Best Minions for a BBEG to use Magic Jar on


Advice


Hey All,

I am DM'ing a higher level campaign where the BBEG has access to the magic jar spell and a number of minions and followers.

Taking the restrictions of the spell into account:

Quote:
If you are successful, your life force occupies the host body, and the host's life force is imprisoned in the magic jar. You keep your Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, level, class, base attack bonus, base save bonuses, alignment, and mental abilities. The body retains its Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, hit points, natural abilities, and automatic abilities. A body with extra limbs does not allow you to make more attacks (or more advantageous two-weapon attacks) than normal. You can't choose to activate the body's extraordinary or supernatural abilities. The creature's spells and spell-like abilities do not stay with the body.

What would be the good options for creatures/followers/things to possess, assuming that there aren't really any limitations and that the follower is willing?

I would like suggestions that are either powerful, or based on interesting tricks and mechanics I could pull off that my players wouldn't expect.

Thanks in advance!

Grand Lodge

Take possession of a PC. This causes lots of problems for the group as they now have to fight the BBEG loyal minions and try not to kill their team mate.

Fun part is you do not need line of sight so you could effectively Wall of force yourself off while a minion or 2 fights the Party. I recommend first round to Wall of Force...second round will be Cloud Kill then Emergency Force sphere to keep yourself out of the cloud.

Next round use magic jar and possess whomever fails the save. Use them to kill the party. If the party makes it through your First wall of force they can deal with the poison cloud...then the sphere of force...These extra rounds they have to work to get to you can allow you to get back to your body and get to safety via teleport or D. Door.


The biggest baddest monster around. Or you can do the second biggest and baddest, and try to convince your players that the biggest and baddess is actually you.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Having a spellcaster in the body of some big dumb brute -- a Frost Giant or an earth elemental or some such -- is always amusing. It's unexpected, and you get a nice bump to your CON/hp and Fort save.

Things with unusual movement, especially things with Burrow and things that breathe water. High level PCs are usually ready to fly and to deal with flying opponents. Things that can pop out of rock or water, cast, and pop back? Trickier. Things with environmental immunities are also situationally useful. Imagine a final confrontation with the BBEG in a lava cavern -- it's 140 degrees and there are pools of lava everywhere. And he's squatting in the middle of the biggest lava pool, in the body of a red dragon.

Possessing an outsider is also an interesting twist. They have SR and good Will saves, and you can't access their Ex, Su, or SLA abilities, but if you can pull it off it's pretty cool. "Demonic possession? Ah ha ha ha."

Doug M.


Hey all, thanks for the suggestions so far. I get that I could posses one of the players, but that's not really my style.

More what I'm looking for is which monsters have the best natural and automatic abilities. Particularly humanoid ones that could also at the same time command minions (so they can speak).

Grand Lodge

Only time I've ever seen it used is for one of my party members to jump into the BBEG then start shouting "kill me while I lay prone and close my eyes."

Grand Lodge

claudekennilol wrote:
Only time I've ever seen it used is for one of my party members to jump into the BBEG then start shouting "kill me while I lay prone and close my eyes."

Sad...Very little creativity.

I used it in Rise of the Rune lords the attack on Sandpoint.
I used Magic Jar on Longtooth the young red dragon. I then turned him on the army he arrived with and then helped the group clean up the Giant army leader Terrakitnis. Fear Aura and breath weapons is a wonderful thing to have verses an army of Giants.

I've used it a lot but the effects it had in that combat was drastic and saved an entire city from being destroyed/burned down. Not a single building was crushed...only gate damage.


Consider possessing an elder aether elemental, which should be easy enough to conjure with greater planar binding or summon monster VII. As an elemental you can speak and hold items normally, while gaining a huge pile of benefits. Blindsense 60 ft, a natural flight speed, and a 30 foot reach for delivering touch spells put you off on a nice start, but the real draw are its defensive abilities.

The elemental's statistics are quite nice, with a solid Constitution, a fantastic Dexterity, and 200 hp. You also get a free +7 deflection bonus to AC from Telekinetic Deflection, and you have DR 10/-, which can provide significant difficulties for parties trying to spam you with large numbers of attacks. Even more impressive are your immunities: aether elementals are immune to force damage, bleed, paralysis, poison, sleep effects, stunning, critical hits, flanking, and precision damage. To top it all off you get a constant, extraordinary invisibility effect that even protects you from invisibility purge and sound based blindsense or blindsight. Oh, and you don't need to breathe, eat, or sleep.

All in all, a very nice chasis for a high-level spellcaster.


Use an extended Object Possession, Greater on an Adamantine Golem.

*cough*


Have a lot of mooks lying around. One of them gets killed? No problem, possess another one. Skeletons walled up in little chambers with an eyeslit into the room (all of them with a spell component pouch unless you have Eschew Materials). Birds flying around the castle in big flocks.

