Oh God Why ~ AKA "DM: By the way the final boss of the campaign is Atropus"

[Kerrus]

The final boss of the campaign I'm in is Atropus, and our DM intends us to first defeat his aspect and then somehow fight the full version, which will be a scaled up version of the Aspect.

Two members of our group are basically window dressing. One is obsessed with being a transmutation focused wizard, but doesn't want to have to make any complex decisions, and basically plays his character like a big dumb fighter. The other is playing a healbot, and we obsoleted him with three healing belts duct taped together.  Neither of them have any interest in optimizing.

The third player DMs another couple local games, but mostly runs low to mid tier games, and despite being told refuses to do any character planning outside of our sessions. Spends an ungodly amount of time each session mulling over decisions he should've made before even ariving.

Still, he's got a good head on his shoulders, and if he's aware of good options, he'll take them.

Then there's me and the last player, we're both very familiar with the system- within certain limits, and both have a history of being the only experienced players in our games.

Tonight's session fell apart because the wizard's player was sick, and the healbot is another town over in setting having been absent last session due to sleeping in. The three of us fought two green dragons and murdered the shit out them, getting a fair bit of loot and a decent amount of XP.

And then before healbot and the intermediate guy running a swordsage left because issues with rides, the DM dropped the big bombshell on us: The plot is one of legend, our characters, or characters matching descriptions which match our characters, are fated to kill an elder evil, specifically Atropus. There will be no DM aid on that. We have to figure out how to do it ourselves. But we can't just make new characters at level 1- exactly.

The other vet player is aiming to reroll a venerable draconic dragonwrought Jungle Kobold cleric, going into Walker in the Wastes, which will let him be a primary caster, also be the big melee tank, and contribute much more effectively in the endgame. His current character is an Orc Fighter. So yeah.

I'm currently playing a Spellthief 1/Bard 2, which I had planned on going Spellthief 1/bard 6/Dread Witch 1/Nightmare Spinner 1/Heartfire Fanner 1/Sublime Chord 2/Dread Witch 4/Nightmare Spinner 4.

Our DM has ruled that the Eberron bard ACF, which lets you swap bardic songs learned at certain levels for bard feats from a small list- will let you learn any feat which has bard or bardic music as a prerequisite. The only song I haven't swapped out already is countersong- otherwise I swapped inspire courage for inspire awe, and fascinate for healing hymn.

When I get all those songs, they're turning into a crapload of bard feats- and with some retraining, and use of the DCFS- I'm going to go for lyric spell and metamagic shenanigans.

This was all planned before I heard about Atropus, who largely invalidates the fear build. Going dragonfire inspiration will let me contribute better, especially if we raise an army and I get an Alphorn in the long run.

He's also ruled that Bardic Nightsticks exist, so just as the cleric will be going divine metamagic, I'll be going Lyric Spell with bard... sticks

And we have to defeat the Aspect of Atropus. I don't know if it'll hit us after level 20, or at,  but my goal is to have some level of effectiveness baked in at level 20. Even if it means persisting time stop with the Cleric and I, and spending a couple days of subjective time making nukes out of explosive rune books or whatever.

The cleric will be able to get up to the aspect without instantly dying from all the negative energy effects, what with being a Dry Lich and all.

Me? lolno. I'm a Celadrin, because when I started this game, I built for theme and quest line story stuff. Not 'kill an Elder Evil'.

So what I wanna ask is, aside from 'you're fucked' if anyone has any ideas what I can do here. The only thing banned in this game are action points. Our DM is even considering letting our kobold cleric quest to become Punpun, via going and finding a Sarruhk and diplomancing it into granting Manipulate Form.

I'm trying to figure out is, within what I've got planned, is haunt shifting into an obdurium body possible? Are there any good pre-epic options for taking out the aspect of Atropus?

I'm really rather put off at the moment, because even with dread witch, there's no way I can use fear effects against the aspect- it has 66 hit die, the most I can hit is stuff with 24 at level 20.

[Solo]

How long do your characters have to prepare for this fight?

[ketaro]

I'd personally rather enjoy a bunch of shenanigans that faceroll into a glorious TPK we all saw coming. And then the players reveal they were just running a simulation via Lucid Dreaming skill shenanigans.

[Solo]

If you have some time, make a few rocket engines out of Decanters of Endless Water, or a box of Gust of Wind or something.

Make a telescope. Find asteroids. Teleport to the asteroids. Attach the engines. Use Newtonian physics to steer them towards the planet. Wait until Atropos comes. De-orbit the asteroids and smash it.

[ketaro]

If you have some time, make a few rocket engines out of Decanters of Endless Water, or a box of Gust of Wind or something.

Make a telescope. Find asteroids. Teleport to the asteroids. Attach the engines. Use Newtonian physics to steer them towards the planet. Wait until Atropos comes. De-orbit the asteroids and smash it.

Whoa there champ.

Please tell me how to make rocket engines out of such items. I'm legit in a space game at the moment and such shenanigans sound perfect.

[Solo]

A Decanter of Endless Water doesn't produce much thrust - whatever the DC 12 strength check to brace it counts for - but it never runs out of fuel. Thus, you can use a bunch of them as propulsion. The rest is just time and math.

[littha]

According to some random information I have saved from interesting 4chan threads on the issue:

A steam rocket powered by a Decanter of Endless Water and heated to the operating temperatures of most steam engines would produce 27 kN of thrust, an exhaust velocity of 1450 m/s, and a specific impulse of infinity.

