Seven Ways to Kill the Tarrasque on thirteen experience levels or less The Tarrasque. It looks approximately like a mammoth, if a mammoth was 70 feet long and had better armor and more weaponry than a squadron of tanks. It's BIG, arguably the biggest creature in the Monster Manual. (Well, arguably some dragons can get bigger. But killing dragons is a whole nother essay.) It's a CR 20 creature all by itself, meaning a party of 20th-level adventurers stands a somewhat better than 50-50 chance of killing it. But what fun would there be in that? A party of 20th-level adventurers is already the biggest team on the block! Until WotC publishes the 20+-char-level expansion, they won't even benefit from the experience they'd get for killing it. (And it's not like the Tarrasque has pockets to carry treasure in, so they wouldn't get any richer for it either.) No, if you want to kill the Tarrasque for experience, you should try and do it at as low a level as possible. *** Level Requirements How low a level is low enough? There's a table in the DMG that says how much experience a party gets for defeating a monster of a given Challenge Rating. A 13th-level party that kills the Tarrasque, for example, earns 46800 experience in the process. If you kill the Tarrasque from a level lower than 13, the DMG doesn't list a value. Instead, it has a footnote reading that "...If the party survived this encounter, either your players are munchkins or you are doing something wrong. Probably both. See the section on Assigning Ad-Hoc Experience Awards for how to handle this." Throughout this text, then, we will assume that your average party level is at least 13. But wait. There's a difference between "average party level" and "level of your characters." What if your 17th-level wizard decides to take his 9th-level little brother with him for a Tarrasque hunt? The average party level is 13, but the party has access to ninth-level spells. How do we deal with this sort of thing? Well, one way to deal with it is to take advantage. Add enough first-level characters to your party to bring the average down to 13. The trouble is that your DM won't let you do this. Or, worse, he will let you do it but won't count the weenies into the party average. Besides, your first-level party members will soak up an equal share of the experience you get. If they bring the party level down far enough, it might still be worth it - but sharing the experience from your kill with a bunch of first-level weenies is just morally repugnant. I would suggest that party level be determined the same way monster Challenge Rating is determined. Four level-13 characters are a level-13 party, right? The DMG says that, if you cut the number of monsters in half, you decrease the CR of the encounter by 2. So, four level-13 characters should be the same as two level-15 characters or one level-17 character. There's still some funkiness in this system: a level-17 wizard is rewarded twice for fighting alone. The first reward comes from dropping his party level from 17 to 13; the second reward comes when he doesn't have to split the experience from his kill four ways. It's still interesting to think about, though. Anyway, we will assume throughout most of this document that your party contains characters of at least Level 13. Actually, almost all of our methods involve the use of +5 weapons, and you need to be caster level 15 to make a weapon +5 with Greater Magic Weapon - but you can still use spell scrolls to do this, and there's only a 10% chance of failure. We'll come back to this subject at a later point. *** Knowing Thy Enemy Now, conceivably you could go and attack the Tarrasque without any idea of his abilities. If you were a high enough level, you might even win. But you'd have no way of knowing your chances ahead of time. More importantly, there's no point in discussing methods for killing the Tarrasque if you don't know what it can regenerate from. So, throughout this document, we'll assume that your character has near-perfect knowledge of the Tarrasque. Explaining how your character acquired this knowledge is left as an exercise for the reader - though we do note that the Tarrasque's spell resistance does not protect it from divination. Tarrasque has a nasty set of special abilities. Fortunately, most of his abilities are defensive in nature: he's really hard to kill but doesn't have much of an attack. His abilities are as follows: Size: 70ft by 50ft Damage Reduction 25/+5 Spell Resistance 32 HP: 840 (Hit Dice: 48) AC 35 Attack damage: 4d8+17, 1d10+8, 1d10+8, 1d12+8, 1d12+8, 3d8+8. All attacks have at least +52 to-hit. You can forget about armor. Stats: STR 45, DEX 16, CON 35, INT 3, WIS 14, CHA 14 Saves: Fort +38, Ref +29, Will +20 Regeneration 40/round Indestructible: Tarrasque can regenerate from all forms of damage. In order to kill him, you must reduce him to -30HP and cast Wish or Miracle over his remains. Imposing Presence DC 20 (when Tarrasque attacks, enemies make Will saves or are Shaken) Anti-Magic Carapace: Tarrasque's natural armor reflects magic, sometimes onto the caster. Rush: Once per minute, the Tarrasque can move at "a speed of 150 feet." Is that the total it moves in a round, or its base speed? Spot: Tarrasque has +21 to Spot checks, with an additional +8 to spot invisible creatures. Invisibility will not protect you. Listen: Tarrasque also has +21 to Listen checks. Don't try to sneak up on him unless you're very, very good. Fire Immunity Poison Immunity Disease Immunity All of these except for Imposing Presence are extraordinary abilities. *** Wish and Miracle One of these abilities is particularly worthy of note: Tarrasque can't be permanently killed unless you cast Wish or Miracle over his remains. Since you're not a level-17 caster, you're not going to be able to naturally cast either of these spells. You can buy a spell scroll of one of these spells for 28825gp. (As an exercise in munchkinning, you might try to convince your DM that using Miracle to finish the Tarrasque doesn't count as a "major request", so it shouldn't require an XP cost. This will save you 25000gp if it works.) But any such spell scroll will have caster level 17. If you, as a 13th-level caster, try to use that scroll, you have a 20% chance of the scroll being wasted. (If you're very unlucky, the spell might suffer a mishap instead of just fizzling. This causes random effects in proportion with the spell's power. You should try to avoid this.) As your caster level drops, the chance of failure increases. But you might not need a spell scroll at all. There's a magic item called a Ring of Three Wishes that costs 97950gp. After three uses it becomes nonmagical, so it seems reasonable to assume that you could buy a Ring with only one wish left for one-third of that, or 32650gp. Anyone can use a Ring, so you wouldn't need a caster level at all for this. We will occasionally revisit this topic as we discuss different techniques for killing the Tarrasque. But, for most of the techniques