I was wondering if anyone was planing on running the Breaching Festival? I have a player who will want to do alot with the academy, has their sights on becoming the headmaster, which is fine by me.The rest of the party I think will really enjoy trying out the festival. Anyone have any sugestions on what to use and how it would be traped or protected?
Any abjuration in the SRD (including the epic stuff) is probably warding the building. On top of that, there'll be a bunch of custom stuff designed by generations of abjurers.
Considering that winning the Festival would unbalance the PC to the point of unplayability in any published Paizo scenario, this probably isn't too strong. :D
I thought about this a little bit and came to the conclusion that in the rules as written, offense trumps defense--in this case, the ability to enter trumps the ability to forbid entry--and you'd probably need custom spells or, more likely, magic items for this to work at all.
You can stop teleportation and plane shift with spells, though you will have to prevent those from being dispelled somehow.
Brute-forcing your way in with spells is hard to stop, short of an enormous anti-magic field, or raising a thick adamant wall around the whole building. Disintegrate is very difficult to counter, and I think is the biggest problem here. It will go through walls of force and similar effects. A two-layer defense with anti-magic on the outside and wall of force on the inside may be the best bet, though it is cheesy. Before doing that, though, consider whether it would be okay for the PCs to do it--if not, don't set the precedent!
Hopefully we can assume that by the time someone has Wish, they have better things to do than win the Breaching Festival. I am pretty sure Wish could temporarily remove the anti-magic shell, and then Disintegrate should do the rest.
I would never run this, personally, because my player knows the rules better than I do, and would inevitably show me that I had missed some obvious angle. And if there has been only one winner in 60 years, there is no obvious angle.
Maybe the Academae is killing all of the potential winners. That would move the problem from defense, which is hard in RAW, to offense, which is much easier. A good mage strike force with astral/etherial spotters ought to be able to do it. It's cheating, if more than one mage is involved, but who is in a position to call the Academae on it?
Or maybe the School of Enchantment is just...fixing them up a bit.
Or maybe people who succeed in getting in meet Sorshen's ghost, and lose all desire to leave again. They're still there, somewhere. Hm. I rather like that idea.
A drastic suggestion: move the entire inside of the building to another plan temporarily. Carceri is an obvious choice. It's well known that getting out of Carceri is tough. (You could crib some material from the last episode of SCAP for this.)
Mry
I think that just the thrill of wining would be worth it to my players. I see the group working together and winning. Then as the headmaster steps up and says here are your winnings. The mage of the group setting forward saying "Well seeing as that was not much of a challenge I think we will take these couple of babbles and you can keep the rest to make it tougher for me next year." Not only making a name for himself and the group but making the Headmaster embarrassed. Then you can create tension between then. Warmly shaking his hand and congratulating the upcoming mage but between a fake smile whispering something about how I am watching you or you made a big mistake my young player.
Mary Yamato those are some good suggestions I will probably wait until after I get the rest of the adventure to figure out how I want to run it.