So our group had an encounter in the whispering cairn. We came across the trapped room with the iron balls in it. One of the other party members and I both had the same thought at the same time, "Holy crap, this is a lot of iron. We could sell this and make some serious money." Here is what our DM sent to us today.
So - Cog, Vanos, Jaek, and Ala (level 3) have found a room in which iron spheres, approximately the size of softballs, are fired at them from concealed chutes in the walls, by a trap designed to knock intruders off of a balance beam onto the floor below. However, this trap has been operating intermittently for a very long time, and the iron balls from previous triggerings have accumulated on the floor, concealing the floor's actual depth.
After killing the grick that was lairing in the pit below, the party had a "what if" moment, when they thought to haul out the iron in the trap and sell it for a noticeable profit.
They then proceded to do the math, and realized that the profits could be considerable.
The actual math follows.
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The room that contains the now infamous "Iron Balls" trap is actually somewhat large, as the original designers hoped to harm the trap's victims with a fall from a height. The volume under the iron is ten feet deep, twenty feet wide, and fifty feet long.
The iron balls in the trap therefore occupy a space 10,000 cubic feet in volume.
The size of the iron balls do not bear on the actual solution because their size is trivial compared to the container volume.
So, the number of iron spheres in the room is determined by the density of the volume.
The density is governed by how tightly packed the iron is question is.
An upper limit of the density is approximately 0.74, which assumes the spheres are perfectly arranged in an offset lattice. This is obtained from Kepler's Conjecture, the proof of which is utterly over my head.
It is unlikely in the extreme that the arrangement of the spheres is perfect, as they are fired from the walls. We will use .7 as a practical maximum for the possible density of the iron in the volume.
So, the density will be given (ad hoc) by 50% + 1d20.
Now, iron in our world can come from one of two methods, wrought and cast. Each has a particular density - 485 pounds per cubic foot for wrought iron, and 450 pounds for cast. In D&D, the material could have been generated by magic, but I see no reason for it to have a particularly strange density, so we will assume the iron has a density of somewhere between those two figures.
That means there are between 2.25 and 3.395 million pounds of iron in the room.
Given an average market price of 1 silver per pound of iron, the market value of the iron in question has a maximum of 339,500 gold peices.
I know that if I were a player, I would be salivating right now.
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As a DM, given that I did not intend for this trap's mechanism to be loot, the temptation to just say "no! you can't! you'll break my game!" is quite strong, but I will take the high road. You can have the iron.
But you have to figure out how to get it out.
I will even help you, because I'm honestly impressed at this, much more than I am horrified. Here are the things you'll have to figure out:
How do I get the iron out of the cairn?
How do I keep it from the other (possibly unscrupulous) powers in the town?
How do I turn it into gold?
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1.Just buy the WC from Mayor Neff from proceeds of loot you'll make on other adventures.
2. find a partner such as the greysmere contract or that Lazne? lady who is probably the only mine manger who's marginally honest.
3. just start your own mining company.
after the three faces with the fall of smenk? you should have any troble from the managers.
Of course the iron could inferior like pyrite(fool's gold)
This is at least the third time this exact topic has come up on these boards. My advice to the DM of your group is to pay attention to the discussions on this messageboard to help avoid/manage such situations.
Check the messageboard archives for the quite extensive discussions previously posted on this topic.
Bottom line - clever idea but not very practical. It'll depend on whether the characters are interested in adventuring (stopping the evil cultists and preventing the doomsday end-of-the-world apocolypse of the Age of Worms) or if they want to retire early and devote all their time and energy into the financial, political, and mechanical logistics of iron ball mining. The choice seems pretty obvious to me.
If it were my game, I wouldn't let them do it- but with a pretty darn good reason.
First off, sure, the characters could just haul all of that iron out of there, sell it to someone who could melt it down, and make quite a profit from it.
...If it were real iron.
Think about it. First off, it would be gamebreaking to give third-level PCs hundreds of thousands of GP- plus it would destroy the economy- and trust me, that's a LOT of work. A lot of things would have to be calculated, and roleplayed out, and what would the end result be? The campaign would end right there. Most characters would just say, "I'm an iron tycoon now. Adventuring is for poor people." Even if that weren't the case, even if they decided to still risk their life and limb on crazy endeavors, they'd face very little challenge if they all had +5 weapons and Armor. However, I hate telling players, "No, you can't do that, because I said so." I also hate stealing from the players by "a thief in the night". Yeah, a thief just happened to show up, tonight of all nights, and all he stole was that ridiculously powerful item that just happened to be ruining the game since you got it. What a coincidence, huh?
