Permanently hiding items/objects

Question

I'm curious how one might go arranging for an item or object to become permanently lost, and completely inaccessible to everyone (I would prefer a method that's reasonably secure against even divine intervention, but certainly understand if that's asking too much). This would include the person who stores the item in this fashion, as well as anyone who not only knew the exact method employed, but perhaps even watched it happen. Note: I want the item to remain completely intact, wherever it ends up.

Here are a few ideas I had, but they suffer from some problems that make them less suitable than would be desirable.

1. Put the item in a Secret Chest and then destroy the miniature. It sounds like it would, however, be possible to mount an expedition to the ethereal plane to retrieve the item. Is there something you could do to a secret chest to make it impossible to retrieve, or perhaps open or remove from, the ethereal plane? Or is this a dead end?
2. Create a demiplane, put the item there, and then give it the dead magic trait, after which you kill yourself. This sounds like a fairly good idea, but do you need to cast permanency after the dead magic trait is added for it to remain past the casting time? It seems like the answer must be no, but some clarification would be nice. If there's no portal and the plane has dead magic, there's nobody who can get there, correct? (By the way: what happens when you die in an area of dead magic?) Alternately, could you add a portal, place the item on the dead-magic plane, exit the plane, and then somehow destroy the portal?

If what I'm asking for sounds too far-fetched, I'd be willing to settle for the following: only abjectly evil beings, including undead, could realistically hope to acquire the item. I mean this in the sense that the alignment must already be evil, not in the sense that doing this would cause your alignment to immediately become evil.

It seems like there must be some interesting trick that could be pulled off, like a magical catch-22, to make an item irretrievable. I'm just not having an easy time coming up with one.

Answer 1

D&D, and by extension Pathfinder, is designed around characters who go places other creatures don't want them to (dungeons) and haul valuable items (treasure) back out. Inaccessible locales, hostile planes, powerful protective spells, dangerous monsters - all are designed to be challenging but surmountable obstacles. The game is specifically designed for this; It is hard to the point of impossible to build a truly impregnable vault/trap/fortress because that would spoil at least some of the fun.

As for foiling the gods... Well, you're unlikely to succeed. Most campaigns don't have any rules that define what a god can do, because the assumption is that they're so much more powerful than player characters that it doesn't matter. There's presumably some reason why this or that god doesn't simply remake the entire multiverse into his or her ideal (Certain settings have suggested some kind of delicate balance of power or mutual "we'll kill you if you move first" agreement that all gods feel bound by, or that there's some cost involved in divine intervention that makes acting through mortal agents the best option, or even that all gods generally like the world the way it is and prefer subtle influence when it comes to making changes because there's less risk of messing everything up that way), but the important thing is that what a god is capable of is limited only by what the GM decides the god does at any given moment. Unless the GM decides that the gods do have limits - and if you're the GM in this case, be careful not to make them too easy for PCs and NPCs to manipulate - you're unlikely to be able to stop them from retrieving anything.

GM fiat can solve the issue, of course, in a "It was cast into the vortex of Mec'ril, which was subject to that ancient and unalterable decree that none, not even the gods, may ever hold knowledge of its contents, such that those who enter forever lose all conciousness and thought even of themselves" kind of way... But you are unlikely to find anything in the rules-as-written that will help. Well, maybe an artefact, but those are only placed in the game by GM fiat anyway.

No, you're better served by making the thing you want to hide extremely hard to find or difficult to achieve for less-than-very-powerful characters. After all, powerful characters are rare, and very few of them will have knowledge of or interest in retrieving whatever it is that you're trying to get rid of.

Answer 2

In this answer, "permanently hiding" will be divided into three parts: Preventing entry, protecting the object directly, and blocking divinations. Also, this post will assume you don't even want yourself to access the item, giving more flexibility to the matter.

Every list is in the order from the weakest to the strongest, so the real casting/placing order may or must differ. Choose accordingly by the estimated strength of your expected foe. Also, notice that this post is made a community wiki, so feel free to contribute if you know any other protection measures.

