Flesh to stone + stone shape.

[Eslin]

What do you think happens when you stone shape something that has been temporarily turned to stone? What would happen once the minute duration is up and they return to flesh if you:


Took a medium humanoid and perfected him. Didn't change his size, but sculpted him into a man of perfect proportions and aesthetic beauty.
Took a small humanoid and sculpted her into a medium one. Take the halfling, stone shape her into a form that is identical but eight times (twice in every dimension) her size.
Took a medium humanoid and sculpted him into a perfect sphere.
Took a medium humanoid and sculpted her into a quadruped. Same size and anatomically sound, possibly looking like a hybrid of dog and ape but with human features.
Took a small humanoid and gave him wings. Kept the body shape identical except for adding more muscle around the chest and large, flight capable wings.
Took a wyrmling dragon, seperated the relevant parts and shaped their fangs into a sword or their hide into a shirt.

[CubeB]

Actually this is pretty much covered in the rules for stone shape. When addressing things like making doors, it says anything more complex than a hinge is not possible, and that you can't manipulate anything larger than 5 feet.

So the majority of people are out, leaving you with small races, dwarves, and children.

So going through your examples.


The perfecting might work, since it's just superficial changes rather than anything fine and mechanical.
This requires you find the extra stone somewhere. Where does the mass come from? I don't remember Stoneshape adding additional mass.
That'd just be lethal.
A quadruped is usually bigger than 5 feet in some dimension, and even then the new additions might not be biologically sound.
You could certainly rearrange things like this, but the wings wouldn't be able to fly. There's a very real chance that the wings would be horrible flesh flaps. Also there's the 5 Feet in any dimension rule.
Actually you could do this, though the craftsmanship might be worse than if a professional did it, since you're warping the flesh and bone rather than taking the time to properly craft the item.

[Demonic Spoon]

There's no mechanism with stone shape to make complicated changes to a person. Say you make someone's legs longer to make them taller - you'd need to ensure that you lengthen the bone and add additional muscle, skin, fat, and other stuff that you don't know anything about.

It's up to the DM, but presumably the Stone to Flesh scroll would not necessarily interpret the whims of the Stoneshaper when deciding what parts of the stone become what kind of flesh. I'd imagine anyone meaningfully altered via stoneshape would die a very horrible death shortly after coming back.

[CubeB]

There's no mechanism with stone shape to make complicated changes to a person. Say you make someone's legs longer to make them taller - you'd need to ensure that you lengthen the bone and add additional muscle, skin, fat, and other stuff that you don't know anything about.

It's up to the DM, but presumably the Stone to Flesh scroll would not necessarily interpret the whims of the Stoneshaper when deciding what parts of the stone become what kind of flesh. I'd imagine anyone meaningfully altered via stoneshape would die a very horrible death shortly after coming back.

This really depends on the DM.

First of all, I don't believe stone to flesh is a spell. You use greater restoration instead, so there's a specific restorative element to the spell. You can't just turn statues into corpses.

You could argue that petrification, as a progressive effect, does not turn one into an undifferentiated statute but rather turns all of your component parts into stone. If you looked at an individual who was petrified, you might find "marbled" stone that looks like muscle tissue, bone, veins, etc...

Greater restoration undoes that. But if you use stoneshape, you're turning that mass into some undifferentiated parts.

Now, I could see some uses, like reattaching a petrified limb, since presumably healing magic has some sort of mystical autocorrect involved. It would probably try to make the victim as functional as possible because that is what the spell is designed to do. So if you stoneshaped someone into an idealized form, greater restoration would try to repair any mistakes you made in the process.

But like real life autocorrect, if what you're doing is too far off from what is supposed to be there, you end up dealing with some really weird shiatsu massage.

For example, it would adjust for height, but adding a size category would require adding extra mass it wouldn't know what to do with, since that wasn't there before. It would try to be functional, but you might end up with a Halfling that is suffocating under layers of person shaped flesh, with bits of armor stuck in side.

