Necropolitans, episode 80: Never bargain with an ifrit

Jaal's sanity continues to erode, and the Necropolitans encounter the guardians of the bunker, in Episode 080: Never bargain with an ifrit.

I was quite pleased with this bunker, which is entirely my own invention. The rulers of Rachikan created a bunker to wait out any calamity, where they would be preserved from harm for however long was necessary for their servitors to restore things to order. They enlisted extremely powerful extraplanar beings to power and defend the bunker, using their unrivalled talent at binding in a sort of pyramid: first bind a large number of powerful creatures, then combine their powers to summon an even more powerful being, and so on. So while it isn't obvious from the combat (because of the necessities of level-based combat), the entities bound here are narratively really powerful and important in their own realms. They aren't happy about their binding, especially after all this time, and it's probably bad that they're absent. Well... presumably by now they've been replaced.

The concept involves five bindings, with the outsiders involved having their identities suppressed by the magic: Bound of Substance, Bound of Guarding/Protection (I used both names in the game), Bound of Fate, Bound of Contracts, and Bound of Eternity.

It is incredibly Player Character energy, incredibly Wizard energy, and extremely Jaal energy to be bickering about whether you can hack a loophole in the magical binding over the voice of the shaitan trying to warn you about it. There are lots of situations where I would allow an attempt at something like that, if they had a concrete plan; Pathfinder doesn't actually include any rules for attempting such a thing, but then, it doesn't include any rules for weird magical situations in general, only specific spells and their effects - which feels like a weird, disappointing omission in a setting that is determined to cram enormous amounts of magic into the PCs and the monsters they fight. In this case: no, I was not about to let relatively low-level PCs who had no relevant information about the bindings, only a superficial exposure to it, and no knowledge whatsoever of Jistkan magic try to spontaneously hack a preposterously elaborate binding created by a group of staggeringly powerful outsiders at the behest of an entire city of genie-binders. You can't do everything with a skill check.

"If you get eaten again, that's fine." - Jaal

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4. Episode 007: Screaming blue murder from his waist (start of Castaways)
5. Episode 023: Everyone knows that mummy octopi are not scared of cooking (start of Nautical Shenanigans)
6. Episode 027: The crumpling noise you can hear was Book 2 (start of Nameless Ancients)
7. Episode 049: Mint Ice Cream (start of Trouble in Cheliax)
8. Episode 067: Or we'll come and eat you and your children (start of Road to Rachikan)