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The Tarrasque. It looks approximately like a mammoth, if a mammoth was 70 feet long and had better armor and more weaponry than a squadron of tanks.
It's BIG, arguably the biggest creature in the Monster Manual. (Well,
arguably some dragons can get bigger. But killing dragons is a whole
nother essay.) It's a CR 20 creature all by itself, meaning a party of
20th-level adventurers stands a somewhat better than 50-50 chance of
killing it.
But what fun would there be in that? A party of 20th-level adventurers is
already the biggest team on the block! Until WotC publishes the
20+-char-level expansion, they won't even benefit from the experience
they'd get for killing it. (And it's not like the Tarrasque has pockets
to carry treasure in, so they wouldn't get any richer for it either.)
No, if you want to kill the Tarrasque for experience, you should try and
do it at as low a level as possible.
*** Level Requirements
How low a level is low enough? There's a table in the DMG that says how
much experience a party gets for defeating a monster of a given Challenge
Rating. A 13th-level party that kills the Tarrasque, for example, earns
46800 experience in the process. If you kill the Tarrasque from a level
lower than 13, the DMG doesn't list a value. Instead, it has a footnote
reading that "...If the party survived this encounter, either your players
are munchkins or you are doing something wrong. Probably both. See the
section on Assigning Ad-Hoc Experience Awards for how to handle this."
Throughout this text, then, we will assume that your average party level
is at least 13.
But wait. There's a difference between "average party level" and "level
of your characters." What if your 17th-level wizard decides to take his
9th-level little brother with him for a Tarrasque hunt? The average party
level is 13, but the party has access to ninth-level spells. How do we
deal with this sort of thing?
Well, one way to deal with it is to take advantage. Add enough
first-level characters to your party to bring the average down to 13.
The trouble is that your DM won't let you do this. Or, worse, he will let
you do it but won't count the weenies into the party average. Besides,
your first-level party members will soak up an equal share of the
experience you get. If they bring the party level down far enough, it
might still be worth it - but sharing the experience from your kill with a
bunch of first-level weenies is just morally repugnant.
I would suggest that party level be determined the same way monster
Challenge Rating is determined. Four level-13 characters are a level-13
party, right? The DMG says that, if you cut the number of monsters in
half, you decrease the CR of the encounter by 2. So, four level-13
characters should be the same as two level-15 characters or one level-17
character.
There's still some funkiness in this system: a level-17 wizard is rewarded
twice for fighting alone. The first reward comes from dropping his party
level from 17 to 13; the second reward comes when he doesn't have to split
the experience from his kill four ways. It's still interesting to think
about, though.
Anyway, we will assume throughout most of this document that your
party contains characters of at least Level 13. Actually, almost all
of our methods involve the use of +5 weapons, and you need to be
caster level 15 to make a weapon +5 with Greater Magic Weapon - but
you can still use spell scrolls to do this, and there's only a 10%
chance of failure. We'll come back to this subject at a later point.
*** Knowing Thy Enemy
Now, conceivably you could go and attack the Tarrasque without any idea of
his abilities. If you were a high enough level, you might even win. But
you'd have no way of knowing your chances ahead of time. More
importantly, there's no point in discussing methods for killing the
Tarrasque if you don't know what it can regenerate from. So, throughout
this document, we'll assume that your character has near-perfect knowledge
of the Tarrasque. Explaining how your character acquired this knowledge
is left as an exercise for the reader - though we do note that the
Tarrasque's spell resistance does not protect it from divination.
Tarrasque has a nasty set of special abilities. Fortunately,
most of his abilities are defensive in nature: he's really hard to kill
but doesn't have much of an attack. His abilities are as follows:
Size: 70ft by 50ft
Damage Reduction 25/+5
Spell Resistance 32
HP: 840 (Hit Dice: 48)
AC 35
Attack damage: 4d8+17, 1d10+8, 1d10+8, 1d12+8, 1d12+8, 3d8+8.
All attacks have at least +52 to-hit. You can forget about armor.
Stats: STR 45, DEX 16, CON 35, INT 3, WIS 14, CHA 14
Saves: Fort +38, Ref +29, Will +20
Regeneration 40/round
Indestructible: Tarrasque can regenerate from all forms of damage. In
order to kill him, you must reduce him to -30HP and cast Wish or
Miracle over his remains.
Imposing Presence DC 20 (when Tarrasque attacks, enemies make Will saves
or are Shaken)
Anti-Magic Carapace: Tarrasque's natural armor reflects magic, sometimes
onto the caster.
Rush: Once per minute, the Tarrasque can move at "a speed of 150 feet."
Is that the total it moves in a round, or its base speed?
Spot: Tarrasque has +21 to Spot checks, with an additional +8 to spot
invisible creatures. Invisibility will not protect you.
Listen: Tarrasque also has +21 to Listen checks. Don't try to sneak up
on him unless you're very, very good.
Fire Immunity
Poison Immunity
Disease Immunity
All of these except for Imposing Presence are extraordinary abilities.
*** Wish and Miracle
One of these abilities is particularly worthy of note: Tarrasque can't be
permanently killed unless you cast Wish or Miracle over his remains.
Since you're not a level-17 caster, you're not going to be able to
naturally cast either of these spells.
You can buy a spell scroll of one of these spells for 28825gp. (As an
exercise in munchkinning, you might try to convince your DM that using
Miracle to finish the Tarrasque doesn't count as a "major request", so it
shouldn't require an XP cost. This will save you 25000gp if it works.)
But any such spell scroll will have caster level 17. If you, as a
13th-level caster, try to use that scroll, you have a 20% chance of the
scroll being wasted. (If you're very unlucky, the spell might suffer a
mishap instead of just fizzling. This causes random effects in proportion
with the spell's power. You should try to avoid this.) As your caster
level drops, the chance of failure increases.
But you might not need a spell scroll at all. There's a magic item called
a Ring of Three Wishes that costs 97950gp. After three uses it becomes
nonmagical, so it seems reasonable to assume that you could buy a Ring
with only one wish left for one-third of that, or 32650gp. Anyone can use
a Ring, so you wouldn't need a caster level at all for this.
We will occasionally revisit this topic as we discuss different techniques
for killing the Tarrasque. But, for most of the techniques described
below, you should expect to pay at least 30000gp to finish the Tarrasque
off.
*** Evaluation
Some of the suggestions we'll make in this Guide are things that,
according to the Rules and to common sense, would actually work. Some of
them are not. Everything we suggest is rated at the end according to the
following criteria:
Cost (in gp) - a 13th-level character has about 110000gp in wealth, so
we'll take this as an upper limit on what one character can spend.
Level required - 13 is optimal. Note that a lot of things get easier for
a level-15 character, as he can cast Greater Magic Weapon
naturally rather than buy spell scrolls of it.
Time required - If the Tarrasque is heading for the capital city, you
need a method that works _now_, not in three weeks.
Experience gained - the most important aspect of any plan, right?
Sensibility - does it actually make sense that you could do this, or is it
a loophole in the rules?
Legality - do the rules explicitly state that you can do this, or is it
just something that it seems like you could do?
Re: Tarrasque killing challenge!
