I am currently playing a magus enginer (not an AT just maxed out knowledge and profession). He have just startet building a littel powerplant in a secret room in a castel he have been asked to build.
We are using the Downtime rules and the powerplant will, when it is finished( if the goblinhorde dosent take over the castel) generate magic capital. If this ends up working as my character hopes. He will build a bigger power plant( there is plenty of room in the secret part of the castel)
Of cause no story about magic nuclear power is finished until somthing goes horrible wrong.
What i am looking for is suggestions of how this can go wrong. Both little wrong and big wrong.
Nothing is of the table any idea no matter how strange is welcome.
I will take the suggestions to my GM.
What exactly this plant do? How does it work?
I'd have it cause magic in the area to bunch up. At a certain distance around the castle is a magical deadzone. Closer to the reactor you run into Primal Magic effects kick in, making casting spells dangerous. Of course, the keys to some of the doors might be basic low level spells o cantrips...
Closer to the core players score an automatic 100 on the primal magic table, random summoned creatures appear, maybe a small war between the divine and the infernal...
And close up time could be distorted. After exiting the room with the core the party finds the castle and the area it affected abandoned, the party themselves assumed dead and to have failed to stop the reactor, etc.
The kinds of creatures that would travel from far and wide to live in such a power plant are probably not exactly friendly.
He must be high level to be designing a magic nuke plant, unless he fed a dead sun god to a nosoi.
What exactly this plant do? How does it work?
The first try out is just a few magic generating rooms from UC re skinner to be machines that gather and refine magic power instead of rooms full of books.
The idea is from a fire of anciennitet magic construction work we encountered in the wilderness. And now my PC is trying to build somthing like it. In a few levels he can use the energy it is gathering for him to build some magic items that he would most likely be able to build no matter what.I think pehaps the bigger powerplant May be somthing about adding metamagic or reusing Spell slots ( like metamagic rods and pearls of power, reskinned to be a big noisy waste generating factory instead of a rods and pearls)
He must be high level to be designing a magic nuke plant, unless he fed a dead sun god to a nosoi.
He is only level 7. He is not building a full powerplant yet more like splitting the atom in his others basement.
He is the Marie Curie of magic nuclear power not the Oppeheimer. Yet:)
Bound fire elementals kept contained in the room generate extreme heat which causes the water in the brass cauldron to heat, steam is generated which travels through the pipes to the turbine. The turbine spins and generates power for the mills in the area while the steam is trapped in the condensing chamber where it becomes water again. A confined water elemental inside the condensing chamber constantly pushes the hot water away from itself and guarantees circulation. The process repeats in an infinite cycle. Free power as long as the elementals don't escape or die.
This is a fine idea but what i am building is somthing that will give, whoever controls the thing, extra magic power in some way.
The elemental thing is using elementals as workforce, pehaps even slaves. I can just gather poor starving refugees if i want cheep labor.
Nuclear power plant? Who needs that with magic? The nuclear reactor is just a really efficient heat source. You know what is also a really efficient heat source? Multiple permanent walls of fire. Or a permanent gateway to the plane of fire. Pump water through this area to create steam and force it through a steam turbine. BAM! Tons of free electricity. Of course, almost noone on Golairon even has a use for electricity.
Why not just open a portal to a permanently storm-filled portion of the Plane of Air and harvest the electricity directly?
Why not just open a portal to a permanently storm-filled portion of the Plane of Air and harvest the electricity directly?
Not knowing enough about the plane or air, I'm not positive if there is a permanently storm filled portion of the plane of air or not. The details that I know about the elemental plane of air do not necessarily suggest the there is excess lighting abound. But I could be very wrong.
In any event, if your cool with having a plane of electricity (which seems just as valid as a plane of air) that would definitely be better than fire.
I would borrow heavily from the infernal syndrome adventure. The magic source (be it an object, or an entity) is overloading, and all sorts of crazy magical beings are showing up, and the players have to get in there and shut it down.
I really like the idea. Per the "if something could go wrong, it will" part, the minor spellblight idea seems good. Possibly it degenerates over time, leading to a big bang that lays one major spellblight over few miles radius. Maybe if someone is pregnant in the nears of the plant her baby could have some quirk? Maybe some spell like ability or some strange connection with magic? For the power gain, if you know the midnight campaign setting, it could be something like the power nexuses .
Just to make sure i have said it. This is not about getting electricity! the Nuclear image was chosen because he is making a machine that will generate magic or at the very least store it. And i think it would benefit the story if it was dangerous for every body involved.
And thanks for all the exellent suggestions. Keep it coming.
You may want a giant obelisk at the center of it, with the obelisk connected to multiple planes. The obelisk would draw power from all of them and generate a generalized magical field. This would also allow the users of it to adjust the obelisk to focus on certain kinds of magical energy over others.