I always try my hardest to find a fix that's not only reasonable, but it's plausible too. First off, as I said before, who's to say that that iron is real iron? If so, the Wind Dukes would have had to put quite a few iron balls into that trap to keep it from running out- after all, you don't want your trap to kill intruders for the first 500 years and then go kaput, right? But it would run out eventually. And that's a lot of natural resources used up for something that could (relatively) easily be solved by- yes, you guessed it- magic!
Don't have the iron spheres be actual iron spheres. They could be magically-conjured iron spheres (let's say they're actually made of magical wind, to fit the theme) that, if taken from this chamber, are dispelled and dissolve into wind again. That way, the Wind Dukes would only have to create a magical device that creates iron spheres, not waste all sorts of time, resources, and space creating and housing this trap that could easily run out. It fits the theme, it makes sense, and it solves an otherwise potentially-gamebreaking problem.
What do you think?
You guys realize that only on a gamer website can you start off a thread with "On Iron Balls" and then go on to a perfectly normal discussion of how many iron balls fit into a room and what their gp value compared to the density and volume etc. etc.
My answer is...the balls are heavy, there are a lot of them and unless you're willing to planeshift all over the known universe, the price of iron in your area will plummet so quickly that the balls would be virtually worthless within a few days.
It's not like you can pull up a wagon train of iron balls to the nearest dwarven smith and demand 27 sacks of gold, which he just has laying around awaiting to pay for the unexpected huge shipment of iron.
Economic principles, usually ignored by many DM's, usually fixes the problem of these types of discoveries by avaricious players.
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Yeah, it's like Paizo needs someone to manage the threads or something.... *cough*WizO*cough*
Thread started in June: Hidden Treasure Trove
More recent resurfacing: Opportunistic Party
Replacing the iron spheres with ones made of clay was suggested in one of these threads (if not both) which I used to nip this capitalism in the bud. Besides, hard ceramic balls bounce so much better which made the trap very effective in three-dimensions.
Somehow I must have missed all those previous threads. When I ran it in my game I described all the spheres as hollow (I assumed if they were solid iron they would be a lot more lethal and a lot harder to use as projectiles) never even thinking about the resale value. Had the PC's talked about selling them I probably would have let them but they would have found the under lying layers of spheres to be more and more pitted and rusted and less valuable because of how long they had sat there corroding.
Certainly an interesting quandry.
The PCs don't have the expertise in mining or business management and have to hire a subcontractor. Have a couple of the mine managers bid on the contract, and offer a low, but steady annuity for the rights to salvage what is essentially scrap iron. The mine managers can explain why they won't bid higher (cf. economics explanations above). The players can boost their incomes a bit without wrecking the game or the local economy, and they won't have to waste time on all that booooring paperwork. After all, killing monsters and saving the world is a hell of a lot more fun than watching ex cons hall iron balls out of a hole in the ground one by one.
What would the PCs do? Haul out each ball on their own? You can't just drag the cursor over the balls and double click on them. ;-) There's no practical way for those balls to be used without abandoning the campaign, which is obviously the wrong choice.
It's like a rogue in an ancient tomb with jewels embedded everywhere. What's more important? The mission, or filling his pockets? Hopefully there's a fellow PC nearby to drag him/her along by the ear.
I erred on the side of simplicity.
They were treated as orcish shot puts.
Resold for half value. Calculated for the cubic foot.
Balls overlapping ignored.
They sold them to an NPC, actually traded for the magic items
they needed. First they bought one wagon.
Then they bought another wagon and a bag of holding.
The portable hole ate up most of the profits off the top.
Once they had that the process sped up.
Now that I think about it, I was playing the character that
claimed the portable hole.
In our home games the DM runs a player character.
In the book Pazio publishes, they will probably make the
balls unlootable.
They should also do something about the mirrors in Hall
of Harsh Reflection.
