PDA

View Full Version : Souls using in constructs/spell costs



Maerok
2007-01-11, 09:48 PM
Can souls (such as those caught in a trap the soul spell or with darkcraft XP) be used in the construction of constructs and/or to pay off the XP requirement of spells?

I would like to make an Artificer who uses souls to pay for much of the cost of his effigy army (LE).

Karsh
2007-01-11, 09:56 PM
The closest thing I can think of is the Sacrifice rules in the BoVD which you can sacrifice someone and make a Knowledge: Religion (with bonuses from the sacrifice) check against a DC of at least 15 to gain DCx3 exp that can only be used for crafting. You can only spend one sacrifice's worth of this "Dark exp" on any one item, so you have to pass pretty high DCs in order to fully use others for your army.

Souls can also be used as material components to get a +10 profane bonus on caster level checks to overcome spell resistance.

Collin152
2007-01-11, 11:57 PM
See if you can get it houseruled. it sounds reasonable to me; i mean, theres still the problem of getting a quality soul.

Mewtarthio
2007-01-12, 12:12 AM
The Flesh Colossus requires a bound ghost (or a magic jar) to operate it, so there's some precendent for magical constructs powered by the souls of the deceased. Granted, an actual ghost isn't very easy to create, but it's reasonable to assume that Golems, which are nowhere near as powerful as Colossi, would have decreased costs (compare the costs of the Flesh Colossus [300 specially-prepared corpses, 30600 XP, 760 thousand GP, 10 HD Ghost, CL 29] with those of the Flesh Golem [6 hacked-up corpses, 780 XP, 10.5 thousand GP, elemental spirit that requires no additional steps to acquire, CL 8]). I think a Soul Bound spirit might be a sufficient replacement for an elemental one. You'll go through more trouble to get it, though.

Replacement
2007-01-12, 12:31 AM
BoVD I believes let you use stored souls, as 10 exp a pop. And you can get dark craft points for really high sacrifices using Knowledge (Religion) I believe.

oriong
2007-01-12, 12:41 AM
I think the main problem is that XP wise, it's not too hard to find someone with a good enough soul to power even a really expensive magic item.

A third level character has 3,000 experience, that's enough to create any sort of magic item of up to 75,000 GP, and if you can use more than one character at once then it takes less than 3 third level characters to make just about any pre-epic magic item.

Even if you can't use more than one at once, a 5th character is all it takes to be the complete XP consumption for a 200,000 GP item.

Anyone capable of using Soul Bind or Trap The Soul can find and steal the soul of a 5th level character with contemptous ease, or even dozens and dozens of them: an endless supply of half-price magic items.

So, if you were to create a rule that allowed them to be used as XP fodder then two big reccomendations.

1) 1 soul at a time. It's way too easy to get a ton of weaklings together and drain their souls.

2) Include some kind of penalty for using stolen XP, for instance you might divide the amount of XP 'harvestable' by 25 (so a second level character only produces 40 XP, a 3rd only produces 120, a 5th only 400, etc.).