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My fiendish devilish daemonic plan

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Ever since I began playing pathfinder and learned you could make contracts with extra planar beings, I've had a dream. Now, my group has at last down a free campaign where I have chosen a drow noble summoner, with the blessing of my group( I home brewed a bit and took off the dex adjustment, poison use, elven immunities and given him normal spell resistance.) and I have the means to attain my plan. This plan is to bring a cacodaemon, imp, and quasit together as pseudo animal companions who will serve me until I die for over a month or release them from my service. The only obstacles in my planning is details. I have a plan to bring them in as servants. The problem however is I do not know what quantities I should provide them. How many souls would it take to make the quasit accept my contract with no risk of him attempting to make off with mine if I die? How many human torturing sessions for the cacodaemon? How many doves for the imp? Do I need anything besides just the magic circle to contain them? Do I need cold iron? Holy water? I just don't know. So, I turn to the pathfinders of the Internet for assistance. If you guys have any info on details such as these, please let me know, it will be much appreciated.

Cacodaemon: Savage and hungry, most cacodaemons cannot suppress their savage natures long enough to make deals. At best, the binder can trick a cacodaemon toward actions in concert with her purposes.

Imp: Imps prefer small and bloody sacrifices that show the binder's desire to do evil—for instance, a heart torn from a living dove grants a +2 Charisma modifier on the summoning check.

Quasit: Even more pathetic than the dretch, the quasit seeks only the assurance that it can return to the Abyss when its task is complete.

It's unlikely you will get an imp and a quasit to work together, not without being exceedingly powerful. One or the other will likely demand the destruction or at least removal of the other as part of their bargain.

To keep the imp content, smashing baby chickens or killing puppies/kitties/bunnies should suffice. Letting them sit around and torture rats will lead to them getting bored and prowling about, killing neighborhood pets.

A quasit should just require the promise of a third of its servitude time in personal leisure/resting time.

A cacodaemon will probably require any service or task to involve slaying or eating people or souls.

As for worrying about the imp or quasit making off with your soul, I doubt they can just grab it and run even when you die. Instead, the imp or quasit will stick around with you as long as the can. The very nature of your deal and their presence will slowly corrupt your soul, either by you fulfilling your promises or them slowly tempting you (slowly, they aren't succubi after all) over the years. Then when you die, your soul goes to 'Hell' (or wherever) anyway and they get credit for being involved in your corruption (or at least adding your evil ways if your soul would already be considered 'corrupted'.)

As for the cacodaemon, it's more likely to just turn on you and kill and eat your soul at the first chance.

The thing I'm worried about regarding quasits taking my soul is that they have this ability to turn the soul of a recently dead corpse near them into a soul larva and doing a plane shift with it. I need an insurance policy to make sure it doesn't do that first chance it gets. Plus the cacodaemon could consume my soul and make a gem out of it. I need a way to employ them while not constantly worrying that they are gonna stab me in the back. This is not a familiar and thus they are not utterly obedient to me. All they need to do is find a gap and bam I'm super dead and being sold as a soul larva in the abyss. Thanks for the tips on satisfying them though. The reason I want to keep them fairly happy is that animal companions, which I want them to be, have a freer reign then familiars because they're unintelligent animals. A evil outsider on the other hand would be extremely volatile as a animal companion because they have far more freedom then they would as a familiar. Animal companions can act without direct orders. As such I want them content so they don't go on a crazy killing spree when they get bored.

They don't need to wait around to slowly corrupt my soul so it will go to whichever one if their underworlds when they can pry it from my cold dead body and take it their themselves.

And while the info says little sacrifices and manipulation and leisure I don't want them to provide a single service for me. I want them to serve me for years, maybe even the rest of my earthly life. I need a way to keep them in line that long.

I love this idea and have done something similar once or twice.

My best advice is to talk to your DM. See what he can work out. I don't think a lot of this is going to work under RAW (as there just isn't options for a lot of it) but if your DM is willing I'm sure the two of you could come up with an option that works.

Unless you're really worried about your DM having this backfire on your soul. In which case... uh... yeah, sorry. :D

Our DM is not a douche, but they can be a bit...tricky. They like to have things come back and bite us in the arse. They're one of my greater worries, as I suspect they are going to have them try for my soul at the most inconvenient times. I kinda wanted all three at once because it would be extremely amusing to watch them all fight for my soul for their respective underworlds like some sort of extra planar keepaway

Also, I was thinking of modelling it after the diabolist imp companion as far as progression goes.

look into planner biding\ally spells.
also magic circle against evil should prevent them from raeching your dead body if your in it.
better yet in 3.5 (idk if this was employed in pathfinder) you could make a magic circle against x permenant and to be turned inward(to keep stuff in) instead of out. so putting them in one will make them captured.
last thing. finding their true name might be usfull if you plan opn binding them for prolonged time and years.

idk if you can get them as animal companians. vut some prc get them as familiers. souch as th soul drinker (or soul eater in 20pfsrd).