It did not say they automatically shatter upon attempted
removal. You can fit ten of them in a portable hole with padding in between.
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I was one of the players in the first group that came up with this idea (Hidden Treasure Trove, linked above). We as players all knew that getting that kind of money was completely out of line with the spirit of the game, and why would you continue adventure if you come across such a ridiculous sum of gold? I mean, you're already rich!
We ended up selling the location and rights to the new 'mine'
to Dervil Ironeater, one of the local dwarf mine-managers. I was bored one night, and actually ran through a CAD-simulated take-off based on the actual size of the balls, modeling the overlap, and considering the unit weight of iron (you can find ANYTHING on the web if you know how to look).
End result was that the trove was actually worth just under 500,000 gold. Dervil paid us 1/10th in a finders fee up front. It ended up being on the order of 7,000 to 8,000 per player (the exact amount escapes me), which is a nice little fee for 3rd level (at that time) PCs. In addition, Dervil agreed to secure the deed to the old manor house outside the Cairn and then he paid for all of the repairs to it, giving us a permanent base (found to be semi-permanent based on future events, but that's another story).
So, our DM rewarded us for a well-laid plan, and the reward made us 'powerful' for our level, because we were able to outfit ourselves with +1 weapons, +1 armour, +1 shields, +1 cloaks, etc. For a short time, game balance was shifted in the PCs favor slightly, but this faded after a level or two.
If I were a DM in a similar situation, I would approach it rationally, as our DM did. I would not punish the PCs for trying to think outside the box. Some poster recommendations from earlier threads actually recommended that the DMs let the PCs spend significant time, energy, and money trying to take advantage of the situation, and then once the balls were removed from the Cairn, they were 'magically transmuted' into clay, or stone, or lead, or doo-doo, or whatever, resulting in the PCs either being embarrassed in town and/or being stripped of the small amount of cash they came about 'legitimately'. DMs who become irritated when their players try to better themselves creatively need to get a grip.
As they say down here in the South, "There is more than one way to skin a cat."
When I was running this, my players thought of exactly the same thing. They got all excited about the prospect of becoming filthy rich. Given that none of them was actually strong enough to pick up such a heavy ball of iron, I calmly said "Great idea! So how are you gonna get them out of the cairn?" They just stared and blinked for a minute, then shrugged before continuing on and didn't say another word.
I think the complicated logistics of removing the balls is enough of a deterrent. Narrate the PCs removing every single ball of iron if you wish to throw them a bone. Eventually, they'll realize that it is quickly becoming an interminably difficult process and probably give up.
Personally, I think the massive store of iron was an oversight in the midst of a cool trap idea. If Paizo did think of a good explanation for it, they left it out of the adventure. Whether there is an explanation for it or not, harvesting the iron is the work of prospectors, not heroes. Let their current characters retire and have them roll up new ones to finish the campaign if the PCs persist.
Creative Director
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Personally, I think the massive store of iron was an oversight in the midst of a cool trap idea. If Paizo did think of a good explanation for it, they left it out of the adventure. Whether there is an explanation for it or not, harvesting the iron is the work of prospectors, not heroes. Let their current characters retire and have them roll up new ones to finish the campaign if the PCs persist.
I suppose it was an oversight; the best fix is to either make the iron balls ceramic or stone... or to make them magic. The builders of the tomb were elemental creatures; perhaps the iron balls are conjured from the elemental plane of earth, and if they're taken from the cairn they rust away.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the adventure as written; if the PCs want to harvest iron from the trap and "get rich" that's fine. They should find that the market bottoms out quick, and it should be a LOT of work not only to haul the iron out but to fight off claim jumpers and bandits (who might also be well-connected mine managers like Smenk).
It's a little unfortunate that there are certain things that the D&D economny won't let you easilly do in an adventure. Other examples are to have a low-level adventure where the PCs defeat a boatload of pirates (suddenly they own a ship that vastly exceeds the gp value they should have access to); encounter a bubbling lake of poison in which swim demons who can splash the poison on intruders (how many vials of poison is a lake, and how much is all that poison worth?); or defeat a group of goblins that have holed up in a mine that no one owns (how much is it worth?).
