Mages of any signifi cant level challenge the Dungeon Master like no other characters. Murder-mystery adventures rarely survive their fi rst brush with detect thoughts or vision. Bot- tomless chasms are easily crossed with a simple 3rd-level fl y spell, and teleportation makes infi ltrating the most sinister fortress child’s play.
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Finding new ways to challenge your players without resort- ing to capricious and arbitrary limitations on magical power can be a daunting task, and many DMs fi nd themselves at one point or another treating the increasing capabilities of arcane spellcasters in their game as a trial to be overcome one spell at a time: monsters with blindsight and scent limiting the utility of invisibility; villains wearing rings of mind shielding to ensure that PCs can’t easily scry them; greater dispel magic suddenly becoming the only spell your NPC wizard villains know how to cast; and so on.
This approach can too easily turn the campaign into an arcane arms race between the mages’ capabilities and your own inventiveness. Even worse, it can trivialize the charac- ters’ accomplishments—if there’s no advantage or benefi t to having labored long and hard to add teleport to a spell list, why bother trying? You have to allow arcane spellcasters to use their new abilities and let your game evolve accordingly as their power grows.
Some of the most common “gamebusting” capabilities that arcane characters acquire are charm magic, invisibility magic, fl ying magic, scrying magic, and teleportation, each of which brings its own perils to the gaming table and requires a suitably creative response.
Charms
Charm magic is the fi rst category of potentially problematic magic that most arcane characters acquire. Every captured villain is routinely subjected to interrogation after being
charmed by a player character bard or mage. While many
players expect that any NPC enthralled by their character’s
charm person spell will naturally be happy to explain all
aspects of the Big Plan to their newfound friend, there are a number of reasonable counters to this tactic.
First off, not every opponent need be a humanoid NPC. A villain can have servants of other creature types—undead, giants, or monstrous humanoids, for example—that are safe from such interrogation until charm monster becomes available, giving you a few levels of breathing room. A clever villain with humanoids in his employ might anticipate the capture and interrogation of his minions (whether by charm or more mundane means), and therefore carefully control the fl ow of information in his organization. Especially devious foes count on the capture and charming of a servant or two, and deliberately sow disinformation in the ranks of their followers so that any would-be heroes instead charge off into ambushes, deadly traps, or terribly embarrassing misunder- standings on the basis of the “guaranteed” knowledge that the charmed creature has given them.
The goal is not to completely prevent the acquisition of important information through charm spells, but to teach the players to treat charm-acquired information with a healthy dose of deliberation and second thought. That way, even in the event that the party does get dependable information from a captured creature, that knowledge has a smaller chance of derailing the game. Charm magic should be a useful tactic
for the characters to consider rather than the perfect solution to every need for adventuring intelligence.
Don’t make your critical NPCs immune to charm magic, because your players will likely just fi nd this frustrating. Likewise, don’t place key information where it can be dis- covered only by of charming the right character at the right time. Instead, design adventures that offer useful (but not always earth-shaking) shortcuts and advantages to be gained from charm-acquired knowledge. If an important NPC isn’t charmed, the characters should be able to continue the adventure—but if they do succeed in charming her, perhaps they avoid a diffi cult encounter later on, or they gain an opportunity to strike their foes with surprise on their side.
Flying
The ability to take to the air has two major effects on play. It easily solves the problem of getting around or over obstacles such as chasms, rivers, and high walls, and it makes monsters without ranged attacks much less dangerous, since a ruthless party can simply attempt to exterminate such foes from the air without fear of retaliation.
You can’t do much to restrict access to fl ying magic once player characters reach 5th or 6th level. If you want an obstacle to remain diffi cult or insurmountable even after this point, your best option is to design encounters and challenges in such a way that the characters will be loath to expend the necessary spells or magic items to overcome that obstacle. The PCs can easily fl y over the fi rst chasm they encounter—but what if a second chasm awaits 15 minutes farther on, when the fl ying spells they used to overcome the fi rst obstacle are no longer in effect? The characters might still have the same capability to cross the second chasm as they had with the fi rst—but now at the possible expense of a fi reball spell the sorcerer might need later. You don’t want to design every obstacle this way, of course (just as you wouldn’t want to prevent characters from using fl y by having every chasm under the effect of a permanent antimagic fi eld), but try to keep fl y an option that the players need to think carefully about, rather than one they use as a default solution to every transportation problem.