Similarly, it would try and fix the wings, but it probably would forget feathers, and forget about the bone structure. You might be able to make a pair of wings in extreme detail, but that would require the additional mass (and, again, that wasn't there before so it risks confusing the spell).

Finally, with the shirt and sword, it would try to make a still living, squirming shirt that would promptly spurt blood everywhere and die. (Though, they'd still be kind of functional? Until it started to decay because you didn't cure it properly?)

...So, short answer, leave the flesh shaping to Illithids, okay?

[Eslin]

This really depends on the DM.

First of all, I don't believe stone to flesh is a spell. You use greater restoration instead, so there's a specific restorative element to the spell. You can't just turn statues into corpses.

You could argue that petrification, as a progressive effect, does not turn one into an undifferentiated statute but rather turns all of your component parts into stone. If you looked at an individual who was petrified, you might find "marbled" stone that looks like muscle tissue, bone, veins, etc...

Greater restoration undoes that. But if you use stoneshape, you're turning that mass into some undifferentiated parts.

Now, I could see some uses, like reattaching a petrified limb, since presumably healing magic has some sort of mystical autocorrect involved. It would probably try to make the victim as functional as possible because that is what the spell is designed to do. So if you stoneshaped someone into an idealized form, greater restoration would try to repair any mistakes you made in the process.

But like real life autocorrect, if what you're doing is too far off from what is supposed to be there, you end up dealing with some really weird shiatsu massage.

For example, it would adjust for height, but adding a size category would require adding extra mass it wouldn't know what to do with, since that wasn't there before. It would try to be functional, but you might end up with a Halfling that is suffocating under layers of person shaped flesh, with bits of armor stuck in side.

Similarly, it would try and fix the wings, but it probably would forget feathers, and forget about the bone structure. You might be able to make a pair of wings in extreme detail, but that would require the additional mass (and, again, that wasn't there before so it risks confusing the spell).

Finally, with the shirt and sword, it would try to make a still living, squirming shirt that would promptly spurt blood everywhere and die. (Though, they'd still be kind of functional?)

...So, short answer, leave the flesh shaping to Illithids, okay?

Stone to flesh doesn't matter, you just let the minute duration run out - loving the idea of using greater restoration as magic fix to make your changes work, though the spell might just revert them to how they were before.

[CubeB]

Stone to flesh doesn't matter, you just let the minute duration run out - loving the idea of using greater restoration as magic fix to make your changes work, though the spell might just revert them to how they were before.

Well, the thing is it still probably wouldn't work.

If you let the spell run out, then... well, you'd probably just end up with a mess, because the shaped stone is a warped version of what was there before, and people can't survive with a three foot long, 2 inch wide heart that lives in their right wing.

[Eslin]

Eh, I'm sure there's a way around it. Making an npc, gonna have him use flesh to stone, stone shape and greater restoration to craft 'masterpieces'.

[infinitetech]

finally a use for 5e medicine and crafting as usual, id say you have to make a medicine knowledge check to know EXACTLY where the parts would have been, then a perception check to correctly correlate to the size, then a medicine and craft and caster level check both to properly shape the structures, different things are different dcs for different parts, you may need handle animal for some checks (your knowledge of their anatomy) but efficiently, if you roll high enough, and are very careful/take it in very small steps, you could do this sort of stuff, and if you have other mages continually casting the spell so that it doesn't run out you have an eternity(they aren't aging) to do this right, piece by piece, process by process, as for the tool building you would need to make a craft check to make the item the correct shape, but the actual structure of it could be far better than a master crafter since you could shape out the impurities and make it a far denser molecular structure than normal, the flesh to stone spell in all reality only mineralizes the tissues/bones/stuff so that it counts as rock, it doesn't mean that its all the exact same type of rock, these would be very hard to do, but if you roll high and are a genius character then you could potentially create anything, also if you bring rock from nearby in it would count as part of the being and lose mineralization, so after a proper check you could bring in iron, gold, crystal, calcium to make bone or many other things

