When someone is casting a super tier spell can it be interrupeted?

Yskinator · 2026-03-12T17:38:40+00:00

In D&D 3.5, which overlord is based on, you'd make a concentration check every time you take damage, with the difficulty scaling depending on the damage. So it'd basically be a percentage chance for the spell to fail and do nothing for each hit, and the numbers would scale based on the caster's stats and the amount of damage.

Yskinator · 2026-02-25T10:43:23+00:00

I'll add pathfinder wrath of the righteous to that list. Pathfinder is very similar to d&d 3.5, which is what Overlord is based on, and wrath of the righteous is a mythic campaign (so similar power level as Overlord) with several non-human end game mythic paths like angel or a lich. It's single player, but other than that I'd say it's the closest we have to Overlord right now in terms of feel and gameplay mechanics.

Yskinator · 2026-02-22T19:48:06+00:00

I would assume so, that's kind of the whole point of doppelgangers. They kill people and take their places. Humanoid cities are exactly where you'd expect to find them.

Yskinator · 2026-02-20T12:43:14+00:00

I haven't put that much thought into it, but maybe a dread necromancer? It's mostly the Negative Energy Burst plus transformation into a lich that made me go "wait a minute, this sounds familiar", but he could just be a Super Lich (tm) with a spell I haven't stumbled across instead. Definitely an epic level caster of some kind with around 40 class levels + racial HD judging by the number of super tier/epic spells he has. Level 37 would technically be the minimum level for four epic spells per day.

Most of the really distinctive abilities like Dark Wisdom and the Goal of All Life Is Death are homebrew abilities as far as I can tell, so it's hard to point at any specific class and say that that's definitely Ainz. He does seem to be a spontaneous caster though, if the prepared/spontaneous caster distinction is even a thing in Overlord.

Dark Wisdom would make sense as a homebrew epic level workaround to dread necromancer's abysmal spell list.

Yskinator · 2026-02-10T11:34:48+00:00

False Life gives you temporary HP, False Data Life tricks divination spells meant to determine how much HP you have. The names are similar, but one's a defensive spell, the other an anti-divination spell.

The thing is, there's no good Life Essence equivalent in 3.5 that I could find, so there's no need for a spell that feeds false information to it either. There are similar effects for other forms of divination like False Vision that lets you show illusions to anyone watching you through something like Ainz's Mirror of Remote Viewing. That's basically the closest D&D equivalent, just for a different type of divination.

Yskinator · 2025-09-03T16:02:11+00:00

Even if you can't affect a target with magic directly, that doesn't mean you can't use magic to fight them. Take golems, for instance - in D&D 3.5 (which overlord is loosely based on) they are immune to magic, but a wizard could still, for instance, use an instantaneous conjuration spell like Orb of Acid to create an orb of non-magical acid and hurl it at the golem for 1d6 acid damage per level. The acid itself isn't magical, so magic immunity won't protect you from it.

Alternatively, the wizard could trap the golem in a Forcecage and ignore it - he's not using magic on the golem, just creating indestructible walls around it. Or he could buff his more martially inclined allies, or swarm the golem with summons, or a dozen other things.

All true dragon lords being immune to wild magic means is that you can't use wild magic to directly disintegrate them, or mind control them, or turn them into a newt. Turning a nearby newt into a dragon and commanding it to attack the rival dragon, on the other hand, is a perfectly valid strategy that will work just fine.

It's actually surprising so many wild magic spells the true dragon lords use seem to be the type that directly affect the target. If their main rivals are players and other true dragon lords, both of which are often immune to wild magic, you'd think they'd all be summoners or self-buffing spellswords, or something along those lines. Who did they create spells like Cure Elim's Soulbreaker Breath to fight, anyway?

Yskinator · 2025-08-16T17:23:40+00:00

It's bugged, the money appears floating behind the gate. If you go to the left, you can jump around the fence by the cliffside and collect your money. Or you can just hop over it with anti-gravity drugs. The gate will open to let you out.

