Cyclical Sentience

[Ruethgar]

So I have been fiddling with the object I intend to animate for my urban druid, little power gamer in me. But anyway, I picked a small tree staff. Similar to the briar staff in Dragon Magazine, tree staves regenerate their charges, the problem being that it is only 1d10 per decade. A way around this is to use lucid dreaming inception to get 3d10 per night, but as constructs my little guys can't physically sleep and they can't learn skills. So, I put Aspect of the Wolf cast by circle magic on the staff as well as Wieldskill, only 6 hours of sleep, but it is good enough.

But here is where I paused. What would be going through this construct's mind? One minute it is quite literally a mindless automaton and the next it has a mind of its own, it can breath, eat, and feel. Would it be granted a soul for becoming a living thing(mmm soul harvesting factory)?

[Phelix-Mu]

Typically soul is different from mind. I don't know if the game backs this up much, but it is possible to get intelligent things that don't have souls (like intelligent items).

I don't think a soul is necessary to dream. A subconscious is all it really takes, and since this is nothing more than fluff in-game, you could easily fluff out the change to animal type granting enough emotional intelligence for there to be some kind of multi-tiered mind-thing going on for the staff-creature.

Could you elaborate on where I can learn about this particular application of Lucid Dreaming? This might prove useful for some other druid projects I have in the wings.

[Ruethgar]

Lucid Dreaming explicitly lets you alter plants and buildings and although it suggests that such alterations are meant to be benign, it is not explicitly stated. It is rather easy to incorporate spell traps in buildings and you are not limited by those pesky spell levels so throw on a persisted time stop trap next to a sleep trap. You fall asleep in the dream and your initial dream self is time stopped for a day and all it took you was less than 1 real world second to get 1 day of sleep in the dream. But wait, there's more, whenever you fall asleep you enter the dream world including when you are in the dream. So dreaming inception and get an inordinately long sleep for 8hr. I actually worked it out a couple times, comes out around 39 years of sleep.

If you were referring instead to wth the tree staff is. That is Quintessential Druid, requires the Invest Magic feat from that book, 9 Kowledge Nature and Craft Staff to make a tree function as a staff with the added quality of regenerating 1d10 charges per decade. Throw it on a greenwooded tree and make whatever sort of statue you want for your construct. Of course Urban Druids don't have to make or find the object they just get it pre-animated.

Of course if you wanted to do all of this yourself, trans-dimensional spell traps can make it happen from your dreams. True Create a greenwood seed, Lucid Dream a treant into being(they are plants after all) to enchant the seed as a Living Tree Staff. Plant Growth:Over Growth to make it an adult, Wood Shape to make it small. Doing it trans-dimensionally means it was never in the dream world so it doesn't have that pesky chance to be destroyed. It is 100% material plane.

And this is of course why humans are always such a strong presence despite their general lack of power. All of those Human Paragons and Factotums taking lucid dreaming to break the world in humanity's favor.

[Phelix-Mu]

Wow. That is pretty sophisticated. I love the trans-dimensional spell part. I'm wondering if this can assist with my green slime apocalypse plan, a kind of Big Red Button for a druid to push if the wizards ever get out of hand (a real problem, judging by some of the posts on these boards).:smallwink:

I'll have to look into it more, but growing the green slime inside a dream would be ideal for avoiding the things that outright kill green slime: fire, cold, and sunlight.

[Ruethgar]

If you need to maintain a dream, teleport your body into the dream and put yourself in a sleeping potion bath(quintessence might work too). Then teleport out with your dream self. Now you will dream forever and still adventure, plus you never die. You wake up, willingly fail vs. sleep and teleport back into the fray. If you want it to be a little safer, make a portal to the astral plane in your dream and spell trap a word of genesis. Your own demi-plane is a little more difficult to get into than your dreams. Make sure your sleeping agent is non-magical so you can true create it outside the dream.

Oh and this is all easily doable by a level one human factotum.