described below, you should expect to pay at least 30000gp to finish the Tarrasque off. *** Evaluation Some of the suggestions we'll make in this Guide are things that, according to the Rules and to common sense, would actually work. Some of them are not. Everything we suggest is rated at the end according to the following criteria: Cost (in gp) - a 13th-level character has about 110000gp in wealth, so we'll take this as an upper limit on what one character can spend. Level required - 13 is optimal. Note that a lot of things get easier for a level-15 character, as he can cast Greater Magic Weapon naturally rather than buy spell scrolls of it. Time required - If the Tarrasque is heading for the capital city, you need a method that works _now_, not in three weeks. Experience gained - the most important aspect of any plan, right? Sensibility - does it actually make sense that you could do this, or is it a loophole in the rules? Legality - do the rules explicitly state that you can do this, or is it just something that it seems like you could do? Without further ado, let us proceed to: ------------ Method 1: Well, it works in Starcraft... Tarrasque has some nasty Spell Resistance, meaning that our Level 13 wizard has only a 20% chance of affecting him with any given spell, even with the Spell Penetration feat. That's assuming that he can get underneath Tarrasque's carapace and attack him point-blank from underneath - which is usually a bad idea anyway since most high-damage spells tend to be area effects. But there are a lot of spells that bypass Spell Resistance entirely since they don't directly affect the enemy. A good example of this type of spell is Illusions. No amount of Spell Resistance will let Tarrasque see through an Invisibility spell, nor will it tell him that any illusions you create aren't actually there. And with an Intelligence of only 3, he's not likely to figure it out on his own. How does this help? Well, the obvious tactic would be to augment your army with illusionary warriors. If you maneuver your troops right, Tarrasque will waste his time trying to kill the fake creatures while the real ones hit him from behind. The trouble is, no pure-illusion spell has the power to take damage - the Tarrasque's attacks will go right through it, and it won't be long until he figures out something is up. * Simulacrum There is, however, a solution. There's a seventh-level spell called Simulacrum which creates an illusionary double of a creature. The double is real enough to take (and to deal) damage, but it exists under your absolute control. The catch is that it only has 51% to 60% of the original's "hit points, level, skills, speech, and personality". Well, no loss - we aren't cloning the Tarrasque for its personality anyway. (One worrisome point: do abilities like Regeneration count as a "skill"? It would be really nice if our duplicate had a way to regain hit points. A Simulacrum can be repaired by a process requiring "one day, 100gp per hit point, and a fully equipped magical laboratory". This seems to imply that standard healing has no effect on it, so the Regeneration ability is really important. If your DM brings this up, you might try to bargain that the Regen is still there, but only operating at 51-60% capacity.) There are other hurdles to clear. Creating a Simulacrum requires a piece of the original creature - nails, hair, et cetera. Blood would probably do. You might be able to find some shed scales or something near its tracks; if you can't, you'll have to remove them from Tarrasque itself. With Invisibility to guard your approach, Flight to let you charge up to Tarrasque before he can spot you and react, and Contingency Dimension Door to let you escape, this ought to be possible without _too_ much trouble. You'll need a +5 axe (a caster-level-15 scroll of Greater Magic Weapon costs 1125gp) and a True Strike spell in order to actually dent the creature's hide; if you target the tip of one of its toenails, you ought to do okay. Simulacrum also costs 1000xp per casting. This is a small price to pay compared to the 46800xp you'll get if you're thirteenth-level, but still nothing to sneeze at. You only need to create two Simulacra if you're generous with the magical support - but when creating an unstoppable army of illusionary Tarrasques, there's no point in being stingy. Create as many as you can afford; once you finish the Tarrasque off, you can take over the world as an encore. * Combat ...Now, your Tarrasques are somewhat weaker than the original. They have a crucial advantage, though: magical support. You can cast Improved Invisibility on all your Tarrasques, letting them avoid 50% of the enemy's attacks. (Tarrasques have +52 to-hit and only AC35, so this is the only way your creatures can avoid attacks. Tarrasque himself will get hit by every attack you make.) If your Tarrasques didn't gain the 25/+5 Damage Reduction ability the original had, you'll need to correct that too. (25/+5 Damage Reduction means your creatures can hurt other creatures as though their attacks were +5 weapons.) You could cast Greater Magic Fang on your creatures at caster level 15 (using spell scrolls) if you have a Druid in the party. Failing that, you'll want to equip your creatures with weapons (similar to brass knuckles but much much bigger) and cast Greater Magic Weapon to make them all +5. How, then, is this going to work? Tarrasque's attacks deal an average of 112.5 damage each round if you just add the damage up. After accounting for critical hits on 18-20 and automatic misses on a 1, the damage goes up to 140 - but half of his attacks will miss every round due to Invisibility, so the actual value is 70 per round. (It's probably okay to work with the average damage: when you're rolling as many d8's and d12's as Tarrasque is, the actual damage will probably be very close to the average.) Your creatures have approximately 440 HP each, so even if they're not regenerating, one of them can survive Tarrasque's attacks for 6 rounds before going down. (If your creatures have the full Regeneration: 40, they can absorb his attacks for more than twice as long. If some of your creatures have it but others don't, make sure to put the ones that do have it in front.) Your creatures, on the other hand, are each dealing the full 140 damage per round. With only two Simulacrums you can deal 280 damage per round; even with Regeneration, Tarrasque will go down after only four rounds. (You won't even have to Wish him dead! Just set a Simulacrum to stand over him and keep beating him down. After two weeks, he'll still be alive, but with negative 20 million hit points; every day your Simulacrum spends costs Tarrasque three days to heal.) There are some amusing things you can do with a not-quite-dead Tarrasque. For example, he regenerates his limbs every couple of minutes: you can produce several million pounds of Tarrasque steak every day! (Better hope he's edible.) We'll leave other ideas (Tarrasque-hide armor, anyone?) to your