SirKazum
2015-03-18, 03:10 PM
As you may know already, "bootstrapping" comes from "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps", and generally refers to building or achieving something grand with little or no initial input, by first setting up some basic resources, using those resources to make bigger things, giving yourself more resources, and so on in a cumulative process.
So the idea here is to have the means to create a whole new world, "in-game", with very little initial resources. Actually, the idea for this thread came from thinking about the Polymorph Any Object (PAO) abuse that's at the core of it; the "challenge" aspect (build a new world with as few resources as possible) is just something I thought of now.
So here are our initial tools:
1) The Demiurge: This is the "guy" who's going to build a world according to your instructions. Since you'll need the world-creator to operate for many centuries, I guess a reasonably efficient way to achieve that is with an intelligent magic item. At least I like the idea. The Demiurge is a humanoid, rather thin bronze statue - a material that's rather durable, but not so valuable that people will be badly tempted to tear it apart for cash. It's an intelligent magic item, with Intelligence and Charisma 16 (pegging it at a base 6,000 gp), whose 3 minor abilities are 10 ranks in three Knowledge skills (Nature, Geography and Local), at 5,000 gp each. It's got a permanent Animate Objects effect on it (1540 gp for the spellcasting and 15,000 gp to cover the XP cost). Total price: 37,540 gp.
2) Creating the material plane: Now that's trickier. At first I thought about making an item that casts Genesis once; however, the resultant plane has only a 180-ft. radius, and that's lame. Additional castings increase the world's radius by 180 ft. a pop, and you'd need a lot of those to make a respectable world. So I guess making an item that casts Genesis 1/day automatically once activated solves that, giving our Demiurge time to work while the plane grows. The only problem is that pesky 5,000 XP per casting, which really drives the price way up. So, according to my calculations, this World Fountain (an item that makes a plane "flow" out from it continuously, at 180 feet per day) should cost 1,556,000 gp. Ouch. Suggestions on how to circumvent this are welcome (much of the price comes from an absurd 250,000 XP cost, which IMO is even worse in practical terms than the 1.5 million gp price tag).
3) Our Demiurge will need reference materials, not only to know what to create and what are the details of each creature and such, but also so that knowledge is available to be passed on to the new world's denizens. So, shall I direct your attention to my Book Learnin' (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?398225-Book-Learnin-Extended-Knowledge-Rules-%28PEACH%29) thread, specifically to the second post, and to the Compendium of Comprehensive Scholarship therein. Yeah, it's homebrew, but it's built using the magic item creation rules, so... and in any event, you could easily just pack a heckuva lot of nonmagical books with the relevant information for a similar price. Anyway, you'll want to pack 10 CCS's, one for each Knowledge skill (10,000 gp each), so that theoretical knowledge about pretty much everything in the world is available to the Demiurge. I'd round it out with a few reference books that list every creature, race, class (base and prestige), skill, feat and piece of equipment that's widely known in the world (basically everything in the core rulebooks, at least), to use as a reference to know what to create. Further details should be gleaned from Knowledge checks/research. I'll assume those reference books comprise a basic (DC 10 under my Book Learnin' rules) library of 150 gp. Those books are going to be rather unwieldy to lug around, so you'll need a Bag of Holding for them as well (Type I is fine), for another 2,500 gp. Total cost: 102,650 gp for the library.
4) Now here comes the heart of this method: something that can cast Polymorph Any Object all day long. Not quite cheap, just for being an 8th-level spell, but anyway, here goes: for a device (let's say it's a crystal pendant) that can cast PAO at will by command word, it comes at 216,000 gp.
5) All we need to round out our Demiurge is some thingamajig that can cast Plane Shift once and dump it smack dab in the deep Ethereal plane, far from any material world, where it can cast Genesis. Purchased from a cleric, the cost is 2,250 gp.
Well, let's ring up the total for our magic items... 1,914,440 gp, most of it coming from the World Fountain (the Genesis 1/day item). Yeah... not quite cheap, but not too bad IMO, considering you're creating a whole friggin' world out of it. Also, remember that, as long as you can somehow buy or commission all of the abovementioned items, you (the person who's going to run this project) don't need to have any specific abilities at all. It's all in the items.
