Meteor barrage! What altitude is necessary?

[(Un)Inspired]

So I seem to remember reading somewhere that a fine way to destroy a city would be to teleport miles above it then cast major creation to create a tremendous lump of iron and watch as it sails downward to destroy said city below it (dinosaur style).

How high up do you think you'd need to be for your iron meteor to impact with enough force to wreck a city? Does terminal velocity completely ruin my fun?

I know about the locate city bomb, the wightpocalypse and the anti-osmium bomb (I really like this one). Are there any other good ways to destroy a city in one fell swoop?

[Malimar]

I know about the locate city bomb, the wightpocalypse and the anti-osmium bomb (I really like this one). Are there any other good ways to destroy a city in one fell swoop?

My favorite is BoVD's apocalypse from the sky, because it doesn't require any shenanigans at all: laying waste to a city (and most of the surrounding countryside) is what the spell is intended for.

[lunar2]

your teleport trick has one flaw. you can only teleport onto a solid suraface capable of supporting your weight. you can't teleport into mid air of any height. you can, however, fly up to that height.

iirc, it only takes a couple of hundred feet to get to terminal velocity, so that's 3-4 rounds with fly.

locate city bomb doesn't work.

[Grod_The_Giant]

By the rules, the damage a falling object deals maxes out at 20d6 (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/environment.htm#fallingObjects). Weight affects how far it needs to fall to deal that much damage, but... there you go. 20d6. It ain't going to blow up a city.

My favorite weapon of mass destruction is to take something with a recharging acid breath weapon-- let's say a 4th level Dragon Shaman, with a green dragon as its totem. Give them the Enlarge Breath and Lingering Breath. Lingering Breath specifies that it can be stacked multiple times on the same breath weapon, but if I remember correctly, Draconomicon says that you can do that for any metabreath feat that increases recharge time. Stack Enlarge Breath until you can engulf the entire city (or country. Or planet. Or material plane), and stack Lingering Breath to an arbitrarily high degree. Breath. You won't be able to use your breath weapon again for several years, most likely, but in the meantime everything in an arbitrarily large area will be taking 2d6 acid damage a round.

[jindra34]

Sadly do to the way damage works in DnD... you either have to create a lump of whatever the size of the city (at which point a 10 foot drop probably would be enough) or no matter how high you go it won't matter.

[The Oni]

Iron might begin to melt at the necessary speeds unless you treated it properly.

What you're wanting to do sounds like Kinetic Bombardment, a.k.a. "Rods from God," which is a real weapons technology that scientists have been working on for years.

Assuming that your setting's planet and atmosphere are similar to earth's, you'd wanna get to the very edge of Earth's atmosphere and make a tungsten pole about 20 feet long and 1 foot wide right on top of the city and drop it. Gravity does the rest, taking out the entire city and a good bit of the surrounding area.

If your DM won't houserule tungsten, you could just do iron and then cast a spell that wards it against heat. I think there's a spell like that somewhere but I can't find it.

Of course all of this is irrelevant because D&D RAW physics overrules all of that nonsense. You could still do a lot of damage that way if the DM was feeling nice, though.

[Zorgoth]

So I seem to remember reading somewhere that a fine way to destroy a city would be to teleport miles above it then cast major creation to create a tremendous lump of iron and watch as it sails downward to destroy said city below it (dinosaur style).

How high up do you think you'd need to be for your iron meteor to impact with enough force to wreck a city? Does terminal velocity completely ruin my fun?

I know about the locate city bomb, the wightpocalypse and the anti-osmium bomb (I really like this one). Are there any other good ways to destroy a city in one fell swoop?

Based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations, I think you could do it - i don't know if 20 cubic feet of lead is enough to destroy a city, but I'd think it could cause a lot of damage, and it's enough that I don't think it would burn up in the atmosphere, but you would need to start a few hundred kilometers up to get the momentum required, and you would need a lot of ranks in knowledge (orbital mechanics) to get anywhere close to hitting your target.

[Mr Beer]

Part of your problem is that objects (like asteroids) generally have a relative velocity to the earth that's much faster than a rifle bullet. I think a lot of the impact comes from that.

[Zorgoth]

Based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations, I think you could do it - i don't know if 20 cubic feet of lead is enough to destroy a city, but I'd think it could cause a lot of damage, and it's enough that I don't think it would burn up in the atmosphere, but you would need to start a few hundred kilometers up to get the momentum required, and you would need a lot of ranks in knowledge (orbital mechanics) to get anywhere close to hitting your target.

