What does everyone think the best spells for a wizard stationed at a small fortress would be? Looking primarily things to deal with threats the garrison is unable to handle on their own (glitterdust for invisible foes), aid strategically (divination), bolster the fort's defenses (wall of stone), stretch supplies (mending, arcane lock) ect. instead of fight directly (that's what the garrison is for).
Was looking for level 5 NPC (0-3), but up to 5 is interesting (Because a level 11 wizard should own the castle, or at least a part of it).
Whispering wind to get a message out if unexpectedly assaulted or besieged is my first thought. Alarm on a postern gate which isn't usually opened perhaps (w/permanency if high level). Detect poison on the supplies. Crafter's fortune to help the local smith if they've nothing else to do.
A bunch of protection spells (usually communal versions) can help the garrison survive.
Flame arrow or a similar spell to cast on the garrison's ammunition.
Unseen servant and mending for regular casting doing maintenance.
Dancing lights is great for signalling (different colors in different positions in different combinations can convey a lot of information.)
True strike if he's the guy pulling the trigger on the catapult or cannon on the fort walls (it's a really good spell for that, because not only is it +20 to hit but it negates concealment miss chances!) Might be a siege mage archetype if the fort has a lot of artillery.
Charm person, detect thoughts, or suggestion for interrogating suspects. Also share language and comprehend language, or even tongues -- you never know who might arrive at the fort not knowing any languages.
Floating disc for moving heavy stuff around.
Expeditious excavation for rapidly digging pit traps and/or clearing the moat.
Protection from arrows would be handy to cast on visible defenders.
Magic circle against <insert enemy alignment here> is always a good buff spell for a group of soldiers.
Heroism for a good combat buff.
Daylight in case of night attacks, and fireball just to act as defensive artillery.
With enter image he could have pictures of himself all over the fort (or nearby) and quickly gather intelligence about the ongoing situation.
Fly to go scouting or send someone after an aerial enemy; beast shape or alter self might be useful similarly.
Haste and slow for combat support.
Magic weapon and greater magic weapon (if high enough level) to allow the garrison to attack otherwise untouchable things. Also, to cast on siege weapons and/or their ammunition.
Bed of Iron, Expeditious Construction, Open and Shut, Clarion Call, Petungrelo’s Validation, Mount Communal, Alchemical Tinkering, Full Pouch, Mindlocked Messenger, Aqueous Orb, Enlarge Person
Expeditious Construction and Expeditious Excavation are ways for them to use low level slots to help reinforce defenses in an area or repair breaches after repelling the attackers. There may also be downtime uses for the spells, such as expanding moats or thickening walls in conjunction with Stone Shape and other spells. Given lots of downtime, you can use them to make hills and ridgelines, and you could even make it unfeasible to approach the fortress except by the designated path(s), flight, or burrowing given sufficient time and the right kind of starting terrain or the ability to start modifying terrain before the (final) fortress is constructed.
Stone Shape is good to help counteract enemies' stone shape spells and also to solidify sections of the loose stone from Expeditious Construction into a solid mass of stone that can then be reshaped as desired to act as patches to repair fortifications or can also just beef up fortifications or alter them to allow for new traps or the like. Could also just make the fortress's walls thicker and taller during downtime or make a series of gauntlets and gatehouses alongside manipulating the natural terrain to eliminate possible approaches to the fortress.
Transmute Mud to Rock can be used to prepare various areas for use with Transmute Rock to Mud once enemy troops walk over them if stone can't be feasibly exposed or isn't naturally bare.
Anthropomorphic Animal can be used to make friends with animals without being a druid or ranger. Get them to Helpful and you can cast Carry Companion on them to stock up on dangerous animals that like your wizard personally. You can also potentially use Anthropomorphic Animal on one or two of them to get a sort of champion unit for a battle instead of just an angry animal that may or may not play nice with your troops. You could also potentially get in Retraining time while it's in Anthropomorphic Animal form during downtime so you can retrain its feats to be proficient with a particular weapon or armor. Possibly even get it to take some class levels. That's getting into some gray territory, though, as would be looking into whether you could cast Carry Companion on them while they were in Anthropomorphic Animal form and thus have the duration of the spell making them animal men paused until they're brought out of statue form.
