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

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Zioneer said:
Counteridea: She sells just the hilt.

So she can truly have a sword without a hilt.
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Selling an Adamantine +2 Sword that costs money more than you ever held in your life from that disgusting Reachman Westerosi Lord who cuckolds your previous lover?

I sleep.​

Selling only the hilt of the Sword just to make a pun?

REAL SHIT!​
 
Azel said:
[X] The Marches


Malarys, Waymar, Tyene, Maelor, Sandor, Mereth, Valaena and Asha will all be needed for the actual pacification process.

Melisandre could really do with a month off after the Ymeri campaign.
Zherys is ruler of a pretty large chunk of Essos, so he should likely take care of that at some point. This is the same problem as Garin and Malarys have. They have actual duties in government that take up time.
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Shall I move Vee, Vargo, Sari and Nettles to something arguably productive, then..?
 
It is kind of a shame that thing is probably going to end up as a show piece somewhere.

But realistically, the Others' response to military industrial complex + heavily armored soldiers armed with DR/piercing weaponry has been "throw more intangible undead at it until the problem goes away!!"

And our response to that was new and improved +2 inherent Ghost Touch weapons, making that solution a crapshoot for them.
 
Do we have the ghost touch armor to protect everyone? Touch AC is often dreadfully small, made worse by a haunt of ghosts.
 
ryuan said:
Do we have the ghost touch armor to protect everyone? Touch AC is often dreadfully small, made worse by a haunt of ghosts.
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Not really. It's not practical or cost effective to try to provide everyone with Ghost Touch armor right now, and it won't be for a long while, if ever. It's enormously expensive just to provide a Legion with Imperial Steel weapons.

For defense against Incorporeal threats, we're better off sticking with a strong offense.

Multiple overlapping Celestial Brilliance spells will be one of the best options and should serve us very well, just like it did in Sarnor. On top of having a super long duration, the spell doesn't allow a saving throw or Spell Resistance. If a spell doesn't allow Spell Resistance, then you can't make something immune to it. A single Celestial Brilliance that can be used 1/Day will cost 1,008 IM, but will be able to maintain up to 7 Celestial Brilliance effects due to each last 7 days. We can easily provide dozens of them to the Legions once we start producing them.

Dawnbloom Leshy are another excellent counter to Undead, including Incorporeal threats. Their Channel Positive Energy power affects a huge radius, does solid damage to Undead, and they can use it 11/Day. They can also use it for a Turn Undead effect which can blunt any Undead attack long enough for our forces to regroup.

Single-use Incorporeal Nova charms for 225 IM and Undead to Death charms for 330 IM each will come in handy, too.

None of these are going to be a solution to the problem, but taken in aggregate they will give our armies a good chance against most types of lesser Undead and quite a few of the middling varieties as well.

I still haven't given up hope on a Magic Army-like version of the Magic Vestment spell, one with a similar range and effect, but to provide Enhancement bonuses to our people's armor and shields. If that becomes available, then a Mythic version which allows for a special property, such as Ghost Touch, might be on the table, too.
 
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That will definitely make our guys a force to be reckoned with!

Another thing, as @Goldfish mentioned, in aggregate all of those things together makes the Legion a hard target.

Generally speaking, you don't go after hard targets by throwing your head against it, you try to sap under it, or blow through it.

And one thing we're not lacking in is champions able of going tow to tow with the enemy.

As stated before, we got a lot of ways to amp up and boost our men's defenses. PfE banners, charms and servitors with useful SLAs. We even have war beasts with natural immunities to a lot of the stuff that tends to get thrown around in mass combat, hard countering the Enchantment school for example.

Finally, one of the problems with our new model army is that while they are excellent troops for going and mowing down waves of chaff and fodder, they seem to lack firepower. That's why we have dragons! And air ships!

