So I was reading the various Create Demiplane spells and I was wondering how many times Create Demiplane, Greater might need to be cast to create a world. The effect is to create an "extradimensional demiplane, up to 20 10-ft. cubes/level". I think that would result in a 4000 foot square demiplane at 20th level. The Earth, from what I can tell, is about 1,040,160,000,000 feet square, though I'm actually not sure how accurate this is. I've read that the total surface area of Earth is about 197,000,000 square miles and multiplied that by 5280 to get feet.
I get that you'd need to cast the spell some 260,040,000 times to create the Earth using this spell (assuming you added on the maximum amount each time and used permanency. I'm not sure that's accurate, though. I'm also not sure how needed such a large world would be.
Any suggestions on this? Is there some better way to create a world by spell or should I just leave that to deities?
Well, there are a few things here. For one, it depends on how much height you demand. Each casting gives you 20 * 10^3 = 20,000 cubic feet. If you demand 20 feet high, that gives you 1000 square feet per casting. This would give you a shell of a demiplane rather than the sphere that the Earth is, but if you're not looking to make dungeons, towers, or particularly interesting oceans, that might be fine.
The other issue is that you need to multiply by 5280^2 to get from square miles to square feet. So we're looking at a phenomenally large number of castings.
I would say if you want to do this, you'd need to have a MacGuffin to amp up the power. Whether that's an artifact (The Forge of Creation) or just mythic power is up to you. As you can see, the number of times you'd need to cast is beyond what I'd consider "reasonable".
Well, there are a few things here. For one, it depends on how much height you demand. Each casting gives you 20 * 10^3 = 20,000 cubic feet. If you demand 20 feet high, that gives you 1000 square feet per casting. This would give you a shell of a demiplane rather than the sphere that the Earth is, but if you're not looking to make dungeons, towers, or particularly interesting oceans, that might be fine.
The other issue is that you need to multiply by 5280^2 to get from square miles to square feet. So we're looking at a phenomenally large number of castings.
I would say if you want to do this, you'd need to have a MacGuffin to amp up the power. Whether that's an artifact (The Forge of Creation) or just mythic power is up to you. As you can see, the number of times you'd need to cast is beyond what I'd consider "reasonable".
Thanks! I was considering creating a setting where the world is a large demiplane but I couldn't quite figure out how it got made because even with my bad math the number of times a normal caster would have to cast this spell and make it permanent seemed prohibitive (to say the least). The Forge of Creation could work well, but I wasn't sure if there were an existing mythic power that already covered this or not.
Not all demiplanes have to be created by a specific spell. If your example has a wizard in charge of it, that would make sense. Otherwise it could be that it has been expanded over time by other wizards or that it just congealed because of some kind of central powerful force.
A brief look didn't find any specific powers, but this is the kind of thing that I would expect to either form as it is demanded by a powerful enough being or group (a sort of magical gravity) or created by some kind of ritual rather than a specific spell.
The other thing is that depending on the power level of the inhabitants, something the size of Earth doesn't have to be the scale of things. If the "oceans" are somehow inhospitable, an island is large enough. In fact, I'd say that a planet-sized demiplane may as well be a real plane. This kind of thing feels more like The Truman Show from my perspective.
Edit: I think it could be really neat, though. A kind of a realization that the world you're in is fabricated by mortals instead of divinity could lead to a lot of interesting questions like what is the difference between deities and mortals? What's real and what's the delusion of the creator? Should we stay in our bubble or move beyond into the greater world? Or why was this demiplane created? Is it a prison of some sort? (thinking Ravenloft here if you're familiar with it).
MATH TIME!!!
Radius of earth 3956 mi +73 mi of atmosphere = 2x10^7 ft (yah we are getting' all scientific notation up in this world creation thread)
Volume of earth+atmosphere shell = (4/3)pi(2e10^7)^3 = 3x10^22 ft^3 which is pretty dang big.
Create Demiplane gives 20000 cubic feet per level/casting.
Which gives 1.6x10^18 castings...
Which is ridiculous. In order to get around this you need multiple orders of magnitude increase in space creation rate.
If an immortal caster casts this spell 1000 times a year (multiple times per day) for 10^10 years (order of magnitude estimate of the age of the universe) that would be 10^13 castings which would mean the caster is 0.000625 % done and would need to wait another 159000 ages of the universe for completion.
So if you have enough time to sit around making a demiplane the size of earth grow with the create demiplane spell you may well be better off waiting for a universe to form independently and go choose a unclaimed planet.