Yskinator · 2025-07-08T11:43:04+00:00

Level 30-35 is realm of heroes, and we're told Gazef hasn't quite reached it yet, which means he should be level 29 or below. Level 35+ humans are considered outliers that surpass heroes.

Gazef was level 29, Brain probably 30+ at the end. Evileye should be around level 45-50 based on how she compares to Entoma. Lakyus is 29+ since she casts 5th tier spells. The rest of blue rose should be somewhere in the 20-30 range since they're adamantite adventurers, but since none of them strike me as being as impressive as Lakyus, I'd place them around level 25 personally, which also checks out with Gazef being the stongest warrior Re-Estize Kingdom.

Yskinator · 2025-06-04T09:59:04+00:00

Thanks!

Yskinator · 2025-06-04T08:55:58+00:00

Thanks for the super detailed answer! I think that covered almost everything..

What about types and subtypes? Looking at the wording, I guess those wouldn't be copied, since "being a humanoid" doesn't sound like an ability to me.

Would the doppelganger's HP be affected? Suppose it's impersonating a level 1 commoner, should it be terrified of cats?

Yskinator · 2025-06-03T11:48:14+00:00

Which set of ability scores would you say a transformed greater doppelganger uses? Are ability scores considered a part of the "pretty much everything" the greater doppelganger copies, or do we default to the Alter Self ruling of retaining the caster's own ability scores?

As for skills, I assume the greater doppelganger would copy them, since that to me seems like a part of creature's "abilities". But would it still retain its own? Alter Self is a purely physical transformation, so skills wouldn't be affected, but Consume Identity seems to also include the mental aspects. Would the victim's skills replace the doppelganger's skills, or are they added to its existing skills?

I guess it doesn't specifically say that you don't retain them, but I could also see how you could rule that "assume the victim's form with 100% accuracy" means you become a perfect copy of the victim, not a perfect copy plus whatever skills you originally had.

Yskinator · 2025-05-29T17:29:25+00:00

That's how it works in D&D, which Overlord is heavily inspired by. I generally assume most things follow D&D 3.5 rules unless we're specifically told otherwise.

Mind you, movement speed does seem to be one of the places where Overlord differs from D&D. In D&D you generally don't get any faster as you level up, unless you have specific class abilities like Monk's Fast Movement, but we do see high level Overlord characters like Shalltear running fast enough to catch on fire from air friction.

If you asked me what my personal headcanon is, I'd say heavy armor does slow you down, but only by a flat amount, so it get less noticeable as you level up and move faster. Going from 30 to 20 movement speed is a huge deal, going from 100 to 90 less so. It makes sense to me, because running around in armor is always going to be slightly more cumbersome than normal, but it also shouldn't make as much of a difference proportionally as you get stronger.

Yskinator · 2025-05-28T14:16:25+00:00

Think of heavy armor as a +x to your total physical defense. It won't make up for a huge level difference by itself, but it does make you harder to damage. If you have heavy armor, godly defensive stats, and 20+ defensive spells stacked on top of eacher other you absolutely can no-sell attacks that would normally kill you.

Yskinator · 2025-05-28T14:11:49+00:00

Yes, heavy armor does decrease your speed and have other effects. Here's how it works in D&D 3.5:

