D&D wizard spells/tricks in a large-scale war

[Privateer]

Suppose a powerful, but non-epic wizard is fighting for one side in a massive kingdom-vs-kingdom war. What can he do aside from precision strikes against small, but important figures, like the enemy general or king?

Google-fu came up with Locate City Bomb, but that one strikes me as a cheesy trick. Is there anything else in his arsenal that would be powerful enough to defeat entire armies of low-levels?

[Icarus]

I've always wanted to try Blackfire from the SpC in a large scale situation.

If you don't care about which side you take down, Control Weather.

[The Winter King]

the wall line of spells are fun, especially widened Walls of fire. There is a spell in sandstorm hat throws a massive wave of water a a huge area. Blackfire is awesome.

[Amnestic]

An army marches on its stomach. Destroy/poison their food/water supplies.
Create infighting with your mastery of enchantment/illusion spells to force the army to tear itself apart for you.
Have your "small precise strikes" be at the high ranking officers. Break their morale underfoot.

[Andion Isurand]

If you are going against an evil aligned kingdom or simply want to help non-evil creatures survive a conflict, I like the Wages of Sin spell from BoED.

[olthar]

controlling the weather so it is always storming for the enemy and comfortable for your army. Or, in a long term war, creating a drought in the enemy kingdom so there is no food for them at all while your kingdom stays able to eat and supply its army.

Communication among troops is key in any combat. A simple spells like message or sending could allow the wizard to coordinate divided forces without any trouble.

Spells like pyrotechnics could make night attacks much easier (blinding every enemy with a 120 foot radius of their camp fires would making the slaughter by your army much simpler to do.

[ken-do-nim]

I'd summon lots and lots of elementals.

[Jinn Master]

You could create a spell that makes golems out of the army's waste, make yourself invisible, and sit there animating them all night. It would certainly screw with morale, and with a large army, you would have a massive supply of materials.

You could also go for infection, by using control weather to create some wind and blow disease ridden air into the camp.

You could also make propoganda pamphlets with explosive runes, and use control weather to blow them into the camp.

[Aharon]

Greater Spirit Binding (Wu Jen 8) can be grabbed via Extra Spell feat (both the spell and the feat are found in Complete Arcane.
With it, you can bind a Spirit of the Land (Monster Manual 2), which has Earthquake at will. It can level cities for you easily, unless the other side has similarly strong bound creatures or wizards of your caliber.
Lesser Spirit Binding (Wu Jen 4) can be used in the same way at a lower level to bind Large Nature Spirits (8 HD) that have Shapechange and can also use any wu jen spell associated with the element most closely related to the nature spirit’s essence. Thus, a mountain spirit can use any earth spell, while an island spirit can use any water spell. A Large nature spirit can use any given spell once per day. (Oriental Adventures)


Edit: Spoilered Stuff that doesn't exactly fit the posted scenario (lots of effective low-level stuff, but not things high level casters would need to rely on) :
A list I put together for my own game some time ago:

Class specific tricks to get lots of persistent buffs on low level mooks:

Metamagic School Focus: -1/Metamagic
Practical Metamagic: -1/Metamagic

Focused Specialist 2/Master Specialist 3/Incantatrix 3
int 18
race 20
level 22
age 24
Spellcraft 11+int 7=18
+7 circumstance
Ring of Spellcraft +8 (6400 gp)
Ring of Spellcraft +8 (6400 gp)
Amulet of Spellcraft +9 (8100 gp)
Headband of Spellcraft +9 (8100 gp)

Artificer 8
int 18
race 20
level 22
age 24
item (4000) 26
Artificer 8
Cleric 9
Bard 4
Wizard 7
Wizard 5/Incantatrix 3

Prayer (Cleric 3, Paladin 3) DC 45/54 40 ft./Widened 80 ft.
Blessed aim (Blackguard 1, clr 1, pal 1) DC 39/48 50 ft./Widened 100 ft.
Righteous Wrath of the Faithful clr 5 DC 51/60 30 ft./Widened 60 ft.
Interfaith Blessing (Cleric 2) DC 42/51 20 ft./Widened 40 ft.
Widened Persistent Allegro (Bard 3) DC 42/51 20 ft./Widened 40 ft.
Persistent Recitation (cleric 4, Purification 3) DC 42/51 60 f./Widened 120 ft.
Elation (Clr 2, BoED), DC 42/51, 80 ft./Widened 160 ft.