So, how does this work?
After receiving your thorough instructions on what your Perfect World is supposed to be like, the Demiurge, properly equipped with all magic items, uses the Plane Shift thingamajig to travel to the Deep Ethereal, pulls the World Fountain out of its Bag of Holding, and activates it. Boom, there you go, a plane (initially quite small, but growing with time) that doesn't have any life in it at first, but has all the minerals, water and atmosphere a world needs.
Now we have a Demiurge walking a desolate, lifeless world, armed with nothing but a bunch of books and a PAO device. How to proceed? Let's leave the Polymorph Any Object (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/polymorphAnyObject.htm) spell open in another tab for reference, shall we?
Okay, what you wanna do is keep iteratively casting PAO in ways that are permanent. According to the spell's duration table, you absolutely need that +5 duration factor from transmuting things within the same realm (animal, vegetable, mineral) to achieve a "permanent" duration (Duration Factor 9 or above), but there's a way around that - PAO can also be used to emulate a number of spells, and some of those (in our case, stone to flesh and transmute metal to wood) have a duration of "instantaneous", which is even better than "permanent" as it can't be dispelled. Anyway. Here's what you wanna do:
Flora:
1) Pebble to chunk of iron the same size (same kingdom, size and Intelligence, duration factor 9)
2) Chunk of iron to iron tree (same kingdom, class and Int - DF 9)
3) Iron tree to wooden tree (metal to wood)
4) Presumably inert wooden tree statue to real, live tree (same kingdom, class, size, Int - DF 11)
5) Repeat until you have a self-sustaining flora.
Fauna:
1) Pebble to statue of a suitable animal (same kingdom, class and Intelligence, DF 9)
2) stone to flesh (turning the statue into an inert, lifeless animal)
3) Lifeless animal into living animal (same kingdom, class, size, related, DF 11)
4) Repeat as necessary to create a suitable ecosystem
The Demiurge can use the CCS on Nature for reference as necessary. Please note that, having ranks in Knowledge: Nature, it can research questions of any DC in that field, and the +23 skill bonus should be plenty enough to craft a perfectly complete and functional ecosystem this way. Knowledge: Geography is there to so it can cast Genesis in a way that the world created makes geographical sense as required.
Alert readers may have noticed a problem - this approach hinges on iterative castings of PAO, mostly with a Permanent duration. Which means those creatures should stay the way they are as long as they live, but they're still vulnerable to Dispel Magic and the sort. I'm counting on the fact that you just need to create the first generation of each species - from then on, the offspring those creatures have (assuming they're fertile, which I don't see why not) will be perfectly natural beings, and therefore not vulnerable to Dispel Magic shenanigans.
Intelligent races:
I guess you can see where to go from here. Use the second PAO chain above (the one for animals) to create whichever races you'd like, in whichever order you'd like. I'd create dwarves first - they're Lawful, which increases the chances they'll be obedient and go along with the Demiurge's plans, and their talent for crafts should help building the world. Knowledge about humanoids is governed by Knowledge: Local, which the Demiurge has, so it can research whichever details are needed about dwarves to create perfect and fully functional ones. Once the dwarves are around, they can start learning things from the books (eventually acquiring ranks in all Knowledge skills, and thus being capable of researching potentially any theoretical knowledge needed), as well as developing whichever skills and classes are needed on their own. Having reference books indicating how the different classes work, and theoretical knowledge to guide them, it's only a matter of time until you have dwarves of pretty much all classes, with all necessary skills.
From then, you just proceed to create other races as necessary (with faithful dwarven helpers to aid and protect you).
As for XP, since you can create an essentially unlimited number of creatures, maybe you just create animals or even monsters to challenge your created humanoids until they level up enough. Maybe you can use that trick to acquire high-level mages that will even help you create the world - who knows, if you've got a Genesis scroll your mages can learn from, maybe you can use that to bypass the cost of iterative Genesis castings. Just have your dwarves or whatever fight until they gain enough levels to cast Genesis.
