it can produce about 20 gallons of water every minute. This means that in desert villages can support crops and people easily.
No, it doesn't. You need at least 2,400 gallons/day of water to support an acre of wheat, which at best will produce enough food to support one person. Your trap will allow your "village" to have a population of maybe 12 people.
Here's a big one. The relative ease for movers and shakers to be resurrected if killed causes a strong move towards capturing and/or imprisoning them instead (you can't raise someone from the dead who isn't dead). If you combine this with specific rules that underground construction incorporating special materials or in particular areas dampens magical movement or divination, you've got an excellent explanation why there are so many dungeons around.
I imagine the Stasis spell would become very popular. They can't die, never complain, cant plot escape, etc.
They are, as are spells like the old enchanted Slumber. Another popular trick, back when restoration had a time limit, was to award your prisoners a healthy number of level drains prior to locking them in their cell.
Chain them up in a stone sphere, dump said sphere into the Astral Plane. Presuming Plane Shift needs an expensive material component, they can't get out and on the astral they won't die of age or hunger/thirst. Heck, any timeless pocket dimension would work for this. As long as they can't suicide...
it can produce about 20 gallons of water every minute. This means that in desert villages can support crops and people easily.No, it doesn't. You need at least 2,400 gallons/day of water to support an acre of wheat, which at best will produce enough food to support one person. Your trap will allow your "village" to have a population of maybe 12 people.
And like I noted it's a mere 250 gp for a single trap, which produces 20 gallons every minute, or 28,800 gallons in a 24 hour period. That's a single 250 gp trap. Every additional trap you add will increase this amount. That means that for less than the cost of a suit of full plate, you can produce 115,200 gallons worth of water per day, or 48 acres of wheat per day.
Any other complaints?
Stuff about wheat
I don't know where he got his numbers, but it's actually a little more complicated than that. I know, I know- I'm just being padantic. Well, freakin' humor me.
Anyway, you require roughly 784,080 square feet of water per season per acre. That's about 5,865,330 gallons of water per season per acre (give or take). Though there is some degree of variation, the planting season is roughly 24 weeks (or 170 days). That is approximately 34,502 gallons of water per day (this fluctuates heavily depending on spring wheat or winter wheat crops and is highly dependent on location). Now obviously it doesn't rain that much every day, or even rain at all every day. But that is the statistical average amount of precipitation (roughly 18' inches of rain) required over the course of the season to walk away with full yield....sort of. There really are more variables than I care to go into. Wouldn't wanna look like I sweat the small stuff or anything like that :P
Estimated yield (in bushels/acre) = 5.8 (SM + R/I - 4.1) bushels/acre
SM = soil moisture (inches)
R = rainfall (inches)
I = irrigation (inches)
The stated amount of 2,400 gallons/day is a far cry from accurate (unless I'm seriously misinformed about modern irrigation and farming). Now I realize this doesn't invalidate you're point any, I just thought I'd be a nit picky old bastard.
There is little point in creating nuclear power when there is nothing for it to power in the first place. There are however numerous bound outsiders that power things like lighting, fires, illusional creature comforts and so forth.
Also the use of animated dead has been done to death (pun intended) in the land of Geb, where zombie farmed produce is one of the countries cheif exports.
and you can't make a trap of create water because the guideline item is a decanter of endless water, which is 30k. Does something similar as far as being able to water people and animals, but not fields.
Paizo has specifically said that created undead are evil. Unless continually controlled, they wander off and kill living things. Areas with undead get rich in negative energy. Negative energy cancels positive energy...you know, life. So having an undead population around is going to cause your living population to slowly invert and plummet from things that are enhanced around undead...death, disease, dying, stillbirths, slow healing, etc. take a look at the last AP to find out what a society with a lot of undead around turns up being like. Unless you keep importing living slaves, life collapses.
So, no undead work force. Besides, unintelligent undead have no skill ranks in working skills, so they can't take 10. Unless continually directed, they will also continually foul up. Not efficient.
Walls of iron basically collapse into useless iron bits when you break them apart, and probably rust away to nothing quickly. It's magical iron...what do you expect?
Agreed that walls of stone and stone shape together can do awesome things...over a very long period of time. Without a high level caster, accomplishing stuff on the scale you are talking about is a minimum scale of months, if not years and more...and you need high level casters, who generally have much, much better things to do then cast Walls of Stone all day, unless you're paying them the 500 gp/day they could make creating magic items.
Fabricate basically lets you make a daily skill check for a spell. Agreed that allowing it to make complex items from raw materials instantly can be abused. However, poisons are right out...had a player try this, and he gave me the volume of poison he was handling. Well, he wasn't an assassin, it was a massive volume of poison, and he had to make a bunch of poison saves for Con damage.
His body was black when it hit the ground. The spell was interrupted, and failed, scattering deadly poison all over the place. It got into the ground water, the air, etc...let's just say he didn't try that again, and no good priest agreed to raise him, either...
You're also abusing the trap rules, which don't work that way in Pathfinder. PF has its own trap rules. Trap rules which make beneficial spells have to abide by the similar item magic rules, not the 'spam' rules of traps. Create Food and Water trap would be priced at a multiplier of a Murlynd's Spoon, for instance.
