huge army help

[grimbold]

Hi, I am dming a group of 19-20th level characters in an epic attack done by the evil forces of the wilderness to take over the world.
They have had little time to prepare and are supposed to be beaten back and eventually die so we can start a campaign where there children lead a revolution against the evil demilich overlord. (quite a bit is taken from oots).

So far they have been very lucky, their magic items make their spells nigh on impossible to save against. (the sorcerer took out 20 pit fiends w/ one wail o tha banshee) and they recently took out a family of blue dragons. They dont really have to worry about spells per day because at 15th level they had a 100 day break were they made a crapload of wands and whatnot (a mistake on my part).

So now i need an army to challenge their epic might. I have tried giants but they get old fast, any suggestions?

PS. On the wail of the banshee, they characters knew it would kill all the party aside from the sorcerer if they heard it so they shot him out of a catipult and he survived 25d6 falling damage w/ 8 hp left so he could cast wail. (they buffed him with armor boosting items before hand.)

[faceroll]

Epic monsters would kill them. Just make sure you account for ALL their immunities. A rank 0 deity would kill them. A well built epic caster with well built minions would kill them.

A level 30 demilich with a few brutal epic spells, immunities to everything, and a bunch of overpowered prestige classes for most of those levels could wreck them. I would go wizard3/master specialist (abjuration) 10/initiate of the sevenfold veil 10/ incantatrix 10. This means all your buffs last all day, you can absolutely wreck them with chained greater dispel on all of them and all their gear, and after spells and template immunites, he has 7 levels of Iot7V to keep things out. Have him pimp save-or-dies and after stripping them of buffs, he just kills them. Or his minions kill them.

Use scry-or-die tactics.

Alternatively, an army of half-minotaur, half-ogre kobokoruku (dwarflike creatures from oriental adventures) shocktrooping frenzied beserkers. Just have them charged by 50 guys that each do over 9,000 damage on a hit, and they get to make lots of attacks.

Or a hulking hurler. Crush them with the moon.

[grimbold]

kk thx can you tell me what sourcebooks these come from?
I am especially interested in the deity
thankyou,
any more help?

[grimbold]

also they are on top of a wall w/ guards w/ true seeing as well as them, so they can't really be surprised. That is an issue because when they win initaitve, they win the fight in one round. The fighter/ dragon slayer has a jacked build and took out a great wyrm blue in one round, admittidely he had one crit but still it was insane.

So i need monsters w/ a good initiative modifier.

[faceroll]

www.d20srd.org has rules for deities & epic level stuff.

Use teleport. Scry & die.

You've got to stop using stuff straight out of the book. A well built CR 20+ dragon should be able to kill most of the team using full attack blood winds (spell from spell compendium) & brutal throw (feat from complete warrior). A wyrm will easily have ~40-50 strength with buffs up, and the spell and feat lets it use its claw attacks as thrown weapons, but use str to hit instead of damage.

Don't forget, Balors blow up and do a ton of damage when they die. Balors just teleporting in as a first wave to weaken the party, followed by long range artillery. There are builds that can shoot crossbows something like two miles. Even fireballs will have a quarter mile range.

You could also use the beholder mage. That is a prestige class for beholders. They give up the ability to use their eyestalks to cast up to ten spells/round as free actions which they spontaneously cast but learn as wizards do.

A beholder mage 2 (lords of madness)/ur-priest2 (complete divive)/mystic theurge 8 (dungeon masters guide)/incantatrix 3(player's guide to faerun) casts 9th level sorc/wizard spells, 9th level cleric spells, and can persist (feat from complete arcane; metamagic that makes spells last 24 hours) them for free thanks to incantatrix. I think that's CR 27, by the books, but more like CR: rocks fall, everyone dies.

To optimize going first:
Use celerity from PHB2, a spell that you cast as an immediate action and which grants you an immediate standard action to take. Totally brutal.
The spell nerveskitter gives +5 to initiative checks. The spell heroics gives you a bonus fighter feat, such as imp. initiative. The spell divine agility gives you +10 dex. These feats are found in the spell compendium. There are a couple traits you can find on the srd I linked that boost your initiative.

[edit]
Shadow pouncing shadow lords (unapproachable east) get to make a full attack at the end of whenever they teleport. You can find teleport effects as swift, move, and standard actions, which means 3 full attacks/round. Use extended wraithstrike to make your attacks touch attacks, get hide in plain sight, pump your hide skill (ridiculously easy to get a hide check in the 50s), and stack damage boosters (like getting str, dex, level and intx2 to your attacks, +sneak attack damage), and you're looking at 100s of damage per full attack. A full attack that targets flat footed touch AC. You should be able kill 3 PCs in a round before they even know they're under attack.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Hi, I am dming a group of 19-20th level characters in an epic attack done by the evil forces of the wilderness to take over the world.
They have had little time to prepare and are supposed to be beaten back and eventually die so we can start a campaign where there children lead a revolution against the evil demilich overlord. (quite a bit is taken from oots).