Anthropomorphic Animal + Permanency can make you a nice animal friend champion or adopted son or the like given the right treatment and temperaments, though you ideally want to throw Awaken into the mix for better Int and the extra HD. Even a DIY Minotaur from turning a Bison into a Bison Man creates a creature that is stronger and tougher than an Ogre.
Unseen Engineers is a way to make it really fast to make traps. Could arguably put it as a mixed use spell if you used it to create a deep pit trap beneath an enemy formation or the like. Sort of a grey area how pit traps interact with it. Otherwise it's firmly in the beforehand prep category due to requiring the materials for the trap to exist and be there, which means the expensive stuff needs to be there. Still, it means you make a trap in a matter of seconds for one spent spell versus the mundane way which can take months.
Rune of Warding and a password for it could be used to supplement an Alarm spell on a postern, especially if Sonic type damage is chosen, because I'm pretty sure that several d8s of Sonic damage is going to make a fair bit of noise.
With False Focus or a decent income he can use Full Pouch to duplicate alchemical items and things like fireworks and stock up on them. So given sufficient downtime, he could make it so that the defenders could toss down Alchemist's Fire on enemies for an entire day or the like.
Various Symbol of X spells could be used in gauntlets or covered up by banners on the exterior wall. Always fun to debuff or incapacitate enemies while they're being pelted with stuff from murder holes or traps are being set off to dump boiling water or heated sand on them or a whole bunch of duped alchemist's fire.
Illusory Wall is higher than a 3rd level spell but lower than 6th level spells. Given time, your mage can coat every inch of the fortress's exterior walls with illusion magic along with much of the ground outside of the fortress. Detect Magic becomes much less useful for detecting where a pit is if you've got a whole sea of illusion magic looking at you. It can also make mundane troops misguage where to go with siege ladders and grappling hooks, I suppose. May be some reasons you wouldn't want to use it in some places, such as complicating things for your mundane soldiers.
Rune of Durability might be useful to have cast on the soldiers' weapons if their enemies are sunder-happy.
Improve Trap makes a trap permanently harder to spot or disable or increases the save DC or attack bonus for it, that can be nice if traps are a bit part of the defenses.
Incendiary Runes, Explosive Runes, and Fire Trap(with false focus or income stream) can be built up for various uses over time.
Conjure Deadfall could be used to build up a stockpile of them, possibly to be dropped one after another in certain gauntlets, if conjured already on the ground and then lifted up through mundane means. That said, it may deal less damage than if you used mundane means to construct a heavy object to drop on enemies.
Siege Spells
Spoiler:
Transmute Rock to Mud and a prepared area of exposed stone(possibly made by its sister spell) can lead to a fair number of enemy troops getting mired in mud.
Curse Terrain + Permanency can serve to make it so that the enemy really doesn't enjoy approaching the castle except by the designated route. Alternatively, it could be set up with curses that don't inconvenience travelers, but are a real problem for an army trying to besiege a fortress.
Lesser Planar Binding to get a Zebub gets you a very nice scout with Greater Teleportation. You can also prevent them from mentally giving anyone visions of what they learn about you by making them give that to you or destroying them completely.
Keep Watch can be used to have your keenest eye soldiers keep watch throughout the night and be useful during the day too.
Telekinetic Assembly maaaay be useful, but you ideally have enough soldiers to assemble siege weapons to use from the fortress to attack outside of it. Still, if you want to do some kind of flanking action and a siege engine can help accomplish that, this gets that siege engine up and assembled instantly, increasing the likelihood that the enemy doesn't know what hit them when you finally start firing.
Clarion Call may be useful for troop coordination.
Minor Creation is good clean fun for making a buttload of poison for all of your archers' arrows or what have you. Make a cauldron of black lotus extract, find a way to dump it on the enemy, profit. Or super kill anyone who gets caught in one of your gauntlets.
Tears to Wine can be interesting, especially if Extended, for its ability to buff a lot of people's Perception checks.
