Nuclear Weapons?

[Chrontius]

So, I've decided upon a Deus Ex Machina for a game I'm running.

I've settled on a spellbook full of Exploding Runes.

100 leaves, 200 pages of it. 200*6d6 = 1,200d6, for an average damage of 4,200 damage.

This will be a Plot Device™; the players get to use it once, if things go so badly that everyone's already going to die.

What kind of footprint will it have? How many tons (or kilotons) would this book be equivalent to?

If a Fireball is about equivalent to a pound of TNT, then this wouldn't be nuclear in yield. But, it would be about equivalent in yield to a 500 pound JDAM going off.

Okay, having made that connection, I don't feel too bad about giving my players a Plot Device. Can you suggest a method of creating a small nuke using the D&D magic system, either 3.x or 5.0? I'll call the book foreshadowing, so it won't be too much of an asspull.

Edit: The title will translate loosely as, "Light fuze, run away."

[Giant2005]

You can't really simulate a nuke regardless of what you do (Without resorting to homebrewing) as we have no ability to increase the radius of any form of explosion.
You could cover the same sort of area with a bunch of Sorcerers (Or Simulacrums) all using something like Delayed Blast Fireballs that are set to go off simultaneously via contingincies. But that is more like carpet bombing than nuclear blasting.

[pibby]

I don't understand why you have to resources within the PHB to make a DM item. If you're going to make something that ludicrous just make it up and track the math if neccessary. Magic items, no matter the caliber, destroy the balence of the game.

If there was a suggestion I had to give it would be to give such a legendary item a good bit of lore behind it.

[HoarsHalberd]

Just have it be a tome of annihilation, made up of thousands of pages, that when opened and activated crumble into shreds and scatter around in a hemi-sphere of sufficient area. Then each of those shreds stop, and start glowing like a delayed action fireball. Then invent some arbitrary formula for damage that means unless you're a lesser deity with resistance to the damage type, you're dead.

[Daishain]

Anything you want.

Seriously, considering the magic available to PCs to represent all the magic in the world is like calling a high school education sufficient to understand the sum total of human knowledge. This is especially true in 5E, where PC magic has been brutally cut back.

I would consider the magic required for such a weapon to be very rare, very dangerous to the person setting it up, and quite unstable, mostly for the sake of avoiding it being deployed everywhere. But its nature can be pretty much anything. The creation of a speck of antimatter, a massive portal that shifts all within a large radius to Limbo, the spawning of hundreds of massive creatures that will shove literally anything they see into their endless gullets, or even just a run of the mill fireball that has been boosted to ridiculous damage and range.

[jkat718]

Honestly, all you need a level 9 Spell Scroll of Wish. "I wish for a pure fusion detonation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_fusion_weapon) to occur" or "I wish for every particle within x feet to have a truly random 50% chance to become their anti-matter equivalent" are both possible wishes. Alternatively, you could just say "I wish for a nuke," but that's boring...

[ruy343]

What kind of footprint will it have? How many tons (or kilotons) would this book be equivalent to?

If a Fireball is about equivalent to a pound of TNT, then this wouldn't be nuclear in yield. But, it would be about equivalent in yield to a 500 pound JDAM going off.

Okay, having made that connection, I don't feel too bad about giving my players a Plot Device. Can you suggest a method of creating a small nuke using the D&D magic system, either 3.x or 5.0? I'll call the book foreshadowing, so it won't be too much of an asspull.

Edit: The title will translate loosely as, "Light fuze, run away."

The following is my (semi-scientific) thought process created by the OP's question.

First, you should probably know that TNT would be more accurately deal "bludgeoning" damage (from the pressure wave) than "fire" damage. That means that some powerful monsters with immunity to nonmagical bludgeoning damage would be left unscathed.

(Self-imposed rule of thumb: If it's a high explosive (TNT, Dynamite, C4, etc.) it's bludgeoning damage (because there's actually no fireball that's created because no oxygen is left). Low explosives (Gasoline, gunpowder, etc, under the proper conditions with oxidizers or other chemical stimuli) burn slow enough that you could classify it as "fire" damage.)

Now, using explosive runes stacked on top of each other is one way to create a very large fireball (since that's what the explosive runes text is most akin to (read: low explosive), you're really just generating a lot of heat. In that case, then I would classify it as fire damage, but it wouldn't leave a crater: It would just burn everything around it within a 50 ft radius (potentially starting forest fires) and deprive the area of oxygen for a round or two.