Undead are nice because they have lots of immunities, and because you can auto-identify which possession targets are undead and which aren't.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

put banana in jar

banana papaya

heehee "bottom" heeheeheehee


Avoron wrote:

Consider possessing an elder aether elemental, which should be easy enough to conjure with greater planar binding or summon monster VII. As an elemental you can speak and hold items normally, while gaining a huge pile of benefits. Blindsense 60 ft, a natural flight speed, and a 30 foot reach for delivering touch spells put you off on a nice start, but the real draw are its defensive abilities.

[...]

All in all, a very nice chasis for a high-level spellcaster.

Firm agreement: this is a good choice. Summon Monster probably won't give you the time you need -- with Extend Spell it'll last maybe three minutes. But Greater Planer Binding will set you right up.

Meanwhile, a couple of general notes on the spell:

1) You want to be sure that the BBEG doesn't tip his hand about the spell being Magic Jar, because Magic Jar has one significant weakness: it can be undone by a simple dispel, cast either on the host/victim or the jar. Once the PCs realize this, they can just spam dispels until one succeeds. So a clever BBEG should try to give the impression that something else (like a Polymorph) is going on.

2) Another issue with this spell is that you absolutely must stay within range of the jar. (Why? Because if your host body is killed while in range, your spirit just bounces back to the jar. But if your host body is killed while out of range of the jar, *you die*.) And the range is medium -- 100' + 10'/level. So a 15th level BBEG has a radius of 250' from the jar. And your body *also* must be kept safe within range of the jar, in that same radius. (Because otherwise, when the spell ends? If your body isn't within range of the jar? *You die*.) In theory your possessed body could fly around carrying the jar and go anywhere you pleased, but in practice this would be insanely dangerous -- if either the jar gets broken, or you don't get it back within range of your body in time before the spell ends, *you die*.

So there are two potential point failures: if the PCs discover either the jar or the BBEG's seemingly-dead and helpless body, that's game over. A wise BBEG will make sure that the jar is someplace undetectable (in a lead-lined box buried in an unmarked location 20' below ground, or whatever) and that his body is somewhere very well guarded and very hard to get at. Again, the best defense here is to have the PCs not thinking "magic jar" so that it never occurs to them to go looking.

3) Finally, note that you can't study your spellbook while your soul is in a jar. So a BBEG wizard will gradually run out of spells while bouncing in and out of hosts. (So will a BBEG sorceror, but it will take longer.) This can be to some degree offset by making the hosts get physically more powerful and dangerous as the BBEG works through them.

4) Oh, and: if the PCs do figure out that they're dealing with Magic Jar? That's bad in one way, but good in another: knowing there's a body-jumper around is likely to dramatically crank up PC paranoia. After all, the BBEG could possess anyone! So, play into this -- pass an occasional note to a PC, or have an NPC act a little strangely.

cheers,

Doug M.


Pathfinder Maps Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

Magic jar is great in the hands of a DM-controlled NPC or monster. Chilling, threatening, an all-round epic challenge to overcome.

In the hands of PCs it becomes all too easy to abuse. Once you've gotten a taste of magic jar, it's hard to go back to being just a squishy mage.

So I'm very ambivalent about this spell, and plan to house-rule it out of general availability.

Great stuff for a BBEG, though. Makes it easier to have a recurring villain, since that villain has a better chance of surviving his own all-too-certain death.


@Douglas: I love your additions here but I did want to point out regarding your second point that you can't really bury the magic jar anywhere because the initial jump from the jar to your first target will require line of effect, even though the initial casting does not:

Magic Jar,PRD wrote:


By casting magic jar, you place your soul in a gem or large crystal (known as the magic jar), leaving your body lifeless. Then you can attempt to take control of a nearby body, forcing its soul into the magic jar. You may move back to the jar (thereby returning the trapped soul to its body) and attempt to possess another body. The spell ends when you send your soul back to your own body, leaving the receptacle empty. To cast the spell, the magic jar must be within spell range and you must know where it is, though you do not need line of sight or line of effect to it. When you transfer your soul upon casting, your body is, as near as anyone can tell, dead.

While in the magic jar, you can sense and attack any life force within 10 feet per caster level (and on the same plane of existence). You do need line of effect from the jar to the creatures. You cannot determine the exact creature types or positions of these creatures. In a group of life forces, you can sense a difference of 4 or more HD between one creature and another and can determine whether a life force is powered by positive or negative energy. (Undead creatures are powered by negative energy. Only sentient undead creatures have, or are, souls.)

So any hop between creatures is probably fine within the range of the spell. Any hop back to your body is also presumably okay as those portions of the spell do not indicate requiring line of sight/effect. Any hop back to the jar is also presumably okay.

But any hop from the jar to a target will require line of effect from the jar to the target.