Preventing entry

1. Just build a fortress, or a well-guarded adamantine chest. Such mundane measures will work against B-list villains without magical power.
2. Travel to another plane, build a fortress which cannot be noticed easily, hide the object, and cast forbiddance. It blocks planar travel towards the location.
3. Prismatic sphere guarding the treasure, which is made permanent with permanency. This effectively blocks teleportation into the space, but anyone who can see the sphere will probably start dispelling the wall.
4. Using secret chest to send someone else with your chest may fail, but anyway it has chance of success. Send someone else locked inside the chest until you succeed. After he reaches the ethereal plane, he takes protection measure against the content, and returns to the material plane by planar travel means. After that, you shatter the miniature to forbid access to the chest, leaving the chest protected while inaccessible.
5. Greater create demiplane with permanency to create a demiplane. Then, build a portal for your exit, and imbue dead magic trait to your demiplane. Both traits do not cost you additional permanency, so you really need only one permanency. Or, if you really want to secure the item rather than carrying the risk by leaving a portal, then commit a suicide. Otherwise, take any extreme measure, including ones introduced above or below, to protect your portal. It is worth it.

Protecting the object itself

1. Lay a magical trap right under the the object. There are so many kinds of magical traps which just blows the intruder, or send an intruder to another deadly trap in somewhere else.

(The first writer couldn't find more of "protecting the object itself." Any addition for this section is welcome.)

Blocking divinations

1. Shield it with a lead sheet, also known as "the poor man's divination blocker."
2. Prismatic sphere given above also blocks divination (because it blocks any spells from affecting inside).
3. Insert the object into a warding box. This will protect the object from divinations (but not from gods' ones).

Conclusion

Since one of the assumptions of Pathfinder is that deities are really strong, stronger than what you can think, any methods from above are not guaranteed to block intervention from deities themselves. However, measures above are enough to repel villains who are looking for the item, or at least let them lose their interest for the item. Practically speaking, any antagonist hiding a plot-critical item with such a measure will not have to worry about protagonists looking for it.

However, some of the solutions provided above are not practical. Sure, a dead magic zone is enough for not letting others find your item, but do you really want to kill yourself (oh, I mean the character) just to make an item inaccessible? Suggestion is, that you should consider costs and benefits for each method and choose wisely. Furthermore, always remind that just one step ahead your enemies still count as winning.

Answer 3

Wrap it in meat and let the Tarrasque swallow it? It's not "hidden" so much as "impractical to retrieve", but might work well enough for most purposes. Depending on which of the many versions of the Tarrasque you use, it'll be spending a long time inaccessible deep underground, and the only way to get the object back is to intentionally wake the Tarrasque, which is the sort of thing that you might get divine intervention to prevent happening...

Answer 4

Create some simulacrums of yourself, but twice as high in level (if possible, the net effect being simulacrums that are identical copies of you but 'look' like characters twice as high in level). Nystul's Magic Aura them to look like you and Misdirection with them so you all detect as some other one of the group. Have them do all of the following at the same time you do, but get them all to Hidden Knowledge first so they don't know that they are not the original or that the item they guard is not the real one.

1. Get Mindblanked.
2. Have a massive 200-foot by 200-foot by 300-foot treasure chest made for you into which the item you want hidden is incorporated a jewelry or some such as appropriate to its type.
3. Travel to the far reaches of the ethereal plane via Secret Chest using your massive chest as the large chest and yourself and as many LG candles of invocation as can be carried as the contents. Be sure to dust first, as the chest, despite its size, can only transport a very small amount of matter in addition to itself.
4. Build a tower in which the artifact in question is to be housed out of the materials used to make your enormous chest.
5. Magically harden the tower. It is now a magical item that does not have charges.
6. Grant it permanent sentience via the rules for crafting sentient magic items, giving it the purpose of sealing away and guarding the item. Grant it no special abilities which allow it to breach the item's defenses or start moving should it go rogue.
7. Now that the tower is a creature (a construct in fact) cast Mindblank on it. The duration of this effect is only 24 hours.
8. Aroden's Spellbane the area around the artifact against the list of spells at the bottom of this post, using multiple overlapping Aroden's Spellbanes if necessary. If you are of sufficiently high Caster Level, or can craft an item with a sufficiently high CL through Heighten Spell or some other means, to ban all of the listed spells with a single casting and have room for one more you should also ban Aroden's Spellbane. This guide will assume you cannot do that.
9. Retrain (if necessary) into a 20th level Conjuration specialist and summon a Trumpet Archon as your permanent summon, keeping the tower and yourself mindblanked as necessary throughout the process.
10. Create a Staff of Mind Blank and Cure Light Wounds with Mind Blank costing 1 charge.
11. Order your created Trumpet Archon to cast Mind Blank on the tower once each day and to recharge the staff each day as well (using the candles). Order it to obey the tower's instructions as long as they do not cause it to enter the sanctuary of the artifact or affect the artifact or any aspect of the sanctuary in any way.
12. Erect shrines/statues to every known deity around the artifact and in the same room as it.
13. Create another intelligent item with a similar purpose to the tower which does not worship any deities and can cast Widened Consecrate at will.

