Optimization Showcase in the Playground: Ghost Riding the Whip

[Piggy Knowles]

INTRODUCTION
With more than a decade and a half of toying around with 3.5, I’ve accumulated a lot of spare builds and ideas. Even when I don't have an active game going, I still like to pop open my builds folder and try to refine things. Recently I decided to make a dedicated effort to flesh out some of these builds into full write-ups, and reached out to some friends in the CO community who might be interested in doing the same. In the spirit of Tempest Stormwind’s Weekly Optimization Showcase (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?), I thought I’d showcase the end results here.

The goal is (usually) not to show off any fancy new TO trick, but to showcase effective, playable builds and spur discussion. While each of us has a different build philosophy, in general the intent is to create something that can be played in most groups from level 1 to level 20. Again, the goal is discussion, so feel free to discuss the build, talk about other options, make suggestions or tear it all to shreds. Also, feel free to use anything showcased here in any of your campaigns—and let us know how they work out if you do!

Right now the group consists of myself, the Viscount, Akal Saris, Venger, WhamBamSam, Darrin and daremetoidareyou.. Typically one of us writes up the build concept and possibly a stub, the others share feedback on Discord or in some of the shared documents we have, and together we refine things until we’re happy with the final product.

For this showcase, we’ll have a bit of a departure from our usual builds: Ghost Riding the Whip!

Ghost Riding the Whip
Because why bother leaving the house unless you can ride in style?

BACKGROUND
I mentioned a couple of showcases ago that one of the abilities we’ve looked at longingly as the basis for a full build many times is the planar bard ACF, portal dissonance. The ability to use bardic music to completely redirect portals, breaches and other similar passages is so tantalizing in its potential, but when you sit down and think about how a build based around it would actually play at a real table, it starts to break down. Still, it’s something that is just so cool that we couldn’t help but return to it again and again, never quite coming up with a build we liked but still endlessly discussing it.

We came up with a lot of interesting things you could do when thinking with portals, including some odd suggestions involving bison, and there’s a lot of fun to be had with this ability if you’re the kind of person who likes thinking outside the box, but as far as everyday usage goes one of the more practical uses was as a method of transportation. If you take a hyper-mobile character designed to be able to get anywhere and add in the ability to easily create portals and redirect them to new destinations, you can turn a curious and situational class feature into full party travel.

Of course, for this to work, you’d need the party to have constant access to a portal on THEIR end, so that you can get somewhere and bring them along. And since we’re talking about traveling in style, why not go one step further and create a mobile stronghold, an impenetrable vehicle full of magic portals to let the party adventure and retreat as needed? And why not give that mobile stronghold an artificial intelligence, high level powers of its own and the ability to move independently?

Yeah, er, we might have gotten a bit carried away with this one. This showcase is going to be a little different from the others as a result. There are definitely some controversial build elements in this one, especially the usage of a feat that is banned at many tables. We tried to use it in a way that was more interesting than OMGBROKEN, but reader be warned: you’re going to see the dreaded L word (Leadership) in this build. Might want to click the back button now.

THE BASICS

• Race: Human or azurin. You need the feat and you need to qualify for Able Learner, so it’s got to be one or the other. This build has a lot of skills it would love to invest in, so the extra skill rank certainly won’t go amiss, but you could certainly argue that an extra point of essentia you have from level one is worth more than the extra 23 skill points you’ll get over the course of 20 levels. Meanwhile, your cohort will be best served as a necropolitan kalashtar.
• Build Stub: Bard 6/Totemist 2/Sublime Chord 2/Soulcaster 10, while your cohort is a straight psion.
• ACFs: Planar bard, lore song, mimicking song, inspire awe. Your cohort will take the psychic knowledge seer ACF from the Mind’s Eye articles.
• Alignment: Any non-lawful, non-good.

Because this build is a bit different from most, it’s actually going to require three build tables (though I’ll only do level-by-level notes for the “main” build). That’s because it is essentially three separate elements: the scout, the ship and the AI:

1. THE SCOUT. The scout is focused on getting into and out of more or less any situation unnoticed and then transporting the remainder of the party there as needed. The scout also has the tools needed to make the ship and the AI work. In an actual game, this will be the main character you’d play.

2. THE SHIP. A mobile stronghold capable of protecting and transporting the party anywhere. Not really a character on its own, but with the way stronghold rules work in 3.5 it essentially has to be built like one, which is why it’s getting its own table.

3. THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. A ship is fun and all, but to really crank things up a notch, you’ve got to give it a serious AI. After all, imagine how boring Knight Rider would have been without KITT. The AI is the intelligence that inhabits the ship. Mechanically this is represented by using Undead Leadership and the haunt shift spell to convert the scout’s undead cohort into a haunting presence. This means that it will be a bodiless entity that “haunts” the stronghold, able to animate it or periodically manifest but innately tied to the ship itself.