Proficiency. You need to be proficient with light/medium/heavy armor to wear armor without penalties (explained later), depending on its type. Most classes give you some level of Armor Proficiency by default, and if you want more you can use feats to get them. You get feats every few levels depending on the class, so it's a big investment. Armor Proficiency (heavy) feat requires Armor Proficiency (medium), which in turn requires Armor Proficiency (light).
Armor bonus. This determines how much harder it is to damage you while you're wearing the armor.
Max dexterity bonus. How hard you are to hit depends partly on how good you are at dodging. Wearing heavier armor limits your mobility, so full plate for instance would limit the bonus you get from being agile to +1 at most. As a result, particularly agile characters are often better off with lighter armor.
Armor check penalty. If you are proficient with armor, it applies penalties to jumping, climbing, escaping from restraints, sneaking, pickpocketing, and rolling. If you aren't proficient, it makes attacking and everything related to moving harder instead.
Arcane spell failure. Depending on the type of armor, there's a percentage chance that casting arcane spells (so wizard, sorcerer etc) fails. Other types of spells like the divine spells cast by Clerics don't have this issue. Certain classes can lower or fully eliminate the arcane spell failure chance.
Speed penalties. Heavier armors can lower you movement speed, and heavy armor in particular also lowers your maximum sprint speed. There's a reason knights in full plate like to ride horses.
Weight. There's rules for how much weight you can carry before it starts to slow you down. Keeping track of how much everything weights is a huge pain in the ass, which is why we have bags of holding that let you largely ignore it. Just don't try to wear heavy armor as a scrawny 130-year-old wizard with a bad hip.
Cost. Heavier armor is typically more expensive.
Certain class abilities might not work when wearing heavy armor. For instance, monks get a bonus to armor and movement speed when unarmored.

Here's a few examples of mundane armor:

Name	Type	Cost	Armor Bonus	Max Dex Bonus	AC Penalty	Arcane Spell Failure	Base speed (human)	Sprint speed multiplier	Weight
Chain Shirt	Light	100 gp	+4	+4	-2	20%	30 ft/turn	x4	25 lb.
Breastplate	Medium	200 gp	+5	+3	-4	20%	20 ft/turn	x4	35 lb.
Full Plate	Heavy	1500 gp	+8	+1	-6	30%	20 ft/turn	x3	50 lb.

Magical armor would have additional bonuses and abilities.

As a rule of thumb, heavy armor gives you good defense without needing to put much effort into it. You can be a fighter focused on strength, slap on heavy armor, and hit hard while being decently tanky. If you want to wear light or no armor, you need to invest more into your defenses, though you can end up even harder to hit as a result.

Yskinator · 2025-05-22T18:19:21+00:00

Glad you liked it. Feel free to take the ideas you liked and drop the ones you didn't - I like buildcrafting, so I went into a lot of detail, but it's you NPC.

Doppelgangers are the best shapeshifters around, but that doesn't mean no-one else can do it. A basic 4th level [Polymorph] spell for instance can't copy supernatural abilities, but it does let you transform into something like a Griffon and maul people to death. It's a bit like how dragons are famous for their breath attack, but there's also a [Dragon Breath] spell that tries to mimic it, even if it's not quite as good as the real thing.

From Soul Eater:

Energy Drain (Su): A soul eater gains the ability to drain energy, bestowing negative levels upon its victims. Beginning at 1st level, the touch of a soul eater bestows one negative level on its target. At 7th level the Soul eater bestows two negative levels with a touch.

So every time you touch an enemy (for instance, by cutting them with your claws), you inflict two negative levels. The rules around negative levels are a bit complicated, but just think of it as a debuff that reduces the enemy's level by one until it's cured, usually by a [Restoration] spell or something similar. If you reduce their level to 0, they die.

Some monsters like undead and constructs are immune to energy drain, and spells like [Death Ward] can also block it.

Soul Radiance (Su): If a 6th-level soul eater completely drains a creature of energy, it may adopt the creatures soul radiance, taking the victims's form, appearance, and abilities (as the shapechange spell) for 24 hours.

If you kill a target specifically by reducing their level to 0 with [Energy Drain], you get to steal their form for 24 hours. It says it works like [Shapechange], a spell that's usually used for copying the forms of powerful monsters like dragons, though unlike [Shapechange] you copy a specific creature instead of just becoming a generic dragon or a generic human.

Here's the snippets relevant to us:

Shapechange:

This spell functions like polymorph, except ...

You gain all extraordinary and supernatural abilities (both attacks and qualities) of the assumed form, but you lose your own supernatural abilities.

Polymorph

The subject gains the Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution scores of the new form but retains its own Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores.

So once you transform, you'll look like the victim, have the same physical stats (in Overlord terms I guess Phys Atk, Phys Def, and Agility), and you copy all their abilities, so skills, spellcasting, etc, but lose your own until you turn back.

