Pimp my Airship: The Damocles

[Jowgen]

Hello one and all. From my other current endeavor (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?450662-Fun-with-Unseen-Crafters), an idea was born to create a most awesome Airship. For those not familiar with Eberron-type Airships, have a handbook (http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=14914.0). I am here to get some ideas an input on the matter.

http://archive.wizards.com/dnd/images/eb_gallery/82108.jpg

Background:

I am set to start playing in a ECL 13 party, and I noticed that our party happens to have the capacity to build big complicated things. Our Dragonfire Adept has utterly ridiculous modifiers to all knowledge checks and Spellcraft (range from 25 to 40, with 1/day +10 boost), our DFI Bard can churn out unseen crafters with very respectable craft modifiers, and my character excels at charming/subjugating creatures of all kinds. While looking for what to do with this capacity, I came to the idea of having the party construct a most epic Airship: the Damocles (it's a Code Geass reference).

Our DM is rather permissive when it comes to rule-of-cool things, so we should have a bit of wiggle-room in getting this project off the ground (pun oh so intended :smalltongue: )

Building the Basic Ship:

Our Dragonfire Adept should be able to find us an area containing sufficient unclaimed Soarwood trees via Knowledge(Nature), [see Dragon 333 p. 91) and if need be Knowledge(Geography)/(Local)/(Royalty) to make sure we don't step on anyone's toes by taking their trees. Together we make the timber and prepare/secure the build-site. Other needed materials we'll get elsewhere as needed.

Eberron-Type airships haven't been developed in our world yet, but I am confident our DM will allow our dragonfire adept to come up with the plan to make one considering her ridiculous knowledge and spell-craft modifiers. In regards to DCs and Time, the closest thing Stormwrack has is the Theurgeme, a magically powered boat; which I think the DM will be happy to use as the basis. Using a couple hundred unseen crafters and the DFA's Ship-building Architecture and Engineering Check, we should be able to get the ship itself built in about 2 and a half months.

The rule-wise tricky bit is the binding of the Elemental. We can get a Khyber dragonshard with little difficulty. We can get a huge elemental with little difficulty. Getting the elemental into the shard without the Bind Elemental feat is the tricky bit. My current solutions for this are to either a) asks for the feat as per the suggest variant to the Heward's Hall magical location, or b) convince our DM to let our DFA be aware of or research an Incantation (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/incantations.htm) to serve this purpose. But yeah, if anyone has any suggestions on how to get the damn Elemental into the damn Shard in any way, please let me know. :smallsmile:

On a side-note for this, my hope here is that we'll be able to swing it to get an Omnielemental bound. Go find one, beat into submission, charm it into accepting being bound to the ship by whatever means we end up having available. Nothing says "we have the most advanced thing ever" than having something that even the books' smartest gnomes consider an unlikely possibility. As for how having one should affect the airship mechanics-wise, please do let me know if you have any suggestions :smallsmile:


Controlling/Flying the ship

My character can keep the elemental charmed for control, so no dragonmarks necessary. Worst case scenario, our DFI bard also has a decent charisma modifier and speaks the elemental languages. Also, we have someone with the Fell Conspiracy feat in the party and I hope that our DM will rule that the bound (omni)elemental can be included in the ritual (e.g. have the dragonshard, through which you get line of effect to it, count as it's eyes/ears here) so that we can command the ship from anywhere within 100 ft of it. Even if not, this aspect is covered.

Manning the Ship:

You need 15 people (as per Eberron Campaign Setting) to properly fly the ship. We could hire a crew to make up for numbers, but my current plan is to use Unseen Crafters (depends on the DM ruling the "can command to craft" part to not mean "can only command to craft"). Still, this leaves the issue of having to micro-manage a whole lot of unseen crafters, in-disposing the party during flights.

My current cheesy solution-plan for this: key a Glyph Seal (MIC) with the Unseen Crafters and have the bound elemental "touch" it, making him the center of the spell, allowing him to essentially control all the ship's minor functions by directing them with his own mental actions. The elemental thus becomes both the propulsion and the crew, all under our command.

Pimping the Ship:

If all goes as planned so far, we have a ship powered by the most badass of elementals, who autonomously operates the entire ship; all at the expense of 2.5 months, a lot of spell-casting/logging, and whatever monetary expenditure the DM deems can't be covered through said spell-casting/logging.

