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My players are making up some mythic PCs to face Cthulhu (stats as written, all official Paizo products allowed) just for fun and I'm not entirely sure how to run Cthulhu. His summoned star-spawn will be there to hopefully drain resources, but how should I use Wish? What about Control Weather?
The star-spawn can speak (telepathic communication) as a free action to trigger Overwhelming Mind, but that's a one time trick with a low DC for level 20/tier 10 PCs. With DCs in the 20's, I'm doubtful they'll hinder the party too much.
Cthulhu gets Gate 3/day and the star-spawn get it 1/day. What should they drag to the fight?
Cthulhu gets wish 1/day. How should he use it?
cthulhu's claws hit in a 10x10 square. Does the grab go off against everything the claw hits?
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Heh Cthulhu isn't really meant for combat, one mythic character can kill him rather easily, assuming you aren't modifying him.
But anyway:
Gate: can call all kind of creatures, preferably creatures related to the lovecraft mythos (Shoggoth, Gug, Denizens of Leng, Unique Colour Out of Space like with 25 or 30 HD, Moon Beasts etc...)
Wish: Probably going to need the wish to heal yourself and your allies back to full life, just use it when Cthulhu gets to 50% hp, assuming he even make it to 50% hp before being defeated.
Cthulhu's claws, yeah the claws do go off every time they hit. But well, your players will most likely have freedom of movement rings or at least cast on themselves, so grappling will virtually not happen.
If your players are going to be level 20 with 10 mythic tiers, you might want to rethink this challenge. If you search on the forum him you can find builds for such characters that can successfully solo Cthulhu. The only part that is difficult about Cthulhu is making the saves for being around him. If you can succeed on the saves (and mythic characters get so many bonuses to doing so) it becomes trivial to defeat Cthulhu.
You might consider changing it to...say level 20 and 7 or 8 mythic tiers if you actually want it to be somewhat of a challenge.
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Wish - "I wish there were four of me right here, right now, of equal power to the original me, all of a hive mind with the disposition and current fury of the original me, having no weaknesses granted by the casting of this spell, and no other side-effects other than those specifically spelled out by the casting of this spell."
Now it becomes a party of Cthulhu!
Wish - "I wish there were four of me right here, right now, of equal power to the original me, all of a hive mind with the disposition and current fury of the original me, having no weaknesses granted by the casting of this spell, and no other side-effects other than those specifically spelled out by the casting of this spell."
Now it becomes a party of Cthulhu!
Excellent, but use on dramatic moments.
Heroes: a bit more lads, he's looking pretty battered and we're still doing ok.Cthulu [insert forementioned wish]
Heroes: ...crap, O.O
Wish - "I wish there were four of me right here, right now, of equal power to the original me, all of a hive mind with the disposition and current fury of the original me, having no weaknesses granted by the casting of this spell, and no other side-effects other than those specifically spelled out by the casting of this spell."
Now it becomes a party of Cthulhu!
As a GM you can freely do as you wish because you are basically only asking yourself for things, and as you control NPCs it becomes trivial for them to receive whatever they want.
That said, this seems well beyond the power of a wish.
Wish can do the following:
• Duplicate any sorcerer/wizard spell of 8th level or lower, provided the spell does not belong to one of your opposition schools.
• Duplicate any non-sorcerer/wizard spell of 7th level or lower, provided the spell does not belong to one of your opposition schools.
• Duplicate any sorcerer/wizard spell of 7th level or lower, even if it belongs to one of your opposition schools.
• Duplicate any non-sorcerer/wizard spell of 6th level or lower, even if it belongs to one of your opposition schools.
• Undo the harmful effects of many other spells, such as geas/quest or insanity.
• Grant a creature a +1 inherent bonus to an ability score. Two to five wish spells cast in immediate succession can grant a creature a +2 to +5 inherent bonus to an ability score (two wishes for a +2 inherent bonus, three wishes for a +3 inherent bonus, and so on). Inherent bonuses are instantaneous, so they cannot be dispelled. Note: An inherent bonus may not exceed +5 for a single ability score, and inherent bonuses to a particular ability score do not stack, so only the best one applies.
