I recently wrote an article on Anti-grammaton as a counter to GITM as well as a stance all on its own. That article presented the idea of killing a GITM outright without issue, and while that’s true of a completely unprepared GITM without anything else going for it, That’s not how GITM plays in most situations, and we’ll see how this plays out

Method 1: 5000 Broken Wings & Other Charms

One of GITM’s primary weaknesses is that it lacks a fly speed, this is actually fixable with one charm, which we can sell some hair to our familiar for [see that here]

Tarakamedes’s gift is the power of flight. The beneficiary of this dark gift grows skeletal wings and gains a flying speed of 50 feet.

The beneficiary of this dark gift must eat bones or grave dirt to survive. At dawn, if the creature has not eaten at least 1 pound of bones or grave dirt in the past 24 hours, it dies.

With 3 turns, we can fly 150ft a round. And in an emergency, use dimdoor to teleport 500, but we risk losing a chwinga pilot, we can however use contingent dimdoor to gain some distance and keep our chwingas, each one using their contingency to keep up with the GITM, giving us 1000 ft.

Other charms give us extra lives, make us harder to find, extra hp, a free use of an inspiration-like effect, and a few others. Mainly, 9 lives and resurrection spell being automatically applied to us on death are the biggest draws besides the flight.

Anti-grammaton likely knows about these charms, and has all of them, given it uses fey contracts to sever its hands just to make a weapon able to fight us. It may or may not also have at-will dimdoor, with either being a dybbuk itself, or by having so many 4th level tattoos it doesn’t care about using all of them on us, and could also cast haste or something else to make itself faster, haste and using their hasted action to dash will catch our normal movement, and it may also have a mount. This is the first of many checks, not checkmate.

Method 2: Ghastly Damage Trinity

Method 2.1: Memento Mori’s Whisper

Using math from “Whisper of the Wyrm” Article, we can get a riffle that can reliably deal ~100 damage per shot with 30 dex, with 3 turns and no EA, we can deal 300 dpr. With a glyph of tashas guise or the likes, we could deal roughly 600 dpr. This would get an anti-grammaton down to 1 hp in a little over a round, leaving us to mop up their death wards and charms. This only hits once, so it’s not as good for that particular job. But combined with method 1, this is a devastating move.

Method 2.2: Rainbow Revolver

POV: you thought your anti-grammaton would easily kill the best build in 5e

Assuming prismatic ammunition is even a thing, we could load a pistol and make arrows out of it for a longbow. The useability of prismatic ammo is pretty dm-dependent, but we’ve made it this far.

a single round out of a prismatic pistol is doing 52d6 + 10 damage [dex saves for around half], 182 per bullet it, [again, assuming only one instance of prisma-wall on weapons] or 94.5 if every save is made, versus an anti-grammaton with 716 hp, we need to hit 8 times to reduce them to 0 hp and start, and with no saves made, it’s 4 hits, with 6 in the middle. if we have prep, tashas guise gets us 6 shots in one round assuming we don’t have to use our action to cast anything.

Method 2.3: Dark Death’s Rainbow

We’re playing a dangerous game using melee versus anti-grammaton, but it also comes with an additional 15d8 psychic damage on top of 50d6 prismatic. this is 252.5 damage on no saves, and 165 damage on all saves. assuming something between, around 200 damage, this is 4 attacks to take anti-grammaton from full to zero. This is doable with dual-wielding and just one attack, and using 2 attacks from either glyph of tashas guise, normally casting it, ect, we can reliably do 3 attacks on our turn and one more from a chwinga to get an anti-gram to one, and this is 6 hits per attack, making it great at chewing through wards.

There’s actually a few fairly straightforward ways to mitigate this damage; mindblank for the psychic is a given, but how can we reduce all chromatic damage? Weirdly, druidcraft.

Enter the chromatic Rose.

This magic rose comes in one of five colors, as noted in the Chromatic Roses table. While a rose is held, it gains a harmless visual effect as indicated on the table.

While holding the rose by its stem, you gain resistance to damage of the type associated with the rose’s color. If you would take more than 10 damage of this type from a single source (after applying the resistance), the rose disintegrates, and you take no damage instead.

As an action, you can blow the petals from the rose to produce a 20-foot cone of acid, lightning, poisonous gas, fire, or cold, as dictated by the rose’s damage type. Each creature in the cone must make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw, taking 3d10 damage of the appropriate type on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. Using this property destroys the rose.

