[3.5] Spells with artillery functions

[HaikenEdge]

Out of curiosity, what spells can be used as artillery, primarily to bomb out fortresses and reduce them to rubble? One of my friends is currently involved in a situation in-game where his party is trying to wipe a fortress off the face of the plane, and I'm kind of curious what spells he could possibly have at his disposal, assuming all 3.5 WotC official and licensed materials are legal.

[Chronos]

Not actually a spell, but the psionic power Energy Wall is excellent for rubbleizing a fortress. Choose sonic, and it ignores hardness and does full damage to objects, and you can attack very large stretches of wall at once.

[HaikenEdge]

Yeah, I should have mentioned that powers also work; I wasn't thinking clearly.

[MesiDoomstalker]

Energy Substitution: Acid Energy Admixture: Sonic Fireball. Add Empower to taste.

[DustyBottoms]

Well placed orbs of force or sonic orbs to take down the wall and then fireball the opening?

Or take down the wall and make a Wall of Fire or Magma and trap them in their own fortress.

[Ravens_cry]

A few casting of Earthquake (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/earthquake.htm)should do it.
Alternatively, Passwall (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/passwall.htm)can be used for rapid undermining, something that was historically done (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/passwall.htm), but by digging tunnels manually, of course.

[Telonius]

A good old-fashioned Disintegrate will work, it just takes a while.

Depending on how the target is constructed (does it count as freestanding?) a Sympathetic Vibration can bring down those walls. 2d10 damage per round, ignores hardness.

[HaikenEdge]

When I say "artillery", I tend to mean in the traditional sense of being able to fire from a long distance away, and just train destruction down on the fortress, reducing it to rubble.

While a lot of these spells are good, they're not exactly the type of artillery I was thinking of.

[MesiDoomstalker]

A good old-fashioned Disintegrate will work, it just takes a while.

I see your Disintegrate and raise you one Sphere of Ultimate Destruction.

EDIT: Actually, a great way to destroy walls or anything somewhat tall is to destroy the base of it. There are rules in the Stronghold book (I think) that says if a part of a wall is destroyed, all the parts above it get damaged, more the higher up from the destroyed section. Could easily create a domino effect if you bust up the 2 bottom sections.

EDIT the Second: Found it, page 98 of Stronghold Builder's Guide. Basically when you destroy a 10x10 section (like after a nice Disintegrate), the sections above take 50% its max HP subtracting Hardness. So if you can break the bottom 20x10 section, and deal Hardness x2 damage to the sections above, you can collapse the entire 10 foot section of wall.

[Diarmuid]

But you're limiting yourself to what we would consider artillery.

When the wizard is that powerful that he is looking to single-handedly level an entire castle, flying above with greater invis and a plethora of protections layered on himself...staying within range of many of the spells listed is perfectly reasonable.

Alternatively, lots of wall or iron/stone and shrink item with a dose of Fly tossed in should do the trick from sufficiently far away.

[Knaight]

I'd also be inclined to look through the Summon Monster list for things with wall breaking functions and acceptable movement speeds (or teleportation). It's not conventional artillery, but you do get a pretty decent range out of the deal.

[Petrocorus]

Summoning thing like a rock or a dire eagle so he can hurl boulder from the air, maybe?

Teleporting some big monster (a Troll for example) inside the castle can have som use too.

Major Creation can actually create ballistas and catapults.

[zlefin]

shrink item can be used to make large projectiles small enough to fire easily; and a readied action on someone else to speak the command word when it's fired will let it turn big.
Or shrink item to drop large objects from a great height on things.

[HaikenEdge]

But you're limiting yourself to what we would consider artillery.

When the wizard is that powerful that he is looking to single-handedly level an entire castle, flying above with greater invis and a plethora of protections layered on himself...staying within range of many of the spells listed is perfectly reasonable.

Alternatively, lots of wall or iron/stone and shrink item with a dose of Fly tossed in should do the trick from sufficiently far away.

I'm kind of leery of telling him to just layer on protections and greater invisibility, since it's a campaign where Disjunction gets thrown around like candy on Halloween, which was also why I was looking for something that could strike from really long distance.

[Diarmuid]

Disjunction is a Close range spell.

Stay more than 75' from your target and you're probably good to go. Heck, if you're worried about it use the ol' tinfoil hat trick.

There are very few spells that are effective as damage dealing on large scales from very far away. Most spells are limited to Close/Medium/Long, and the Long ones are still 400 + 40'/lvl as a base.

[(Un)Inspired]

Build up like 10 castings of fire seeds and put your resulting bombs in one jar. Use the telekinesis spell to thrust the 150d8 bomb at whatever you want blown up.

[nedz]

Fireball with Explosive Spell ought to do it, but the rules are silent on this.

[Darkweave31]

Polymorph any object the walls into lettuce and attack with your army of hungry herbivores!!!

Or start marching around the castle several times then cast miracle to bring down the walls!!!

You could also try to animate siege weapon to animate a bunch of catapults and bombard castle to taste, though that's really the long way around.