Defending the Den-Tucker's Experiment

[Kaveman26]

Defending The Den:

I am in the process of doing some Third Act Over-Hauling for my Necromancer’s campaign. Having recently saw a few different threads relating to Tucker’s Kobolds and having been on the receiving end of a Tucker’s themed experiment I proposed the following concept. To give me a bit of a breather to catch up we are going to do the following.

All material from PF-PRD is fair game
Six Level 1 Kobold PC’s
14 As written Kobold NPC’s
4 Dire Rats NPC’s
1 Level 3 Kobold “Champion” NPC
1 Level 4 Kobold “Chief” NPC
5,000 in resources
15 point buy for stats
100,000 square foot “warren”
Must be below ground and may be of any naturally occuring material or worked stone

The six of us PC Kobolds have been tasked by our tribe to make the home warren a safe haven that will repel or kill invaders. To this end the Chief has empowered us to keep the warren safe by any means we are capable of.

We will face off against Adventuring Parties (5 PC’s pulled from NPC Codex) starting from level 1 and moving up until we can’t defeat any more. Each time we complete a challenge the warren is reset. So if we kill a level 3 party and lose 5 scrub tribe members they are considered returned to us when we combat the level 4 party.

The goal is simple…how high of a party can we kill or force to flee from our home.

A few restrictions:

Any trap that involves some sort of “trigger” will cost a minimum of 100 gold to create

Things like a pit trap are “free”. If we cover the pit trap the breaking of the cover is considered a “trigger”. Uncovered pit traps etc are free and unlimited. Nothing deeper than 30 feet is permitted.

Thoughts?

Predictions on how high we can kill?

[Demidos]

Some key considerations--

Do the higher level parties see the fate of the lower level groups, and how paranoid are they?
Do the traps reset between encounters/how much downtime do you have, and

A giant concealed hammer from the wall that pushes them into a 30 ft pit trap could deal with parties up to 4th level, no sweat.

On the other hand, Magic Missile is an easily available and terrifying spell against kobolds, since it will always hit and will steadily cut down on the available kobold minions at higher levels. Healing is a must-have if the opponents attack often.

Having read about the exploits of your parties....9th?

Edit: Totally forgot -- alchemy is of the utmost importance! Using alchemy you can make alchemical poisons, tanglefoot bags, sovereign glue.....

Buy aboleth mucus if you want the DM to cry helplessly. Expect to only be able to use it once.

Look up "Shax's handy haversack". The stuff in that guide is very useful to this situation.

[Kaveman26]

Some key considerations--

Do the higher level parties see the fate of the lower level groups, and how paranoid are they?
Do the traps reset between encounters/how much downtime do you have, and

A giant concealed hammer from the wall that pushes them into a 30 ft pit trap could deal with parties up to 4th level, no sweat.

On the other hand, Magic Missile is an easily available and terrifying spell against kobolds, since it will always hit and will steadily cut down on the available kobold minions at higher levels. Healing is a must-have if the opponents attack often.

Having read about the exploits of your parties....9th?

Edit: Totally forgot -- alchemy is of the utmost importance! Using alchemy you can make alchemical poisons, tanglefoot bags, sovereign glue.....

Buy aboleth mucus if you want the DM to cry helplessly. Expect to only be able to use it once.

Look up "Shax's handy haversack". The stuff in that guide is very useful to this situation.

Each progressive party of higher level has no preknowledge of low level groups fate.

We reset all traps and resources with each encounter.

Magic missile will be scary and a nasty problem.

In terms of downtime it will be functionally unlimited.

[Kami2awa]

Uncertain if this works, but does magic missile auto-hit things with a flat miss chance eg invisible opponents or those with concealment? Because that's not hard to get.

Edit: yep, total concealment affects magic missile, so you can simply get some smokesticks.

[Demidos]

Thunder stones will impart a 20% ASF chance and prevent enemy coordination.

[The Glyphstone]

Will the enemy tactics be optimized forum-brain-style, or played as the stereotypical party of tank/rogue/healbot/evoker blaster?

[NowhereMan583]

There's probably a lot you can do with the simple fact that kobolds are, like, three feet tall. Make all of your ceilings three feet six inches high -- see how well humans and elves and whatnot can fight back while crawling on hands and knees. Exacerbate this by giving a bunch of your kobold NPCs the "Suck in Your Gut" trait and making the tunnels even smaller.

