A lot of you guessed about work arounds to the death field problem, and if you didn’t come up with a solution as simple as this, it was probably because you wouldn’t have thought it could be defeated this easily.

It is pretty bone headed, but in The Council’s defense, Sciona didn’t think of it, and this is the final deterrent after running the rest of the Vault’s gauntlet. First and foremost, security through obscurity, then the physical challenge of accessing the vault, then breaching the vault, then defeating the guardian, then surviving the lobby defenses, and finally breaching each sub vault, all while under a time limit since normally the alarms would be going off.

Really though, they should have put more time into… I don’t know what it’s called, but opposition research? You Red Team it, so the second thing you do after designing any kind of defense or security is figure out how to beat it. Then you go back and fix all the ways you figured out how to beat your first version. The problem with security through obscurity though, is you want as few people knowing about the defenses as possible, so you wind up getting the people who designed the defenses trying to break them instead of putting fresh eyes on it. Still, if nothing else, the pillars should all be closed and unlabeled, so a thief would have to break into each one separately and blindly.

Of course in the real world, there’s always considerations of budget and practicality. Yes, a vault in the core of the Earth would be difficult to access. It also might be cost prohibitive.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.