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Using "Stone to Flesh" repeatedly over a long time to turn a whole mountain into a pile of meat and then animate it into a colossal++++++++ creature. ^^
Orbital elevator: Using greater teleport and permanent walls of force, create a platform in geostationary orbit. Use teleportation circle to create two way link to platform. Herald the space age of the Renaissance!
Or permanent reverse gravities stacked on top of each other until it reaches space. Of course you'll need some facing the opposite direction at the top, lest the traveler simply be launched into space.
50 silver coins weigh 1 lb, an 11th level wizard has 820000 sp in wealth.
Use fabricate to turn sp into two silver rods of appropriate size.
Mount them parallel to each other and lock them in place with immovable rods.
Place iron projectile to be fired (Use wall of iron as appropriate) in between rods.
Cast Lightning bolt on one rod.
Render all fortifications obsolete.
I'm not getting how this does anything except possibly melt your silver rods and iron wall...?
I'm not getting how this does anything except possibly melt your silver rods and iron wall...?
50 silver coins weigh 1 lb, an 11th level wizard has 820000 sp in wealth.
Use fabricate to turn sp into two silver rods of appropriate size.
Mount them parallel to each other and lock them in place with immovable rods.
Place iron projectile to be fired (Use wall of iron as appropriate) in between rods.
Cast Lightning bolt on one rod.
Render all fortifications obsolete.
i didn't really get it either, but i'm not a physicist.
best i can figure is that he think's it'll create a super magnetic field or something.
better idea(I think, but again I'm not a physicist.)
Coil a crap ton of wire (or the equivalent) around a non-magnetic tube->>Place metallic object to be fired at one end of the tube which does not have coils around it-->> Hit coils with lightning bolt to momentarily create a powerful electromagnet.
If done correctly(and I'm right) the electromagnet will only be active only long enough to pull the projectile toward it, but not long enough for the projectile to get stuck. Just get wire strong enough not to simply melt when struck by lightning. Good luck with that using midevil tech, though I'm sure magic could make up the gap.
All cool ideas. But very expensive, most people aren't going to pay for them when you can do it the old fashioned way for much cheaper.
Also lightning bolt won't work to provide electricity for things like the railgun. It'd probably just melt the silver.
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The weakness in all the above suggestions is that you suppose that magic is a unlimited resource and that it will be possible to harness unlimited quantities for a unlimited span of time in a fixed location without secondary effects.
If we look a bit of Golarion lore we see that we have the Mana Wastes, an area where the use of powerful spells and magical artefacts had caused long lasting damage to the fabric of magic.
Another interesting source of lore is the Wishcraft article in The final Wish (AP n,. 24). The continual use of wish magic in a single location warp reality.
So probably magic energy can be compared to water. It is abundant in most of the world, but if we start to tap to much of it in a specific location we can create problems.
So a high magic civilization will have problems similar to our own: magical pollution, shortage of magic in some specific location and so on.
Things like the teleportation circles network work well in theory. It isn't too hard to limit the circle size and/or guard the circle location, so the danger of invasion is limited (I really wouldn't like to be the guy trying to teleport his army through a 10' radius circle in a bare room under the fire of enemy guards).
But what happen when you teleport? You pass through the astral like in earlier versions? You become a stream of energy particles travelling at high velocity?
Independently by what is the underling mechanic you can bet that doing hundred of tleportations from the one location to another location, always along the same route, will have some secondary effects after a time.
Undead computer: First, find a place with a major rat infestation. Solve vermin problem but keep a bunch of rats around. Also take rat corpses. Second, find a secluded spot where you wish to begin work on your undead computer. Third, using animate dead, turn rats into skeleton rats. Give basic orders (e.g. if rat 1 OR 2 raises tail, raise tail etc.) Congratulations, you now have logic gates. Expand from there. (Taken from 4chan's /tg/ section)
That was a extrem infestation if you have enough rats for that - even a simple Neumann-core would need thousands of them and would be able to compute stuff that some guys with paper can do.
