Help me make a city fly in d&d 3.5

[Eslin]

I'm creating a human wizard capital for a human dominated, high magic campaign. Access to xp, crafting gold and rare materials is easy but not infinite, and I'm envisioning a city of hundreds of different materials, enchants and defenses - automated spell turrets (anyone know where to find those?), different bits crafted out of various light materials, riverine and adamantine reinforcements for the most vulnerable parts and dotted all over with flying carpets, levitate spells, flasks of alchemists fire (lighter than air!) built into the framework.

Nothing has to be optimal, this is a city full of wizards suddenly having an idea and adding their own enchantment/material/item to the city's mass. So, what makes things fly and what defences can be used to turn it into a medieval death star?

[Anecronwashere]

For all your Science, magitech and (if refluffed) Magic needs:
Gramarie (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=252794)

Using RAW, there isn't much for floating cities, without just saying "Ok, this city flies. Because Magic."

[Kuulvheysoon]

Try and track down a copy of Lost Empires of Faerun.

There's an Epic spell there (or is it merely 10th level?) that basically slices the top off of a mountain, inverts it, and floats.

[Silva Stormrage]

Stronghold builder's guide can do it but it is EXPENSIVE.

[Vizzerdrix]

Shining South. 4th level Wizard Spell called Suspension. 1000 lbs/CL floats for a long time. Put a trap of that and a cheap golem in every basement.

[Eslin]

Try and track down a copy of Lost Empires of Faerun.

There's an Epic spell there (or is it merely 10th level?) that basically slices the top off of a mountain, inverts it, and floats.

Not looking for a single spell, looking for an interlocking web of enchantments, items and materials to form an incredibly high magic hodge podge city of varying materials.

So, what others do we know? Lighter than normal building materials, spells that provide push or floatation, spells that can be used for defence? (Again, anyone know where I can find the rules for magic turrets?)


Shining South. 4th level Wizard Spell called Suspension. 1000 lbs/CL floats for a long time. Put a trap of that and a cheap golem in every basement.

Perfection! Thanks, I'll add a few of those lying around.

[Anecronwashere]

Assuming a CL7 trap (minimum CL before getting 4th level spells) that's 3.5 tons
Assuming each house weighs (hurrah for Google) the average of 120,000 pounds + 150,000 pounds for foundation of a 1500 foot home (again, average going by my googlefu
135 tons /house

You end up with 74,074 and change /10mil tons
To float that much you need 2,857,143 traps going off every 1d4+7 days

2, almost 3 million traps /10million tons
Each one costs 14,000GP and 1,120XP before reductions


NOTE: This calculation assumes residential homes, no streets and not taking into account the actual ground they are on except the foundations. The actual amount is probably a lot more

[Vizzerdrix]

Soar wood from Eberron.


Spell turrets from DMG2.

[TypoNinja]

Do you want your City to fly, or just float there. Cause there's a difference.

Best RAW option, is probably the Stronghold Builders Guide Book.

15k per 20x20x10ft space if you just want it to float at a fixed height. 10ft to 10 miles, determined at time of enchanting.

If you want to give it the ability to actually move around up there, that costs extra, between 5k and 25k per 20x20x10ft space, depending on how fast you want it to go. The scale runs from 1/96th of a mile an hour, to 10 miles an hour.

Very expensive, but has the advantage of being permanent, and extremely resistant to dispelling. Turning off your flight requires a dispel magic or disjunction to hit the entire city simultaneously.

[Eslin]

Do you want your City to fly, or just float there. Cause there's a difference.

Best RAW option, is probably the Stronghold Builders Guide Book.

15k per 20x20x10ft space if you just want it to float at a fixed height. 10ft to 10 miles, determined at time of enchanting.

If you want to give it the ability to actually move around up there, that costs extra, between 5k and 25k per 20x20x10ft space, depending on how fast you want it to go. The scale runs from 1/96th of a mile an hour, to 10 miles an hour.