+2 morale STR
+2 morale DEX
+5 ft. movement
+3 AC
+5 ranged attacks
+2 ranged damage
+6 melee attacks
+6 melee damage
one additonal melee attack per round when making full attack
30 feet movement


when high level cleric is doing the routine:
Widened Persistent Crown of Glory (Glory 8)
+4 morale bonus on attack rolls,
saves, and skill checks, immunity to
fear effects, and temporary hit points
equal to your caster level (maximum
20).
Widened Persistent Lion's Roar (Cleric, Courage 8)
+1 morale bonus
on attack rolls and saves against fear
effects, plus temporary hit points equal
to 1d8 + caster level (to a maximum of
1d8+20 temporary hit points at caster
level 20th).
Sacred Heaven Pal 4
+2 sacred AC, retain dex bonus to armor while flatfooted/against invisible opponents

Other useful mass buffs, non-persistable
Mass Aid
Mass Conviction
Mass Fireshield

Generally useful low-level battlefield spells
Message PHB
Alarm PHB
Bane PHB
Bless PHB
Enlarge Person PHB
Entangle PHB
Summon Swarm PHB
Light PHB

Cure Light Wounds, Mass
Cure Moderate Wounds, Mass
Cure Critical Wounds, Mass

High area spells
Control Weather, Control Wind PHB
Earthquake, Sun Burst PHB
Forbiddance around position of army general

Keeping positions
Traps (Glyphs etc.)
Guards and Wards(immune creatures you can use in it: Destrachan, Grimlocks, Oozes, Tremorsense: Phasm, Umberhulk, Purple Worm, Yrthak) PHB

Duration Concentration (good for low-level guys, doesn't consume many spell slots):
Dirge of Discord SpC
Wall of Gloom SpC
Wall of Sand SpC
Hypnotic Pattern PHB
Lullaby PHB
Major Image PHB
Minor Image PHB
Rainbow Pattern PHB
Scintillating Pattern PHB
Silent Image PHB
Storm of Vengeance PHB
Veil PHB
Wall of Fire PHB
Control Darkness and Shadow Forgotten Realms
Wall of Ooze Forgotten Realms
Apocalypse from the Sky BoVD
Evil Weather BoVD
Inspired Aim BoED
Drums of War Heroes of Battle
Summon Monster I + Concentrate on Summoning (3rd Party Book)


Psionics:
Energy Wall XPH


Miscellaneous
Hallucinatory Terrain PHB
Mirage Arcana PHB
Plant Growth, half circle PHB
Silence PHB
Greater Cloak of Bravery SpC
Cold Snap Frburn
Illusory Pit SpC
Shadow Landscape SpC
Shifting Paths SpC
Aiming at the target SpC
Call Lightning, Call Lightning Storm PHB
Feather Fall: catapulting people (Paratroopers), cast on incoming artillery to make it less effective
Evil Armies: Circle of Prot against Evil, Dimensional Anchor, Planar Binding
Evil Armies & Good Armies: Planar Ally PHB
Polymorph PHB
Touch of Healing => Heighten endurance of mooks



Use of Image spells:
Make them look like Acid Fog,
Bigby’s Hand Spells
Cloud Kill
Delayed Blast Fireball

[Ytaker]

Planar binding. Avoral (guardinal) and Bralani (eladrin). They have the at will abilities charm person, wind wall, magic missile, and aura of fear. There is essentially no way for low level people to damage this group. They'll face multiple auras of fear, which will stop any melee units, and they'll face wind walls, which can stop any arrows. A group of them summoned by you can essentially defeat an entire army on their own, if you leave them to their own devices.

If you can't get good beings, a bone devil makes a good utility bind. They have at will invisibility and wall of ice, which takes care of protecting them, and you can bind some other creature with an at will range ability.

[ken-do-nim]

Planar binding. Avoral (guardinal) and Bralani (eladrin). They have the at will abilities charm person, wind wall, magic missile, and aura of fear. There is essentially no way for low level people to damage this group. They'll face multiple auras of fear, which will stop any melee units, and they'll face wind walls, which can stop any arrows. A group of them summoned by you can essentially defeat an entire army on their own, if you leave them to their own devices.

If you can't get good beings, a bone devil makes a good utility bind. They have at will invisibility and wall of ice, which takes care of protecting them, and you can bind some other creature with an at will range ability.

