Forums of the Megaverse®

For story reasons, there's a group of people in the campaign I'm participating in that are not capable of using magic themselves (so they don't have anti-magic spells available) but the level by which they can access material, non-magical resources is over 9000.
They know about a magically gifted person capable of casting escape, and doing so in an instinctual manner (i.e. they don't need to speak out the spell and can focus their magic without words) - which they now need to lock up safely.

I am now looking for a material that would make shackles or handcuffs made from it resistant or, preferrably, immune to having the escape spell cast on them - does something like that exist in the world of RIFTS without GM intervention?

Splynn Dimensional Market has magical and biowizard restraints. The TechnoWizard Shackles get a saving throw against Escape, and as a GM, you could easily come up with an improvement on it.

none of which are available to PC's in chaos earth.

my suggestion is rather than try to fight the spell directly, engineer your prison to be less effected by the spell.

the spell lets you open locks or escape bindings. but it also only effects one per casting. so the initial idea would be to use lots of locks and bindings. so they have to cast lots of spells to do so. this will at least slow them down and give players a chance ot catch them in the act. 2-3 handcuff's, the arms roped together, legs cuffed together,.. go wild.'

the other alternative, if the players know a bit about the spell (would need decent lore skill), would be to remember that "bindings", in the context of the spells description, looks to mean knots. so restraints that don't have locks and don't have knots/moving parts ought to work. for example, being welded into a pair of arm restraints that are just two loops of metal. or having their legs encased in a cement block. etc.

An Obulete, or however you spell it.
Lock them in a prison cell that is a vertical pit. To get out you need a ladder that is lowered down from the surface.
Thus, even if you unlock the door, and untie yourself... you still have the door closed (weight of the door keeps it closed anyway) and the then you still have to get UP the intervening space.
For more fun if it is something like an airlock where one door is physically locked out while the other door is open... then that is another layer of security.
Depending on the subjects biology, you could pressurize the prison so that you need to properly decompress to get out. That should slow down hasty escapes... after all, if you need to sit in the decompression room for eight hours while the helium in your blood bleeds out slowly or you die horribly it makes it rather hard to escape quickly.

Another possible solution is simply to use an absurdly heavy door. It doesn't matter if the door is locked or unlocked if it weighs 200 tons and requires specialized machinery to move.

Another option is to have cameras monitoring the person and to hit them with something (tear gas, nap gas, tazer, whatever) if they start shedding cuffs)

Or you can put that in the hallway... so you can be unlocked in your cell sure... but open the cell door and we flood the room with gas.

if they need food/water that is a lever as well. If they ditch their shackles then they get their meals cut for example

And the simplest solution is to have the handcuffs be wired to an audible alarm. If they unlock they sound the alarm. Sure, the wizard can cast Escape on the cuffs (put three or four pairs on them). but the second they do, they will be made.
If you hook the rest up to zap them with neural maces or what not, that should discourage that sort of thing pretty quickly.

eliakon wrote:An Obulete, or however you spell it.
Lock them in a prison cell that is a vertical pit. To get out you need a ladder that is lowered down from the surface.
Thus, even if you unlock the door, and untie yourself... you still have the door closed (weight of the door keeps it closed anyway) and the then you still have to get UP the intervening space.
For more fun if it is something like an airlock where one door is physically locked out while the other door is open... then that is another layer of security.
Depending on the subjects biology, you could pressurize the prison so that you need to properly decompress to get out. That should slow down hasty escapes... after all, if you need to sit in the decompression room for eight hours while the helium in your blood bleeds out slowly or you die horribly it makes it rather hard to escape quickly.

Another possible solution is simply to use an absurdly heavy door. It doesn't matter if the door is locked or unlocked if it weighs 200 tons and requires specialized machinery to move.

Another option is to have cameras monitoring the person and to hit them with something (tear gas, nap gas, tazer, whatever) if they start shedding cuffs)

Or you can put that in the hallway... so you can be unlocked in your cell sure... but open the cell door and we flood the room with gas.

if they need food/water that is a lever as well. If they ditch their shackles then they get their meals cut for example

And the simplest solution is to have the handcuffs be wired to an audible alarm. If they unlock they sound the alarm. Sure, the wizard can cast Escape on the cuffs (put three or four pairs on them). but the second they do, they will be made.
If you hook the rest up to zap them with neural maces or what not, that should discourage that sort of thing pretty quickly.

if you havn't watched it, watch Kung fu panda, where the leopard? bad guy is imprisoned for ideas, also the Xmen movies, where they had magneto imprisoned in the plastic/glass prison.