Ghost Riding the Whip

THE SCOUT

Level	Class	Feats	Class Features	Spells Known	Notes (Click to Expand)
1st	Bard 1	Able Learner, Darkstalker	Bardic music, lore song, mimicking song, fascinate, inspire awe	Detect magic, mage hand, daze, light	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Bard really isn’t a bad pick for a scout/stealth-focused character, getting a decent number of skill points and most of the relevant skills, plus spells to augment. Your class features should similarly help; lore song provides a quick but sizable bonus to a skill check as needed, mimicking song gives you the opportunity to boost your move silently check, fascinate can help you distract foes and inspire awe is a quick and easy debuff that scales well thanks to the perform-based DC.
2nd	Bard 2			Prestidigitation, swift invisibility, grease	Spoiler: Build Notes Show 1st-level spells come on here. You won’t have multiple uses of these a day yet, but swift invisibility is a nice way to get out of harm’s way quickly when needed and grease almost never goes amiss.
3rd	Totemist 1	Incarnum Spellshaping	Wild empathy		Spoiler: Build Notes Show A quick jump into totemist here. Totemists make fantastic scouts, giving you early access to powerful abilities like teleportation and great ways to boost stealth or perception skills. Just a single level means you can enjoy a +6 competence bonus to hide and move silently, while also adding in at-will teleportation, darkvision, similar bonuses to search, spot or listen, etc. And, of course, that’s not all that you can do with a level of totemist. I’d like to highlight wild empathy in particular, which is surprisingly good for you thanks to your Charisma focus, especially since beast tamer circlet and unicorn horn’s bonuses stack.
4th	Totemist 2		Totem chakra bind (+1 soulmeld capacity)		Spoiler: Build Notes Show Totemist 2 is as fantastic as ever, giving you a great (and unique) chakra bind, an extra meld and point of essentia and the ability to increase the essentia cap on whatever if bound to your totem chakra. The totem chakra actually opens up a ton of offensive options (mostly in the form of natural attacks, but also some nice ranged attacks such as the manticore belt and some at-will debuffs or save-or-sucks), and has some nice benefits on the utility side as well, such as making your teleportation into a move action, flight or a limited form of scent.
5th	Bard 3		Planar inspiration	Ghost sound, silent image	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Back into bard. A new 1st-level spell means you can nab silent image, which is great for causing distractions, providing a place to hide, bluffing battlefield control and just general trickery.
6th	Bard 4	Undead Leadership		Alter self, silence	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Uh-oh, we’ve done it now: Undead Leadership is no less broken than the standard variety, even if it’s *slightly* more limited in scope. Here you’re mostly using it to to power your eventual stronghold, as the cohort will form your ship’s AI and your followers can help set up and maintain things. I won’t spend too much time talking about it here, but see the section on the AI for more details on what exactly you’ll be attempting to recruit for a cohort. 2nd-level spells also come online here. Alter self is practically a must-have, and is perfect for any sort of infiltrator both for its disguise abilities and its access to alternative movement like flight and swim speeds, while silence is both useful for stealth purposes and a potent anti-spellcaster tool. Just remember that YOU need to make noise to cast, too...
7th	Bard 5			Improvisation, glitterdust	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Another bard level means more spells, so hurray! Glitterdust is, well, glitterdust, useful as a big area save-or-suck but also for its intended purpose of sussing out hidden foes (especially when combined with some of the alternative senses granted by your totemist melds). Improvisation is a fantastic skill booster all around and one of my favorite bard spells.
8th	Bard 6		Portal dissonance		Spoiler: Build Notes Show Even though the build eventually evolved in a very different direction, portal dissonance was the start of all of this. The ability to use your bardic music to redirect portals is thematic and fascinating and really opens things up tactically in fun ways. At its most basic, enjoy essentially turning things like bags of holding or psychoportive shelters into ring gates. It can provide some interesting and reliable full party transport at a fairly low level, where you sneak, teleport or fly around and set up quick little mini-gates to then ferry along the rest of the party, but that’s hardly all you can do. Like the portal gun or ring gates themselves, it’s also something that rewards sideways thinking. Check out the “Now You’re Thinking With Portals!” section for more on this.
9th	Soulcaster 1	Landlord	Arcane investment 1	Portal well, glibness, gaseous form	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Another broken feat alert! Landlord might not be QUITE as broken as Leadership, but then again, maybe it is. It provides an absurd amount of funding to be poured into a stronghold space (from 25k to 200k per level), plus provides you with matching funds for any other improvements you provide beyond this. Again, this can get out of hand really really quickly, so feel free to scale this up or down in a way that’s appropriate for your campaign. The important thing is that you’ll want to set up a small base of operations that you apply lots of mobility enhancements to. Whether you go for the TARDIS or KITT or Howl’s moving castle is up to you. For your class, go ahead and jump into soulcaster so that you can progress both your totemist goodies and your casting. Speaking of, 3rd-level spells come online, so go ahead and grab glibness and gaseous form. Even without fully investing in bluff, glibness should let you lie your pants off without much effort, while gaseous form is yet another way for you to escape from harm or get into places that you shouldn’t. You also get another 2nd, for which I like portal well. It’s on theme and gives you yet another way to screw around with portals, this time by creating an extradimensional space WITHIN the portal. It’s flavorful and fun, so why not?
10th	Soulcaster 2			Tiny hut	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Tiny hut is a fun little spell for creating one-way concealment in a decently sized area. It’s not as innocuous as invisibility sphere, since the hut itself will be visible, but it’s still quite handy both in and out of battle.
11th	Sublime Chord 1		Bardic lore, bardic music	Ruin delver’s fortune, celerity, enervation, haunt shift	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Are you surprised to see sublime chord here? As always it’s a huge no-brainer for most bardic builds, letting you dramatically jumpstart your spellcasting. Immediately go ahead and pick up some excellent get out of jail free cards in ruin delver’s fortune and celerity, as well as a nice strong debuff in enervation. Haunt shift is a little bit odder. It’s going to be the key to turning your ride from a boring old Pontiac trans am into KITT: by turning your undead cohort into a haunting presence, you can essentially let it serve as the unbodied intelligence inside your ride. While it will mean your undead buddy will no longer have a body, it can still move things around and eventually even animate the whole stronghold. Plus, if you’ve been following our advice, your cohort will be a psion capable of doing quite a lot with just mental actions. Honestly you don’t really even need this as a spell known, since you’ll very rarely cast it, so a scroll would easily suffice… but I put it on the spell list anyhow to highlight it. If you do go the scroll route, feel free to swap it out.
12th	Sublime Chord 2	Open Lesser Chakra (shoulders)	Song of arcane power	Assay spell resistance, shadowfade	Spoiler: Build Notes Show You mostly want to spend your bardic music on portal dissonance, but song of arcane power is quite strong as well. As for spells, shadowfade lets you create a portal to the plane of shadow. In addition to being easy planar travel, it’s also a great target for your portal dissonance, as its duration and size makes it a lot more convenient than climbing in and out of bags of holding. For your feat, Open Lesser Chakra may feel like a waste considering that you’ll get the shoulders chakra from your soulcaster levels eventually, but it’s in my opinion the second-best chakra available to the totemist, and it’s worth getting it earlier. There are two absolutely incredible shoulders binds for you: the shadow mantle (creating a big globe of impenetrable darkness that follows you around, and providing you blindsight within that globe) and the phase cloak (letting you turn ethereal every single time you move, which is insanely good and something I’ve written volumes about in the past). Those two aren’t your only options, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find better ones.
13th	Soulcaster 3		Chakra binds (crown, feet, hands)	Disintegrate	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Call me old-fashioned, but I do love me a good disintegrate spell. I know direct damage is usually a loser’s game, but this one is strong for the level and has a ton of utility as well, thanks to its ability to just obliterate objects and large chunks of terrain. Oh, and you also get your least chakra binds finally! If your DM is of the opinion that the Open Chakra feats provide you with an extra bind (a hotly contested question), this is actually relevant, since it means you’ll have a spare binding that needs to be used on something. The totemist has some surprisingly strong options in these binds, though. If you’re having trouble choosing, you can’t go wrong with the shedu crown for telepathy.
14th	Soulcaster 4			Greater dispel magic, irresistible dance	Spoiler: Build Notes Show You get a couple of bargain spells here, taking full advantage of the sublime chord’s ability to learn spells at the bard level if lower. Reap those rewards with a 5th-level greater dispel and early access to the no save, just dance irresistible dance.
15th	Soulcaster 5	Melodic Casting		Plane shift	Spoiler: Build Notes Show You can hardly call yourself a proper portal bard if you’re stuck on one plane, can you? Plane shift is another double duty spell, as it can serve as a pretty potent save-or-die in addition to providing the utility of literally walking across planes. Melodic Casting is mostly here to make sure you can maintain your portal dissonance while casting.
16th	Soulcaster 6			Scry location, ruby ray of reversal, stun ray	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Some nice spells here. Your AI can do some very potent scrying of its own, but I’m a fan of scry location as well because it requires no saving throw, just a caster level check to scry virtually anywhere. This makes it much more difficult to block. Ruby ray of reversal is mostly just picked because it’s so fun to say is just an all-around “undo” spell, letting you spring traps, unravel chains, eliminate BFC, reverse polymorph or petrification effects or drill large holes through force effects. Finally stun ray does what it says on the tin, letting you zap your foes’ actions away.
17th	Soulcaster 7		Arcane investment 2	Polymorph any object	Spoiler: Build Notes Show All the brokenness of polymorph, dialed up to 11: PAO is one of the absolute best spells in 3.5 for a reason.
18th	Soulcaster 8	Double Chakra (totem)	Chakra bind (arms, brow, shoulders)	Bestow greater curse, antimagic ray, blackfire	Spoiler: Build Notes Show You get a trio of excellent spells, and finally unlock your arms and brow binds. There are a couple of decent options, but you likely won’t use any of them. Why? Because you took Double Chakra here, allowing you to nab two totem chakra binds at once.
19th	Soulcaster 9			Gate	Spoiler: Build Notes Show I usually don’t go gate because it’s a bit harder to effectively use without straight breaking the game (as compared to, say, shapechange, which is always absurdly good but also something you can easily keep in check based on the forms you choose), but there’s no way a portal-obsessed planar traveler wouldn’t take it at the first possible opportunity. Play nice and don’t make your DM or the rest of the party hate you.
20th	Soulcaster 10		Magical distillation	Limited wish, avascular mass, genesis	Spoiler: Build Notes Show You close out with three more spells, including the ultimate capstone for someone of your predilections: the ability to create your own demiplane via genesis. Will it necessarily come up in combat most days? No, but I just couldn’t resist...