14. Designate a 20 foot radius sphere around the artifact as its sanctuary to your archon.

15. Have your Archon use it to cast consecrate on each of the shrines cutting off the area around them from the intervention of each associated deity, and schedule her to repeat the process every day. Be aware that doing this will probably anger all of the gods and you will probably die long before you complete this step if you are not careful. Once this step is complete you can remain in the tower immune to the direct wrath of the gods, but you may have to deal with the intervention of their minions, which you should be able to do via various combat-y things, allies, massive spells of doom, diplomacy etc.
    Your simulacrum doubles should provide some defense against this retaliation by splitting up the enemy forces.

16. If custom magic items are allowed, craft some wondrous items of at-will Aroden's Spellbane and have the Archon use them to maintain the wards. We will assume from here out that they are not.

17. Cast Genesis (via a staff if you have to), warding the space so created similarly to the tower sanctuary. The plane should be generated sentient, strongly lawful aligned, with the Flowing Time trait 1 round| 1 year, with a permanent planar portal to your tower, and with the limited magic trait limiting magic to only non-divination level 0 spells or level nine Conjuration (summoning) spells with the Lawful and Good descriptors.

18. The plane should specifically be mind blanked, and you should seed it with various primitive life forms so the plane can amuse itself and not grow resentful/bored (beings from this plane who wander into the tower will certainly not have the necessary spell effects to deal with the tower's defenses and so won't pose much of a threat).

19. Produce a large number of staves of Aroden's Spellbane (on the fast plane) and store them in the tower, where the Archon can use them to fulfill her duties.

20. The archon should be commanded to place all the staves she used in the other plane for recharging once she has finished her duties for a day and to stay with them there and recharge them 1 charge per day until they are all recharged. Each charge will cost her 1/2 of a candle (two 1/4 candles) as she needs to buff her CL to 17. In her time off she is to craft candles of Invocation on the faster plane so as to remain able to perform her duties. She is to obey the plane in the same manner as the tower but the tower is to have authority if ever there is conflict. She is to put to sleep, erase the memories of, and kill (in that order) anyone who enters the tower other than herself as long as it does not prevent the completion of her other duties.

21. Give her some kitted out gear so she can win fights if they come up and resist hostile spells if it matters, she is the lynch pin in your defense.

22. Create a small army if Iron Golems wielding staves of Aroden's Spellbane who wait with readied actions to counterspell any Aroden's spellbanes being cast by anyone other than the Archon.
23. Hold off the waves of enemies from your stronghold for 60 days from the start of your plan (which needs not to have already happened), at which point each day you and your stronghold have a 5% cummulative chance of being irretrievably lost.
24. After this order your archon to also guard you from those who would disturb your slumber and then cast Temporal Stasis on yourself, forfeiting your save.
25. Your perfect defense is now complete.

Your defense is very, very immune to wish, cannot be located via magic of any kind, including the infamous legend lore, cannot be interacted with by any deities you knew of, is generally immune to magic that might compromise it, and possesses no mobile workers with their own wills. Even you can't get into it, because you are permadead via temporal stasis in order to make sure the archon functions properly forever and there are no loose ends. Even if someone were to stumble upon the tower, they will leave it not remembering how they died or where they were. An planar expedition might be mounted to find the tower, but there are many such towers and each of them is both very hidden and very well defended.

Pros:

• Immune to Wish, Miracle, other high level spell effects
• Infinite Duration
• Immune to Divine Intervention

Cons:

• Keeps you incapacitated for as long as it works

• Divinely Funded Epic Planar Expeditions might be a problem eventually, though they will have a lot (infinite) area to search without any hint as to where you are.

