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Trekkin
2010-04-12, 01:19 AM
So I'm in a campaign in which we're exploring a new world, and as it happens we ended up accidentally starting a forest fire, raising the ire of the elven/fey half of the party. This got me thinking: adventurers tend to be rather ruinous, but to the best of my knowledge there are no characters based around ruining the world, and while I wouldn't run one in this campaign massive and lasting destruction holds a certain appeal. Thus, I put the question to the forum:

What classes, spells, or races would be best at ruining a game world?

Ruin here probably includes diseases, defoliation, poisoning...anything that makes the world worse, on as large a scale as possible. Salt the ground, burn the trees, flood the valleys, taint the atmosphere, plague the cities...

So how would one make a character who was optimized for leaving a trail of utter destruction in its wake?

DementedFellow
2010-04-12, 01:24 AM
Walker in the Waste who casts Dismiss Water whenever he comes across water, making the country a desert wasteland behind him.

You can enter into WitW as easily as level 4 if you make a case for it. RAW legal but RAI not. Before that you have access to the Cleric spell to dismiss water. Go nuts.

JeminiZero
2010-04-12, 01:25 AM
The two most famous (pre-epic) spells of mass destruction:
1) Anti Osmium bomb
2) Locate City Bomb (even without explosive spell, you can apply flash frost and fell drain. This will level drain all the level 1 commoners dead, raise them as wild wights, and trigger the Wightpocalypse).

Amiel
2010-04-12, 01:27 AM
There's also the Apocalypse from the Sky spell; it's from the BoVD.

Post epic, there are the epic spells; hellball in particular.

Beorn080
2010-04-12, 01:32 AM
If you can convince your DM, a reverse druid of sorts would fit nicely. Pretty much a druid, but with its powers based on a hatred of nature instead of an attunement with it.

Otherwise, wizard. Nothing says destroy the world like high end magical shenanigans. Incendiary cloud, Cloud Kill, Shapechange into Red Dragon or similar, Horrid Wilting, Control Weather, Gate.

Also, if you have a "buy and sell anything" style market system, 2 million chickens. At 2cp a pop, even a 3rd level character can afford thousands, and chickens produce two things, eggs and guano.

Trekkin
2010-04-12, 01:32 AM
Why anti-osmium and not anti-neutronium (pure neutrons) ? By my calculations that's a 17,691,287,041,132.20 - fold increase in density, and therefore 121,655,798,300,000,000 megatons of TnT per cubic foot. And if you specify they're neutrons from, say, carbons in glucose, it becomes plant-based...

JeminiZero
2010-04-12, 01:53 AM
Why anti-osmium and not anti-neutronium (pure neutrons) ? By my calculations that's a 17,691,287,041,132.20 - fold increase in density, and therefore 121,655,798,300,000,000 megatons of TnT per cubic foot. And if you specify they're neutrons from, say, carbons in glucose, it becomes plant-based...

I didn't create it so I can only guess: It might have something to do with the fact that Major Creation allows only the creation of rather basic materials: Stone, Metal, Gems, Vegetable Matter. And vegetable matter can be taken to mean unrefined stuff only: wood, grain (with the husk still on), whole fruit and such. Which neutronium is not.

Coidzor
2010-04-12, 02:07 AM
Hmm. Well, I guess we should probably think of a couple of categories to narrow the focus down a little bit.

Something like...

Defoliation: eliminating plant life in an entire region, causing mass migrations and starvation. (For example, that walker in the wastes and dismiss water stuff in order to destroy water sources and leave the land to dessicate, though that would require mitigating the ability of rain to alleviate/repair the damage that one causes as well as probably messing with glacial melts and river paths and such. Blighters are basically fluffed to be this incarnate, though I believe their delivery was... lackluster.)

Mourning: being capable of creating a region utterly antithetical to life as PCs know it.

Toxicity: Plagues and poisons and pollution of the air, water, land, or people.

Maledictions: Curses and the like. Probably mostly rituals and epic stuff. Possibly some overlap.

World Destroying: Gray goos, planar destruction, anti-osmium bombs, sundering the planet.

