Building a nation- Unlimited Awaken Spell Trick

[Gotterdammerung]

I've been polishing a mini-guide for a Iron chef entry I didn't get to submit and it has caused me to delve deep into everything artificer. While I was researching I happened upon a fun build that I thought was worth sharing.

Race- Warforged
Class-20 Artificer
Important feats- Craft Staff, wand surge, rapid spell, reach spell, chain spell, persistant spell, maximize spell, empower spell, etch schema, Ability Enhancer, dragon prophesier, Prophecy's Hero.

First you need to craft a staff with a single spell, awaken spell, on it. Because of the costly exp component this will hurt a little but it is worth it. You have plenty of XP to take the hit by 12th when you get the craft staff bonus feat from artificer. And your craft reserve + retain essence can be used to alleviate a good bit of the bite.

Then you need to craft 5 schemas of metamagic item infusion.

Using the artificer infusion concurrent infusions, cast multiple metamagic scroll infusions on your schema's of metamagic item. Apply reach, persistant metamagic to all 5 schemas.

Now activate all 5 schemas applying reach, rapid spell, chain spell, maximize spell, and empower spell to your staff of Awaken. These effects will last all day since the schemas of metamagic item were all persisted.

Now enter prophetic favor, and use your bonus action point from Prophecy's hero to activate your staff of awaken without spending a charge, thanks to wand surge. The awaken uses your caster level as is normal for staffs. The awaken has the effects of reach spell, chain spell, maximize spell, and empower spell thanks to the reach persistant metamagic item schema's. The awaken is also enhanced by the feat ability enhancer.

So the final result. 1/2 HD+wis times per day you can use this trick. It will takes 1 hour to cast the awaken each time we do the trick, and 8 hours of rest to regain infusions to prime the trick the next day. So at 20th level we can easily perform this trick roughly 16 times per day (22 wisdom required, higher wisdom score and miscellaneous caster lvl bumps will allow us to reach maximum efficiency sooner than 20). We gain 21 awakened plants and/or animals each time we do the trick (1 main target + 20 chain targets). That is 336 possible awakened creatures per day. 122,640 per year. That is over 1 million population in your nation after 10 years.


These plants have severely jacked int, wis, and cha. The animals have severely jacked int, meh wisdom and respectable charisma.

Plant-
.5(3d6+2) + 20 intelligence (min 22- max 30)
.5(3d6+2) + 20 wisdom (min 22- max 30)
.5(3d6+2) + 20 charisma (min 22- max 30)

Animal-
.5(3d6+2) + 20 intelligence (min 22- max 30)
.5(1d3+2) + 5 + base animals charisma (min Base animals charisma +6 - Max Base animals charisma + 7)


Now, yes these creatures don't automatically follow you. But they have an attitude of friendly towards you, and with a little focus into leadership resources, you can quickly claim the head position of your newly forming nation. And even if one of your creations rise to the task of leadership, they are probably smarter, wiser, and better suited for leadership, so its OK. The main thing to remember, they are friendly towards you, you are their creator, so you will definitely be allowed a place in their society/nation.

B4 you start creating it is best if you invent a new language. The more complex the language the better. When you create these creatures you can automatically teach them your new language. This will help solidify the new nations identity. Their own personal bonafide language.

While other nations may start with more resources, your nation is set up for great things. Every member of your society is automatically a supra-genius, wise as solomon, and charismatic like robert downey jr. There is no weakest link for this blossoming nation. It won't take long for this nation to overcome typical hurdles.

[Renen]

So you can pretty much have a nation of http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/7/75222/2233398-many_ents.png

[awa]

there friendly to you not each other.
Odds are your "nation" will wipe itself out within 24 hours
those deer wont take kindly to the wolf trying to eat them. trees wont like squirrels eating acorns.
even plants do everything in there power to kill any competitors for light and space its just normally happens on a level that very hard to see once they can move around and smash each other i suspect we will have open warfare. heck i could see shrubs making an alliance with humans to take out those dirty trees.

[Gotterdammerung]

there friendly to you not each other.
Odds are your "nation" will wipe itself out within 24 hours
those deer wont take kindly to the wolf trying to eat them. trees wont like squirrels eating acorns.
even plants do everything in there power to kill any competitors for light and space its just normally happens on a level that very hard to see once they can move around and smash each other i suspect we will have open warfare. heck i could see shrubs making an alliance with humans to take out those dirty trees.

Personally, I would only awaken small plants, as they gain the most mechanical benefit from the trick and can trade out their 1 starting racial HD for class levels.

