This is another installment in "DMDM's Guide to the Diabolist" (Part I is here, and the mechanics of planar binding can be found over here) but other casters may find it interesting as well.
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Ahhh! It Got Loose!
Planar bindings are deliberately designed to be dangerous and to fail pretty regularly. That's a feature, not a bug. These spells allow you to call up potentially unlimited numbers of powerful outsiders and bind them to your service for long periods of time. So of course the game designers attached land mines to them, for balance. This Guide is going to show you how you can bind large numbers of powerful outsiders to your service anyway. You just need to follow some simple rules...
Three rules for ALL Planar Binding spells.
1) Never Cast Alone. If something goes wrong, it's just you and an angry outsider. Always have backup -- another PC, a cohort, your apprentice.
2) Be Prepared. Always have a plan B. Sooner or later, one of your called devils will break loose. You need a Plan B. It can be a raging barbarian cohort with a two-handed weapon, an apprentice with a scroll of Dismissal, or a Contingency spell that teleports you to your backup lair. But be prepared. Do your homework. Know what powers the creature you're calling has. If it has mental attacks, make sure everyone in the room has Protection from Evil. If it breathes poison, have antitoxin on hand. And so forth.
3) Never Call Anything Over Your CR. Your CR is your level-1. So if you're 10th level, don't call anything over CR 9. There's always a cool creature right at your CR. Wait a level and call it then.
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So, you have your circle drawn, your sacrifice ready, your nervous apprentice close at hand... it's time to start conjuring and binding! Here I list some of the outsiders you're most likely to conjure up. This is by no means a complete list; consult the pfsrd for more. An asterisk (*) means a creature that's not a devil -- you don't get to use your Infernal Charisma against it. (And let's pause here and note that once you hit that fourth diabolist level, Infernal Charisma becomes really, really handy... it can make the difference between a very iffy summoning and one that's a slam dunk.)
There are three statistics you have to think about here: Spell Resistance, the creature's Charisma, and it's Will save. Its Will save is what it uses to resist being called in the first place, its SR can be used to get out of your circle, and its Cha can both get it out of the circle and be used to defy you. Remember, the more times it can defy you, the more rolls it gets to escape! So you want to win those Cha checks. More discussion of how to do this can be found in the chapter on "Conjuring -- The Dummy's Guide".
Lesser Planar Binding: Who You Gonna Call?
Lemure [CR 1, SR 0, Will +0, Cha 5] -- The lemure is feeble, stupid, can't teleport, and has no useful skills or SLAs. Summon one of these at your initiation to start your career as a Diabolist and then never bother again.
Imp [CR 2, SR 0, Will+4, Cha 14] -- These little guys have their uses, but for a creature of their CR they're actually pretty hard to call and bind. Anyway, you already have an imp companion -- and zebub devils are easier to conjure and make better scouts.
Gaav (Host Devil) [Cr 3, SR 0, Will +0, Cha 8] -- These guys are pretty easy to call and bind, but for combat purposes the bearded devil is just going to give you much more bang for your buck.
Zebub (Accuser Devil) [CR 3, SR 0, Will +1, Cha 12] -- The zebub isn't terribly bright, but it has at-will invisibility, at-will teleport, +15 stealth (the imp, for all its other fine qualities, has no stealth), whispering wind for reporting back, and a variety of useful SLAs including that weird Infernal Eye thing. Summon these guys regularly for use as spies and scouts -- in particular, if your party doesn't have a rogue, you want one of these flybabies bobbing invisibly down the dungeon corridor in front of you. Despite their low CR, they'll stay at least occasionally handy well into higher levels.
Hell Hound* [CR 3, SR 0, Will +1, Cha 6] -- Despite not being a devil, these guys are fairly easy to summon, and their low Int means they're not too hard to please -- if you regularly give them meat and stuff to burn, they should be happy. If you're just getting started with planar binding, or you need to call up a lot of monsters fast with a high chance of success, go with these guys. A pack of them can be fun, but their low CR and lack of useful skills or SLAs means that before long you'll be moving on to bigger and better monsters.
Ukobach [Cr 4, SR 15,Will +7, Cha 13] -- These little pyromaniacs are Paizo, but 3.5, not PFRPG -- they showed up in Pathfinder #25 (Bastards of Erebus) and have never been converted. Check whether your DM will allow them. A specialized tool, call these if you want to burn stuff down. Note that they're unusually "friendly" for devils, and may show up with gifts or information.
Barghest* [CR 4, SR 0, Will +7, Cha 14] -- Call one of these guys when you need to get rid of a body.