Actually I take it back about the orbital mechanics. Starting a few hundred kilometers up and dropping it straight down, it only take a couple minutes. The precision still has to be pretty good. And yeah, D&D rules won't let it work if you do that, but in that situation I think the DM should dothe science. Falling damage in D&D is stupid anyway, as our favorite webcomic writer demonstrated in Snips, Snails, and Dragons Tales (a Huge creature should take a lot more than 20d6 damage at terminal velocity).

[(Un)Inspired]

I've taken a look at apocalypse from the sky and while the premise is good (or evil?... whatever I like the premise) 10d6 doesn't seem like enough damage to really hurt any serious infrastructure in a city despite the fact the the descriptive text claims it levels mountains...

Also I'm looking at the teleport spell in the SRD and I'm not seeing the text that says you must teleport onto a solid surface.

What a shame that falling object damage maxes out at 20d6 I guess that's why dinosaurs are still around in the various d&d worlds


My favorite weapon of mass destruction is to take something with a recharging acid breath weapon-- let's say a 4th level Dragon Shaman, with a green dragon as its totem. Give them the Enlarge Breath and Lingering Breath. Lingering Breath specifies that it can be stacked multiple times on the same breath weapon, but if I remember correctly, Draconomicon says that you can do that for any metabreath feat that increases recharge time. Stack Enlarge Breath until you can engulf the entire city (or country. Or planet. Or material plane), and stack Lingering Breath to an arbitrarily high degree. Breath. You won't be able to use your breath weapon again for several years, most likely, but in the meantime everything in an arbitrarily large area will be taking 2d6 acid damage a round.

I like this. It makes me think of the big bad wolf huffing and puffing and obliterating the prime material plane.

Edit: Oh yeah the character I want to do this with is a Psion that has the Hypercognition power so if the d&d physics worked in his favor he could probably line up the shot just fine.

[Mr Beer]

A cubic foot of lead will weigh about 321 kg at room temterature.

Level 20 = 20 cubic feet = 6,420 kg.

Drop from 10,000 metres up, has Kinetic energy of 629,160,000 Joules, according to this link: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/flobi.html

So this is 6 x 10 to power 8. According to Wikipedia, this is 150 KG of TNT equivalent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent

So, nasty but not city wrecking by any means. You need a much bigger impactor or a much faster one or both. This is a terrible way to try to take out a city.

[TuggyNE]

Slightly adapt my write-up of Stuka, the White Wyrm of Dread Bombardment and you should be good to go.


I've taken a look at apocalypse from the sky and while the premise is good (or evil?... whatever I like the premise) 10d6 doesn't seem like enough damage to really hurt any serious infrastructure in a city despite the fact the the descriptive text claims it levels mountains...

It isn't.


Also I'm looking at the teleport spell in the SRD and I'm not seeing the text that says you must teleport onto a solid surface.

It's in the general rules for Conjuration (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicOverview/spellDescriptions.htm#conjuration).
A creature or object brought into being or transported to your location by a conjuration spell cannot appear inside another creature or object, nor can it appear floating in an empty space. It must arrive in an open location on a surface capable of supporting it.

(I assume creatures that can natively fly would treat air as such a surface, but who knows?)

[Big Fau]

Iron might begin to melt at the necessary speeds unless you treated it properly.

What you're wanting to do sounds like Kinetic Bombardment, a.k.a. "Rods from God," which is a real weapons technology that scientists have been working on for years.

The Rods from God project was mothballed decades ago.

[Zorgoth]

Based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations, I think you could do it - i don't know if 20 cubic feet of lead is enough to destroy a city, but I'd think it could cause a lot of damage, and it's enough that I don't think it would burn up in the atmosphere, but you would need to start a few hundred kilometers up to get the momentum required, and you would need a lot of ranks in knowledge (orbital mechanics) to get anywhere close to hitting your target.

Calculation: Let's say we need to get it up to 10 km/s. That will take about 1000 seconds at 10m/s/s (graviational acceleration on earth). That will be 5000km up. You'll only get a fraction of 10 km/s in reality since gravity is considerably weaker up there. It will definitely be more than 3km/s. I don't have the patience to narrow it down any further. If we say it's 5km/s, and 20 cubic feet (maximum volume of the spell) of lead is about 6.5 metric tons, then the energy released in stopping those 6.5 metric tons moving at 5000m/s is 1/2mv^2=1/2*6500*5000^2=approximately 8*10^10 Joules.