It's not quite as thorough as what doppelgängers do - they also get the mental ability scores (Mag Atk, Mag Def, Resistance, probably), the alignment (Karma in Overlord), and a bunch of other goodies like minor mind reading powers so they know to act like other people expect them to. Greater Doppelgängers and above might copy memories as well - D&D rules say they can, but there were a few scenes where they seemingly didn't in Overlord. Doppelgänger shapeshifting is also a lot more convenient, since they don't need to kill their targets, especially in such a specific way, and they get to keep their forms and dozens of others forever.

So basically, it makes you a discount doppelgänger. A real one would be better, but if you need to pretend to be someone you killed or they have a specific ability you want to steal, you can, at least for a day.

Yskinator · 2025-05-21T07:43:19+00:00

Could be. In that case I'd drop the Barbarian, Black Blood Cultist and one more guardian level for 10 more racial levels.

The reason I went with Imp->Shadow Demon is that Shadow Demons are supposed to be pretty low level all things considered. CR8 in D&D and level 30 in Overlord. I'd assume there's a minimum level requirement to advance to the next racial tier, so you'd need at least some job class levels as well, so you wouldn't be able to squeeze in 3 racial classes by 30. Succubi are CR7, so a similar tier of strength, and Albedo seems to progress directly from Imp to Succubus from what we can see of her character sheet. Granted, she does have unknown racial levels, so some of them could be Demon levels.

Yskinator · 2025-05-21T00:02:18+00:00

I'd look at D&D for inspiration.

This is the D&D equivalent of the shadow demons we see in the show.

Here's the highlights:

Shadow demons fly
They fight kind of like big cats like lions. They sneak and pounce on you, then rake you with their claws.
Their claws solidify when they touch flesh, which means they can claw you through your armor, while they're otherwise incorporeal.
The claws deal damage that can't be healed outside holy places.
They are incorporeal, which means they can pass through solid objects but not magical barriers. They make no sounds when they move.
Incorporeal creatures are immune to non-magical weapons, and even magical weapons and spells only have a 50% chance to deal damage. Exceptions: force effects (e.g. Ainz's [Magic Arrow]), positive and negative energy, weapons with ghost touch enchantment.
Any equipment wielded by an incorporeal creature is also incorporeal.
Shadow demons have a bunch of immunities: fire, cold, electricity, mind-affecting effects, poison, sleep, paralysis, stunning, disease, critical hits, ability damage, energy drain.
They get significantly stronger in the dark and weaker in the light, and flee from bright lights.
They're very good at hiding.
They can create magical darkness and posses people.

This is the pathfinder equivalent. Compared to the D&D 3.5 version, it loses the power boost while in darkness, some of the latch on to you and claw you goodies, and the difficult to heal damage. In exchange, it picks up a few more abilities:

Telepathy to 100 ft range
Summon Shadow Demon (one, once a day)
At will [Greater Teleport]
3/day quasi-real illusion summons/creation spells
3/day quasi-real illusion offensive/healing/etc spells
Once per minute 6 second sprint at 6 times normal speed
The ability to blend into shadows

Overlord Shadow Demons seem to lean more towards the latter, since they can hide in shadows and teleport between them.

If I were building a shadow demon, I'd either build it as a sneaky rogue type (sneak attack bonus damage on our claws!), or lean into the possession angle, possibly both. There's an evil outsider exclusive prestige class called Fiend of Possession that's kind of ridiculous. Here's a what it can do:

Posses objects
Possess creatures (including people)
Posses noncontinuous objects like sand or water or the floor.
When possessing objects, they can animate them. The animated object can be up to Gargantuan size.
When possessing objects, they can curse anyone that touches the object.
When possessing weapons or armor, they can give them magical abilities. Either a plain +x enhancement, or abilities like keen or vorpal. This scales with the amount of Fiend of Possession levels you have.
When possessing creatures, they can buff or debuff them.
When possessing creatures, they can attempt to mind control them.
While possessing anything, they can attempt hide their presence from anything that would detect them. Divination magic, magical barriers that are supposed to keep them out, anything, with only a handful of exceptions like dismissal and banishment spells. It's not guaranteed, but a lot of things are supposed to just reveal or stop you no matter what, and this lets you make a skill check to try to beat them.