All pit traps should contain some creature liable to eat anyone that falls in -- whether that's a low-level summon trigger or some beast you rounded up in the wilderness.

Poison everything. Not just poison darts -- when the enemy NPCs stop to rest (as they should if your warren is sufficiently dangerous & you reset the traps behind them), sneak into their camp, poison the rations, empty any bottles of antidote they happened to bring (pour it into a waterskin so you can use it later, just in case), and fill those bottles with more poison. [EDIT: or, if you're worried they'll catch on and use that poison against you, just fill them with kobold urine.]

Hidden passages behind the walls with arrow slits.

Make sure all the floors are sufficiently poorly-maintained to qualify as difficult terrain (except in the aforementioned hidden passages, naturally). After all, your kobolds shouldn't be engaging the enemy in anything resembling a stand-up fight, so it shouldn't be a problem for you.

[Socksy]

There's probably a lot you can do with the simple fact that kobolds are, like, three feet tall. Make all of your ceilings three feet six inches high

They're between two and 2.5 feet tall, so lower them even more to bother halflings and gnomes!

Also, isn't there a pretty cheap magic item that does nothing but protect against Magic Missile?
In fact, doesn't the first-level spell shield do that?

[Tvtyrant]

Covering a pit with branches costs 100GP?

More seriously, you could easily make the kobold caves have locking doors. Enter a tunnel filled with caltrops, door shuts behind and ahead of you. Oxygen runs out on a few minutes. Having rolling boulders pushed by hand is basically free and lethal, as is covering the floors of certain hallways with reed mats which catch fire, blinding, choking and burning the intruders.

[NowhereMan583]

More seriously, you could easily make the kobold caves have locking doors. Enter a tunnel filled with caltrops, door shuts behind and ahead of you. Oxygen runs out on a few minutes. Having rolling boulders pushed by hand is basically free and lethal, as is covering the floors of certain hallways with reed mats which catch fire, blinding, choking and burning the intruders.

Or combine the two -- have the kobold kitchen on the bottom level, and set it up so it vents into an upper-level hallway with locking doors. When the adventurers are in that hallway, lock the doors, and throw something on the fire that produces lots of smoke.

And if they try to climb down the "chimney" to stop you, then you have dinner delivered straight to your cookfire.

Oh, and always go after the adventurers' gear. Kit out some of your kobolds for stealth, and have them steal stuff from the adventurers whenever they get the chance. And, of course, never forget to salvage stuff off of dead adventurers. Potions, magic weapons, ammunition, adventuring gear, tools, skin, bones, the tasty bits...

[Mabn]

play with water. It's free, and having to go through a tunnel of water and enter through a barricadeable trap door to get some place or having a stone tunnel with a dirt ceiling set up to suddenly turn to mud are pricelessly horrible.

edit : and to comment on pit traps, there is really no reason to have anything else, put 9 foot long, 5 foot wide, 30 feet deep pits with 2 foot wide 3 foot tall 4 foot long passages between them. The kobolds can have a series of 13ft wooden brides that let them treat the whole place like a normal hallway, but when the adventurers look ready to climb up to a given passageway the kobolds can stop shooting at them through the opening, run across the next bridge, and take the bridge away.

edit edit: and affix metal spikes to the bottom of the passageways in parallel lines that the bridges sheath over so crawling through them is extra fun. You should have spikes at the bottom of the pits too, but that's pretty typical.

[daremetoidareyo]

play with water. It's free, and having to go through a tunnel of water and enter through a barricadeable trap door to get some place or having a stone tunnel with a dirt ceiling set up to suddenly turn to mud are pricelessly horrible.

edit : and to comment on pit traps, there is really no reason to have anything else, put 9 foot long, 5 foot wide, 30 feet deep pits with 2 foot wide 3 foot tall 4 foot long passages between them. The kobolds can have a series of 13ft wooden brides that let them treat the whole place like a normal hallway, but when the adventurers look ready to climb up to a given passageway the kobolds can stop shooting at them through the opening, run across the next bridge, and take the bridge away.

edit edit: and affix metal spikes to the bottom of the passageways in parallel lines that the bridges sheath over so crawling through them is extra fun. You should have spikes at the bottom of the pits too, but that's pretty typical.

