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Rival Academies gives us the chrysopoetic curse spell, which creates instantaneous gold from nothing.
What is stopping a sin mage (who would have access) from getting a wand of this, then casting it on their pet goose every day until they can afford a second wand, then rinse and repeat until they are generating enough wealth to satisfy their greed?
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The spell only generates 2d6 GP worth of gold flakes when it expires. That's not a very effective way to generate income by the time you can cast 7th rank spells. I guess you might dump any leftover spells into it at the end of the day since you can turn one spell of sufficient rank into a school spell whenever you refocus
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RAW? Nothing. On a practical basis? Time.
Chrysopoetic Curse is a 7th Rank Spell, meaning a Wand of Chrysopoetic Curse is a 15th Level item costing 6,500 gp.
As the Curse leaves behind 2d6 gp worth of gold flakes and dust (unless the target Critically Succeeded on the Saving Throw), at an average of 7 gp per Casting you would need to cast the Curse 929 times to afford a Wand. At 15th level you could cast the Spell 8 times a day with Drain Bonded Item. So, that's 116 days, with you devoting all your Rank 7 and Rank 8 spellslots, plus your use of Drain Bonded Item, every day.
Is it doable? Yes. Seems like a really boring way to live your life though.
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You might as well just invest in a skill you can use with the Earn Income activity at that point.
You might as well just invest in a skill you can use with the Earn Income activity at that point.
Earn Income doesn't compound the family's generational wealth though. Think of the children!
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Assuming TheyDidTheMath correctly,
The second wand would only take 103 days to earn. We're at 219 days.
3rd - 93 (312 days)
4th - 84 (396 days)
We're starting to pick up speed here. Let's spend another year at the grind. It only takes an hour of time per day, so it's not like a job, more like a hobby.
5th - 77 (473 days)
6th - 71 days (544 days)
7th - 66 days (610 days)
8th - 62 days (672 days)
9th - 58 days (730 days)
10th - 55 days (785 days)
In 2 years and 2 weeks, you could assemble 10 wands. Using those alone, you could earn 70gp per day which is over 25,000gp per year. Those numbers don't seem very boring for an hour of "work" per day, then a few minutes once you have the wands.
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You might as well just invest in a skill you can use with the Earn Income activity at that point.Earn Income doesn't compound the family's generational wealth though. Think of the children!
Don't make me explain capitalism to you. I'll do it if you force my hand.
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Rival Academies gives us the chrysopoetic curse spell, which creates instantaneous gold from nothing.
What is stopping a sin mage (who would have access) from getting a wand of this, then casting it on their pet goose every day until they can afford a second wand, then rinse and repeat until they are generating enough wealth to satisfy their greed?
Devaluing gold by artificially injecting more in to the supply chain.
Or a much weirder interpretation:
As the value of a given mass of gold goes down via increased supply from your repeated spell casting, the spell will slowly start to yield a larger mass of gold to maintain that constant worth of 2d6gp.
Devaluing gold by artificially injecting more in to the supply chain.
Or a much weirder interpretation:
As the value of a given mass of gold goes down via increased supply from your repeated spell casting, the spell will slowly start to yield a larger mass of gold to maintain that constant worth of 2d6gp.
Hilarious! Townsfolk eventually have to pay people to haul the gold clutter away, switching the value of gold negative, at which point the next casting floods the multiverse with gold drowning all life in pure, flaky gold sin.
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Yes, Perpdepog, using that spell slot to cast a spell as a service gains more gold. And it can also gain more gold if applied against low-level, gain-zero-XP enemies, ones that don't pose a risk.
This also falls in the "Why don't you open a store then?" territory of what actually drives your PC to adventure?
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You might as well just invest in a skill you can use with the Earn Income activity at that point.
"Ya know, I thought creating gold with magic would be profitable, but honestly I started making more money running my fancy tea shop in Absalom.."
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All right, generational wealth calculation... the wand costs 6,500 gold and earns 7 gold per day. You earn one wand per 929 days per wand. Lets say we want to have clear acceleration and compounding benefits: our goal is one gold per day per day, or one wand a week. We need one-seventh of the 929 wands, 133 wands. That's an initial investment of 864500 gp, more than a 20th level party together.
