If someone is killed by a death spell what does their body look like? Do they just appear to have died from natural causes or what?
This isn't addressed. Possibly it would vary from spell to spell. If you are asking if a mundane autopsy or skill check would reveal that the rules are silent on it.
Personally, I think most would just 'suck the life force out' leaving a corpse with no apparent cause of death. Some spells, like phantasmal killer, that call out a particular cause of death (in that case 'from fear') would have evidence of that. Certainly in that case I would expect a fearful expression as well as medical evidence if the tools and skills were available to analyze it.
Also not technically a death spell but what would someone killed with implosion look like? I imagine they would get crushed into a really tiny and dense ball with a sickening crunch (A human sized creature would leave a ball about the size of a pea for example.)
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The size of a [/i]pea[/i]?
If we take a seventy kilogram human (hunnerd fifty lbs, about) (I know that I'm wrong, but it's easier to approximate than to try and convert between imperial and metric systems) as our typical human, and we say that our typical pea has a volume of about a centimeter cubed (it's a square pea. If you wanna muck about with fractions of pie and five milometer radius, be my guest. Besides, using a square centimeter makes all the math easier.) than an imploded human has a density of seventy thousand grams per centimeter squared.
For reference, solid steel clocks in at, like, eight grams per square centimeter. Lead is eleven and some change. The densest material on the surface of the earth, osmium, is twenty two grams per square centimeter. Which I thought was impressive!
A pea-sized imploded human would be so heavy that they'd sink through whatever surface they're standing on and wouldn't stop until they were lodged in the core of the planet.
OK how big would be reasonable?
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I'm not, typically, a reasonable person; you'd probably be best off asking someone else. Myself, I'm partial to the pea-sized figure you were going with earlier; it's funnier to imagine.
Whatever size you decide the spell compresses people to, keep in mind that since implosion isn't duration: permanent the target will spring back into shape, likely explosively, at the end of the spell's duration.
hmm. I always thought the duration was how long you can keep targeting people with it (up to 4 rounds), not that they un-imploded at the end. If they did they would probably just look like a mass of unrecognizable gore and bone fragments.
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Eh, I'd venture a guess that even if the spell ending didn't restore the body's original shape, the pea-sized human, having no external force keeping it compressed, would disintegrate well before reaching the planet's core. It's a pretty careless guess without grabbing a pencil and doing some first year physics calculations.
Sounds messy either way.
/always preferred the inversion part of the old school implosion/inversion.
You're correct about the duration. Thought it was the same as 3.5 but no. Also is concentrating on the spell a free action?
You're correct about the duration. Thought it was the same as 3.5 but no. Also is concentrating on the spell a free action?
No, I wish it was.
The spell lasts as long as you concentrate on it. Concentrating to maintain a spell is a standard action that does not provoke attacks of opportunity. Anything that could break your concentration when casting a spell can also break your concentration while you’re maintaining one, causing the spell to end. See concentration.
You can’t cast a spell while concentrating on another one. Some spells last for a short time after you cease concentrating.