A series of eyehooks put into the walls across from each other can be lined with string. It is typically kept slack, but a lead string on each island can be to be yanked and tied. Halfway across the gap, a PC that tries to jump or fly needs to cut the string or slow down and move around it. In this way you confound the first solution the PCs will try to do.

Need a way to defend against proportionate wildshaping halfling druids...

[Mabn]

A series of eyehooks put into the walls across from each other can be lined with string. It is typically kept slack, but a lead string on each island can be to be yanked and tied. Halfway across the gap, a PC that tries to jump or fly needs to cut the string or slow down and move around it. In this way you confound the first solution the PCs will try to do.

Need a way to defend against proportionate wildshaping halfling druids...

considering the ceiling of the tunnel is level with the ceiling of the passageway, even if a small sized creature could jump 9 feet they would concuss themselves and fall. Still, equiping the kobold on potshot duty with a javelin they could shove back dedicated jumpers with is wise. wildshaping, and anything else that can fly or climb seamless greased stone walls effectively will nullify the strategy, so it is best combined with other methods. The eyehooks seem like they would make climbing easier, but on that theme you could have a weighted net with hooks across the center of the way to the pit that is tied up to the far entrance and fastened to the ceiling that could be released to drape down and have the ceiling be a series of wooden boards mostly cut through at the line the net is fastened across so that when any weight is put on said net the boards all snap and they and the hooked net carry whatever latched onto them down to the bottom of the pit. The 500 pounds of rock above said boards would be held up by a separate sheet of taught fabric so the net board could be on a hair trigger and the rocks could be released separately.

[goto124]

Uh...

did we account for reasonable ways for the adventurers to get out alive?

Or do we assume they'll find their own way out?

Or are we trying to kill them?

[Kaveman26]

Will the enemy tactics be optimized forum-brain-style, or played as the stereotypical party of tank/rogue/healbot/evoker blaster?

Enemies will be played traditionally and not "forumed" up

We are aiming to kill or force a retreat. We are also largely trying to prevent retreat

[Traab]

Honestly, shrinking the tunnels down all by itself should be all you really need to do. Only specific races would have any reasonable ability to traverse these areas at all. No human warrior is going to be useful if he has to spend the entire adventure fighting on his knees to be able to shuffle his way through the low ceilings. Assuming they arent short enough to force a full scale baby crawl posture. On the other hand, there probably ARE adventure races that can manage the short tunnels, and larger areas to work with means more room for extra traps and ambush locations. :p

For amusing and random trap ideas. Create a number of pointless (to you) tunnels. Put them on a fairly steep upslope and leave copious sign of kobolds using the area. When they get halfway up the tunnel, the door behind them is slammed shut and locked from the outside, at which time an indiana jones style boulder drops at the top of the tunnel. Just small enough to fit in the tunnel without getting caught, too big to dodge around in any way. Locked door keeps them from escaping and they get smashed.

Pit traps with water and a large slab of something heavy dropped on top once they fall in. Drowned.

Lots of strings for rogues to spot and "disarm" They dont attach to any trap, they are tied to a bell a couple tunnels over so when they get cut or otherwise moved, the kobolds are warned that its time to activate the actual triggers for whatever traps you like.

[NowhereMan583]

Create a number of pointless (to you) tunnels. Put them on a fairly steep upslope and leave copious sign of kobolds using the area. When they get halfway up the tunnel, the door behind them is slammed shut and locked from the outside...

I feel like you could pretty much just stop here. Use doors made of sturdy material, and instead of a lock that can be picked, just lower a bar or roll a big rock in front of it on your side.

Easily combined with ideas earlier in the thread, and possibly with inhalation poison.

You could do the same thing with your pit traps -- once the adventurers are in, cover the opening with a big rock and leave them there. Just for fun, have your shaman (I assume your kobld tribe has at least one magic-user) cast grease on the walls a few times so they can't get back out.

EDIT: Oh, and since you'll have money out the wazoo once you've salvaged the possessions of the first few adventuring parties, consider hiring some mercenaries to do the dirty work.

[Traab]

I feel like you could pretty much just stop here. Use doors made of sturdy material, and instead of a lock that can be picked, just lower a bar or roll a big rock in front of it on your side.