===Aelryinth
better irrigation data
My 2,400 gallons/acre is based on a whole bunch of assumptions about 100% effective delivery of water to red hard spring wheat (nothing running off, nothing evaporating before the plant can get it, etc.) that were intended to absolutely generously overstate the amount of crops that create water can support, in order to drive home that no, create water cannot be successfully used for world-changing, it doesn't produce enough water.
And like I noted it's a mere 250 gp for a single trap
Ah, yes, "a mere 250 gp". Sure. After all, a laborer can save up that much in a mere 6.8 years, if he doesn't have to spend any of his income on food, housing, clothes, or taxes.
If you're talking "a few isolated middle-of-the-desert villages here and there built by wealthy eccentrics", sure, you can pull that off with create water. But the subject of the thread is world-changing magic.
12 acres per trap means 53.33 per square mile. You can, say, cut that in half if the area has enough rain to provide half the water the crops need. In that case, you can turn an arid area the size of Rhode Island into cropland for 7 million gp, or 70 million laborer-days' worth of income. And you still have 99.97% of the Sahara left to go.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Oh, and for Prisoners, use Flesh to Stone, store them away in a lead box somewhere. If you're a Transmuter specialist, you can even keep them aware and aging if you like. Bring them out when it's their time, save on storage costs and food.
Alternately, smack their intelligence and polymorph them into something useful, like a pig or a cow or mule, and get some use out of them when they lose their intellect and become just normal animals. that rapist looks like a good candidate to be a chicken or a sow in my book...
===Aelryinth
Oh, and for Prisoners, use Flesh to Stone, store them away in a lead box somewhere. If you're a Transmuter specialist, you can even keep them aware and aging if you like. Bring them out when it's their time, save on storage costs and food.
Alternately, smack their intelligence and polymorph them into something useful, like a pig or a cow or mule, and get some use out of them when they lose their intellect and become just normal animals. that rapist looks like a good candidate to be a chicken or a sow in my book...
===Aelryinth
+1
If you're talking "a few isolated middle-of-the-desert villages here and there built by wealthy eccentrics", sure, you can pull that off with create water. But the subject of the thread is world-changing magic.
"A journey of a thousand miles is started with a single step."
And it doesn't take 'wealthy eccentrics' it takes someone that can afford full plate... that's a level 4 NPC... at worse a level 6... if the NPC can't perform the sort of shenanigans that people let PCs get away with using crafting feats and what not.
If a NPC has a single rank in profession he can weekly bring home at least 2.5 gp *yes this is the minimum(assuming no bonus in wisdom and it is a class skill) -- so yeah about 2 years to get that first trap... if he doesn't spend on anything else in that time. He's much more likely to be earning 7 gp a week, which cuts the time needed down remarkably and still leaves him room for a decent lifestyle (an average life style takes 10 gp a month which would be about 2.5 gp a week -- leaving 5 gp a week for saving).
So a single NPC can easily put the money together for this sort of 'quest' and he doesn't have to be particularly wealthy to do it either.
And fortunately traps don't follow the same rules as wondrous items do.
and you can't make a trap of create water because the guideline item is a decanter of endless water, which is 30k. Does something similar as far as being able to water people and animals, but not fields.
Yes, you can. Likewise a decanter of endless water is a far cry from merely a water creation effect. It is also a weapon, and capable of gushing out huge amounts of water at an alarming pace.
Paizo has specifically said that created undead are evil. Unless continually controlled, they wander off and kill living things. Areas with undead get rich in negative energy. Negative energy cancels positive energy...you know, life. So having an undead population around is going to cause your living population to slowly invert and plummet from things that are enhanced around undead...death, disease, dying, stillbirths, slow healing, etc. take a look at the last AP to find out what a society with a lot of undead around turns up being like. Unless you keep importing living slaves, life collapses.
That's great and all but I'm talking core. Even the fluff contradicts itself and goes on to say that mindless undead are incapable of doing more than following orders. That much has been mentioned before. Likewise, this was not a discussion about the morality but cold hard facts, and the fact is undead are damn efficient at being brute labor. Meanwhile, no you don't need to import living slaves. The entire thing is based on the assumption that you have living citizens and raise living livestock, and when they die their bodies return to the workforce as their souls travel to the great beyond.
So, no undead work force. Besides, unintelligent undead have no skill ranks in working skills, so they can't take 10. Unless continually directed, they will also continually foul up. Not efficient.
Yes, undead work force. That's kind of the idea of undead. Mindless minions who do your grunt work. Likewise, yes, they can take 10. You do not require ranks in a skill to take 10 and both Craft and Profession are not trained only. A non-ability has a +0 when applied to keyed skills and similar, so an undead can indeed take 10 and preform routine tasks, but cannot do tasks that require training (hence "untrained laborer") like digging ditches, carrying stuff, or digging holes and planting seeds while an experienced farmer oversees their work.
Agreed that walls of stone and stone shape together can do awesome things...over a very long period of time. Without a high level caster, accomplishing stuff on the scale you are talking about is a minimum scale of months, if not years and more...and you need high level casters, who generally have much, much better things to do then cast Walls of Stone all day, unless you're paying them the 500 gp/day they could make creating magic items.
I never said that everyone was doing it, but a PC certainly can, and it certainly can change the world.
Fabricate basically lets you make a daily skill check for a spell. Agreed that allowing it to make complex items from raw materials instantly can be abused. However, poisons are right out...had a player try this, and he gave me the volume of poison he was handling. Well, he wasn't an assassin, it was a massive volume of poison, and he had to make a bunch of poison saves for Con damage.