Create Armaments can be used to make your champion a weapon that can bypass a rare material DR if you don't already have one on-hand, but the material component is also fairly expensive. Probably not economically feasible for your mage.
Restore Corpse can help stretch rations in a siege, so long as you have someone to cast Purify Food and Drink to make the rotten flesh edible.
Shrink Item could be useful for bombing or dropping a bunch of burning debris on the enemies' tents or their own fortifications, especially if you have a convenient source of lava nearby.
Greater Magic Weapon can be useful for making some mooks able to bypass DR/magic with their ranged attacks.
Obsidian Flow can be used both during downtime to make it deadlier when enemies get pushed off the walls or into the moat or even make it slower and more difficult to approach the fortress save by the designated path, as well it can serve in combat as a moderate blast and debuff.
Ice Spears is another spell that is potentially useful in combat situations and outside of them. The ice created will melt into water, which can help to a certain extent with water, as a single spear is around 65.45 cubic feet of ice. In cold environments it can form a palisade or be used as cladding for the stone of the fortress to help protect against Disintegrate, especially if the GM rules Snow Shape works with ice and not just snow.
If sufficiently morally ambiguous to use Animate Dead, well, between spells like Stone Shape and mundane construction, you could make vaults or rooms exterior to the walls and fill them with mindless undead like Plague Zombies or Bloody Skeletons that can be unleashed on besiegers to soften them up, I suppose, though this tactic is risky due to the existence of Command Undead. Beheaded would be good for something that one retains control of, given the ability to give them ranged touch attacks which can churn through heavily armored and elite but mundane soldiers, although the range is short enough that you'd want to have them back away from the walls until they tried to storm them or storm a breach or they break through an outer gate and find themselves in murder hole central. It also has its uses during sieges when you're actively getting bodies. And if someone is dumb enough to throw diseased heads at you, you can send those flying back at them and spitting fire for good measure.
Shadow Conjuration is a versatile spell in general, of course. One sneaky use is to use Shadow Conjuration to make a bunch of stone by mimicking Expeditious Construction, then Stone Shaping it into flooring over pits. By my understanding, if they're made aware that it's an illusion, then they have an 80% chance of falling through what was previously solid stone to them. Possibly this is an 80% chance per round.
Lesser Geas can be used to keep a guardian monster or two around or turn a captured enemy against their own.
And that's everything I can remember from when I had to defend my lair in my last Way of the Wicked Game that I can think of that may be of interest.
When it comes to actively engaging in combat, they'll want at least some option to prepare blasting spells, but they'll probably mostly want to think about how they can buff their side, debuff the enemy, divide the enemy into bite-sized portions for the soldiers, or bolster their side with summons. So GOD Wizard stuff. Treantmonk's guide is dated but there's still some good stuff in there and it can help evaluate more recent spells.
Single target spells not intended for the wizard or a commanding officer generally aren't too useful, especially if playing with the Troop subtype where they just don't work.
Whispering Wind is great.
Dancing Lights also pairs with Ghost Sound for signaling.
Aqueous Orb is pretty good, especially as it is dual purpose with fire fighting and combat.
Full Pouch is clearly printed in error, especially with Eschew Materials/False Focus, but useful. Combing with Water Purification Sponge is nifty: Who said you need to be a divine caster to cast Purify Water?
Enter Image, as always, is let down by it's absolutely terrible range. Paizo really needs to print a greater version with an extant range and let the caster jump between images in the image's sight.
The answers also depend upon what level of mage (including level relative to the other defenders), and how many of them the castle has (some spells might be all right when you have a whole bunch of mages even if they aren't very high level, but if you have just one, even if high-level, that one is going to need to be saving spellcasting capacity for a smaller number of extremely critical spells).
