One of my players asked me this: how much Quintessence to cover and preserve a body?

[AnonymousPepper]

Or specifically, how many castings of it would he need?

He asked me this the other day and I honestly have no idea.

For a medium creature, presumably, but knowing the amount for small and large creatures would be nice too.

http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Quintessence

[Slithery D]

http://www.medcalc.com/body.html

[Cowardly Griffo]

So according to that link a 5'10" 200-pound person (roughly average-ish for medium creatures, I'll say) is about 2 square meters. Considering it's described as a one-inch diameter bead in the text, let's be extraordinarily generous and say you can get four square inches out of one casting. So that's 775 castings. :smalleek:

This brings up a logistical problem: how do you actually store that stuff? Does dropping it in a barrel or drum count as "applying" it, in which case you have to worry about it evaporating?

On the other hand, there's no listed saving throw, which makes me instantly think of psionic item manufactories / traps which churn out the stuff to preserve, say, prisoners in. Theoretically, you could trap gods with it (although the local League of Wizards Who Know Better would tell you that's not all that impressive. -.-;).

Even if you don't want to go that far, though, psionic items would seem the more efficient route. You don't have to worry about the power-point tax that manifesting more quintessence would start entailing after a while.