Very expensive, but has the advantage of being permanent, and extremely resistant to dispelling. Turning off your flight requires a dispel magic or disjunction to hit the entire city simultaneously.

Cool, I'll have several of the foundations enchanted like that. I'm looking for it to float, stuff like flying/weather spells will give it direction.

[Hylas]

I imagine a city, to be light as possible, will have homes much more open-aired designed with plants chosen as being lightweight, useful, and nice to look at. The materials will also be lightweight to save on mass, especially that wood used in airships in Eberron (the name escapes me at the moment) and mithril. If solid walls are definitely needed then you can't get lighter or stronger than a wall of force. Add in some ambient temperature spells and some spells to control the wind so it isn't blowing everywhere (something like wind wall that blows against the trade winds could also double as a protective barrier to keep out those pesky adventurers). Of course, the richest wizards would take advantage of extra-dimensional space. Perhaps most homes are the same size from the outside and only differ from the inside.

[Eslin]

Walls of force, brilliant! Thank you for that, and does anyone know of a cheaper way of building with them than the 2500xp permanency? A command word item of permanency might work I guess, by the time you'd cast 100 it would have paid itself off.

[Zack Reever]

In Faerun the Netherese were able to create floating cities...find out how they accomplished this and your golden.

[Daftendirekt]

Try and track down a copy of Lost Empires of Faerun.

There's an Epic spell there (or is it merely 10th level?) that basically slices the top off of a mountain, inverts it, and floats.

That's actually in PGtF. It's called Proctiv's Move Mountain.


In Faerun the Netherese were able to create floating cities...find out how they accomplished this and your golden.

They did it with the very spell I just mentioned. Then they built a mythallar (http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Mythallar) to keep it afloat.

[Douglas]

How did this city come about? You've already said it isn't one super high level guy doing it in one step, so how did the piecemeal effect proceed? Did these wizards raise an existing city into the air, or did they create a small one that started out flying and add on to it over time? The latter approach makes much more sense to me, as trying to make half a city fly should tear it apart. Raising a pre-existing city pretty much has to be done either all at once or by replacement (which would functionally be equivalent to creating a new flying city).

[Eslin]

Wizards (international guild) decided to make a new guild hall, decided the church was growing too strong and they wanted their headquarters not to be in any particular country, so some idiot suggested it fly. Being wizards they thought that was a great idea and let everyone pour as much of themselves into it as they wanted, everyone went nuts using their power to create different ways of flying/different materials and eventually it ended up far larger than just a guild hall. Since then every wizard who has been able to has moved there, adding more and more to it every day.

[Icewraith]

Raising a mythal usually results in a bunch of spellcasters contributing their highest-levels slots and expensive material components in order to mitigate the insane DC for city-raising mythals.

Basically you have a bunch of spellcasters research and gather a bunch of exotic material, then you have a massive spellcasting ceremony you need to ensure isn't disrupted (possibly involving hundreds of casters supplemented by outsiders via planar binding), then you have a floating city.

Epic spells come down to GM discretion at the end of the day in terms of dc, but as long as you can always get more spellcasters you can do all of the following and more:

Disallow all mind control, dismissal and disintegrate effects within the area of the Mythal

Tack on the Destroy seed and add a giant recharging death-star beam with arbitrary d6es of damage

Dramatically bump up the mythal's caster level so it can't reasonably be disrupted or destroyed by antimagic, the Destroy seed, the Dispel seed etc

Activate predefined spells via command word (create food and water, Heal, Extended Reach Spell Otto's Irresistable Dance or worse for the mischevious or twisted - there's always BoEF if you really want to cause trouble)

Summon your own army on short notice (Summon Monster and Gate for as many Air Elementals or Celestials you want. Air Elementals are probably the preferred "meat shield" summon for a flying city.)

And more!

If you can get enough casters or material, you can also use the epic spell that creates the mythal to make or grow your own city.