Spoiler: Spells known

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1- Swift invisibility, grease, silent image, improvisation
2- Alter self, silence, glitterdust, portal well
3- Glibness, gaseous form, tiny hut
4- Ruin delver’s fortune, celerity, enervation, assay spell resistance
5- Haunt shift, shadowfade, greater dispel magic, scry location
6- Disintegrate, irresistible dance, ruby ray of reversal, bestow greater curse
7- Plane shift, stun ray, antimagic ray, limited wish
8- Polymorph any object, blackfire, avascular mass
9- Gate, genesis

Spoiler: Stat Suggestions

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You’re a bit MAD, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. Charisma is your primary stat, but you’ll also want Dexterity and Constitution reasonably high, and Intelligence for more skills wouldn’t go amiss either. But don’t despair - since Strength and Wisdom are easily dumped, even with a moderate point buy, you should be able to do just fine.

SAMPLE STAT ARRAYS (before racial adjustments):
Str 8 / Dex 14 / Con 14 / Int 12 / Wis 10 / Cha 16
Str 8 / Dex 14 / Con 16 / Int 12 / Wis 10 / Cha 16

Spoiler: Skills Notes

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You’re a human with Able Learner, a positive Intelligence and quite a few skill points to spend. Perform of course should be kept high (it doesn’t need to be maxed, but you’ll want to get to the point where you have a +19 bonus so that you autosucceed on your portal dissonance checks). Sublime chord has some hefty requirements but they shouldn’t be too hard to hit, leaving you plenty of room to focus on stealth and perception skills. I’d probably invest any leftovers into UMD, though a smattering of knowledge skills wouldn’t go amiss either. (Remember that you’ll need at least a rank in religion for Undead Leadership.)

Spoiler: Equipment Recommendations

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Your requirements are a bit different than the standard bard or the standard sneak. As you don’t focus on inspire courage and aren’t likely to muck about in melee, a lot of typical bard items don’t apply. And with your totemist levels able to give you huge competence bonuses to your stealth, a lot of the typical sneak items aren’t really worth it either - for example, it’ll generally be more efficient to shape a hide/MS-boosting soulmeld than to purchase shadow and silent moves armor right up until you can afford the greater version.

Other than that, boost your Charisma as high as possible, get things that make you better at spotting threats or expand your casting, grab yourself an essentia helm and a collar of umbral metamorphosis and while you’re at it, trick your character out with as many bags of holding as you can find. Like Hayley says, you can never have enough. You also have a big moving fortress that teleports around, so um, don’t be afraid to think big when you’re looking at items, and remember that the Landlord feat’s fund matching means that it’s often cheaper for you to apply permanent magical effects to your stronghold than to buy a personal item with the same effect.

