowed down by caring for their poisoned friends. +0.25

Medium-higher levels: Divine Crusader’s rapid spellcasting progression does a lot of the heavy lifting for these levels. Your spell list is extremely limited, but you’ve still got a couple of nice options for tormenting any party, Song of Discord, as you highlighted, being a particularly vicious one. +0.25

Top end: Infinite-range 9th level spells is a good note to end on. Aren’s repertoire of tricks remains limited overall, but he’s a difficult foe to deal with simply by his sheer range. +0.5

Power total: 4

Elegance:
I’m not penalising you for it, but please be aware that you’ve got a lot of typos and slightly-wrong names (“Poison Master” instead of “Master of Poisons”, sometimes the Tangle Terror is listed as “Tunnel Terror”) which just makes the entry that little bit harder to read through. -0

Your sources section is a bit of a mess. One web article comes with a link but the other one doesn’t; one of your ACFs is sourced but not others. -0.25

You don’t appear to meet the Dex 25 prerequisite for the Distant Shot epic feat. Even in hybrid form, which by my calculations gives +8 Dex, your Dexterity would still only be 23. -0.25

All your other prerequisites appear to be fine, though. Prestige classes and feats all good. +0.25

You’re crossing your settings, but not egregiously. I do also have to raise a bit of an eyebrow at a Divine Crusader who relies on domain-based spellcasting for a lot of his tricks being out to kill all the gods. Ghaunadaur is a good choice for “god who hates all the other gods so much he wants them all dead”, but it’s still a bit like a powerful dragon training and equipping a dedicated dragon-slayer. -0

Elegance total: 2.75

Memorable Villainy:
Elf-specific options? Plenty, and the synergy between Arcane Archer and Seeker of the Misty Isle is an important part of the build. +0.5
Long-term plans? Slightly dubious, in that the plans themselves aren’t particularly extended and the preparations involved are only as time-consuming as a few Craft checks. Enough to meet the round requirements, but could be longer-term. +0.25
More Than Mortal? Yes, and relevant to the build. +0.5
CE? Yes, and it’s relevant to the build. +0.5

Baseline memorable villainy: Provides a somewhat one-note challenge throughout the levels, but does consistently provide a challenge. Quite a few escape options. DMs may have to exercise a little care in ensuring that the PCs being fired upon from way outside their engagement range over and over doesn’t become frustrating rather than fun. Plot-wise, Aren is a single powerful individual rather than a leader of armies or cults, so encounter diversity may be difficult. His mission is definitely one most PCs will want to stop, and he has a couple of angles he can pursue if played intelligently, but a campaign built around Aren is mostly just going to involve chasing after him. If the PCs can actually corner him, the campaign is sort of… over? I don’t see a lot of divine casters lining up to raise the Godslayer from the dead. Still, he has enough escape tricks at most levels to make that difficult.

General baseline assessment: 2. Memorable Villainy total: 3.75

Overall Total: 12.25


Disappointment

Originality:

Drow is neither completely bargain-basement default elf, nor something deeply obscure. +0.
Drow Paragon: Not as obvious as Elf Paragon or Half-Elf Paragon, but still -0.25.
“Karsite Drow”? +1.
Keening Spirit: I love to see obscure monster templates like this dug up and brought to the VC. This is the sort of thing only the VC can facilitate. +1.
Defiant? Lurking Terror? Jeez. +0.5.

Originality Total: 5

Power:
Starting and low-mid levels: You are… a cleric with no ability to cast spells. “Nothing dangerous enough for her CR” is certainly one way of putting it, yes. Even with Magic In The Blood and Drow Paragon giving you 4 uses per day of your drow SLAs, those SLAs are still Darkness, Dancing Lights and Faerie Fire. You spend half the contest’s overall CR range having no ability to actually hurt or seriously incapacitate the PCs. You can... apply a mild debuff at close range, but only on a failed save (and only to good creatures, which some but not all PCs will be)? The best you’ve really got is a Sudden Ability Focused Blinding Vanish, and even then you’re only blinding for 1 round. Your best move in any fight is to retreat immediately, which doesn’t make for great villainy. -1
Medium-higher levels: Once you hit Keening Spirit, however, things turn around rapidly. It’s a 1/day ability… but what a 1/day. DC 23 Fortitude save in a 60ft area around you, straight-up Save-or-Die. You’re hitting a 9th-level spell effect at CR 12. And those who can make the Fortitude save to survive that are likely to have trouble with the Will save to avoid being panicked by your fear aura, which notably has no 24-hour-immunity clause. PCs with good Fortitude saves and good Will saves… are likely the divine casters the rest of your chassis is focused against.* Beware a Paladin with a ghost touch weapon, though. +0.5
(*Or they might be Monks. But if someone’s voluntarily playing a Monk, they deserve to feel useful and badass this once.)
Top end: Hide in Plain Sight is an excellent way to get into the middle of the party in order to Keening them all, although as an incorporeal undead you could also just float through the ground or walls. Ability Focus and Reverberation help keep Keening’s DC nice and high, although we are at a level where PCs having protections against Death effects is going to be a lot more common. This is the level where I’m most concerned about Disappointment not really having a lot of alternate options if your plan A fails. One fighter-type with Mind Blank, or one wizard running Veil of Undeath, or a cleric who’s divined your existence and pre-cast Mass Death Ward on their party before meeting you (which your Divine Cancellation can’t do anything to stop), and you’re spending 2d4 days in limbo. If the PCs haven’t prepared against you, though, your primary save DC is so high that you’re still a powerful threat even at the levels when spells like Wail of the Banshee are more expected. +0.5

