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| 5 |
 Originally Posted by Tumbawadi, Kraadir Shaman-King
Yet again my vision showed me the darkness that's about to consume our lands, my children. The corruptors are already making their move as I speak: plotting, gathering, building, maneuvering their pawns. Their kind is the craftiest and most deceitful, so keep your eyes, your ears, your mind, open and keened. The enemy's greatest strongholds are the souls of those they subvert, so make sure that the words you speak, thoughts you contemplate in, and deeds you act on, are none but yours.
As our forefathers did, we must keep the Ordughan safely away from their hands, lest the others fall.
At this point, Adzorok is a novice special operations agent with: 1. massive subterfuge via skills, telepathic communication, incorporeality, malevolence, and ethereal travel, 2. unparalleled information dump via skills, malevolence+bluff, and Lore, and 3. solid scouting via skills, urban tracking, and ethereal travel. She can also stow things away by using Ghostly Grasp to put them on her person, even letting her "hide" them in the ethereal plane.
She prefers to avoid combat, which is easy when you are nigh untouchable. Still, she has Energy Drain for 2 negative levels per touch, and Malevolence for control and minionmancy. In fact, the combination of Malevolence, Energy Drain, Drain Touch, and enough supply of living creatures enables a steady source of wight minions.Spoiler: Main Trick 1: Wight Flock
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Step 1: Use Energy Drain to kill someone, turning its corpse into a wight (call it W1) that isn't under control.
Step 2: Use Drain Touch to bring W1 to 0 Wisdom, so that Malevolence now has a 90% success rate against it.
Step 3: Slay another humanoid while possessing W1, which will trigger Create Spawn. The new wight (call it W2) is now under W1's control.
Step 4: As W1, "Transfer control" by ordering W2 to completely obey the ghost that will come out of "your body", as though that ghost is W1.
Great! Now Adzorok has a wight spawn completely under her control. Repeat steps 3-4 as needed to increase W1's "flock".
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| 10 |
Originally Posted by Chief Vanguard Polyanna Creed of Saltport City
We went from being one of the most peaceful major cities to having these series of jailbreaks, thefts, kidnappings, and murders within a span of a year...of the high profile variety, no less! Oh, what a glorious time to be alive!
I want these criminals discovered, found, and tried, and all stolen cargos back to the merchant ships. A-SAP, of course, or it will be your neck in the noose! I'm telling you, this city is just an unsolved murder or two away from enforcing a witch-hunt that our allied cities have already done to find their mystery criminals!
Get all your cronies to work on this, and, I dunno, feel free to hire specialists that are actually competent enough to do your job. I'm not even paid enough to deal with this kind of crap.
Mindsight for 20ft. is invaluable in her espionage. Raven Urban Companion is a great addition, as it more or less doubles up her good skillmonkeying, provides a body to possess for situationally more superior espionage than being in ghost form, and is an easily availablde/replaceable (24hrs, no XP loss) source of living body for 1st-generation-wight* creation, and is a decent meat shield (3/4 her HP) chassis for utilizing Wild Shape (see below).
Adzorok also gets MoMF and Wild Shape to greatly increase her versatility (Small to Large Animal/Humanoid/Giant/M.Humanoid up to 8HD). These make blending in, gathering information, and scouting easier. Unlike cookie cutter MoMFs, Adzorok combines her Wild Shape with her ghostly abilities and takes them to new heights.Spoiler: Main Trick 2: Malevolent Shape
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After using Malevolence on a creature, use Wild Shape to transform its body. Furthermore, if the possessed creature is an ally, Adzorok can exit the body to let the creature control their own Wild Shaped selves while she gets her full complement of actions for doing something else.
So, what are its most obvious uses for Adzorok?
- This gives another layer of defense that keeps her combat-viable if needed. Possessing a high HP creature (such as her raven) is the optimal choice for this.
- This can be used to take advantage of the possessed creature's type/subtype and retained abilities, such as undead immunities, or her wight's Create Spawn and Energy Drain automatic abilities (provided that the new form still has a Slam attack).
- This gives an easy means of disguise for things such as covert insertion or retrieval of other creatures. Who would suspect an eagle or two? Or a nondecript possessed commoner with a generic mule (wild-shaped wight)?
- This can direct blame/suspicion of hostility towards an unsuspecting possessed creature, giving more subtlety to her operations.
- This gives her a "nova" strategy for creating her "flock", which is a specialized party of Wild-Shaped allies. Possess an ally (such as her wights), use wild shape, and then exit the body; repeat as necessary. So now, instead of having a single powerful Wild Shaped body via MoMF, Adzorok can have up to four powerful Wild Shaped body at the same time. The downside is any fragility of possessed creatures, which means this will be more useful in situations where either the possessed creatures have high HP, taking damage won't be an issue, or Adzorok will try to quickly take out the opposition before it can retaliate.