I am not saying those are the best prisons but they give you some ideas. I also will mention "the incredibles"

for instance have multiple bindings/locks where binding 1 grounds through binding 2 on the wrists, if either of them gets removed, it effectively tazers the prisoner

and the deep pit with a design shape sort of like a bottle especially if it has a lowered center access, so good luck trying to climb the walls and portions of the walls that are polished perfectly smooth for ~10 ft, and another 10 ft where the walls have micro grooved surface (not rough enough to actually grip onto but rough enough that a suction cup or similar can't get a seal the point being to make it as close to impossible to get out as possible without the guards actively assisting.

If you have the Rifts Book of Magic they have a section on magic restraints (pg274-9), this is compiled from Rifts WB23 and SoT#1.

The CS had Containment body armor (penalties to cast spells) and various (non-magical) restraints on pg276, Cyber Implants are also an option (pg276-9, obviously this requires surgery and such).

Other options that come to mind:
-encase them in metal so they can't cast spells effectively (raises the PPE requirement, plus side effects)
-drug them (sleep, drunk, etc)
-Rifts WB2 has some useful Bio-weapons (if available)

Lock them in a cage, weld it shut for transport. Or make a base, and lower the cage down onto it. The weight of the cage is essentially the lock.

Plus you can always drug them/knock them out. Deep sedation?

Hector_919 wrote:They know about a magically gifted person capable of casting escape, and doing so in an instinctual manner (i.e. they don't need to speak out the spell and can focus their magic without words)

Did you get that from Rifts Underseas pg 63 "Notes about Magic Underwater"?

Characters who cannot speak aloud can concentrate very deeply, saying the incantation in their mind, but can only cast one spell per melee round and it counts as three melee actions

I'm not 100% sure whether that's still in effect. Siembieda wrote WB7 with CJ Carella and seems to like to go back on Carella-adjacent data.

Case in point, DB12 (Dimensional Outbreak) pg 98 Demons in Space : spell casting in space makes it sound like demons are the only ones who can silent-cast now:

Demons and Deevils (not humans and other mortals) can still attempt to cast a spell by mouthing the words and focusing extra hard on it and on focusing their will.

I thought that this new requirement to "mouth the words" might be why only demons can do it in space (and presumably underwater) because the shock of a vacuum sucking the air out of your body (or water entering your mouth) would be too distracting (but not to demons, who don't breathe air) but it specifies demons casting a spell "countless times" (being thousands of years old) is part to do with it.

Instead of their 89% chance, perhaps something like allow a cumulative 1% chance of silent-casting per full 100 times you have cast a spell? That way to get the demons' 89% you would only have to cast a spell 8900 times, something I'm sure they find easy to do over the course of 1000 years (you'd get there casting it 9 times per year, less than once a month!)

ShadowLogan wrote:If you have the Rifts Book of Magic they have a section on magic restraints (pg274-9), this is compiled from Rifts WB23 and SoT#1.

I think the Bio-Wizard "Mouth Wrap" might even be able to stop a demon from casting spells. Since it "completely prevents the mouth from opening" a demon couldn't "mouth the words" which is how they manage to cast spells while in the vacuum of outer space (and presumably also underwater)

One question remains: are there any creatures out there explicitly without mouths who know spells?

The only example that comes to mind for me are the Zembahk (Atlantis pg 82-83 appearance "no mouth") who have all spells 1-5.

That would go a long way to explaining why it's so easy for the Splugorth to capture them though! They know a bunch of spells, but can't normally cast them except with the help of metamorphosis magic to take on a form that has a mouth... so they would need an outside ally mage to get the ball rolling to put metamorphosis magic on them, or some other means of shifting their form to a mouthed one.