Get a giant, intricately carved block of Adamantium, Obdurium or better (Unobtanium? Just don't use Plotnium, it becomes arbitrarily unstable at dramatic moments)to serve as the focus for your Mythal. Yeah the whole thing is destroyed if the focus is destroyed (and if the expensive material compoenents aren't consumed but instead used by the spell, you can adjucate special effects there as well) - but the city really needs to have a plot-centric object that will destroy it if threatened so your PCs can save it or have a reason to protect it.

Oh, and you should have a perpetual divination effect going that will sense a complete and utter failure of magic one hour before it occurs, then twenty minutes before failure will Plane Shift (or at least teleport so that the city is firmly on the ground) to an appropriate place instead of the mythal suddenly de-powering and your entire city and its inhabitants crashing to the ground.

The final DC determines the cost and time necessary to research the spell, if not for the time (and xp expenditure) requirements you'd be much better off investing in a Tool of Epic Spellcraft instead of mitigating the DC with an arbitrarily large number of casters. You would also have to get to 24th level (earlier depending on Epic Bonus Feats) so you can grab both Epic Spellcasting and Craft Epic Wondrous Item.

My main point is the effect you want already exists, and while you do need one 21st level caster, the effects involved would certainly require a large Wizard's guild, collecting say... several hundred adamantine rods to act as foci for the mythal's levitate effect, constructing a suitable foundation for a flying city, planar binding or planar ally-ing large numbers of outsiders into providing supplementary spellcasting services, divining the correct date to perform the ritual, making sure the ritual isn't disrupted etc.

Oh, and the only gem of suitable size and quality to serve as part of the focus serves as the right eye of the grand statue of Badguyus the Badguy, god of evil and kicking puppies, located in his realm in the 20XXth layer of the Abyss and guarded by a legion of demonspawn as well as the terrible deity himself.

If you just need the city to just exist than it can simply by DM fiat. If you want it to work under what passes for preexisting rules when it comes to flying cities, this is how to do it. In the end it boils down to "The DM determines what it can do, how it can fail, and how expensive and powerful it is."

[Tvtyrant]

Tons of Decanter's of Endless Water on the bottom using nozzles/permanent Wall of Fire. It also gives it the whole "flying waterfall" look flying castle's love but normally cannot justify.

[Eldest]

Immovible rods. Lots of them. Your house doesn't get to really move about, but it will stay in one spot, and hangs in the air if you chose.

[TypoNinja]

Tons of Decanter's of Endless Water on the bottom using nozzles/permanent Wall of Fire. It also gives it the whole "flying waterfall" look flying castle's love but normally cannot justify.

Decanter of Endless Water actually has really sad water pressure, less than your bathtub.

[Tvtyrant]

Decanter of Endless Water actually has really sad water pressure, less than your bathtub.

That is why you put them in a boiler with walls of fire and a tiny nozzle :P

Your basically making a steam based flying machine, as the pressure will build from the heat. You might want to make the boiler out of shaped walls of force though.

[Jack_Simth]

Cool, I'll have several of the foundations enchanted like that. I'm looking for it to float, stuff like flying/weather spells will give it direction.

Well, if you don't mind it not *really* floating, but being supported by material that exists only on the Ethereal plane....

1) Get control of a Ghost (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/ghost.htm) that can cast Wall of Stone (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/wallOfStone.htm) (a Simulacrum (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/simulacrum.htm) of one that can cast much higher spells will do nicely, but there is the curious question of how you do that).
2) Have the ghost manifest, and put a layer of stone down flat on the ground.
3) Due to the nature of manifested Ghost casting, that layer of stone is simultaneously material, ethereal, and incorporeal all at the same time.
4) Have the ghost de-manifest, and cast more copies of Wall of Stone, layering on top of the flat piece on the ethereal, as high as you feel like.
5) Have the ghost Manifest again, and put another layer on top.
6) Build whatever you like on your floating stone platform.

