Create Demiplane + Bountiful = profit?


Rules Questions


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Hello all. I was wondering about the bountiful ability of create Demiplane. It says that the Demiplane will produce enough food to feed one medium creature for every 10ft cube of the Demiplane. It is possible to remove this food from the Demiplane? Specifically, take it to a city and sell it?

Sovereign Court

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You aren't going to make enough food to be rich, compared to what a high level adventurer can make just going through a dungeon. Yeah you can remove it but when you consider that 1 lb of wheat is only 1 cp...yeah, sure go ahead.

Scarab Sages

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Yes, feel free to spend 500 gold pieces of components and 4 hours of a 17th level wizard's time to create 17 days worth of rations for 10 people, pay someone to gather the described berries and fruits, transport them to a town, and sell them. You might even break even depending how many silver pieces the DM is willing to give you per pile of fruit. Congratulations, you have used the reality shaping power of a god wizard to invent Rube Goldberg's take on the Neanderthal economy.

Scarab Sages

But now that I've got the snark out of my system, I can envision this being something really cool when thought out creatively. Take for instance a desert tribe driven to the very brink of starvation and granted a demiplane with permanency as a gift from some powerful figure they did a service for. It would save them, be what they built their entire future around, these holes in reality where food and water come from.


Yeah, basically the ranger in my home game seems to get a bit more evil in each session. So I was planning to make a Demiplane, and take a small number of people there, and let them live there permanently. I was just wondering if it would be profitable at all to have them sell what they didn't need.


I see no reason why this would be disallowed. Selling food alone has never been the most profitable business though, as Eltacolibre pointed out. If they are content with just living off the land and making a small profit besides, then sure, that'd be fine. Ultimate Equipment has a list of trade goods and prices.

Your last post is a little vague. Is the ranger causing a food shortage by killing all the wildlife? Are they hunting the people and/or intelligent monsters down so they want to hide?

Scarab Sages

I think it depends what your after. For an adventurer living in the adventurer economy it probably wouldn't be more than roleplaying (not a bad thing). For a retired adventurer living in a more natural economy and without the urge to dump a year's wages in a single night it's a valid way to bring in a little extra spending money as you enjoy your private paradise.


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For massive profit give your castle the theme "city of gold". Then remove the gold bricks from the street.

One casting of this should allow an almost arbitrary amount of wealth.

Trees that grow 25k diamonds? Might work.

Like the plane of earth with veins of metal? That should be easy.


How much land can 4.5 million gallons of water support for agriculture?

That is level 30 casting of greater cdp.


Nothing about the spell or the Earth-Dominant trait in the GM guide says you get to pick what everything is made of. I certainly wouldn't allow anyone to make a demiplane out of gold, adamantium, or any other such commodity. I'd allow it to be golden colored, but not made of the element.

Having a water demiplane, on the other hand, would be just fine. You'd have to make a portal and cart the water out bit by bit though.


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You can give a demi plane a theme. That would imply that you can fill it with stuff. Maybe not solid block of gold a an earth plane that is also rich in diamonds should be doable. Then you just need to mine it.

If no precious metal or jems just go with iron or wood.

Subjective gravity and reverse gravity makes getting the water out easy.


Listen Atrus, if you want your Farm Age books and your offsite safari grounds don't come cryin' ta me when some of your spellwriters develop god complexes and go crazy.

Joking aside, demiplanes are vague on purpose, by the time you can put the really GOOD stuff in them (8th level spells at least) you have access to tricks and magics that can break the game no matter HOW you lock them down. Divination magic at that level can find veins of precious materials, fabrication magic can generate thousands or even millions of gold in weeks, it's outside of a realm where hard rules can beat creativity. There is nothing saying you cannot create a demiplane made entirely of diamond in order to make more demiplane. The GM can adjudicate and rule whatever s/he wants, but it's all vague and free-form.