Power total: 3

Elegance:
Your Sources section is excellently laid out. Covers all material used, provides specific page numbers instead of whole books. Exemplary sourcing. +0.5

Okay, so, here is where I have to address the other side of “Karsite Drow?”. Because, well… The reason one doesn’t see Karsite Drow is because you can’t do what you’re doing. Look, I have a lot of sympathy for “the wording of this template technically says X, so by RAW…”, but the thing is, Karsite just isn’t a template. It’s not something you apply on top of Human. Karsite is its own race. Yes, there’s a sentence in the sidebar saying that a DM might, under some personal-setting-specific circumstances “consider giving karsite abilities to half-elves or half-orcs”, but that one mechanic-less sidebar sentence does not a template make. What you’ve done is more like the Arcane Swordsage variant than like template stacking. You’ve essentially created a homebrew race. Which then makes the attempt to dodge round the CR issue a lot weaker. Either issue in a vacuum might not be penalised quite this harshly, but they compound with each other. -2

Defiant ex-cleric levels… I’m assuming you’re looking at the “These benefits are cumulative.” sentence to justify getting multiple copies of the listed benefits? That’s a technically arguable way of reading that phrase, I suppose. It falls into one of those typical CharOp “this is obviously nonsense but the poorly phrased grammar doesn’t say I can’t” areas that we’ve all used before. However, what’s not technically arguable is that you can’t be a Defiant 12. There just aren’t 12 levels of Defiant for you to take. -1
You meet all the prerequisites for your feats and prestige classes. +0.5

Elegance total: 1

Memorable Villainy:

Elf-specific options? Drow Paragon and Keening Spirit are both elf-only, and Keening Spirit is the centerpiece of the build. +0.5
Long-term plans? As far as we’re given any details of Disappointment’s plans, they do seem to be fairly wide-ranging in scope. No particular time-consuming preparations, though. +0.25
More than Mortal? Decisively so, and relevant to the build. +0.5
CE? Yes, and it’s somewhat relevant to the build. Keening Spirit and the Blasphemous Incantation ACF both require ‘evil’ alignment, although not CE specifically. +0.5

Baseline memorable villainy:
There’s not really much in your entry about Disappointment’s villainous plans. Three sentences in the CR 12 write-up that say she’s going to destroy all gods, starting with Lolth, by destroying all Lolth’s worshippers. Well… I suppose, if she’s planning to kill every single Lolth-worshipper in existence, with a 1/day short-ranged death scream as her primary weapon, that certainly is going to take a long time. I don’t think that’s quite what the contest requirements meant, though.

The thing is, as presented, this is an encounter, not a villain. Okay, so she’ll return 2d4 days after the players fight her (assuming she doesn’t TPK), but why should the players care that she’s returned? What’s she doing to pursue this goal of killing all worshippers of Lolth? Has she convinced the Athar to change from a sect of antitheist preachers and philosophers into a crusading army ready to wipe the planes clean of all non-Athar, and if so, how? You’ve got to give me something to work with here. (And if the PCs do have reason to fight Disappointment more than once, you run headlong into the issue I mentioned up in the Power section of how many ways there are at higher levels to completely shut down your one trick.)

General baseline assessment: 1. Memorable Villainy total: 2.75

Overall total: 11.75


Camus Ci'xot

Originality:

Unusual sub-race choice. +0.25
Seeker of the Misty Isle, again, on my short list of expected PrCs. (Not a single Champion of Corellon Larethian among the entries though. The inherent power of spellcasting, I suppose.) -0.25
Divine Crusader… of Merrshaulk?? Well. I’ll address that in Elegance. -0
Other PrCs are original enough to meet the elf-special-options requirement without penalty, but not shocking and unexpected enough to merit a bonus. +0

