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He should have fallen on his sword. That would have been the sensible thing to do.
Punched his ticket for Elysium right away, no waiting around.
He thought they'd only kill him.
Why did he think that? How stupid was he? Why in the world did he think that?
And now instead of his next great adventure he's flubbed a save against dominate person.
I need to buy a dozen scries to check on Korvosa's holdings and see if the Shoanti Burn Riders are asleep in their beds. I should have done that forever ago, it's incredibly urgent.
No one has sent her to say they're under attack, but no news is not necessarily good news.
The Burn Riders are asleep.
It seems not all of the shadows stopped at Korvosa's city walls, but the damage is reasonably local. It looks like people across Conqueror's Bay in Veldraine are on alert, and villagers are evacuating into city, but they must be operating on a Sable Company warning; the shadows are as yet far away and won't cross the distance before dawn absent a deliberate push to do so.
An hour from now (scrying takes an hour to cast) Cressida will heave a sigh of relief. Though she's going to need someone to liaison with the Sklar-Quah in the morning and rescind Eodred's ultimatum if she wants sustained relief on this count...
Maybe it's better to leave Eodred dead for a bit while they hammer that out, and then she can present it to him fait accompli.
Before that, though,
Next order of business: I was wondering if you had an idea for sealing the Vault against the active dead, without restricting airflow and in such a way that the living can get in and out unharmed? Or if you have a different idea for air we could do that instead.
Ideally a solution we can implement immediately, but if you've got one that will take four weeks to set up I'll still hear you out; gods know how long we'll have people stuck down here. If it's possible to do for less than 34,450 gp that would be really really convenient to me.
This is a very constrained problem to solve.
The first thing they need to do is cut a groove ten feet deep into the walls of the tunnel using stone shape, and slot into the groove a ringing 12,500 gp permanent wall of force. Otherwise, no matter what defenses they dream up, the shadows will just go around them through the walls. All the abjurations and magical traps in the world are as shit if there are any walls which aren't ten feet thick or doors which aren't ringed with walls of force.
Even that won't protect against all incorporeal undead - for instance, a Huge-size ghost or shadow could still just go around - but it looks like a good solution to the threats they expect to face.
But then, that's what she thought after the Hall of Wards was safe against ethereal wizards and lone ghosts, so if Cressida has another 25,000 sails going spare they could bar the door to a dire dread wraith, if those are a thing. Or bar the walls, anyway; none of this protects the door. Barring the walls to a Gargantuan-size undead would cost exponentially more and seems like fence-post security - at that point someone with magic is optimizing against your specific defenses and the thing to do is dispel or suppress their magic, else they'll just find the nearest unblocked path... but that's what she thought yesterday about incorporeal creatures in general. The Hall of Wards was so, so very prepared to defend against an ethereal wizard or someone magic jarred into an allip, or even a single powerful ghost.
They couldn't have stopped Geb but they could have made him work for it.
This might be an ignorant question, but why not smooth the tunnel a bit with stone shape, give it some right angles, and set the wall of force flush with the four walls of the tunnel? Seems like that way one wall should be long enough to stop anything less than thirty feet long from ghosting through the floor.
That was an ignorant question, but Cangi has nearly infinite patience for those even when she's not heroic up to her gills.
"Walls of force form flat, vertical planes."
Oh, that'd explain it. Lingering curiosity: you said vertical. Do you mean vertical relative to the caster, or...?
WALL OF FORCE is not called CEILING OF FORCE. CEILING OF FORCE would be a DIFFERENT SPELL.
What happens if you cast wall of force while floating in the Black Tapestry? Or a plane with subjective gravity?
WALL OF FORCE is not EFFECTED by GRAVITY.
Gravity is an entire DIFFERENT thing.
WALL OF FORCE is an UNANCHORED VERTICAL WALL.
People have their theories, but the only way to know is raw empiricism; you have to cast the spell or one like it and see the orientation. Under normal conditions on Golarion, though, it nearly always corresponds to our common-sense conception of up and down.
Anyway, cut the grooves, insert the walls. After that they need to protect the door.
