Quote Originally Posted by chaincomplex View Post
By my reading this trick works, then. Simulacrum plus transference.
Simulacrum cheese + Dal Quor cheese = time problems solved forever I think

Transference means I can work on other people's items without any XP concerns. As for my own items...I'm gonna assume Thought Bottle nonsense is off the table?

It's hard to imagine said portals being portable when they lack rules for movement, especially when the psicrystal progenitor is explicitly shattered and so not available to extrapolate movement for.
FWIW, SBG has portals that can be crafted and built into strongholds. I'm assuming that if the stronghold is mobile, the portal within it would move with it, so that's at least one way of getting mobile portals, if this particular one isn't kosher.

Conceptually, I'm not opposed. Of course, I'd like to hear some details. Like a sketch of what's going into these "strongholds".
Not gonna detail the main stronghold cuz that's a pretty standard thing. It's essentially a small college with dorms and classrooms and laboratories and a dining hall, with some room for guests and the like. Here's our two controversial options.

Spoiler: The Bus
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Sometimes, it's valuable to the education process to bring the students somewhere else, to observe a natural or magical phenomenon more directly while teaching about it. These field trips are uncommon, but tend to be quite dangerous, and so I've built myself a Bus that's more like a magic tank.

Components (1ss/10000 gp):
  • 1ss/10000 gp: Auditorium, Luxury


Walls (60000 gp/ss):
  • 60000/ss: Obdurium


Wall Augmentations (144500 gp/ss):
  • 7500/ss: Airtight
  • 12000/ss: Ethereal Solid
  • 50000/ss: Magic Warding, Improved
  • 12000/ss: Magically Treated
  • 60000/ss: Prismatic Screen
  • 3000/ss: Transparent


Every bit of the walls have had Hardening cast on it at CL 20.

Mobility (436500 gp/ss):
  • 25000/ss: Incredible Locomotion
  • 10000/ss: Burrowing
  • 1000/ss: Crawling
  • 15000/ss: Flying
  • 3000/ss: Sailing
  • 7500/ss: Submersing
  • 125000/ss: Plane Shift 5/day
  • 250000/ss: Teleport Without Error 5/day


Wondrous Architecture allows for a spell effect to work on everything within a stronghold space, continuously. Depending on how mobile it is, the base price is lowered from 2000 to 1000 or even 500, and there's no duration modifier. Also AFAICT there isn't a limit on how many of them you can have in a particular stronghold space, but I'm gonna assume a low limit to keep things reasonable.

Immobile Continuous "Fortify Metal Or Stone" (3000 gp)

Create Portal allows me to make portals between locations, up to whatever size I'd like as long as I can afford them. In this instance, I'm making a portal at the back of the bus that connects back with the main base (the small college). Two-way portal like that cost 150000 gp. There's also maybe a second portal on the outside bottom of the bus, which is one-way and costs 100k.

Conclusion

The outermost bus defense is the prismatic screen, which destroys all objects and effects unless they can tank all the saves or strip all the layers with magic. Even if the screen is taken down, the obdurium is still airtight and ghost-proof, so they'll have to teleport in or beat their way through. Beating your way through the obdurium means getting past Hardness 100/540 HP/Break DC 90. You could drop this bus in freefall from orbit and it wouldn't make a scratch. A bath in lava or powerful acids tickles. A tarrasque claw at maximum PA tradeoff and damage roll still couldn't scratch this stuff unless you gave it the ability to crit objects. If you do manage to scratch it, there's an epic artificer with at-will Repair Critical Damage sitting behind it. If you teleport past the walls to make trouble, or manage to cast a spell that just requires LoS and not LoE, everyone onboard the bus has SR 32. And of course if trouble starts brewing that the professor thinks will be a problem, SOP is for students to begin evacuating before someone teleports onto the bus, or breaks the wall.

The bus can sit up to 31 people total, and is highly mobile, at least by the standards of the time. 5/day Plane Shift, 5/day Teleport (or whateve the 3.5 equivalent is), and it can burrow, crawl, fly, sail, or submerse at 10 mph. Between Plane Shift and Teleport, you should be able to get pretty close to any destination in the multiverse, close enough that your 10 mph will be sufficient for local transportation. If anyone needs to use the restroom, or evacuate, or fetch some equipment, the portal at the back of the bus allows all-day two-way connection to the main stronghold.

654000 gp/754000 gp if I purchased it at market price (adjusted for climate/city modifiers). But I'm gonna be a Landlord and a nigh-epic artificer, so that number will be...a lot lower.