For fl ying PCs who choose to attack grounded foes, the simplest solution is to make sure those foes can shoot back. Killing orc axefi ghters from the air is easy enough, but orc archers or spellcasters pose a different challenge, and you can also include occasional encounters with fl ying foes to neutralize the characters’ advantage. At the same time, it’s also good adventure design to create occasional encounters with a weakness that clever players can exploit. Giant vermin such as Huge scorpions might pose a deadly threat if attacked head on, so you can place a colony of them in an adventure with the expectation that the characters will use fl ying magic to defeat them without taking losses.
Invisibility
Few spells are as highly coveted (or as subject to potential misuse) as invisibility. Invisibility serves two purposes in the
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game—fi rst as a spell for bypassing encounters and gather- ing intelligence, and second as a defensive spell that makes an affected character more diffi cult to hit.
The simplest counter for invisibility is an enemy who ignores it—a crea- ture that has blindsight or one subject to a see invisibility effect. Similarly, some special abilities (such as blindsense, tremorsense, and scent) limit the effectiveness of invisibility even though they don’t negate it outright. NPC spellcasters might have scrolls or prepared spells such as glitter-
dust, invisibil- ity purge,
or see invisibil-
ity. For that matter,
any spellcaster with ac- cess to a summon monster spell will fi nd numer- ous creatures on the summoning lists with the scent ability, providing a good offense against an invis- ible foe.
Not every ad- venture should be designed to foil invisible characters, but any NPC who lives in expectation of attack by a hostile spellcaster (which is to say, virtu- ally any thinking creature in a typical D&D campaign) has likely given some thought to dealing with in- visible foes. Two human sentries set to guard a pas- sageway might be a signifi cant obstacle, but those same sen- tries provided with a well-trained dog consti- tute a much more formidable threat to invisible infi ltrators. Creatures with at least a modicum
of slyness might place simple “traps,” such as a stack of emp- ty pots behind a door—anyone opening the door knocks them over and makes a noticeable racket. An
invisible character’s footprints are easily seen as he moves across a sandy or muddy fl oor (and bear in mind that in a typical D&D fan- tasy environment, spotlessly clean fl oors should
hardly be the norm).
In general, sophisticated foes with ac- cess to magic of their own are likely to
understand the capabilities and limitations of invisibility and provide suitable ob-
stacles. Shopkeepers in a good-sized city are certainly aware of the temptation their
wares offer to low- level mages with
invisibility spells,
and they will take steps (such as sim- ply locking up all but the most mun- dane merchandise) to prevent such theft. Slow-witted or prim- itive foes are more likely to be caught off guard by invisible
infi ltrators—but not time after time. Even
a band of ogres, once they realize that their foes are using invis- ibility to sneak up on them, will take steps to counter the tactic.
Scrying
The general category of scrying magic includes not only the scrying spell but also a number of related divinations, such as clairaudi-
ence/clairvoyance, contact other plane, and discern location. On the
most basic level, any time a character can cast a spell that might answer a question he otherwise wouldn’t be able to answer based on the information at hand, he has an opportunity to derail the adventure. Scrying might not help a character storm a castle or explore the depths of a dungeon, but it’s very likely to locate and identify the chief villains in any
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plot, and it can solve otherwise challenging mysteries with a single easy casting.