Thanks zza. I didn't know about the names, and that ought to be helpful. When I say animal companion I mean tailor it a bit to suit a extra planar being. What I want is them serving me, but not as a familiar, as familiars are fairly useless in combat, especially when you get these familiars so late. As such, getting them as animal companions seemed the optimal choice. There's nothing in the rules about the summoning contracts being short term, so I decided animal companions would be a good way to go, as they would progress strength-wise and not become inconsequential at a higher level. I figured that they could also pretty much follow the same lines as the diabolist imp companion, getting a few cantrip-level spells or new shape shifting forms as they progressed in the place of bonus tricks (Quasits and Cacodaemons already have telepathy) and their hit points keeping level with the parties so they didn't just get ground into the dirt by a tougher enemy like a familiar would.

I want a way to keep them off me if I die in battle though. While that may keep them away out of combat if I die in an encounter no sane cleric would waste a move defending my body from a demon or daemon. Also, that perma-circle may be really helpful, as I could soften them up by leaving them in one a few weeks before offering the contract.

Seems like the best option for keeping your soul safe is a contingency plan. That could be literal... use the Contingency to teleport your body away or create a magic circle around it. Or it could be part of the pact. How hard would it be, really, to get the Cacodemon to agree to a bargain that let it eat your other servants as soon as you were dead?

Or you could play the higher pucker factor game. Have your actual pact be with one or more far more substantial entities that have dispatched these lessor servitors to act in their stead. That might be the easiest way to get competent servants, since it also gives the GM carte blanche to /eventually/ do unspeakable things to you that aren't as direct as taking your soul.

Or you could bluff. It seems to me that an imp would tread lightly if you even insinuated that your contract had been referred to an Inevitable.

Heck, you could have other contracts with angelic entities stating that upon your death, they retrieve your body themselves and/or smash these heinous forces of evil. Lots of options.

The real killer here is what it will mean for the rest of the party. You can defend yourself all you like, but if you take a dirt nap, the number of ways your servants can become a problem for the party are beyond counting.
Grand Lodge

Now I want to make an NPC whose soul is being competed over by a Silvanshee Agathion, a Harbinger Archon and a Lyrakien Azata.

It's the politest property dispute ever.

If you can cast 5th level arcane spells, this is dead easy: you just throw Lesser Planar Binding three times. You don't even have to negotiate; all you have to do is word your binding very carefully.

If you're not that high level, you either use a scroll (pricey, and there's a risk of spell failure, but if you're at least middle levels it should work) or you pay a higher level arcane caster to cast it for you.

Third alternative: find an evil cleric, get him/her to cast Lesser Planar Ally, and ask that the conjured outsider be assigned to your service. LPA is only a 4th level cleric spell, so that's good; a mere 7th level cleric could do it. On the downside, it costs a crapload of money. That's because the outsider arrives friendly to the caller... they're both serving the same god... and serves more or less willingly, as opposed to Planar Binding where the outsider is being forced into service. Also, you might have to find three different evil clerics to bring these three different creatures, since LPA only brings the servants of the cleric's particular god. (Unless a very generous DM ruled that some NE deity happened to have all three evil races as servants.)

Doug M.

That's what I aim to use to acquire them Doug. Lesser planar binding. Plus as a summoner I get it a level early. The reason I'm being careful is that if you don't contain them when you first summon them using planar binding they can....well...fly off the handle, so to speak, and attack you. You have to make a contract the outsider is happy with or they'll just attack you or, if you get them properly contained, flip you the bird and go back to whatever plane they came from. That's why I'm so interested in finding something sufficient to pay them to make them serve me for a long time. Plus they won't accept riches, so one must get creative, which is why I'm asking for help.
Ms. Pleiades wrote:

Now I want to make an NPC whose soul is being competed over by a Silvanshee Agathion, a Harbinger Archon and a Lyrakien Azata.

It's the politest property dispute ever.

That would be amusing. Was thinking of adding a good outsider into the mix to add to the amusement. I can just see them all ganging up on some poor good outsider and throwing it off a cliff somewhere when I'm not looking, then returning to their squabbling as if nothing took place.

No no no. Your DM is misunderstanding this spell. The whole point of LPB is that you are *binding* the outsider. You're forcing it to do something, whether it likes it or not. There are limits, of course: you can't force it to commit suicide, or do something impossible, or commit acts that are clearly against its nature. But within those bounds, you have broad leeway. And you do NOT have to "keep them happy". That's what makes this such a great spell.

Containing them is easy peasy: that's what your circle is for. None of these bad boys can teleport, so all you need to do is make a DC 20 Spellcraft check to draw a conjuring circle and then cast Magic Circle Against Evil on the circle.