imagination; suffice to say that there's a lot you can do if you don't mind violating the law of conservation of mass. Summary. Cost: 1500gp - focus for Contingency spell (you should have one of these anyway) 1135gp - longsword and Greater Magic Weapon scroll 200gp, 2000xp (OR 14550gp for scrolls) - two Simulacrum spells 6000gp - 12 brass-knuckle-equivalents, Tarrasque sized 13500gp - 12 spell scrolls Greater Magic Weapon Total: about 22000gp, more if you don't want to spend xp on Simulacrum, much less if your Tarrasques inherit the original's Damage Reduction ability. A-. Level: Level 13 is a must for Simulacrum. A. Time: one day (hopefully) - acquire a piece of Tarrasque two days - create two Simulacra one day - defeat Tarrasque In the best case, you could do this in four days - not _too_ much of a stretch. B-. Experience: You get the full 46800, no need to share. A+. Sensibility: How were we going to acquire those Tarrasque nail clippings again? B. Legality: If the spell wasn't supposed to do that, it wouldn't be in the PHB. A. Overall: Sounds good to me. A. ---------- Method 2: An Exercise in Logistics The illusion idea from Method 1 was a good one, but the Simulacrum idea wasn't entirely faithful to it; the creatures we created with Simulacrum were real, not fakes. That technique also cost a bunch of experience to prepare: 1000xp per Simulacrum created. There's another, more common way to use illusions that can serve us well in this method: the illusionary floor. The idea is this. Dig a big hole. Put an illusion over the top so Tarrasque falls in. Fill the hole with water. Tarrasque falls in. Tarrasque drowns. We'll work on this one step at a time. * Step 1: Dig a big hole. How big a hole do we need? Tarrasque is 70 feet long and 50 feet wide, so he's about 90 feet along the diagonal. He has a reach of 25 feet beyond that. We'll make the hole 140 feet in diameter for reasons described below. A 140-foot-diameter hole is 15393 square feet in area, and if the hole is 200 feet deep then we need to remove about 3.1 million cubic feet of earth. We'll want to dig the hole in solid stone so that Tarrasque can't dig his way out of it. There's a fifth-level spell called Transmute Rock To Mud that transmutes two 10-foot cubes of rock per level into mud. We can use a sixth-level spell, Move Earth, to remove the earth from the pit. Our 13th-level wizard can cast five Transmutes and one Move per day if he uses his higher-level spell slots as well; that's just enough to deepen the hole by ten feet. He should be able to finish the hole in about three weeks. We'll see later that the hole doesn't need to be quite so deep: Tarrasque isn't going to be in any condition to climb out of it, so all that matters is that the water be over his head. Our wizard can get away with one week's work instead of three if he's in a hurry. The principle is the same, though. * Step 2: Put an illusion over the hole. This part is easy: the fourth-level spell Hallucinatory Terrain targets one thirty-foot cube per level. We can cover the whole thing with two castings. They last two hours per level, which at 13th-level works out to one day. * Step 3: Fill the hole with water. This could be a bit of a problem, actually. Probably your best bet is to divert a river into the hole - not too difficult a task compared to creating the hole in the first place. Four Transmute spells and two Move spells can create a 10ft x 10ft channel 1000 feet long in solid rock; if you can find a suitable river five miles away, you can finish digging the channel in three weeks. If you can't find an area of rock that's near a river, but the season is summer, you can use the sixth-level spell Control Weather to change the weather to "torrential rain". The duration is 4d12 hours, and you can cast the spell three times per day, so you can keep the rain up as long as you like. It's not clear from the rules how long it will take until you have 200 feet of water in the hole, but it shouldn't take too long. If neither of the above conditions applies, you may have to settle for digging a hole in standard dirt near a river. Or you could use Move Earth on a lake that's already there, making the sides much steeper and the bottom deeper. * Step 4: Tarrasque falls in. This step is really easy. Shoot an arrow at Tarrasque; keep shooting until you have his attention. Run away, very fast, using a Fly spell. (Your base move with Fly is 90 feet; you'll have no problem evading Tarrasque. If you're worried about his Rush ability, you can polymorph someone into a Pegasus and add Horseshoes of Speed, granting a base fly speed of 240.) Eventually Tarrasque tries to run over the empty air, and falls in. ...Wait a second here. Isn't there some sort of Reflex save associated with falling into a pit? Well, ordinarily there would be. However, if a character is "running or moving recklessly" on encountering a covered pit, the save is negated. * Step 5: Tarrasque drowns. This step is much harder. Here, for your reference, is the drowning rule: Any creature can hold its breath for a number of rounds equal to twice its Constitution score. After that, it has to make Constitution checks; the DC starts at 10 and increases by 1 per round. When it fails a save, it dies in three rounds. Now, Tarrasque's Constitution score is 35, so Tarrasque can last between 9.5 and 11.5 minutes underwater. During this time it can do any of several things. It can try to dig at the sides of the hole. It can try to swim to the surface. It can also try to climb the side of the hole. We need to make sure that none of these things will get it out of the water within, say, 15 minutes. The easiest variable to control is Tarrasque digging at the sides of the hole. The walls are made of stone, which has a hardness of 8 and has 15HP per inch of thickness. (Presumably these numbers are for one five-foot square of rock, but the table doesn't explicitly state this, so we won't assume it.) If Tarrasque can deal 100 damage per round to the rock (after subtracting 8 hardness for each of five attacks), that's 6 inches of rock per round, so Tarrasque can tunnel through 60 feet of rock in 12 minutes. The pit is 200 feet deep, and Tarrasque is only 70 feet long, so no matter what he does he's still underwater. The other possibilities, swimming and climbing, are harder to control. The Monster Manual doesn't give us any indication of how well Tarrasque can swim or climb. Both of these abilities are based on Strength, though, and Tarrasque has a Strength of about 45. How can we make sure that Tarrasque won't be able to get out of the pit? * Never Swim on a Full Stomach Tarrasque has a strange habit: he likes to swallow whole anything that attacks him. Usually this doesn't hurt him, as he has a Fortitude save of +38, making him immune to all types of poison. In certain cases, though, this can work against him. Suppose that we craft an iron statue and place it in Tarrasque's path as it approaches our trap. Perhaps we create an illusion so that it seems