That's great but we're using the rules here. According to fabricate you merely make the appropriate check to transform X into Y. It's not even a matter of daily. Just mass. Your house rules don't concern me.
You're also abusing the trap rules, which don't work that way in Pathfinder. PF has its own trap rules. Trap rules which make beneficial spells have to abide by the similar item magic rules, not the 'spam' rules of traps. Create Food and Water trap would be priced at a multiplier of a Murlynd's Spoon, for instance.
Again, I care little for your making stuff up.
The more you know
.
Nice. ^-^
Ah, yes, "a mere 250 gp". Sure. After all, a laborer can save up that much in a mere 6.8 years, if he doesn't have to spend any of his income on food, housing, clothes, or taxes.
If you're talking "a few isolated middle-of-the-desert villages here and there built by wealthy eccentrics", sure, you can pull that off with create water. But the subject of the thread is world-changing magic.
12 acres per trap means 53.33 per square mile. You can, say, cut that in half if the area has enough rain to provide half the water the crops need. In that case, you can turn an arid area the size of Rhode Island into cropland for 7 million gp, or 70 million laborer-days' worth of income. And you still have 99.97% of the Sahara left to go.
You haven't bothered to actually read the rules at all, have you? The average untrained laborer taking 10 on Craft/Profession checks earns 5 gp per week, or 20 gp per month. The average cost of living in the core rules is 10 gp/month. That means most commoners have 10 gp after taxes and common expenses each month, which means that a single commoner can save up 120 gp over the course of a year.
Now if only about 1/2 the average cost of living is gained as income for the local lord, he's making 5gp per commoner per month. A lord with a group of 300 commoners would bring in 1,500 gp every month, which is 500 gp more than it costs to live extravagantly by the rules. Which means that he could conceivably afford two water creation devices per month. It would be a large investment, but if you were colonizing a new dominion it would be very much worth it. More land means more people which means more money.
Likewise these devices can be made by any 3rd level adept with Craft Wondrous Item, which means they don't require high level wizards, PC-classed characters, or anyone even exceptionally mundane (heck a 3rd level adept is according to Paizo about as tough as your average barmaid - and yes I do think that's kind of stupid).
Economics in D&D and Pathfinder gives an idea as to how the world would work using Pathfinder rules as the basis. We're discussing what magic and such can do when presented in the world as-is. I care little about people complaining because it's not realistic. That's not really the point of this discussion.
Effectively, magic produces energy and mass from nothing. It is the ultimate technology. It's beyond the tech in Star Wars and Star Trek combined. Magic makes wormholes look like the cave-man's method of travel. Magic produces free-energy from literally nothing. That's why it is magic. Magic at its fundamental levels would be capable of powering entire cities, because you can literally harness lightning on an infinite scale.
This is of course about magic changing the world.
1) You convert material of one sort into a product that is of the same material. Creatures or magic items cannot be created or transmuted by the fabricate spell. The quality of items made by this spell is commensurate with the quality of material used as the basis for the new fabrication. If you work with a mineral, the target is reduced to 1 cubic foot per level instead of 10 cubic feet.
You must make an appropriate Craft check to fabricate articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.
Casting requires 1 round per 10 cubic feet of material to be affected by the spell.
--
When you craft poison, you run the risk of poisoning yourself. This craft check is done by dosage created.
He tried making a LOT of poison. That's a LOT of craft checks you can't take 10 on (Personal harm). That was a LOT of poisoning himself. And it all happened instantly, but he wasn't through them all when he was dead, and being dead kind of obviates a spell in progress.
2) Magic items all fall under the 'similar items' rule first. You don't get to use the trap rules just because they are cheaper. The trap rules are no more valid for item creation then the Infinite CLW ring and the True Strike sword. Infinite water creation falls under the aegis of the decanter of endless water. Even if you knock off the power stream, you are still looking at significant cash outlay. Ditto food creation. So, quit house-ruling that the overarching rules of item creation don't apply.
3) Undead labor doesn't work over the long term because it KILLS THE LIVING. Ergo, it doesn't matter how much undead you have, at some point, unless you go out and grab the living from some other area, you run out of a living population by secondary effects. Geb is a state that endorses slavery...it goes raiding/buys more population. And non-intelligent undead cannot take 10...it's a conscious choice required. And again, the whole 'if not overseen, they go around and try to kill the living part' means you have to have continuous and active oversight.
In short, you're grabbing the rules you want to, and not the rest of them that have been noted as applying.
If you want real labor over time, you'd just build constructs that you could actually give whatever skill ranks and intelligence level you wanted to to them, and they'd never go off task. Costs more then the 50 gp/hd to Animate Dead, however.
4) PF has the Mana Wastes, which resulted from overuse of magic. That's potential proof right there that over-reliance on active magic use can prove disastrous...and how many magic-intensive/reliant empires have perished on Golarion? When it fails, it fails spectacularly.
==Aelryinth
When you craft poison, you run the risk of poisoning yourself. This craft check is done by dosage created.
He tried making a LOT of poison. That's a LOT of craft checks you can't take 10 on (Personal harm). That was a LOT of poisoning himself. And it all happened instantly, but he wasn't through them all when he was dead, and being dead kind of obviates a spell in progress.