Oh yeah, those are good; the main reason I mentioned elementals is the DR would make them hard to injure and air elementals have that whirlwind ability which is perfect for taking out an army of mooks.

[Killer Angel]

Some Tippy's tricks, ala "create magic traps" to give food to your troops, or various buffs.

[Jinn Master]

Heat metal on iron filings, blow it into the enemy. It'll blind a good number of them, I imagine.

[Thorcrest]

Illusion is your friend, with a simple silent image spell you can make it look like armies are doing X when they are actually doing Y. Also great for concealing actual battlefield movements, and making them think your doing other things than you actually are... I can leave the specifics to you.

[Tyndmyr]

Suppose a powerful, but non-epic wizard is fighting for one side in a massive kingdom-vs-kingdom war. What can he do aside from precision strikes against small, but important figures, like the enemy general or king?

Google-fu came up with Locate City Bomb, but that one strikes me as a cheesy trick. Is there anything else in his arsenal that would be powerful enough to defeat entire armies of low-levels?

Wightpocalpyse. Gating in Solars. They can take on fairly large numbers of troops that way.

Raising undead. The HD cap is limiting for this, but still...free soldiers for your side that you can essentially replace at will.

Mass buffs. How worthwhile these are depends entirely on how good the troops are to start with. If they're terrible...probably not worth bothering.

Dominate/Mindrape. Those small precision strikes? Yeah, those guys now work for you. The amount of people a 17-20th level caster can mindrape and dominate in a week is pretty impressive.

Also, there's always blasting. Sure, an enlarged fireball may not be the most awesome thing ever for adventurers, but it'll tear a decently sized hole out of a battlefield. After you've done your strikes for the day and burned off the high level abilities, wading through giant piles of mooks with your low level spells/wands is a great way to pull a little extra xp.

[Ravens_cry]

If you are being besieged, Cloudkill is your friend. Most soldiers won't get a save, and it is explicitly heavier then air. This means you can cast it, it will affect the troops surrounding your castle, but not your allies on the walls.
The wall of x spells can make for excellent choke points, so they are forced into a narrow column, where an area of effect spell, or even archers, can be used to deadly effect. On the offensive side, stone shape makes for a great way to speed undermining or simply bringing in troops. Dimension door, especially if you have information on the interior design of the castle, can also get a strike force into the castle and do a lot of damage. It can also be used by the besieged to do the same for a command tent. And if worst comes to worst, teleport can get key personnel out, fast.

[Tyndmyr]

Yeah, Im a fan of invisible walls of fire on the battlefield.

Not only are they highly efficient at killing people, they induce a lovely paranoia about moving anywhere without detect magic. A great way to tie up all the low level enemy casters.

Control Winds is also pretty solid. 40 ft/cl is a pretty solid area for high level folks, and hurricanes are notably problematic. Now, to use this as a wizard, the easiest way is to be a domain wizard and select the Storm Domain.

[Qwertystop]

Widened Grease, Heightened to the point where they will rarely make saves.
Widened Wall of Gloom, if your troops have Darkvison.
Widened Wall of Water, if they have water breathing.
Widened Invisible Wall of Sand, with Earthglide. The enemies will suddenly hit an area of slow pain, and your men can "walk" through it fine.

Give some of your troops a way of casting Tenser's Floating Disk to get past terrain hazards set up by you or the enemy, like the above Grease. Message is good too, lower-level Sending if you have line-of-sight. Just give the commander a window in his tent.

[Ytaker]

Oh yeah, those are good; the main reason I mentioned elementals is the DR would make them hard to injure and air elementals have that whirlwind ability which is perfect for taking out an army of mooks.

Yeah, the dr is very helpful. Greater ones have 10. But the soldiers, with good selection of feats and weapons, will eventually be able to chip them down. Hence the spell like abilities- even a huge army won't be able to take them down because they simply can't touch them.

If the non epic mage goes with them they'll be able to do all the other things in this thread as well and take out any mages or priests summoned to take the group down. Both sides likely have mid level casters and priests, and if you take out theirs, your casters will have battlefield dominance.

If they are defeated he can simply teleport out and repeat. The big thing is hit and run. His spells are ablative, and he can recover them by sleeping. The enemy's troops are not ablative.