• Remove injuries and afflictions. A single wish can aid one creature per caster level, and all subjects are cured of the same kind of affliction. For example, you could heal all the damage you and your companions have taken, or remove all poison effects from everyone in the party, but not do both with the same wish.
• Revive the dead. A wish can bring a dead creature back to life by duplicating a resurrection spell. A wish can revive a dead creature whose body has been destroyed, but the task takes two wishes: one to recreate the body and another to infuse the body with life again. A wish cannot prevent a character who was brought back to life from gaining a permanent negative level.
• Transport travelers. A wish can lift one creature per caster level from anywhere on any plane and place those creatures anywhere else on any plane regardless of local conditions. An unwilling target gets a Will save to negate the effect, and spell resistance (if any) applies.
• Undo misfortune. A wish can undo a single recent event. The wish forces a reroll of any roll made within the last round (including your last turn). Reality reshapes itself to accommodate the new result. For example, a wish could undo an opponent's successful save, a foe's successful critical hit (either the attack roll or the critical roll), a friend's failed save, and so on. The reroll, however, may be as bad as or worse than the original roll. An unwilling target gets a Will save to negate the effect, and spell resistance (if any) applies.You may try to use a wish to produce greater effects than these, but doing so is dangerous. (The wish may pervert your intent into a literal but undesirable fulfillment or only a partial fulfillment, at the GM's discretion.)
To me, it very unfair to allow the Wish spell to succeed at something like this. Would you allow a player to make such a successful wish? I certainly wouldn't, and even though he is Cthulhu is no reason to give him carte blanche on what wish can do.
For reference, creating a simulacrum of cthulu is a 7th level spell which gives you one cthulu snow man at half the power of cthulu. Of course, the spell is notoriously bad because it really doesn't discuss what happens when you lose half your hit dice in regard to how your powers are affected.
However, what might be reasonable is an army of cthulhu simulacrums that cthulhu has made in advance because pesky adventures keep bothering him. Figuring out how to adjust the power levels for the simulacrums might be an issue, but honestly you have a simulacrum army of cthulhu. You win.
One idea that comes to mind is to try and use the Wish to nullify their Mythic powers, or magic (i.e. Anti-Magic Field, or perhaps an Anti-Mythic Field). Although this hurts a lot of Cthulhu's tactics, when it nullifies about 90% of their tactics, it turns into a brutal faceoff of physical might, something which I'm certain Cthulhu would pull the win with.
Also consider that cthulhu probably has someone that can cast mythic contingency on him and give him a contingency teleport away, with a contingency of if anyone not loyal to him enters his domain or some such.
Followed by Cthulu using his at will greater teleport to teleport to the moon, where he is immune to the void of space.
The party fights through his starspawn to find Cthulhu is no longer there. Congratulations Mario, but your Princess is in another castle!
Also consider that Cthulhu should have wealth to use for himself at least equal to that of a 20th level character. Start decking him out in all that magical bling.
Also, after the party has made their initial move against Cthulhu he should be sending nightmares and starspawn after them continually. He certainly can't win a straight up fight, but he can fight a war of attrition. Which seems like something a great old one would do.
Also, you may consider giving Cthulhu his on special demi-plane which is an dead magic demiplane. Sure, it negates a lot of his abilities. It also negates SO many of the party's...it could be interesting.
Make use of astral projection. Spend some time on his lair, make it accessibility via interstellar travel or maybe through a gateway in the Dimension of Dreams. Use control weather for fog effects to reduce visibility. Think of some unusual weather effects for his home planet/lair (think jupiter) maybe acid rain, mind fog, thundering effects so loud they cause sonic damage etc
Also since Cthulhu grants cleric spells make sure you stat up a cult to slow down and harass the players.
Second his use of Gate, have fun digging for weird monsters like the Iathavos Qlippoth, void dragons, dread devourers(a great template to add to the cult leader).
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Give him appropriate wealth for his level.