One idea might be to have a circular room (fighting arena) that is no bigger than the max range of the spell. On the ceiling, in the center of the room, have a simple set of crystal lights (quartz crystals with 'Continual Flame' or somesuch) embedded there along with a handful of other otherwise non-descript items. Have the jar, in the form of yet another crystal, also embedded here. Let it pierc through the stone ceiling into an upper room where the BBEG body is located. The jar is now within line of effect of anyone in the room, the BBEG body is hidden and safe. He could have a minion with a Hat of Disguise set up to look like him. Possibly several. Maybe they are Blinking Hats of Disguise (totally made up) which are set up to send the disguise randomly to one minion each round. He can hop around to his heart's content and the party won't really know which is which.

To keep it from being a complete cluster-kitten you can either motivate the BBEG to come down and take care of matters himself i.e. the PCs represent a credible threat to his plans of left unchecked after beating his minions. Or perhaps he just escapes to get them another day. Dunno.


Douglas Muir 406 wrote:
Summon Monster probably won't give you the time you need -- with Extend Spell it'll last maybe three minutes.

Plenty of time to cast magic jar, take control of their body, hitch a ride back to their home plane, and plane shift/greater teleport your way back.

Summoning wrote:
A summoning spell instantly brings a creature or object to a place you designate. When the spell ends or is dispelled, a summoned creature is instantly sent back to where it came from

As for most of the other issues mentioned, these can be circumvented by simply casting the spell possession instead of magic jar. Amrel, is material from Occult Adventures legal in your campaign?


Avoron wrote:
Douglas Muir 406 wrote:
Summon Monster probably won't give you the time you need -- with Extend Spell it'll last maybe three minutes.

Plenty of time to cast magic jar, take control of their body, hitch a ride back to their home plane, and plane shift/greater teleport your way back.

Summoning wrote:
A summoning spell instantly brings a creature or object to a place you designate. When the spell ends or is dispelled, a summoned creature is instantly sent back to where it came from
As for most of the other issues mentioned, these can be circumvented by simply casting the spell possession instead of magic jar. Amrel, is material from Occult Adventures legal in your campaign?

Yeah it is. However, and I should have mentioned this earlier, the BBEG is actually a ghost with the malevolence ability.

My idea was to let the party eventually "figure out" that the BBEG was just casting magic jar. They would spend all of this time trying to break the spell or destroy the jar or what have you, and then when they did, the BBEG would fake dying and just float into the floor until the party left, or possess one of his prisoners and leave with the rest when they were eventually freed by the party. The real trick would be figuring out that he was actually a ghost.

All that said, I'm not as worried about the receptacle issue, I'm just looking for the creature with the best abilities that still function with magic jar.


I did exactly this once, many years ago. The ghost was a former assassin / serial killer (which is to say, an assassin who really enjoyed his work). He was bound to the knife that he'd used in life... which looked like an ordinary kitchen knife, not a dagger or anything like that. He found an ally in a sorceror (who had resentments and issues of her own). The inspiration for the whole thing was the minor (but surprisingly good) 1990s movie "The Frighteners"...

...anyway. Sure, a ghost works, but you have to give him a goal, and also give the players some way to get rid of him. Destroying his jar item works, of course.

Doug M.


Wheldrake wrote:


In the hands of PCs it becomes all too easy to abuse. Once you've gotten a taste of magic jar, it's hard to go back to being just a squishy mage.

So I'm very ambivalent about this spell, and plan to house-rule it out of general availability.

Yes and no. True, in the hands of a clever player it can provide a huge power-up. But the range limitation means that for a standard dungeon crawl or outdoor adventure, you have to carry the jar around with you AND either carry your body, or be VERY sure that you can get back to it in time. Both of those requirements provide lots of opportunities for the DM to make things interesting for Mr. Clever-Clever.

Doug M.


While BBEG and not minion, have it be a Beast Bonded Witch of 10+ levels. They have a magic jar like ability and no listed distance limit. Arguably, both the witch and familiar can upgrade bodies via this ability [Twin Soul].

/cevah

EDIT: Take over this minion or this one.


Douglas Muir 406 wrote:

Having a spellcaster in the body of some big dumb brute -- a Frost Giant or an earth elemental or some such -- is always amusing. It's unexpected, and you get a nice bump to your CON/hp and Fort save.

Two words: Material components


Hey, you know that damsel that the party's come to save? You know, the frail pretty one? Find a safe place in range for your body and not only do you have a nasty trap, you can force people to go through a pretty dire choice to make.


Drahliana Moonrunner wrote:
Douglas Muir 406 wrote:

Having a spellcaster in the body of some big dumb brute -- a Frost Giant or an earth elemental or some such -- is always amusing. It's unexpected, and you get a nice bump to your CON/hp and Fort save.

Two words: Material components

Sorcerer/Psychic supremacy.


Anthropomorphic animal + great white whale :-)

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder First Edition / Advice / Best Minions for a BBEG to use Magic Jar on All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.