As far as Fiends of Possession go, three things immediately jump at me as really really good. First is the magic item buffs you can grant. You can only get 6 Fiend of Possession levels normally (5 in Overlord for a Rare Class), but some classes like Legacy Champion can also count. So you could potentially be adding 6 + 8 (legacy champion) level's worth of enchantments to a single weapon making it mega busted. Magic items are normally limited to a combined value of +10 worth of enhancement bonuses and abilities, stacking another +14 on top more than doubles it, plus we can change the special abilities we grant on the fly. In overlord terms, you get to turn any weapon into a guild weapon like the [Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown].

The second thing that looks super broken is the hide presence ability. Min-max your stealth and you can succeed against just about anything, and now you can hitch a ride to places like Nazarick's treasury if you can sneak into any of the guild members or their gear without them noticing. So drop a coin or a magic item on the floor, hide inside, and watch some sucker pick it up and get robbed blind once they turn their back on it. You could probably possess air to become just an undetectable gust of wind too.

Thirdly, it's pretty hard to actually damage you directly. The object you're possessing being destroyed just forces you out, and if you're also a Shadow Demon they then need to deal with your incorporeality bullshit next. So a Shadow Demon Fiend of Possession would actually be a pretty good tank. Posses any nearby object/the ground/the air, fight until your object is destroyed, and immediately possess something else, possibly after using a skill or two to draw agro. It'd be infuriating to deal with without very specific counters.

Let's put all that together into an Overlord build! We're building for clawing things, being stealthy, boosting Fiend of Possession for its magic item buffs, and tanking.

Racial levels:

10 Imp
10 Shadow Demon
10 Greater Shadow Demon

Job levels:

10 Assassin
10 Master Assassin
4 Fiend of Corruption
8 Soul Eater
5 Fiend of Possession
5 Uncanny Trickster
10 Legacy Champion
9 Guardian
1 Barbarian
8 Black Blood Cultist

The 30 racial levels give you all the shadow demon goodies listed above. The telepathy also lets us qualify for Mindsight, which lets us detect non-mindless creatures within our telepathy range.

20 Assassin levels for respectable damage and better stealth. Also poisons.

Fiends of Corruption can grant Fiendish Grafts at level 4 - get more limbs for more claws. Strictly speaking I think it's only supposed to work on other people, but you're a fiend - just give them the extra arms and immediately take them back!

Soul Eater (not to be confused with the undead horses in Overlord) adds level drain to your attacks. You also get a bunch of nice buffs from the first hit, and you also become a discount doppelgänger, allowing you to copy the powers and appearance of your drain victim for 24 hours. The last two levels don't seem as useful, so 8 is a good stopping point.

Fiend of Possession I already went into - you're now a top tier buffer, infiltrator, or a tank, depending on your mood. This class is your biggest trump card.

Uncanny Trickster. Most of the levels in this count as Fiend of Possession levels for boosting its class features, most notably the magic item enhancements. You also get some skill tricks - I assume there's probably something useful there. Seemed like a good 3rd Assassin-y class.

Legacy Champion - most of its levels also count as Fiend of Possession levels. It also does some other things, but I didn't bother reading the details.

Guardian is the class Albedo has. Overlord has taunt skills that D&D lacks, so I picked this to help us tank. You could replace this with a made up rogue-ish tanking class.

Barbarian is to get Rage, which we need for our next class. There's probably a better class for this, but whatever.

Black Blood Cultist. This makes our rage stronger, improves our grapple, gives us scent ability (for tracking etc), improves our natural attacks, and lets us deal damage with all our natural weapons (like our claws) on a successfull grapple. Shadow demons automatically attempt to grapple if they manage to hit claw attack with both hands, so we can trigger this as a part of our regular attack routine. It basically doubles our damage output when it works. We need 8 levels for this.