Unfortunately for our city-busting plans, a ton of TNT is about 4*10^9 Joules, so really this is only like exploding 20 tons of TNT, and a lot of that is going to be lost in the atmosphere. We need about 1000 times more material. You could do it if you could get an army of mages up there with time stop who kept creating more objects.

[Zorgoth]

Calculation: Let's say we need to get it up to 10 km/s. That will take about 1000 seconds at 10m/s/s (graviational acceleration on earth). That will be 5000km up. You'll only get a fraction of 10 km/s in reality since gravity is considerably weaker up there. It will definitely be more than 3km/s. I don't have the patience to narrow it down any further. If we say it's 5km/s, and 20 cubic feet (maximum volume of the spell) of lead is about 6.5 metric tons, then the energy released in stopping those 6.5 metric tons moving at 5000m/s is 1/2mv^2=1/2*6500*5000^2=approximately 8*10^10 Joules.

Unfortunately for our city-busting plans, a ton of TNT is about 4*10^9 Joules, so really this is only like exploding 20 tons of TNT, and a lot of that is going to be lost in the atmosphere. We need about 1000 times more material. You could do it if you could get an army of mages up there with time stop who kept creating more objects.

As for getting up there, get a Horizon walker with plane of shifting mastery and craft a magic item of continuous feather fall, and accompany him as he dimension doors straight up every 1d4 rounds. If he's level 15 it would take under a day to ascend 1000km, although presumably there are fatigue issues. You can always sleep in a resilient sphere...

Edit: due to duration, you would sleep in a forcecage, not a resilient sphere.

[Zorgoth]

As for getting up there, get a Horizon walker with plane of shifting mastery and craft a magic item of continuous feather fall, and accompany him as he dimension doors straight up every 1d4 rounds. If he's level 15 it would take under a day to ascend 1000km, although presumably there are fatigue issues. You can always sleep in a resilient sphere...

1000 times more material is assuming no loss to atmosphere, obviously there is a lot and I'm not sure how to compute it. But it's not going to be more than one or two orders of magnitude off at the most, and it might be less than one for all I know.

[ArcturusV]

Isn't there a problem with the meteor premise in that conjurations, such as creating Walls of Iron, etc, are limited to only being made on solid ground. So you can't actually make 'em at 600 miles up in the air or something.

Teleport up there with an army of mages each carrying up to their additional weight limit in something like magnetic lodestones that they can clink together to form a singular mass?

[Zorgoth]

As for getting up there, get a Horizon walker with plane of shifting mastery and craft a magic item of continuous feather fall, and accompany him as he dimension doors straight up every 1d4 rounds. If he's level 15 it would take under a day to ascend 1000km, although presumably there are fatigue issues. You can always sleep in a resilient sphere...

Edit: due to duration, you would sleep in a forcecage, not a resilient sphere.

Actually, time stop/major creation doesn't work due to casting time, but I solved the problem. This is how you do it. You camp out 1000 kilometers above the surface in a barred forcecage, repeatedly creating major creations in other barred forcecages. You can stick around up there indefinitely if you have the right magic items since forcecage has a long duration. If you're level 15 with some bonus spells and are recasting your forcecages every so often you can make 12 or so major creations a day. So do this for a year or so, then rain unexpected and unstoppable destruction from heaven. Of course, if a level 15 mage can't destroy a city in a year some other way...

[Zorgoth]

Actually, time stop/major creation doesn't work due to casting time, but I solved the problem. This is how you do it. You camp out 1000 kilometers above the surface in a barred forcecage, repeatedly creating major creations in other barred forcecages. You can stick around up there indefinitely if you have the right magic items since forcecage has a long duration. If you're level 15 with some bonus spells and are recasting your forcecages every so often you can make 12 or so major creations a day. So do this for a year or so, then rain unexpected and unstoppable destruction from heaven. Of course, if a level 15 mage can't destroy a city in a year some other way...

It would be much faster if you could create magic items storing upwards of 1000 castings of major creation, but since it is a fifth level spell I'm not sure if there's any practical way to do that.

[The Oni]

The Rods from God project was mothballed decades ago.

Yes, but that's because of it being prohibitively expensive, not operating on faulty principle. A high-level mage with the ability to fly for free and create matter for cheap could pull it off easily.