Oh and some cleric who disagrees with necromancy could destroy all your effort with a few well placed channels
Well... There was a thread about getting infinite energy out of immovable rods through a construction with portal rings and other crazy stuff based on mixing physics with magic - all of which led to physical reality feeling pretty much abused - back in the WotC-boards. It was awesome.
I've just thought about reconstructing it from my mind, but it's too complicated and...
Here's the thread.
Perhaps you find some nice things in there that still work in the PF-system. ;)
I don't see how we're going to run out of water anytime soon, and we're a planet with a population of 6 billion.Oceans full of water aren't any good if they are not drinkable. Supplies of healthy water are a major concern in many areas of the globe, including the southwestern United States which has been relying on large underground aquifers which do not replenish themselves as fast as the demand taps them.
To add something to that, cracked about that:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19048_6-important-things-you-didnt-know-were -running-out-of_p2.html
Desalination plants, and ceasing with senseless wasteful practices like open air farming in dirt like some 7000yo sumerians when both greenhouses and hydroponic farming has been invented allowing to capture even all water while assuring a even absorbtion of nutrients.
Combined with breeder nuclear powerplants, like tens of thousands of them.. using stuff like thorium which is as common as it gets. Replacing all current energy needs and multiply by a hundred, the thorium should still last for a billion years or so. And voila, water solved..
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So probably magic energy can be compared to water. It is abundant in most of the world, but if we start to tap to much of it in a specific location we can create problems.
So a high magic civilization will have problems similar to our own: magical pollution, shortage of magic in some specific location and so on.I don't see how we're going to run out of water anytime soon, and we're a planet with a population of 6 billion. Golarion has a significantly smaller population.
If magic had the problem of being non-renewable like oil, then I'd worry a bit, but water? There's plenty of water about and it's part of a cycle, consumption is going to be the same as production.
Drinkable water or flowing water that can be used for hydraulic power?
We already have problems with scarcity of it.We have huge reserves of water that can be made usable with a noticeable expenditure of resources, like desalination of tidal wave power plants, but that is not the "easy to get" water most people take for granted.
What would those secondary effects be?
Independently by what is the underling mechanic you can bet that doing hundred of teleportations from the one location to another location, always along the same route, will have some secondary effects after a time.
If you use the old rule that teleportation use the astral plane, hundred of passage every day in the same location will probably weaken the barrier between the astral and the material plane and will draw the attention of the astral plane denizens.
There are several monster that live on the astral and hunt in the material plane, lighting a beacon for them isn't the smartest move.
Combined with breeder nuclear powerplants, like tens of thousands of them.. using stuff like thorium which is as common as it gets. Replacing all current energy needs and multiply by a hundred, the thorium should still last for a billion years or so. And voila, water solved..
While thorium nuclear plants have several advantages over uranium power plants, included the availability of several hundreds years of fuel, all kinds of power plants require lots of water for cooling and power transference.
And it need to be as pure as possible.---
I see it this way: less than a century ago most houses in Europe had a well and could take drinking water from it. Now the water table has gone deeper as the water has been overused, mostly for industrial use.
With magic we could get the same result.
A single spellcaster has no noticeable effect. A stationary "magic turbine" would probably use most of the magical power in a area and make magic access more difficult.
So a magical society similar to our industrial society will have similar problems.
So probably magic energy can be compared to water. It is abundant in most of the world, but if we start to tap to much of it in a specific location we can create problems.
So a high magic civilization will have problems similar to our own: magical pollution, shortage of magic in some specific location and so on.
This is the premise of Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away setting. (It's also a 1970's oil-crisis allegory.)
Scrolls have to be made by somebody; QED.
This statement is true. The statement that a given 9th level scroll is purchasable in a small city 75% of the time is true. The missing statement that would cause these two true facts to necessitate the existence of living 17th+ level casters in the world is a statement on the age of the scroll(s).