Populate R'leyh with starspawn with class levels - blood ragers, inquisitors, etc. A 18 level sorcerer starspawn is only CR 29, but should be horrible to actually go up against.
Play up R'leyh being a madhouse. Look at the Guards & Wards spell, and then reskin those effects and apply them to the entire city, for example.
Keep in mind that Cthulhu can use the mythic version of any SLA it's got.
I wouldn't allowed a mythic wish to bring in multiple Cthulhu's, but mythic wish can explicitly duplicate any other mythic spell.
Fudge Cthulhu's mythic power - maybe it's got 10 power outside of R'leyh, but has infinite power inside of it.
Cthulhu can target other unique beings with its caster level 30 Gate. It can totally pull in another friendly demigod, such as Hastur (its "brother") or Dagon (an explicit ally), if it wishes and said demigod is agreeable.
A house rule that I do for my own demigods - give it a better version of divine source. Give Cthulhu every single domain spell from its domains as 1/day SLA (or more if it crops up repeatedly), and remember that by the very virtue of having them, Great Cthulhu has access to the mythic versions of any of those.
Doing that would give Cthulhu mythic meteor swarm (courtesy of its Stars subdomain), among other goodies.
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Cthulhu isn't written up even remotely powerful enough to stand a chance against a level 20 mythical party. It's also hyper-intelligent, so won't do stupid stuff. It would be stupid to give a bunch of crunchy insect critters (the PCs) a chance to harm its precious hide. It won't fight them on their own terms, it will fight them on it's terms.
The players will have super-powerful optimized characters. Any one of them should be able to easily solo Cthulhu, if it fights stupid and gets in a can't-win toe-to-toe slugging match. Look up the Zen Archer 'One' on the forums for an example of a non-mythic PC who can probably solo Cthulhu by about 18th level. Cthulhu could probably be one of the 'Beastmass' challenges ...
I put my vote with the above suggestion of 'After they fight through legions of class-level Starspawn to Cthulhu's lair, they find it gone.' It's teleported away to its vacation home on the moon. From there it'll wage a war of attrition to weaken the PCs and drive them all insane. It'll never personally go near them. Instead, it'll send regular minions, dreams of insanity, etc. If they chase to the moon it'll teleport to its old vacation home in another galaxy on another dimension, adjacent to its actual lair within an anti-magic zone on the surface of a dead star.
Once the PCs counter the war of attrition with Mind Blank, Contingency, etc, Cthulhu will get nasty. It'll have cultists investigate the PCs and learn their weaknesses. Most PCs have relatives, friends, or at least something they care about. Cthulhu will corrupt or destroy those, making it gradually worse unless the PCs leave it be. The perfect tactics by Cthulhu will leave the PCs alive, but so miserable they wish they were dead. The perfect victory by Cthulhu would involve the PCs all willingly seeking oblivion, although it might also accept genuine conversions.
Really, if the GM plays up Cthulhu's intelligence and creepiness, it should have no trouble avoiding, then destroying, the PCs. That is its way.
Cthulhu isn't written up even remotely powerful enough to stand a chance against a level 20 mythical party. It's also hyper-intelligent, so won't do stupid stuff. It would be stupid to give a bunch of crunchy insect critters (the PCs) a chance to harm its precious hide. It won't fight them on their own terms, it will fight them on it's terms.
This. Cthulhu's Intelligence is 31. Which means he is far smarter than everybody on the this forum, the GM running the adventure, and all his players put together.
The notion that he would just stand around in a straight-up fight and let a party of uber powerfuls run right over him is crazy.
Really, all things being equal, this level of Intelligence would mean that playing him correctly would involve the GM creating a long list of outlandish contingencies nobody else could ever think up, and then playing Cthulhu as if he thought them up on the fly. That might begin to simulate his smarts.
Problem is, your average gaming group would interpret that as an unfair nerf. Because, for the most part, players are unreasonable people. (Just saying - we all want it both ways, don't we?)
So my answer would be... don't let them fight Cthulhu.