[Zorgoth]

It would be much faster if you could create magic items storing upwards of 1000 castings of major creation, but since it is a fifth level spell I'm not sure if there's any practical way to do that.

A better idea: Shrink Item. It can be put in wands, so after somehow acquiring many thousands of metric tons of lead, cast Shrink Item on a few thousand 40 cubic foot volumes of lead on earth. Now we have instead of maybe 40,000 metric tons of lead, 10 metric tons of shrunk lead. Now fly up to space as explained previously. Cast a Gate to another plane, then from that plane cast a Gate to the location of your shrunk lead on the ground. Find a way to make the lead go through the Gate. For example, you could make a big ball of shrunken lead on a ramp, stopped with some object, then disintegrate the object that is stopping it.

Of course you need to be level 17 to do this.

Once it's up in space, dispel the shrink item spells and let it fall.

[(Un)Inspired]

Perhaps some of these ideas could be combined?

Would it be possible to pilot an elemental airship around a thousand kilometers up. You could just live up there if you had a continuous magic item protecting you from the unpleasant atmospheric conditions that high up.

Then you major creation your 20 ft. Cubes of lead and then shrink item on them so you can store hundreds (thousands?) of them on your skyboat.

Then when you have your ridiculous number of lead cubes you tip them all overboard simultaneously and activate your command word to unshrink them.

Even if falling damage tops out at 20d6, thousands of them are landing on the city. That should destroy it right?

[Slipperychicken]

By the rules, the damage a falling object deals maxes out at 20d6 (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/environment.htm#fallingObjects). Weight affects how far it needs to fall to deal that much damage, but... there you go. 20d6.

This is not true. Only 20d6 can come from distance. The 1d6/500lb of the object is in addition to the damage from distance. So you can theoretically get the damage as high as you want, assuming you can get a heavy enough object.


My favorite is BoVD's apocalypse from the sky, because it doesn't require any shenanigans at all: laying waste to a city (and most of the surrounding countryside) is what the spell is intended for.

Actually, a 17 mile radius (assuming minimum CL of 17 and a flat plane) gets you 907.46 square miles. That's about the size of a small country like Luxembourg or Hong Kong. At CL 20, that gets you 1265 mi^2 (country the size of Belgium, Moldova, or Taiwan).

Because of how circles work(A=πr²), the area effected increases exponentially with caster level, so you'll want to boost your CL as much as possible when you cast Apocalypse From the Sky.

[Zorgoth]

Perhaps some of these ideas could be combined?

Would it be possible to pilot an elemental airship around a thousand kilometers up. You could just live up there if you had a continuous magic item protecting you from the unpleasant atmospheric conditions that high up.

Then you major creation your 20 ft. Cubes of lead and then shrink item on them so you can store hundreds (thousands?) of them on your skyboat.

Then when you have your ridiculous number of lead cubes you tip them all overboard simultaneously and activate your command word to unshrink them.

Even if falling damage tops out at 20d6, thousands of them are landing on the city. That should destroy it right?

An airship isn't going to work in space because there is no atmosphere to hold it up, unless it has magic that works by some means other than creating buoyancy.

[Malimar]

Actually, a 17 mile radius (assuming minimum CL of 17 and a flat plane) gets you 907.46 square miles. That's about the size of a small country like Luxembourg or Hong Kong. At CL 20, that gets you 1265 mi^2 (country the size of Belgium, Moldova, or Taiwan).

Because of how circles work(A=πr²), the area effected increases exponentially with caster level, so you'll want to boost your CL as much as possible when you cast Apocalypse From the Sky.

Aye; I determined once that it would easily completely cover any of the countries/continents in my home campaign setting. So by "most of the surrounding countryside" I guess I meant "most (or all) of the surrounding country/ies".

[(Un)Inspired]

An airship isn't going to work in space because there is no atmosphere to hold it up, unless it has magic that works by some means other than creating buoyancy.

That's why I'd use one of those magical elemental airships from Eberron

[Zorgoth]

Oh, silly me. Instead of Gate, use a permanencied Teleportation Circle. You only need to cast it once on the ground and once in space, and you can easily haul up 10 metric tons of shrunk lead in a day - just raise your strength to 15-20 and bring 200-400 pounds at a time. You can probably do each load in a few minutes, so you'll be done in a few hours. The teleportation circle in space needs to be on a horizontal surface, but it should be easy enough to put some dirt on top of a forcecage. Once you've acquired the lead on the ground, the whole process of dropping it from space can be accomplished in a couple days, but you do have to be level 17 for the teleportation circles. At a lower level, it could be more difficult.