Accounting for the fact that there are 58 9th level spells, the resulting probability approaches unity (99.999999999999999+%) that *any one* 9th level spell scroll will be available for purchase in a small city. (According to my calculations, if one doesn't care about the content of the scroll, and only wishes to purchase a scroll with a 9th level spell scribed on it, one would be able to find such a scroll for purchase in a small city in approximately all but one attempt out of 100 nonillion (10^32).)
Of course, the only reason that the inference above is technically invalid is because there are no odds or percentages given for determining if the scroll for sale was crafted recently or was extracted from the library/treasure vault/crypt of some long-dead magician. If such odds were supplied, regardless of what those odds actually were, it would then be entirely valid to infer that some of the 9th level scrolls for sale were crafted by living, civilized NPCs. (Most of us make the intuitive leap that says that there's some chance that at least one of the scrolls was not created by someone/something that's presently dead.)
Of course, all of this analysis rests on the assumption that the 75% availability rule is uniformly well representative of the actual economy across all possible ranges of interaction. The argument that says, "Of course it is, it's RAW!" overlooks the fact that the rules are an abstraction designed to be easy to use while still supporting the functionality of the game world across only the range of interactions in which the PCs are *likely* to engage. It's unrealistic to assume that the economy in the game works like this for all characters, PC and NPC alike. It's similarly unrealistic to demand that the GM maintain a functioning economy for a fantasy setting.
The 75% availability rule works well for players asking, "Can I buy {THIS} here?" It cannot be taken as a good benchmark for inferring population distribution and NPC power levels, just like the approximation f(x) = x is not a useful approximation for f(x) = x^2 for *most* values of x. Compared to the entire world economy, the individual shopping questions of the PCs enjoy roughly the same degree of local applicability as the approximation of f(x) = x^2 by f(x) = x.
This is the premise of Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away setting. (It's also a 1970's oil-crisis allegory.)
+1
I use this in my game, mages can only draw 'X' mana each day based on the area they are in. Dead zones slowly drain mana. So-called 'Rich' zones are either dedicated to a particular type of magic or wild and uncontrolable. Think of filling a Franklin stove with anthracite and feeding in pure oxygen. One of the reasons Elves 'migrate' within their lands is fresh mana. Ditto Dragons. I have places where mana has 'run out', gone sour, become poluted, etc. and am looking for more things that can go wrong.
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This is the premise of Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away setting. (It's also a 1970's oil-crisis allegory.)So probably magic energy can be compared to water. It is abundant in most of the world, but if we start to tap to much of it in a specific location we can create problems.
So a high magic civilization will have problems similar to our own: magical pollution, shortage of magic in some specific location and so on.
I know, I have been a SF/fantasy fan for almost 40 years ;)
Niven isn't the only one that has written about that idea too.I see magic as a renewable resource but one that can be locally depleted or disrupted with excessive use.
It is a good way to explain why most ultra-magic civilization end badly.
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If we look a bit of Golarion lore we see that we have the Mana Wastes, an area where the use of powerful spells and magical artefacts had caused long lasting damage to the fabric of magic.
Another interesting source of lore is the Wishcraft article in The final Wish (AP n,. 24). The continual use of wish magic in a single location warp reality.
So probably magic energy can be compared to water. It is abundant in most of the world, but if we start to tap to much of it in a specific location we can create problems.
So a high magic civilization will have problems similar to our own: magical pollution, shortage of magic in some specific location and so on.Except we know this to not be the case in Golarion for most of the effects mentioned.
The Mana Wastes are the result of centuries of warfare using Wish level magic.
However, the world is littered with lesser permanent magic items, tens of thousands of years old, that still work exactly as designed. Elf Gates, the Doorway to the Red Star, all that endless Thassilonian junk, lots of slightly newer Osiriani stuff, too.
The setting strongly indicates that as long as you don't go completely crazy, magical architecture and other permanent magic items last until destroyed w/o negative effects of any sort.
