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I have an odd little notion for a game I might run some time, largely centered around villains with nasty habits of not staying dead for a variety of reasons. Reincarnated druid, clone shenanigans, rakshasas (timescale permitting), maybe some old standby undead.
The idea would be to really push the theme, with lots of suicidal plans, and paranoia about old enemies turning up again in new forms, ultimately leading up to having to work out some unorthodox and possibly ethically dubious way to finally settle things (like, oh, dragging everyone off to stand trial in Galt).
A lot of the appeal here is in having the primary villain show up at various times, being outright defeated (or committing suicide in some spectacular fashion), only to crop back up later. The problem here is, PCs, inevitably, are going to treat this as a puzzle. Subduing the big ol' taunting archvillain through non-lethal means would derail the whole thing, so... I need to plan ahead for all the various ways that could happen.
Off-hand I can think of:
Non-lethal damage followed by imprisonment- Easily addressed in any number of ways.
Baleful polymorph/petrification/trap the soul- Ring of counterspells maybe?
Allying with some form of undead or daemon- I don't think there's any easy way for PCs to enlist one of the relevant creatures, but I could very easily be wrong.
So... brainstorming time. Any spells/magic items/other odd shenanigans I'm forgetting that could short out the premise here? Any better ideas for how to counter them?
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Feeblemind: Is free, is level 5, and is harder to resist for arcane spellcasters. That spell actually one-shotted a boss in my games. I suggest a contingency here.
Dominate person: Like Feeblemind, but then your party will have a buddy with them. All they need to do is to drop the villain unconscious at the caster-level-minus-1th day and cast again the spell. And again and again and again.
Plane shift: This is a weapon. Being sent in a plane where time flow very quickly is very effective (the buddy could say: "What the hell is just happened?" in the time where whoever he knows dies of old age). I suggest a dimensional lock/anchor. Or a patient villain.
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Kill the villain and then Animate Dead. Being a mindless undead really hampers your options for resurrection.
Portable Hole + Bag of Holding is always fun.
Plane Shift to a Major Negative Dominant plane will hit him with a massive number of negative levels just by being there until he dies and becomes a wraith, loosing all abilities it had in life.
Energy Bending. You know it had to be said. But other than that, Geas?
Even death isn't necessarily permanent in this game, so... Uh... Bribe the GM?
You mean like put them in an inescapable death trap?
A slight combination of two previous ideas. Make the villian a mindless zombie, drop him into a bag of holding and seal it in stone somewhere somehow. He can't be brought back with anything but a wish or miracle then I believe, and if they don't word it right he will still be stuck in a bag of holding locked in stone somewhere running out of air rather quickly.
Re-education. With a healthy side-dish of brainwashing.
Bag of Devouring.
This is something I thought very deeply about as my character brainstormed all the horrible ways to take someone out without killing them. Bestow Curse can be used to inflict insanity, including amnesia.
I have an odd little notion for a game I might run some time, largely centered around villains with nasty habits of not staying dead for a variety of reasons. Reincarnated druid, clone shenanigans, rakshasas (timescale permitting), maybe some old standby undead.
The idea would be to really push the theme, with lots of suicidal plans, and paranoia about old enemies turning up again in new forms, ultimately leading up to having to work out some unorthodox and possibly ethically dubious way to finally settle things (like, oh, dragging everyone off to stand trial in Galt).
A lot of the appeal here is in having the primary villain show up at various times, being outright defeated (or committing suicide in some spectacular fashion), only to crop back up later. The problem here is, PCs, inevitably, are going to treat this as a puzzle. Subduing the big ol' taunting archvillain through non-lethal means would derail the whole thing, so... I need to plan ahead for all the various ways that could happen.
Off-hand I can think of:
Non-lethal damage followed by imprisonment- Easily addressed in any number of ways.
Baleful polymorph/petrification/trap the soul- Ring of counterspells maybe?
Allying with some form of undead or daemon- I don't think there's any easy way for PCs to enlist one of the relevant creatures, but I could very easily be wrong.
So... brainstorming time. Any spells/magic items/other odd shenanigans I'm forgetting that could short out the premise here? Any better ideas for how to counter them?
Ok, so you're running the game and you want to keep the PCs from capturing and holding the archvillian because then they will have no quest? There is an item called a Poison Ring. Doubt any of your PCs will check for that. Your archvillian could secretly poison himself again and again even after being captured so they wont know how he dies and it'll frustrate the hell out of them because they think they've captured him and won.
You could also use the old trick of the villian putting a hit on himself in the PC's hometown so that if they ever do drag him back there to be thrown in the dungeon, he can be recaptured by the bounty hunters to be killed in some glorious way or just killed on sight.
I don't see how it would be hard for you to kill your own villian if you're running the game.. lol
If you just want ways for the player to defeat the NPC without the NPC dying, perhaps the NPC sent their shadow, their skin, an illusion or an ice sculpture (Shadow Projection, Skinsend, Project Image or Simulacrum) instead. Magic Jar or Marionette Possession could be used too.
If you want terrible fates to sentence an NPC to, consider Mind Seed (3rd party - Dreamscarred Press).
In general this sounds a bit like one of Emperor Tippy's campaigns & you might try to google him or the Tippyverse for ideas.