We make an absolute massive number of chromatic roses and keep them in places easy to grab by the fistfull, given we’re a large creature, having 100 roses in a hand seems rather easy.

If we care to take things even further, we can wear the artifact ‘mask of the dragon queen’ and gain absorption on some of these hits, restoring HP on these hits. Making lasagna a net detriment. Getting this artifact is a bit up in the air, given it’s an artifact.

Finally lifewell tattoos can give us resistance and one-time absorption to necrotic

Ok, but what about antipasta tech? well, marut are natively resistant to thunder. leaving force and bludgeoning. we can get a tattoo of force absorption, but bludgeoning we may be out of luck and be forced to avoid it through AC, which we can buff with armor, a shield, the shield spell, and buff spells like haste and tashas guise, given we can get glyphs and set-up. The only thing keeping it down now would be a grapple into anti-pasta grater, using our movespeed to move it in and out of the obstacle we set down. This is something it can’t do to GITM, because GITM is immune to grappled, and we have advantage for being larger than a marut.

Until we consider armor of invulnerability, which negates all damage for 10 minutes. Of course, this could result in a 10 minute stale-mate because GITM just uses theirs. We can also use a contingent resilient sphere to get some time before it gets disintegrated or runs out.

Method 3: I’m still a wizard

Method 3.1: Maximus Containment
There’s quite a few spells that can give anti-grammaton a hard time. Specifically, it lacks immunity to stun, exhaustion, blindness, incapacitation, and grappled.

However, it has high int and wis saves, making these somewhat hard to target. Still, something like psychic lance or tashas laughter could put it on the ground and out of the right for a time, but with prof in all 3 mental saves and magic resistance, it’s difficult to get one to land.

Simmilarly, wall of force and force cage aren’t the best counters, because echo knight has free teleportation and with its high saves, even force cage is likely to be gotten around. We could use obscurement to keep them from being to see where they want to place an echo, this is actually really effective because of the small range and the lack of extra senses a marut has; not even truesight, just darkvision for 60ft, so with our Chwingas turns, we could use prestidigifog, or a bottle of smoke, or pyrotechniques, or just use tripple-conc on GITM, one for a big fog cloud and one for wall of force, and then surround the marut in a spherical wall of force or a force cage. Without vision and a place to teleport to, the Marut is trapped unless it brought a method of dealing with being stuck like this. Dimdoor is an option, though only a chance, and then it maybe could find a way to disintegrate a force cage if it could see and target it, both of these options take a full action, leaving us space to shoot Anti-grammaton from a distance. Or, perhaps best of all, We can use a diamond of infinite value and the imprisonment spell, trapping their soul forever.

This is all assuming it can’t just appear out of nowhere and one-round us before we can win initiative though. Which we shouldn’t assume is a given.

Method 4: 4th dimensional fuckery

Ghost in the machine struggles with extra-planar travel, and anti-grammaton excels at it, this is good all my its own, allowing anti-grammaton to more easily choose a fight, but it also makes us consider Time travel as a solution.

Ghost in the machine, can however, travel through time, just not as easily through planes, but time travel is not extra-planar travel. This means GITM has to substantiate itself through time to maintain its lead, and so anti-grammaton can’t go back in time and kill GITM’s father, and GITM can’t go back to make sure anti-grammaton and kill anti-grammatons father, as they both send themselves back to the start of time to thwart the other.

This also means one of the most likely meeting points for anti-grammaton and GITM is the start of time itself, waging eternal war so neither gains control of the timeline.

Initiative War and how not to play

GITM has the advantage when it comes to initiative. it comes with an innately higher dex, has more opportunity to boost its init with spells and feats like alert. chwingas can give constant guidance for init rolls, twi1 dip is a recommended dip for a GITM, and its chwingas have a separate turn. We can boost GITMs odds further by using charms and other effects to make it more difficult to teleport directly to us. So the odds of us losing initiative and being one-rounded before a turn are actually quite low. However, anti-grammaton can exit and enter fights more easily than GITM, and even if the chance is small, it’s still there. How do we ensure anti-grammaton can’t win?