However, there's no reason at all that the players can't be given something else for a more... ahem... explosive finale. You could give them two bottles of alchemical liquid that should never be combined except under EXTREME circumstances (at which time a large fireball/poisonous gas cloud will be created). That would also serve as a way to take out any big bads (or an army thereof). It would also be fun to see how the players treat the bottles...

Other possibilities include stones taken from the bedrock of the elemental plane of fire (which explode on contact, hence the sea of fire), a bottle full of flesh-eating amoebae, a sphere of annihilation that grows, or a large colony of high-explosive ants, bred for the purpose of burrowing into the earth a distance before they all spontaneously explode (giving you that crater you always wanted :) )

[Xetheral]

As other posters have pointed out, you can simply hand-wave whatever you want.

On the other hand, it can be fun to think through the ramifications and implications of trying to stick to the mechanical effects while also permitting any logically deducible consequences.

In this case, you've got a LOT of fire damage, and therefore heat. The magic (apparently) prevents the heat from flowing via convection outside of the radius, but presumably there is still a LOT of thermal radiation, which can cause secondary heating. Large forest fires can jump firebreaks by heating anything reasonably nearby and in line-of-sight to autoignition temperatures. Using that as a model, you could simply rule that everything on the ground within line-of-sight and a certain radius automatically catches fire. If there is sufficient combustible material in range, that mundane fire might eventually grow hot enough on its own to create a firestorm, which could easily result in devastation on a scale similar to that of a nuclear weapon.

Admittedly, an "instantaneous" heat pulse would have to be preposterously hot (on the scale of an actual nuclear weapon) to actually ignite anything via thermal radiation (for more information, see: http://fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/thermal.htm). In the case of forest fires (and larger nukes), the heat transfer accumulates over time.

[Tvtyrant]

Honestly, all you need a level 9 Spell Scroll of Wish. "I wish for a pure fusion detonation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_fusion_weapon) to occur" or "I wish for every particle within x feet to have a truly random 50% chance to become their anti-matter equivalent" are both possible wishes. Alternatively, you could just say "I wish for a nuke," but that's boring...

If the universe had particles, or antimatter, or fusion. This is not inherently the case in D&D. See: Spelljammer, Balor weight to size ration, etc.


They should probably weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 lbs, give or take a few hundred.

But ultimately, they're outsiders. A balor is literally made of evil - for all we know it's composed of malecules and cruelectrons instead of the usual stuff. Who knows what kind of mass they might have.

[jkat718]

Other possibilities include Another possibility is a combination of stones taken from the bedrock of the elemental plane of fire (which explode on contact, hence the sea of fire), a bottle full of flesh-eating amoebae, a sphere of annihilation that grows, or and a large colony of high-explosive ants, bred for the purpose of burrowing into the earth a distance before they all spontaneously explode (giving you that crater you always wanted :) )

Fixed that for you. :smallbiggrin:

Actually, I forgot about the Sphere of Annihilation; that's a really good alternative. Just have a Talisman of the Sphere that grants the additional power of growing the sphere by 10+(10*INT) mod, rather than move it that much, but only for one specific Sphere of Annihilation.

Given an INT of 20 (ignoring magic items, but c'mon, if you have access to both a Sphere of Annihilation and a Talisman of the Sphere, you probably have some method of finding/buying/creating a Tome of Clear Thought, as well), that means you can expand the sphere from 2ft. in diameter (volume: 4.19 ft.3) to 2+10+(10*5)=62 ft. in diameter (volume: 125,000 ft.3) in 6 seconds. Since the Sphere has very similar properties to antimatter, let's assume it's the magical equivalent to that. For some easy calculations, let's use the mass of anti-oxygen (ie., the mass of oxygen), 15.999 AMU, which we can round to 16 AMU. At STP, oxygen has a density of 1.429 g/l, so let's use that density for anti-matter (not sure if that's accurate, but whatever). 1 ft.3 = 28.3168 l, so the volume of the large SoA is:


1.25*105 ft.3 *
2.83168*101 l *
1.429 g =
5.0580884 * 106 g



-------------
-------




1 ft.3
1 l




Using the mass-energy equivalence formula (E = mc2, where m = 5*106 g), we can find that this new SoA contains 4.4938 * 1020 joules, or 1.0740 * 10 kilotons of TNT.

