How to survive the spectrepocalypse?
In D&D 3 (and related games), a spectre can easily kill normal people and spawns other spectres, leading to an exponential apocalypse fairly easily.
What reliable means of long-term protection from spectres exist in the rules?
The scenario
A single spectre stops hanging around in its old tomb and decides that the time has come to snuff out all life. It finds a village or a metropolis, maybe, kills someone in the night, and now there are two spectres. They repeat the deed. Since a spectre causes two negative levels (and d8 damage), it can kill almost anyone instantly, and once the process gets going, stopping it becomes quite a challenge.
It is, however, conceivable that a high level character survives long enough to warn someone else, perhaps on another continent, of the incoming wave of undeath. But spectres are fast and incorporeal, so that will not give much time for preparations.
Given this highly limited time scope, who could survive and how?
Limitations
I am most interested in core rules only solutions (in D&D 3, D&D 3,5 or I guess some similar game), but should those fail, other sourcebooks can be taken into account.
Variants
Shadows and wraiths are less effective, but can certainly start a similar process. Ghouls and wights are even more limited due to corporeality.
1 answer
Using this as the source for Spectre rules : https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/3e_SRD:Spectre
How fast?
A spectre flies 80ft, whereas a human walks 30ft. Therefore, since humans walk at 3.5 miles an hour, spectres fly 2-2/3rds that, or about 9-1/3rd miles per hour (rounding down to 9 for future calculations)
Limiters
Per the rules, this is a cheap hive beast. The spectres are all under the command of the master spectre and can only do one thing at a time.
The rules aren't clear how much autonomy the drones have, but here are some options :
- No Autonomy, at all : the master spectre must be on-hand to direct each kill. So you lose the ability to scale exponentially. The rules hint that this is the case - "They do not possess any of the abilities they had in life."
- Drone level autonomy : the spectre might be able to get the swarm to do one general thing (harvest flowers, build hive, kill everything) within some not-far distance from the master. So while you get exponential growth within the command radius, you are back to one action at a time outside of it.
- Human level autonomy : the spectre can conduct a worldwide push. But, these agents have enough autonomy to say "no", or go about their own agenda. The rules suggest this is not the case.
How long to consume a village?
A village has an urban core usually about a mile in diameter (half-mile radius), with remote farms or wilderness out to about 7.5 miles around it.
To walk the urban core in a "lawn mowing" grid about six feet wide and get everyone in the urban core, the master spectre would need to walk 880 single-mile passes, or 880 miles. At 9 miles an hour, it will take our spectre 97.7 hours, or about ten (10) nights to thoroughly scour the village for the maybe 500 people living here and murder them all.
In between nights, the spectre and its minions are powerless. So the village folk actually have a good opportunity to form a response.
Note, livestock (probably including pets) get wigged out about the spectres. Many of your humans are going to have an opportunity to flee to the woods where finding them takes much longer (years to get everyone).
Next city
Large villages are about half a days ride (15 miles) from one another, so the spectre plague could generally make it to the next big urban core before the sun comes up.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads