It's true that you get petrified... you're screwed, even more if your statue gets crushed. However, I keep getting ideas that turning someone into stone can have its benefits:
- Petrifying the entire party followed by curing them is a good way for DMs to either reset the campaign or to make major changes to the world. Petrifying the heroes only to restore them 20 years later can be used to alter many things.
- Petrifying prisoners to make them easier to store into a prison.
- Petrifying diseased or cursed victims to seal the effects until a cure is found.
- Petrifying yourselves and have someone else get you inside a castle, as regular statues with a contingent stone to flesh spell that activates 1 hour after being petrified.
- Flesh to Stone, then Stone to Mud = instant Kill
The only way I just can't find how to use petrification is to use it to petrify more than one creature at once. For instance, I can't petrify a man holding his wife and have both turned into a single statue. Another example would be someone grappling a monster and sacrificing himself to stone him and the monster into statues at the same time.
Anyway... how creative can you be with petrification?
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Reposting medusa anecdote :)
Party was on a passenger ship for the duration of a long voyage. Large cast of NPCs onboard for the party to get familiar with along the way, among them a veiled wizard that kept mostly to herself yet seemed to just hover at the edge of the crowd, like she wanted in but was afraid to go all the way. Naturally the bard decides to chat her up.
A murder mystery starts up, with the wizard and a couple of the party members as some of the prime suspects. And some of the bodies are petrified. After it's found out that the medusa is a wizard things get even more complicated. Heated arguments, one nearly avoided "lynching", and more bodies later, the real killer(s) are found: a thief and wizard with a small basilisk at their disposal. They severely damage the ship as they make off with half of what they came for, and we're all stuck on a slowly sinking boat miles from shore.
We're low level. We don't have the resources to get all the passengers safely to shore. We don't even have the resources to get the whole party to safety.
The bard has an idea, manages to talk the medusa into it, has a marginally harder time convincing us, and a much harder time convincting the captain.
All the passengers are gathered in the hold of the ship. Everyone is advised to brace themselves and not leave any limbs sticking out. Then the medusa suddenly exposes her face to them, petrifying them. Then we give her and the best "sailor" out of the party all the equipment we have that could possibly get them to shore, and she finishes petrifying the rest of us.
They make it to shore a couple of sharks later. They get help, and a few weeks later we're all salvaged out the sea and restored, with the medusa suffering blood loss for the sake of changing everyone back. At that point we had a new quest we were weeks behind(catching the thieves) but we had earned the trust and appreciation of an awesome NPC ally by placing trust in her.
She and the bard hooked up later. Bards man...
The cleric that delivered their baby had to be buffed because we had no clue exactly what was going to happen.
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If you want to be really cruel give a Medusa a Stone Shape spell! Restoring a petrified, stone-shaped person to flesh only to find them all horribly twisted, bloated and deformed would be horrifying.
Got a Calistrian greater medusa in a homebrew city that has been building a temple decorated from top to bottom with the petrified victims of her cult and unfaithful lovers, all woven together by stone shaping magic to make one beautiful work of art.
I've long liked the alternate prison idea, with prisoners being stoned and turned into more easily stored and filed shapes like cubes, rods, and especially discs stored on a metallic rod running through them, leaving them turnable like a prayer wheel. These prisoners would have their history, crimes, and natural appearance either etched into their surface or put on a plaque bolted onto them to keep track of who they were and in case they needed to be restored later.