Originality total: 3

Power:
Start of campaign: The Greenbound template gives you some powerful SLAs at this point – as you note, Wall of Thorns is very effective at such a low level where its fixed numerical factors are an advantage rather than a disadvantage. I don’t think there are spaces through which you can throw daggers at a creature trapped within multiple feet of brushwood dense enough to require a DC 25 Strength check result to move through, but just locking the party down for half an hour while you go accomplish your own objective is more than enough. +0.5
Low-mid levels: As we head up towards CR 10, a multiclass ranger/fighter starts looking less impressive – this is probably Camus’ weakest set of levels, where the SLAs of Greenbound are no longer out-of-context threats and he doesn’t play all that differently from a melee-focused ranger. He has no way to consistently keep enemies flat-footed, so he gets one round of high-damage attacks if he moves into melee range in the surprise round and wins initiative so that he can full-attack in the first regular round, but after that, or if he loses the initiative against his melee target, his accuracy and damage output is unimpressive. He has no pounce or other way to apply his array of attacks except by getting tied up in melee, and he’s lightly armoured enough that he doesn’t really want to be tied up in melee now that PCs will have magical weapons that can overcome his DR. And a villain who shows up, makes a single round of attacks, and then immediately leaves, over and over, is going to get frustrating rather than cool quite quickly. +0
Medium-higher levels: That’s not actually the text of the Arboreal Guardian’s ‘Unhindered Charge’ ability – it says “When making a charge or taking the run action”. And it doesn’t change in the 3.5 update, I checked. Nevertheless, being able to run or charge through your own plant growth effect is still a major advantage, and it does still give you both some very impressive mobility and a very distinctive arena to fight in. +0.5
(You can’t, unfortunately, use this to move through your wall of thorns – the last sentence of the spell description explicitly calls out that it is not a ‘living plant’ and hence your ability that lets you ‘pass unhindered through normal inanimate living plants’ does not apply.)
Top end: Camus’s spellcasting is now both relevant and quite helpful. His melee threat still isn’t that great, even with Prehensile Tail and Multi-Weapon Rend – Arboreal Guardian and Seeker of the Misty Isle both being ¾ BAB classes keeps him from getting a 4th iterative attack – but it’s not terrible. The thing that bothers me is that making use of his multiple attacks requires him to either stay adjacent to an enemy (allowing them to hit him back on their turn) or retreat at 5-foot-step speed (allowing them to follow him also at 5-foot-step speed and still full-attack him back). He has to pick between his mobility advantage and his multi-attack advantage. This does give him flexibility, I suppose, but it feels more like a weakness than a strength. On the plus side, against any squishier PC type who’s been stupid enough to get more than a 5 foot step away from the big tanky meat-shield types while in his plant growth area, Camus can descend on them and blenderise them; it’s just that once the big tanky types are the last ones left standing, he’ll struggle. +0.25
Power total: 4.25

Elegance:

Your Sources section is basically adequate. You forgot to source the Hit-and-Run Tactics ACF, but everything else gets a book name at least. -0.

The trick you’re using to replace Two-Weapon Rend with the ELH’s Multi-Weapon Rend is interesting, and it looks like it does successfully bypass the rule on not being able to take an Epic feat before 21HD since you’re not technically actually taking the feat. However, nothing in the Special: line of Multi-Weapon Rend allows you to ignore its prerequisites, so equally technically, you don’t have the Multidexterity feat listed as a prerequisite and can’t use it (and the Multidexterity prerequisite wasn’t removed in the ELH 3.5 update, I checked). I’m not actually going to assess a penalty for this, however, because even WotC eventually recognised that having Two-Weapon Rend be an Epic feat was a stupid idea given how weak it is, and their failure to reprint Multi-Weapon Rend as a non-epic feat at the same time as they reprinted Two-Weapon Rend as a non-epic feat was pure laziness on their part. -0.

Ignoring the “extremely technically, you don’t have this feat that no longer exists in the first place” note above, you meet all the prerequisites for your prestige classes and feats. +0.5

I don’t like that you’re taking both Elf racial substitution levels and Half-Elf racial substitution levels. I think the text of the half-elf Elven Blood trait makes this technically arguably legal despite the racial substitution level rules, but it’s definitely not elegant, and it’d start an argument at at least some DMs’ tables (mine included). -0.25

So, you’re a half-elf, protecting the Spirit Wood (through a very twisted lens on what ‘protecting’ looks like, but still, protecting your own tree at the very least), who is a Divine Crusader of… Merrshaulk. The patron deity of the yuan-ti and only the yuan-ti, who hates and despises all non-yuan-ti, and barely has the energy for his yuan-ti followers, even. How? Divine Crusader doesn’t technically come with a requirement that the deity in question has to agree to your service, but “deity in question isn’t specifically murderously hateful against you” doesn’t really seem like a high bar to clear for most patron deity choices. Except this one. Were there really no other CE Plant-domain options? -0.25

(Having looked carefully through Ghostwalk, it does also appear that Merrshaulk doesn’t actually exist in the Ghostwalk setting. Not only is he not mentioned anywhere in the book, including the sections on the yuan-ti, but the two yuan-ti clerics the book details, one of whom is the Serpent Mother of all Yuan-Ti and leader of their entire civilisation, are both clerics of Orcus. He’s not explicitly mentioned as not existing, though, I suppose. -0.)