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Flesh to Stone - can't be raised or reincarnated if you don't actually die. You could also keep a stable of basilisks, medusas or cockatrices to petrify captured enemies, sort of like some villains keep pigs to eat the corpses.
Trap the Soul, Imprisonment, Temporal Stasis are all rather high-level solutions.
There are many prisons in Golarion, from the metaphysical to the mundane. Toss him in the right one, and he's not getting out. Magic can be used quite effectively, either to destroy every trace of him, to turn his alignment to something better, to inflict with insanity, to bind him (minimus containment version of binding is a favourite), and so on. Book of Vile Darkness has Eternity of Torment - unaging Imprisonment with eternal pain. Polymorphing the villain to build a house with mortar made of him is useful, and so on. Just eating him doesn't help much, but if you polymorph him into a jelly monster or a plant, there won't be a skeleton or the like to revive him with.
In the end, there are few ways to be absolutely certain he doesn't return, but you can make it cost quite a lot and take a lot of time, as well as give you warnings when someone tries.
A few more...
Ways to keep folks dead or at least unable to bother you anymore:
Feed them to a cacodaemon … keep the soul gem very safe (and the many, many variants of snagging & storing their soul)
Change their base form into something long-lived and unlikely to trigger a contingency for resurrection or similar
After the 1st time they got away, Summon a Shoki and ask it to personally escort the soul you are about to free to Pharasma THEN kill the AV (or same tactic, but use a Valkyrie)
*optional – have several other psychopomps or inevitables around to back it up
Mirror of Life Trapping
Iron Circlet of Guarded Souls
Ways to keep coming back:
Never use your own body – Magic Jar is your friend…
*Bonus points - never use your own soul OR your own body – the only thing more risk avoiding than Magic Jar is a [U]simulacrum[U] using magic jar
Clones
Reincarnate
Being owed favors by the right religious groups… preferably LN ones that have what they need to resurrect you if you don’t check in at an appropriate time via sending
Never actually be there physically – always use some sort of divination & possibly long-distance communication to interact with your minions & monologue the PCs
Non- or stretched RAW:
Private demi-planes or pocket areas of outer planes that you have properly motivated minions summon you from (so that you are summoned, not called to the prime and only get bounced back when you die. This may require that the villain be an outsider, though – I’m not positive where this lies in PF cosmology / metaphysics)
Far-fetched, but funny - having won several bets with Pharasma so she “owes you” several returns… (thematically, I could see something similar working with a an artifact such as a variant deck of many things that the villain gets several “returns from unavoidable doom”, but this is soooo not RAW or canon-supported)
Some sort of immortality curse that the villain has turned to their benefit… perhaps they do not actually have their soul with them, but are reconstituted again and again from a geographic location of magical significance (and so much “background magic” that it is impossible to scry or teleport to)
Evil time-travelling samsaran
-TimD
Removal of limbs coupled with tossing them into a Timeless Demiplane of some sort should work just fine.
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Westley: ...Your ears you keep, and I'll tell you why. So that every gasp - every babe who weeps at your approach - every woman who cries out "Dear God, what is that thing!?" will echo forever in your perfect ears. That is what 'to the pain' means. It means I leave you in anguish. Wallowing in freakish misery. Forever.
Man, if I had just found his thread 7 minutes earlier. ;). Well timed preemptive ninja, LH. :)
Depending on exactly how you GM feels about this sort of thing is my favorite method. Works better on permanently getting rid of objects than people, because creatures can always kill themselves.
Create a demi-plane, make it permanent, add the timeless quality to it. Create another demi-plane that isn't permanent. Use another casting of create greater demi-plant on the permanent to create a gate to the impermanent demi-plane. Cast greater demi-plane on the permanent plane to make it a dead magic area. Place defeated object/powerful mcguffin in dead magic permanent timeless demiplane and leave via the gate. When the non-permanent demiplane ends the permanent demiplane no longer has a gate to anywhere, and magic cannot be used within its confines. Congratulations, you have trapped the BBEG in an dimension outside of time and space.
Might be easier and cheaper to just cast a bunch of Anti-Magic Fields (since the Timeless quality essentially makes them permanent).
Helm of Opposite Alignment.
in one of my 3.5 games, The players had to deal with a Half Black Dragon War Troll mercenary whose team was screwing with their countries men.
Wartrolls regen is only shut down by acid, half black dragons are immune to acid, so it made him quite the indestructible little fellow.
Eventually they defeated him with the all mighty dollar. they threw so much money at him to fight for them instead he couldn't possibly say no.
Actually and honestly redeem them, turning them away from evil. Probably one of the more difficult and time-consuming methods, but also avoids issues with "good" PCs using coercion and magical compulsion on sentient beings.
Note that this needs to be discussed with the GM as to whether or not a particular villain is redeemable.
Might be easier and cheaper to just cast a bunch of Anti-Magic Fields (since the Timeless quality essentially makes them permanent).
That's true. In any event though, same premise. It's a great disposal for anything sensitive.
Can't be located by magic, cannot use magic in it, can't use magic to get to it (a bit unclear as it's uncertain whether one can teleport/planeshift into an area of antimagic). Short or direct divine intervention I don't believe there is any way to retrieve it.
If you can be relatively certain that the creature wont kill itself then it's stuck. Of course, after some amount of time it would probably eventually breakdown and kill themselves.