Spoiler: Orbital Bombardment
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...okay so this is gonna get stupid, and I don't have the actual building fully planned out yet but here's the concept:

The stronghold part is extremely simple. There is a deep pit with a building over it. At the bottom of the pit is a portal with a trapdoor over it. The building is essentially a small warehouse that serves as a breeding ground for a very specific kind of ooze. This is an ochre jelly that has both the Sentry Ooze and Mineral Warrior templates. Such a creature has been purchased from Neogi slave-traders, who would've had to track down or breed a very specific variant for this customer, and thus it is 4 times more expensive than usual for its CR: a total of 25600 gp, which cannot be reduced unless I'm gonna become a slime breeder.

These slimes have Int 1, and are capable of taking up to 3 feats. Those feats will be Final Strike, Improved Unarmed Strike, and Versatile Unarmed Strike. I can use magic to change whatever feats the one I purchased already had into these feats for pretty cheap, I imagine. For the next part I'll need some method of commanding/controlling/training the slimes, which should be doable.

There are two spots in the warehouse that are like...resetting healing traps, or maybe wondrous architecture granting fast healing to one specific square. In one of these spots is the ooze originally purchased (81 HP). It changes its unarmed strike to slashing, hits itself, takes no damage, and splits. Now there are two ochre jellies, each with 40 HP, each in a healing spot. Assuming this is like...resetting cure critical trap, that's 4d8+7 HP per turn, average 25. Any split oozes that aren't healing will help continue splitting until they can't split anymore (10 HP or less) and then they'll go crawl down the whole. I think they can run with a climb speed, but I'm not 100% sure.

Spoiler: Process
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Round 1
(1) 81 HP

Round 2
(2) 65 HP

Round 3
(2) 57 HP
(2) 32 HP

Round 4
(2) 53 HP
(2) 28 HP
(4) 16 HP

Round 5
(2) 51 HP
(2) 26 HP
(4) 14 HP
(8) 8 HP
Pit +8 oozes

Round 6
(2) 50 HP
(2) 25 HP
(4) 13 HP
(8) 7 HP
Pit +8 oozes

Round 7
(2) 50 HP
(2) 25 HP
(4) 12 HP
(8) 6 HP
Pit +8 oozes

Round 8
(2) 50 HP
(2) 25 HP
(4) 12 HP
(8) 6 HP
Pit +8 oozes


The part of the pit the slimes are filling up is 572 feet deep. Ochre jellies are 6 inches tall and so this fits 1144 of them in the pit, a vertical column of ooze. Going from a single ooze at full HP to 1144 oozes available for the pit takes about 147 rounds; with a bit of wiggle room added to allow those later ones to move into position, that's a ~15 minute recharge time, potentially longer or shorter depending on specific rolls for the resetting Cure Critical trap (although with how many casts there are, I'm assuming average will be pretty close). The last 4 ft are the trapdoor and the portal; the other end of this one-way portal is attached to the bottom of the Bus.

The bus positions itself at least 200 ft above a given target. The trapdoor is triggered (maybe remotely, maybe by taking the two-way portal back to base to pull a lever or something). The trapdoor pulls away, and 1144 oozes fall 576 feet in the first round. This has the last of them just barely touching the portal and going through, leaving an empty pit and a once-more-closed trapdoor over the portal. The oozes will be somewhat aimed based on Aerial Bombardment rules (HoB pg 67-68). This will involve an attack roll (at -4 penalty from normal, -2 extra for every 50 ft above target, presumably with no maximum range since it counts as thrown but talks about attacks aimed more than 250 ft down) against AC 5. Presumably, if we're 200 ft above target and only taking -12, that'll be a breeze for any nigh-epic character.

The oozes fall, and land. whatever was in the 10x10 area they landed on takes 20d6 damage, as does the ooze itself. Since the ooze has 10 HP at most, 20d6 kills it 100% of the time, which triggers Final Strike. This is a 60 ft radius explosion with a primary 6d6 bludgeoning damage (Ref DC 21 for half) and an Earthquake effect, as the spell, presumably only affecting the 60 ft radius. After that, the body is so destroyed that it takes True Rez, Wish, or Miracle to bring them back (so effectively they've been disintegrated, nothing remains behind). In the first round, 744 of the jellies will make impact; the other 400 instances will hit during the second round, giving you time to escape if you somehow barely survived.

1144 instances of 20d6/6d6/earthquake is going to wreck basically anything it hits in a 15 ft diameter circle (the diameter of an ochre jelly), and wreck structures in a 135 ft diameter. You drop that onto solid stone, and there's a 15 ft diameter hole going straight down 476 ft, with everything within 60 ft of the hole severely damaged by the massive number of earthquakes that just occurred. if you dropped it on a structure, then each of those jellies is also dealing 100 damage (bypassing hardness) to every structure within 60 ft of the impact zone. If you did that to the Bus while the prismatic screen was down, the Bus would be destroyed in just 6 hits.