Any suggestions on this? Is there some better way to create a world by spell or should I just leave that to deities?
If you're the GM, you can simply use the Wish spell to do that. The Wish spell's section on creating greater than the listed effects is only subject to GM discretion, so there would be nothing stopping something like a Pleroma Aeon or a Fomorian Titan from creating an entire world from nothing.
You might not like this method, but it's still technically 100% rules legal.
They don't call it the "mightiest spell" for nothing.
If you're the GM, you can simply use the Wish spell to do that.
This.
Want to make it special? Okay: the wizard that did it used a Mythic-style version of Wish in a huge ritual that boosted the wizard's caster level with several powerful archmages assisting the wizard and multiple apprentices assisting each archmage and there were runes and the stars were properly aligned and it took a lifetime's worth of preparation...
And then it MAKES SENSE that this wizard was able to create a world, at least in my opinion.
It would be feasible to create a spell like create demiplane except it creates a small planet. Provided the created planet isn't used in an abusive way (like summoning it to crash into another planet or destabilizing orbits), it's not quite as powerful as a demiplane. This provides some room in the spell's power budget to make the planet bigger or something.
Not all demiplanes have to be created by a specific spell. If your example has a wizard in charge of it, that would make sense. Otherwise it could be that it has been expanded over time by other wizards or that it just congealed because of some kind of central powerful force.
A brief look didn't find any specific powers, but this is the kind of thing that I would expect to either form as it is demanded by a powerful enough being or group (a sort of magical gravity) or created by some kind of ritual rather than a specific spell.
The other thing is that depending on the power level of the inhabitants, something the size of Earth doesn't have to be the scale of things. If the "oceans" are somehow inhospitable, an island is large enough. In fact, I'd say that a planet-sized demiplane may as well be a real plane. This kind of thing feels more like The Truman Show from my perspective.
Edit: I think it could be really neat, though. A kind of a realization that the world you're in is fabricated by mortals instead of divinity could lead to a lot of interesting questions like what is the difference between deities and mortals? What's real and what's the delusion of the creator? Should we stay in our bubble or move beyond into the greater world? Or why was this demiplane created? Is it a prison of some sort? (thinking Ravenloft here if you're familiar with it).
I'm familiar with Ravenloft and it's actually what partly inspired this idea. I also like the idea of making people wonder about the reality they find themselves in. One of my favorite tv shows when I was younger was Land of the Lost and I remember how neat I thought it was. Of course, the Land of the Lost is much smaller than Earth, but I also wondered what would happen if people trapped within a similar 'bubble' suddenly found a way out to somewhere else.
MATH TIME!!!
Radius of earth 3956 mi +73 mi of atmosphere = 2x10^7 ft (yah we are getting' all scientific notation up in this world creation thread)
Volume of earth+atmosphere shell = (4/3)pi(2e10^7)^3 = 3x10^22 ft^3 which is pretty dang big.Create Demiplane gives 20000 cubic feet per level/casting.
Which gives 1.6x10^18 castings...
Which is ridiculous. In order to get around this you need multiple orders of magnitude increase in space creation rate.
If an immortal caster casts this spell 1000 times a year (multiple times per day) for 10^10 years (order of magnitude estimate of the age of the universe) that would be 10^13 castings which would mean the caster is 0.000625 % done and would need to wait another 159000 ages of the universe for completion.
So if you have enough time to sit around making a demiplane the size of earth grow with the create demiplane spell you may well be better off waiting for a universe to form independently and go choose a unclaimed planet.
Yeah, simply using the spell as it is would not be practical in the least, which is why I was looking for other options here.
If you're the GM, you can simply use the Wish spell to do that. The Wish spell's section on creating greater than the listed effects is only subject to GM discretion, so there would be nothing stopping something like a Pleroma Aeon or a Fomorian Titan from creating an entire world from nothing.
You might not like this method, but it's still technically 100% rules legal.
They don't call it the "mightiest spell" for nothing.
I'm going to be running it, but it's still in the creation phase. Part of my idea was that the players could find evidence that rather than being a world created by deities it was somehow created by mages instead. I'm not sure if I'm going to have deities here or if the deities are actually going to be "divine" in the more usual sense of the word (they could simply be very powerful, immortal casters). Though, I'm also not sure exactly what the difference might mean overall except for the fact they might want to be very sure other people don't figure out how to become immortal...
I'm not opposed to what you suggest with wish and the suggestions you make. As far as that goes, it's possible to use elohim as well (since this sort of thing seems to be their gig). I just wasn't sure what options mortal casters might have or what might be the best way to go with this.