Barbazu (Bearded Devil) [CR 5, SR 16, Will +3, Cha 10] -- These guys are your go-to, meat and potatoes devils for your first few levels of conjuring. They're relatively easy to conjure and bind: once you overcome their SR, their lowish Will save and weak Cha are unlikely to present problems, and you can raise the odds still higher by giving them something to kill (+2 on the Cha check). A single bearded devil is only CR 5, but four of them are CR 9 and a group of six is CR 10, so you can have squads of them running around into the low teen levels. They have respectable hp, AC 19, and the ability to dish out large amounts of damage quite fast. At-will teleportation means that they're tactically incredibly flexible; they can pop up next to enemy casters, swarm opponents who think they're safely distant across a chasm, your party rogue will always have a flank buddy, you name it. Once you're able to cast LPB regularly, you should always have a few of these guys hanging around. Print out a copy of their stat block... you're going to be using it a lot.
Nightmare* [CR 5, SR 0, Will +3, Cha 12] -- There are two reasons to call up a nightmare. One is if you want to travel to the Outer Planes, as the nightmare can Plane Shift itself and one rider once/day. This is quite risky, since you have to travel alone and you can't come back home for a full day. But if for some reason you really need to go, this is the fastest way to get there. The other reason is, of course, to lend it to the party antipaladin, cavalier, or other steed-crazy fighter type. It's a great way to thank the party tank for standing next to you all those times. A few levels later you can offer him the chance to trade up to a cauchemar -- see below.
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Some math follows for the folks who like that sort of thing.
Let's Do Math!:
Here's a sample of how this works in play. Say you're a Wizard 5 / Diabolist 4 with a 20 Int, a 14 Cha, Spell Penetration, and Spell Focus: Conjuration. You prepare Lesser Planar Binding, Dimensional Anchor, and Magic Circle Against Evil (twice), and start calling a bearded devil. We'll say you take 20 on the Spellcraft check to draw the circle.
Odds of successfully calling the devil: your spell DC is 21, and the barbazu's Will save is +3. You'll succeed 85% of the time.
Odds of successfully keeping the devil in the circle: it can force you to make an SR check, and that's its best bet for escaping. SR 16, you roll at +11. You'll win 80% of the time. Which means the other 20%, you now have a ticked off barbazu in the room with you. See earlier discussion about being prepared.
Odds of binding the devil to your service: assuming no modifiers (there are various possible modifiers, but never mind that now) this is a straight-up opposed Cha check, with you at +6 (+2 Cha +4 Infernal Charisma) and the devil at +0. Your chance of winning that is 74%. If you win, ta da! Congratulations -- the devil is bound to your service for up to nine days. If you lose, the devil sulks in the circle for a day. Then tomorrow you come back and repeat the last two checks: it forces another SR check to escape (80% chance you win) and then you can try another opposed Cha check (76% chance you win).
Your total chance of getting a bound devil out of this morning's work is 85% (chance of calling) x 80% (chance circle holds) x 76% (chance of winning Cha contest). That gives a 51.7% chance of outright success on the first try. Of course, if you don't win the first time, you can simply try again... as long as the devil hasn't killed you.
Do these sound like bad odds? They're not, if you're prepared. Here's the thing: if you cast every day, at the end of nine days you'll have probably four and quite possibly five barbed devils sworn and bound to your service. And that, my friend, is when you hit the dungeon.
If you draw a diagram with a dc 20 spellcraft check, you can cast dimensional anchor before hand and they can't test the trap with their SR.
Their only way to escape is a charisma check with +5 to the DC
Diagram info:
You can add a special diagram (a two-dimensional bounded figure with no gaps along its circumference, augmented with various magical sigils) to make the magic circle more secure. Drawing the diagram by hand takes 10 minutes and requires a DC 20 Spellcraft check. You do not know the result of this check. If the check fails, the diagram is ineffective. You can take 10 when drawing the diagram if you are under no particular time pressure to complete the task. This task also takes 10 full minutes. If time is no factor at all, and you devote 3 hours and 20 minutes to the task, you can take 20.
A successful diagram allows you to cast a dimensional anchor spell on the magic circle during the round before casting any summoning spell. The anchor holds any called creatures in the magic circle for 24 hours per caster level. A creature cannot use its Spell Resistance against a magic circle prepared with a diagram, and none of its abilities or attacks can cross the diagram. If the creature tries a Charisma check to break free of the trap (see the lesser planar binding spell), the DC increases by 5. The creature is immediately released if anything disturbs the diagram - even a straw laid across it. The creature itself cannot disturb the diagram either directly or indirectly, as noted above.
Oh, if you are high enough level to cast geas, it is pretty nice to make your demand easier
Making the opposed Charisma check is not the only way to gain the creatures service. Nothing prevents you from casting spells at it so battering it with Persistent Suggestion spells to agree to your preferred deal is always an option.