And I am pretty sure I can keep the peace just fine. That is what a society is for. To keep the peace through law and order and social responsibility.



So you can pretty much have a nation of http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/7/75222/2233398-many_ents.png

Yeah, basically.

The Ents are on the move!

[SowZ]

You're best off sticking to one type of plant, yeah, to avoid in fighting.

[8wGremlin]

You could If you wanted extend this very same trick to my black sand entity



The Sand Domain gives both Awaken Sand (http://dndtools.eu/spells/sandstorm--85/awaken-sand--3170/) (6) and Blacksand (http://dndtools.eu/spells/sandstorm--85/black-sand--3162/)(2)

Thought that it was interesting...
A huge pile of intelligent sand, that is a Huge animated object with a base land speed of 40 feet and a burrow speed of 20 feet.
Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores are each 3d6.
is a huge area of magical darkness, and anyone who comes in to contact with it also takes 1d4 negative energy damage
oh and they are friends of the caster...


With the maximise and empower that's more impressive..
(see the thread for more details)
Huge Awakened Blacksand Entity (minmax boards) (http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=8556.msg136433#msg136433)

[Gotterdammerung]

You could If you wanted extend this very same trick to my black sand entity



With the maximise and empower that's more impressive..
(see the thread for more details)
Huge Awakened Blacksand Entity (minmax boards) (http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=8556.msg136433#msg136433)

Yeh you could make some giant black sand people. The downside to doing it that way though-

Natural black sand may be hard to find and can be removed with a sunlight spell. Sand made with the spell has to be permenancy'd which can be dispelled. And the initial staff cost is HUGE with the exp cost for awaken sand being double what Awaken spells exp cost is. Also , you can't make small and tiny animated objects for awaken sand. This is a downside because 1 hit dice or lower creatures can trade in their Hit dice for a class lvl instead. You have to use the huge animated object statistics for your sand creatures which eats up 8 plant hit dice. So it isn't quite as ideal.

But yeah, D&D is littered with Awaken style spells. Any of them could likely be adapted to work with this trick for a creature factory effect. You would just have to look closely at each of them for hitches.

[Phelix-Mu]

Or the underground empire of green slime. Emerge at night to ransack the realms of mere mortal races. Devour entire civilizations, leaving naught but stones behind. Especially effective against undead. Combine with liberal use of energy immunity, quench and teaching critters UMD.

If you can get a [foolish]DM to nail down a mechanic for rate of reproduction, this gets even sillier, since each awakened green slime stands to spread/reproduce new squares of green slime very quickly, and can plausibly toss/drop/cast off extra green slime matter with each hit on a target, to an extent limited only by the consumable material at hand.

Really, the druid spell list is quite silly for out of combat tricks like this. Just combining Will save optimization and mass awaken can be very effective, allowing one to awaken some very powerful plants. One of my level 20ish druids awakened a bunch of 40HD oaks, and gained some very powerful allies, overnight.

[Psyren]

heck i could see shrubs making an alliance with dwarves to take out those dirty trees.

FTFY :smallbiggrin:

But anyway - yeah this is a nice thought exercise but there's many ways it could turn out quite badly. For one thing, creating sapient deer and other prey animals, just so they are fully aware of their existence/purpose as food for the predators, strikes me as incredibly cruel; it could even be considered evil.

Leadership won't help much here - you have very little control over the specific followers you get, even if logically they should come from the forest you just "upgraded."

[Phelix-Mu]

FTFY :smallbiggrin:

But anyway - yeah this is a nice thought exercise but there's many ways it could turn out quite badly. For one thing, creating sapient deer and other prey animals, just so they are fully aware of their existence/purpose as food for the predators, strikes me as incredibly cruel; it could even be considered evil.

Leadership won't help much here - you have very little control over the specific followers you get, even if logically they should come from the forest you just "upgraded."

1000% agree with Psyren, here. Your nation of critters could quickly come to resent their own augmented nature.

Think, for instance, how often sentient humans struggle with their own intellect/lack thereof, wishing that we didn't have to make difficult choices, in denial over this or that, painfully aware of our own flaws and shortcomings. Now give that awareness to creatures for whom it was never intended.

As a druid, particularly a non-evil one, doing something along these lines is only acceptable when you have no other way to combat some big threat to the natural balance. You gain many powerful allies, but you have to treat each one as something akin to a child, and mass production of sentient children is probably unwise, not to mention unnatural.

This option is particularly unsavory to good-aligned druids, since you create aware beings and then subject them to situations where they will be in great jeopardy, directly increasing their capacity for mental and emotional suffering.