to be shooting arrows at Tarrasque. Tarrasque eats it, of course, and continues chasing us. How does this affect Tarrasque's ability to swim? Tarrasque can swallow one Huge creature at a time, so let's make our statue Huge. A Huge creature is twice as large in every dimension as a Large creature, which is twice as large as a Medium creature - so our Huge statue has a volume 64 times the volume of an equivalent Medium-sized statue. Actually, we can do better than this - we cast Reduce on the statue before Tarrasque sees it. Reduce will decrease all of its dimensions by 50%, so if the statue is Huge when Tarrasque swallows it, it will grow to be Colossal after the spell wears off, with a volume of 512 times that of a medium-sized creature. Now, a medium-sized human can weigh 200 pounds or more - we assume our statue is somewhat portly. If our statue was a Colossal human, it would weigh a little more than 100000 pounds, or 50 tons. It's not human, though; it's iron. A human's density is approximately 1, the same as the density of water; iron has a density of 7.874. Our statue weighs 800,000 pounds when the Reduce spell has worn off! ...Wait, now. How would we buy such a statue? We don't need to pay for a great work of art - actually, we'd prefer a cube or a sphere, and our illusion spell can make it look like a creature just the same. But where are we going to find 400 tons of iron? How are we going to transport it? Well, it turns out there's a fifth-level spell called Wall of Iron which can create a wall with area one five-foot square per level. The thickness of the wall is three inches at caster level 13, so one casting will produce up to 80 cubic feet (or about 20 tons) of iron. We'll want to use Shrink Item on the iron as we produce it, decreasing its mass and volume by a factor of 1727; we can then use use the fifth-level spell Fabricate to mold it into any form we please. (This might actually be an abuse: Fabricate doesn't work on magic items, and it's a bit unclear whether magically shrunken iron counts as a "magic item". The alternative is to melt down the shrunken iron in a forge and re-cast it - not too impractical, actually, provided you can be certain the spell won't dispel itself partway through.) We have no lack of spells, so let's be extravagant: we'll use 43 castings of Wall of Iron to create 3375 cubic feet of iron. (This is enough to make a 15-foot cube of iron.) This will take a little more than a week. We'll cut the walls into manageable 26-cubic-foot sections (four five-foot squares of iron three inches thick) using whichever method is simplest (perhaps some Fabricate spells targeting the small amounts of iron between the sections we want). We can then cast Shrink Item on each individual section. Our 13th-level caster can cast Shrink Item 16 times per day (assuming an 18 INT), so this will take nine days, at the end of which all the iron will be less than two cubic feet in size. We'll only need one more Fabricate spell to collect it into a nice 18-inch cube, and we'll then have three days until the Shrink Item spells wear off. (The spells would wear off over a period of nine days, and they're all mixed together in that little iron block. The process would be interesting to watch.) We should cover the block to a thickness of another six inches or so with some of the leftover unshrunken iron. Shrink Item spells are a little finicky - they sometimes dispel themselves when they suffer an impact, and we don't want that to happen too soon. We should probably also put the block inside a cow or something so Tarrasque won't get confused when eating it. How can we make sure the block will expand just after Tarrasque eats it? Shrink Item can be deactivated with a command word. Once Tarrasque falls in the pit a simple Shout spell should be audible inside his stomach, which will expand the block quite nicely. We'll use the same command word for all the spells. * Tarrasque drowns. Okay, so Tarrasque is stuck at the bottom of a pit with an 844-ton iron block in his gullet. Anything in Tarrasque's stomach takes 2d8+8 acid damage and 2d8+10 crushing damage per round; we need to make sure that he can't digest the block before he drowns. The Tarrasque has a strength of 45, and he's a Colossal sized creature, so his maximum load is roughly 200000, or 100 tons. If he tries to carry more than that, he "can only stagger around with it", meaning he can't move more than 5 feet per round. Our cube will weigh 100 tons when its diameter is 5.85 feet; we want to show that it won't get smaller than that before Tarrasque drowns. Iron has a hardness of 10 and 30 hp per inch of thickness. It also takes half damage from acid attacks. We'll ignore the acid damage as negligible, but the block is taking 9 crushing damage, destroying about a third of an inch of iron on each side, per round. After 15 minutes (150 rounds) the block will have lost 50 inches, or a little more than 4 feet, from each side, leaving it with a diameter that's a little less than 7 feet. It'll be close. (Well, actually, if you think about it, crushing damage shouldn't _really_ be able to harm a block of iron, should it? The DMG says the DM can rule that certain items are immune to certain types of damage. But a true munchkin does not rely on his DM for favorable rulings; accordingly, we have performed the calculation as though crushing dealt full damage.) (Actually, there's one more thing we might worry about. Tarrasque is known for rampaging across the landscape, eating entire towns when it encounters them. Who's to say it can't just drink all the water? Sure, the volume of the water is much greater than that of the Tarrasque - but so are all those towns it eats. Also, when water encounters a strong acid (such as exists in Tarrasque's stomach) it produces a great deal of heat. Can Tarrasque's stomach acid boil the water in fifteen minutes' time? One would hope not.) After Tarrasque has been at the bottom of the hole for fifteen minutes, he will be thoroughly drowned, which automatically reduces him to -10 hit points. (There's some question here about his regeneration. The regeneration effect gives him +40HP at the start of each of his moves, and it's not clear when the drowning effect drops him back to -10. Is Tarrasque jerked back to consciousness every six seconds? One would hope not.) All that remains is to go down there and put him out of your misery. You need to drop him to -30 hit points in order to kill him; if you have a +2 STR mod, you can do this with coup-de-grace with a +5 heavy pick. Immediately after you hit him, you use a Haste partial action to finish him with Wish. (There are some details here about spellcasting underwater. Make a diving bell or something.) ...Actually, why bother with the Wish finisher at all? Tarrasque is stuck, unconscious, at the bottom of a deep pit. He's not going anywhere. Why not leave him there? Well, eventually he's going to digest that iron block you fed him. Presumably his stomach action slows down after he