Contingent dimdoor seems like a good option, espeically if we can place it on all of our chwingas, getting some distance away from anti-grammaton instantly, forcing the anti-grammaton to use action surge just to teleport to us, if it has dimdoor available. We could also keep a contingent resilient sphere ready for when we are popped out of our mech, re-possessing and using our chwingas turns to gain the upper hand once we recover our form. These tactices are more effective when we have resistance to the anti-grammatons attacks, so tattoos of force and thunder absorbing are a big plus.

Contingent resilient sphere seems like the best, as it requires preparation to defeat and still takes an action, as well as opens more options for us to only appear our of it when we want to. We can even do things in ghost form without out mech, and abuse incorporeal movement to sink into the floor, being nigh-untargetable while casting spells and going back in. This also negates the possibility of anti-grammaton using a contingent dimdoor to teleport itself toward us and finish us in the fight round 1.

This isn’t an automatic win, especially depending on the magic items that the anti-grammaton is using, but we have a sure upper-hand, especially with resistances on our side. GITM is all but assured victory [assuming we’re not stuck in a super small arena]. There’s only one place left for anti-grammaton to turn

Going even further beyond

This isn’t going to make sense if you haven’t read road to 2400.

Anti-grammatons biggest chance is to find a greater demon and make pacts unti lit hits true max level. selling its soul in a final sacrifice.

The anti-grammaton levels to 2400 using this tech and blows GITM out of the water instantly. Even at range using ultra-powered eldritch blast, or simply escaping its cage perfectly using chronurgy, or any other myriad of ways to beat every trick. It has far too much HP for a normal GITM to hope of getting through without using a prismatic grater. with so many bonuses to initiative, it’s going to go first, and even if it didn’t, has far too many ways of getting around control now, even if it’s not outright immune.

2400 vs 2400: The Fight of ultimate ego vs ultimate sacrifice

The HP differences between these two have basically disappeared at this point, a level 2400 character has around 42,000 HP. However, anti-grammaton has auto-hits, every attack is 147.5 damage, assuming no resistances, or 73.75 assuming all resistances. meanwhile all agonizing blast EB [assuming you take all agonizing blast from every warlock for 180 levels] is 1d10+720 per beam for 4 beams, i’d take one invoc for eldritch spear for extra range. you need a way to cancel the disadvantage, or just force it to hit once using chron up close. meanwhile, GITM has an impossible time landing a condition vs your +100 saves, but slowing you down with forcecage is still a hypothetical option. Bludgeoning anti-pasta tech seems to be a winning strategy here, a grapple into just one move action is 5 instances of prisma-wall, or 300d6 damage [1050], assuming one grapple from melee into move into 2 dashes, this is 5500 damage, not accounting for extra movespeed from monk, which 20 levels of nets you +30 movespeed, so 450d6 [1575] and 6125 damage from move and 2 dashes, all assuming just one instance of anti-pasta at a time, full poki-stick-tech deletes you instantly if you get grabbed.

quick note here; immutible form is all that keeps one of these two from casting true poly into a shoe and throwing them into a forever-hole with an instant loss chronurge ability, unless they counteract eachother.

Sheer action economy wins here, the nova-potentially being nullified, this has become a battle of endurance versus the ultimate endurance-tank that is GITM, and GITM has three times as many turns to throw out attacks, grapples, spells, ect.

However, without anti-pasta tech, GITM is on the backfoot, its only long-lasting damage being ultra-EB [which would be at dis vs high AC] or fists. Poetically, GITM only kills anti-grammaton using one trick; the trick that allowed anti-grammaton to exist in the first place.

Though, worth mentioning we need to feed the machine our class features for it to have our HP, which may mean using our simulacrum to do so, which may mean fighting anti-grammaton and its simulacrum solo. While this gets much closer, and with bad luck could spell the doom of GITM, the damage math checks out still in its favor.

without a pit of bludgeoning anti-pasta, though, and only a weapon using it, how does that turn out? Well, GITM takes 73.75 per attack, and receives 8 per turn until one anti-grammaton dies. Anti-grammaton is taking 147.5 damage per hit and is taking 12 attacks per turn. [not counting novas on either side, they’re the same and run out so fast into the fight it won’t matter long-term.