Easily combined with ideas earlier in the thread, and possibly with inhalation poison.

You could do the same thing with your pit traps -- once the adventurers are in, cover the opening with a big rock and leave them there. Just for fun, have your shaman (I assume your kobld tribe has at least one magic-user) cast grease on the walls a few times so they can't get back out.

EDIT: Oh, and since you'll have money out the wazoo once you've salvaged the possessions of the first few adventuring parties, consider hiring some mercenaries to do the dirty work.

Or, instead of covering the opening of the pit trap with a rock, drop a rock into the trap itself. You could get a fairly massive rockfall setup to crush your enemy party while they are busy dealing with the gelatinous cube or whatever is in your pit. A multi stage trap like that would be really good at finishing off lucky or tougher than normal players. And yeah, the idea of looting the ever increasing in level adventure party could work well. Though do kobolds do business with merchants and mercenary guilds like that?

[icefractal]

Every time I see this thread, I keep read it as "Defending the [Den-Tuckers] Experiment", as in an experiment named after two people.

"Yes, of course now the possibility that the test would create a Pun-Pun event is obvious. At the time they performed it though, there was no indication that testing form-altering magic on an ordinary Kobold would be dangerous in any way. If we held all arcane experiments to such a standard, we'd still be using the archaic formula for Haste that took years off your life!"

[/tangent]

[Surpriser]

Are you allowed to change the warren layout and traps for higher-leveled parties? Or do you have to set up a single layout used in all encounters.
Also: What is the target of the adventurers? Do they want to reach a certain room? Clear out all kobolds? Commit suicide in a creative way?

I guess the most trouble will be made by small (or smaller) adventurers and summons. Anything at least medium can be blocked off from using your tunnels (unless they lead into a deathtrap anyway).

[Kaveman26]

Our DM is still tweaking some details on how he will run the adventure parties fairly. We are looking at a few scenarios.

1. They are the average murder hobos looking for kills and loot who will probably turn tail and flee when things get choppy.

2. We have a macguffin somewhere in the warren they want and we can't give away.

3. They want revenge and are looking to wipe out the tribe.

Worth noting. We are creating one warren for levels 1-3, then update for 4-6 (if we make it) and then update for 7-9.

We don't get too keep loot from our kills for further parties. We can scavenge from the dead or present members attacking us

Our resources go back to square 1 after each "wave"

[Surpriser]

The first three waves should be easy, you could win simply by superiority in numbers.
Depending on how your DM actually runs the adventurers, you could use these to test various ideas and strategies. If you feel that the higher waves will learn (on purpose or unconsciously) from the earlier ones, place a series of covered pit traps and swarm the survivors.

I highly recommend building your lvl 3 and 4 NPCs as spellcasters, if you are allowed to influence that. Illusions, grease, invisibility and so on will be extremely helpful (more so than direct damage spells, the numbers are against you with these). The same goes for the 6 PC kobolds.

Pit traps are a lot more dangerous, if there is fog all around them, or an invisible wall on the other side. Alternate between illusions of floors over pit traps and illusions of floors over actual floors to confuse attackers and force them to spend resources (on the other hand, since pit traps are free, litter the whole warren with pits and have your kobolds move only via easily removable wooden planks).
Remember that you get a save vs illusions only if you interact with them - so don't give them a reason to interact with your illusory walls until it is too late.

[Ionbound]

What about digging out a killing ground? Like, after crawling through the tunnels, the adventurers come to a 11x10 room or something with kobolds on 10-foot-high platforms with bows. You get enough guys in there and they might be perforated in the first round or two.

[DireSickFish]

With your group I'm predicting they last till level 7 minimum. And I wouldn't be surprised if they make it past that. If the big one is proof of anything its that your players know how to dig in and fortify.

[Mabn]

I just realized, your warren can be made of any naturally occurring substance and resets after an encounter. You could easily make most of it out of coal, build a bunker, and kill everything with fire.

[LudicSavant]

A rather big factor is going to be how smart and optimized the adventurers are. For some players, Tucker's Kobolds is the expected norm. For others, the idea of tactics more complex than walking up to a thing and hitting it is shocking. The difference this makes can be pretty vast.

For example:

I just realized, your warren can be made of any naturally occurring substance and resets after an encounter. You could easily make most of it out of coal, build a bunker, and kill everything with fire.