Zembahk = "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"

Axelmania wrote:

Hector_919 wrote:They know about a magically gifted person capable of casting escape, and doing so in an instinctual manner (i.e. they don't need to speak out the spell and can focus their magic without words)

Did you get that from Rifts Underseas pg 63 "Notes about Magic Underwater"?

Characters who cannot speak aloud can concentrate very deeply, saying the incantation in their mind, but can only cast one spell per melee round and it counts as three melee actions

I'm not 100% sure whether that's still in effect. Siembieda wrote WB7 with CJ Carella and seems to like to go back on Carella-adjacent data.

Case in point, DB12 (Dimensional Outbreak) pg 98 Demons in Space : spell casting in space makes it sound like demons are the only ones who can silent-cast now:

Demons and Deevils (not humans and other mortals) can still attempt to cast a spell by mouthing the words and focusing extra hard on it and on focusing their will.

I thought that this new requirement to "mouth the words" might be why only demons can do it in space (and presumably underwater) because the shock of a vacuum sucking the air out of your body (or water entering your mouth) would be too distracting (but not to demons, who don't breathe air) but it specifies demons casting a spell "countless times" (being thousands of years old) is part to do with it.

Instead of their 89% chance, perhaps something like allow a cumulative 1% chance of silent-casting per full 100 times you have cast a spell? That way to get the demons' 89% you would only have to cast a spell 8900 times, something I'm sure they find easy to do over the course of 1000 years (you'd get there casting it 9 times per year, less than once a month!)

ShadowLogan wrote:If you have the Rifts Book of Magic they have a section on magic restraints (pg274-9), this is compiled from Rifts WB23 and SoT#1.

I think the Bio-Wizard "Mouth Wrap" might even be able to stop a demon from casting spells. Since it "completely prevents the mouth from opening" a demon couldn't "mouth the words" which is how they manage to cast spells while in the vacuum of outer space (and presumably also underwater)

One question remains: are there any creatures out there explicitly without mouths who know spells?

The only example that comes to mind for me are the Zembahk (Atlantis pg 82-83 appearance "no mouth") who have all spells 1-5.

That would go a long way to explaining why it's so easy for the Splugorth to capture them though! They know a bunch of spells, but can't normally cast them except with the help of metamorphosis magic to take on a form that has a mouth... so they would need an outside ally mage to get the ball rolling to put metamorphosis magic on them, or some other means of shifting their form to a mouthed one.

Zembahk = "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"

Re: zembahk - I think that you might be extrapolating the requirement to mouth words a bit too far.

eliakon wrote:Depending on the subjects biology, you could pressurize the prison so that you need to properly decompress to get out. That should slow down hasty escapes... after all, if you need to sit in the decompression room for eight hours while the helium in your blood bleeds out slowly or you die horribly it makes it rather hard to escape quickly.

..

And the simplest solution is to have the handcuffs be wired to an audible alarm. If they unlock they sound the alarm. Sure, the wizard can cast Escape on the cuffs (put three or four pairs on them). but the second they do, they will be made.
If you hook the rest up to zap them with neural maces or what not, that should discourage that sort of thing pretty quickly.

Another idea: hang someone by their hands/legs above an acid pit. The shackles staying shut are the only thing preventing them from falling into it. Their desire to stay alive keeps them from escaping (not useful for securing suicidal prisoners, of course)

dreicunan wrote:Re: zembahk - I think that you might be extrapolating the requirement to mouth words a bit too far.

You can't mouth words if you don't have a mouth. Seems reasonable. Mouthless mages are out of luck, like handless gunslingers.

In one of the Seige on Tolkeen books, the CS developed a white noise generator so annoying that only spellcasters with an ME of 24 or higher are able to concentrate and cast any spells. That seems like a good use case for the majority of spellcasters.

Nekira Sudacne wrote:In one of the Seige on Tolkeen books, the CS developed a white noise generator so annoying that only spellcasters with an ME of 24 or higher are able to concentrate and cast any spells. That seems like a good use case for the majority of spellcasters.

That was an implant, and one had to be skilled at meditation, or have an ME of 24, or be lvl 8 or higher in order to block out the noise and sleep or concentrate for 1d4x10 plus 1d6 minutes per level,of experience. It actually just made it take longer to cast spells; it didn't prevent it completely, and that effect was tied as much to sleep deprivation as to the noise itself.