[Cyrion]

Yeah- cloudkill while they're asleep can do amazingly bad things to an army not heavily protected.

In general, focus on tactics that create disorder and occupy multiple people with your one action. Cause disease can be nasty if you do something contagious and slip it in so it can spread before being detected. Your one spell either requires multiple cure diseases, or it runs havok; make them find the dog in the camp that's been spreading bubonic plague... Destroy their food and water, and now you're occupying casters with having to create it. An army is not going to be happy with the magical equivalent of raw tofu for very long.

Also consider how you use your magical resources. If you've got two casters available, offset their sleep cycles so that you always have someone lobbing things at the other army- then they have to do the same with their casters.

[potatocubed]

Mirage arcana (Wiz 5), hallucinatory terrain (Wiz 4), and veil (Wiz 6) are pretty much explicitly designed for large battles, and have nice long durations to boot - you cloak the place in illusions, then get stuck in to something else.

Move earth (Wiz 6) can let you reshape a battlefield however you like, including building a massive earthen maze for the enemy soldiers to navigate. Combine with some hostile earth-gliding creatures for best effect.

[kestrel404]

Explosive runes. Unless you're being attacked by illiterate barbarians, then scattering playing cards covered with explosive runes all over the battlefield that your enemy will be marching over is better than land mines.

[Eldariel]

Shapechange is obviously huge; turning into anything immune to normal opponents (simple Dragon-forms work fine) and AoE attacks (e.g. Dragon) could create immense (read: platoon-wide) destruction in a matter of seconds. Any kinds of Weather-effects and anything that can dig trenches (Shape Stone, for example), let alone Wish to replicate normally-huge-casting time spells in 1 standard action.

And yeah, Gate is as strong as ever. Planar Binding, given more time, works too, and the 20-round duration on many summons will also make them exceedingly useful. But yeah, a high-level Wizard has many ways to inflict massive damage in a massive area. Most efficient means is acting through proxies though, or in general using offense that doesn't involve expending spell slots for only killing 1000 people or something. Things like Shapechange and Gate give you ways to have effectively immortal weapons and infinite "ammo" for wiping out masses.


It's also worth noting all the other huge implications of having high-level magic available:
- Communication between combat units can be handled through Telepathy (Telepathic Bond can be Permanencied). One of the biggest issues in medieval time and the reason suboptimal tactics had to be employed was simply the lack of ability for units to coordinate and react together to unplanned events. Only with radio has that changed. A single higher level Wizard would remove that entire aspect making the whole army a hundred times more efficient.
- Supply lines are exceedingly trivial to handle through Teleportation. Hell, a high-enough level Wizard to create a Teleportation Circle would just basically allow the army to be anywhere it wants at any point with instant reinforcement possibility.
- Divinations like Commune, Divination and Contact Other Plane allow for rather exact mapping of opposing army strength, their plans and any possible equally noteworthy figures in their ranks. Way better intelligence than any intelligence agency ever has been able to provide.

And of course, mind controlling high-ranking members of the opposing force (just Dispel the Pro-Evil or whatever they have and go for it) would make the hostile force completely unable to act. Though high-level casters on the other side would counteract this, of course.

[Ravens_cry]

- Supply lines are exceedingly trivial to handle through Teleportation. Hell, a high-enough level Wizard to create a Teleportation Circle would just basically allow the army to be anywhere it wants at any point with instant reinforcement possibility.
se.
I am working on a Roman Empire like civilisation that has a teleportation circle engraved in the stones of the main square of every market town. Expensive, but off set by the tolls paid by merchants and other citizens who use it during peace time and allows brutally efficient response to revolts and invasions. As you might expect, tampering with a circle is a form of treason.
***
Not a Wizard trick, but Bards will be very useful in mass combat. For low levels verses verses low levels the +1 to hit and damage from a 1st level bard means quite a bit, and it only gets better as you get better bards. Can ghost sound be used as basically an amplifier? This would allow a bard to potentially sing over the entire battlefield, providing bonuses to all allies.

[Tyndmyr]

Can ghost sound be used as basically an amplifier? This would allow a bard to potentially sing over the entire battlefield, providing bonuses to all allies.

No, but Im pretty sure low level spells exist specifically for that.

Make sure one of said bards is a DFI bard. Adding d6s of fire damage is ludicrously awesome at low levels.