As a TO experiment, interesting, but the idea loses appeal when you actually get down to the ramifications.

And I would also point out that awaken is pretty poorly written. As a DM, if a player wants to exploit something poorly written, I would generally reserve the right to have topics not directly dealt with by the effect entirely at DM discretion, possibly running contrary to RAI or to how the player might hope things would work out.

One of my baseline principles is "great power comes with a price" and even if the player manages to dodge most of the "price" associated with an effect, that just makes me as DM inclined to have all of the price kick in at the role play level (e.g., something along the lines of each awakened creature has a splinter personality based off of the character's personality...the creatures are friendly, as per spell description, but they are increasingly mentally imbalanced, and prone to bad decision-making...I mean, the player just handed me dozens/hundreds/thousands of npcs, expect mitigation :smallcool:).

[awa]

another thing to consider how do you think the awakened animals/ plants are going to feel about their natural predators even when their only eating there non intelligent brothers and sisters. you think the oak tree is going to put up with squirrels eating all those baby trees? those shrubs are going to see there unintelligent brethren being smothered by the trees there gonna take axes to them.

I suspect awakening on a large scale would cause catastrophic ecological damge.

[Mithril Leaf]

Your best bet would probably be doing it in a demiplane with transplanted small plant life, all of the same non-invasive species. Absolutely a bad idea to awaken anything that would hold a grudge against previous enemies, so animals are pretty much out. Also want to avoid things that take a lot of space, so I'd avoid trees. Maybe tulips are a good choice?

[Vaz]

I'm not entirely sure stat generation falls under the effects of maximise etc.

I came up with this build for Wu Jen for unlimited Armies.

Wu Jen 12/ Incantatrix 3/Archmage 5 use Verdant Transformation, Body Outside Body, Wish x2, and PAO x2

1.Wu Jen casts BOB SLA twice and makes 8 clones of self.
1a) each clone and clone of clone does the same, ad infinitum
1b) Each clone uses Metamagic Effect to Persist themselves (so each clone can use its SLA's 2/day, twice for four castings of 4 clones)
2) Each clone PAO's a stone into a bush (8 castings over 24 hours)
3) Each clone Wishes the PAO bushes Awake (8 bushes)

Sure it is not exactly the uberstatted trees you have, but it with only a single generation (ie only the Wu Jen casting BOB), you have 2sla's from sla and 5 spellslots for 7ths, wthout CL augmentation that is 28 clones. Including self that is 29 casters each with 4 awakens, or 116 trees awakened (112 if the Wu Jen doesn't want to burn the XP).

Factor in that twice a day, each clone can clone itself a further 4 times and each clone can awaken 4 trees...

[8wGremlin]

Your best bet would probably be doing it in a demiplane with transplanted small plant life, all of the same non-invasive species. Absolutely a bad idea to awaken anything that would hold a grudge against previous enemies, so animals are pretty much out. Also want to avoid things that take a lot of space, so I'd avoid trees. Maybe tulips are a good choice?

And they evolve in to TRIFFIDS!

[Last Laugh]

Factor in that twice a day, each clone can clone itself a further 4 times and each clone can awaken 4 trees...

That sounds like a headache, I mean if you can control these clones at all you have to have some sort of contact with them right? To be able to aim their actions while you aren't present you have to sense through their sense? (otherwise you can only awaken stuff you supervise :/)

I feel like the end result would be an army of awakened shrubs guided by a raving lunatic (or are the shrubs not friendly vs YOU because you aren't their creator?)

Also you should awaken before you PaO so you have dragons who think they are shrubs... or lapdogs.

[Phelix-Mu]

Your best bet would probably be doing it in a demiplane with transplanted small plant life, all of the same non-invasive species. Absolutely a bad idea to awaken anything that would hold a grudge against previous enemies, so animals are pretty much out. Also want to avoid things that take a lot of space, so I'd avoid trees. Maybe tulips are a good choice?

I do like the genius that underlies this kind of thought experiment. Plans are cool, and they sound very clean cut in thought experiments and such. But, I think any plan along the lines of "unlimited x" or "infinite y" involves the manipulation of power on the scale of the kind of thing that should have a Murphy's Law corollary that can be seen from space.