[Eslin]

finally a use for 5e medicine and crafting as usual, id say you have to make a medicine knowledge check to know EXACTLY where the parts would have been, then a perception check to correctly correlate to the size, then a medicine and craft and caster level check both to properly shape the structures, different things are different dcs for different parts, you may need handle animal for some checks (your knowledge of their anatomy) but efficiently, if you roll high enough, and are very careful/take it in very small steps, you could do this sort of stuff, and if you have other mages continually casting the spell so that it doesn't run out you have an eternity(they aren't aging) to do this right, piece by piece, process by process, as for the tool building you would need to make a craft check to make the item the correct shape, but the actual structure of it could be far better than a master crafter since you could shape out the impurities and make it a far denser molecular structure than normal, the flesh to stone spell in all reality only mineralizes the tissues/bones/stuff so that it counts as rock, it doesn't mean that its all the exact same type of rock, these would be very hard to do, but if you roll high and are a genius character then you could potentially create anything, also if you bring rock from nearby in it would count as part of the being and lose mineralization, so after a proper check you could bring in iron, gold, crystal, calcium to make bone or many other things

Stealing every single bit of that. I'm going to make the NPC be a transmutation wizard with Arcane, Nature, Perception and Medicine and proficiency in Mason's tools. He is going to make such beautiful abominations.

[infinitetech]

yay my madness and tinkering infects yet another!!, btw eslin, dont worry about that numbing feeling, ill be done soon

[Eslin]

yay my madness and tinkering infects yet another!!, btw eslin, dont worry about that numbing feeling, ill be done soon

That was the idea I was already going for, it's why I made the thread, but medicine is a great way of finessing it, adds more skill and feels realer.

[edge2054]

This would make a great villian for a Halloween game.

[Segev]

Setting aside modern scientific and like-to-like analysis of thought, and trying to step into a more mythic mindset, I think this sounds like the kind of thing "magic" might do in myth and legend. So depending on the kind of game you're running, this could work quite well. The more "hard" your fantasy is - that is, the more "magic only does what it says, and science fills in the gaps" it is as opposed to "magic does strange but intuitive things with the warped consequences coming not from lack of scientific understanding, but even stranger laws still" - the more "woops, you twisted him into a flesh sculpture of body horror" is likely to come up. The more it is the latter example, however, the better this will work...but the more likely stranger consequences, perhaps spiritually or karmically or mystically, may arise.

[Kornaki]

The idea that you can turn someone into stone and they can pop back just fine, you can turn someone into a mouse and they can pop back just fine, but if you turn them into a stone mouse they die a horrible death because science is a strange one.

[Segev]

The idea that you can turn someone into stone and they can pop back just fine, you can turn someone into a mouse and they can pop back just fine, but if you turn them into a stone mouse they die a horrible death because science is a strange one.

Like I said, from a mythic perspective, the "reshape the statue, get what you reshaped it into back" approach seems reasonable.

[Daishain]

The clause that prohibits making anything more complex than a hinge would seem to prohibit most of these examples, or at least prohibit the new features from being functional. The mechanics behind a living organism is "only" a few hundred orders of magnitude more complicated than a hinge.

Even if that were not a concern I would greatly question the caster's ability to visualize the inner workings of flesh well enough to get the needed cellular patterns right, even if they somehow had a perfect understanding of the anatomy involved.

[Dark_Stalion]

I'd read it as you've effectively taken a scalpel to them. Changes in dimensions would mean you've moved bits of them to somewhere else and when they return to flesh they basically die immediately from organ failure etc. Anything you do to a flesh to stone person damages them. Lost limbs are lost, etc. You'd need to make some serous medicine checks in my book to not screw that up.

[Eslin]

The clause that prohibits making anything more complex than a hinge would seem to prohibit most of these examples, or at least prohibit the new features from being functional. The mechanics behind a living organism is "only" a few hundred orders of magnitude more complicated than a hinge.