Elegance total: 3

Memorable Villainy:
Elf-specific options? Yes, and a nice broad array of them too, contributing well to the build. +0.5
Long-term plans? As a half-elf Camus doesn’t quite have the multiple centuries of lifespan of some of the other entries, but his plans do play out over the course of years. He has to physically heft a bunch of brush and trees into place and replant them to prepare the battlefield prior to a confrontation if he wants to use plant growth, which seems very time-consuming. Moreover, slowly expanding the borders of the Spirit Wood and rounding up plant minions created by his Evil Weather effect are both time-consuming parts of his plans. +0.5
More Than Mortal? Yes, thanks to the Greenbound template, and very key to the build. +0.5
CE? Yes, and relevant to the build via Divine Crusader. +0.5

Baseline memorable villainy: It takes quite a while for Camus’s true level of villainy to become apparent – he can’t actually cast Evil Weather until level 20 – but he has a good line in low-level harassment of non-elven villages, serpent-folk minions and allies, and rebuked and commanded plants, making for a reasonable diversity in adventure types and enemies to fight across a campaign. He’s still a bit of a loner personally, but he has reasons to have allies or minions, so it’s not just one guy trying to ambush the party in melee and then getting surrounded and mulched. And his overall plans, once finally uncovered, are nice and villainous, with an excellent climatic section of the devastation of the rain of nettles and the following desperate attempt by the party to cut their way through the jungle and hunt down Camus before he has the time to recover and repeat the spell. (Or they could just scry-and-die him in that vulnerable period immediately post-casting – do figure out some reason why they can’t, or he’ll go splat in a very boring fashion.)
General baseline assessment: 2 Memorable Villainy total: 4

Overall total: 14.25


Robert-Irae

Originality:
Unusual sub-race choice (well, unusual based on my pre-judging expectations, anyhow – star elves are surprisingly popular): +0.25
‘Dark wood element spellwarped yellow musk creeper’ – okay. Interesting. I’m always a sucker for a weird stack of templates. +0.5
Lyric Thaumaturge, Sublime Chord, Spellsinger – if this were a bard-focused round I’d be deeply unsurprised by the first two and interested by the third, but as it stands, none of them were particularly expected. +0.25
Symbiotic template – A way-too-common source of VC cheese. -0.5
Totemist/Soul-eater – I do like to see the less-common magic systems get their time in the sun, but the soul-eater bit is a fairly well-known combo. -0.

Originality total: 3.5

Power:
You’ve not provided the usual breakdown of CR 5, 10, 15 and 20 highlights, and only one half of the build gets a build table, so it’s difficult to evaluate your power across the levels. We have some early Bardic work, with a pre-emptive level of Binder that mostly just cuts down your caster level at this point (although Naberius does have some nice tricks for a bard). We then start in on Lyric Thaumaturge, adding some more Bard power, and then of course Sublime Chord, and finish in Spellsinger. Without tactical breakdowns I can’t really give you credit for any particularly interesting uses of those tricks except for the top-level explanations, but Sublime Chord is a classic way to let a bard keep up with other full spellcasters, and it fulfils its role adequately, if un-creatively.
Power total: 3

Elegance:

I appreciate that your sources section cites to the page number rather than just the book, which is a useful time-saver. I don’t appreciate that it leaves out an entire prestige class; Lyric Thaumaturge goes entirely un-cited. The Book of Vile Darkness’ corrupt spells are also mentioned in your one tactical write-up but go un-referenced in your Sources. -0
Mother Cyst is your 1st feat and a relatively important part of your villainous plans, so it’s disappointing that you failed to take the necessary 2 ranks of Knowledge (Religion). I’m also unclear as to why Perform (hand harp) begins at 4 ranks and then suddenly drops to 2 ranks at level 2. Indeed, leaving it at 2 gives you the necessary ranks to take Knowledge (Religion). So this error is easily corrected, but still a bit messy. -0.25

You take Melodic Casting at level 3, but continue to put skill ranks into Concentration throughout your build, eventually bringing it to 15 ranks. This doesn’t help you meet any pre-requisites, and Melodic Casting replaces Concentration with Perform for spell-casting, so I really don’t understand why you’ve done this. -0

Corrupt Arcana uses the Taint rules. I was under the impression the Taint subsystem was entirely banned, but checking the competition rules post, it appears that Taint was un-banned from round 47 onwards. It also doesn’t appear that you’ve used high levels of taint for free bonus feats, so I’ll let this pass with only a raised eyebrow for now. -0

I would appreciate it if your Stats table made clear which ability score was increased at which level, instead of simply saying ‘Level’. -0