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| 15 |
Originally Posted by Sky-Captain Ieupolt, Greenrose 127th Fleet
Just when I thought we've finally managed to capture Baron Chebyshev, an important pillar of our community, he managed to escape and jump off our ship! I've heard rumours about prominent people even in distant kingdoms acting very strangely as of late and all sorts of wild conspiracy theories trying to make sense of such phenomenon, but it doesn't even take a bright man to realize there's nothing but death falling hundreds of feet down. We've recovered four of the seven amulets he's stolen from the Royal Vault, but it appears he's managed to keep the rest from us.
If that wasn't unsettling enough, we've seen a disturbingly increasing amount of ravens heading northwards for a few days now. I've honestly no idea when it started, exactly, but when you see scores of them, and then eventually hundreds, you start paying attention. Our chief navigator, as do most of us here, took it as an ill omen of sorts by the time the sages in our ship number them to at least a thousand, and decided to steer off their direction. Just the thought that the late Baron heading on the same direction not being mere coincidence sends shivers down my spine...
On her own, Adzorok now has Alertness even without her Urban Companion, her Malevolence improves, her specialty skills linearly improve, and her Wild Shape exponentially increases versatility by adding Extraordinary Abilities and allowing Tiny to Huge Animal/Humanoid/Giant/M.Humanoid/Fey/Vermin/Aberration/Plant/Ooze forms of up to 13HD. The sheer surge of Wild Shape options and the 11/day limit increase also directly improve her Malevolent Shape trick.
Most importantly, however, the Adzorok flock becomes fully realized at last on the high point of the build (Level 15). So, what is the Adzorok flock, you ask? It's an unkindness of innumerable ravens blotting out the sun, all at her master's disposal, to be sent on any mission where the flock's specialty will be needed.Spoiler: Main Trick 3: the Adzorok flock
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Step 1: Use the Malevolent Shape trick on raven, turning it into a Black Pudding with the Split(Ex) ability.
Step 2: Have the body take slashing/piercing damage, to Split into two duplicates of itself except with half HP. Do note that due to how Malevolence works, the HP halved isn't Adzorok's, it's her raven's. Since these are duplicates of the original, there will now exist two "Half-HP Raven being possessed by Adzorok, and currently being Wild Shaped for X hours into a Black Pudding", which means there will also be two Adzoroks that can leave each raven's body (although the Wild Shape form to Black Pudding remains until X hours passes).
Step 3: Each Adzorok kills its half-HP raven (possibly by repeating Step 2 until the latest generation of raven dies) and gets a new full-HP raven after 24hrs.
That's it--a means to exponentially multiply Adzorok without harming her own health, using easily replaceable raven urban companions as "hosts". Unlike her initial multiperson Malevolent Shape nova, each individual of the Adzorok flock is now rocking 13d12s, each is a master of many forms with full complement of daily abilities, and each is a ghost capable of using energy-drain/malevolence/ability-damage. Adzorok basically becomes an entire spy network and special operations division for her master.
Also if you are into this sort of thing, the Adzorok flock officially sets the record of gathering as much rangers as possible, decisively beating this one.
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| 20 |
Originally Posted by Archivist Xu'Lian, last Grandkeeper of the Dawnguard Imperial Bibliotheke
"The light of day brings people new hope", so I've often read, and so have the elders taught me centuries ago. What, then, does this eternal darkness mean?
We paid scant thought to the unfound rumours and the ancient prophecies, laughed at the ramblings of the mad sages, ignored all terrible omens, and paid no heed to the warnings of even our most learned monks.
Is it any surprise, that apocalypse struck us in the blink of an eye? Wars ignited in all corners of the world, the oldest alliances and friendships were broken in bids for power, massive armies of heaven and hell and earth plowed through bloody fields and ruined cities, and iron fists of tyrants tightened their grip on lands where anarchy doesn't reign. Our mightiest heroes remain scattered on multiple fronts, each with their own battles against these threats--or this singular threat, as many such heroes postulated. Even the countless ravens that filled the sky swoop down to feast on our fallen, their shapes constantly changing into terrible and grotesque forms.
The addition of Combat Reflexes and Robilar's Gambit will further improve the flock's combat capability, and using Malevolent Shape even negates one the "Gambit" part of the feat. Energy Drain from Ghost or Wight (using Morphic Weapon to create a slam attack), which is actually retained while Wild Shaped, can even be combined with these feats to have AoOs grant negative levels.
Most importantly, Multimorphs means the flock can change their shape as often as they like to further increase their flexibility. The Adzorok flock finishes on a high note with a +14 BAB, which is just a +1 lower than straight-classed average-BAB characters, +14/+11/+4 saves, and 18d12s. |
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Re: Villainous Competition X: Henchman are Villains too
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