Hi, my name is James and welcome to Code/Switch. Have you ever wanted to overthrow the established order and became frustrated with the amount of soldiers you have to muster? First you gotta put an ad in the local paper and hope the Order doesn’t notice, then you have to shift through applicants, fill out their 1040s and then comes training them. Its amazing anyone fights wars at all really. Pathfinder has a mass combat and leadership system for accruing allies, but its still essentially the same process but with dice. Luckily for us lazy warlords Pathfinder is a world of magic, and we can combine this magic with 8th grade geometry to let us cheat the system. Today on Code/Switch I’ll teach you how to instantly get your own army for the low, low price of 10,000g and getting in good with a hag.

The Set-Up

We’re going to abuse the Witch class here. Witches get a class feature called Hexes, supernatural abilities that can give help or cause harm. Because we’ll probably need a hag for this, its unusual we’re using the helpful hex, Coven. When a witch uses this hex she can use an Aid Another action to grant a +1 bonus to another witches caster level for a round. This buffs all of the target Witches spells and hexes. We also need a Witch the with Boundaries or Occult patron to gain access to the Gate spell at 18th level, but for us, we’re going to summon an army, we’re getting a 20th level Witch. We’re going to need almost a thousand other Witches as well who will use the Coven hex to boost that Prime Witches caster level when she activates the Gate spell to call our army. Oh and those Witches need to float, you’ll see why in a second.

Execution

The Coven hex has a 30 foot radius. If you remember your middle school math classes that gives a Witch a 60 foot spherical “bubble” that she can affect. This is a 3D sphere, so it doesn’t matter if the target is to the left, above, or below her, just that its in that bubble, hence why we want them floating, to cram as many Witches as possible in that sphere. The volume of a sphere is 4/3πr^3, our hexes radius is 30ft, which gives our sphere a volume of 113,040 ft cubed. A medium creature in Pathfinder occupies a 5 foot by 5 foot by 5 foot box, which would give a medium creatures space a volume of 125 cubic feet. If we divide our total volume by the witches volume (113040/904) we learn 904 witches would fit in this sphere. Subtract one Witch so our Prime 20th level Witch can occupy the center and if they all use the coven hex on the same round our Witch can cast the Gate spell at Caster Level 923.

Results

The Gate spell allows you to summon an individual or several creatures, but their total hit dice can’t exceed twice your caster level. Yes this costs 10,000g but now you have 1,845 Hit Die worth of called creatures. The creators of this equation recommended Pit Fiends as your called army, but my personal choices would be either Star-Spawns of Cthulhu or Obcisidaemons. I guess if you found a hag that hated the idea of this happening, a coven would summon a bunch of Angels or other garbage like that, but good luck getting that together now that legendary fiends have ravaged civilization.

I hope you enjoyed this apocalyptic installment of Code/Switch. I’d like to thank the 2 who told me about this non-sense and I implore you to keep this as a theory rather than pushing this idea on your home GMs. Much like a taco whose tortilla is fried chicken, this idea is cooler in your head. I’d also like to give a shout out to anyone who attended PAX Unplugged. I had a really good time and met a lot of cool people into Pathfinder and Starfinder. I also mourn the time lost to lines to get into D&D Adventure League scenarios.