drowns, but you shouldn't bet on it stopping. Once the iron block is gone, he might float to the surface and start breathing again, and you really don't want that to happen. If you go down there and attach some kind of shackles to him, though, he won't float to the surface no matter what happens. If you cast Wall of Iron some more, you can probably bury him under enough iron that he won't come to the surface for quite some time. (And the water will turn a pretty red color from all the rust. Years from now, Tarrasque Pool will be a tourist attraction...) You'll also need to make some provision for keeping the water level above his head: there's a 9000gp item called a "Decanter of Endless Water" that can produce 30 gallons of water every round, but you're probably better off diverting a river. You might also want to worry about theft of the Decanter or sabotage of the Shackles by various evil types; we will leave precautions against such occurrences as an exercise for the reader. Summary. Cost: 2500gp if you have the spells already. A+. Time: 21 days - dig a deep hole ?? days - fill hole with water 7 days, 2500gp for spell components - create 840 tons iron ? days - break iron into chunks 9 days - cast Shrink Item on the iron 1 day - fabricate, illusion spells 15 minutes - showtime This would require much planning. D. Level: We never actually use any spell above sixth level, but we need a 13th-level caster to cast all the Shrink Item spells before they start expiring. A specialist (or someone with Extend Spell) might be able to do this in less. A. Experience: You get the full 46800, no need to share. A+. Sensibility: Is Tarrasque vulnerable to drowning? Uncertain. B. Legality: Can you use Fabricate on Shrunken iron like that? Can your Shout spell be heard inside Tarrasque's stomach? C. ...But if you've got time to burn, and your DM is okay with the legality, this is a fine method. ---------- Method 3: Flying Army One thread common to every method we suggest is this: it's _very important_ that you not let Tarrasque get the chance to attack you. Tarrasque has a lot of maneuverability, but there's one thing he can't do at all, and that's attack air units. So why come near him at all? You can just cast Fly on everyone in your party and shoot him from the sky. The only problem you have then is finding a way to deal Tarrasque more than 40 damage per round. Tarrasque has an Armor Class of 35, 30 of which is from his Natural Armor bonus. In order to hit him with a roll of 19 you would need an attack bonus of +16. With a +4 DEX, a +5 weapon, and Weapon Focus, you could get that at Fighter level 6. But it would take a lot of level-6 Fighters to deal Tarrasque 40 damage per round. Fortunately, you don't have to hit Tarrasque on a 19 in order to hurt him. Why bother with Level-6 Fighters when a Level-1 Fighter can still automatically hit Tarrasque every time he rolls a 20? If he takes the Rapid Shot feat, in fact, your Level-1 Fighter has two 5% chances to hit Tarrasque every round. If your fighter is using a +5 strength longbow with +5 arrows he can deal 1d8+14 damage with every hit, for an average of 1.85 damage per fighter per round. If you have 50 archers shooting each round, you can deal an average of 92.5 damage, of which Tarrasque will heal 40 and suffer 52.5. At that rate, you'll finally kill him after 17 rounds, or about 34 arrows per archer. ** Outfitting an Army Wait! There's a problem. How are you going to equip 50 people with +5 longbows? Where are you going to get 50 people with 18 strength in the first place? Who can memorize enough Fly spells to get them in the air? Well, as to the manpower question, there's a feat called Leadership that allows you to collect followers as you gain levels. A 16-Charisma wizard, at 13th level, has a Leadership Rating of 16, which is enough to collect 28 followers of first-level or better. If you have two such characters in your party, that's fifty people right there. If you don't, you have to hire people. A first-level fighter doesn't cost very much at all to hire out for a day, but you do have to be careful not to give him anything he might be tempted to steal. You certainly can't cast all the spells you need to outfit your army in one day. If you're creative, though, you can get most of them for free. Need 18 strength? There's this great spell called Polymorph Other that permanently changes the target into another creature... There are some funny restrictions on what you can choose, but one of the allowed creatures is the Annis Hag, an ugly-looking creature with a strength of 25. That's plenty strong enough to use a strength bow. Need your army to be flying? Polymorph some warhorses into Pegasi; once they get used to the idea of flying, they'll be the best mounts you could ask for, moving 240 feet per turn with no trouble. Your DM may give you trouble about retraining your new Pegasi. Natural pegasi are supposed to require 3000gp and several months to train; you might point out that natural pegasi have like a 12 intelligence, and your polymorphed ones only have a 2. If this is a problem, you can recruit some commoners as polymorph subjects. The experience you're offering is totally unique: your subjects will become magnificent winged horses, able to fly under their own power, able to return to human form when it's over, PLUS they get to be first-hand witnesses to one of the greatest battles ever fought, PLUS they're defending their families from the Tarrasque's attack! What girl, boy, or adult could resist? You can probably sell tickets. There's one last problem: you need everyone in your army to have +5 strength bows and +5 arrows. Sadly, Polymorph can't help you here; you'll have to cast Greater Magic Weapon yourself. This is the expensive part: you can get a pair of wands to cast the spell (you need 100 castings, one for bow and one for arrows, for each of 50 soldiers), but your wands need a caster level of 15 if you want your arrows to be +5. Market price on this is (750*3*15) = 33750 gold pieces per wand. If you're caster level 15, you can make the wand yourself for half that (and try the Magical Artisan feat from Oriental Adventures to deduct 25% from that cost), but this still isn't cheap. On top of that, you're paying 25000gp to outfit all your people with mighty composite +4 longbows. (Hold on there, says the DM - you can't use a longbow while mounted! Ordinarily you couldn't, but Annis Hags are Large size, which means that a longbow to us looks like a shortbow to them. Again, if your DM gives you trouble, you can replace the Pegasi with a wand of Fly.) Be sure to remind your soldiers that the longbows are a LOAN, not a GIFT, and anyone who tries to steal from you will suffer the same fate the Tarrasque did. It could be a major pain to find this many longbows, since they take forever to make; fortunately, there's a fifth-level spell called Fabricate which lets you create them yourself, if you have at least a +15 to Craft: Bowmaking. (This also cuts the price by