Here's my own headcanon: vegetation from a bountiful demiplane can be taken out, but after 24 hours it starts to rot, and rots really fast (say, 4x speed). This still doesn't stop you from running cattle in an open field demiplane, and/or feeding nutritious fruits and vegetables (must balance people's diets) to folk the day they are harvested. Add in double-time for the demiplane and the cattle grow pretty fast. You still need regular farms for long-term stockpiles and storage, but you can feed a city pretty easily with demiplane farms.

For special materials, like tons of adamantine or diamond, there are risks. Since the demiplanes themselves exist within the ethereal or astral planes, it stands to reason that realms made within them are going to attract attention, especially when you are making and then destroying a lot of them in the same place and pulling really heavy raw materials out of them. The transformation and abduction of heavy amounts of fluidic aether (again, headcanon) or constuction of Zorth-axis vertices will bring in ghosts, Astra Dreadnoughts, dream-beasts and Leng denizens over time. They will see what is going on and start either messing around with the demiplanes you made or wriggling through the cracks created by your planar portals to attack the real world.

Most WISE casters prefer to make things only have the appearance of things anyway. Silver pavement that is not actually silver can be strong as steel while just as pretty, and few visitors will steal it once word gets out that it's worthless and any appraiser worth their salt can tell the difference.


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One more note about game balance. By RAW, no real "by the rules" way to break it, a 9th level wizard has all the money she wants as long as she has time. Fabricate can increase your total wealth by 50% every time you cast it, by more "reasonable" ruling you can still make about that much per day by Gather Information-ing what rich people want to buy, picking up the raw materials for 33% of is base cost, and selling it for 50% base price (plus haggling) to the interested party. Your bard comrade or cohort will need to do the talking, but that's no big deal. After the city is out of cash, you use some divination and gather information to find all the adamantine (or whatever) you can buy and go do so, teleport if necessary.

Net time cost: not THAT much more than harvesting a demiplane made of adamantine. Maybe a few days. Remember this is Core Rules, well before any add=ons or Blood Money shenanigans. This is legit the way it was designed.

Anyway, the point is if you want to keep WBL and "balance" when players have access to that kind of magic, you just have to have a certain amount of "gentleman's agreement" with the PCs. You don't drop rocks on their heads, they don't cheat the system too badly. Be fair, be nice, party on.


Trees that grow 25k diamonds would be nice, but the GM would implode my demiplane if I did that. I already have to hold back during our games to keep the nerf hammers away. That's why I was considering food. If I can't get very much money from it, I could just give it away. At CL15 when I can get Bountiful, that's 150 10ft cubes, so enough food to feed 150 people. Might bring some wildlife / livestock in as well, have a Astral farm, and give all of the food to different cities. Though I need more people to harvest it then. I could get golems I guess, but that just exacerbates the money problems.


Just set up a gentleman's agreement with the DM regarding what you can and can't do, and make sure instead of getting a ready pile of spend-on-anything cash you're doing something that helps your party members more than yourself and/or helps NPCs. But more on that in a bit.

At CL 15 you have to use plane shift to make any and all deliveries of food and such by hand. The demiplane needs an easier method of travel to really be useful in large-scale food production or other uses. Your wizard will have better things to do with his 7th level slots than 'porting a bunch of porters back and forth every single day.

Which brings me back to the point I was going to get to. Give the Demiplane a big diamond, just large enough to pay for making all the spells/effects you want permanent, add all the abilities you want including SEVERAL permanent portals which link to different cities in a kingdom, stack on protections against teleportation, and then hand the keys to the doors to the king. He gets a source of food for hundreds of people, a "royal road" that he can route troops and trade wagons through at great speed, and thanks to the in-plane river, a good source of fresh water.

The king will be very grateful (that has political benefits) and the GM will probably consider it decent role-playing (meaning less inclined to hit you with a nerf hammer).