Okay, but our wands make more money! How long would it take to start with one wand and earn the rest to get to the "one wand a week" point? It's 5,076 days, or almost 14 years. If you dump almost all of a 19th level character's wealth into the starting investment to begin with ten wands, you can cut that in half.
How is the wand as an investment? Well, it costs 6500 gp and returns 7*365 = 2555 annually, which is a 39% annual return. That blows any conventional investment out of the water, even if it's very slow to compound.
How disruptive is the wand as loot? That ignores the two-and-a-half years to earn back the cost. Well, it's a 15th level item, so you're not really expected to have it until 16th. How long does it take to earn the starting lump sum for that level? 20,000 / 7 / 365 = a little under eight years.
Honestly, I think Paizo absolutely hit the nail on the head with this. It's juuust good enough to feel like a real money hack worthy of a Runelord of Greed, but not so much that it's going to mess up a game. A forty percent return is amazing, but it also means that somebody short-sighted who found a buyer at full price could sell the wand to get themselves two and a half years' worth of casting in money right now. The spell is uncommon, and nobody who learns it will want to share it widely. All while making it a combat-relevant spell.
- The wand is genuinely a very solid way to secure the fortunes of a powerful wizard's future generations. (As long as they can keep their stupid mouths shut and melt the gold down to be less suspicious.)
- The wand is a great explanation for a family or noble house's wealth. It's not enough to solve all financial woes, but it provides a tidy annual income for basically no work, supplementing whatever they actually do.
- The wand is an ideal heist target. It's worth a lot in its own right, and it really is "one last job and we can retire" because the wand will produce enough to afford fine cost of living indefinitely with money left over, or support a full party and their families on a comfortable cost of living.
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I presume at some point you'd get a visit from the priests of Abadar explaining the concept of "inflation" to you (see the Traveler's Guide how the church of Abadar keeps prices stable). Forcefully, if necessary.
In 2 years and 2 weeks, you could assemble 10 wands. Using those alone, you could earn 70gp per day which is over 25,000gp per year. Those numbers don't seem very boring for an hour of "work" per day, then a few minutes once you have the wands.
That's still over two years of using every 7th and 8th level slot you have, plus Drain Bonded Item, plus however many Wands you have at that point.
You're really putting your life on hold for over two years, to reach a point where you can earn 25,000 gp per year for free.
That's still over two years of using every 7th and 8th level slot you have, plus Drain Bonded Item, plus however many Wands you have at that point.
You're really putting your life on hold for over two years, to reach a point where you can earn 25,000 gp per year for free.
Is it really THAT crippling? As long as you aren't going for damage, slots at -2 rank than your max (or less) can still put in some ridiculous work as long as you aren't loading yourself exclusively with incap trait spells.
If you're smart about it, you won't even blow the slots in the morning; you'd wait to see if you can incidentally use those 7th and 8th rank slots naturally over the course of your day, then wait until right before your 8-hour snooze to use the rest.
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This is starting to sound like the premise of some sort of Cookie Clicker/Universal Paperclips style game in Golarion.
Call it Goldfinger!
...Wait.
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I find myself thinking that the reason it ultimately will never happen is that a 15th level Runelord, having indulged the Sin of Greed for so, so long... would just find the rate of return too low.
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This is starting to sound like the premise of some sort of Cookie Clicker/Universal Paperclips style game in Golarion.
That was my first thought. As an incremental game enjoyer, I'm like 'So you buy a wand, spend three years using it to afford another. Then it only takes 1/2 years to get a third. Then pretty soon you have to drop the money on something that can make wands fast enough to keep up.'
I'm prepared for this to be an elf strategy.
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But using only the wand once per day everyday for 6889 days, while reinvesting the wand-generated good in to more wands, you'll start producing >1 wand's cost in gold per day!
That's when this gold farm REALLY takes off.
It does, of course, assume 100% of created gold is reinvested at the earliest opportunity, so we can't use any of it to provide for our needs.
Also we're spending 93 minutes per day purely casting from wands, not to mention the logistics of going through 923 wands, actions to pick up and set down the wands, moving, managing 93 bulk worth of wands.
It's probably still worth it, tho.