It is probably also worth pointing out that at level 15 you can just start using Moment of Prescience to win the opposed check.
One thing that seems to be missing from your guides, concerning the magic circle trap -
Magic Circle against Evil wrote:
You can add a special diagram (a two-dimensional bounded figure with no gaps along its circumference, augmented with various magical sigils) to make the magic circle more secure. Drawing the diagram by hand takes 10 minutes and requires a DC 20 Spellcraft check. You do not know the result of this check. If the check fails, the diagram is ineffective. You can take 10 when drawing the diagram if you are under no particular time pressure to complete the task. This task also takes 10 full minutes. If time is no factor at all, and you devote 3 hours and 20 minutes to the task, you can take 20.
A successful diagram allows you to cast a dimensional anchor spell on the magic circle during the round before casting any summoning spell. The anchor holds any called creatures in the magic circle for 24 hours per caster level. A creature cannot use its Spell Resistance against a magic circle prepared with a diagram, and none of its abilities or attacks can cross the diagram. If the creature tries a Charisma check to break free of the trap (see the lesser planar binding spell), the DC increases by 5. The creature is immediately released if anything disturbs the diagram - even a straw laid across it. The creature itself cannot disturb the diagram either directly or indirectly, as noted above.
The diagram makes it considerably less likely that a creature can break out once you've summoned it, greatly reducing the odds of having an angry devil/whatever trashing your lab. if you're spending days on bringing in critters, you'd be well advised to take the time to make the diagram. [Hmm, ninja'd on the diagram by Wheezy.]
Anyways, these guides are good stuff.
I'll also mention elementals as an alternate to hellhounds - medium elementals have 4 hit dice, low int scores, and +0 Cha mods, making them easy to bring in and boss around as long as you can communicate with them.
Zhangar is right: you should always be using a diagram with your magic circle. Not only does it prevent SR from allowing escapes, it's the only way to have the circle last long enough to try again the next day if your Chr check fails. If you have a lair, instead of being a nomad, you should have one permanently engraved in the floor of your summoning room.
Another note about preparation is you need to cast dimensional anchor on your circle if the thing you are summoning can teleport: otherwise it will just thank you for the free ride to the material plane and teleport out of the circle.
And most devils more powerful than an imp can teleport.
Thanks to everyone for pointing out the issue with the magic circle. I didn't catch that and will revise accordingly.
Andreww, Moment of Prescience is a great tip! I hadn't thought of that. Of course, by the time you have access to that spell, you'll have a lot of other tricks to play... but anyway, if you have other ideas for spells, please pass them along.
Zhangar, I didn't mention medium elementals because they're on the Summon Monster list -- if you're a 9th level caster, it's usually less trouble to get medium elementals with Summon Monster IV. I do have huge elementals on the next list. Low int scores are a two-edged sword, btw! They mean the creature is less likely to be able to plot successfully against you, but they also mean you're not going to see much tactical brilliance.
Andreww, Moment of Prescience is a great tip! I hadn't thought of that. Of course, by the time you have access to that spell, you'll have a lot of other tricks to play... but anyway, if you have other ideas for spells, please pass them along.
Even better Moment of Prescience comes along just as you get Greater Planar Binding. The Planetar has +7cha, the horned devil +6, Marilith +7, Bythos Aeon +5, Immolation Devil +7 and lots of others.
As a 15th level Wizard bringing along your friendly outsider with 16th level cleric casting is quite handy.
If you're a sorceror with Infernal Charisma calling a devil, you're not going to sweat the Cha checks too much; by 17th level you're going to have +15 or something. But for the non-Cha-based casters, or when calling a non-devil, yeah, it's a concern. So this is a nice spell to have in your pocket.
I think Earth Elementals are actually worth it for Binding, because of their Earthglide ability gives them neat mobility options. I've used them to scout in dungeons, but the short duration on Summon Monster is a problem. You will probably have to learn Terran.
All the elementals can be situationally useful. The fire elemental is probably the most *generally* useful, because it's a decent combat brute and the world is full of things that can be burned. But, yeah, the earth elemental would be a close second.
I was much more impressed with Augmented Summoning of Earth Elementals for combat actually. I also had fun when we encountered a small house with baddies in it. "Is the house made of stone?" "Yeah, wood is rare here." "Excellent. Wood would've been bad. Well, I'll tell them to go in through the walls and start flanking."
Earth Glide can be compared to flying, but it's much rarer. Sometimes you want to explore a dungeon (often stone and underground) and scrying is impractical. Teleportation also doesn't work so well if you have no prior information about the layout.