If you're with a group of adventurers who is used to using tactics and strategy, they may well put Fire Resistance on themselves (or buff themselves with temporary hp or some other defense) and then set the place on fire themselves.

[NowhereMan583]

Though do kobolds do business with merchants and mercenary guilds like that?

PC kobolds probably do.

What about digging out a killing ground? Like, after crawling through the tunnels, the adventurers come to a 11x10 room or something with kobolds on 10-foot-high platforms with bows. You get enough guys in there and they might be perforated in the first round or two.

Or don't bother with a separate room and just put murder holes in all the ceilings. Especially the ones above pit traps.

[Ajmes]

I would say focus on ways to force the party to split, and then use all the previously recommended ideas. They would be unable to help each other, which considering their specialized skillsets, would make their deaths a lot more likely from traps. Due to the way the game works, or most games in fact, 1 person by themselves is almost always weak, while many together are much stronger. 1 Adventurer against a dozen+ Kobolds is dead, unless maybe they're a high level caster.

While they're crawling, murderholes for spears are good from the side, but you could also have some kind of object above that is essentially a sturdy metal spike attached to a very heavy weight, so when they're crawling, it would drive a spike down upon them with immense force, sort of like a heavy crossbow effect, punching through them.

Low ceilings and cramped spaces in general are great, as well as the pit traps, boulders, falling rocks, water, etc. As far as the big room at the end idea, make sure there is enough range so that you have multiple turns to fire with your bows. You could also have a long hallway that is a gradual climb covered in difficult terrain and caltrops, with locking doors behind, but also an alchemic glue trap, to root people in place. Instead of a boulder at the top, have a Ballista. For any shooting position make sure there is cover for you, and none for them, and have some kind of air flow in the room designed to suck out smoke or mist, so cover can't be created with items or magic.

Have the corridors that run the length of the entire area be only accessible from secret doors that are in the end of the warren, so you would have to be dead for them to access them, and that's even if they found them.

Does Silence allow a save if cast on an object as a radius ability? If not, then have 2 cleric kobolds that stay in the corridors running along the length of the warren's trap gauntlet have silence cast on themselves, and follow the PCs. Prevents communication, prevents spellcasting to deal with anything/survive, etc.

You could also find a way to include an element near the end, that if not overcome, essentially forces the party to do most of it over again.

Another excellent thing you could do which is free, is a highly complex maze, which would be even better if you could split the party, since only someone with specialized skills could hope to overcome something, and an inability to communicate would make it even tougher. No matter how high level you are, unless you're immortal/construct/undead, everyone starves to death, or dies of dehydration.

Finally, the most bastardly thing I can think of, which might not even be allowed because it involves real world knowledge, is infection. If you had a kobold-waste bucket, combined it with dried blood, urine, iron rust, and putrified organs from the dead, and you coated some arrows or spears in that, and then had a highly complex maze, every single PC will die horribly in a few days, and will become extremely sick after around 1 day. In fact, there are a lot of real world things that are exploitable if you had the knowledge. I've often wanted to make my own such experiment similar in concept to this one, but more of a 'if you were a really smart person from our real world in dnd, what could you do?'.

[MrStabby]

I more direct use of Kobald's waste is to use it with compost to create carbon dioxide to flood the tunnels with. Create an area of tunnel lower than the surrounding areas and open the taps to vent the gas in. Adventurers would have no warning from sight, sound or smell.

With the narrow tunnels you have less volume to fill and you make it harder for the adventurers to back out. An nice silence spell to stop the adventurers using wind spells to clear the tunnels is an added bonus.

As they just about back out you can try flushing them through with boiling water the other way. How much water could you boil with 50 GP of wood?

[NowhereMan583]

As they just about back out you can try flushing them through with boiling water the other way. How much water could you boil with 50 GP of wood?

Forget "boiling" -- the warren resets, right? Build it so it runs under a large body of water. Give the warren a secret back exit. If things get bad, retreat out the back and trigger a trap that opens a door under the lake that floods the dungeon.

If that skirts too close to abusing the "reset" rule, build it between a lake and a large underground cavern so you can set up a separate trigger to drain the place.

Bonus points for stocking the lake with dangerous aquatic creatures in case the NPCs have water breathing.