THE SHIP

While the ship could be any vehicle from an airship to a mobile siege engine, making it a stronghold allows it to double as a serious, near-impenetrable base of operations. Landlord provides a significant amount of funds to dedicate to your stronghold, while your followers provide an easy source of labor to assist you in its construction and protection. In fact, the Landlord feat alone is significant enough to provide almost 100% of the funds needed to create the ideal stronghold - you will hardly need to dip into your WBL at all. On those rare instances you do, Landlord also provides matching funds, meaning you buy these enhancements at half cost.

Stronghold Builder’s Guide is the go-to source for information on strongholds. While most people think of strongholds as big immobile fortresses, there are quite a few options to make them walk, fly, burrow through the ground and even teleport or move across the planes. While strongholds can be incredibly expensive, their prices are based on the size and number of rooms. Making a simple stronghold that is only a single “stronghold space” (basically a single room up to a maximum of 20’x20’x10’, the size of a small cottage) makes many of the changes downright cheap. Since you wouldn’t want to go much bigger than this regardless, this is perfect.

While there are a LOT of options for how to customize the perfect stronghold space, we’ve gone ahead and written up our own suggestions, listing the funds provided by the Landlord feat and our suggested modifications at each level, as well as any additional funds you may need to contribute. (For those who follow the IC builds, I’m basically cribbing this straight from my “The Professor” build from Hoardstealer, where I essentially attempted to make a TARDIS via Landlord. I’m also borrowing heavily from what little we know of sofawall’s “The Cube.” If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!)

Spoiler: Level by level suggestions

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Level	Landlord funds	Extra required funds	Upgrade
9	25,000gp	N/A	Fancy smithy (3000gp), surrounded by three-foot hewn stone (6000gp), three feet of packed earth (250gp) and three inches of iron (6000gp), lined with lead (1000gp). Add an iron door with an amazing lock (650gp) and improved arcane lock (205gp). An engraved circle of protection (7500gp) permanently provides the stronghold with the effects of a magic circle spell (choose the alignment that best fits your party).
10	25,000gp	500gp	Crawling mobility feature (1000gp) at incredible speed (25000gp) will give your stronghold the ability to move overland at a rate of 10 miles/hour.
11	25,000gp	N/A	Flying (15000gp) and burrowing (10000gp) give you two new modes of travel.
12	25,000gp	N/A	Magically treat the walls of the stronghold to double their hardness and HP (12000gp). Ethereal solid will block ethereal travelers from bypassing the walls (12000gp).
13	50,000gp	N/A	The stronghold can greater teleport 1/day (50000gp).
14	50,000gp	N/A	The stronghold can plane shift 1/day (25000gp). The veil of obscurity (25000gp) allows it to be disguised as though by a mirage arcana spell.
15	50,000gp	N/A	Add magically treated adamantine walls (42000gp) to the outside of the stronghold. Add a hall of speech (4500gp), which gives all occupants the ability to understand any written or spoken language. Add three invisible helpers (4500gp) to cover all mundane tasks and generally provide party support.
16	50,000gp	N/A	Greater teleport an additional time per day (50000gp).
17	100,000gp	10,000gp	Two prismatic screens (120000gp) provide two of the stronghold’s walls with a daily refreshing prismatic wall effect.
18	100,000gp	10,000gp	Two more prismatic screens (120000gp) let you cover two more walls.
19	100,000gp	10,000gp	And two more prismatic screens (120000gp) means you are now protected on all 6 sides.
20	200,000gp	N/A	Six freestanding walls of force (16000gp) further enclose the stronghold. Improved magic warding (50000gp) provide all occupants with SR 32. The fog veil (22500gp) allows you to surround your stronghold with solid fog when desired. Add another use of greater teleport (50000gp) and two more uses of plane shift (50000gp). Spend your remaining 11.5k on the world’s fanciest paint job.

THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The core trick to imbue the stronghold with an artificial intelligence is to take an undead cohort and cast haunt shift, having it haunt the stronghold. Haunting presences are interesting. They are always aware of their surroundings, seeing and hearing everything within 60’. They lack a body (even an incorporeal one), and cannot be turned, rebuked or destroyed short of a special ritual that temporarily forces them into a physical form. They can still speak to nearby creatures, and via the poltergeist ability, they can also control the movement of objects with moving parts. Once they have 10 HD or more, they can even turn the object they are haunting into an animated object.

You will be able to cast haunt shift natively at ECL 11. However, haunt shift affects a maximum of 8 HD of undead, and at that level your cohort will have a maximum ECL of 9. Therefore, to get the most out of the ability, you’ll want to make sure your cohort has an ECL of HD+1. It’s for this reason that we gave the AI the evolved template, making sure it is a legal target. However, if you can reliably gain access to a scroll of the spell earlier, this is not necessary. Interestingly, while haunt shift can only affect up to 8 HD of undead, it’s an instantaneous spell and after it is cast there is nothing to stop the haunting presence from continuing to advance. Based on the way cohorts accrue XP, it should continue advancing in level throughout the game, gaining in strength and new abilities.

As for the actual build, the lack of a body made psionics a natural fit. As psionic powers generally require only mental actions to manifest, a haunting presence should have no issue manifesting them even without taking a physical form. While some such powers do have a touch range, that’s where the psicrystal comes into play: a psicrystal can deliver touch spells on its master’s behalf, allowing it to directly interact when necessary.

For this particular build we focused on the seer, working entirely with support abilities that allowed the AI to operate an advanced stronghold. Most powers were based on providing detection, communication, information gathering or transport. As the AI, your cohort will be able to manipulate objects via far hand or telekinetic force, see from afar with a wide array of clairsentience and scrying powers, communicate with the party, manifest a temporary body to perform physical tasks via astral construct or objects via psionic major creation and more. Kalashtar was chosen for access to mindlink, which alongside anchored navigation can even work across planes, allowing the AI to stay in constant communication with you no matter where you are.