• Incredibly expensive, time consuming, and difficult

• Effectively requires an Epic-level campaign to pull off

• GM may start PCs in a new game on your sentient plane, where they may find some crazy PC way of breaking things after a few million years.

• If both your plane and your tower go rogue and they work together they might be able to kill your archon, breaking the system keeping everything in place. You will know if this happens, however (though you won't be able to do anything about it).

• Your GM may rule against this use of consecrate spell. The use presented here is a valid RAW interpretation, but exotic interpretations of the nature of divine connections effectively neutering this use of the consecrate spell are also possible RAW.

As a note, if you are planning on becoming a lich and using this to hide your phylactery, don't. Becoming undead is never a good idea and is one of only a few ways to make your character easily permakillable. Undead cannot be raised via any method short of that one new crazy tech artifact or time travel. Humanoids can be resurrected super easily. If you can pull this off, you don't need to be a lich. Looking for immortality? Use clone. Want to keep the same body forever? Start drinking strange fluids. Seriously, it's safer than undeath. Or you could use that one Mammon coin thing.

Aroden's Spellbane should block the following:

• Shades
• Wish
• Miracle
• Limited Wish
• Remove Curse
• Break Enchantment
• Polymorph Any Object
• All summoning subschool spells other than Summon Monster IX and Secret Chest
• All divination spells
• Arcane Mark
• All illusion spells with the Shadow descriptor/subschool
• Plane Shift
• all conjuration (teleportation) spells
• Stone Shape
• Warp Wood
• Greater Dispel Magic
• Dispel Magic
• Detect Magic
• Astral Projection
• Etherealness
• Dispel Good/Evil/Chaos/Law/Balance
• Dominate Monster
• Mordenkainen's Disjunction
• Legend Lore
• Vision
• All spells with the [Evil] or [Chaos] descriptors
• All necromancy spells lacking the [curse] descriptor
• Limited Wish
• Discern Location
• Invisibility
• Greater Invisibility
• Veil
• Anti-magic Field
• Passwall
• Phase Door
• Knock
• Time Stop
• Hallow
• Unhallow
• Desecrate
• Break Enchantment
• Impart Mind
• All Enchantments other than those with memory or knowledge in the name
• If Forbiddance isn't used in your defense it should be banned.
• Ideally, all spells not used in the running or defense of the tower. The above should get you by, though.

Alternatively if you could just track down a Scepter of Ages you could deposit whatever it is you're hiding at the end of time. I think it'd be pretty safe to say no one would find it for a while.

Answer 5

The only effective defense against divine meddling is to make sure that you've got some other divine/infernal power invested in keeping the item hidden. Depending on what the item is, you might be able to simply find one of the many deities who would be glad to watch over it for you, but that's likely only going to work for extremely dangerous and/or valuable artifacts. Failing that, you could maybe perform some service to the god in exchange for having them hide the object for you.

Answer 6

Go Mythic Archmage, with the Sanctum ability:

You gain access to your own personal extradimensional sanctum. By concentrating ..., you conjure the door to your own personal sanctum, similar to mage’s magnificent mansion, but with the following differences. The sanctum [is shapeable]. The sanctum is permanent and persistent, so you can store objects within the sanctum and retrieve them on future visits. ... When you conjure the sanctum’s door, you decide which creatures can see and use it (to all other creatures it’s invisible and impermeable). ... As a full-round action, your familiar can enter or leave the sanctum from any square adjacent to you, without using the conjured door.

Mage’s Magnificent Mansion grants that:

Only those you designate may enter the mansion

Thus, the Sanctum is only enterable by "those you designate" (and your familiar). Store your McGuffin of Secrecy in your Sanctum along with your backup spellbooks and such, and done.

If you're worried about your familiar, simply elect not to have one.

Not as flashy or complicated as some of the other options, and it's a little fuzzy on the extent to which divine intervention is blocked, but a lot easier to set up and manage.

You might also set up a Forbiddance area that encloses the Sanctum. It's not 100% clear whether using the door would be blocked by Forbiddance, but it probably would be (since, after all, you're moving from one plane to another). Still, if the McGuffin is that important...

Answer 7

Depending on the nature of the object:

Enchant it with enough fire protection and cast it into a gas giant planet. This is only applicable to items that will be unharmed by great pressure.