The Noctuary (D&D 3.5e, Level 20+ Adventure)

[AvatarVecna]

Yeah, D&D is a little ambiguous here. Presumably they follow a planet's rotation or sit still relative to a ship's deck, so you may be able to give a portal a frame of reference with respect to a moving body. This of course is not the same as them moving with perfect independence but I'm willing to give this interpretation credence of the purpose of the game.

*nodnod*

The magic schoolbus is just the standard endgame caster superbase, playing stronghold rules straight but with a lot of wealth. Not allowing it would be more ad hoc than I want to be. But the same is true for grabbing Leadership and building a straight Artificer companion, and the same principle applies: excepting special circumstances, the companion/stronghold should be relegated to a party support or fluff role, and the player should try to find a reason for this to be so. I don't think this should be hard for the magic schoolbus, it's basically designed to be a party support base, but just bear this in mind. Especially for the next caveat...

1) Uh oh I think you figured out what I'm going for here. I promise I'm gonna play it a bit more seriously but uh...yeah.

2) I absolutely agree, and fortunately that doesn't require a lot of changes. The thing about the bus, and really any mobile stronghold, is that's rather slow, and doesn't really have a ton of firepower. It's primary benefit is that it's close to indestructible to most standard situations. It's less a like...realworld "driving into a warzone and shooting everything" tank, and more a "I'm going to sit here soaking all the damage while my friends beat up on the bad guy" tank. It is designed for providing survivability to the passengers. The prismatic screen is hypothetically a potential weapon, since it's a SoL effect to anyone that hits the last layer (and a few of the others), but I think we can stretch RAW a teeny tiny bit to cover that. Here's a general rule about abjurations:

If an abjuration creates a barrier that keeps certain types of creatures at bay, that barrier cannot be used to push away those creatures. If you force the barrier against such a creature, you feel a discernible pressure against the barrier. If you continue to apply pressure, you end the spell.

So technically this is more meant for like...antilife sphere or magic circle against evil. Normally it would prevent entry to specific creatures, but it can be moved. But abjurations are defensive in nature, so you can't move towards a creature it would prevent entry for, and squeeze them against a wall. I think this either applies to, or can be minorly stretched to apply to, prismatic screen, such that flying into somebody doesn't provoke a number of SoDs. Anyway, the bus isn't gonna have any other weapons except maybe the ooze cannon. If you're in the bus, and you wanna do something to people outside the bus, you either already need stuff that doesn't require LoE, or you need to exit.

As for movement...the bus can teleport around a little bit, and it can move at 10 mph. Which is fast for a vehicle, but in character terms that's 88 ft/round. That's like..."a dwarf running in heavy armor" speeds. That's "monk 20" speeds. It's not awful, but it's not really great, and you can't buy it faster than that. It's not gonna go dogfighting with dragons, and at this level, I imagine most characters will have at least Fly 60 ft on their own, and possibly much better.

This is a scouting vessel, for teleporting into a dangerous area and getting a quick look around, safe in the knowledge that it takes like bare minimum 8 spells before someone has LoE on you. And it's troop transport, it can bring people to the battlefield, but it doesn't really serve as a good way to participate in a fight. It's not a tank or a fighter jet, it's...a bus. It's a very tough bus.

Also, it's big. Normal caster thing is to make a 0.5ss to save money and space, and that's 2000 Sq ft. That's like a 15 ft diameter sphere. But this is a bus. It's 40 ft long and doesn't really get on its backside. It's not gonna fit inside places that aren't specifically built for it.

The concept of orbital bombardment—once we work out details of details and logistics—would be oddly thematically consistent with the second half or third of this campaign if we ever get to that point. So I want to allow some version of this. Problems: (i) how are you getting Final Strike onto slimes without DCFS; (ii) the process is simple enough we must ask why NPCs in the world aren't using the slime air strike, and whatever excuses and limitations we think up should apply to you as well; (iii) as before, these projects should play a support role. Orbital bombardments do have a place in larger campaign-level discussions, but the player should come up with some excuse (once we satisfy (i)–(ii)) as to why they're not replacing adventuring wholesale with orbital strikes, excepting again special circumstances.[/LIST]

> How are you getting Final Strike onto slimes

Sentry Oozes aren't born, they're the result of magical experiments. It grants them intelligence, and a bunch of feat slots. Presumably, the ooze gets to choose its own feats, but control over the ooze should let you make those kinds of decisions for it.

> the process is simple enough, why NPCs don't do it

There's a number of barriers. Firstly, you either need to find a Mineral Warrior/Ochre Jelly yourself, or you need to hire someone who can. The first can be difficult to do solo, which is why I mentioned the rules where you can enlist the help of a slaver society. But buying a slave from the slave traders is something that turns some people off (and is, frankly, dangerous if you can't resist them yourself). Additionally, if you're buying from the Neogi, they're not selling you the original, they're selling you a Split clone, that way they can use it themselves, or sell more to someone else. Working with them is potentially a strategic mistake, but they make the "find an ooze" part of the plan difficult. If the one you found was already a Sentry Ooze with the right feats, great; otherwise, you've gotta do the experiments yourself and figure out how to give it the template (and then figure out how to give it the right feats). Luckily, we can split oozes off for our test subjects until we get one that works.

Secondly, deploying the oozes in any kind of reasonable manner takes a lot of space, which realistically needs a lot of money. Each ooze is taking up roughly 88 cubic feet, and you're dropping 1144 of them at a time. That's ~100000 cubic feet you need, just for the shaft. Starting the oozes high, or digging a deep hole, will be much more expensive than usual. Finally, Portals require CL 17 to craft at all, so anyone wanting to make one basically already needs the ability to write their own checks, more or less. And of those that possess that much magic, this is just one method of enacting mass destruction, and all it does is a 400 ft deep hole 15 ft in diameter. It's pretty good, but epic casters can do a lot of dumb stuff that's way better, without having to spend like 200 grand up front.

Between the required casting, the required cost, the required land, the difficulty (tedium or moral) of acquiring the original specimen, it's probable that I'm not the only one in the world doing this, but there also won't be that many of them. But if we have many epic opponents, this is something they could easily be doing too, especially if they're already Landlords.