The idea of camping in a forcecage for a year doesn't work because forcecages are just too expensive to recast every day for a year.

Edit: Also, major creation has a limited duration, so that's another reason that doesn't work. I guess you could use true creation, but I'm sure there are many ways to destroy a city with 1000 8th level spells. But you probably do need a bit of orbital mechanics and precision once you're 1000km up, the earth rotates quite some distance in the time it would take to fall that far (which is a couple minutes). However, acquiring a few thousand metric tons of lead or some other dense material might not be that hard to do by mundane means. People might be confused as to why you keep buying it up, but it's not like anyone will guess your true intentions before it's too late.

[Zorgoth]

That's why I'd use one of those magical elemental airships from Eberron

Well I guess the question is whether they are magically flying or magically buoyant. Does it say somewhere so you'd know for sure? Also, you might need to protect the ship in some way for it to survive in a vacuum.

[ArcturusV]

Wouldn't Shrink Item run into some of the RAW Silliness (Or not depending on what you recall and think about physics and such) that even if you shrunk down 20 tons of scrap iron it'd still weigh 20 tons by RAW (Even though it's 1/4th the size). So shrink item would have no impact?

[The Oni]

An airship isn't going to work in space because there is no atmosphere to hold it up, unless it has magic that works by some means other than creating buoyancy.

At any rate I don't think you need to get to space-height to pull off 20d6 damage. The only reason space-height would be needed would be to replicate R.F.G., and again, falling damage rules override physics. 20d6 only requires 200 feet up.

[Zorgoth]

Wouldn't Shrink Item run into some of the RAW Silliness (Or not depending on what you recall and think about physics and such) that even if you shrunk down 20 tons of scrap iron it'd still weigh 20 tons by RAW (Even though it's 1/4th the size). So shrink item would have no impact?

The spell description explicitly states that it reduces the mass by a factor of 4000.

[Zorgoth]

At any rate I don't think you need to get to space-height to pull off 20d6 damage. The only reason space-height would be needed would be to replicate R.F.G., and again, falling damage rules override physics. 20d6 only requires 200 feet up.

Well yes, if you go by the literal rules, you can just drop lots of items from 200 feet up. Although really you need to be high enough up that you can prepare for a day without anyone noticing. You can probably destroy the city by simply carpeting it with falling objects from a much lower hegiht. However, in reality, if I were the DM, I would not rule that an object falling at multiple kilometers per second was working under the same system of falling damage. Which is stupidly nonphysical in the first place, but the 20d6 maximum is assuming things fall at terminal velocity. The lead from space is falling at many, many times terminal velocity. I would rule that it made a giant explosion, just like it actually would.

[Captnq]

There are no rules covering this in 3.5.

So I would fall back to 2nd edition's starjammer rules and once something achieves terminal velocity it burns up. A bright show of light explodes over the city.

Instead, use a variety of Maximized/Empowered/Widened druid spells and wipe out the city that way.

[FearlessGnome]

As an alternative for those times when you want to keep the city intact, and just kill all the lowly commoners inside it, may I suggest a supernatural Widened Extended Black Labyrinth? It's a two mile radius Maze, and any commoners within are going to have an awfully hard time finding any food or water until the Mystery runes out. Which will be in... 18 days, at the soonest. Requires level 18 for the supernatural version, but it's so worth it, just for the knowledge that anyone outside who wants to end the Labyrinth early is going to have to do it one 40 foot radius burst of Disjunction at a time.

[Zorgoth]

There are no rules covering this in 3.5.

So I would fall back to 2nd edition's starjammer rules and once something achieves terminal velocity it burns up. A bright show of light explodes over the city.

Instead, use a variety of Maximized/Empowered/Widened druid spells and wipe out the city that way.

That still isn't a particularly sensible rule when the object is obviously too large to burn up that way.

Incidentally, I just looked up the approximate dimensions and speed of the object that caused the Tunguska event, and adjusting for the velocity and the required blast area, somewhere between 10000 and 100000 metric tons at 5km/s should be enough for a blast to reach the surface that is capable of felling trees in an area a few miles wide even if it burns up in the atmosphere. And I'm pretty sure if you dropped a bunch of lead like that it would not all burn up, but rather a large part of it would hit the surface, which would simply wipe a city of the map. Mind you, it will burn up if it is pieces probably, so the shrink item method needs some way of fusing all the lead together after unshrinking it before letting it fall. You should be able to support the weight with forcecages while you manipulate it, assuming the task can be completed in a timescale of days rather than months.