In my campaign, as mentioned above, economic principles fix those things fairly rapidly. There was some discussion about this very topic in the 1st edition DMG if I recall. I don't have a problem with my PC's exceeding the wealth guidelines, because they often find that having huge amounts of money just presents huge amounts of problems.
If my players accumulate enormous wealth and are able to keep it, I encourage them to save it for their character's eventual retirement, where the building of a castle and a manor quickly sucks such excess wealth dry. Since powerful magic items aren't for sale in my campaign and there are only so many potions being brewed, my players quickly find themselves frustrated that they can't go on a magic millionaire spending spree--the stuff just ain't there to buy....
...and James...I don't consider it an oversight that you guys didn't mention what to do with tens of thousands of iron balls in an adventure. Some things just need to be left up to the DM--if every single nuance or possible consequence of an advneture gets explained away in print, the word count would be enormous and you would have no controversy for discussion on these boards ;)
I suppose it was an oversight; the best fix is to either make the iron balls ceramic or stone... or to make them magic. The builders of the tomb were elemental creatures; perhaps the iron balls are conjured from the elemental plane of earth, and if they're taken from the cairn they rust away.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the adventure as written; if the PCs want to harvest iron from the trap and "get rich" that's fine. They should find that the market bottoms out quick, and it should be a LOT of work not only to haul the iron out but to fight off claim jumpers and bandits (who might also be well-connected mine managers like Smenk).
It's a little unfortunate that there are certain things that the D&D economny won't let you easilly do in an adventure. Other examples are to have a low-level adventure where the PCs defeat a boatload of pirates (suddenly they own a ship that vastly exceeds the gp value they should have access to); encounter a bubbling lake of poison in which swim demons who can splash the poison on intruders (how many vials of poison is a lake, and how much is all that poison worth?); or defeat a group of goblins that have holed up in a mine that no one owns (how much is it worth?).
I also saw no problem with it. If the players want to mine the trap, then great. They will need to hire laborers to remove the iron, since there is way too much for them to do by themselves, in any timely manner. Diamond lake doesn't exactly have a lot of unemployed miners, so unless the players want to poach from the mine owners by paying premium they will have to import labor. They will need to hire teamsters to take it to market, as there is no market for iron in diamond lake. These employees will cost money, lowering their profit.
Then they will either have to purchase the cairn. I'm sure somebody owns the land and is likely to show up quick when it becomes apparent that there is something valuable there. If the land is unowned, then I'm sure Mayor Neff will show up with the proper paperwork showing his ownership pretty quick.
Assuming that they do all this then they sure can make money, but the curruption that is omnipresent in diamond lake will eat up a lot more of the bottom line.(a significant amount of their workforce will probably be on the payroll of Neff or Smenk) Also the money is not going to just show up immediately, it will filter in over time. A slow steady income is not going to make that big a difference. Especially with all the money they will have to layout to get the operation started.
A better option, if the players were real clever, would be to secure the rights to the cairn quietly, before anyone knows that it is valuable, then sell the rights to a developer. Again this probably wouldn't get them too much to ruin everything.
Saying it was an oversight was not necessarily a criticism as I felt it was easy to deal with. I just thought it comical that they probably didn't realize how much valuable iron was actually inside that room when they devised the trap. It's still a really cool trap.
The group I'm DMing is a kill all monsters, free everyone else, then loot everything possible group.
They drove Smenk out of town. Smart creatures avoid them.
I'm concerned about the next adventure that takes place in
The Wispering Cairn.
The balls are gone and the chamber beyond was locked up by the
ghost. The water room was drained. The statues were taken.
The Albino Half Orc and his two friends now work for the characters.
Hehe...and my players want me to figure out the value of the mirrors in Sodden Hold now. <sigh> If a 4"x4" small steel mirror is 10gp, so a 10' x 10' mirrored wall is 9000gp. <sigh>
Hehe...and my players want me to figure out the value of the mirrors in Sodden Hold now. <sigh> If a 4"x4" small steel mirror is 10gp, so a 10' x 10' mirrored wall is 9000gp. <sigh>
This is when you take a page out of vaudeville...
DM: You see an dwarf running toward you, being chased by orcs.
Party: Oh oh...
DM: Oh! The dwarf runs through the mirror! You take 2d6 damage from the breaking glass shards...