Things like the teleportation circles network work well in theory. It isn't too hard to limit the circle size and/or guard the circle location, so the danger of invasion is limited (I really wouldn't like to be the guy trying to teleport his army through a 10' radius circle in a bare room under the fire of enemy guards).Which is why they are of limited utility to armies.
They work great for trade, though.But what happen when you teleport? You pass through the astral like in earlier versions? You become a stream of energy particles travelling at high velocity?
Independently by what is the underling mechanic you can bet that doing hundred of tleportations from the one location to another location, always along the same route, will have some secondary effects after a time.The above is completely unsupported by any evidence in the setting. The vast majority of and entire intelligent species left Golarion through a gate of much greater range and power than a teleportation circle, and then returned through the same one. It does not seem to have had secondary effects. Note that Treerazer was unable to even deliberately warp the Sovyrian Stone. The Sevenarches are broken, but there is just as much evidence that that is through disuse as through overuse.
If it was so easy to break magic in an area that you could accidentally do so with infrastructure development, we would see it used often throughout history as a weapon of war.
-Kle.
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Most of your counter arguments are based on items that are dormant 99+% of the time. And several of those items show sign of decay (most of the Thassalonian stuff, a few of the Elf Gates [like the Sevenarches you cited] and so on).
There are very few examples of constantly active, long lasting and very powerful magical effects. And those generally have some caretaker.
I am not saying that it is impossible to have that kind of civilization, simply that it will not be without its problems.
Stuff about scrolls.
For scroll I use a completely different approach. As the single spell scroll price is low the normal rules on availability make it easy to find even in small town. I prefer linking the availability of scrolls to the spellcasting services presents in the city.
Any common spell up to the level of the city spellcasting service can be found 75% of the time, the other spells can be found in the random magic items or through research.
About the original comment: Magic of the Inner sea has several spellcaster capable of casting level 9+ spells, a good number of them are still active (and several are presumably dead, but this is D&D and death isn't forever).
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While thorium nuclear plants have several advantages over uranium power plants, included the availability of several hundreds years of fuel, all kinds of power plants require lots of water for cooling and power transference.
And it need to be as pure as possible.Nope.
The water used for power transference through a steam turbine needs to be as pure as possible. The cooling water doesn't need to be pure at all, or even water. The internal cooling medium is also captured, and does not need much in the way of replacement. Neither does the heat-sink material need to be pure.
-Kle.
LOL.
Yes, you can use other stuff for the heat transference inside a reactor but you wish it to be as pure as possible.Any impurity mean it will not work exactly as intended.
As a cooling medium for the turbines today we use water and it is way better if it is pure. You don't want to have salt or slit deposits in your cooling system.
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I see magic as a renewable resource but one that can be locally depleted or disrupted with excessive use.
It is a good way to explain why most ultra-magic civilization end badly.
While I like this general idea I would point out that most civilizations end badly -- high magic or not.
After all the Mwangi suffered just as much as the Azlanti, and the other low magic cultures when earthfall happened. Low magic cultures were conquered and ruined by higher magic cultures and have fallen to dragons/giants/barbarians just as often as the highly magical ones have (Irrisen supports this too).
So it's not that ultra-magic civilizations have a higher percentage of bad endings its just that they are so awesome that when they do fall people notice.
It's the same with Rome in the real world actually -- plenty of other civilizations have fallen before and since... heck even during Rome's fall... we simply remember Rome because it was awesome at the time. That doesn't mean the other non-Roman civilizations died peacefully in their sleep or didn't have just as horrific endings as Rome did -- we just don't remember them because they weren't as awesome.
Exactly how did he make a cannon out of a fireball? Fireballs don't have enough force to launch anything. All he did is heat the ammunition up. Fireballs create fire, not kinetic explosions.
==Aelryinth
The write-up on Nethys seems to indicate that magic is an infinite resource that permeates all planes, and can never go dry. Only localized effects happen, and they are aberrations.
Of course, Nethys being able to see everywhere magic is, thinks magic is infinite. What he refuses to believe is that where magic is is just a very small subset of infinity, and the rest of the place has no magic whatsoever...because he can't see the nature of the rest of Creation.
heheh.