The problem with this spell is not the summoning. It's two things. First, you have to beat these creatures on an opposed Cha check in order to bind them to service. The DM can add modifiers to this check one way or another... for instance, the dove's hearts for the imp would give you +2, and a particularly good (or bad) contract might add another +2 or -2. If you don't win the Cha check, no biggie... the creature just sits there in the circle, and in 24 hours you can try again. You can keep trying once/day until the spell expires.

However! Problem #2 is that if you roll a natural 1, the creature escapes... no exceptions. This spell always has a 5% chance of failure, no matter what. That (partly) balances its general awesomeness. That said, if you're familiar with these creatures, having one escape the circle should be no big deal... you're 10th level, and they're CR 2. Swat the little monster dead, and conjure up another one.

(Note that you get Lesser Planar Binding a level late compared to a wizard -- a wizard can do this at 9th level, you must wait until 10th. Yes it's only a 4th level spell for you, but that's negated by your slower spell progression.)

Doug M.

Ah, I get it. We assumed that you had to win the will save, the charisma check, and then additionally pay them with little things to get them to serve you. What are the spells limitations? Can they act freely unless you firmly command them against taking action? I don't want to come into town, and, a week later, get lynched because my imp murdered all the family pets. Do I have to command them to not do these things, or is it implied? If I need to command them to avoid doing such things then I prefer to keep them content, so they will not constantly be searching for holes in my binding.

And what's this about 10th level?! I get lesser planar binding at fourth level as a summoner and we're starting the campaign at 1st level.

And I get it earlier because I'm a summoner.
Dukeh555 wrote:
Ah, I get it. We assumed that you had to win the will save, the charisma check, and then additionally pay them with little things to get them to serve you.

Nope. You can throw in "little things" -- like the dove's hearts -- to give yourself a bonus on the Cha check. But they're not required.

Quote:
What are the spells limitations? Can they act freely unless you firmly command them against taking action? I don't want to come into town, and, a week later, get lynched because my imp murdered all the family pets. Do I have to command them to not do these things, or is it implied? If I need to command them to avoid doing such things then I prefer to keep them content, so they will not constantly be searching for holes in my binding.

Yes, that's another issue with the spell. A creature conjured by a Planar Ally spell will keep its own personality and motivations and goals. And it will act in a manner consistent with those goals, unless you specifically bind or instruct it not to.

So, for instance, a succubus may use her Suggestion on your fellow party members. A shadow demon may possess an NPC. Devils will want to tempt people to wickedness. Daemons will want to hurt and kill people; demons will want to ruin and destroy randomly. Fire elementals will want to burn stuff, angels will want to help, heal and rescue, inevitables will seek to enforce Law, and so forth. That's their nature. You can prevent them from doing these things by clear instructions and/or careful wording of the binding. But they will still *want* to.

And, of course, the creature may well resent being bound, and may connive at your downfall and destruction. Note that called creatures get to use their SLAs and skills! So, a conjured devil can use Bluff to lie to you, Sense Motive to figure out what you really want; a succubus can read your mind; and so forth. Intelligent creatures are perfectly capable of pretending to be fine with the situation while quietly plotting something truly horrible for you down the line. They MUST obey the terms of the binding -- but within those terms, they will continue to follow their evil natures.

One way to think of this is as something like a hierarchy of motivations. Do you remember Asimov's Laws of Robotics? It works like that, more or less.

I. A bound creature will act to preserve its own life and will not act in contradiction to its alignment.

II. A bound creature will obey the terms of its binding, except where this directly conflicts with Rule I.

III. A bound creature will seek to carry out its own agenda, except where this directly conflicts with Rules I or II.

Does this make sense?

Doug M.
Dukeh555 wrote:
And what's this about 10th level?! I get lesser planar binding at fourth level as a summoner and we're starting the campaign at 1st level.

Go and look at the summoner's spell progression. Wizards are "full casters", meaning they get access to new spells every second level -- first level spells at first level, second level spells at third level, third level spells at fifth level, and so forth. Therefore, they get fifth level spells at ninth level.

Summoners are "partial casters", meaning they get access to new spells every THIRD level. That's fair, because they have eidolons and lots of other cool powers. So they get second level spells at fourth level, third level spells at seventh level, and fourth level spells at 10th level.

Doug M.

By the way, if you are starting at 1st level you may want to look at DMDM's Guide to the Diabolist. It's about building the Diabolist PrC, but it has lots of information that will be useful for anyone building a planar binder type character -- i.e., traits, feats, spells, useful magic items, etc. etc.

Doug M.

Ohhhhh, thought you meant it was 10th level now or something. I know I get it late. I aim to acquire some scrolls to put to use.
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