Doing something dangerous is different from being "in danger." Crafting doesn't prevent you from taking 10, whether it's a bomb, alchemist fire, or poison. You just have to not be in combat or distracted. Jumping over a 10-foot chasm is most certainly dangerous, but you are not in danger when you do it: most people will never fail assuming a running start, no distractions, and good footing.
Taking 10 to craft poison is perfectly fine.
1) You convert material of one sort into a product that is of the same material. Creatures or magic items cannot be created or transmuted by the fabricate spell. The quality of items made by this spell is commensurate with the quality of material used as the basis for the new fabrication. If you work with a mineral, the target is reduced to 1 cubic foot per level instead of 10 cubic feet.
You must make an appropriate Craft check to fabricate articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.
Casting requires 1 round per 10 cubic feet of material to be affected by the spell.
--
When you craft poison, you run the risk of poisoning yourself. This craft check is done by dosage created.
He tried making a LOT of poison. That's a LOT of craft checks you can't take 10 on (Personal harm). That was a LOT of poisoning himself. And it all happened instantly, but he wasn't through them all when he was dead, and being dead kind of obviates a spell in progress.
Taking 10 is legal.
2) Magic items all fall under the 'similar items' rule first. You don't get to use the trap rules just because they are cheaper. The trap rules are no more valid for item creation then the Infinite CLW ring and the True Strike sword. Infinite water creation falls under the aegis of the decanter of endless water. Even if you knock off the power stream, you are still looking at significant cash outlay. Ditto food creation. So, quit house-ruling that the overarching rules of item creation don't apply.
The cost of creating traps doesn't make it cheaper. In fact for the most part it comes out to being the same creation cost as any other wondrous item that throws a spell around at-will. Likewise, I would like to see a rules quote to back up your argument since you seem insistent upon arguing this.
3) Undead labor doesn't work over the long term because it KILLS THE LIVING. Ergo, it doesn't matter how much undead you have, at some point, unless you go out and grab the living from some other area, you run out of a living population by secondary effects. Geb is a state that endorses slavery...it goes raiding/buys more population. And non-intelligent undead cannot take 10...it's a conscious choice required. And again, the whole 'if not overseen, they go around and try to kill the living part' means you have to have continuous and active oversight....
Again you're making stuff up. There's nothing that says that undead cannot take 10. In fact it would make the utmost sense that they would only take 10 unless it was not an option since they would do everything exactly the same way using the same efforts without variation unless instructed. As for the fluff, I don't really care about it. There's nothing in the rules now or ever that causes undead to spontaneously cause stuff to start dying around them because they merely exist, so I really don't care about this.
4) PF has the Mana Wastes, which resulted from overuse of magic. That's potential proof right there that over-reliance on active magic use can prove disastrous...and how many magic-intensive/reliant empires have perished on Golarion? When it fails, it fails spectacularly.
GOLARIAN has the Mana Wastes. Pathfinder is a game system, derived from the 3.5 system, derived from the 3E system, and it's all the d20 system. The Mana Wastes are no more a part of the Core Pathfinder campaign setting than Spellfire and Eliminster are.
Seriously man.
You haven't bothered to actually read the rules at all, have you?
Core rules, p.159 and p.163, thanks. Laborers make 1 sp/day. Right there in black-and-white.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
You haven't bothered to actually read the rules at all, have you?Core rules, p.159 and p.163, thanks. Laborers make 1 sp/day. Right there in black-and-white.
And then you can easily see that they can alternatively take 10 on Profession or Craft and make 5 gp per week. Skill checks do not work differently for NPCs unless specifically noted.
Since one is a core mechanical function and one is basically an estimation based on nothing, I will go with what the crunch says, and the crunch says that the laborer earns 5 gp per week.
Permanent animate objects on a millstone is the first step to the mechanization of golarion. You can have a single animated gear as a motor for an infinite variety of devices.
The more you knowNice. ^-^
You do realize the problem he was pointing out is that create water would actually be more than ten times less efficient at irrigating wheat than the numbers I suggested — you need 34,500 gallons per acre per day, not a mere 2,400. Which is to say, your 250 gp trap, by his numbers, actually only makes enough water to irrigate 0.84 acres, not 12 acres.
You do realize the problem he was pointing out is that create water would actually be more than ten times less efficient at irrigating wheat than the numbers I suggested — you need 34,500 gallons per acre per day, not a mere 2,400. Which is to say, your 250 gp trap, by his numbers, actually only makes enough water to irrigate 0.84 acres, not 12 acres.The more you knowNice. ^-^
Yep. I'm fine with that. It's pretty interesting, actually. It would be interesting to see what sort of investment it would take to fund entire fields. Perhaps set up an irrigation system. I don't know a whole lot about wheat as most of the crops in my area tend to be corn, cotton, tobacco, strawberries, and so forth, but it's interesting to think about. I've seen what a little bit of water can do for most common crops like potatoes, tomatoes, vine beans, melons, okra, peanuts, collards, onions, sweet potatoes, and so forth; so I know that having access to thousands of gallons of water a day can prepare a lot of land if you can spread it over your crops. I admit to being unfamiliar with growing wheat though.
However, this is an interesting subject to me because it can affect how I look at the game and the world within it. I like to keep verisimilitude pretty steady, and it makes sense that in a world with magic that people would be using this fantastic resource to make life easier or do things with it that we can only dream of.