GITM has +17 to-hit versus the anti-grammatons 25 AC [+3 armor, no shield included] We’ll assume flat rolls first, needing to roll 8 or higher means it hits 60% of the time. Which means it would take 40 rounds of constant damage to bring down one anti-grammaton. over those 40 rounds, it would take 23600 damage. taking 40 more rounds to kill the other one, leaves it with 10k hp. GITM wins in this scenario. However, if they were to use a +3 shield, it would take 68 rounds of combat to reduce one to zero, and GITM would die on round 74 to the other anti-grammaton.

interestingly, things like bladesong or other abilities to increase AC aren’t quite as impactful as you’d normally expect, as it’s either possible to dispell it from the marut, or it only lasts a minute, which could be spent stalling, and is “only” 10 rounds, or about 11% of the fight. Monks and barbarians unarmored defense also won’t come up, because armor of invulnerability is so important, everyone uses it and sits around for 10 minutes. I didn’t calculate marriage AC, though maybe i should, and below assumes shield spells get counterspelled from infinite tattoos. Though, bladesong may be more impactful than I first suspected, since you get prof uses per long rest, which is 7 in the case of marut, taking up a majority of the fight given no stalling takes place. Bladesong would win if you continued to smash into eachother martial-style, but we can wait out each individual bladesong by using illusory reality on our chwingas illusion spell and surronding ourselves with an adamantine sphere, plus using charm of the travelers haven to create a tiny hut.

Assuming GITM has advantage [using blindsight + obscurement] it takes 51 rounds to kill one anti-grammaton, taking 29500 damage in the process. it would take another 51 rounds to kill the other one, the other anti-grammaton overtaking GITM 42 rounds later… and reducing to its ghost form. If anti-grammaton can’t prevent the re-possession of the mech, it loses. if we were lucky enough to draw out GITM’s reaction to negate our shield spell to keep the damage equilibrium in check, we action surge true poly them into another mighty servant of luek-o, making their form forever immutable and imprisioning them in non-sentience, then leave, as the machine minus ghost would kill us. If we did not draw out its reaction, I would have suggested we have to grapple it. Assuming chronurgists convergent futures negate each other, the entire fight comes down to this dieroll, but anti-grammaton has the upper hand, but dybbuk is immune to being grappled. We have one option that doesn’t induce a save: bag of holding bomb the ghost and ourselves into the astral plane. Given the ghost likely wasn’t carrying its own supply of stuff and was using machine-sized items, which we’ve seperated it from, its ability to deal damage should be low now, we have to prevent it from planar travel as well, meaning we need a bead of private sanctum and to deploy it before its next turn.

if GITM is using a contingent resilient sphere, we resilient sphere their resilient sphere, which is an object and gets no save, and trap them. or we use a bead of fabricate and fabricate a resilient sphere around them using another source of force, making sure it’s a resilient sphere so they have a hard time leaving. if the corpse isn’t visible to the dybbuk, it can’t possess it, but it likely has blindsight from a feat or one of its fighting styles from fighter.

This leaves open the possibility of quicken disintegrate into action re-possession. To prevent this, quicken force cage around the machine, since using a bead isn’t “casting” but “releasing” the spell. this forces 2 spells out of the dybbuk to re-possess, which can’t be done in one turn unless they have a bead of fabricate to fabricate the forceage around you instead, and locks them out of their machine

GITM has one more counter-move. If it makes armor out of anti-pasta bludgeoning type, and it can fit on its ghost form, it melds into the machine until it pops out of said machine, allowing it to move directly into the anti-grammaton’s space, hitting it with anti-pasta from the inside, and killing it in ghost form. [it could also just bring an anti-pasta dagger and attack from the inside, only using reactions to negate save-or-suck into convergent future from the anti-grammaton. Amazing that GITM wins by going “inside” another machine, that being anti-grammaton itself, and killing it from inside out using its own tech.

Finally, GITM can just cast a prismatic wall mid-fight, using a chwinga to make it uncounterspellable, and grapple-grater an anti-grammaton into them, this could be dispelled, but you’ve delt ~6k damage in the meantime, or more using an action surge, giving GITM the fighting advantage.

Conclusion

it’s entirely possible either anti-grammaton or GITM win, depending on who can run their build best and who planned the furthest ahead and did it the best, as well as a very small amount of luck being involved. With the length it takes for either 2400 stand to kill the other, it’s entirely possible for anti-grammaton to leave a fight it doesn’t like, as can GITM. These two likely pursue each other for eternity, none quite safe in their own immortal quest to kill the other. The example 2400v2400 fight I gave took over 90 rounds and comes down to a single action. Anti-grammaton may not be a full counter to GITM, but it is an extremally worthy opponent where even a small slip spells doom on any powerscale between the two.