Multiverse-level havock: Planar-level shenanigans.

Anything other ideas?

krossbow
2010-04-12, 02:18 AM
If you can convince your DM, a reverse druid of sorts would fit nicely. Pretty much a druid, but with its powers based on a hatred of nature instead of an attunement with it.


that exists. Its called the blighter. destroys nature to power its own druidic magic.

jseah
2010-04-12, 02:36 AM
You can theoretically use ring gates + Quintessence/Temporal Stasis to get an unstoppable force to meet an immovable object.

In particular, putting an iron rod half-way through a pair of ring gates, welding it to itself and then stasis-ing it should net you the setup.
When you twist the gates, the rod experiences an increasing amount of force to bend or break it. Which Temporal Stasis would render it invulnerable to. This can generate an infinite amount of force which would proceed to destroy everything in the light-cone in a blast of infinite energy.

krossbow
2010-04-12, 02:39 AM
You can theoretically use ring gates + Quintessence/Temporal Stasis to get an unstoppable force to meet an immovable object.

In particular, putting an iron rod half-way through a pair of ring gates, welding it to itself and then stasis-ing it should net you the setup.
When you twist the gates, the rod experiences an increasing amount of force to bend or break it. Which Temporal Stasis would render it invulnerable to. This can generate an infinite amount of force which would proceed to destroy everything in the light-cone in a blast of infinite energy.



Murderer.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v224/Gaia_Knight/catgril-death.gif




Their blood is on your hands. Your hands.

nolispe
2010-04-12, 02:52 AM
Wizard. True creation on the astral plane, whereupon you fall for however long you feel like, whereupon you greater teleport the lump of stuff wherever you want the destruction to go. If you do it right, you should be able to make the entire created thing convert to energy. given CL 25, you should be able to pull off a 32 teraton explosion, + Falling energy. Hasta la vista, Earth.

jseah
2010-04-12, 02:57 AM
^Do you realize how irritating that picture is? Especially since it's animated. >.<
I get that way too often.

*************************************

You can also use ring gates to reflect gravity (exactly how depends on your GM's interpretation of gravitation).
A few thousand pairs can rip out a pretty large chunk of any planet. Not to mention destabilizing orbits as well.


Other things including using ring gates as a momentum drive to push the moon out of orbit. (or if you don't like ring gates, lots of permanent gust of winds packed into boxes)


There's also the good 'old wight-o-clypse. It'll probably get stopped by some budding adventurer but it'll cause quite a lot of havoc before that.

DarthCyberWolf
2010-04-12, 03:35 AM
Well it's no destroying the world, but you could get a Major Iceheart, (magic item from Frostburn) then just take a "walk-about".

Sydonai
2010-04-13, 05:55 PM
Maximized, empowered, extended, Horrid Wilting.......Epic magic ftw

jiriku
2010-04-13, 06:03 PM
A sorcerer with an optimized locate city bomb can blow a hole in the world. For those faint of heart who cry about circular areas of effect, the same principle applied to an apocalypse from the sky of sufficiently high caster level will accomplish the same task, albeit with greater investment.

As a red wizard I toyed around with the idea of creating orbital kinetic energy weapons. While each one would probably have only about 1/8 the explosive blast of the Hiroshima bomb, they could be created at no gold cost with the investment of about 8 spell slots of 6th level and lower. A red wizard of sufficiently high level, backed by a circle of simulacrums of himself, could increase the yield and probably reduce the spell slot investment fairly significantly too.

Ernir
2010-04-13, 06:04 PM
One day, I will make an Entropomancer BBEG.

Il_Vec
2010-04-13, 06:07 PM
Not exactly on-topic but you may find it amusing and someone can create a build based on this: In the ongoing campaign I'm playing, there has been this major war beetween the gods and in the end, the Good guys won. So, most Evil gods are dead, missing, hiding, being "re-incorporated" or locked away. Some of our characters are actively trying to bring back some of said Evil Gods.

So, one could make a build out of smuggling a lot of powerful Evil Outsiders into the campaign.