Edit: Fireball can melt lead (says so in the spell description), so actually you can probably weld your entire lead supply into one giant meteor (unshrinking it a few pieces at a time and using wands of fireball), and then maybe use major creation to coat the outside with ceramic to encourage it's not burning up in the atmosphere, although I don't know how effective or necessary that would be.

[lunar2]

D&D falling damage may actually work with D&D terminal velocity. terminal velocity in 3.5 is 300 ft/round, or roughly 30 mph, just 1/4 of terminal velocity IRL (for humans, anyway. i don't know if other objects have different terminal velocities, except for balloons and similar extremely low density objects). it's kind of the same excuse for why dragons can fly.

[TuggyNE]

A better idea: Shrink Item.

I see no one read my linked post. :smallsigh:

[(Un)Inspired]

Sorry Tuggy, I actually did follow your link. I love the idea of the iron dragon slamming into a group of adventurers at mach 1 and your plan for that dragon to drop a shrink item payload on them is pretty terrific.

Again, even capping at 20d6, enough objects crashing into a city is going to destroy it and with shrink item the number you can unload at once is staggering.

[TuggyNE]

Sorry Tuggy, I actually did follow your link. I love the idea of the iron dragon slamming into a group of adventurers at mach 1 and your plan for that dragon to drop a shrink item payload on them is pretty terrific.

Well good! At least somebody liked it.

[(Un)Inspired]

I actually really like finding real world technological analogues in d&d and the long range stealth bomber dragon is a good one!

[Zorgoth]

I see no one read my linked post. :smallsigh:

Oh well, now the only way to restore my honor would be the traditional method of ritual suicide among my people: casting time stop and then positioning myself directly in the path of a supersonic dragon.

However, Shrink Item will not destroy a *city* that way reasonably. Each casting can at most get 20 feet by 20 feet by RAW, although you could probably multiply that by something to reflect the fact that the boulders keep moving. Cast that 10,000 times and you only cover 90 acres, which is a tiny fraction of a city, even a medieval one. And that would use up 200 wands costing 2 million gp or months of preparation. It would get a village/town sort of thing, or a castle, but if we're talking about levelling a nation's capital, we need some serious mojo. You need to be able to get by with 1000-1500 shrink items, which is about what a level 20 wizard with Extend Spell can pull off before the durations start to expire.

This is why D&D needs asteroid rules. How could they leave that out of the SRD? Seriously.

Edit: To qualify, you could clearly ruin a city's infrastructure with 1500 supersonic 10 ton boulders, or destroy the major buildings, or level its fortifications. You could effectively make it uninhabitable. But personally, I'm going for nuclear weapon level annihilation here.

[TuggyNE]

Oh well, now the only way to restore my honor would be the traditional method of ritual suicide among my people: casting time stop and then positioning myself directly in the path of a supersonic dragon.

Heh.


However, Shrink Item will not destroy a *city* that way reasonably. Each casting can at most get 20 feet by 20 feet.

Well now, you don't have to actually cover every single square foot directly; indirect damage can do a lot of it for you, and as long as a single boulder falls on a building large chunks of it will likely collapse. (Depending on how you figure building HP loss, I guess.) So spread it a bit thinner and that should work better.

Let's see, use Chain Spell + Reach Spell to hit multiple targets per casting. Requires a 9th-level slot without reducers or rods, so either a triple-advanced great white wyrm, a great white wyrm with five Sorcerer levels, or some reducer feats and rods is indicated. (Maybe more than of the above.) Let's assume CL 20 using the +1 CL ioun stone and at least enough Cha to get a bonus 9th, so 5/day. That's 5*20 boulders/day, not counting all the other slots: 6 for each of 3rd through 8th, plus 2 bonus slots for 3rd through 5th and 1 for 6th through 8th: 145 total boulders per day. More efficient use of slots can crank that up, but that in itself helps a good bit.

Next, of course, each boulder smashes an area about 9 times (triple width, triple height) its own diameter or better, so we only need maybe 1200 boulders for 90 acres, which is solved with 9 days' castings. But 90 acres really is rather small; Londinium was maybe 350 acres, and Jerusalem was 220 acres for quite a while, so let's try for 360 acres. Takes 35 or 36 days. Seemingly, we can get 10 acres/day with this.