What if you were crafting the wands yourself? Wouldn't that reduce the time it takes to be able to earn enough gold to then keep buying more?
What if you were crafting the wands yourself? Wouldn't that reduce the time it takes to be able to earn enough gold to then keep buying more?
Base crafting doesn't save you any money, so not unless you spend additional days working on it to lower the price. If you spend a month making a wand, you can put a real dent in the cost.
Course, crafting is a downtime activity measured in days, so your GM may rule you can't spend an hour activating wands while you're crafting wands, in which case there's a crossover where you wind up losing more income than you gain in cost savings, at which point you should outsource the wand creation.
Wow, this really is an incremental game!
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The moment my GM says "[#] years pass in peace. What were you doing during that time?" I'm SO bringing this one out!
The earnings are so incremental that the cost of one's lifestyle would factor in. High-level characters could lead a spartan lifestyle, but really? Seems like you'd be enjoying life a bit more than that. And then there are consumables one might be accustomed to burn through, and whatever social pressures there might be contribute one's greater ability to society. And so forth.
And then there's getting a job w/ royalty/oligarchs or investing in actual capital and staff. The PF2 mechanics are fuzzy on such NPC pursuits, but we have examples of NPCs that pull in far more money via trade.
So yeah, boring and unimpressive use of one's abilities, resources, and lifespan.
This might be hilarious as a behind-the-scenes reason why the instructors in Strength of Thousands remain detached from the battles. They've dedicated their slots to mining flakes of gold.
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To put this in terms that make sense in my own brain, because of how long it takes and how little it produces, it feels more like a parttime job than fulltime. You're better off doing something else as the main gig, but it certainly doesn't hurt as a side hustle.
In the time it takes you to get this going you could take your kids on an adventure and make them both more powerful to maintain your families safety and make enough money to start doing things with.
Otherwise at some point someone's going to figure out how your family gets its wealth and either steal it, or kill for it.
The thing about easy money is that unless the circumstances are right, someone's going to do something about it.
Not a bad thing for an immortal to have. The luxurious lifestyle expense is 100gp per week. Three wands isn't cheap, but it means that they always have enough with some left over, all for a couple minutes each morning and a low-save test subject. Just means they have to pay people like No-Face, dumping handfuls of unworked gold in front of them.
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I presume at some point you'd get a visit from the priests of Abadar explaining the concept of "inflation" to you (see the Traveler's Guide how the church of Abadar keeps prices stable). Forcefully, if necessary.
Alright, paladins of Abadar hunting down the party for causing inflation is a hilarious plot hook, and I'm putting that in my idea folder alongside "Champions of Zyphus who follow behind the players and reset traps and restock dungeons."
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See I think you'd make more money selling the wands to nobles, letting them do all the gold stuff, then coming back to you. No need to bother doing it yourself, and you make more.
Become the MLM wizard!
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See I think you'd make more money selling the wands to nobles, letting them do all the gold stuff, then coming back to you. No need to bother doing it yourself, and you make more.Become the MLM wizard!
Not something I've seen personally, but at my Uni's DnD club there was a story of a party that started a pyramid scheme that got so out of hand a demon lord signed up.
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Not something I've seen personally, but at my Uni's DnD club there was a story of a party that started a pyramid scheme that got so out of hand a demon lord signed up.See I think you'd make more money selling the wands to nobles, letting them do all the gold stuff, then coming back to you. No need to bother doing it yourself, and you make more.Become the MLM wizard!
I'm surprised a Devil didn't try to coopt it.
I'm surprised a Devil didn't try to coopt it.Not something I've seen personally, but at my Uni's DnD club there was a story of a party that started a pyramid scheme that got so out of hand a demon lord signed up.See I think you'd make more money selling the wands to nobles, letting them do all the gold stuff, then coming back to you. No need to bother doing it yourself, and you make more.Become the MLM wizard!
"Trying to co-opt the pyramid scheme" is how the pyramid scheme gets you. Devils of all entities know that.
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This reminds me of the opening of Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse. The protagonist buys a magic stone that finds money and wealth. un-owned money and wealth. Guy spends his last dollar on it thinking it's his ticket to riches and fortune... only to realize after a few uses, the only un owned money and wealth that exists is lost loose change.