Of all the magical capability that a high-level spellcaster can bring to the table, scrying might be the most diffi cult for the Dungeon Master to deal with. The only foolproof defense against scrying is to pit magic against magic, relying on spells such as nondetection or detect scrying in an attempt to ward off inquisitive heroes. The mundane precautions of sentries, dogs, and locked doors won’t protect a villain’s stronghold against scrying magic—but there’s no reason a villain can’t use spells to anticipate the arrival of trouble in the same way that characters might seek to avoid it. For example, an evil cleric might use a divination spell to ask if he will be the target of a scrying within the next week—and if so, by whom. Assuming the divination spell succeeds, the cleric could then take steps to defend against the scrying attempt.
As with the defense against charmed interrogations, a clever and meticulous villain without access to divination- defeating spells might also make an effort to control the information accessible to any particular minion, potentially limiting the damage of a thorough scrying effort. After all, if the lieutenant known to the heroes has no idea where the secret stronghold lies and has never met his leader face to face, no amount of scrying upon the lieutenant will ferret out the villain’s secrets. A very clever foe will take steps to show her enemies what she wants them to see, planting false information where the characters’ scrying attempts are sure to uncover it.
As with charm spells, the best way to keep scrying spells from tipping the balance of the campaign is to design adventures that count on them. Build scenarios in which the characters are expected to use scrying magic to advance the plot and determine their next course of action. Anticipate the fact that the PC mage might attempt to cast scrying on the mysterious red-haired monk who was seen near the king’s chambers just before the king was killed, then design encounters appropriately. Scrying based on nothing more than that rough description might be the only clue available to characters trying to solve the murder, or it might be a false lead. The mysterious monk might have had nothing to do with the murder, or, even if he was the killer, might not have known who he was working for. Perhaps he was given instruc- tions to frame a lord who is loyal to the throne by fl eeing to the house of the unsuspecting lord after the killing. Just like charm magic, scrying magic should be a helpful tool that sometimes provides unhelpful results, teaching characters to treat it as a step toward fi nding the solutions to particular problems, not as a solution in and of itself.
Teleportation
More than most other types of magic, teleportation can allow a party of heroes to turn your most challenging adventures into so much dramatic Swiss cheese. Teleportation (often in conjunction with scrying magic or a charm spell interroga- tion) is often used to skip past minions and defenders in
order to get right to the chief villain, rendering your perfectly designed preliminary encounters useless. More signifi cantly, a party armed with teleportation magic is very hard to subject to any kind of mortal peril; one quick spell pulls everyone’s bacon out of the fi re as soon as things start to look bad. Without powerful magic or relatively arbitrary restrictions, teleporting PCs are extremely diffi cult to hinder unless you can situate the occasional adventure in a place where teleportation is unreliable, such as a specifi c demiplane or in certain reaches of the deep underground. For example, the Underdark of Faerûn, in the FORGOTTEN REALMS campaign
setting, is characterized by the presence of faerzress, a magical radiation that hampers divination magic and teleportation magic. Every creature in an area affected by faerzress recives a +4 bonus on Will saves against all divination spells. The use of any teleportation spell in the Underdark requires a Spellcraft check (DC 35, or DC 25 for normally infallible methods such as greater teleport), or a teleport mishap ensues.
Certain spells such as forbiddance and hallow can make small areas impossible to teleport into or out of. The spells
anticipate teleportation and greater anticipate teleportation (see
page 97) offer the protected creature a short period of warn- ing before a teleporting character or group arrives. As with other types of problematic magic, though, player characters have earned the right to use teleportation by the time they reach the appropriate level, and you shouldn’t attempt to make every villain’s stronghold immune to it as a standard feature of your adventure designs.
Clever villains who lack access to thorough teleportation defenses can take other steps to limit the effectiveness of teleporting heroes. An evil cleric with a divination spell could easily anticipate the time of the heroes’ arrival and set an ambush. Another villain might go to the trouble of building false throne rooms or lairs in the hopes of confusing her enemies, so that teleporting attackers might material- ize inside a deadly trap. As with scrying and charm magic, simply controlling information in the absence of elaborate precautions is a good step toward preventing unwanted visitors—locating and teleporting to the overlord’s lair will be a great deal more challenging for the player characters if the villain’s minions have no knowledge of the location or layout of that lair.