Spoiler: The AI build table

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THE AI
Evolved necropolitan kalashtar seer 17 (psychic knowledge ACF)

Level	Class	Feats	Class Features	Powers Known
1st	Seer 1	Psicrystal Affinity	Psychic knowledge	Detect psionics, synchronicity, vigor
2nd	Seer 2			Call to mind, far hand
3rd	Seer 3	Expanded Knowledge (astral construct)		Share pain, clairvoyant sense
4th	Seer 4			Psychoportive shelter, detect hostile intent
5th	Seer 5	Expanded Knowledge (object reading)	Bonus feat	Time hop, touchsight
6th	Seer 6	Linked Power		Telekinetic force, energy wall
7th	Seer 7			Remote viewing, anchored nagivation
8th	Seer 8			Psionic divination, correspond
9th	Seer 9	Expanded Knowledge (schism)		Clairtangent hand, psionic plane shift
10th	Seer 10	Transdimensional Power	Bonus feat	Psionic true seeing, psionic major creation
11th	Seer 11			Temporal acceleration
12th	Seer 12	Psionic Meditation		Retrieve, psionic contingency
13th	Seer 13			Divert teleport
14th	Seer 14			Psionic moment of prescience, psionic phase door
15th	Seer 15	Burrowing Power, Psicrystal Containment	Bonus feat	Hypercognition
16th	Seer 16			Bend reality, matter manipulation
17th	Seer 17			Metafaculty

Powers Known
1- Detect psionics, synchronicity, vigor, call to mind, far hand, astral construct
2- Share pain, clairvoyant sense, psychoportive shelter, detect hostile intent, object reading
3- Time hop, touchsight, telekinetic force, energy wall
4- Remote viewing, anchored navigation, psionic divination, correspond, schism
5- Clairtangent hand, psionic plane shift, psionic true seeing, psionic major creation
6- Temporal acceleration, retrieve, psionic contingency
7- Divert teleport, psionic moment of prescience, psionic phase door
8- Hypercognition, bend reality, matter manipulation
9- Metafaculty

Now You’re Thinking With Portals
Portal dissonance is an… odd little class feature. At its core, this basically allows you to redirect a portal, breach or rift so that instead of its usual destination, it leads to another portal that you have personally traveled through within the past 30 days.

This is the kind of ability that forces you to completely rethink the basic idea behind portals. However, there are some limitations. You can only maintain portal dissonance for up to a minute, it requires constant playing to maintain the effect, and the portal redirection is only one way.

The basic trick, however, is still quite potent. At its core, it allows you to scout ahead and then transport the entire party there, bypassing any number of dangerous elements. The trick is simple: the AI creates a long-duration portal in the ship via psychoportive shelter. This creates a portal to an extradimensional space with a 7’ diameter. You must be sure to travel through it at least once before going out scouting. When you reach a destination, pop open a bag of holding or similar item (or cast a shadowfade, once you hit level 11) and redirect it to the exit of the psychoportive shelter. This will allow you to instantly step back onto the ship. Then you redirect the psychoportive shelter back to the exit of the bag of holding, allowing you and the entire party to travel to the new destination.

As you (and the ship) gain more and more ways to infiltrate and travel, this essentially allows you to create temporary teleportation circles to more or less anywhere. It’s a great way to transport large groups, items and even small armies (though keep in mind that you cannot maintain a portal dissonance for more than 10 consecutive rounds) to more or less anywhere. However, with a little bit of ingenuity, there is certainly more you can do with this. Travel through as many portals as possible, and keep portals up in interesting places. Portal dissonance can allow a simple portal to cross planar boundaries. It can redirect little things like extradimensional spaces, meaning suddenly something as simple as a bag of holding may instead serve as a gateway thousands of miles away - or even on another plane of existence entirely. It is not merely restricted to portals you create, either, and there is no save against this ability; if you can make the DC 20 perform check every round, you can redirect any nearby portal, rift or breach that you are aware of. That includes something in the possession of an enemy.

Basically, this is a concept that rewards cleverness and out of the box thinking. It’s worth taking a moment in every encounter or scenario and thinking about how a portal placed just right might change the terms of the encounter.

BUILD SUMMARY
This one is a hard showcase to really talk about, because there are so many major elements going on here, and so much of the build is about finding clever solutions to problems via liberal use of portals. All in all, though, let’s take a look at what you end up with: a skillful bard with 9th-level spells and a ton of stealth- and transportation-related goodies, including the ability to manipulate portal destinations with a song, plus access to all totemist soulmelds to augment all your abilities. On the meldshaping side you can shape 6 soulmelds, have 9+ essentia to move around and can make 3 chakra binds (or 4, depending on how your DM reads the Open Chakra feats), including dual binding your totem chakra and all the least and lesser binds. You can also invest essentia into your spells to boost their caster level or DC.

Oh, and you have a near-impenetrable mobile stronghold powered by the haunting presence of a 17th-level undead psion with the ability to see across any distance and manipulate space and time. You know, as long as we’re talking about things you’ve got.

There are a lot of aspects of this build that are downright broken… but despite being a somewhat conservative DM, I’d almost certainly allow this in my games. Why? Because it’s fun, and it’s something that benefits the whole party rather than just setting one PC up above the others. I mean, who doesn’t want to have a sneaky teleporting portal bard and his sentient floating castle in their party?

VARIANTS
This is a build with a lot of moving parts, but fundamentally the concept rests on just four elements: the level 6 planar bard ACF, Landlord, Undead Leadership and the haunt shift spell. Once you nail those down, the world’s your oyster. Before we decided on making the AI a psion, we’d originally planned on a bard/ardent/cerebremancer, and while I’m much happier with the totemist version, the cerebremancer was definitely high-powered and worth consideration.

And if you have easy access to scrolls, you don’t even need sublime chord - a simple UMD check and a scroll of haunt shift will fulfill that particular requirement! That really opens up a lot of options. The other accelerated caster classes are on the table as well: a savage bard/ur-priest version would be easy to mock up, and while you’d need to find another source for your AI other than Undead Leadership, an apostle of peace could work as well. Or you could fully embrace the silliness and go with some sort of fochlucan lyrist, because why not? Off the top of my head I don’t see any reason why bard 7/rogue 2/druid 1/sublime chord 2/fochlucan lyrist 8 wouldn’t work. Heck, with a bit of finagling I bet you could even work planar shepherd in there too, just to really…

OK, I’m getting carried away. Soon I’ll start talking about planar bubbles of the Elemental Plane of Bison, and then we’ll be right back where we started...