So what you have is a planar sandwich. On the bottom, in contact with the ground, you have a layer of stone that is both material and ethereal. The next layer, supported by that dual-nature stone, you have ethereal stone. Supported by that ethereal stone, you have a layer of stone that is both material and ethereal. On top of that, you have your building.

So from a material plane perspective, you have a building sitting on top of a layer of floating rock, which is supported by nothing, and is hovering above a layer of rock on the ground. From an ethereal plane perspective, you have a big floating brick (and can see the ground it's anchored to, and can see the building on top of it).

Oh yes: And it's all Instant effects. Can't be dispelled, and will last as long as stone does (a very long time).

If you're willing to branch outside of Core, the feat Transdimensional Spell (+1 metamagic, found in Complete Arcane, Complete Divine, and Unapproachable East) removes the need for the ghost. You:
1) While on the material plane, cast a Transdimensional Spell Wall of Stone flat on the ground.
2) Get to the same spot on the ethereal (via Plane Shift (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/planeShift.htm) + Teleport (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/teleport.htm), Gate (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/gate.htm), Ethereal Jaunt (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/etherealJaunt.htm), Etherealness (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/etherealness.htm), or any other method at your disposal).
3) From the Ethereal Plane, cast several regular Wall of Stone spells, building on your foundation.
4) Return to the material plane (same way you got to the Ethereal).
5) Find a way to see the stuff on the ethereal (True Seeing (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/trueSeeing.htm), See Invisibility (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/seeInvisibility.htm), or a number of other methods).
6) Cast another Transdimensional Spell Wall of Stone, this time on top of the ethereal stone.
7) Build your house on the top layer.

This looks very similar to the ghost-built ones, however, your two layers of transdimensional stone also show up on the Plane of Shadow (that's how you tell how any given setup of this was done, incidentally).

Note that if you make the walls of your house out of Transdimensional Walls of Stone (and the windows out of Invisible Spell(Cityscape) walls of stone), this also makes your building resistent to incorporeal and ethereal intrusion.

No magic items or XP expenditure needed (you might need to spring for Simulacrum for the Ghost, and that costs significantly, but everything else is just build and daily resources).

Edit:

Immovible rods. Lots of them. Your house doesn't get to really move about, but it will stay in one spot, and hangs in the air if you chose.
And with planning and work, you can move it later! Put a really big, really sturdy cart underneath, be ready with a high caster level Featherfall, and start deactivating the rods one by one. Then haul it wherever, levitate it up (you'll need a pretty high caster level!), and re-activate all the rods.

[Eslin]

Hey, can anyone describe the decanter of water/fire/steam thing to me? It sounds awesome, but I don't get how it looks/would work/how to describe to my players

[Emperor Tippy]

Hey, can anyone describe the decanter of water/fire/steam thing to me? It sounds awesome, but I don't get how it looks/would work/how to describe to my players

Imagine a box. On the bottom of that box is a nozzle. Inside of the box is a permanent wall of fire and a Decanter of Endless Water set on Geyser. The Wall of Fire turns the water to steam, the steam comes out of the nozzle under pressure. The box floats.

[Tvtyrant]

I made a handy diagram!

http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2013/070/f/c/decanter_steam_rocket_by_tvtyrant-d5xrei2.png

Basically how I understand it works is by super-pressurizing the steam so that the velocity of the steam is high enough to impart enough energy to move the city/airship/spaceship. Normally pressurized water would back up in the container or burst the pipes/boiler, but the containers are magic and the water has no where to back up to. You get a certain amount of water no matter what. Then the walls of fire flash boil the water, causing it to expand as steam and become even more pressurized. The narrow nozzle allows all of this pressure to back up behind the steam right at the mouth, causing it to fly out extremely fast.

Then you put a bunch of them coming out the bottom of your ship, and maybe a few that are movable to turn the air-castle. The boilers need to be really strong to keep from bursting, so you make them out of force instead of metal so they are magically invincible.