This problem is partially alleviated by the fact that, though the iron in total may be worth 350,000 - 500,000 gp, Diamond Lake can only cash out for 40,920 gp. What happens when Diamond Lake is tapped out is not covered under standard rules (Can the characters still sell their goods at a reduced price? How long until the town assets return?), but this will slow the players down fast. I suppose the next stop for the players would then be the Free City; three days travel could mean several ambushes or raids (Depending on how they secure their hoard). And once they get to the Free City... as a metropolis (IIRC), the Free City is home to hundreds of opportunities to sell the iron, and as many (If not more) to loose them.
Why bother? Its just a trap, not the focus of the campaign. Just say the effects of the Major Creation spell fade once they leave the Cairn. I thought the focus of Age of Worms was to fight the spawn of kyuss, not become Iron Ball Merchant Overlords :)
My players also wanted to 'Mine out' the Whispering Cairn and sell the iron on the open market.
I dealt with this by ruling that the enchantment that keeps the Whispering Cairn whole (and restores things like the lanterns) likewise keeps the iron balls from rusting. Furthermore, I ruled that removing the iron from the Whispering Cairn removes that magic's protection and thousands of years of oxidation (rusting) is allowed to catch up with the iron.
My players' wheelborrow full of iron balls turned to rust dust not long after the left the Cairn...
The mirrors may be 10 foot high, but they are 5 foot wide.
Made of a strange metal with no glass.
900 GP per mirror.
The xenophobic, vain, elves probably bought most of them.
Hehe...and my players want me to figure out the value of the mirrors in Sodden Hold now. <sigh> If a 4"x4" small steel mirror is 10gp, so a 10' x 10' mirrored wall is 9000gp. <sigh>
So you have four players, they sell it, and they get 2,250 gp each. If you feel that's too much, I suggest requiring a significant amount of effort to get them loose. My players are unlikely to be so mercenary so I doubt I'll have such joys. :)
This problem is partially alleviated by the fact that, though the iron in total may be worth 350,000 - 500,000 gp, Diamond Lake can only cash out for 40,920 gp. What happens when Diamond Lake is tapped out is not covered under standard rules (Can the characters still sell their goods at a reduced price? How long until the town assets return?), but this will slow the players down fast. I suppose the next stop for the players would then be the Free City; three days travel could mean several ambushes or raids (Depending on how they secure their hoard). And once they get to the Free City... as a metropolis (IIRC), the Free City is home to hundreds of opportunities to sell the iron, and as many (If not more) to loose them.
I doubt the PCs could ever get that many tons of iron to the Free City in one trip without powerful magic or a gigantic caravan. They'd definitely tap out the resources of Diamond Lake quickly, that's for sure. If the DM doesn't mind handing out all of Diamond Lake's cash that's fine. Bear in mind that the DMG says that when the PCs clean a town out of their gp reserve, a majority of it is likely to be in dulled copper and chipped silver coins, not shiny gold and platinum. I doubt they'd have a very easy time carrying 10,000 gp worth in cp. 10 tons of copper right there.
Hehe...and my players want me to figure out the value of the mirrors in Sodden Hold now. <sigh> If a 4"x4" small steel mirror is 10gp, so a 10' x 10' mirrored wall is 9000gp. <sigh>So you have four players, they sell it, and they get 2,250 gp each. If you feel that's too much, I suggest requiring a significant amount of effort to get them loose. My players are unlikely to be so mercenary so I doubt I'll have such joys. :)
Actually, I thought the entire labyrinth section was mirrored, as well as the room where the dopplegangers are. That's a ton of mirrors. I should I have put that in the original post. No biggie. I just thought it was funny.
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Creative Director
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What about all those adventures we publish where the PCs clear out a castle or house or other stronghold from the monsters living therein? According to the DMG (page 101), a simple house is worth 1,000 gp. A huge castle can be worth 1,000,000 gp; more if it has a moat with bridge! And what of the adventure where the PCs encounter a pirate ship and kill the crew in a random encounter? Suddenly they have a warship worth 25,000 gp!
What about all those adventures we publish where the PCs clear out a castle or house or other stronghold from the monsters living therein? According to the DMG (page 101), a simple house is worth 1,000 gp. A huge castle can be worth 1,000,000 gp; more if it has a moat with bridge! And what of the adventure where the PCs encounter a pirate ship and kill the crew in a random encounter? Suddenly they have a warship worth 25,000 gp!