You meet all your other feat and prestige class prerequisites. +0.25

Elegance total: 3

Memorable Villainy:

Elf-specific options? The Spellsinger prestige class requires “some measure of elven heritage, at least 1/8th elven blood”. It’s noted to be open not only to elves and half-elves but to humans with elven heritage as well. This appears to be the only (sort-of) elf-specific option in the build, and it feels like I could replace it with any full casting advancement Bard PrC. +0
Long-term plans? The infiltration of the star elves’ demiplane with controlled pawns certainly seems like time-consuming work. Summoning Ityak-Ortheel the Elf-Eater feels like one of those things that will go very quickly once it happens, but Robert-Irae don’t appear to have any idea how to go about doing so, just the name, so searching for a summoning ritual is a long-term goal, albeit not an actual long-term plan. +0.25
More Than Mortal? Yes, via the Symbiotic template. +0.5
CE? Yes, and required to be Evil thanks to Vile feats. +0.5

Baseline memorable villainy: Fundamentally this villain plays a lot like a smarter version of a yellow musk creeper, which I suppose is appropriate. There’s the opportunity for some sort of intrigue campaign here, rooting out enemy spies and unwitting pawns – but I’m constructing that opportunity on a fairly bare framework. The character is given at least some detail as a combatant. We’ve got some battle tactics, a little minion-mancy with at least one or two longer-term and more subtle options, enough for a couple of encounters or maybe a side quest arc, and then it feels like the author has remembered they’re supposed to be constructing a major villain and has just tacked on Ityak-Ortheel as an afterthought. Why are Robert-Irae a campaign-defining threat? Well, they could summon the Elf-Eater, maybe.

Don’t just gesture vaguely in the direction of some canon threat and try to make canon do your work for you. Tell me why it’s relevant, how the villain uses it, make it… you know, memorable.
General baseline assessment: 1.5 Memorable Villainy total: 2.75

Overall total: 12.25


Cestoda Cironess, the Worm that Waits

Originality:
Drow – Again, not so deeply boring a sub-race choice as to be penalised, not so out-there a sub-race choice as to pick up any bonuses. Half-drow is a bit rarer, but still kinda unexciting, sorry. +0
Symbiotic template – A way-too-common source of VC cheese. -0.5
Dread Necromancer – Okay, promising start. +0.25
Drow Paragon – Not as obvious as Elf Paragon or Half-Elf Paragon, but still -0.25.
Seeker of the Misty Isle, again, on my short list of expected PrCs. -0.25
Yathrinshee – Now this is definitely not something I was expecting at all. Good work managing to dig up a PrC obscure enough I’d never heard of it previously. +0.5

Originality total: 2.75

Power:
I should note that I appreciate the little disclaimer at the beginning of the Benchmarks section.
Start of campaign: A reasonable spell-caster set-up, particularly with some minions, and I like the note about Eyes of the Zombie. (I do wish Eyes of the Zombie itself were clearer about what the controller can do through the zombie, but that’s hardly your fault). I do want to note, however, that some of the numbers on your given tricks are extremely low; Charnel Touch, for instance, is handy as far as out-of-combat healing goes, but for an NPC, who’s much more likely to be acting on combat time-frames, it’s 1 hit point of healing per standard action. Similarly, Evil Devotion gives a form of DR that the PCs will be very unlikely to be able to bypass at this level, but it’s only a single point of DR. A single point of damage one way or the other certainly can swing a combat at these levels, but it’s not something to rely on. +0.25
Low-mid levels: Always-on Death Ward is a nice boost, as is Threnody. I’m less than confident about your ability to Dominate a century worm at this level, though; for some reason best known only to Wizards of the Coast, Dominate Vermin is a Transmutation spell, and you have nothing that boosts your save DC when casting it. With your 15 Wisdom at this point giving a final save DC of 15 and the Century Worm’s +13 Will, it has to roll a natural 1 to fail its save and be dominated. And you’ve then only got 7 minutes to use it before it gets another save, so you’ve got to bring an uncontrolled CR19 Century Worm quite close to wherever you’re enacting your evil plans and then pray it rolls a 1. Still, putting that aside, you’ve got a reasonable minion-mancy build going, which is always a plus for making good boss fights, with a few nice unique notes to it (such as Threnody). +0.25
Medium-higher levels: I’m looking at that picture on page 32 of the Fiend Folio and there is absolutely no way that thing has a skeletal system. That said – you’ve gone from “minion-mancy with some tricks” to “horrifying monster of evil” with astonishing speed and flair. Curse of the Revenancer plus Love’s Pain is a truly inspired combo. So is Mastery of the Dead combined with the yathrinshee “all your caster levels stack for the purpose of necromancy spells” ability (I’m being a little generous here in assuming that the caster level used for the Mastery of the Dead caster level check is whatever caster level was used for the spell that triggered it, but only a little.). Absorb Strength is an odd recommendation, though; you really can’t afford the Wisdom damage, which can very easily be enough to make you unable to cast any of your spells that might heal the damage. +0.5
Top end: The Symbiotic template is a real wrecking ball of power – all the strength and melee capabilities of a CR19 brute, and all the spellcasting potential of a full caster with access to 9ths, in one chassis, and then there’s the substantial CL boosts you can get from double-dipping Practiced Spellcaster with Yathrinshee and then using Consumptive Field on top. This is an easy +0.5.
Power total: 4.5