Result: 4,493,800,000 j OR 10,740,000,000 kt of TNT

Is that sufficient? :smallamused:

EDIT:
If the universe had particles, or antimatter, or fusion. This is not inherently the case in D&D. See: Spelljammer, Balor weight to size ration, etc.
Bah, you're no fun! :smalltongue:

[Xetheral]

Fixed that for you. :smallbiggrin:

Actually, I forgot about the Sphere of Annihilation; that's a really good alternative. Just have a Talisman of the Sphere that grants the additional power of growing the sphere by 10+(10*INT) mod, rather than move it that much, but only for one specific Sphere of Annihilation.

Given an INT of 20 (ignoring magic items, but c'mon, if you have access to both a Sphere of Annihilation and a Talisman of the Sphere, you probably have some method of finding/buying/creating a Tome of Clear Thought, as well), that means you can expand the sphere from 2ft. in diameter (volume: 4.19 ft.3) to 2+10+(10*5)=62 ft. in diameter (volume: 125,000 ft.3) in 6 seconds. Since the Sphere has very similar properties to antimatter, let's assume it's the magical equivalent to that. For some easy calculations, let's use the mass of anti-oxygen (ie., the mass of oxygen), 15.999 AMU, which we can round to 16 AMU. At STP, oxygen has a density of 1.429 g/l, so let's use that density for anti-matter (not sure if that's accurate, but whatever). 1 ft.3 = 28.3168 l, so the volume of the large SoA is:


1.25*105 ft.3 *
2.83168*101 l *
1.429 g =
5.0580884 * 106 g



-------------
-------




1 ft.3
1 l




Using the mass-energy equivalence formula (E = mc2, where m = 5*106 g), we can find that this new SoA contains 4.4938 * 1020 joules, or 1.0740 * 10 kilotons of TNT.

Result: 4,493,800,000 j OR 10,740,000,000 kt of TNT

Is that sufficient? :smallamused:

While 10.7 Tt of TNT is amusing, I'm confused as to how you expect the energy from the annihilation reaction to escape the confines of the sphere.... :P

[HoarsHalberd]

The following is my (semi-scientific) thought process created by the OP's question.

First, you should probably know that TNT would be more accurately deal "bludgeoning" damage (from the pressure wave) than "fire" damage. That means that some powerful monsters with immunity to nonmagical bludgeoning damage would be left unscathed.

(Self-imposed rule of thumb: If it's a high explosive (TNT, Dynamite, C4, etc.) it's bludgeoning damage (because there's actually no fireball that's created because no oxygen is left). Low explosives (Gasoline, gunpowder, etc, under the proper conditions with oxidizers or other chemical stimuli) burn slow enough that you could classify it as "fire" damage.)


TNT would more likely be thunder damage in this edition, with low explosives being bludgeoning.

[ruy343]

Thunder damage... Fair enough; I stand corrected.

[Shining Wrath]

How about instead of nukes, use the equivalent of a fuel air bomb?

First: you need a roc to lift this into the air, because you want to drop it from a great height.

Use the existing idea of a Necklace of Fireballs (don't recall if that made it into 5e DMG but it exists) and the equivalent idea for lightning and cold damage (and acid if you're nasty enough). Add to that the Delayed Blast Fireball; a spell can go off some time after being cast.

You drop a giant globe which is comprised of thousands (531,441) of necklace of X (fire, electricity, cold, force) stones, each the size of a sling stone. After a delay sufficient to let your roc fly away (during which the globe is dropping) the globe splits into 3 pieces, each of which is fired off 120' in a random direction and then splits into 3 pieces, each of which is fired off, repeating 12 times until there are only individual stones falling through the air.

Then after another delay they all resolve as spells of their particular type.
The fire stones resolve as fireballs.
The electric stones resolve as lightning bolts, going in a random direction.
The cold stones resolve as ice storms centered 50' above wherever the stone came to rest.
The force stones resolve as magic missiles, again firing in a random direction.

Everything is cast with caster level 17 as making one of these monster globes is a 9th level spell.

The idea is to have the stones finish splitting apart a hundred feet or so above the ground, fall to earth, and then go off. You should have an area roughly a mile across with very few out the outside and a dense concentration at the center, resulting in utter annihilation of anything vulnerable to fire, electric, cold, or force.

Since there's technically no reason you can't extend this to other damage types (e.g., radiant) feel free.