So, what do you think? Am I completely crazy, or just a little bit? :smalltongue: I was just curious to see if you can create a world out of nowhere with PAO... but are there any better alternatives to bootstrapping a D&D world? Assume the finished world is going to be more or less standard for D&D campaigns.
So the idea here is to have the means to create a whole new world, "in-game", with very little initial resources. Actually, the idea for this thread came from thinking about the Polymorph Any Object (PAO) abuse that's at the core of it; the "challenge" aspect (build a new world with as few resources as possible) is just something I thought of now.
So here are our initial tools:
1) The Demiurge: This is the "guy" who's going to build a world according to your instructions. Since you'll need the world-creator to operate for many centuries, I guess a reasonably efficient way to achieve that is with an intelligent magic item. At least I like the idea. The Demiurge is a humanoid, rather thin bronze statue - a material that's rather durable, but not so valuable that people will be badly tempted to tear it apart for cash. It's an intelligent magic item, with Intelligence and Charisma 16 (pegging it at a base 6,000 gp), whose 3 minor abilities are 10 ranks in three Knowledge skills (Nature, Geography and Local), at 5,000 gp each. It's got a permanent Animate Objects effect on it (1540 gp for the spellcasting and 15,000 gp to cover the XP cost). Total price: 37,540 gp.
2) Creating the material plane: Now that's trickier. At first I thought about making an item that casts Genesis once; however, the resultant plane has only a 180-ft. radius, and that's lame. Additional castings increase the world's radius by 180 ft. a pop, and you'd need a lot of those to make a respectable world. So I guess making an item that casts Genesis 1/day automatically once activated solves that, giving our Demiurge time to work while the plane grows. The only problem is that pesky 5,000 XP per casting, which really drives the price way up. So, according to my calculations, this World Fountain (an item that makes a plane "flow" out from it continuously, at 180 feet per day) should cost 1,556,000 gp. Ouch. Suggestions on how to circumvent this are welcome (much of the price comes from an absurd 250,000 XP cost, which IMO is even worse in practical terms than the 1.5 million gp price tag).
3) Our Demiurge will need reference materials, not only to know what to create and what are the details of each creature and such, but also so that knowledge is available to be passed on to the new world's denizens. So, shall I direct your attention to my Book Learnin' (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?398225-Book-Learnin-Extended-Knowledge-Rules-%28PEACH%29) thread, specifically to the second post, and to the Compendium of Comprehensive Scholarship therein. Yeah, it's homebrew, but it's built using the magic item creation rules, so... and in any event, you could easily just pack a heckuva lot of nonmagical books with the relevant information for a similar price. Anyway, you'll want to pack 10 CCS's, one for each Knowledge skill (10,000 gp each), so that theoretical knowledge about pretty much everything in the world is available to the Demiurge. I'd round it out with a few reference books that list every creature, race, class (base and prestige), skill, feat and piece of equipment that's widely known in the world (basically everything in the core rulebooks, at least), to use as a reference to know what to create. Further details should be gleaned from Knowledge checks/research. I'll assume those reference books comprise a basic (DC 10 under my Book Learnin' rules) library of 150 gp. Those books are going to be rather unwieldy to lug around, so you'll need a Bag of Holding for them as well (Type I is fine), for another 2,500 gp. Total cost: 102,650 gp for the library.
4) Now here comes the heart of this method: something that can cast Polymorph Any Object all day long. Not quite cheap, just for being an 8th-level spell, but anyway, here goes: for a device (let's say it's a crystal pendant) that can cast PAO at will by command word, it comes at 216,000 gp.
5) All we need to round out our Demiurge is some thingamajig that can cast Plane Shift once and dump it smack dab in the deep Ethereal plane, far from any material world, where it can cast Genesis. Purchased from a cleric, the cost is 2,250 gp.
Well, let's ring up the total for our magic items... 1,914,440 gp, most of it coming from the World Fountain (the Genesis 1/day item). Yeah... not quite cheap, but not too bad IMO, considering you're creating a whole friggin' world out of it. Also, remember that, as long as you can somehow buy or commission all of the abovementioned items, you (the person who's going to run this project) don't need to have any specific abilities at all. It's all in the items.
So, how does this work?