How much would it take to use magic to colonize in a desert and make an oasis city amidst a dangerous and terrible wasteland of monsters and brigands? What would it actually take to make an entire city that floats in the sky? What would life in a pseudo-medival city be like with magic? Would you see running water and continual flame street lamps be next to horses clad in barding, being ridden by knights bearing magical dragon crests that spring to life and breath fire?
The 3.x DMG basically said the best way to break verisimilitude in a world with magic is to act like life is somehow like life was our own history, where people somehow are distant from the forces that otherwise saturate the rest of the world. It breaks suspension of disbelief, and it is interesting.
So taking an excerpt from the blogger post I linked to earlier, let's look at what sort of investment we'd be looking at again.
AlvenaPublishing.Blogspot.com[/url]"]Suddenly, the idea of a community pooling their money to pay brave adventurers to save their village makes a lot of sense. If you had four hundred people in a village, and just 75% of them were actually doing their part, that would be 300 villagers who were producing at least an average of 10 gold each per month, or 3,000 gold pieces between all of them. If the lord of the land was making 50% of their cost of living each month (5 gold per villager), that would be 1,500 gp in his pocket every month. In a single year, the lord would acquire 18,000 gold pieces worth of wealth from his people.
So let's say our lord of the land, who runs a small village of 400 people is making 1,500 gp a month. So he has 18,000 gp to invest per year. Now a solid amount of this will probably go towards all kinds of things, including his extravagant living. However, if we just took 500 gp from from this amount, you could have two of these devices constructed that month. Then two the next month, and then two the next month. It might take a while, but Rome wasn't built in a day, and a potentially portable self-renewing water source likewise isn't (unless you have some crazy adventurer walk into town and commission fifty of them).
So every month you would increase your water production by 57,600 gallons per 24 period. So in one year worth of investing, you'd have 691,200 gallons of water being produced every 24 hours or 20,736,000 gallons of water per month. That's a lot of water. If you wanted, you could also construct a system using purify food and drink to function as a continuous filtration system that purifies contaminated water, allowing you to literally recycle used water into fresh clean water once again.
On another note, you could create some sort of device - such as say a sacred statue of a goddess of plants and fertility - that essentially cast plant growth repeatedly each day using the Enrichment option for about 7,500 gp which would increase the crop yields by a third for half a mile. You could then cart the blessed relic around the kingdom passing around this bountiful blessing to the people.
Also, any sentient construct such as a homunculus, or sentient undead, can use a lyre of building indefinitely, effectively creating another form of infinite labor. All they need is enough ranks or situational modifiers (via buffs, magic items, whatever) to take 10 on the Perform check.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Infinite Food & Water: A magic trap of
Infinite Water on the Cheap:
Trap out of a positive spell. Not on my watch.
You don't get to benefit from easier construction rules only because you call a trap something that clearly isn’t.
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,
.
Wall of stone: yes, but it produce limestone or equivalent stone, nothing special.Wall of iron: “Iron created by this spell is not suitable for use in the creation of other objects and cannot be sold.”
It is a bit strange but probably it is a bad quality alloy.
Fabricate: going by the RAW of the spell it is way less almighty that it seem at first reading: “You convert material of one sort into a product that is of the same material.
So you can convert a stone to a statue or steel into several sword blades, but you can’t build an item that has 2 or more material components, so you can’t build finished swords, build houses, you can’t even turn iron minerals into iron ingots (as it would produce 2 end items, the iron ingots and the slag, mad of different materials from the starting material).
Undead Laborers: costly to produce and in need of constant directions by someone with the power to control them. Good for very menial activities in a controlled environment. (they would be great to do the initial digging of the Panama Channel or work in a cave, but little more). Remember that you need a spellcaster to control them and he need to have 1 level in his spellcasting class every 4 hd of undead controlled.
Sadly they will not remove the need for slaves, only reduce it.
Want infinite mechanical energy? Permanent reverse gravity. Put fly wheel on one of the edges (not top or bottom). Not that hard.
|
|
Alternately, smack their intelligence and polymorph them into something useful, like a pig or a cow or mule, and get some use out of them when they lose their intellect and become just normal animals. that rapist looks like a good candidate to be a chicken or a sow in my book...
===Aelryinth
Old rule (2nd ed). Now baleful polymorph is again permanent and the target don't revet back on his death.
The old ring of samll animals to draft horses created to feed the gryphons work again.
So it is possible to feed the population turning mice into cows.
Edit:
Hack, no, BP turn the targets only in small sized creatures.
If you're a Transmuter specialist, you can even keep them aware and aging if you like.
Care to explain where that bit come from? I don't see anything like that.
Has anyone mentioned Control Weather and Plant Growth to help cultivate otherwise near-infertile areas? Buy cheap land with bad soil, fertilize, and farm.
Once the soil has been naturally replenished with crop rotation, distribute the land to the common people, charge a monthly tax, and use the profits to build a kingdom.
|
|
Wikipedia say: It takes around 3,000 litres of water, converted from liquid to vapour, to produce enough food to satisfy one person's daily dietary need.
That is 792.5 US gallons
A magic item constantly producing water, made at CL 3 will produce 6 gallons every round. i.e. 1 gallon/second.
86.400 gallon/day, enough for 109 persons.
