| Lass |
So if you were a high level Warlord living and ruling in a very hostile territory what sort of defenses might you install into your castle to prevent assassins, incursions and other unwanted guests?
Magic and Mundane, monsters and minions - what would work best?
To be more specific this pertains to Grask ulreth the Orc Warlord of Belkzen who lives in Urgir.
TheIronGiant6
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Magic is extremely useful for keeping areas safe with permanent symbols. Whether of death, pain, stunning, insanity, or just scrying, symbols make good traps that can be placed anywhere and tailored to ignore people who speak the password. As well, magically treated walls increase the hardness and hitpoints of the wall. Simulacrum of pretty much anything can be made to guard every entrance, and giving a permanent see invisibility to yourself and any guards can prevent magically aided assassins from sneaking inside. If you are short on the gold to do this, add alarms and invisibility alarms to gates. Wear a Ring of Sustenance to prevent being poisoned through food or drink. I am not familiar with the specific setting, but I've found magic helps build and maintain castles without the chance of betrayal.
If you're not comfortable with that much magic, moats with retractable bridges can protect the entrances, and having tower shields for your guards (Even if they don't use them normally) can give them quick cover from any bowman. The benefit of not having magic around your castle is that it can't be dispelled. Hope that helped a bit.
| Claxon |
Well, I'm not going to address your specific individual because unfortunately as an Orc of Belkzen he probably isn't especially smart or likely to have powerful spellcasters at his disposal.
However, things that are good.
Forbiddance
Teleport Trap
Permament antimagic greater demiplane for throne room and bedroom.
A properly paranoid warlord will spend the majority of his time in this sort of safe location. Safe from magic that might otherwise attempt to get at him. It can be expanded to a large size so long as you have enough money (you just need to make all the additions before you add the antimagic quality). You affix one gate that opens into the safe haven. Inside you place guards, such as admantine golems. Without magic admantine golems are virtually impossible to destroy. Walls of adamantine inside can help prevent entry, and slow assassins so that the adamantine golems have time to kill them.
Your warlord could also have several more locations of his "base" set in similar antimagic demiplanes. So that he's only exposed when moving between any of these areas.
He would also probably keep some sort of device that created a contingency effect on him to teleport him to a safe location if he were ever close to be unconscious or unable to act.
At high levels, the biggest threat to any entity is magic being used to ensure their death. The death blow might be delivered by a weapon, but it most likely reached their with the aid of magic.
| Corvino |
If all residents of the castle are the same alignment - Forbiddance. Level 6 Divine spell that prevents teleporting, plane shifting, summoning and the like. It also deals a decent amount of damage to anyone of a different alignment entering the area.
In general - look at Permanency. There are lots of alarm and area-denial effects that can be affected. Invisibility alarm at your main gate? Permanent Stinking Clouds in the moat?
| Claxon |
Also, as Corvino is mentioning. Multiple layered defenses to harass invaders/assassins.
The inner most layer should be antimagic, the kings sanctum. With powerful non-magical guards and a presumably powerful warlord, they will only lose in this scenario if there are just too many enemies to keep up. Thankfully, in all the outside layers you spent a lot of energy and effort making sure they never reached this inner most layer, or that only a handful managed to.
In out layers, forbiddance covering everything is a great way to cause damage to any would be assassins (probably different alignment) and to prevent them from magical getting past your defenses. In this way, a keep is actually quite functional, where it would normally be bypassed by teleportation.
Teleport traps in the surrounding area outside the forbiddance zone may just send would be assassins to their own doom.
The spell Guards and Wards. It's great at helping to protect a keep.
Hallow or Unhallow can be very useful for it's long duration additional effect.
| Claxon |
Well, keep in mind that you can't have symbols or wards in the same area that you have antimagic fields present. The antimagic field suppresses all magic.
This is why I was suggesting permanent antimagic demiplanes for the warlord to reside and work in, with traps such as symbols and wards around the portal that allows entrance an the demiplane. (Antimagic demiplanes have 1 permanent portal that "teleports" you from whatever plane the portal is on to the demiplane.)