You could even go beyond a kingdom. Set up an interdimensional "Little Sigil" which runs trade all over the world. The political ramifications of being literally EVERYONE'S neighbor, as well as a powerful wizard in a nearly-unassailable extra-planar fortress should be quite interesting. You can end up playing politics with kings and emperors. You can have an army of followers and subjects who choose to live and work in your planar paradise. You can be the mediator between major figures or organize a planetary defense force when Evils From Beyond (Demon lords, Cthulhu, whatever) rear their heads.

It might toss you into NPC territory, or be forcibly back-burnered, but since you'll be using the Downtime Rules from Ultimate Campaign to make money you won't be bringing in piles of gold to spend on making your party "too powerful."


If you want to be very ruthless, you can use your amazing wizard powers to create a drought (terraform, I guess), and make your demiplane the only reasonable source for food. Jack up the price and you make profit at the expense of literally everyone else in the land.


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Why grow wheat when you can grow expensive spices?


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Pathfinder Starfinder Society Subscriber

The 500 GP cost of this spell is for a focus, so it is basically a one-time expense. Sure, you could grow crops on your demiplane and sell them for a profit -- but given the amount of wealth an adventuring spellcaster able to cast that spell would have accumulated and would be able to earn by further adventuring, it is not an economically worthwhile thing to do.

However, I could see it as an interesting idea for a retired NPC spellcaster who is the patriarch of a farming family and who periodically casts this spell to maintain his personal demiplane as the family farm. Every few days he ejects family members from the demiplane so that they can take their crop to market.

I would imagine that this scheme provides a steady income on the order of what the more traditional owner of an inn or tavern might make.


boring7 wrote:

Just set up a gentleman's agreement with the DM regarding what you can and can't do, and make sure instead of getting a ready pile of spend-on-anything cash you're doing something that helps your party members more than yourself and/or helps NPCs. But more on that in a bit.

At CL 15 you have to use plane shift to make any and all deliveries of food and such by hand. The demiplane needs an easier method of travel to really be useful in large-scale food production or other uses. Your wizard will have better things to do with his 7th level slots than 'porting a bunch of porters back and forth every single day.

Which brings me back to the point I was going to get to. Give the Demiplane a big diamond, just large enough to pay for making all the spells/effects you want permanent, add all the abilities you want including SEVERAL permanent portals which link to different cities in a kingdom, stack on protections against teleportation, and then hand the keys to the doors to the king. He gets a source of food for hundreds of people, a "royal road" that he can route troops and trade wagons through at great speed, and thanks to the in-plane river, a good source of fresh water.

The king will be very grateful (that has political benefits) and the GM will probably consider it decent role-playing (meaning less inclined to hit you with a nerf hammer).

You could even go beyond a kingdom. Set up an interdimensional "Little Sigil" which runs trade all over the world. The political ramifications of being literally EVERYONE'S neighbor, as well as a powerful wizard in a nearly-unassailable extra-planar fortress should be quite interesting. You can end up playing politics with kings and emperors. You can have an army of followers and subjects who choose to live and work in your planar paradise. You can be the mediator between major figures or organize a planetary defense force when Evils From Beyond (Demon lords, Cthulhu, whatever)...

The "Little Sigil" idea I actually used in a KingMaker gamer, to unite all the nations cities together. It was called "The Hall of Doors" and trade across the nation EXPLODED after that. In a good way :)


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You could grow rare plants, raise rare (and expensive) animals, set up a factory with specialized workers who create rare and valuable goods, etc. With no rent to pay, no marauders or thieves, to worry about, no predation or insect problems (just don't include them in it), no seasonal weather issues, etc., you could focus on creating or raising expensive things without the costs and hazards of doing it elsewhere.


Roan wrote:
The "Little Sigil" idea I actually used in a KingMaker gamer, to unite all the nations cities together. It was called "The Hall of Doors" and trade across the nation EXPLODED after that. In a good way :)

I always find setups like that compelling. From The World Serpent Inn to great Sigil herself the Inn between the worlds trope is always fun. Arguably it *insert long-winded dissertation on socioeconomics* and I'm a crazy futurist so I like that stuff.

I probably play too much Civilization.

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