Want to make it special? Okay: the wizard that did it used a Mythic-style version of Wish in a huge ritual that boosted the wizard's caster level with several powerful archmages assisting the wizard and multiple apprentices assisting each archmage and there were runes and the stars were properly aligned and it took a lifetime's worth of preparation...
And then it MAKES SENSE that this wizard was able to create a world, at least in my opinion.
This also works perfectly well for me. Like I said, I'm mostly looking for suggestions on how it might be possible. Simply using create demiplane just isn't going to cut it on its own.
It would be feasible to create a spell like create demiplane except it creates a small planet. Provided the created planet isn't used in an abusive way (like summoning it to crash into another planet or destabilizing orbits), it's not quite as powerful as a demiplane. This provides some room in the spell's power budget to make the planet bigger or something.
*nods* I wasn't sure about a "create planetoid" spell. But a demiplane can be attached to a larger world as well, so I was just trying to figure it out.
Another reason I ask about this is that there was an old theory that Earth was slowly expanding (this was developed before plate tectonics was known) and that aether was somehow being converted into new materials for our planet. I thought that given how demiplanes seem to work, it actually could be how planets are created.
There´s also more hands-on methods of creating planes then casting a spell over and over.
Gods teearing chunks out of worlds.
Gods tearing chunks out of each other.
Elementals tearing chunks out of their planes.
People tearing chunks out of their planets.
In general its easier to create somethign out of somethign else then it is creating somethign from nothing. If the creator to be wants to make a new plane, perhaps it would be easier to get someone else to do it for them.
A non-godly way to do it would be to befriend a group of strong earth elementals, make a Gate to an empty plane (of which there is no doubt no shortage of) and havign the elemental tear chunks out of the earth plane and throw them through the gate. Woilá, a huge chunk of ground that you can now start buildign from. A Titan might help along the process immensely.
Perhaps the plane already existed but was empty of life untill somem age happened to find it?
Theres a tonn of real world, world creation stories, you should check some of them out.
Just a few include:
Norse mythology had the material plane created from a kind of titan, his flesh is the earth, his bones the mountains, his ground teeth rocks and pebbles, blood the ocean, and so on.
Christian mythos had one god make the world from nothing in seven days.
Hindu mythos is varied, but include the world being created from an egg, another has three gods who take turns creatign the world, protecting it and destroying it.
Greece mythology has us beleive that we live on the backs of great gods.
A japaneese creation story I once heard was about the world being formed from sea flotsam, from which sprung the gods.
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Sorry to unearth such an old thread. What I did for my plane where the pc's found the portal to that is constantly growing. you know the story...in ages long past an unknown demigod of Portals, Rifts and Demiplanes tried to create something, a place for his worshippers to be and in so doing it lef to his demise?...
Real story, Demigod tried to make a self-replicating plane and he injected some of his limited divine essence into his epic level version of the genesis spell. By doing so he gave the first initial demiplane an extremely limited form of sentience as it was being formed insofar that it wanted to live and expand. Not realizing that this would happen due to a nearby astral storm that chose that moment to intercede. As he thought that his casting needed more power he opened up the floodgates to his divine power and essence. The newly created plane did not have the power to become a truly endless plane. What happened is that the original monolith the Demigod used was the conduit for the transfer of his essnce to the demiplane.
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Description: (all monoliths are identical): Before you stands a monolih. It is black in color. it is 20 ft tall and 8 foot to a side square. It is impervious to harm, being treated as a part of the outer barrier of the demiplane itself as to relates to damaging effects.
Math: Each monolith once per 30 days autocasts the level 9 Genesis as if by a level 40 caster to expand the area of the demiplane. The terraign created is based on pattern left over from the demigod (up to DM) (mine has a mix of mystara with the gomain rules of birthright. Though only 1 type of bloodline so far from demigod)
For every 1,000 castings of the genesis spell by a particular monolith a new monolith is created by the demiplane who now has slightly more power and at which point all existing monoliths will move through the earth of the plane, phasing through any obstacles in their path at a rate of 100 movement speed until they reach their new location at which point all existing monoliths will be equal distance from one another.
In mine they are now up to 16 monoliths.
I think it's funny that a 20th level casting of Create Demiplane gets a 91' diameter "planet". Boop.
Out of all the crazy stuff they can do, try as they might, it's just a decent sized rock. Kind of underwhelming in juxtapose with everything else they can do at that level.