two-thirds.) So, the plan is simple. You use your two wands to give all 50 of your people +5 bows and arrows. Then they all get on their pegasi and fly over to wherever Tarrasque is, staying a good 100 feet up in case he can jump higher than it looks. They open fire, with the Pegasi pacing Tarrasque so it doesn't get away, and it takes a little less than two minutes until he collapses. Once he's collapsed they fire a few more rounds to make sure he's dead, then you finish him off with Wish. What could go wrong? ** What Could Go Wrong There's a little problem you might run into, particularly if your DM is (justifiably) feeling annoyed with you. This plan hinges on the rule that a natural 20 is an automatic hit - but, for every roll of 20 one of your soldiers makes, somebody else is likely to roll a 1. On a natural roll of 1, bad things can happen. If you haven't been careful in arranging your soldiers, they might shoot each other in the backs - but even if they avoid that, they're hovering high in the air, and if they drop their bows it will be tough to get them back. Make sure to tell your DM the soldiers have their bows attached to their wrists by straps, have covered quivers that they open one at a time so that they won't lose all their arrows if they turn upside down, et cetera. Tarrasque has an Imposing Presence ability which can scare your soldiers, giving them -2 to damage. Fortunately, to use this ability he has to "charge or attack", which he can't do since your soldiers are in the air. So this, at least, shouldn't be a problem. ** Optimizations We've played fast and loose with the logistics involved here; you don't need quite the damage output we described, so some tinkering with the figures could make a big impact on your budget. - You could use magic of your own (Prayer, for example, and bardsong) to increase your soldiers' damage rate; you could then save some money by using a cheaper wand of Greater Magic Weapon on the longbows. (The arrows need to be +5, though, or they won't hurt Tarrasque at all.) - A caster-level-5 wand of Enlarge can boost your soldiers by a size category, increasing their base longbow damage from 1d8 to 2d6; unfortunately, this only works if they're not riding Pegasi. (There's some funniness here since annis hags are just barely Large creatures anyway; best to work out the details with your DM.) - If you have good damage per soldier, it will let you get by with a smaller number of soldiers. Your wands won't be totally depleted after the battle, so you can sell the spare charges and make back some of what you spent. - Your soldiers run out of magic arrows after 25 rounds, so you need to make sure the Tarrasque dies before then. How close you want to cut it is up to you. Summary. Cost: 67500gp - two wands of Greater Magic Weapon 25000gp - 50 mighty +4 composite longbows 1000gp - 20000 arrows 32650gp - Wish finisher (from Ring of Three Wishes) Total cost: 126150gp. This isn't _too_ outrageous, as a 13th level character should have about 110000gp worth of equipment to start - but it's not good. D. Level: No problem; a seventh-level wizard could cast the Polymorph spells needed, and everything else is just wands. A+. Time: A thirteenth-level wizard gets ten Polymorph spells per day, so figure ten days to polymorph the entire army. It takes about 34 days to craft a wand of GMW, though. C. Experience: Well, if you could afford the price tag, you wouldn't need any other party members... except, wait. You just got help from fifty other people. 46800 experience split 50 ways is 976 experience. F. Sensibility: This method relies on the fact that anybody, no matter how weak, can always hit his target 5% of the time. This is probably not the case. C. Legality: This method is entirely legal. A. Summary: This is the sort of method a government would use: lots of cash, no finesse at all. --------- Method 4: Flying One-Man Army ...But wait. Using Method 3, you're going to kill Tarrasque with FIFTY OTHER PEOPLE? Sure, they'll bring down the average level of the party somewhat - but do you really want to end up splitting the experience for this kill fifty ways? The most you can say for that method is that you rid the country of a threat. Unless you're a government, a much better way is to kill Tarrasque by yourself. Assuming, of course, that you happen to be a thirteenth-level cleric. We've only got one person, so we need rather a lot of damage output. Fortunately, we've only got one person, so buff spells are cheap. Our cleric will use the following: - The Magic domain allows our cleric to cast arcane spells off scrolls. - The tried-and-true mighty composite +4 longbow, enchanted to +5 with Greater Magic Weapon. - Fifty +5 arrows, similarly enchanted. - Our cleric will be polymorphed (from a scroll) into a Girallon, which has 26 strength and 17 dexterity. (And four arms!) - Our cleric will also read a scroll of Maximized Cat's-Grace; this will boost his dexterity to 22. - Our cleric will wear a mithril chain shirt with the "of Speed" enchantment from Defenders of the Faith. This makes him permanently hasted. It's a little pricey, but he really should have one anyway. - The Fly spell, from a scroll, and the Expeditious Retreat spell, from another scroll, gives him a base flying movement of 180. - The Improved Invisibility spell doesn't provide protection since the Tarrasque can spot invisible creatures, but it does grant +2 to-hit. - Divine Power is a fourth-level cleric spell that grants the caster a base attack bonus equal to their total character level - in this case, 13. It lasts one round per level. - Divine Favor is a first-level cleric spell that grants the caster a +1 luck bonus to attack and damage per three caster levels. It lasts one minute. - Righteous Might is a fifth-level cleric spell that doubles the caster's size, granting -1 to-hit and increasing his weapon's damage die by one. It lasts one round per level. - Bless is a first-level cleric spell that grants a +1 morale bonus to-hit. It lasts one minute per level. - The Weapon Focus (composite longbow) feat grants +1 to-hit. - The magic item "Bracers of Archery" grants the wearer +2 to-hit. It also grants +1 to damage, but only at close range. - The Rapid Shot feat grants our cleric an extra attack at his highest bonus, but inflicts -2 to all attacks made that round. Previously, we've needed to get Greater Magic Weapon on scrolls in order to reach caster level 15. Here, that won't be needed. There's a magic item called a Necklace of Karma Bead that, when activated, grants a cleric a +4 boost to caster level for ten minutes. That will increase our cleric to caster level 17, which is plenty for our purposes. We'll try to kill the Tarrasque in two minutes or less, which poses a small problem since most of our spells don't last quite that long. To solve this we'll use the Extend Spell feat, which makes a spell one level higher and doubles its duration. This gives us values of: To-hit Damage Base attack bonus +13 1d8 Rapid Shot -2 Divine