So, as a DM, I would really enjoy this kind of plan. It's a good plan, and even if I foul it up a bit, the player is still going to achieve some coolness as a result of investing resources. The fouling up is directly proportional to the coolness, though, and, even with the example of awaken, the bottom line is that you just introduced 1000s of npcs into the game. Should they be friendly to the PC? Yes, or at least they start that way. Any other npc could Diplomacy a change of heart among your followers, and that is the straightforward way. Turn/rebuke plants is a thing, and I would also point to a series of frankly unhinged rules in BoVD about hive minds and critters. Eventually, if you are targeting animals in the wild, you will target one that is a "normal" animal for purposes of the spell, but with some subtle riders that let the [insert malign entity] discreetly gain access to the legions of awakened critters.

In short, the greater the exploit, the less the DM needs thorough justification to engineer a plausible plot complication, because the manipulation of power on this scale is literally like a flame for the villain moths. If it was possible for the PC to use power in this way, some NPC somewhere will do something on a similar or smaller scale and find a way to muck up the plan.

Still, I love plans like this, and the scope of what is possible with magic in 3.5 is really endlessly fascinating.

[Vaz]

That sounds like a headache, I mean if you can control these clones at all you have to have some sort of contact with them right? To be able to aim their actions while you aren't present you have to sense through their sense? (otherwise you can only awaken stuff you supervise :/)
"This spell creates one or more indistinguishable duplicates of you, all of which share your ability scores, personality, class levels, skills, feats, and memories."

No need for any special allowances.


I feel like the end result would be an army of awakened shrubs guided by a raving lunatic (or are the shrubs not friendly vs YOU because you aren't their creator?)As intelligent as newly awakened 18 int trees might be, they don't know what exactly the clones are; for all appearances they are completely like for like with the exception of spellcasting, an abstract not present in life.


Also you should awaken before you PaO so you have dragons who think they are shrubs... or lapdogs.
No,you PAO a stone into a tree, then Awaken the tree. No need to feed them that way then. Sure you can PAO a Dragon with it, but the average back garden topsoil doesn't normally contain 3million dragons, it does have that many pebbles though

[Gotterdammerung]

I do like the genius that underlies this kind of thought experiment. Plans are cool, and they sound very clean cut in thought experiments and such. But, I think any plan along the lines of "unlimited x" or "infinite y" involves the manipulation of power on the scale of the kind of thing that should have a Murphy's Law corollary that can be seen from space.

So, as a DM, I would really enjoy this kind of plan. It's a good plan, and even if I foul it up a bit, the player is still going to achieve some coolness as a result of investing resources. The fouling up is directly proportional to the coolness, though, and, even with the example of awaken, the bottom line is that you just introduced 1000s of npcs into the game. Should they be friendly to the PC? Yes, or at least they start that way. Any other npc could Diplomacy a change of heart among your followers, and that is the straightforward way. Turn/rebuke plants is a thing, and I would also point to a series of frankly unhinged rules in BoVD about hive minds and critters. Eventually, if you are targeting animals in the wild, you will target one that is a "normal" animal for purposes of the spell, but with some subtle riders that let the [insert malign entity] discreetly gain access to the legions of awakened critters.

In short, the greater the exploit, the less the DM needs thorough justification to engineer a plausible plot complication, because the manipulation of power on this scale is literally like a flame for the villain moths. If it was possible for the PC to use power in this way, some NPC somewhere will do something on a similar or smaller scale and find a way to muck up the plan.

Still, I love plans like this, and the scope of what is possible with magic in 3.5 is really endlessly fascinating.

Well yeah, rule 0 could always come back and bite you in the butt. But a GM could also have no problem with it at all. I don't feel that awaken is poorly written. Especially when you compare it to its counterparts like awaken construct and awaken undead (horribly written spells).

Just because a GM can invent reasons for your nation to destroy itself doesn't mean he will, or even that they are likely to do so. And he can invent these reasons to destroy any nation already existing in the world, so it really doesn't matter.

I listed animals and plants because I was listing potential options. I already stated I would just raise small and tiny plants. And I don't see them de-evolving into crazy petty twisted screw ups. There isn't any reason for them to. there isnt anything perverted about awaken, its good wholesome druid life magic. And if we roleplay their stats, they are even less likely to be disfunctional. As far as needs go, they have even less stress than a normal society. It is easy for them to get plenty of sun and plenty of nutrients from the soil. And as far as some of them just suddenly turning to the dark side and making trouble, that can't even happen. Plants are always neutral when given sentience by awaken. Your plants can't even turn evil or good, they are just always neutral.

This idea can work fine from a roleplay standpoint. I think a bunch of genius, guru, rock star shrubs who have all their needs easily met, have a instant national identity, have a strong loving leader, and have a forced zen like unwaivering neutrality can't help but succeed as a society.