If they are "supposed to die", just kill them. You're the DM. When they ask how come they're dead, say "Who are you asking? You're dead."

Seriously, if you want to kill the party off so you can start a new game, just make up a creature that kills 1d4 PCs per round, no save. Have the bad guys enact a ritual that opens a rift to the Plane of Bad Stuff You Just Made Up right on their location, so that they die, no save. Open a Teleportation Circle right on top of them and attack them with a dozen 20th level sorcerer dragons.
Don't hold back or play fair if you're going to kill them.

(All this advice assumes you've decided it's totally okay to kill off all your PCs - which many other DMs or players might consider unfair or unfun.)

[grimbold]

they don't neccesarily 'have' to die but it would facilitate later campaigns. Thankyou for the advice, this be my first campaign :)

[hamishspence]

Maybe bring out some of the more interesting epic monsters?

Or make it so that whatever they're fighting can't be banished without the PC sacrificing their life in a non-resurrectable way?

If the PCs have to go out- they should go out in style though- give them a chance to shine, and any sacrifices they make should be meaningful.

An Elder Evil invading the world, which can only be banished by the Heroic Sacrifice of the PCs, is one way of doing it.

[Darkxarth]

I am going to try to keep my advice simple, using only core.

An evil Demilich overlord should probably have some powerful Undead. I suggest at least one Nightcrawler and a pair of Nightwalkers. In addition to spell-like abilities (which are ok) they have Desecrating Aura, which boosts the Demilich and any other undead, such as the Dread Wraiths they can summon. Note: Undead are immune to death effects like Wail of the Banshee.

A Black Dragon (Wyrm) would be iconically cool, if not super powerful. A half dozen Half-Fiend Storm Giants would also be an impressive sight, and with 43 Strength and a slew of spell-like abilities from the Half-Fiend template, they would be nothing to sneeze at.

Also, a Red Half-Dragon Titan is a fun creature, too. Immunity to fire means that he can drop that Meteor Swarm spell-like ability on himself, if necessary, and take no damage.

Use all of the above, in addition to whatever else you want to include (Cornugons, Mariliths, etc.) and the Demilich, of course. The great thing about these creatures is that most of them include Round-by-Round tactics if you are having difficulty running so many high-powered creatures at once. Of course, there are ways to make them much more powerful, especially by using spells from the Spell Compendium, but that is a lot of extra work for a first campaign.

Finally, the most important thing of all of the above: do NOT forget to make casters, like the Sorcerer, roll to overcome Spell Resistance on applicable spells against these monsters.

[LOTRfan]

I suggest facing them off against a giant army of Undead (the main villain for this campaign is the same Demilich, right?). Use the Unkillable Zombie template from Libris Mortis, apply it to a bunch of Humanoid races, Giants (of many varieties), and Gold Dragons. You now have an army of hundreds of thousands of Troops (each kind uses the same statistics), ready to invade whatever Kingdom the adventurers adventure in. The Kingdom only has enough time to mobilize a couple thousand soldiers, and so draft the players to the front lines.

Throw in a couple hundred Huecuvas with negative energy spells to act as both healers for the zombie hordes and damage dealers. Add a highly powerful 40th level Lieutenant (A Vampire or Mohrg or something) that grants the entire army a +5 bonus to all attacks or something.

At this point, you have a near unstoppable force that just keeps coming until a sufficient amount of players die. At that point, you say the majority of the force is destroyed and the rest are retreating. This gives your characters an epic ending (killing the Demilich's best Lieutenant and slaughtering hundreds, if not thousands of Zombies), and explains why the Demilich has not conquered the world by the time the next campaign starts up (he had to rebuild his force).

The only problem is, this would take forever to play out.

[JeminiZero]

Hi, I am dming a group of 19-20th level characters in an epic attack done by the evil forces of the wilderness to take over the world.
They have had little time to prepare and are supposed to be beaten back and eventually die so we can start a campaign where there children lead a revolution against the evil demilich overlord. (quite a bit is taken from oots).

Curious Question: If their near-epic parents couldn't stand against the Evil Forces who haven't taken over the world, what hope do the starting level Children have, against the Evil Forces who have taken over the world?

Anyway, true Epic Monsters are utterly ridiculous, especially the Abominations. The Atropal is probably the most appropriate given the undead theme of the Forces of Evil.

There are also a handful of notorious player killing machines floating around these boards made by ridiculous template stacking. The Damn Crab is one, and of course my Emerald Legion is the other.

[LOTRfan]

Is that crab qualified for all those templates??? How is any non-spellcaster supposed to beat the armor class, besides a natural 20?

[Morph Bark]

Curious Question: If their near-epic parents couldn't stand against the Evil Forces who haven't taken over the world, what hope do the starting level Children have, against the Evil Forces who have taken over the world?

Prophecies of course!

That, and Evil isn't one big happy family.