Elegance:
Your source section is distressing. Major elements of your build, like the yathrinshee prestige class, are flat-out missing from your sources section, as are spells such as Dominate Vermin that you make a key point of in your Benchmarks. Other elements, like Adoration of the Frightful, are attributed to the wrong book (it’s actually in Dragon Magic), or otherwise involved far too much hunting (please don’t cite “Bestow Curse alternate uses” to “BoVD”; give me a page number or at least a chapter, for something as vague as that). -0.5

Using Elder Evil devotion to get bonus feats is, IMO, basically equivalent to something like Flaw usage, especially in the VC; it’s just free feats. (I do appreciate the work you put in to incorporating the Elder Evil into Cestoda’s backstory, but that gets judged down below in Memorable Villainy.). I also strongly dislike that you didn’t put the bonus feats into the table; it makes it harder to keep track of what feats you have at what levels. -1

You meet the prerequisites for all of your feats and prestige classes. +0.5

Elegance total: 2

Memorable Villainy:
Elf-specific options? Yes, and Yathrinshee is the centerpiece of the build. +0.5
Long-term plans? Extraordinarily so, and with plenty of time-consuming preparations (not merely the wait for the worms to grow, but the work needed to acquire corpses and seed them in appropriate locations in the first place). +0.5
More Than Mortal? As a 40HD creature (with a +1 level adjustment, let us not forget), Cestoda’s ECL is vastly above her CR. And the Symbiotic template is extremely relevant to the build. +0.5
CE? Yes, and necessarily Evil for the Vile feats and Elder Evil servitude. +0.5

Baseline memorable villainy: Looking over the Timeline and Sample Campaign Usage sections, I am thoroughly impressed at the amount of thought that has been put into this villain. A whole campaign structure is outlined, with a variety of enemy types to fight, and a progression of plot lines. There’s drama, there’s plans for low and high level parties to foil, there’s threats to their loved ones and sudden emergences of buried monstrosities. All the elements of the build play smoothly into the villainous plots, and the villainous plots support the build. Top notch villainy.
General baseline assessment: 3 Memorable Villainy total: 5

Overall total: 14.25


Shadows of the False Elder

Originality:
Sun Elf – an extremely standard elf sub-race, possibly even more so than the PHB-standard elf in competitions since they get that lovely bonus to a Wizard’s favourite stat. -0.5
Elf Generalist Wizard – given the competition theme, exceedingly expected. -1
Shadowcaster, Noctumancer – An obscure magic system that rarely gets a chance to shine. +0.5
Tower-Merged – Ah… beg your pardon, what? … Well. Okay then. +2

Originality total: 4

Power:
I have tried and failed repeatedly to make heads or tails of how to rate this comparatively to everyone else. For the sake of ever finishing these judgements, you’re just getting a 5 for the whole “is four casters at once” business.
Power total: 5

Elegance:

Small note that I’d prefer it if your Stats table detailed ability score improvements by level rather than clumping all ability score improvements into a single column and thus requiring me to reverse-engineer your Intelligence score increases from your skill points column; it opens up more room for error. -0

Your Sources section is excellent, thorough and detailed with specific page references. The separate Spell Sources section was a little confusing at first; I do appreciate however that with the sheer volume of spells you’re throwing around, segregating them into a side table where they’re not overwhelming the main Sources table is a reasonable adjustment. +0.5

I believe you have a clash between two of your Alternate Class Feature choices. The text for Domain Wizard in Unearthed Arcana says “A domain wizard cannot also be a specialist wizard; in exchange for the versatility given up by specializing in a domain instead of an entire school, the domain wizard casts her chosen spells with increased power.”. The Generalist Wizardry feature of the Elf Wizard substitution level says “This substitution feature replaces the standard wizard’s ability to specialize in a school of magic.”. While they don’t use precisely the same templating, it certainly appears clear to me that both of these ACFs replace the wizard’s ability to specialise in a school. And it is a well established property of ACFs that once you have sacrificed a class feature, you can’t then sacrifice it again to power something else. -0.5