[CockroachTeaParty]

As was mentioned previously, Mirage Arcana, Hallucinatory Terrain, and other Big Illusions are fantastic for large battles. Make it look like your castle is a hill, then make an illusion of a fake castle nearby (in range of your other spells), and fill the moats with lava, or something. Who cares if nobody will die if they step in the illusion-lava? Nobody's going to want to try it. Or you could be a real jerk and have illusory lava sprinkled around pools of *actual* lava.

Cloudkill is definitely worth a few laughs, but few spells can cause as much mass destruction in one round as Horrid Wilting. Killing hundreds of soldiers in six seconds by sucking the water out of them is sure to do wonders for enemy morale.

Some of the more insane spells from Frostburn are excellent for destroying large swaths of area. Just bury the enemy in tons of snow.

[Ravens_cry]

No, but Im pretty sure low level spells exist specifically for that.

Make sure one of said bards is a DFI bard. Adding d6s of fire damage is ludicrously awesome at low levels.
Indeed. When a typical 1st level warrior using the nonelite array, your typical, in most games, D&D soldier, has 9 hit points, an extra d6 is brutal. It's like giving everyone flaming weapons. A smaller, more manoeuvrable army, able to cut through enemy lines. D&D is not meant for large scale battles, rolling would be brutal unless you abstracted things intensely, but it is fun to hypothesize the effects it would have.

[Privateer]

Lots of really cool ideas! :smallsmile:

I want to clarify the scenario, though. When I say army of low-levels, I mean an army made of primarily 1-3 level warriors, but that, of course, would have its own casters with magic items of mid and possibly higher levels. So obvious things like using Greater Invisibility and a crossbow for as many rounds as the enemy has soldiers are out.

Also, just for kicks and giggles, let's complicate the scenario for the wizard, since there are a lot of ways for him to mess with an enemy army when backed by an army of his own.

Suppose he doesn't have a friendly army, AND suppose he has a location to protect that the enemy army can get to in reasonable finite time. So, it's a high-level wizard in his precious tower in the middle of nowhere, who pissed off the local king too much and now has one of the kingdom's armies marching to burn down said tower. Tower can be assumed to have a reasonable garrison for a stronghold of around 20 low-level warriors. Enemy army is in the tens of thousands mooks, backed by 10-20 mid-level and up to 100 low level PCs of their own. Is the wizard screwed now? :smalltongue:

Somehow evacuating the entire stronghold and thus buying himself more time is fine, if there is a way for the wizard to do that.

[Aharon]

@Privateer
It depends on how cheesy you want to get. Generally I would say that no, the army isn't a threat, because most of the ideas still work. If he refrains from using them and the other side does, it could endanger him (i.e. he doesn't use bound creatures, one of the enemy mid level mages uses spirit binding for a Nature Spirit).

Basically, you should lay down what we can use and what we can't. Many of the tricks mentioned are borderline cases that some DMs don't allow because they are headache inducing.

[potatocubed]

Something to bear in mind is that anything one side can pull, so can the other, assuming equal quantities of wizard. One of a wizard's primary duties might well be the anticipation and nullification of enemy wizard tricks.

[Tyndmyr]

Suppose he doesn't have a friendly army, AND suppose he has a location to protect that the enemy army can get to in reasonable finite time. So, it's a high-level wizard in his precious tower in the middle of nowhere, who pissed off the local king too much and now has one of the kingdom's armies marching to burn down said tower. Tower can be assumed to have a reasonable garrison for a stronghold of around 20 low-level warriors. Enemy army is in the tens of thousands mooks, backed by 10-20 mid-level and up to 100 low level PCs of their own. Is the wizard screwed now? :smalltongue:

No. If he has Gate, he is not screwed. The only plausible danger to him is any of those 10-20 mid-level PCs that are spellcasters. Kill them first. Preferably using scry and die tactics.

Hell, a symbol of insanity on the front door is basically enough to tie up the army for a significant amount of time for almost no resources.


Somehow evacuating the entire stronghold and thus buying himself more time is fine, if there is a way for the wizard to do that.

...teleport? Yes, evacuation being on the table means the wizard automatically wins.

[Chilingsworth]

I would depend on what you mean by "low level" "Mid Level" and "High Level."

If, for example, you mean low level = 1-3 (same level as the warriors, but with PC classes), mid level = say, 8-12, and high level (the basically solo mage) = 17-20, the result could be far different than if you mean low level = 1-9, mid level = 10-14, and the mage is level 15 or 16.