Let's make it a nice round number, 100 persons/item. (it require a near perfect aqueduct and/or water delivery system. Most current systems have an horrendous level of losses during transportation, but this is a fantasy game)
The effect is comparable to the middle effect of a Decantler of endless water: "“Fountain” produces a 5-foot-long stream at 5 gallons per round."
A price of 3.000 gp seem about right.
Common labourers will never be capable to afford them, and even artisans will have a hard time unless they would be pooling their resources together (like a guild or something similar).
In true medieval fashion it would be the property of the local ruler, like it often happened for the mill.
He would be then applying some kind of "water tax" to the use of the created water.
The tax would be aimed primarily at farmers owning tracts of lands or at sharecroppers. About 3 gp/year for each tract of land large enough to feed a person will pay back the magic fountain cost in 10 years.
Surely feasible. But worth it only where natural water is scarce.
you'd have 691,200 gallons of water being produced every 24 hours or 20,736,000 gallons of water per month. That's a lot of water.
No, it really isn't. 6.4 acre-feet a month is not very much water if you're trying to irrigate arid land.
Worse, create water explicitly specifies that the water disappears after 24 hours if not consumed, so you can't store any of the water you're making. Two create water traps, working constantly, produce enough water on a daily basis to . . . keep one minimum-depth Olympic swimming pool continually filled as the water created 24 hours earlier disappears.
There are lots of potentially world-changing applications of magic in Pathfinder, yes. I'm not denying that. I'm pointing out that your create water traps are not one of them. The spell just doesn't make enough water to do it. It takes quite literally hundreds of thousands of create water devices to turn a mere 30 mile by 30 mile patch of desert into cropland.
it can produce about 20 gallons of water every minute. This means that in desert villages can support crops and people easily.No, it doesn't. You need at least 2,400 gallons/day of water to support an acre of wheat, which at best will produce enough food to support one person. Your trap will allow your "village" to have a population of maybe 12 people.And like I noted it's a mere 250 gp for a single trap, which produces 20 gallons every minute, or 28,800 gallons in a 24 hour period. That's a single 250 gp trap. Every additional trap you add will increase this amount. That means that for less than the cost of a suit of full plate, you can produce 115,200 gallons worth of water per day, or 48 acres of wheat per day.
Any other complaints?
Wow that whole resetting trap mechanic is horribly exploitable. What if I create boots that are trapped to do a cure on me every time I step on them, cure lite would only cost 500 GP, talk about regeneration. Guess I will be house ruling that one, traps are just for traps, not for unlimited spell casting
Magic traps are generally immobile, but that's RAI not RAW to my knowledge.
Magic is present in Golarian today, but not to the level where it's impacting the economy on a munchkin level.
According to the rules for magic item and spell casting availability by settlement size, its highly likely that everyone in the world has seen and interacted with magic of some kind. Thorps have a 75% chance to have any magic item worth 50gp or less to be available on a weekly basis. There are 1d4 minor magical items over that base amount (up to 500 gp). On top of that 1st level spells are regularly available for purchase. And that is just in a Thorp, the smallest possible settlement. The larger the settlement, the more powerful spells and items likely to have been seen or interacted with at some point.
In larger settlements magical goods and more powerful spellcasting are more readily available. That would not be the case unless there was a lucrative market for them and the settlement rules agree. A metropolis has a 75% chance per week to have any item worth 16,000 GP or less available for purchase. That means that high valued magical inventory is being moved regularly. This is in addition to the weekly 4d4 medium and 3d4 major magical items with a value in excess of 16k GP (up to 100k GP).
So while its true there aren't streets of gold (actually a possibility for a planar metropolis), it isn't true that magic isn't heavily affecting the economy on a global scale. Quite the opposite, in fact; magic is the majority of all major investments.
Magic/Tech fusions are definitely no where near the level they are in Eberron, air travel is in it's relative infancy.
Minor nit pick: Air ships in Eberron are actually quite new. They were invented in 988 YK and only saw use in the final 8 years of the Last War. They are also in relative infancy. True story :)
Well Golarion has a giant space station/ship that crashed into the world and created a giant techno-mountain full of dungeons with weird creatures and constructs from another world. Likewise, any 13th level wizard can take an afternoon stroll to the moon and back again, or pop over to a galaxy far far away with a casting of greater teleport.
Screw hyperspace travel. :P
On a side note, there's something to be said about fantasy battles on trains and flying machines. In the arcade game "Dungeons & Dragons: Shadows over Mystara" they had both flying ships and trains, mixed with gnolls, troglodytes, dragons, demons, drake-riding dark elves, gargoyles, beholders, displacer beasts, goblins and goblin war machines, stirges, magical swords of legend, cursed weapons to be cleansed, a city of tiny gnomes, devious castles and traps, shapeshifting colossal red dragons, powerful liches, mage-knights, ghouls and skeletons, and gnomes that drop bombs from airships on a big demon.
Also for the record Mystara is a classic D&D fantasy campaign.
Wow that whole resetting trap mechanic is horribly exploitable. What if I create boots that are trapped to do a cure on me every time I step on them, cure lite would only cost 500 GP, talk about regeneration. Guess I will be house ruling that one, traps are just for traps, not for unlimited spell casting
Unlimited spellcasting isn't that big a deal. Just really expensive for anything past 1st level spells. It's worth noting that the cost to craft (not market price) a trap that repeatedly casts cure light wounds each round is the same cost as a magic item that casts cure light wounds every round at-will (1,000 gp in creation cost).