Actually distributing these evenly may be rather more of a challenge, ironically.

[Zorgoth]

This is why horizontal walls of force should be allowed (just arrange your rocks on top of the permanent wall of force, then dismiss it). I know they aren't by RAW, but it seems kind of silly that a wall of pure force cares what direction gravity is pointing. Of course, then you aren't dropping them from a dragon, which is part of the fun. But on the other hand, you don't need to find a dragon to collaborate with you in your evil schemes. If you're doing the 2000 or so rocks from space thing you can prepare it without using most of your spell slots, and if the DM allowed real world physics it would basically be like dropping a high-yield pure-fission atomic bomb.

Huh, I've never used Chain Spell before. Chain Disintegrate! Vaarsuvius' dreams would be fulfilled. But actually, using chain reach extend at 9th level and chain reach at 8th level, plus your other slots, if you use 5 slots a dat of all levels but 4, and 10 at 4 due to ring of wizardry, you should be able to make around 7000 shrunk items cast at CL 20 by investing 40 days (the 8th level slots only come into play 20 days before you want the items). But actually the items are only 40 cubic feet tops, which has a limit to its destructive power. 20 feet by 20 feet might be about right for the area it can destroy, which still doesn't give enough boulders for complete destruction of the city.

However, what could be more dangerous is more smaller pieces. After you shrink your 4 foot diameter boulders into 3 inch diameter rocks, break them (without striking them against a hard surface - possibly you could use the shatter spell). If you can get pieces of the right size, then you can add a hail of much more numerous smaller supersonic rocks. They won't do the same kind of damage individually but there will be a lot of them, probably dealing 20d6 damage each even by RAW.

So now I want a party of level 7-8 heroes to have an encounter with an evil level 20 wizard, which is even because this wizard used virtually all of his spell slots preparing Shrink Item in preparation for bombarding a city, and somehow neglected to prepare any spells that would immediately kill such a party.

The evil wizard has threatened to destroy our city in one month's time for resisting his attempts to conquer us! You must find and destroy him before he can finish shrinking all his ammunition! Now, why a nation that could defend itself against a level 20 wizard invading them would send such a party after him, I'm not sure. But whatever.

[Flame of Anor]

Okay, there seems to be some confusion about what terminal velocity does. It does not (in the real world) burn anything up. Terminal velocity is the speed at which the acceleration of friction is equal and opposite to the acceleration of gravity. When things burn up in the atmosphere, it's because they are going much faster than terminal velocity and slowing down.


locate city bomb doesn't work.

How's that?

[Zorgoth]

So... If you cast shrink item on a ton of huge lead blocks to get little lead pieces, then you melted all the little pieces together, then you dispelled shrink item on all the pieces simultaneously... Would it remain in one piece and become to giant merged lead object? Or would all the constituent objects try to overlap each other when growing and cause it to break apart?

I'm thinking it would break up, but if not it would be a really easy way to make a really scary meteor.

[Incorrect]

Several smaller meteors, each dealing 20d6 damage to whatever buildings they hit seem to be a good way. D&D does not have rules for any kind of explosion following an impact. Just make it rain canon balls.

For the plan with one single meteor, the RAW problem is that max damage from falling objects cap at 20d6. Of cause, this does not apply to thrown objects. Now, if only there were some kind of specialized build focused on throwing enormous objects for horrible damage... :smallamused:

Simply bring your Hulking Hurler friend along to chuck the meteor at the city. 10000d6 damage should be trivial.

[Zorgoth]

Well, yes, the meteor from space idea is in fact premised on the idea that DMs can think for themselves and that they would probably rule that an object which in the real world would level a city does more than 20d6 damage to an area a few meters across.

Edit: to be fair, since the object weights tens of thousands of tons, it deals a lot more than 20d6 damage by RAW. But the main point is that it should do what it actually would do, at least approximately. The falling damage rules are silly enough anyway for being size category independent (if you drop a mouse from the top of a building, it will probably be fine - it will not take 20d6 damage. Conversely, if you drop a really large creature, it should take extra damage - the falling rules were clearly designed with the idea in mind that small and medium creatures aren't all that different in size and how the rule applies to other sizes of creatures that people don't play isn't important). Trying to apply a falling damage rule based on terminal velocity to something moving at Mach 20 is kind of silly.