===Aelryinth
...we just don't remember them because they weren't as awesome.
We don't remember them for the same reason we think Rome was awesome, because Rome and Roman Catholic Church wrote the history books.
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Desalination plants, and ceasing with senseless wasteful practices like open air farming in dirt like some 7000yo sumerians when both greenhouses and hydroponic farming has been invented allowing to capture even all water while assuring a even absorbtion of nutrients.
Combined with breeder nuclear powerplants, like tens of thousands of them.. using stuff like thorium which is as common as it gets. Replacing all current energy needs and multiply by a hundred, the thorium should still last for a billion years or so. And voila, water solved..
Of course that just leaves us with the hazards and problems of nuclear power instead.. like what to do with increasing piles nuclear waste with half-lives of millennia.
By the way those plants consume water too.. in fact they generate so much waste steam, they'll have their own climate impact. Thorium as a reactor fuel unfortunately only lives in the pages of 1950's science fiction. The only way we've ever gotten energy from it is from the heat of radioactive decay, and pound for pound it's only a bit more than a carbon battery of the same weight.
Thorium reactor are feasible and should work as efficiently as uranium reactors. Simply they were not developed as they are way less efficient in producing weapon grade fissionables, so the different armies weren't interested in financing their development.
Water is often used, largely because it is cheap and readily available.Captive cooling systems generally don't use pure water, they use water with anti-corrosion and thermal mediation additives, just like your car does. "any impurity means it will not work exactly as intended" is one of the most scientifically inaccurate statements I have ever read. This is chemistry, not alchemy.
-Kle.
Yes, you use water with selected additives. But you don't use any available water as the presence of variable levels of salts and other compounds can produce unwanted chemical reactions.
You use deionized or distilled water, then you add exactly what you want in the water in exactly the quantities you want.|
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Tell that to the Chinese. They've had a more or less stable civilization that dates from the time of the Egyptians. It's had some minor changes in government. (And yes, Communism is really just another form of a long chain of government styles of strong central control) They've had terrible episodes, but nothing has ever fully brought Chinese civilisation down.
While I like this general idea I would point out that most civilizations end badly -- high magic or not.
All civilization end. Some of them with a bang (Carthage), some with a relatively fast decline after their peak(Rome), some with a long, steady decline (Byzantium).
Using that meter the Greek Roman civilisation is still going strong.
Some secondary rearrangement of the government form and demographic is irrelevant.
Correct. Rome went from being the center of the known world, an Empire that covered millions of people and many, many countries, to just another city state.
China's history is one of gradual absorption of other tribes/nations into what we currently call 'the Chinese', and which the Chinese themselves will tell you are vastly different cultures and peoples. Basically, the Han have been slowly expanding and assimilating/subjugating other cultures. They are still at it, having taken Tibet, and encroaching on India and Pakistan and Nepal, and wanting to grab Taiwan once again. Before the Communists, China was a joke...hundreds of millions of people the British basically made a laughingstock out of, just like they did India.
China is rising again, but this is a definitely a 'new' China, not a continuation of the old one, which basically fell off the world stage in the 1500's.
==Aelryinth
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If the following ways of changing the world through spells have been covered, feel free to ignore them. These are some staple world-altering spells or strategies, and some may be surprised at how low-level many of them are.
Infinite Food & Water: A magic trap of create food and water with an automatic reset is 7,500 gp. Add in prestidigitation for another 500 gp to round it to an even 8,000 gp. Now you have a device that produces infinite food and water and then flavors it to different desired tastes so it isn't bland. You have have it be a series of pressure plates which allow people to activate the trap and then activate the flavors they desire via prestidigitation. Each time the trap is activated it produces enough food and water for 15 people or 5 horses.
How does it change the world? Attrition sieges cannot work because you can never starve out a city that has invested in a few of these. Likewise, you can improve the quality of living of your subjects immensely, as no matter how poor, your subjects will be able to eat their fill of wholesome, tasty meals.