Also force doesn't weigh anything, so instead of having a multi-ton boiler you have a few pounds of decanter and whatever water is inside at the time. The weight issue (coal, water and boiler) is why steam isn't good for flying. In this case all three issues are taken care of, so it is perfect.

And this is sort of what it would look like in flight.
http://realrocketman.tripod.com/timcorsyeam.jpg

[Magemakeboom]

Magic of Eberon has bits on binding elementals to certain items and transport vessels. maybe something to consider to make your city fly, have it run on elemental power. just a thought

[Eslin]

I made a handy diagram!

http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2013/070/f/c/decanter_steam_rocket_by_tvtyrant-d5xrei2.png

Basically how I understand it works is by super-pressurizing the steam so that the velocity of the steam is high enough to impart enough energy to move the city/airship/spaceship. Normally pressurized water would back up in the container or burst the pipes/boiler, but the containers are magic and the water has no where to back up to. You get a certain amount of water no matter what. Then the walls of fire flash boil the water, causing it to expand as steam and become even more pressurized. The narrow nozzle allows all of this pressure to back up behind the steam right at the mouth, causing it to fly out extremely fast.

Then you put a bunch of them coming out the bottom of your ship, and maybe a few that are movable to turn the air-castle. The boilers need to be really strong to keep from bursting, so you make them out of force instead of metal so they are magically invincible.

Also force doesn't weigh anything, so instead of having a multi-ton boiler you have a few pounds of decanter and whatever water is inside at the time. The weight issue (coal, water and boiler) is why steam isn't good for flying. In this case all three issues are taken care of, so it is perfect.

And this is sort of what it would look like in flight.
http://realrocketman.tripod.com/timcorsyeam.jpg

Thank you kind sir! That last image doesn't appear to have appeared, but the rest is amazingly useful. Totally going to have those things be the main thrusters on any smaller craft wizards build and include a bunch in the city proper.

[TuggyNE]

(a Simulacrum (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/simulacrum.htm) of one that can cast much higher spells will do nicely, but there is the curious question of how you do that).

There's a piece already in your spell component pouch, isn't there? :smalltongue:

Or, more sensibly, Ignore Material Components; you do, after all, have an epic caster, right?

[Tvtyrant]

Thank you kind sir! That last image doesn't appear to have appeared, but the rest is amazingly useful. Totally going to have those things be the main thrusters on any smaller craft wizards build and include a bunch in the city proper.

You are very welcome! Also note that you can also make a spaceship this way, and if you make a gas-mask with a bottle of air instead of a filter you don't even need an air supply!

[Eslin]

Spaceship wise I figure greater teleport wins out - but for making hovering platforms for mana drilling, fighter jets (armed with what? can anyone think of cheap or effective spells to aim at people? Magic missile/scorching ray/orb of acid/disintegrate I'm thinking in order of ascending cost) and boosting the flying city, they're excellent.

[draconomial]

Immovible rods. Lots of them. Your house doesn't get to really move about, but it will stay in one spot, and hangs in the air if you chose.

And with planning and work, you can move it later! Put a really big, really sturdy cart underneath, be ready with a high caster level Featherfall, and start deactivating the rods one by one. Then haul it wherever, levitate it up (you'll need a pretty high caster level!), and re-activate all the rods.

This inspires me to build a steam train on top of an animated chain of train tracks made of immovable rods that activate, deactivate, and rotate to the front as they support the train.. Maybe making the tracks invisible. Or have the tracks on the ethereal plane and the wheels made by a manifested ghostly Shape Metal.
http://jay.mobile9.com/download/media/41/flyingtrai_pkzs2vz8.gif
Sorry to necro the thread

[Trasilor]

To me, this kind of thing was always simply an exercise in another form of optimization: using RAW how can I do X.

What I find funny, is the game designers go the opposite way: I want X, lets create something that does this.