As for evacuation, the mage could manage this with teleportation circle if he has 9th level spells, easily. He might still lose his keep, but he should also be able to trap it to do some real damage to the invaders if he has to.

[Tyndmyr]

Hell, I'd do it just to be vengeful. Explosive runes is cheap, low level, and will ruin the day of any low level soldier tromping through.

If you're a wizard, and your tower DOESNT have deathtraps, you're doing it wrong.

[Warlawk]

I will admit that I am not an expert on the specific traits of individual planes out there, but aren't there some planes that can have pretty extreme differences in time flow from the prime? So a wizard could keep two plane shift spells in his loadout, one to shift to the prime and one to shift back to his "fast time" plane. So he can go to the prime, drop his entire spell load on the enemy army and then plane shift back out to his safe place and recover, but more importantly he can sleep and regain his entire spell load for the day. Rinse and repeat and you have a wizard dropping his entire daily spell list into your army every hour or so (depending on time flow differences). For that matter, the Genesis spell lets you create a demiplane where you dictate the traits of the realm.

(Did a quick look on the SRD (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/planes.htm))


Time

The rate of time’s passage can vary on different planes, though it remains constant within any particular plane. Time is always subjective for the viewer. The same subjectivity applies to various planes. Travelers may discover that they’ll pick up or lose time while moving among the planes, but from their point of view, time always passes naturally.

[snip]

Flowing Time

On some planes, time can flow faster or slower. One may travel to another plane, spend a year there, then return to the Material Plane to find that only six seconds have elapsed. Everything on the plane returned to is only a few seconds older. But for that traveler and the items, spells, and effects working on him, that year away was entirely real.

So you could create your own demiplane with the genesis spell and dictate that one day passes in your demiplane for every second that passes in the prime material. You can planeshift out after casting all your spells and spend a full day there, then shift back and technically be within the same round you left. The time difference on the prime material would be so small that people would likely not even know you left (except that planeshift does not allow you to enter the plane at a specific spot, but that's easy enough to deal with through teleport etc).

Since we're already blowing XP and prep time on Genesis, lets just assume the use of a thought bottle and have the wizard use a number of wishes to create two magic items that allow a swift action use of Plane Shift, and one of teleport without error as well, just to cover the transport issues of getting to and from the battlefield to the safe house demiplane. We'll stop thought bottle item creation abuse right there before it just gets silly, but that's potentially another "i win button" given that the wizard has virtually unlimited amounts of prep time due to the time differential.

Note that the time differential also allows for virtually unlimited creation of explosive runes bombs and other such goodies.

Now, on to the actual destruction. Skipping the time honored tradition of walls, blasting, summoning etc which has already been covered, lets look at something new. We're going to assume that wish will let you learn one spell from another class list as if it were a wizard spell. Not a traditional use of Wish, but one that is not unreasonable. Our wizard is going to use wish to learn Blizzard as a 5th level spell. Whoever wrote this spell has NO concept of how snow interacts with the things around it.

1 foot of snow per round, 1 round duration per level, 100' radius per level. And it inflicts non lethal cold damage to things caught in it. Now, our wizard is non epic but a level wasn't set and several people have already assumed level 20 so we'll just go with that. That means 20 feet of snow over 2 minutes in a 2000' radius, or a circle 4000 feet edge to edge.

20 feet of snow in 2 minutes will BURY an army. Now, the spell has a duration so you can extend it. It has a rolled damage component so you can apply both maximize and empower. It has a radius so you can widen it. The real kicker is that you can apply invisible spell to it so that the army has no idea what's happening to them. Above and beyond the obvious benefit of an invisible blizzard this can have a dramatic impact on morale as anyone not directly in the blizzard has a nice view of all their comrades being entombed in something no one can see and freezing/suffocating to death. The various combinations of the above metamagic lets you fill all your spell slots from 5th on up with blizzard spells and lets you drop a truly absurd amount of snow on the enemy army. This ignores all of the oddball wightocalypse possibilities and such and just sticks to pure core metamagics.

Now, the blizzard spell is transmutation [cold] and the description indicates that what it actually does is change the climate conditions in such a way to force snow to fall. The snow itself is not actually magic, and is a byproduct of the conditions created by the spell and not actually a creation of the spell. That means the snow is real and is there to stay. That has two immediate consequences.