Zaq
2010-04-13, 09:10 PM
On a small scale, a DFA can burn down a lot of things, all day long. You're clearly terrorizing a city rather than a country (unless you find a nice dry field or forest), but you're doing it at level 1.

Once you get onto a larger scale, pretty much any full caster will get the job done, for obvious reasons. Control Weather is a classic city-destroyer, Planar Ally/Binding is good for all kinds of shenanigans (just summon a few demons and offer them the chance to cause as much havoc as they can. They're sure to agree. Demons love that.) with or without chaining, anything that does bad things to physics on a large enough scale is of course a winner, and a lot of the more obscure spells out there (from, for instance, the It's X Outside books) can actually have lasting environmental consequences.

A Blighter would actually work well for this. Deforestation is exactly what it says on the tin, they get some of the more destructive druid spells, and since you're not optimizing for combat, they don't suck quite as bad.

Also, anything you can keep making that sticks around can be abused. I've always wondered what would happen if you covered, say, a mountain with Quintessence. Especially if that mountain's snowpack was a vital part of the region's water supply.

My books are closed, but I'm pretty sure there's a spell in either BoVD or Elder Evils that summons "evil weather," some of which can be really nasty. That's a good start.

I wonder if there's any way to optimize diseases? Sure, do-gooders might try to spread Remove Disease spells around, but if you can infect enough commoners to start an epidemic, there won't be enough clerics around to stem the tide. (Imagine if, during the Black Plague, one person in every, say, 250 could utterly cure two people per day of the plague. There would still be a statistically significant chunk of Europe's population missing after a few years. Also note that there's nothing in Remove Disease that specifically prevents you from being infected again...)

Arcane-surge
2010-04-13, 09:32 PM
A Dragonborn anything with the right metabreath feats (lingering breath and enlarge breath are key, I think) can light the entire plane on fire forever. You can apply the same metabreath feat more than once to a single use by accepting a further delay, so you just forgo having a breath weapon for the rest of your life, and enjoy the fireworks.

Abd al-Azrad
2010-04-13, 09:57 PM
It is my interpretation that you can use the Sacrifice rules from BoVD to, if you are sufficiently skilled, gain free Limited Wishes limited only by the amount of gullible saps you can lure into your massage parlour. Each Limited Wish is itself fantastically powerful, and can itself provide a Create Undead spell to produce a spawn-creating undead (tastefully, out of the sacrificed corpse). Exponential growth of murder!

So imagine a build that exists to create a cult (a cleric for the flavour, or a bard for the Diplomancy and buffing madness) dedicated to three things:

1) Optimizing the Diplomacy checks of its followers (a.k.a. proselytizing),

2) Optimizing the Knowledge (Religion) checks of its followers (a.k.a. sacrificing like gods),

3) Creating mohrgs.

I'm aware that wightocalypse has been mentioned already, and is easily preventable by the Good Guys (TM), but this character doesn't even need to kill a fly (at least directly), she just has to convince others to do the dirty work for her.

Sinfire Titan
2010-04-13, 10:17 PM
A Dragonborn anything with the right metabreath feats (lingering breath and enlarge breath are key, I think) can light the entire plane on fire forever. You can apply the same metabreath feat more than once to a single use by accepting a further delay, so you just forgo having a breath weapon for the rest of your life, and enjoy the fireworks.

Yeah, Enlarge Breath+Clinging Breath+Entangling Exhalation=Acid for everyone. May want an Elixir of Dragonbreath for the higher damage though.

Talon Sky
2010-04-13, 10:36 PM
1) Take a lot of levels as an arcane spellcaster
2) Lock yourself away for 1000 years with the sole intent of finding a way to destroy the world with magic
3) ???
4) PROFIT!

Alvrick
2010-04-13, 11:36 PM
one of the best ways is just to become a Talontar Blightlord, from Unapproachable East. use that disease ability a few times in a few forests across the world and watch the taint spread. remember to use it on plants, animals, and intelligent beings!