SOURCES
OK, going to cop out here and maybe edit these in later if at all. We scoured a lot of material for this one, and I wrote this up over several days, so I don’t have easy notes for sources. I’m happy to provide info for anything in particular, but there are a few sources that are particularly important for this showcase:

• Libris Mortis: Haunt shift spell, haunting presence rules, Undead Leadership
• Stronghold Builder’s Guide: All the fun rules for strongholds and their various enhancements, plus the Landlord feat
• Planar Handbook: The planar bard ACF comes from here, which provides portal dissonance.

***

And that’s that! Please let us know what you think in the comments, and what you’d like to see for future showcases!

[Piggy Knowles]

You didn't think I was kidding about the bison, did you?

Spoiler: We get up to serious business when we're building

Show

WhamBamSam09/16/2020
what are we trying to do with our fancy car and portal things

piggy knowles09/16/2020
Drive around in style I guess?
Keep a portal inside the vehicle
Bard sneaks in to whatever dungeon
Once infiltrated, casts portal well, dissonances it back to the vehicle to let the whole party through
I can't remember if dissonance is two way, if it's not you have an extra step of having to go back to the vehicle and then dissonancing the vehicle portal back to your portal well but should still be doable before the 1 rd/lvl expires

piggy knowles09/16/2020
Pimp My Ride - Portal Bard with Undead Leadership and Landlord, Haunt Shift undead cohort into mobile stronghold to become “AI”, portal all around

Bard 6/Ardent 3/Cerebremancer 1/Sublime Chord 2/Cerebremancer +9
1 Bard1- Able Learner, Darkstalker
2 Bard2-
3 Ardent1- Practiced Manifester (ardent)
4 Bard3-
5 Bard4-
6 Bard5- Undead Leadership
7 Bard6-
8 Ardent2-
9 Ardent3- Landlord
10 Cerebremancer1-
11 Sublime Chord1-
12 Cerebremancer2- xxx
13 Cerebremancer3-
14 Cerebremancer4-
15 Cerebremancer5- xxx
16 Cerebremancer6-
17 Cerebremancer7-
18 Cerebremancer8- xxx
19 Cerebremancer9-
20 Cerebremancer10-


Mantles: Freedom, Time, Fate

Power known:
1- deceleration, dimension hop
3- time hop
4- psionic fly, remote viewing
5- anticipatory strike, psionic freedom of movement
6- temporal acceleration, evade burst, greater precog
7- fate of one
8- mass time hop, psionic greater teleport
9- time regression
Something like that
Cheesy as hell
But it might be fun to do a cheesy showcase now and then

Venger09/16/2020
that looks hilarious

Bassellope09/16/2020
I'm not following. Haunt shift turns into a portal how exactly?

Venger09/16/2020
they haunt shift the spook into the car
and then make the glovebox or some compartment the portal

Bassellope09/16/2020
Yes, so it's haunting a location. ok.

Venger09/16/2020
is my understanding

Bassellope09/16/2020
Or mundane object = vehicle.
And there's a portal of some sort already in the vehicle, like a bag of holding or portable hole?

Venger09/16/2020
I think since he's got landlord
that the vehicle is a rolling fotrress
like a siege tower or something
so there ought to be ample room for things to be turned into portals

Bassellope09/16/2020
Hmm. So can we redirect the portal to a field of stampeding cattle? Put the portal above our enemies, bury them with falling cow damage.

Venger09/16/2020
lol
elemental plain of buffalo
not sure

Bassellope09/16/2020
If the cattle are stampeding, then the target takes stampede damage and falling object damage.

Venger09/16/2020
now that's thinking
with portals

piggy knowles09/16/2020
lol
I like it
also that's definitely the tagline of this showcase
call it Pimp My Ride
and use "Now that's thinking with portals" as the tagline
ezpz

Bassellope09/16/2020
Here's the vertical cattle stampede post:
https://forums.giantitp.com/showsing...1&postcount=38

Venger09/16/2020
very cool

piggy knowles09/16/2020
lol
I love it
my favorite thing is how unnecessary the stampede damage is

Venger09/16/2020
that's great

piggy knowles09/16/2020
It's just there as a nice f*** you

Bassellope09/16/2020
I am wounded... how is 455 average damage "unnecessary"?

piggy knowles09/16/2020
lol

Bassellope09/16/2020
But yes, it's nice to add that knife twist on the end: "Oh, and you take... uh... 455 damage." "From what? I already took 29000 damage!" "Well, the cattle were still stampeding when they fell on you."
I can't remember if I started that idea with "Can I optimize stampede damage?" or "Can I optimize falling object damage?"

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
Stampede damage is something I want to do one day

Bassellope09/16/2020
If we add barding with armor spikes to the cattle... would that double the falling object damage? No, that's improvised object damage.

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
It's hard to manage

piggy knowles09/16/2020
We've done trample, so it's only fair we do stampede too

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
Maybe truenamer 20, gate in celestial bison?
I know 400 cows names!

Bassellope09/16/2020
Well, interesting party trick, I would have to say.

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
You just need a portable source of bison

Bassellope09/16/2020
Ok, you need at least 5 bison to get stampede damage. Body outside body, perhaps?

Venger09/16/2020
what did santa claus do
back in nightsong infiltrator

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
Do summons using lower level summons for 1d4+1 extras Stack?

piggy knowles09/16/2020
Effigy maker for robot bison, duh

Venger09/16/2020
he did something that made a bunch of clones of himself
and then he aided another to get to every house in one night with the clones

piggy knowles09/16/2020
It was BoB cheese I'm p sure
But it's been a while since I read that one

Venger09/16/2020
no those summons don't stack
it's just "1d4+1 from the list immediately lower"
you can't coopt each of those single guys
into 1d4+1 of the list one step lower
if you could
we'd just destroy all enemies with an army of celestial dead monkeys

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
So a twinned summons could hit the minimum

Venger09/16/2020
or maximized

Bassellope09/16/2020
There was some Spellthief/Wu Jen combo... steal body outside body from your clones?

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
Genesis: elemental plane of bison +precipitate breech?