Coidzor wrote:
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Anthropomorphic Animal can be used to make friends with animals without being a druid or ranger. Get them to Helpful and you can cast Carry Companion on them to stock up on dangerous animals that like your wizard personally. You can also potentially use Anthropomorphic Animal on one or two of them to get a sort of champion unit for a battle instead of just an angry animal that may or may not play nice with your troops. You could also potentially get in Retraining time while it's in Anthropomorphic Animal form during downtime so you can retrain its feats to be proficient with a particular weapon or armor. Possibly even get it to take some class levels. That's getting into some gray territory, though, as would be looking into whether you could cast Carry Companion on them while they were in Anthropomorphic Animal form and thus have the duration of the spell making them animal men paused until they're brought out of statue form.
Anthropomorphic Animal + Permanency can make you a nice animal friend champion or adopted son or the like given the right treatment and temperaments, though you ideally want to throw Awaken into the mix for better Int and the extra HD. Even a DIY Minotaur from turning a Bison into a Bison Man creates a creature that is stronger and tougher than an Ogre.
{. . .}
I have been wondering if that's how the various animal-folk races (including Kitsune and Tengu) originated -- mages kept using and experimenting with Anthropomorphic Animal, and thus accidentally created animal-folk that then bred true.
Went over the Archive of Nethys for some more spells that would be of potential interest.
Spoiler:
Break could be used to damage/destroy parts of battering rams or siege towers, perhaps.
Stone Discus has an exploit involving the nature of Conjuration(Creation) spells with Instantaneous durations and the ability to make weapons out of Stone. The fact that it exists makes a lot of people very angry whenever they learn of it, but you're acknowledging Full Pouch as broken without flipping out over it and also making use of it, so...
Decompose Corpse could have uses for storing the dead without being a health hazard or dealing with any diseased bodies thrown over the walls. Clerics get the spell too, though.
Discern Next of Kin is a potentially useful means of authenticating someone's identity to help protect against infiltration.
Ferment may be of use if you can arrange to get a large thing of booze into the enemy camp, sneak over to it, cast the spell on it, wait for them to get debuffed by it, and then have your dudes attack them before the duration expires. May be more feasible for anti-brigand activities if the fortress does that kind of thing.
Burning Sands has probably the largest AoE of a first level spell and could be potentially useful for creating some difficult terrain to bog down enemy troops. It could also potentially be used to fill an area above a pit trap that would then dump it on enemies trapped in a gauntlet, mimicking a heated sand trap.
Instant Portrait could be used to make the template for a wanted poster, I suppose, or be useful for Enter Image if a use could be found for it or if it were altered to be more useful.
Linked Legacy can help with planning strategy in a war room.
Preserve is a Cleric or Wizard spell that can help with stretching supplies out.
I'm sure there's uses for Unseen Servant during downtime and a few that could be thought up for siege time or other periods of increased activity.
Vocal Alteration and Raiment of Command could be combined to get up to some real shenanigans. Risky shenanigans, but there's definitely some potential there.
Aboleth's Lung will, when combined with a way to get around the touch range limitation, allow you to potentially condemn an enemy champion to suffocation.
Admonishing Ray may be of interest for potential live capture of VIPs.
Arrow Eruption can be used to dupe Durable Arrows during downtime. I can't recall offhand if there's necessarily any way to have Durable Arrows made from special materials, though, so it may be a curiosity at best if one isn't using it to duplicate magical ammunition and then use Make Whole to repair it to regain the lost magic in each individual duplicated arrow.
Bestow Weapon Proficiency would be another way to give weapon proficiency for a short period of time to an Anthropomorphic Animal that you're using as a champion.
Blindness/Deafness can make a prisoner become much less able to escape. As can the spell Irregular Size, though only the Cleric would have access to the spell in the posited scenario of 2 level 5s and a small host of level 3s.
Carrion Compass may be useful to track down a necromancer causing trouble in the vicinity.
Commune with Birds is potentially useful for gaining information about the surrounding area.
Defoliate can help with keeping plant life from encroaching on the cleared area around the fort. Though mundane means are probably preferable.
Dress Corpse and Sculpt Corpse can be used to engineer the appearance of treachery in the enemy camp to sow discord among them, I suppose.
Enchantment Sight may be potentially useful to help detect attempts at suborning your dudes.
Flurry of Snowballs may be a notable blast spell for 2nd level spells, being a 4d6 damage 30' cone.