What I need now are good offense and defense to add to the ship, either by design of the ship itself or as add-ons. :smallsmile:

My ideas so far:
- Cloud cover. A Single Vapor Bottle (Fog subsituting Bottle of Smoke from Shining South) should be able to camouflage the entire ship as a streaming cloud on long journeys, or while it's "parked". By placing it so that the observatory at the bottom isn't included, the crew can continue to keep an eye on things outside with minimal chance of being spotted.
- Emergency Sleep-smoke shield. Sleep Smoke is a cheap easy to craft inhaled poison from Waterdeep. Have vials of the stuff around the ship, so that the Unseen Servants can un-plug them to catch/dissuade invading enemies.
- Sprayer system. Sprayers (A&E) turn liquids into 5x10 area effects and can be operated by Unseen Servants. It should be possible to get them hooked onto a central dispensary system for long-lasting shots. Upon attack, the Unseen Servants start spraying the invaders with whatever liquid is appropriate. Holy Water might be good (bye bye incorporeal undead). Suggestions for others welcome :smallsmile:
- Hallow. A ship should be able to be hallowed afaik, so having a good spell keyed to the hallow would be a big bonus. Suggestions welcome :smallsmile:


So yeah, that's what I have so far. I hope you share my dream of an awesome fortress of complete aerial superiority and contribute your awesome ideas. :smallbiggrin:

[Tysis]

For camouflage just pick up a Veil of Obscurity. Definitely get Hardening cast on the hull of the ship. That'll put the hardness of the hull at 11 if its cast with CL12-13 which is better than iron and it doesn't weigh you down. Charts of Certainty will keep you from ever being lost. Imo it would be cool if you could get water-breathing tied to the hallow spell, now your airship is also a submarine.

I would look into hiring crew for the ship. You have a DFI bard and a reason to have 15 people following you around that's a pretty solid boarding deterrent. Also, you could hire another 8-10 crew members or so and modify the hull to have hangar doors for some firesleds. Build the hangar with room for I'd say 6 firesleds, that way you can have a spare or two. Toss on a few ballistae and keep a high level caster on retainer and you're set.

[Jowgen]

Hello Tysis, thank you for your interest in the Damocles project :smallbiggrin:

I did consider Veil of Obscurity, but I don't find it worth the price-tag lest it somehow hides the crew as well, which it explicitly doesn't.

Hardening might be a good investment, if I can find a sufficiently high-leveled caster. A real high caster level is needed to make dispelling it harder and cover the entire ship with the least number of castings. I should be able to get away with just having the Hull and the deck hardened, but that still leaves the question: how the devil do I calculate the cubic feet for that? :smallannoyed:

Charts of Certainty aren't really needed. The DFA has enough Knowledge Geography to get us from completely unknown locations to somewhere distant but carefully studied even using an extremely poor chart (Stormwrack). We're not getting lost anytime soon.

I like the idea of submarine capacity via hallow, but actually, why stop there? Surely there is a spell somewhere that'll shield the ship with air so we can go into space? :smallbiggrin:

You make an excellent point in regards to the Dragonfire Inspiration Benefits. We still have one party member pending, maybe the DM will allow Leadership on him.

Firesleds I don't think will be nessecary, as everyone in the party can fly. If we do get mooks, I'll get em some life-rings just in case, but generally they're meant to stay on the ship anyways.

[IcarusWulfe]

Now you just need to find a way to get a Lancelot shield generator on to the Damocles.

[ExLibrisMortis]

If you can get the hardening done by a supernatural ability, you bypass the dispel problem. A dweomerkeeper is the obvious solution, but you may be able to use spellstitched undead with Supernatural Transformation or similar. Complicated, but you can always sell further castings to some rich craftspeople.

Also have a look at the Dragonlance prestige class Sea Mage.

Imbue Boat (Su): [...] Once per day, when the sea mage is preparing his spells, he may imbue a number of spells equal to his sea mage level into the boat itself. [...] The sea mage casts an imbued spell as normal (including requiring all verbal, somatic, and material components), but, so long as he is in contact with the boat at the time, he and the boat are considered to be one for the purposes of determining the spell’s range. [...]

A very fun way to defend your airship.

[Tysis]

I'm away from book right now so I'm not 100% on these numbers. The Explorers Handbook lists The Beginner's Luck as an example airship of average size. Its hull has 1000 10ft cube sections and the hull has 60hp so it's a wooden hull 6 inches thick. The airship is 90x300x50. So just for a ballpark estimate treat it as half a cylinder with a radius of 70ft and a height of 300ft. Which if you only hardened the outer inch would be just over 8500 cubic feet. Looking at any picture of an eberron airship and you can see that said half cylinder would likely be anywhere from 1/2 to 1/4 empty space if you put an airship inside it. So ballpark I would say somewhere between 4200 and 6400 cubic feet to harden to outer inch of the ship. That's a starting point at least, I'm sure someone can give a more exact measurement but I think if you take those numbers to your dm you can get going.