Bassellope09/16/2020
Yes, because your clones can't cast spells, but the still have spells that can be stolen.

piggy knowles09/16/2020
Sadly precipitate breach is random
But if you made ENOUGH elemental planes of bison
Then eventually the chance of rolling anything but becomes vanishingly small

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
I cast fireball!
Sorry bro, the powers have shifted

Venger09/16/2020
lol stuff the ballot box with elemental planes of bison

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
It's bison ball now

Venger09/16/2020
a write-in ungulate
scry into the universe three over
"[optimization][3.5] How to optimize an utterbison assault necromancer? "

piggy knowles09/16/2020
lol

Bassellope09/16/2020
Conjure Ice Beast... do ice beast bison keep Stampede (Ex)?

Venger09/16/2020
since we're a bard
I think so

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
Actually, do bison zombies keep stampede?

Venger09/16/2020
let me go actually check
>zombisons
talk about using every part of the buffalo
zombies lose all special attacks

piggy knowles09/16/2020
So no zombison
Sad

Venger09/16/2020
as do skels unfortunately

piggy knowles09/16/2020
Maybe an m bison stampede instead

Venger09/16/2020
related have you gents ever seen a bison skeleton at a natural history museum

Bassellope09/16/2020
Are there other zombie templates that keep Ex? Dracolich zombies? Skeletal draconic zombies?

Venger09/16/2020

piggy knowles09/16/2020
Neat

Venger09/16/2020
the skeleton dragon and skeleton zombie templates keep some stuff like breath weapon
yeah isn't that interesting
they are majestic creatures

Bassellope09/16/2020
"You take stampede damage, falling object damage... and then the bison breath fire on you."

Venger09/16/2020
and much healthier than beef
lol
what was i doing
ice beast right
checking to see if it keeps special attacks

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
Psicrystals + wild cohort
Psicrystals get feats
At 3 they take psicrystal, at 6, wild cohort

piggy knowles09/16/2020
The big guy is with me! And the medium guy! And the little guy! And we all have bison!
Sadly doesn't work though, psicrystal needs a psionic class
BUT
Is there anything stopping you from using psychic reformation on the bison themselves
To give each bison wild cohort?

Bassellope09/16/2020
Ok, brain just swerved into a weird direction. The bison get stampede damage... regardless of what size they are. So... we need to create a swarm of tiny bison.

piggy knowles09/16/2020
Mm

Venger09/16/2020
ice beasts lose all special attacks

Bassellope09/16/2020
1000 bison = 200d12 stampede damage.

Venger09/16/2020
and replace it with a crappy one from the list
hence their lowered cr

Bassellope09/16/2020
Not crappy. Cold aura is no-save 1d6 burst as a free action.
Ice beast = blasting spell for clerics.

piggy knowles09/16/2020
Zceryll can get us a summon every 5 rounds
If we can get an arbitrarily high effective sorcerer level

Venger09/16/2020
>it takes psicrystal
it's psicrystals all the way down

piggy knowles09/16/2020
We can summon 2880 pseudonatural bison a day

Venger09/16/2020
>each bison gets wild cohort

Bassellope09/16/2020
Dark speech to hivemind the swarm of tiny bison for an arbitrarily high effective sorcerer level.

Venger09/16/2020
seems legit
infinite bison
nothing stopping that
i love tiny bison
i can take them on the train with me
put them on my desk
squeeze milk into my coffee
have them graze on my lemongrass plant
poop in my zen rock garden

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
That's a sentence

Venger09/16/2020
>free action
wtf
it must be limited times/round
>at the beginning of its round
Yes, I'm aware
i know puns are the lowest form of wit, but I don't know what it is
bison/buffalo
just keeps giving me all these ideas for jokes
@Bassellope i feel like i'm missing something
why is dealing 3.5 typed damage/round useful
does hivemind work on animals? i thought it only worked on vermin
or is it all swarms

piggy knowles09/16/2020
3.5?

Bassellope09/16/2020
It's no save damage in a 10' burst, and it's in addition to the creature attacking with a bite. Clerics have very few direct-damage spells at level 1.

Venger09/16/2020
(average of 1d6 damage)

piggy knowles09/16/2020
Oh the cold aura
I thought you were talking about stampede

Venger09/16/2020
oh, you mean for low level clerics
that's entirely fair, withdrawn
i know clerics don't have blasts

piggy knowles09/16/2020
Yeah ice beasts are good at low levels

Venger09/16/2020
but they don't really need them since they have buffs
fair enough

piggy knowles09/16/2020
1-3 in particular

Venger09/16/2020
i played a cleric malconvoker once

piggy knowles09/16/2020
3 gets you the oversized centipede
For Engulf shenanigans

Bassellope09/16/2020
Yes, Engulf, although it's hard to get that to work reliably.

Venger09/16/2020
and fluffed all my ice beasts as being shadow demons from hell
right after "princess and the frog" came out
thing was the party had a dfi bard
so
it was very hard for me to determine how useful my summons actually were in a vacuum
when each of my centipedes is getting fistfuls of sonic damage
true
anyway
is there a generalized rule
that you can create new swarms
that aren't statted up
out of any given tiny animal

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
Mobs

Venger09/16/2020
and do the hivemind rules apply to animal swarms
is that a rule from cityscape
and does it apply to creatures of animal intelligence

daremetoidareyou09/16/2020
Yeah, but it's not a swarm per se

Bassellope09/16/2020
They do, although it's 3.0 rules (BoVD) and the rules barely make any sense as-written.

Venger09/16/2020
ok, so that's something to think about
walk me through mob rule, dare

Bassellope09/16/2020
Dark Speech in BoVD has a "Dark Unity" option, allows you to create a hivemind of up to 100 vermin or animals (must be 1 HD or less). You take 1d4 Con damage (soak via Strongheart Vest).

Venger09/16/2020
or naberius
if we're going zceryll for summons
we're already a binder

Bassellope09/16/2020
Here's the tricky part... when I used this for Black Sparrow, no one called me on it... but if you treat the Hivemind as a single creature... add another 99 creatures to it with Dark Unity.

Venger09/16/2020
ok
so we're energy draining the bison to get to 1hd
with a wight or something

Bassellope09/16/2020
Or take one of the creatures in the original hivemind to link it to another 99 creatures in a different hivemind... to create 199 creature hivemind. Rinse and repeat as necessary.