At CR 7 / 5th level, you gain Shadow Familiar as a bonus feat. That’s not valid: even though you’re using the Creeping Darkness trade to effectively gain two levels of shadowcaster at once, you should still gain them in the normal way; therefore, when you’re gaining the bonus feat from shadowcaster level 2, you’re not yet eligible to take Shadow Familiar with it, as that has a prerequisite of being a 3rd level shadowcaster. Furthermore, the Bonus Feats feature lists what feats you’re allowed to take with it: “The list of feats you can select includes any metamagic feat (as described in the Player’s Handbook), Favored Mystery, Greater Path Focus, Nocturnal Caster, Path Focus, Shadow Vision, and any metashadow feat.”. Shadow Familiar isn’t on that list. This is actually a bigger issue than it initially looked, as there’s really no good substitution; you don’t want to take Path Focus this early on because you don’t have access to the Dark Reflections path yet, and you don’t want to take Favoured Mystery either for similar reasons. I’m therefore assessing what would otherwise be a fairly harsh penalty amount for one feat. -0.5

On to the big question, the reverse-engineered template: excellent work here. As you noted in your explanation, you’ve erred on the side of caution, and that’s winning you a substantial extension of good faith on my part. All of the cheesy and OP aspects of the template are things WotC wrote into it, and it’s very clear that it is, indeed, a template; they simply failed to provide the full details. You've done a tricky piece of reverse engineering without breaking anything, contradicting the original examples, contradicting yourself, or spiralling off into cheese-land. Good job. +0.5

You otherwise meet necessary prerequisites, have the right number of feats and skill points, etc. +0

Elegance total: 3

Memorable Villainy:
Elf-specific options? Accepting some level of elf-specific-ness to the template (which seems reasonable), very much so, and includes other elf-specific options in the Elven Spell Lore and Elf Wizard options as well. +0.5
Long-term plans? Your long-term plans are as poorly specified and detailed as a number of the other entries, and it disappoints me somewhat, given how much work has clearly gone into the rest of the entry – not to mention that the Liquid Pain angle doesn’t work great, both in that a single dose of Liquid Pain is, per BoVD p33, only worth 3 experience points, and that Liquid Pain can only be used with magic item crafting, not with Permanency. Still, there’s at least some gesturing towards long-term plans to rebuild the tower and fill it with traps and so on, enough to meet the minimum requirements. +0.25
More Than Mortal? Yes, and very much going above and beyond the call of duty here. +0.5
CE? Yes, although it’s not used beyond Shar worship. +0.25

Baseline memorable villainy: The demonstration of the reverse-engineered template is very impressive, and there’s clearly a lot of power to go around. However, what there’s not a lot of, is information about Shalan’s villainy and his evil plans. As noted in the summary above, Liquid Pain doesn’t work with Permanency, and you can’t cast most of the good Permanency trap spells like the Symbols anyway. Still, the potential quest for the Nether Scrolls provides some sort of base to build upon, as does the fairly detailed combat tactics and spell preparation notes and the Permanency details. (No credit for the part about the Nether Scrolls being in Windsong Tower already in the form of the Quess An Teranthvar, that bit you cribbed from the published adventure.) There’s not nothing here, but there’s not enough to really make more than a brief plot hook.
General baseline assessment: 1.5 Memorable Villainy total: 3

Overall total: 15


Woe Tannenbaum

Originality:
Elf sub-race: … Spirit Tree? Well. It’s certainly unusual. +0.5
Binder – the most useable of the Tome of Magic classes, especially as a dip, but not completely obvious. +0
Ur-priest – a common power class, but not being used in anything like the standard fashion. -0.25
Master Alchemist – a very unexpected prestige class indeed. +0.5

Originality total: 3.75

Power:
Start of campaign: N/A – character doesn’t exist below CR 10. +0
Low-mid levels: Character doesn’t exist below CR 10. At CR 10, a plain spirit tree, even one with a few extra feats, isn’t all that impressive for its CR; you have a reasonable save bonus against divine save-or-dies, an extremely minimal amount of DR – 2 points is nothing at this sort of level – and a 1/day access to CR 4 animal backup. Your primary combat function at this level is indeed as a Huge bruiser, but you’re not all that great at being a Huge bruiser either. +0.25
Medium-higher levels: You are, indeed, an excellent supplier of potions. You don’t really have much else going for you, but you sure can supply potions. Or at least, a potion; one per 8 hours, and you only have one, or at CR 15 two, 3rd level slots per day in any case. +0.25
Top end: While you technically have access to 9ths, that’s only with magic item support; note that a 9th level ur-priest, which is what you’re casting as, has 0 9th level spell slots per day without bonus spells, and that your Wisdom is too low to provide a bonus 9th level spell without at least a +4 external bonus to your Wisdom score. You do have approximately the spellcasting potential of a 16th or 17th level cleric, on a high Strength and high Constitution frame, so that’s respectable enough at least. +0.25
Power total: 3.75

Elegance:

Sources list simply not present. Scattered superscripted acronyms are not an appropriate substitute for an organised Sources section. -0.5