Now some GMs might really get upset because healing for basic wounds can be so readily available to parties, but honestly it doesn't change how the game plays too heavily. It could end up making non-casters a bit more attractive since it means they actually could win the war of attrition versus spellcasters in long games, since they would be able to heal about 50 hp per minute between fights by spamming their belt of cure light wounds over and over again.
On a side note, the boots you describe would be really funny as a cursed object (it would probably only seem cursed if you were undead). Put the shoes on, can't get 'em off, every round you move you're hit by a CL 1 cure light wounds spell (average +5 hp). Swap cure light for inflict light for a living-hostile version.
Y'know, this idea amuses me enough I might write these up and drop them into one of my games. I'm sure if the party found boots of unyielding stamina that gave +1 Con and cast cure light wounds on you each time you moved, they would think they were very interesting and might even keep them.
Paizo has specifically said that created undead are evil. Unless continually controlled, they wander off and kill living things. Areas with undead get rich in negative energy. Negative energy cancels positive energy...you know, life. So having an undead population around is going to cause your living population to slowly invert and plummet from things that are enhanced around undead...death, disease, dying, stillbirths, slow healing, etc. take a look at the last AP to find out what a society with a lot of undead around turns up being like. Unless you keep importing living slaves, life collapses.So, no undead work force. Besides, unintelligent undead have no skill ranks in working skills, so they can't take 10. Unless continually directed, they will also continually foul up. Not efficient.
You're aware that Golarion contains a nation that has worked this way for over 4,000 years without collapsing, right?
Seems like that makes your argument laughably false.
-Kle.
Obviously you can't read, either. As I specifically mentioned that Geb is a slave-taking state, and continually infusing its living population from outside its borders.
You want to know what undead do an environment, you only need look at northern Ustalav and the legacy of the Whispering Tyrant.
==Aelryinth
On the Flesh to Stone, I'm flashing back to a 3.5 variant rule for Transmuters in a Forgotten Realms module, specifically two brothers in Waterdeep, one of them a transmuter spec who invented a variant Flesh to Glass spell, where transmuters casting the spell could keep the petrified people aware if they so chose.
==Aelryinth
Can we please stop using Golarion's nations as if they were somehow rule citations? Because they're not. There's a lot of people that play in different campaigns with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, not just the world of Golarion. There is literally noting in the core that says what you are suggesting, Aelryinth.
Likewise, skeletons do have anything suggesting that they suddenly abandon their previous orders to run off and start slaughtering babies and such. In fact, it merely says they have "an evil cunning that allows them to use weapons".
So yeah, if you have a necromancer who crafts and orb or similar arcane tool that uses animate dead once per day to animate 10 HD worth of undead as a spell-trigger, the orb would cost 7,250 gp. Expensive, but it would allow 1st level adepts to produce 10 HD of undead per day, and the material component is already factored into the magic item.
Now there's nothing that suggests adepts are any rarer than any other NPC class such as warrior or expert. In fact, due to the availability of common magic items, potions, and the like, it's likely that adepts are probably the most common crafters of basic magical items.
So now let's say you have a single necromancer of 7th level. He has leadership. As his followers he gets some adepts and then explains his plan to use necromancy to create a utopia where people will want for little, and then has each of these adepts use the orb to animate up to 10 HD worth of undead per adept. He now has a lot of undead. Now these undead don't have to be humanoid, they could be livestock (oxen are only 20 gp and are very strong undead at 3 HD each).
So then the necromancer goes and saves a village from some sort of peril. Say the necromancer swoops in and drives off a clan of orc raiders with his skeletal oxen, and then is seen as something of an unlikely hero to the people. So he then turns and calls to these people to join him in building a grander village, or a kingdom, or whatever. Regardless, he just gets a few people on his side and they form a community (could even be a little cult commune).
So now you have families who are aligned with your necromancer who seems like a hero (if Cheliaxians can worship Asmodeous, I'm pretty sure someone can forgive mindless polished skeletons). They set to building their families and you set to having them educated in the basics of magic so they too can use these magic orbs to animate and oversee undead. You instigate a system of trade where you either buy the deceased corpses of people (say a contract similar to donating your body to science) or use the bodies of executed criminals such as murderers, rapists, etc.
As your influence grows, your people acquire a larger amount of undead. For every living adult you have you could have up to 10 medium 1 HD skeletons under their command, doing stuff like working fields, picking crops, cutting wheat, or whatever. As your society grows, you use this influx in the basic workforce to help build colleges where your living people can go to get a government funded education and be fed lots of sweet propaganda to build their moral about helping their village/city/nation/empire grow. They study the arts, science, and so forth. Almost everyone receives some training in magic, and you end up with a higher caliber of people in your nation.
So how does this skeleton workforce stack up next to nations who refuse to accept the assistance of undead labor because they think it's "ewwy"?
Well every year you will have a certain number of births and a certain number of deaths. As people in your kingdom die, your workforce grows. Your workforce also doubles as your military force, because every undead worker, beast, and so forth are also ready for battle at a moment's notice. Most of your workforce doesn't eat, sleep, or get sick, so your productivity versus expenses in terms of resources is immense. Your people are more educated, and thus can pioneer new advances in technology and magic faster than those around them.