Even if that were not a concern I would greatly question the caster's ability to visualize the inner workings of flesh well enough to get the needed cellular patterns right, even if they somehow had a perfect understanding of the anatomy involved.

It says 'two hinges and a latch, but finer mechanical detail not possible', but that's not a problem - it's a statue, until it's living once more it's merely regular detailing. It specifies nothing beyond hinges, indicating the object can't have many moving parts, but that's not a problem because they're not moving parts while it's a statue. An elbow is a hinge, a statue's elbow is a chunk of stone.

Inner workings wise, it's going to require a lot of medicine checks, intelligence checks, nature checks, masonry checks, the works. But the good doctor's not going to mind if he gets a few wrong in the process of seeking perfection, all art requires rough drafts.

[Person_Man]

High fantasy setting? Everything you describe would magically work as intended, perhaps with some sort of monkey's paw catch.

Low fantasy setting? None of what you described would work, and attempts to make it work would lead to terrible lab accident type incidents, where the creatures physically look like their new form but with horrendous actual effects - muscles made of skin, not enough bone structure leads to a collapsed pile, horrendous pain, etc. An interesting plot would be about an Evil spellcaster who did this over and over again until they found a way to perfect and use it for certain applications, for example, creating chimeras, basic cosmetic surgery to change the appearance of criminals and the super rich, torture, etc.

[Eslin]

High fantasy setting? Everything you describe would magically work as intended, perhaps with some sort of monkey's paw catch.

Low fantasy setting? None of what you described would work, and attempts to make it work would lead to terrible lab accident type incidents, where the creatures physically look like their new form but with horrendous actual effects - muscles made of skin, not enough bone structure leads to a collapsed pile, horrendous pain, etc. An interesting plot would be about an Evil spellcaster who did this over and over again until they found a way to perfect and use it for certain applications, for example, creating chimeras, basic cosmetic surgery to change the appearance of criminals and the super rich, torture, etc.

It's basically the latter, thinking about it, though not truly low fantasy, since in a truly realistic fantasy even with the best knowledge in the world anything beyond minor alterations wouldn't work - which is fine, I don't do D&D for perfect realism (hello gargantuan dragons which can apparently fly unaided!). I run a logical game, things rarely work by mythical reasoning. I figure it is possible, but difficult, and perhaps requires a few secondary spells. Doing a perfect job requires flesh to stone, stone shape and a hefty number of high DC checks in medicine, nature, intelligence and masonry, with the DCS only reachable with circumstance bonuses from repeated experiments. The good doctor's spent many a year on theory and experimentation, and can somewhat reliably alter the shape of the subject, with the chances lowering the more dramatic the transformation - if the players try anything beyond cosmetic surgery, they'll end up with a twisted abomination of meat and bone that desperately tries to breathe for a few seconds or minutes before painfully expiring.

Planning to have what to do with his research be a fun moral dilemma for the players - it's horrifying, and clearly the knowledge was gleaned from dissecting hundreds of corpses mutilated by his horrific experiments, but there's a lot of potentially very useful medical knowledge in there.

[jkat718]

Slightly off-topic here, but could this be a way to make stone golems into flesh golems, or vice versa? Also, akin to the "owlbears-were-made-by-drunk-wizardry-students (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0322.html)" theory, could this be the process by which the original forms were formed?

[Maxilian]

Took a wyrmling dragon, seperated the relevant parts and shaped their fangs into a sword or their hide into a shirt.


These's a great idea, it would be a really nice and easy way to create pretty strong and unique items (mostly weapons), you just have to cut the part you want (make it take 5 feet, no more) and turn it into stone, after that just shape it in whatever way you want and you got a new weapon of that...

[infinitetech]

jkat, though it would be a fleshy stone golem or vice versa, unfortunately no, golemancy is very precice with how you build them, the "magic" itself that keeps them alive may actually be destroyed through this