Using two flaws and Elder Evil devotion for a ton of free feats. -2

Your class skills for your Plant HD are incorrect. Spirit Trees receive Knowledge (ghost lore), Knowledge (nature) and Knowledge (any one) as class skills (emphasis added). Keeper of Forbidden Lore makes Knowledge (planes) and Spellcraft class skills, but that still leaves you with both Knowledge (arcana) and Knowledge (religion) being taken as class skills when you can only have one. This is a significant issue, not just a matter of some slight re-juggling, since your skill points are sufficiently tight at the early levels that it affects your qualification for both Ur-Priest and potentially also Master Alchemist. -0.25

I don’t know what you’ve used as the basis for your ability scores but it certainly isn’t the standard elite array, as the contest rules require it to be. -1

You also can’t just take a “Wis +1” in the middle of your Plant HD; adjustments like that are incorporated into the base creature’s scores already, so you’re double-dipping by taking both the monster’s ability scores and an extra HD-based ability score adjustment. -0.5

Elegance total: 1

Memorable Villainy:
Elf-specific options? Well… no. And that’s not particularly surprising really - Spirit Trees have an association with elves in the Ghostwalk lore, but they simply aren’t elves mechanically, and don’t qualify for any elf-only options. This build is a nice demonstrator of the combination of Potion Sap and Master Alchemist, but it doesn’t actually fulfil the round requirements here. -1
Long-term plans? Unfortunately I can’t really judge a backstory that you didn’t manage to write. Still, ‘bring about the return of Father Lymic’ is about as much detail as some of the other entries gave, and you do do a lot of time-consuming potion-making. +0.25
More Than Mortal? It’s a tree. And not one with any kind of official Level Adjustment. +0.5
CE? Yes, and required to be Evil. +0.25

I sympathise with the difficulty of fleshing out a good backstory and flavour section in time, but I can’t judge what’s in your head, only what’s in the entry, and what’s in the entry is only the vaguest skeleton of a villain. Also, this is the elf-only round and you’re not actually an elf.
General baseline assessment: 1 Memorable Villainy total: 1

Overall total: 9.5

[Battlechaser]

Thank you for judging.

[H_H_F_F]

Thanks so much for the elaborate judgements, NotInventedHere!

[FactualArcher]

Thanks for judging. No disputes from me.

[H_H_F_F]

One dispute for our judge:


Heyo, thanks a bunch for judging! I really enjoyed your judgement, tough but fair and overall really comprehensive, that said, the Originality rankings I received bothered me a bit.

My smallest issue lies with my feats and combat style: I thought the focus on expanding dense forest and fighting with three weapons was pretty novel, but it seems like originality scores only considered class and race, not tactics and feats.

The fact that Camus is a greenbound creature isn't mentioned or rewarded, despite other builds with creative templates getting huge bonuses for it, which kind of surprised me.

I'm also flabbergasted that Arboreal Guardian didn't earn me any points: I've never seen a build use it, with good reason! It's a difficult-to-enter half-caster with a narrow racial/setting focus from a pretty obscure source. Googling to find any discussion of it gives me:
-Lists of casting-advancing or nature-themed classes where it's mentioned for completeness's sake
-The iron chef round seven years ago where it was the ingredient and exactly four people could think of legal builds with it
-This specific round of VC

It really sucks to see Arboreal Guardian get written off as 'elf-specific and not particularly unexpected' when it genuinely seems to be one of the least-known elf-only classes out there. I get that some elf-only options are pretty expected this round, but take that principle too far and it just becomes a fixed originality penalty for anyone who commits to the theme too much.


Were there really no other CE Plant-domain options?

Zuggytmoy, who's a demon lord (and seemed likely to cause issues about what did or didn't count as a deity), and a secondary Yuan-ti deity who exists only in the FR and has every problem Mershaulk has. In retrospect, perhaps I should've just splurged on Heretic of the Faith and worshipped a more elf-typical god. My only excuse is that the yuan-ti are a lot more active and agentic in Ghostwalk and have a clear singular goal, and I figured it gave me a little wiggle room to receive spells from a yuan-ti god if I'm working towards the same objective.


(You can’t, unfortunately, use this to move through your wall of thorns – the last sentence of the spell description explicitly calls out that it is not a ‘living plant’ and hence your ability that lets you ‘pass unhindered through normal inanimate living plants’ does not apply.)

Also, if you'll look at the Wall of Thorns description, it says: "Creatures with the ability to pass through overgrown areas unhindered can pass through a wall of thorns at normal speed without taking damage" in one of the later paragraphs. So it's not a living plant, but it is a nonliving object that my ability to move through living plants applies to. It took me a moment to catch that too when I first tried to figure out how the two interacted.


Once more, thank you for your judgement, there were a lot of really fair criticisms there and I'm glad that it got judged so thoroughly.