There is no spell nor magic item known to her which could reliably do it for a long enough duration. Forbiddance comes closest, but Master Cangi doesn't think it really works for this.
She toyed with the idea of using a succession of four LN forbiddances cast by Darb Tuttle, each Maximized from a rod for 18 damage against an incorporeal CE creature on a successful save, each with a ring of force to make shadows pass through them, as would cost 56,000 gp in material components alone but likely kill even the greater shadows. Even that, though...
To start with, Forbiddance is an inherently dangerous spell to put in a public area. It damages anyone whose alignment doesn't match the spell, unless they speak a password before entering. Un-Maximized, the damage may not be much by the standards of a shadow or experienced veteran (the main purpose of the spell is to block interdimensional travel), but it's more than enough to cook 90% of humanoids.
It's considered best practice in Lastwall (a place that uses the spell heavily) to put forbiddance, where necessary and when possible, behind a door painted in red and white stripes. (Julaei thinks Lastwall uses different colors for rare non-lawful and non-good forbiddances, but doesn't know the details of their schema.) Or failing that, to put the spell's effect behind a line on the floor painted those colors. For all their caution, Lastwall still has accidents every year where someone melts themself for the sin of absentmindedness or stupidity or fumbling lips that mangle the password. Or when someone's alignment shifts by a step without their realizing it.
Still, cooking a few Korvosans would be pretty minor as prices go to keep every shadow and greater shadow out of the Vault, if it weren't for the larger problem: whatever password they put on the forbiddance, anyone entering will have to speak aloud. Lingering shadows that hear it could just follow through on their coattails.
So, she doesn't know any spells that are going to cut it here. This is a job for an automatically resetting magical trap.
Cressida listens to Julaei Cangi's wizard noises about how creating magical traps is objectively harder than creating any other sort of wondrous item, about how many spells can't be made to stabilize in the form of a trap even if they look like they should, about how traps often require material components not required by the original spell, about how traps which emulate spells quickly degrade if activated repeatedly in a short period of time or if not allowed to dissipate energy, and Kroft is treated to a lecture on how you can spend your entire life working with traps that emulate Summon Monster 3 and at the end of it all you'll still have things to learn, and then there's this whole tangent about why an automatically resetting trap of create food and water is the proverbial Philosopher's Stone for crafters of magical traps and has been since the days Emperor Tippendius the First reigned in Oppara, as yet with no success, and then she hears about how there's an obscure Cleric spell called anti-incorporeal shell the utility of which is sharply limited by its hemispherical shape that incorporeal beings can burrow under and up through but perhaps if the shell were recessed into the ground and then mostly filled with shaped stone? or of course Cangi could base the trap off undeath ward though it's a much higher circle and at that point Cressida Kroft interrupts to ask how long the defense would take to construct and how much it would cost. She doesn't need the whole History and Future of Humanity here.
Between 20,000 gp and 111,000 gp, and at least 3 weeks if it's possible at all - though in all likelihood it is. Still, with magic traps you can never really know.
Are Cressida Kroft and Master Cangi open to a private conversation by message? Because I was eavesdropping and I think I can help you seal the door.
I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a Cyphermage in Riddleport who says they've recovered the lost secret to using permanency with phase door[1]. They haven't been able to test it, it'd take at least 15,000 gp in diamond dust and an eighth-circle to cast the permanency, but I saw a piece of the spell diagram and I think it's legit.
We'd have to find some way to fix the air, but that strikes me as an easier problem than keeping the shadows out.
Don't bandy your new knowings about; I was sworn to secrecy on all of this.
-
1. Pathfinder Core Rulebook, Page 320. It's a Core spell, I missed that you could make it permanent. Point at me and laugh. ↩
Cressida Kroft never been happier to suddenly be in debt to a member of a criminal conspiracy.
(The Order of Cyphers are a secretive sect of wizards based out of Riddleport. Until it's been proven otherwise in comprehensive detail, it's safe to assume that they're a criminal conspiracy.)
...If Ileosa gives her guff about paying the Cypher Mage to keep incentives aligned, she'll find some way to make it up to the person.
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