This is what kills me. Another thread was devoted to it earlier, but if your PCs are ravenous looters who will take anything not nailed down (or come back with hammers, for what /is/ naild down) then their wealth will quickly outpace what should be expected of a party of their level.
ToEE was /horrible/ about it. I remember PCw piling up armor and weapons in a stockpile, then spending weeks travelling back and forth to Verbonoc to sell them.
It makes for interesting side quests, though; and you'd be surprised at how angry merchant guilds get when interlopers start stealing business from them...
When it comes to property, I try to avoid being heavy-handed about refusing the PCs; if they want to take the abandoned home and attempt to buy it, I'll let them do what they can to get their hands on it. Heirs may pop up, taxes will increase...it can radically alter the tone of the campaign.
In my current SCAP game, the bugbear Fighter wants to take over Jzadirune and the Malachite Fortress and use it as his base of operations. I'm fine with him trying it; NPCs will tend to give him a wide berth once it's discovered that he's living in a plague-infested warren. Occasional interlopers will make their way into the Malachite Fortress, and side treks will ensue...especially when one of Kazmojen's preferred customers show up looking for new "supplies."
Don't forget the volcanic eruption.
To misquote the Tick:
"You can't destroy the Earth. That's were I keep all my stuff!"
-GGG
What about all those adventures we publish where the PCs clear out a castle or house or other stronghold from the monsters living therein? According to the DMG (page 101), a simple house is worth 1,000 gp. A huge castle can be worth 1,000,000 gp; more if it has a moat with bridge! And what of the adventure where the PCs encounter a pirate ship and kill the crew in a random encounter? Suddenly they have a warship worth 25,000 gp!
I probably shouldn't go into my party's plan to turn Sodden Hold into an adventurer-killing gold mine? Player's schemes for money crack me up :)
I worked in a game shop where players could come and use our tables to play their games. I heard a new d.m get himself into a bit of a jam. This is the gist of it.
Um, and there's like a door in the wall.
We break down the door.
Um, you can't break it down.
But we have about fifty strength between us all.
The door is made of Adamantite.
We break out the cold chisels and remove the door, however long it takes.
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In the homebrew setting I'm running AOW in, the majority of the world is just coming out of a dark age where technology slid back into the Bronze age technology. Iron working is just beginning to take hold again and anything made out of refined iron or steel is very valuable. Naturally, a pit full of refined iron was a game-breaking problem for my campaign world.
Solution: I replaced the iron balls with thousands of humanoid skulls. A permanent obscuring mist effect on the floor of the pit prevented the PC's from seeing the grisly affair, and the odd hollow "poont" sound of a skull being launched into them from a magical pitching machine was more unnerving than a simple iron ball could ever be. Lots of fun fighting the grick on crunchy bones too. Made my player's cringe. >:)
... and I thought this thread was about an Iron Golem having guts.
Ultradan
Why not just have some higher level NPCs come along (the trio from Diamond Lake would serve very well indeed) and take the iron from them? Oh what a rivalry that would create!
It would be quite difficult, if not impossible, to get all that iron out without being detected. Not to mention the impact it would have on the economy. It wouldn't take long at all before the powers that be intervene and lay claim to all that iron.
Think of it like finding a shipwreck laden with gold just off the coast of some country. That country will lay claim to the treasure and, since it's within territorial waters, will have a legal right to do so. The Whispering Cairn is only an hour outside of Diamond Lake so it's easily within someone else's jurisdiction. For that much treasure, have them pull rank and seize it from the PCs (perhaps with a finder's fee, if you're feeling generous).
Or you can just say the PCs sell all the iron, become wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, and retire. End of campaign. That iron might not look so tempting afterall...
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hehe, after reading Lady Auroras (nods in her direction) comments; gm, please insert rust monster groupies; you know they are hungry and all that iron would be uhm; delicious. of course; haveing the pc wagon train that stuff back over the next several months to a smelter, then to various ports for sale would provide some nice bandit adventure as they get raided cause weath like spilled milk draws flies.
Lol Ultradan; I too read this tread thinking it was going to be asking how to put some vim and vinager into a lackluster party.