Infinite Water on the Cheap: Similar to the Infinite Food and Water method, merely producing water is exceptionally cheap. A resetting trap of create water produces 2 gallons of water each time the trap is activated for 250 gp. So for the cost of a single suit of banded mail, a village can acquire a water source that they don't have to worry about being poisoned or dried out.
How does this change the world? Firstly it means that it is possible to colonize deserts and other inhospitable places where water is scarce. Even our modern societies have to go to great lengths to create waterways to channel water from places where it is to places where it isn't, and that presented challenges that if unmet would have left much of California barely cultivated. This allows you to take water with you everywhere you go, and it can produce about 20 gallons of water every minute. This means that in desert villages can support crops and people easily.
Likewise it means that even small villages should have access to running water. If not through pipes then through wooden or stone ducts which channel water from a master source. The trap can be set so that it automatically produces water until the water level in the room or container reaches a certain point and then deactivates until the condition is met once again.
Infinite Building Materials: Wizards can cast wall of stone to produce a crapload of stone in nice long workable sheets for free, and wall of iron produces about 2500 gp worth of iron for about 50 gp in material components, which means that it's an effective and cheap method of attaining lots and lots of iron.
Combined with the almighty fabricate, entire villages and cities can be produced out of thin air in measurements of days instead of years. The stone and iron can then be shaped into various buildings, ramps, aqueducts, pipes, tunnels, bridges, or defensive structures quickly and easily.
Now Pathfinder apparently nerfed Wall of Iron from its previous incarnations and added a clause that says "Iron created by this spell is not suitable for use in the creation of other objects and cannot be sold" which doesn't make any sense because the iron is neither temporary magic iron (conjuration-creation) and is noted to be affected by any natural phenomena that affects iron (and frankly heating and working iron is a very natural process). Even if you decide you can do nothing more than spam walls of iron, that's enough to produce large re-enforced walls with enough thickness to block most common divination spells.
How does this change the world? Building materials aren't as readily needed. Do you need a desert community built but you lack large quantities of natural resources to produce houses? Bam, instant quarry. It also makes forward bases in armies more prevalent, as an army could literally spring up a forward stone-fortress overnight.
Also for those curious, a resetting trap that creates 45 ft stone slabs costs a mere 22,500 gp or about the cost of a minor cloak of displacement. A small price to pay for what amounts to an infinite quarry.
Undead Laborers: Undead are the ideal workforce for anyone looking at things from a purely logical perspective. The cost of creating a magic item that allows 1st level civil servant adepts to animate undead allows entire kingdoms to produce a workforce that does not require pay and doesn't eat, sleep, or get sick. Livestock can be turned into unlivestock to plow fields tirelessly. Skeletons can plant and pick crops. Dig ditches, haul stuff, and form the bulk of armies. Small communities can have their standing militias working in the field, no matter the weather, clad in all the armor they want. Each skeleton can take 10 on Craft and Profession checks to generate 5 gp worth of work per week as an untrained laborer.
How does this change the world? It removes the need for a slave caste or grunt labor. A society that controls the flow of resources using undead labor is twice as productive with the same workforce (as undead have darkvision and can work 24/7). Meanwhile, you can encourage your living population to pursue scholarly activities. After several generations, dying members rejoin the workforce, while your living people progress in the arts of science, culture, philosophy, and tactical warfare. The majority of your defense and grunt labor is handled by the undead, and if an enemy nation attacks you, every soldier that is killed can be cannibalized into your ranks for your society, making it hard to assault your kingdom.
These are a few options, but no where near comprehensive. There are hundreds more, I'm certain. These are just a few classics.
Keep in mind that Wall of Stone must merge with existing stone, so the infinite stone slab trick at least requires some Adamantine saws to facilitate separation. ;-)
Keep in mind that Wall of Stone must merge with existing stone, so the infinite stone slab trick at least requires some Adamantine saws to facilitate separation. ;-)
Fabricate **poof** stone bricks, no tools.