I actually am asking this because I had a party actually with the help of hired labor break down a wizard's tower because it was built out of blocks of mithril. It took them a month of game time, and I even used it to build some encounters off of where thieves, dragons, or some other group of greedy jerks attacked them. Should I have put a stop to this? Does this sound like the party was too thorough?
Depends on why they were after the wizard. Was the wizard the BBEG? Was there some compelling story reason to go after this wizard or did they just wnat his things so badly they decided to put in full effort to get it?
The groups I've been part of have ranged in thoroughness.
There was one where a guy dealt with the BBEG's entire underground complex by rerouting a river to drain into it. And there have been parties that have taken apart entire castles just to sell the materials.
Then there's been the parties that missed major magical items because they didn't bother to loot their fallen enemies.
I'm assuming that they defeated the wizard first but honestly when you build a tower out of a material that PCs want armor made out of and is worth 10 times its weight in gold what do you expect? This tower could be worth literally tens of millions of gold, they could potentially start their own currency with all that mithril. They could buy an army, or a country (a small one), or both.
It sounds like the players are just being smart and seeing something that was an unintended consequence.
I don't see why it would take a month to demolish and transport the mythril though: bags of holding IV carry 1500 lb and only would cost 20 lb of mithril, scrolls of Teleport only costs 2.25 lb of mithril each, a Lyre of building only costs 26 lb of mithril, and you can afford to spend whatever price need be to hire a bard to play the lyre, heck there is probably already a bard that has and can play a Lyre of Building that you could rent.
If you are really concerned about them taking so long have a bard (with a Lyre of Building) and a wizard buddy of his (who has scrolls of teleport and bags of holding IV) show up and offer that they can transport the entire tower in a day to anywhere in teleport distance for only 100 lb of mithril (a complete scam at 50,000 gp which the party can totally afford). Call them the Song & Spell Moving Company or something equally cheesy.
Why would you build a tower of mithril? Adamantine I could see as escalation after you have them bypassing locks with an adamantine dagger, stealing your adamanine locks, and stealing your adamantine doors and doorposts, but what's mithril do?
Yeah...building a tower out of mithril seems silly.
This is also why I moved to a system that converts wealth by level to magical encumbrance by level. If you can only have a maximum amount of magical items on your person then you aren't so worried about getting the most gold for every item you sell or stealing everything that isn't nailed down.
Claxon wrote: Yeah...building a tower out of mithril seems silly.
This is also why I moved to a system that converts wealth by level to magical encumbrance by level. If you can only have a maximum amount of magical items on your person then you aren't so worried about getting the most gold for every item you sell or stealing everything that isn't nailed down.
Kinda like that.
Pan wrote: Depends on why they were after the wizard. Was the wizard the BBEG? Was there some compelling story reason to go after this wizard or did they just wnat his things so badly they decided to put in full effort to get it? They actually ran him off, being a bit of an upper level baddie, and they did it to tick him and his boss off. It was greed motivated though because they actually took the time to find out if it could be taken apart.
Claxon wrote: Yeah...building a tower out of mithril seems silly.
This is also why I moved to a system that converts wealth by level to magical encumbrance by level. If you can only have a maximum amount of magical items on your person then you aren't so worried about getting the most gold for every item you sell or stealing everything that isn't nailed down.
It is silly but I decided to do up a random table when I was building the boss layers. I have also had a magical glass castle and a cave in a diamond the size of a small hill.
robert best 549 wrote: a cave in a diamond the size of a small hill. Whelp... throw WBL completely out the window once they find that pile of near-infinite wealth, if it hasn't already left in an explosive manner. Though I guess you could pull something to arbitrarily de-value the hill of diamond; like make it smell so bad they had to permanently enchant the area with prestidigitation or something.
Though I do have to say that any setting that has those kinds of awesome random things in it is one that I would love to be running around as a PC, and not just for the horrible DM infuriating reasons.
I call the next tower/castle/temple being one that accidentally got infused with the powers of a Rod of Wonder.
Yeah, give me a mithral tower and I immediately want to steal it and melt it down.
One time in a high level campaign we fought a titan who was described as having a gigantic adamantine sledgehammer. After killing him there was a discussion amongst the party members about whether we take the sledgehammer because of how heavy it was (it was supposedly over 2000 pounds), but I pointed out that the adamantine alone was worth more than the rest of the treasure we had accumulated so far in the adventure.
Turned out that it was just a straightforward Maul of the Titans though. What a rip-off!
Peet
I was in a party that after clearing an isolated area from evil, it was only accessible via a rickety rope bridge, we hauled everything except a sacred idol or something like that. This included a 500 lb throne we carted across that bridge.
Another party, going through Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, considered salvaging an iron bridge (we estimated it weighed 50 tons and at 1 gp would have been our largest treasure), fortunately across the bridge was an Adamantine tower. After defeating the door, it was sentient and a spell caster, we removed it and sold it off.
Other parties have left treasure and not searched every crevice for the last copper piece.
Timebomb wrote: robert best 549 wrote: a cave in a diamond the size of a small hill. Whelp... throw WBL completely out the window once they find that pile of near-infinite wealth, if it hasn't already left in an explosive manner. Though I guess you could pull something to arbitrarily de-value the hill of diamond; like make it smell so bad they had to permanently enchant the area with prestidigitation or something.
Though I do have to say that any setting that has those kinds of awesome random things in it is one that I would love to be running around as a PC, and not just for the horrible DM infuriating reasons.
I call the next tower/castle/temple being one that accidentally got infused with the powers of a Rod of Wonder. Thankfully no one actually noticed because to had been covered by a few inches of dirty and all. But devaluing it would be simple. I mean introducing several hundred tons of any valuable material will do it.
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robert best 549 wrote: I actually am asking this because I had a party actually with the help of hired labor break down a wizard's tower because it was built out of blocks of mithril. It took them a month of game time, and I even used it to build some encounters off of where thieves, dragons, or some other group of greedy jerks attacked them. Should I have put a stop to this? Does this sound like the party was too thorough? In hindsight, if I ever do something like this, it'll be a transmutation effect that ends once the wizard is dead...
Kairos Dawnfury wrote: robert best 549 wrote: I actually am asking this because I had a party actually with the help of hired labor break down a wizard's tower because it was built out of blocks of mithril. It took them a month of game time, and I even used it to build some encounters off of where thieves, dragons, or some other group of greedy jerks attacked them. Should I have put a stop to this? Does this sound like the party was too thorough? In hindsight, if I ever do something like this, it'll be a transmutation effect that ends once the wizard is dead... Great idea...
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