Every year, non-undead using societies have a number of births and a number of deaths. The dead are then either a waste of space in graveyards or are disposed of through cremation or whatever, but ultimately you're only increasing your dominion if you are having more children born than people die. Your people then must be divided into different groups for grunt labor, professionals, scholars, and soldiers, which means that their productivity is lessened greatly.
============================
Here's another way to look at it. Ever play Age of Empires II? Imagine that for every adult villager your kingdom poops out, you instead get a villager who animates 10 more workers to collect lumber, wood, stone, gold, and food. Meanwhile every single one of these 10 minions also functions as a fast-moving soldiers who are nearly immune to arrows (DR 5/bludgeoning), are tougher (+2 natural armor), can wear cheap armor (+2 armor), and come with weapons (2 natural claw attacks), who can patrol and march indefinitely, doesn't require food (Hey, your army DOESN'T march on its stomach).
Now I don't really pay a lot of attention to what Geb does. Honestly any society that embraces undeath and still has to keep a slave caste is a failure and should get new leadership.
Also, let's go back and think about the water discussion. Supporting a population's need for food and resources is a hard deal. However undead don't have to eat, sleep, or drink. If you experience something akin to the black plague and a lot of your people die, your workforce just expanded, and you can use prestidigitation to clean them, or dunk the skeletons in vats of alcohol or something to kill the bacteria.
Skeletons also don't produce biological waste. You don't have to worry about large scale waste management in work areas where you have a workforce of skeletons, 'cause for every 20 skeletons you got about 1 guy pulling the strings. So a group of 200 skeletons is actually only about 10 guys who actually need to eat, drink, rest, and poop.
Likewise, putting them on auto-pilot isn't that hard. Skeletons are mindless but they're not stupid. They're like robots. They cannot think for themselves but they have an equivalent to a 10 Intelligence for carrying out tasks and the like. If you wanted them to dig a ditch, but you were sleepy, you could draw them a picture of what you wanted, tell them to dig the ditch from point A to B and then stop and do nothing until you woke back up and gave them new orders.
In term of sheer efficiency, we have about 10-20 workers for every person that needs to eat. Yes sir, I'll take as many as you can give me.
=====
PS: As much as I love Arthas from WC3, he's a moron. If you wipe out all the living people in the world, then you doom your undead kingdom to stagnation and limit your reign.
To have a true kingdom of perfect prosperity, you must balance both sides of the coin. For it is life and unlife that are separated by death, but ultimately they are two sides of the same coin. The closer life draws to undeath the faster it approaches death, and the closer life approaches to undeath the faster it approaches death.
The spell you need is Interplanetary Teleport.Well Golarion has a giant space station/ship that crashed into the world and created a giant techno-mountain full of dungeons with weird creatures and constructs from another world. Likewise, any 13th level wizard can take an afternoon stroll to the moon and back again, or pop over to a galaxy far far away with a casting of greater teleport.
No you don't. People have been using greater teleport to travel in space for a hell of a lot longer than the spell planetary teleport has been around. Planetary teleport is just safer. See Planetary teleport won't let you accidentally 'port yourself into a star or something you mistook as a planet.
Greater teleport can transport you anywhere on the same plane of existance, which means that you can pop from one side of the universe to the other, but not from one universe to another. Get it?
Liches were the quintessential space explorers before interplanetary teleport because they could prep their spells, leave all their valuables in their lair, set the odd contingency to destroy themselves if something went horribly wrong and they were somehow trapped, and then port themselves around the galaxy, exploring planets and hiding phylacteries until to their dead-heart's content. If they accidentally ported into a star, a planet with doomsday gravity, acidic atmospheric conditions, or somewhere where the crust of the planet boiled with liquid magma...
Well they can try again in 1d10 days.
|
|
Likewise, skeletons do have anything suggesting that they suddenly abandon their previous orders to run off and start slaughtering babies and such. In fact, it merely says they have "an evil cunning that allows them to use weapons".
ecc
First, a first level adept could control only 4 HD of undead, so your orb would rise only 4 Hd of them as a safety measure.
The adept rise them and order: cut a hole in the ground, size 20'x20' and pile the excavated earth there (the foundation of a house, ordering them to build a house is too complicated).
Next day he raise another 4 HD of skeletons and give the same order. He lose control of the first 4 skeletons. I agree that there is no reason for them to stop obeying the last order they received. The problem is that now you can't change it.
Same thing every day till the foundation is completed.
And now? I take a second orb that allow him to control undead (again 4HD, his limit) and order the first four skeletons to lay the foundations tones.
Ops, the other undead are still excavating the site. confusion ensue and probably you get a collapsed excavation.
The end result is that your controller is limited to what he can control normally. So no huge army of undead. Only a good mindless brute force.
They would be much more useful as power for a grindstone, endlessly pushing a wheel to power it.
The caster level of the effect is 5th, which means the magic item would grant you control of the undead as if you were a 5th level caster when you activated it. However, semantics aside, you have more workers than you have people to feed.
Likewise, according to the rules you can supervise assistance and untrained laborers as part of Craft and Profession. The undead are effectively untrained laborers (having a +0 in both Craft and Profession), and thus - as I noted - you would have a few supervisors working on the project. Most of them would be well educated because they spent their time going to school, learning enough magic to progress society, and advancing science.
Do you really have anything other than "you can't do it because I say you can't" or are you going to continue wasting my time?