Bloodwar Musing: attack of the Bloodfiends

[Jowgen]

Fiend Folio (originally CotSC) features the Blood Fiend, a type of vampiric undead that strangely enough still gets categoried as a Demon in relevant sources, despite no longer being an outsider or having the chaotic subtype.

Now these boys got very little love in the books. Dragon 359's Demonomicon article mentions them as something that might actually become a naturally spawning species of Demon in the future, but that's about it.

They have slightly tweaked Vampire type powers (none of the weaknesses or auto-res stuff), though its spawn ability only works on Evil Outsiders. Any evil outsider, not just Demon despite the flavour text suggesting otherwise.

They strike me as heavily unbalanced in terms of their war potential in the blood war context.

I'd like to get some thoughts on my musings.

What we got

You are Orcus. You have a small number of loyal Bloodfiends.

They are the standard model, 12 HD undead bruisers with a slew of hefty resistances and self-healing options, 4 natural claw attacks that energy drain, at will Gaseous Form and Teleport without Error, and most importnatly: a Create Spawn ability that works on ANY Evil Outsider.

You equip them with standard anti-divination tools, put them on a boat and send them up the Styx with orders to make their way into Baator. Between their gaseous form, alternate form, +17 to stealth skills, and Dominate Monster abilities, they make pretty darn efficient infiltrators. Lets say 3 make it in.

Your 3 Bloodfiends scatter and hide via greater teleport as soon as they get onto Baator.

Their orders: use Guerillia tactics to prey on low level Devils. Anything up to Pain Devil is fair game.

Each Devil killed by one of their Energy Drains will rise as a Chaotic Evil 12 HD Blood Fiend.

Lets assume these Spawns are NOT under the Spawner's control, as the ability doesn't spell it out in this case. When each victim rises 1d4 days later, it will still go out hunting for new Devils to feed on, although not nessecarily as carefully.

The question now is, how far does the scourge of ravenous Bloodfiends spread through the 9 Hells before Baator mounts an effective countermeasure?

How can they guarantee that they'll be able to get them all, particularly your main 3, as to prevent... more waves?


Now as a note, all this assumes you are sending in bog-standard 12 HD Blood Fiends onto this mission, so for added fun, lets say you had liberal access to Feat Shuffling and could thus customise your Blood Fiend Guerrilias... your BFGs?

[Arcane_Secrets]

I'm not quite sure how coordinated you envision Perdition as being, but wouldn't whoever rules the layers eventually start locking down the ingress and egress points and prevent nobody, except for the higherups who are far beyond the limits that you provided, from getting into or out of a layer? So for a time it'd probably really slow them down although I'd be hard-pressed to try and put numbers to this.

I'm also not sure if they could guarantee getting them all, but they'd probably change their procedures at borders accordingly if they don't already do things like this: station guards with mind blank and constructs that can't be dominated, force everyone to go through an antimagic field with lots of guards on both sides so the instant someone detects as blood fiend they get killed, et cetera.

[Jowgen]

I'm not quite sure how coordinated you envision Perdition as being, but wouldn't whoever rules the layers eventually start locking down the ingress and egress points and prevent nobody, except for the higherups who are far beyond the limits that you provided, from getting into or out of a layer? So for a time it'd probably really slow them down although I'd be hard-pressed to try and put numbers to this.

I'm also not sure if they could guarantee getting them all, but they'd probably change their procedures at borders accordingly if they don't already do things like this: station guards with mind blank and constructs that can't be dominated, force everyone to go through an antimagic field with lots of guards on both sides so the instant someone detects as blood fiend they get killed, et cetera.

Once you're on Baator, teleport is perfectly sufficient for moving between layers; meaning you can move between Arc-devil juristictions, which is bound to throw a wrench in any attempt at coordinated response to your campaign of terror.

Also, I actually made getting into Baator in the first place sound waaay harder than it actually is. Trying to secure a whole plane is a logistical impossibility.

Even excluding plain of plane shift, there is the Styx (though how it interacts with Undead is never quite spelled out afaik), the gate town connecting to the Outlands, the Fires of Dis incantation... so many options.

The only reason Blood War troupe movement is commonly done via natural portals is that when you're dealing in enternal large scale warfare numbers, cost efficiency becomes a priority. The BFG insurgency doesn't need to concern itself with that.