Venger09/16/2020
ok

Bassellope09/16/2020
Well, Black Sparrow can metamorph into a Phiuhl (Fiend Folio has such wacky creatures in it), and use Dessicate (Ex) to add negative levels if need be.
Anyway, once you get above 150 creatures in the hivemind, each +50 creatures gives the hivemind +1 Int and... +1 Cha I think?
Once Cha gets to 18 or higher, the hivemind gains Sorcerer levels.
Swarm size is determined by the base creature's size, so... there's an upper limit to how much Cha you can squeeze out of a swarm of tiny, diminuative, for fine-sized creatures.

Venger09/16/2020
yeah it does

WhamBamSam09/16/2020
fiend folio is one of the better caster splats
anyway, bison

Venger09/16/2020
so how small are we getting these bison

WhamBamSam09/16/2020
do all the bison have to have the stampede attack, or can a regular bison lead a stampede of zombies/ice beasts/etc by virtue of the others still being bison

Bassellope09/16/2020
Black Sparrow was using a swarm of bats, because that was the best option from summon swarm, so... 5000 I think? 89 levels of sorcerer casting.
For each point of Int bonus possessed by the hivemind, each individual creature gets 1 feat and 1 skill point. I didn't have time to optimize that out at the time, because I figured it was overkill, but assuming 5000 bats take "extra slot", each individual bat can cast a sorcerer spell on it's turn, so let's say 5000 magic missiles all at once. Or a +5000 Jump check from 5000 bats.

Venger09/16/2020
good point
we really only need one bellwether
during normal stampede circumstances that is
the thing is he will almost certainly be killed by the falling damage
so once he's splattered, the other bison without this ability won't confer it to all other bison
but let's say we have one indestructible normal living bison with stampede
what advantage does the rest being zombies or ice beasts offer

Bassellope09/16/2020
Scratch that. 5000 Know:Religion checks, sacrifice rules, get 5000 efreets, 15000 wishes.

Venger09/16/2020
it cahnges type so they can't be a hivemind anymore and get casting
and we're already dealing infinite damage so we don't care about str boost
lol

WhamBamSam09/16/2020
makes them easier to produce

Venger09/16/2020
how so

WhamBamSam09/16/2020
it's easier to make a large number of zombies/skeletons than to keep large numbers of living creatures on hand and following direction
unless we are somehow producing an endless bison dimension

Venger09/16/2020
i thought the plan was to produce one or more elemental plains of bison
through genesis or similar
since we're a bard
what would be really good is to rent out ballrooms in holiday inns to hold seminars for 9thlvl tier 1 casters
and tell them why it's a good idea for them to use genesis to create demiplains of bison
and that the more of them there are the better odds of the trick working
classic joker bard stuff

WhamBamSam09/16/2020
I wasn't sure if we were doing tactics for that build or if we had gone off on a tangent of more general stampede optimization

Venger09/16/2020
me neither honestly
I think it's unrelated
but someone mentioned using the portal bard to open a tear to that plane
so bison shoot out of it
so it could go on there since the bison trick is pretty much wblmancy
that can work on any character
but if we could open a portal we could essentially do it for free once we farmed enough bison
if we make the plane fast time that shouldn't take long

Oh, yeah, and click here for a list of all prior showcases! I promise, most of them do NOT include bison.

[ExLibrisMortis]

I laughed a lot reading through this. Great build. Never actually looking at planar bard--that ability is amazing.

The rest of the party can take Landlord and contribute to the fortress as well. Just a fun thing for a party that's all on board.


I was looking at building a similar sort of fortress, but with Planar Vanguard 10. Planar Vanguard is basically the psionic Planeshifter, so the capstone is (unsurprisingly) genesis, but with a very cool twist: it's your psicrystal that becomes the new demiplane, and it doesn't lose any of its abilities (you explicitly get to create a new one, too, which is a nice touch). You even get the psicrystal benefits of your crystal-turned-demiplane while on the plane, which means you can use share powers/deliver touch powers/channel power via your own personal demiplane. I don't know what happens when you share greater metamorphosis with a demiplane, but you can!

Once that's in place, you have to do the difficult work of actually bringing your demiplane with you. Planar bubble will get you the planar traits, but it's not certain that includes the psicrystal stuff. Acorn of far travel might do it, but that's the sort of thing I'd prefer to avoid. The thing I settled on is simply a flying fortress (a 20 ft. by 60 ft. rose garden with red brick balustrades, planted in a 5' deep stone planter of the same size, with climbing roses running down along all the sides) with stairs down leading through a portal to the demiplane, which would act as the fortress' interior. "Have some tea in our rose garden while my psicrystal maps the route to our next adventure, dear companion."

Strongholds are so much fun. I love that book.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Hmm, it doesn't look like there's anything preventing you from applying the Dungeonbred Monster template to a creature multiple times....

In addition to hordes of tiny Bison that still do full Stampede damage (which is hilarious), that could be handy for Symbiotic Creature nonsense (although the template is most useful for a host creature, but is better suited to making a creature qualify as a guest).

[daremetoidareyo]

Hmm, it doesn't look like there's anything preventing you from applying the Dungeonbred Monster template to a creature multiple times....

In addition to hordes of tiny Bison that still do full Stampede damage (which is hilarious), that could be handy for Symbiotic Creature nonsense (although the template is most useful for a host creature, but is better suited to making a creature qualify as a guest).

I so wish this were true, but the template is size locked.

Maybe you could have one bison, and like 7 slaves that you've named "Bison"

[PoeticallyPsyco]

I so wish this were true, but the template is size locked.

Dang, you're right. Still, at least you can have a gnomish cavalry riding Medium Dungeonbred Dungeonbred Elephants/Triceratops. Or maybe a small aquatic race riding Dungeonbred Dungeonbred Dungeonbred Dungeonbred Zaratans (actually, it'd probably need to be a tiny or smaller race, since you need four people banging on their shells just to get them moving and a 5th person giving directions).

[Empyreal Dragon]

Always fun to see one of these. I've actually used some of them for games. This one is.... odd. But I like it