After receiving your thorough instructions on what your Perfect World is supposed to be like, the Demiurge, properly equipped with all magic items, uses the Plane Shift thingamajig to travel to the Deep Ethereal, pulls the World Fountain out of its Bag of Holding, and activates it. Boom, there you go, a plane (initially quite small, but growing with time) that doesn't have any life in it at first, but has all the minerals, water and atmosphere a world needs.
Now we have a Demiurge walking a desolate, lifeless world, armed with nothing but a bunch of books and a PAO device. How to proceed? Let's leave the Polymorph Any Object (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/polymorphAnyObject.htm) spell open in another tab for reference, shall we?
Okay, what you wanna do is keep iteratively casting PAO in ways that are permanent. According to the spell's duration table, you absolutely need that +5 duration factor from transmuting things within the same realm (animal, vegetable, mineral) to achieve a "permanent" duration (Duration Factor 9 or above), but there's a way around that - PAO can also be used to emulate a number of spells, and some of those (in our case, stone to flesh and transmute metal to wood) have a duration of "instantaneous", which is even better than "permanent" as it can't be dispelled. Anyway. Here's what you wanna do:
Flora:
1) Pebble to chunk of iron the same size (same kingdom, size and Intelligence, duration factor 9)
2) Chunk of iron to iron tree (same kingdom, class and Int - DF 9)
3) Iron tree to wooden tree (metal to wood)
4) Presumably inert wooden tree statue to real, live tree (same kingdom, class, size, Int - DF 11)
5) Repeat until you have a self-sustaining flora.
Fauna:
1) Pebble to statue of a suitable animal (same kingdom, class and Intelligence, DF 9)
2) stone to flesh (turning the statue into an inert, lifeless animal)
3) Lifeless animal into living animal (same kingdom, class, size, related, DF 11)
4) Repeat as necessary to create a suitable ecosystem
The Demiurge can use the CCS on Nature for reference as necessary. Please note that, having ranks in Knowledge: Nature, it can research questions of any DC in that field, and the +23 skill bonus should be plenty enough to craft a perfectly complete and functional ecosystem this way. Knowledge: Geography is there to so it can cast Genesis in a way that the world created makes geographical sense as required.
Alert readers may have noticed a problem - this approach hinges on iterative castings of PAO, mostly with a Permanent duration. Which means those creatures should stay the way they are as long as they live, but they're still vulnerable to Dispel Magic and the sort. I'm counting on the fact that you just need to create the first generation of each species - from then on, the offspring those creatures have (assuming they're fertile, which I don't see why not) will be perfectly natural beings, and therefore not vulnerable to Dispel Magic shenanigans.
Intelligent races:
I guess you can see where to go from here. Use the second PAO chain above (the one for animals) to create whichever races you'd like, in whichever order you'd like. I'd create dwarves first - they're Lawful, which increases the chances they'll be obedient and go along with the Demiurge's plans, and their talent for crafts should help building the world. Knowledge about humanoids is governed by Knowledge: Local, which the Demiurge has, so it can research whichever details are needed about dwarves to create perfect and fully functional ones. Once the dwarves are around, they can start learning things from the books (eventually acquiring ranks in all Knowledge skills, and thus being capable of researching potentially any theoretical knowledge needed), as well as developing whichever skills and classes are needed on their own. Having reference books indicating how the different classes work, and theoretical knowledge to guide them, it's only a matter of time until you have dwarves of pretty much all classes, with all necessary skills.
From then, you just proceed to create other races as necessary (with faithful dwarven helpers to aid and protect you).
As for XP, since you can create an essentially unlimited number of creatures, maybe you just create animals or even monsters to challenge your created humanoids until they level up enough. Maybe you can use that trick to acquire high-level mages that will even help you create the world - who knows, if you've got a Genesis scroll your mages can learn from, maybe you can use that to bypass the cost of iterative Genesis castings. Just have your dwarves or whatever fight until they gain enough levels to cast Genesis.
So, what do you think? Am I completely crazy, or just a little bit? :smalltongue: I was just curious to see if you can create a world out of nowhere with PAO... but are there any better alternatives to bootstrapping a D&D world? Assume the finished world is going to be more or less standard for D&D campaigns.