Illusory Maze can combine with damage over time effects or mundane sources of damage to bog down the enemy while they take damage. Decently large AoE.
Raging Rubble could be potentially interesting due to having no limit on how long you can concentrate on the spell.
Waves of Blood may, depending upon GM ruling, create a whole mess of blood that will make a fair amount of area pretty gross, especially after a day or two. All depends on how the GM determines the nature of the duration.
^Your link to Stone Discus instead points back to this thread. What's the exploit using this spell? Without some kind of good exploit, this spell actually seems rather poor (you have to make an attack roll with your bad Base Attack Bonus, and it isn't a Touch Attack, and doesn't have very good range).
It'd be that the discuses count as various special materials at higher levels, and instantaneous conjuration spells create real matter not something which vanishes.
That said I'm not sure how you'd use them. They're not weapons that you could use easily without the spell, and 'count as' rather than 'made of' means that reforging the material into something else is very iffy.
^Interesting . . . for some reason I thought that Instantaneous Conjuration attack spells created something that stuck around just long enough to do the attack, and then vanished. But I don't have any proof(*). So . . . if they stick around indefinitely and you pick them up after use, you might be able to use them as Chakrams, if you have proficiency with these.
(*)However, if this ISN'T true, you could make unlimited amounts of acid by casting Acid Splash into a catch basin. Which would be quite the useful thing to do during downtime to prepare cauldrons of acid or at least a stash of Acid Flasks for defending your fort . . . .
^Interesting . . . for some reason I thought that Instantaneous Conjuration attack spells created something that stuck around just long enough to do the attack, and then vanished. But I don't have any proof(*). So . . . if they stick around indefinitely and you pick them up after use, you might be able to use them as Chakrams, if you have proficiency with these.
(*)However, if this ISN'T true, you could make unlimited amounts of acid by casting Acid Splash into a catch basin. Which would be quite the useful thing to do during downtime to prepare cauldrons of acid or at least a stash of Acid Flasks for defending your fort . . . .
From the Conjuration subheading in the general Magic section:
Which, yeah, makes Corrosive Touch and a few other spells, such as Waves of Blood, Acidic Spray and one or two other spells that are both Instantaneous and some other duration a bit weird, like Caustic Eruption. Then there's also things like Burst of Nettles which doesn't have any subschool at all, but creates acid-filled nettles, and Dust of Twilight which also lacks a subschool but seems to create stuff.
Acid Splash actually has a clause that it disappears after one round inserted in there at the end. I couldn't tell you offhand if this was inserted during the initial publication of Pathfinder or one of the various waves of errata, but they recognized that potential exploit or point of rules uncertainty as to what the heck happens to it over time at some point.
Pellet Blast is another spell where they realized it could stick around afterward and someone could try to collect them all and have some number of uses of pellets for firearms or something and made it disappear after it did its damage. While Stone Call is one where they unnecessarily added at the end that the stone disappears at the end of the 1 round/CL duration.
Beanstalk, on the other hand, is an example where it has a duration but there is something left behind after the duration ends which the spell text calls out explicitly.
All of this stuff I learned when I was going through all the published spells last December for terrain altering, money making, long duration, permanent, and Permanent spells.
As to the Exploit that makes a lot of people mad
Spoiler:
Stone Discus leaves behind permanent stone, in this particular case, stone that can apparently bypass DR/Magic and Silver. It's an unknown form of stone, of course.
Depending upon the size of the stone discuses and their state after striking a target, Stone Shape may or may not be necessary to gather it together into a workable form for mundane crafting.
Then from there you just determine how many arrowheads or if you have a lot of time, spearheads, you can make to give to your mooks to bypass DR.
So the best use of Stone Discus is to exploit it -- it isn't very good otherwise.
Suggested fix: Add the text about the discus(es) disappearing after the attack, as I somehow missed for Acid Splash, but in exchange, give a bonus to hit that rises with a decent fraction of caster level, or alternatively (maybe even better), have the spell use your caster level as your base attack bonus (stacking with normal base attack bonus obtained from other classes).
