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A Sword Without a Hilt: A Song of Ice and Fire/D&D 3.5 Crossover

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Crake said:
@Goldfish For this, best not think too much about build, or what they've done, but motivation.

With enough potential to be capable of learning to be a Trapsmith (able to go above level 5), the right motivation can get a person pretty far. With the type of people the Inquisition picks up, @DragonParadox, can we assume there's enough with the right kind of cause or ambition that would catch his attention on a level roughly equivalent to generate students per month as the Scholarum teachers' calculations?

Keeping in mind the Inquisition now roughly encompasses tens of thousands of people, most of them admittedly just desk clerks and admin types, but a decent proportion doing field work, themselves generally recruited among the type of people to get caught up in the intelligence service (the right personality type) and the rarified qualities that sees them thrive in it long enough to be recruited.
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I wonder if Shara Rogare would be interested? She's level 9, and could relatively easily retrain some Shadow Thief levels into Trapsmith. If she was a Rogue 5/Trapsmith 4, that would give her a pretty nice suite of abilities, and I could see her making the effort after working with a bunch of magic using agents for a while now.
 
DragonParadox said:
Yeah, that sounds doable.
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I just realized that most of the people who would be learning would be pretty rare already. Like the top 5% of the Inquisition's field agents.

If we ask him to train some of them, we can assume generally the Inquisition has at least some Trapsmiths in their ranks with a 2-3 levels in it after a year or so.
Goldfish said:
I wonder if Shara Rogare would be interested? She's level 9, and could relatively easily retrain some Shadow Thief levels into Trapsmith. If she was a Rogue 5/Trapsmith 4, that would give her a pretty nice suite of abilities, and I could see her making the effort after working with a bunch of magic using agents for a while now.
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Yeah, that sounds good. Maybe she can become a Swiftblade, too?
 
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Goldfish said:
I wonder if Shara Rogare would be interested? She's level 9, and could relatively easily retrain some Shadow Thief levels into Trapsmith. If she was a Rogue 5/Trapsmith 4, that would give her a pretty nice suite of abilities, and I could see her making the effort after working with a bunch of magic using agents for a while now.
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This might fall under the "it's hard to retrain people as spellcasters" clause. She may need to spend a few months/years at the Scholarum and being tutored by our current Trapsmith. It's not like Trapsmith is anything close to her current build's theme.
On the other hand, despite my misgivings I do think it would be a good idea to put in the effort.
Crake said:
I just realized that most of the people who would be learning would be pretty rare already. Like the top 5% of the Inquisition's field agents.

If we ask him to train some of them, we can assume generally the Inquisition has at least some Trapsmiths in their ranks with a 2-3 levels in it after a year or so.

Yeah, that sounds good. Maybe she can become a Swiftblade, too?
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Swiftblade has literally no link with her previous build or abilities...
 
One Autumn Leaf said:
This is a member of the faction who sought to eradicate magic. Expecting sanity is not a good idea.
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I can see us bemoaning how often we end up having to chase down people who sold their souls / are in the process of doing so to some demon god or eldritch horror any day now.

In fact, we've had to do this often enough that we really should be bitching about this more often. There was Gray Worm in Plane of Molten Skies, there was Tor... and Aegon.

Technically we still haven't found Illyrio, who has more reason to have a personal grudge against us than most, and was in proximity to the BE.

Rationally, I want to believe there's no way he has the resources or personal power to actually swing a bargain with any fiends of note, not at stay alive long enough to be relevant to us at all.

But since when has logic and reason ever helped us when dealing with fiendbait patsies? They always manage to return to trouble us no matter how dipshit they are.
 
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Crake said:
I can see us bemoaning how often we end up having to chase down people who sold their souls / are in the process of doing so to some demon god or eldritch horror any day now.

In fact, we've had to do this often enough that we really should be bitching about this more often. There was Gray Worm in Plane of Molten Skies, there was Tor... and Aegon.

Technically we still haven't found Illyrio, who has more reason to have a personal grudge against us than most, and was in proximity to the BE.

Rationally, I want to believe there's no way he has the resources or personal power to actually swing a bargain with any fiends of note, not at stay alive long enough to be relevant to us at all.

But since when has logic and reason ever helped us when dealing with fiendbait patsies? They always manage to return to trouble us no matter how dipshit they are.
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It would be funny if one of the beings they sold their souls too were like "yeah it amuses me more to eat you, you're not worth the effort to keep around", and that was that.
 
Zioneer said:
It would be funny if one of the beings they sold their souls too were like "yeah it amuses me more to eat you, you're not worth the effort to keep around", and that was that.
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That probably happens a lot, people overvaluing their souls and getting eaten for their audacity.
 