Power -1 +2d6-1d8 Strength +4 Bow enhancement +5 +5 Arrow enhancement +5 +5 Divine Favor +5 +5 Dexterity +6 Invisible +2 Bracers of Archery +2 Weapon Focus +2 Bless +1 --------- --------- +38 26 (average) Our cleric gets a total of five attacks, at +38/+38/+38/+33/+28. Of course, the Tarrasque will probably be moving, so he'll need to use his Haste partial action to give chase; this means he usually gets four arrows per round, at +38/+38/+33/+28. The third arrow has a 95% chance to hit the Tarrasque's 35 AC, and the fourth one has a 70% chance to hit, for an average of 3.65 hits per round. At 26 damage per shot, that's an expected yield of 94 damage per round; the Tarrasque heals 40 damage, so we get 54 damage per round of firing. That kills the Tarrasque in under two minutes, during which time our cleric fires about 80 arrows. As usual, he uses a Miracle finisher. He can cast the spell off a scroll since he's caster level 17 anyway (though that doesn't save much money). Summary. Cost: 17250gp - +1 mithril chain shirt of speed 6000gp - necklace of karma bead 5100gp - bracers of archery 500gp - mighty composite +4 longbow 1125gp - scroll of maximized cats-grace 700gp - scroll of polymorph 700gp - scroll of improved invisibility 325gp - scroll of fly 100gp - scroll of expeditious retreat (caster level 4) various cleric spells - free 28825gp - Miracle finisher scroll 28850gp for equipment we should have anyway, 2950gp for scrolls, and 28825gp for the Miracle finisher. B. Level: Everything works with caster level 13. A. Time: You'd need to prepare spells specifically for this, so figure about a day. A. Experience: 46800 experience, all to one person. Perfect. A+. Sensibility: Everything more-or-less works. A. Legality: This method is entirely legal. A. Summary: If you're going to build your D&D character into a one-man army, this is the way to go. ---------- Method 5: The Macross Way There's an extremely cheesy anime called "Macross" in which we learn that the power of song can defeat any evil. This example demonstrates the truth of that lesson. Bards have an ability called "Inspire Courage" which grants all who hear it a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls. This ability is usable even at Level 1. So, get an army of 50 bards with slings and march, singing, on the Tarrasque. Each of your bards has +50 to-hit and deals something like 1d4+50 damage. Since your weapons aren't magical, Tarrasque's damage reduction will ignore the first 25 points of damage, but he still takes at least 25 damage per hit. 50 hits at 25 damage each is 1250 damage total, which puts him way into the negative hit points in one round. Now, you could follow this up with a 30000gp Wish spell. But why bother? Let each of your fifty bards draw a knife and, singing happy chopping-up-the-Tarrasque songs, cut the monster into hundreds of little pieces, each of which can go in its own little jar. (Actually, you'd need a whole lot of jars. Tarrasque is a Colossal sized creature, and he weighs 130 tons. That's 2.5 tons of Tarrasque per bard. Maybe you'd better invite some guests from the nearest village.) Tarrasque meat is one of the rarest things in the universe, even if there's rather a glut of it on the market just at the moment - in a hundred years, each of these pieces might be worth a fortune. Cost: Hiring a bard costs a gold piece per day. Getting that many bards to come to one place might be a problem unless you lure them there with the promise that they'll witness the demise of Tarrasque. This exercise is cheap (or free) to implement, and if you hold onto your chunk of Tarrasque for a while before selling it, you can probably turn a hefty profit. A+. Level: A level-1 character could do this. Fifty level-1 characters are equivalent to approximately a level-8 party, but that's still way below the Level-13 experience threshold. A. Time: Figure about a week for the bards to gather in one place. B. Experience: The experience would get split fifty ways or more; a bunch of Level 1 bards would go up to Level 2. D+. Legality: ...Unfortunately, morale bonuses don't stack. This tactic is a complete fraud, as you have hopefully realized long before now. F. Sensibility: See Legality. This only works in bad anime. D-. ------- Method 6: One-Hit Finisher A lot of our efforts thus far have been concentrated on reducing Tarrasque to -10 HP through some death effect, then using coup-de-grace to drop him to -30 so we can kill him. This method does things the other way around. Tarrasque is kind of a heavy sleeper. He usually sleeps for five to ten years at a time in between devouring helpless villages. If you're quiet about it (and if you can find his lair - tricky at best), you could sneak right up next to him while he was asleep - close enough, in fact, for coup-de-grace. Coup-de-grace is an interesting action. You hit the enemy and automatically deal a critical, plus Rogue Sneak Attack damage if applicable. With most mundane enemies this is enough to finish them - but, if it's not, they still have to make a Fort save (DC 10+damage) in order to survive. Tarrasque has a +43 Fort save, so we need to deal him 54 damage if we want to be certain he won't make his save. What weapon shall we use? We have two nice options. A Heavy Pick has the best critical in the game - 1d6 points of damage but a x4 multiplier. A bow, on the other hand, gives us a x3 multiplier but lets us stack weapon enchantments on both the bow and the arrow. We'll assume we have at least an 18 strength: Bow: 1d8 damage (mean 4.5) 4.5 +5 arrow enchantment 9.5 +5 bow enchantment 14.5 +4 strength bonus 18.5 x3 critical 55.5 Pick: 1d6 damage (mean 3.5) 3.5 +5 weapon enchantment 8.5 +4 strength bonus 12.5 x4 critical 48.5 The bow seems to be the better choice. Note that we can also apply such benefits as Point Blank Range, Bracers of Archery, and Weapon Specialization to the bow damage - and it's probably a good idea to apply as many of these as possible, since the 55.5 damage figure is only an average, not a guarantee. There's an Icy Burst enchantment we can put on the bow if we like, dealing an extra 1d6+2d10 cold damage. (Actually, there's a question here: does Icy Burst get negated by spell resistance? Spell resistance has no effect on weapon enhancement bonuses, but it might work against magic damage from weapons.) If you're a Rogue, your Sneak Attack bonus will also add to the total. ...That brings up an interesting question. What class are we dealing with here? We need a Wizard to cast Greater Magic Weapon on the bow and arrows, but we've made mention of effects like Weapon Specialization and Sneak Attack that aren't available to Wizards. We also have to have a Silence spell to cover our approach to Tarrasque, and only Clerics and Bards can cast Silence. Well, it turns out that we're going to need more than one character anyway if we're going to pull this off. Once we finish the coup-de-grace, Tarrasque will fail his save and drop to -10 hit points. His Regeneration effect will