On a smaller scale, Wyverns are nice delivery platforms on a tactical level. Being able to deliver munitions to anywhere on the battlefield, and quickly, and these are munitions that just so happen to threaten everyone and can't simply be dispelled.

Or in the case of Wildfire, which is not something even an Other champion wants dumped on him, he's spending an action dispelling the fire, and then another action needs to be spent to get rid of the regular fire it turned into (or opportunity costs, you need rare resources to get complete immunity to fire, which Searing property in Wildfire deals with nicely).

Military industrial complex! Peace through superior firepower!
 
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I'm not sure if we have superior firepower though, @Crake.
Sure we can churn out powerful gear and well-trained troops, but the Others are also very good at churning out mighty undead in ridiculous numbers.
I think that our military-industrial complex is impressive because it aims to match them them, not because it's better than them. Traditionally, heroes respond to undead armies by decapitation strikes, not by attempting to create their own armies of soldiers and strong lieutenants.
Let's compare armies!
  • Our soldiers are well-equipped Legionnaires who can mulch normal troops, while they have many types of lesser undead, often with crazy powers (incorporeality, debuffs, negative energy, etc - and on top of that, undead traits) who can also mulch normal troops. They also have insane amounts of chaff.
  • Our troops are lead by groups of specialists or enhanced Praetorians, theirs are led by groups of CR 8-10 undead with weirder powers.
  • We have powerful engines of war, they have high-CR undead and massive AoE magic (this might be a win for us - they have stuff that can fight Heralds and other CR 10-15 threats on an even footing, I can't think of much that can beat a Moonchaser).
  • We have PCs with crazy amounts of gear, they have true Others who are Gestalt high-levels PCs (this might be a win for them, because I suspect they'll have more high-level PCs than we have PCs. Thankfully their high-level PCs might spend lots of effort on beating our Air Force and whatnot).
  • They can walk into old barrows and armies and create troops, we can feed corpses to the Forge or Essosi cities into the recruitment office and create armies.
  • They have no logistical trail and serve the will of dark masters, we have unified command and a magitech logistics trail (still a weakness for us, but we have it handled for now)
 
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TalonofAnathrax said:
while their are undead with crazy powers (incorporeality, walking and fighting in hostile weather/darkness that their leaders produce, etc) who can also mulch normal troops.
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These are as much outliers as our own crazy troops and constructs. Their main forces are weaker undead. That they can have special abilities like intangibility is their strongest selling point besides numbers, while we can use equipment in mass scale to counter some of that.
 
I'm not even including their massive amounts of chaff in here. They can get massive amounts of Wraiths and Shadows and Wights quite easily (likely thousands of them at need) so I consider them as Legionnaire-equivalents, considering our gear advantage.
The chaff is just a distraction and environmental obstacle, like their tendency to turn off the Sun and cause massive blizzards. It won't win, but it will inflict attrition, require effort to hold it back, and provide meatshields and distractions for the forces that actually matter.
 
The tried and true method to solving issues that the Military-Industrial Complex can't adequately solve is to expand and empower the Military-Industrial Complex until it can.
 
TalonofAnathrax said:
Our troops are lead by groups of specialists or enhanced Praetorians, theirs are led by groups of CR 8-10 undead with weirder powers.
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Our strike teams against such will also be CR 8 Praetorians, with generally superior equipment all around, and our troops in general are augmented by creatures and constructs with, you guessed it, weirder powers than the Praetorians have.


TalonofAnathrax said:
We have powerful engines of war, they have high-CR undead.
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We have dragons, and other murder beasts.

And then we have the engines of war. Generally multiple strategic weapons which can't be countered with any one silver bullet.


TalonofAnathrax said:
We have PCs with crazy amounts of gear, they have true Others who are Gestalt high-levels PCs.
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True, there's no getting around this.

Our main PCs are gaining MR though, which isn't to be underestimated, and seriously throws combat situations out of whack depending on their shtick, which is generally OOC given their custom paths.
 
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