[X] Goldfish

Alas, it seems the Sactificial Goat shall not leave the familiar-space evermore.
 
egoo said:
[X] Goldfish

Alas, it seems the Sactificial Goat shall not leave the familiar-space evermore.
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Sacrificial Goatman has his place, but this job is more suited to the Sacrificial Janni Squad.

I wonder if they've maintained any degree of continuity of consciousness like Goatman? If so, they are probably getting tired of being sent in for dangerous scouting missions.
 
Goldfish said:
Sacrificial Goatman has his place, but this job is more suited to the Sacrificial Janni Squad.

I wonder if they've maintained any degree of continuity of consciousness like Goatman? If so, they are probably getting tired of being sent in for dangerous scouting missions.
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I doubt it, the last time we called one up (before that one time in New Ibb when we caught that Daemon), they were pretty perfunctory and subservient. Really unnerved Benjen Stark.
 
Goldfish said:
Sacrificial Goatman has his place, but this job is more suited to the Sacrificial Janni Squad.

I wonder if they've maintained any degree of continuity of consciousness like Goatman? If so, they are probably getting tired of being sent in for dangerous scouting missions.
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I thought these summons were specifically transient. I guess we can just test it by shouting the verbal component to Final Sacrifice without actually casting it and seeing if they flinch or something. :V
 
We threw a fit when we realized our summons could be inherently compromised, and then @DragonParadox just said their memories exist for the sole purpose of hilarity and had no deeper meaning or capability for abuse to it.
 
ryuan said:
We threw a fit when we realized our summons could be inherently compromised, and then @DragonParadox just said their memories exist for the sole purpose of hilarity and had no deeper meaning or capability for abuse to it.
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The Doylist answer.

The Watsonian one could perhaps the mage shapes the spell to summon a construct who is familiar with them and bases their memories and (to an extent) personality off the mage's experiences, since they're powering the spell and could provide both those components.

That is a pretty damn sophisticated spell, if so, considering there's one per spell circle.
 
I just had another brainwave related to Sharra Rogare getting Trapsmith training from Swift Eye; even among our most experienced Inquisition agents, she has probably had more dealings with the Fey than anyone else.

She dealt with them regularly in Lys for years, where the Goblin Market was situated, and likely got some of her starting kit, which included good enchanted armor, weapons, and a couple other goodies before we ever recruited her.
 
Vote closed
Adhoc vote count started by DragonParadox on Dec 13, 2020 at 4:32 AM, finished with 35 posts and 9 votes.
  • [X] Vee will activate her Bead of Karma to raise her caster level to 21 then use a Summon Nature's Ally VII spell and a Metamagic Gem of Extend Spell to Summon 1d4+2 Janni to act as scouts.
    -[X] The scouts will persist for up to 84 rounds (8 minutes and 24 seconds), during which time they will scout both sides of the gate while Invisible and Reduced to Small-size, remaining in Telepathic contact with one another and the main party via their own Telepathy and an Interplanar Telepathic Bond Blood Wishes by Viserys. After their initial investigation, they will use their Ethereal Jaunt ability to determine how the gate reacts to Ethereal travelers.
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DragonParadox said:
Vote closed
Adhoc vote count started by DragonParadox on Dec 13, 2020 at 4:32 AM, finished with 35 posts and 9 votes.
  • [X] Vee will activate her Bead of Karma to raise her caster level to 21 then use a Summon Nature's Ally VII spell and a Metamagic Gem of Extend Spell to Summon 1d4+2 Janni to act as scouts.
    -[X] The scouts will persist for up to 84 rounds (8 minutes and 24 seconds), during which time they will scout both sides of the gate while Invisible and Reduced to Small-size, remaining in Telepathic contact with one another and the main party via their own Telepathy and an Interplanar Telepathic Bond Blood Wishes by Viserys. After their initial investigation, they will use their Ethereal Jaunt ability to determine how the gate reacts to Ethereal travelers.
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How often do you come across a situation where the players have actually had to do any work after we spent over two RL years micromanaging a ballooning nation state, and go, "Oh... right. They could literally solve this problem with one, maybe two spell slots. Summoning is some bullshit, huh?"

Not so much a D&D 3.5 rarity is it is a rarity for this quest (since magic can answer questions Mereth posed like "why not send us, your highly elite force of incredibly loyal special operatives" and Viserys is just like "lol why not just use Conjuration, Mereth?"). I think 90% of what we do just involves teleporting somewhere, and having an interesting conversation with someone, and then teleporting somewhere else and maybe spreading a creature-feature's molecules all over the tarmac / waiting for them to start chewing the scenery so we can gank them.

Or this scene specifically was perhaps just a case of Mereth not used to having an Archmage usually in close proximity but... heh, man am I basically the bargain bin of Watsonian and Doylist jokes this month? This was in three threads, no less!
 
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