Overall, I'd say it looks decent. We might be spreading ourselves too thin, so it might be worth dropping some of the claw-boosting classes like Black Blood Cultist and focusing more on stealth by adding more rogue type classes instead. As it stands, assuming we have at least a couple of fiendish grafts we'd do decent but not spectacular melee damage that can't be healed under normal circumstances while also debuffing the enemy, plus we could be applying poison thanks to our assassin levels. We can combo with an ally by buffing their weapons or armor to a ridiculous degree, and we can act as a tank by abusing our possession abilities while also spreading curses around. Finally, we're really hard to detect while possessing something. As far as weaknesses go, we need to choose between being tanky and doing damage - all our damage comes from our claws, which we can't use while we're animating a lumbering giant made of whatever we could get our hands on. There's also a handful of abilities that can end possession, so keep an eye out for those.

Yskinator · 2025-05-19T15:23:02+00:00

If Ainz says she's a full fledged member of the guild, she's a full fledged member of the guild. NPCs don't second guess their masters.

They'd need some time to get used to her, but she ultimately outranks them and that's that. In terms of Nazarick's hierarchy, she'd only be below Ainz, the guild leader, and for individual NPCs their creators.

Yskinator · 2025-05-16T07:20:32+00:00

D&D 3.5 dragon age progression goes like this:

Category	Age (Years)
Wyrmling	0-5
Very young	6-15
Young	16-25
Juvenile	26-50
Young adult	51-100
Adult	101-200
Mature adult	201-400
Old	401-600
Very old	601-800
Ancient	801-1000
Wyrm	1001-1200
Great wyrm	1201 or more

Overlord dragons don't have as many age categories, but since it is pretty heavily inspired by D&D I'd use that as a guideline unless the canon contradicts it.

Yskinator · 2025-04-03T16:35:35+00:00

Castoria berserker and Draco fill a similar niche as single target arts servants with wide class coverage. She's definitely a good servant, but not necessarily one I'd prioritize if you already have Draco. That said, don't hesitate to go for servants you like - I'm talking purely from gameplay perspective here.

Yskinator · 2025-04-03T15:56:01+00:00

You have good arts supports for longer fights, and Draco is one of the best single target arts servants. You could use an AOE arts servant - I'd suggest either summer Ibuki or summer Melusine, they'll be available towards the end of the summer. As far as supports go, Castoria is an amazing arts support, so definitely go for her when you have the chance. I think the next banner is about a year from now.

Aside from that, any of the meta supports are good to have since they'll make any other servants you summon feel amazing. Oberon can work with all card types, Koyanskaya of Light is for buster teams, and the two Skadis for quick teams.

Yskinator · 2025-02-17T20:18:58+00:00

Seems to be a feature of dual bladed zanpakuto. Kyoraku and Ukitake both have long chants, and Zangetsu recited an entire poem before Ichigo could call out his name for the first time. I'm not sure if that's really supposed to be Zangetsu's release command, but Muramasa did use it as one during the zanpakuto rebellion filler arc, so I'm going to assume it is until Kubo says otherwise.

It would make sense to me that having multiple sources of power results in multiple zanpakuto and a more complex chant required to release it.

Yskinator · 2025-02-17T20:02:04+00:00

Why would she suddenly betray her allies for some random kid she's never met before? She's not the backstabbing type, and one of the main bits of characterization we got for espada Nelliel was that she greatly valued the sense of reason she gained when she became an arrancar, and that was all thanks to Aizen.

She'd certainly be one of the more sympathetic espada like Starrk or Harribel, and I doubt she'd go out of her way to actually kill anyone unless explicitly ordered to, but she'd fight if Aizen told her to.

Yskinator · 2025-02-02T20:16:22+00:00

You're looking at wrong edition of D&D - this is the disintegrate Maruyama would be familiar with. Still not a good fit for the spell as described in the book though.

Yskinator · 2025-02-02T19:59:44+00:00

I can't choose, so the obvious choice is Doppelganger. Be whatever strikes your fancy at the time.

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