It's fun to have his stats in a rulebook and everything. But this just smacks of the old 1st Edition days, when you had to sit around listening to the worst players bragging about how their DM let them kill Arthur (from Deities & Demigods), and how they took Excalibur and used it to kill all the other Knights, and then did unspeakable things to Guinevere, etc., etc. It's just a gross, juvenile masturbatory fantasy that can't really lead to anybody ever getting a date/functioning in society/the like. It's the sort of bragging rights that makes it so the people who laugh at and hate us just look right to do so.
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If your players are going to be level 20 with 10 mythic tiers, you might want to rethink this challenge. If you search on the forum him you can find builds for such characters that can successfully solo Cthulhu. The only part that is difficult about Cthulhu is making the saves for being around him. If you can succeed on the saves (and mythic characters get so many bonuses to doing so) it becomes trivial to defeat Cthulhu.
You might consider changing it to...say level 20 and 7 or 8 mythic tiers if you actually want it to be somewhat of a challenge.
This is all I find searching for cthulu.
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If your players are going to be level 20 with 10 mythic tiers, you might want to rethink this challenge. If you search on the forum him you can find builds for such characters that can successfully solo Cthulhu. The only part that is difficult about Cthulhu is making the saves for being around him. If you can succeed on the saves (and mythic characters get so many bonuses to doing so) it becomes trivial to defeat Cthulhu.
You might consider changing it to...say level 20 and 7 or 8 mythic tiers if you actually want it to be somewhat of a challenge.
This is all I find when I search for Cthulu and then it won't let me post.
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That is all.
Cthulhu wishes for the Tarrasque to be released on the opposite side of the world. Now the party must split to handle both. Dun dun duuuuuuun!!
This is all I find when I search for Cthulu and then it won't let me post.If your players are going to be level 20 with 10 mythic tiers, you might want to rethink this challenge. If you search on the forum him you can find builds for such characters that can successfully solo Cthulhu. The only part that is difficult about Cthulhu is making the saves for being around him. If you can succeed on the saves (and mythic characters get so many bonuses to doing so) it becomes trivial to defeat Cthulhu.
You might consider changing it to...say level 20 and 7 or 8 mythic tiers if you actually want it to be somewhat of a challenge.
If you're just searching for the word Cthulhu it probably wont show you what you're looking for. I can't remember the title of the thread, but there was definitely one in which the whole goal was to solo cthulhu, after that edition of the Bestiary came out.
Anyone find it odd a being named "Azothath" is giving away methods to defeat Cthulhu?
A wizard 20 non mythic can solo Cthulhu
If Cthulhu has the chance to use their wish to replicate antimagic field it almost impossible to win.
OK...now think about this logically:
1) Destiny
Cthulhu is hyperintelligent, very wise, and has the ability to predict the future (he can read the stars). He has a cult working for him that is world-spanning and has many priests/wizards/diviners among it's ranks.
Any individuals destined to slay Cthulhu pretty much aren't going to make it out of the cradle without divine protection. If they do, they will probably have to spend their entire lives dodging assassins. Then if they do go after him, they'll probably find he's not there (see below).
2) Location
Cthulhu lies dead but dreaming in the sunken city of R'lyeh. So that's probably a couple of miles down in an ocean in an unknown location - this will be problematic for many to even find, let alone get to. Once you do, one hefty zap (like anti-magic shell) takes out your ability to breath & resist staggering pressure, and you die.
Of course R'lyeh could come to the surface, the stars being right and all, but then with a freed Cthulhu you have another problem: he can go just about anywhere, and you can't. If he knows he could lose, he just leaves and organizes minions to take out the party one by one.
3) He's Immortal
Given the Immortality ability he has, permanently killing him is just not possible. You can force him back to his tomb for a while, but that's about it. I doubt anything short of a god can "kill" Cthulhu for good.
In other words, why prep for a fight that's pointless and if approached directly isn't going to happen anyway?
Yes, in a normal game is impossible.
I think this is about a simulate duel players vs Cthulhu
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Yes, in a normal game is impossible.
I think this is about a simulate duel players vs Cthulhu
Essentially for bragging purposes, then...