Naturebane
2010-04-18, 05:15 AM
how about this
for a before epic
step 1 belts of battle (a 3 charge item that give actions) and if dm uses altinate items get rings,headbands and so on of battle
step 2 a lot of disintegrate spells/wands or better yet enlarged disintegrate spells/wands

its not the most ecoteroist of above plans but next to irreversible then use a dismiss water spell and the worlds water will be no more.

Kobold-Bard
2010-04-18, 06:35 AM
A Dragonborn anything with the right metabreath feats (lingering breath and enlarge breath are key, I think) can light the entire plane on fire forever. You can apply the same metabreath feat more than once to a single use by accepting a further delay, so you just forgo having a breath weapon for the rest of your life, and enjoy the fireworks.

:smalleek: I did not know they could be reapplied. I love it.

I'm personally a supporter of the Wightocalypse method. I had a BBEG plotting to do just this.

magic9mushroom
2010-04-18, 06:44 AM
If you can figure out a way to stick Fell Drain on an unlimited-range spell, bad stuff happens.

deuxhero
2010-04-18, 06:51 AM
Iron Heart Surge+Sun or Iron Heart Surge+gravity.

Nidogg
2010-04-18, 07:07 AM
Wall of force+ comet fall+ enlarge spelld enlarge object to fall from orbit to bring a planet sized rock hurtling towards the earthfrom the promised land!. and reality maelstrom with widen/ extend.

PaladinBoy
2010-04-18, 11:44 AM
I'll second the use of Control Weather for city-wide destruction. Not really capable of destroying the whole world, but you could theoretically badly damage any type of civilization by wrecking all of the cities and villages you could find. I had a character who used this as her most powerful weapon when she got truly annoyed.

I'd also like to mention one druid spell that same party used on a city that annoyed us - I think it was called Fimbulwinter or something. (Don't have my books, so I can't look it up, unfortunately.) Forced a wide area into winter weather conditions for a rather large number of weeks. I'm sure there's some wide-ranging harm you could do to the world's climate by spreading that around as much as possible.

Eternal Drifter
2010-04-18, 12:32 PM
Ruining the game world, you say?

Here is one example that happened in one of my games just a couple days ago.

One of my players was playing an intelegent crossbow with an Ego of 30. (Explanation: The player of the crossbow had been through around 10 humanoid characters in two years, so he went for a change.) The special purpose of the crossbow was to create anarchy, with the power to dimention door at will with the 'weilder' (actually whatever being the crossbow had dominated for the day) and generally cause chaos wherever he went. He did too well the previous session, so I had the overgod, Ao, put the crossbow on the plane of death, where no mortal could enter or exit. A Quasit took the crossbow to the Abyss, and then got rid of it. The Crossbow then teleported about, searching for a portal to the material plane, and he got one... the thing is, the portal put him right in front of the sleeping Tarrasque!

I figured, that should urge him to get back to the rest of the party, but no, he went and tried to wake the beast up. He did in the end, and then had the crossbow successfuly dominate the Tarrasque! Next thing the party knew, the Crossbow-wielding Tarrasque was teleporting across the contenent...right...towards... the party!

Luckily, there was an artifact in the party, so I had the artifact teleport the humanoid party to a different world, and then the Crossbow went wild, destroying all the sources of government on the contentent. Then, finally, an epic level party came along and put down the beast.

And then a player suggested something the crossbow's player was fearing: put the crossbow to the Elemental Plane of Fire (the crossbow is made of wood; there was good reason to be afraid of his character winding up on the plane when using an Amulet of the Planes the previous session). I granted it: the crossbow now burns eternally, but the contenent: ruined, and it will take years to put it back together (or, if certain evil organizations act fast enough, a year to put it under the rule of evil).

dspeyer
2010-04-18, 01:34 PM
An uber-disease could be nifty for this. Do I remember that there are rules somewhere for enhancing animals (so that the enhancements breed true)? If so, pick a nasty parasite to apply them to. All it really needs is spell resistance (most remove-disease casters are low-level) and dimension door 1/day as a means of spreading. Then teleport to a bunch of population centers and release it.