A single Decanter would be able to lift anything less than a ton into space

[Kerrus]

We're currently level 3, almost to level 4. The fight has been suggested to happen at a minimum of level 20, but more likely somewhere around level 23. The DM has suggested that we may be able to attain divine rank 0 around that time, but is staying mum on the details.

Also, the other minmaxer in our party is stuck as a fighter, the DM got really butthurt when he wanted to reroll because he'd done a bunch of story planning for him already. So there's only going to be me, the favoured soul healbot, and our focused specialist transmuter (banning Enchantment, Illusion, and Abjuration), who threw the most immensely butthurt shit fit when informed about the boss, and asked 'why can't it be more like a shit tier MMO boss with rotating weaknesses and AI logic vulnerabilities you can take advantage of to exploit its weak spot for massive damage!?'.

I don't have high hopes those two, but they're both primary casters, so I'm going to  encourage them to take what summoning spells they can at high level, and pull them into a persisted time stop via bracelets of spell sharing for twelve hours every couple rounds to 8 hour rest, recover all their spells, and then blow all their summons.

Atropus' Aspect's major vulnerability seems to be touch AC of 15, and all his really problematic stuff is (su), so if we antimagic ray him repeatedly, it shuts down the really bad stuff. He still auto-kills anyone on a critical hit, but he doesn't have many ranged options.


As for the big moon himself, our DM apparently didn't really read the full description, or really get the idea that he is literally a moon, or that once he touches down, everything dies. His plot was your standard boilerplate of 'ancient civ sealed it away, when it wakes it will already be on the surface of the world. We managed to convince him to at least stuff it in an extradimensional space or something. No idea how we're gonna kill it though- it doesn't have a statblock for a reason.


EDIT2: We might have more 'time' than whatever it takes to get to level 23- Teleport Through Time, or Timereaver may exist, and be on the table for the purposes of extra prep time.

[Solo]

Asteroid bombardment. Seriously.

As the radius of an explosion increases, the number of problems it is incpable of solving approaches zero.
-Vaarsuvius

[Unbeliever]

Honestly, I wouldn't stress about it much.  The odds of this game lasting another 20 or so levels seems ... umm, doubtful from this thread.

Also, why can't the Fighter just start taking levels in Warblade or some non-shitty class that hits things with swords? 

And, I don't understand this thread really at all.  Atropus' aspect is CR 23.  The full-scale Atropus is scaled up version right?  Or of its focus or whatever.  Basically, it's a thing with hit points.  You fight it 20ish levels from now while the megasteroid falls to the earth, and if you fail it's an extinction-level event.  If you kill it, then I guess it stops.  Or, if something something gravity (I hesitate to include anything approaching physics when an undead planetoid traveling the multiverse is involved), then ... Wish, I guess. 

Really, though, I'd be thrilled to go fight the undead space sphere. 

[awaken_D_M_golem]

Rocks fall, everyone dies, some drama on the way ...

According to some random information I have saved from interesting 4chan threads on the issue:

A steam rocket powered by a Decanter of Endless Water and heated to the operating temperatures of most steam engines would produce 27 kN of thrust, an exhaust velocity of 1450 m/s, and a specific impulse of infinity.

A single Decanter would be able to lift anything less than a ton into space

  heeyyyyy ... you could optimize this.

And put all those Profession (Pirate) skill points to work.

[Dr_emperor]

Honestly, I wouldn't stress about it much.  The odds of this game lasting another 20 or so levels seems ... umm, doubtful from this thread.

Also, why can't the Fighter just start taking levels in Warblade or some non-shitty class that hits things with swords? 

+1  I mean even at a level a week you would just barely be fighting him by the end of summer.  If its going into epic; epic spells crush any sense of balance even if a DM can maintain it for that long  Your fighter can find religion/hate religion pump charisma/pump wisdom if he didn't completely dump it and take divine crusader/ur-priest.  The other characters might start pulling there weight or get bored that monsters don't have flashing neon weak points to target with color coded spells and quit.

[Kerrus]

So we have a plan. We iterated through several plans, including trying to calculate the falling damage from de-orbiting asteroids, and whether or not his 'call meteor swarm' SLA would actually be able to affect those KKVs. We tried to figure out if we could antimagic ray him, but as per the spell compendium, antimagic ray allows spell resistance, so there's no getting through that unless I boost my caster level to something ridiculous. I have the pieces for that already if necessary.

We talked about throwing Ragnorra at him, but looking at their stats, the aspect would just wreck her, and letting her get a foothold on the planet wouldn't be any better even if she did win.


But that put us on the right track, and after a fair amount of research and my thinking about some old shenanigans, we found a mostly viable solution.

We're going to ice assassin the fucker.

[Solo]

2/10 for style.

[Keldar]

An evil moon is going to kill the planet and you want to time travel to fix things.   What would Link do? 

[Kerrus]

@Solo, if this were an optimized party of primary casters who I could actually rely on, then dropping asteroids would be viable. As it is, the only primary caster worth any salt is going to be me- and I'm a Bard.

[Endarire]

What about Leadership?  That gets you move characters!

WHat about other permanent minions like via simulacrum?  A Sim Solar scroll costs ~8K at my last calculation.

[Kerrus]

Ultimately this campaign ended due to inter-player drama, and it was determined that the party bard/spellthief/sublime chord/dread witch used obscene caster level stacking to hit Atropus with the mindrape spell, effectively dominating it.

[Solo]

There's at least two things wrong with that...

1. In space, no one can hear you rock.
2. Atropus is immune to mind affecting.

[ketaro]

Who actually believes anything higher than the single digits of HD isn't immune to mind-affecting effects by default?