First is weight. A quick search came up with some numbers, 5.2 pounds per cubic food for light fluffy snow and 12.5 pounds per cubic foot for heavy wet snow. That averages to like 8.85 so lets call it 9 pounds just to make it easy. Not going to get too in depth with exact physics and blah blah blah (mostly because I'm bad with things like that), but anyone who lives in an area with snow will tell you that 20 feet of snow on a building usually results in a collapse. This means any structure in the spell which isn't a stone building is likely to collapse. Light stone buildings that are not meant to withstand a siege would probably collapse as well. So you've just flattened anything short of stone military buildings within the radius.

Second is melting. Again I'm not going to try and screw around with exact numbers but that much snow is going to melt into a LOT of water causing all kinds of crazy flash flooding as well as just outright mud and wet conditions which has been known to exacerbate issues of disease and sickness in army camp conditions.

Would type a little more but I need to go run an immediate errand. Bottom line, if the wizard can manage to get Blizzard he can just flat ruin that advancing army without any weird tricks.

[Qwertystop]

There's a spell, can't remember what it's called, but what it does is:
direct damage to a living target, and if the spell kills them a water elemental rises from their body.

[Ytaker]

The mages are the main threat. 10-20 casters of level 10 are far more deadly to a single mage than 30000 fighters at level 3 because the wizards can cast save or die effects. He can teleport away if the level 3 fighters do too much damage. With good planar binds and gates he can summon creatures that can kill thousands of enemies. The levels of the mid level and low level PCs are far more important than the horde of mooks.

If time is a problem you can plane shift to Dal Quor - The Region of Dreams. 10:1 time ratio. Sleep for 48 minutes (8hours) and you're ready to burn all your spells again.

Edit. No, evidently only planar shepherds get that. It was apparantly ripped out of the universe.

[Darth Stabber]

Permanancied symbol of death. Set to go off when stepped on, apply liberally to the battlefield. Every 10 minutes it kills off 150hp worth of enemies. whether or not you give your troops immunity or a password, depends on your alignment.

[Tyndmyr]

The levels of the mid level and low level PCs are far more important than the horde of mooks.

Levels and classes.

That said, he can teleport in, get a surprise round, celerity himself another round, and rely on a contingent teleport to get him back out. That requires...phb 1 and 2. Meh. He should be able to down at least a caster or two each strike. Quite probably some assorted damage to whoever is unfortunate enough to be nearby.

So, with 10-20 mid-level people, probably a third of which are casters(high for D&D universe as a whole, but we can assume that getting casters will be a priority). Figure a third of them are sleeping at any given time.

Yeah, he can probably go through those casters in a day. Easy.

[Privateer]

Our wizard is going to use wish to learn Blizzard as a 5th level spell.
<lots of awesomeness skipped> :)


That spell sounds absolutely fantastic, but I can't find what book it's in. Where is it? I'd get that book just for this spell! :smallcool:

EDIT: Got it; Frostburn.

[graymachine]

What can a high-level wizard wizard do in a war? Assuming he doesn't have an opponent caster, he wins forever. In a war footing you remove the primary weakness of wizards; prepping spells. Wizards in the situation of a war don't need to think in terms of an adventuring party, which frees them to be maximally effective. All of the above suggestions are true and a wizard can handle them all, especially if he has the lower level wizard-students he should reasonably have (read Leadership.)

Essentially, if one army has a high-level wizard and the other doesn't, the other army loses. Period. It's not even a question of mechanics; it's simply logical when you think about it.

Things get really interesting when both armies have high-level wizards.

[Tyndmyr]

Yeah. In which case, it generally gets to an interesting wizard duel. Interesting, because both presumably have a fairly secure place to rest, and a fairly consistent way of meeting each other and opposing desires. I can see a war in which wizards devote a lot of resources to countering each other.

That said, once one side achieves wizard dominance, the other side is probably done.

Wizards sort of form an analogy to modern control of the air, really.

[HeadofVecna]

Sorry for the thread necromancy, but I can't believe the spell Frostfell (also in Frostburn) never got a mention. It kills everything in a 20' cube per level save to take 1d6/level.

[HeadofVecna]

Sorry for the thread necromancy, but I can't believe the spell Frostfell (also in Frostburn) never got a mention. It kills everything in a 20' cube per level save to take 1d6/level.