[lord_khaine]

The real way of using Apocalypse from the Sky is to combine it with a Fell Animate :smalltongue:

BAM, instant zombie apocalypse!

[Talothorn]

Force cages and horizontal walls of force are not necessary. Use a few immovable rods to build a platform for working/sleeping. RAW legal and cheap.

[lunar2]

Okay, there seems to be some confusion about what terminal velocity does. It does not (in the real world) burn anything up. Terminal velocity is the speed at which the acceleration of friction is equal and opposite to the acceleration of gravity. When things burn up in the atmosphere, it's because they are going much faster than terminal velocity and slowing down.



How's that?

iirc, one of the feats involved requires the spell to allow a reflex save. locate city does not allow a reflex save.

[Zorgoth]

Force cages and horizontal walls of force are not necessary. Use a few immovable rods to build a platform for working/sleeping. RAW legal and cheap.

Well, there is the issue that if you're trying to weld your items together after unshriniking them, you would need more immovable rods than anyone could afford. If you're just trying to drop them piecemeal though, that works. As long as you can actually use the rods as effective supports (more concerned about surface area than carrying capacity).

[Maginomicon]

You can utilize Elven High Magic (MoF 13) to increase the caster level of an area spell by succeeding on a Spellcraft check with a DC equal to 20 + 5 × CL increase of the area spell.

It doesn't mention the time and materials needed, so I house-rule the following:


If you use chalk to draw such a circle, it requires a suitable surface and 1 round for every foot in the circumference (round down, minimum 1 round) and a new piece of chalk (costing 1 cp each) for every 20 feet in the circumference (round down, minimum 1 piece of chalk).

You can create a circle by magical methods much faster, most notably through the shape line of spells.

----------

Further, the "must appear on a surface capable of supporting it" clause is a restriction of the conjuration school itself, which includes not only creation and summoning but teleportation. That is, you can't actually teleport into the sky. The RAI is highly likely this way so that spells like Teleport automatically put you down on the ground somewhere instead of putting you at some random elevation relative to your desired destination.

(NOTE: Technically-speaking, the RAW says "to your location", but this is a moot point really.)

You'd have to create some sort of flying surface that can support whatever you need, fly it up there, and from then on you can teleport/create/summon whatever you want. This makes sense really, as getting something to the needed location and altitude still requires a payload delivery method.

[nedz]

All you need is a Flying Carpet and a Chicken Infested Commoner.

Just bury that city in dead chickens.

[Maginomicon]

Just bury that city in dead chickens.Yum! :smallbiggrin:

(do it from high enough and they'll even be roast chickens)

[Zorgoth]

"A creature or object brought into being or transported to your location by a conjuration spell cannot appear inside another creature or object, nor can it appear floating in an empty space. It must arrive in an open location on a surface capable of supporting it."

That looks to me like it is talking about summoning, not teleportation. I mean, you could argue that it was referring to teleportation in that you are bringing yourself and whoever you are carrying to your own new location, but at that point we are getting kind of silly.

[Zorgoth]

I don't think you can teleport straight into outer space since you aren't familiar with the location, at least not until you've created a landmark up there, but I think that you can use horizon walker with dimension door. In any case you can certainly use overland flight, although it will take several days to get to city-busting altitude.

[Belial_the_Leveler]

1) Create a sufficiently large hollow structure with walls of iron. Lots and lots of them.

2) Create a dense core inside the hollow structure out of walls of iron.

3) Use a system of pulleys similar to those in castle gates to raise and lower the core. Make it large and tough to lift, say, an iron cube 100 ft across weighing 200.000 tons.

4) Cast reverse gravity multiple times inside the cube, above the iron core. Make it permanent.

5) Now you can raise and lower the entire structure by getting the core in and out of the reverse gravity field and giving the whole structure negative weight. You effectively have an antigravity drive that can boost you to orbit.

6) Make a really large boiler. Link some decanters of endless water into it. Put some permanent walls of fire under it in a permanent zone of sweet air.

7) Divert the arbitrarily large quantities of steam produced by step 6, in arbitrarily high pressures, out of the aft of your vessel. You now have a reaction drive system with infinite fuel. You can accelerate indefinitely, eventually reaching other planets or even other galaxies (emphasis on "eventually")

8) Go far out of the Earth, then turn back and ram your 300.000 ton, village-sized vessel on a nation of your choosing at a significant percentage of lightspeed.


9) Cue in 40.000 gigaton explosion.