then kick in, boosting him back to 30 hit points. This is bad. Clearly we need an accomplice to hit Tarrasque as well. The accomplice can also coup-de-grace, since Tarrasque will be at -10 hit points until his turn. But he only needs to deal 30 damage or so, so he can just as easily be a wizard, and the first attacker can be a fighter. We can pay a cleric 60 gold to cast the Silence spell. ...So, both players coup-de-grace the Tarrasque on the first round, dropping him below -30 hit points. (Actually, there's some question of whether you can coup-de-grace during a surprise round, before Tarrasque is aware of you. If your DM gives you trouble about this, your characters can take the Death Blow feat from the Fighter/Monk handbook, which makes coup-de-grace into a partial action which you can easily perform during a surprise round.) On subsequent rounds the players continue to coup-de-grace, dealing more than 40 damage total, so Tarrasque's hit points drop until he's at -100 or so. Then one of the players leaves the area of Silence and uses the Wish to finish Tarrasque off. That's really all there is to it. Summary: Cost: 1000gp - two mighty +4 composite longbows 4500gp - four scrolls Greater Magic Weapon (caster level 15) 32650gp - Wish finisher (from Ring of Three Wishes) Total cost: about 40000gp, plus you have to find where the Tarrasque sleeps. That last could be tricky. B. Level: The wizard should have a high caster level in order to use the scrolls. The fighter should have an 18 Strength (though this can be augmented with Bull's-Strength if needed.) Level 13 will certainly suffice. A-. Time: Tarrasque never stays awake for more than about a week at a time. On the other hand, once he's woken up, it's probably too late to stop him from destroying the city. C. Experience: 46800xp split two ways isn't too shabby. A-. Sensibility: Wait - you're going to kill a monster the size of a village with _one arrow_? Maaybe if you shot through its eye and into its brain. Maybe. B. Legality. This is completely legal. A. --------- Method 7: The Big Sleep The Tarrasque has 35 AC and 840 hit points, which is pretty impressive. However, most of that AC is from natural armor. There are some attacks that ignore natural armor, and against those the Tarrasque has a total AC of 5. Most importantly, incorporeal touch attacks ignore natural armor. This method will describe how to kill the Tarrasque, not through hit point loss, but through Wisdom drain. There's a particularly nasty kind of undead creature called an Allip. Allips are noncorporeal, which means they can travel through the ground beneath your feet to attack you. They don't deal normal damage, either; instead, when an Allip hits its target, the target takes 1d4 permanent Wisdom damage. Unlike hit point damage, this damage doesn't heal naturally; only a Restoration spell (or some higher-level variant) can cure it. And an Allip makes its attack at +3 to hit, so it will hit the Tarrasque's touch AC of 5 ninety percent of the time. How can we get some Allips? Well, the most obvious way is through Rebuke Undead attempts. Allips are 4HD creatures, though they count as 6HD for purposes of turning; if you roll a Rebuke attempt powerful enough to rebuke 12HD creatures or better, you can use it to control the Allips instead of rebuking them. You can control up to your cleric level worth of undead at any one time, so that's three Allips per cleric. Not a bad start, but Tarrasque can kill an average of three Allips every round (he misses half the time because they're incorporeal), so you'll need more than just that to finish him off. One way to handle this would be to use two thirteenth-level clerics, each with the Magic domain so they could cast arcane spells off scrolls. Each cleric would cast Haste off of an arcane scroll on each of his three allips. Tarrasque gets three attacks of opportunity as they charge; even if all three attacks hit, the other three allips can make two attacks each, for an average of 15 wisdom damage. Tarrasque only has 14 wisdom, so this probably finishes him. There's a little problem we haven't discussed. Allips are LOUD: an Allip "constantly mutters and whines to itself, creating a hypnotic effect." The hypnotic effect won't actually harm the Tarrasque, since it's a DC15 will save, but it will certainly alert it to your presence. One way to handle this would involve a few well-placed Silence spells; with that, your shadows could travel underground and attack the Tarrasque from underneath. Otherwise, Tarrasque will hear you coming, and you have to hope it won't run away. Seems like a fair bet, since Tarrasque is the most powerful thing in the world as far as it knows, but better not to take chances. A more interesting way to deliver your Allips to their target would make use of the "Master of Shrouds" prestige class from Defenders of the Faith. A thirteenth-level cleric can have six levels of Master of Shrouds, which among other things gives him the ability to summon four Allips at a time (as a Summon Monster spell), (3 + CHA mod) times per day. (The summoned Allips are a little hard to control if you don't have something for them to attack, but a thirteenth-level cleric should have no trouble with it.) Unfortunately, there's some messiness involved in spellcasting in Tarrasque's presence. Ordinarily you'd just do it while flying, but you have to summon to a stable surface even though Allips don't need one; you might try a Wall of Force spell to create a stable surface high in the air. Otherwise, you can do your summoning somewhere safe, then send your Allips into battle as in the above method. Once Tarrasque drops to zero wisdom, he falls into a coma; he doesn't wake up until his wisdom returns. The only way for this to happen is if some cleric is (a) skilled and wise enough to cast a Restoration spell, (b) clever enough to get around Tarrasque's spell resistance and Will save, and (c) stupid enough to think Tarrasque won't kill him when he wakes up. This seems very unlikely, so Tarrasque ought to be down for quite a while. Summary: Cost: YOUR IMMORTAL SOUL! Well, not necessarily that - but dealing with the undead is definitely an evil act, so this route isn't available to the good-aligned. Monetarily - well, finding Allips isn't easy, and creating them involves a lot of messy torture. But you don't have to spend any gold on this method at all. B. Level: You'd need level 12 to command three Allips, or to summon four per round with Master of Shrouds. Fortunately, level 13 is still the standard. A+. Time: The only time needed is that to find (or create) the Allips. If you're summoning them, you don't need any preparation at all. A+. Experience: 46800xp split two ways, or you can keep it all for yourself with Master of Shrouds. A. Sensibility: Is the Tarrasque vulnerable to wisdom drain? I don't see why not. A. Legality: There aren't any rules for finding or creating Allips (though what we've suggested seems reasonable), but you can summon them just fine. A.