If you are the DM, if you want a flying/floating city (one that is practically immune to dispelling/disjunction) simply state, City of X is a floating city. If the players ask how, respond with, "Ancient magic long lost to the world."

I guess personally, I don't really understand why you need to know the "How".

I mean think about it, do you really understand how your TV works? or your Computer? Eventually, if you breakdown things into smaller and smaller units we end up with "it just does". If you don't believe me - answer me this: why do things with the same charge repulse each other?

[Vizzerdrix]

answer me this: why do things with the same charge repulse each other?

Thoon wills it to be so. That is why.

[Gavinfoxx]

You should look at this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/14zilT4WGOyHM0AfpG4-GmD2FkgDg1HZ9HC1cTleQHds/

And the things I link to FROM there as well.

[Captnq]

Get rocks. Get your caster level up as high as possible.
Cast Stone Trap a bazillion times.
Build stuff on top of the stone traps.

If anyone uses an AMF, the rocks fall, but eventually fall out of the AMF and start to float. As soon as the AMF ends, the rocks return to their old position. Make sure to use cross beams and supports incase someone does something dumb like this.

So the lower say 100 feet of you city is off limits. Now it floats.

If you want flying, find creatures with perfect maneuverability. Murder them. Animate their corpses. As flying zombie what-evers, you can have them "fly" even as skeletons, so they don't actually need air anymore. You can put them in boxes and they can fly. They can fly forever, since they are skeletons. Have them hold up your city. Technically, they are immune to AMF and dispel magic, because they fly as an (Ex). Now you can order them to fly wherever you want. Just make sure nobody goes down there or they might eat them.

[Zweisteine]

Make a custom magic item of continuous Levitate, with a caster level boosted beyond imaginable levels to support millions of tons at a time. It would be insanely expensive, but that's what chain-gated Solars and Djinn are for. The magic item is the entire chunk of earth the city sits on, which you'll have to magically carve out beforehand. Stone Shape, Transmute Rock to Mud, etc. will help accomplish that. Try to turn the foundation of the city into a solid piece, to make it a single enchantable item.

For extra security, transmute the foundations of the city into a number of inextricable linked stone or metal shapes. They must be completely irremovable from each other. Then, enchant each one with the full enchantment. That makes it safe from dispel magic. Make sure some of the sections are inaccessible, so nobody can dispel them anyway.


EDIT:
Y'know, I'm pretty sure Faerûn had some floating cities once (in the Empire of Netheril). You might want to look into that. I believe it involved something called "Mythallars."

[VoxRationis]

The decanter jet idea would create contrails, rather than waterfalls, due to the steam condensing on suspended dust particles. You might make the city wreathed in clouds if you do it right...

Lots of flying carpets?

I'm voting for Magic Missile; Scorching Ray and other touch attack spells are only as good as your turrets, Magic Missile ignores most things (you should put some sort of backup plan in case someone has the bright idea of getting Shield), hits incorporeals to prevent shadow invasions, and can be spammed for a sheer volume making up for their lack of individual punch.

[Gavinfoxx]

Magic Missile is really bad for the ONLY spell in traps, but it's useful in the four-spells Spell Turrets, because Shield and simple magic items make you immune to it.

Anyway, spell turrets need like four spells that they cycle through. There's some good ideas for them in the living in a flying box thread.

A good l1 spell list for Spell Turrets is:

Magic Missile (Evocation)
Power Word, Pain (Enchantment)
Ray of Enfeeblement (Necromancy)
Lesser Orb of Acid (Conjuration)

[VoxRationis]

I did say to have a backup plan.
What are these "spell turrets" anyway? Where are they from? Are they just fancy names for magic traps, or is there a specific thing somewhere?

[Gavinfoxx]

They are in DMG II

Some ideas for them are mentioned here:

http://community.wizards.com/forum/previous-editions-character-optimization/threads/1128391

You know, one of the threads my flying airship handbook links to?