[Tvtyrant]

Getting the elemental into the gem ahould be doable using a wish spell. A scroll would work, or if your party is willing to be evil you could put the silly high skill checks to use sacrificing an individual to an evil god using the book of vile darkness rules and get a free wish.

[Eisfalken]

If you would permit a DM with some fondness of Eberron to offer some personal insight/opinion...


Our Dragonfire Adept should be able to find us an area containing sufficient unclaimed Soarwood trees via Knowledge(Nature), [see Dragon 333 p. 91) and if need be Knowledge(Geography)/(Local)/(Royalty) to make sure we don't step on anyone's toes by taking their trees. Together we make the timber and prepare/secure the build-site. Other needed materials we'll get elsewhere as needed.

This is just an aside, but AFAIK the only source of soarwood in Eberron is/was Aerenal. Maybe on Xen'drik, too, but as far as lore went I wasn't aware that any soarwood existed on Khorvaire, Argonessen, or Sarlona. If I am incorrect, I gladly stand corrected.

Even if true, this doesn't mean you're screwed. Them "undying" elf types are territorial, but they do sell soarwood. Best bet, get in good with one of the elven nobles, let them park yourself a small work camp to build your custom ship right there, in exchange for goods and services (spell-casting services, in particular, might win them over). Few Diplomacy rolls, maybe deal with some rivals out there, etc., and you're golden.

It's basically more DM fiat on this one, as well as things like, do you want to build in secret, where exactly do you want to build, etc.


Eberron-Type airships haven't been developed in our world yet, but I am confident our DM will allow our dragonfire adept to come up with the plan to make one considering her ridiculous knowledge and spell-craft modifiers.

The question is if there are any other elemental-bound vehicles in the game. If there are not, then that technology isn't actually that easy to just figure out, because there is no existing proof of the theory. Just off the cuff, I'd call for rolls for the following discoveries: binding elementals to Khyber dragonshards (Knowledge (the planes) DC 25); mounting the shard into a vehicular frame (Knowledge (arcana) DC 20); controlling the bound elemental to force it to move the vehicle (Knowledge (the planes) DC 20). Each check has to be made in the sequence listed, and if any of them fail, you have to gain 1 rank in that skill before you're allowed to go to the next one. The idea is that you have to develop each aspect of elemental vehicle technology before going on. Note this doesn't cover making Knowledge (architecture & engineering) checks to correctly build the ship itself, just to figure out how to make it an elemental-powered vessel.


Getting the elemental into the shard without the Bind Elemental feat is the tricky bit. My current solutions for this are to either a) asks for the feat as per the suggest variant to the Heward's Hall magical location, or b) convince our DM to let our DFA be aware of or research an Incantation (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/incantations.htm) to serve this purpose. But yeah, if anyone has any suggestions on how to get the damn Elemental into the damn Shard in any way, please let me know. :smallsmile:

Have you considered limited wish? That seems like a functional use of it for my purposes, and it doesn't offend me as a DM since you're paying XP to have the one-time use of a feat. I would even allow you to spread the XP loss to everyone involved in the binding process (since it requires assistants to do this for vehicles), to mitigate the cost some.

In fact, if you have money to burn, just get a scroll of limited wish and be done with it. If it also takes UMD checks to activate, even better from a flavor standpoint: you are trying to warp the very fabric of magic to bind that elemental to an airship.


On a side-note for this, my hope here is that we'll be able to swing it to get an Omnielemental bound. Go find one, beat into submission, charm it into accepting being bound to the ship by whatever means we end up having available. Nothing says "we have the most advanced thing ever" than having something that even the books' smartest gnomes consider an unlikely possibility. As for how having one should affect the airship mechanics-wise, please do let me know if you have any suggestions :smallsmile:

Mechanics are no different; there is literally no difference between fire and air elemental on an airship, and I can't see justifying you getting a special ability here. The elemental isn't actually able to exercise it's natural powers/abilities; it is little more than a magical "engine" to propel the ship using an elemental's inherent flying ability.

Having said that, I would offer you a warning: omnimentals are even more ornery than fire elementals, and that is saying a lot. If this thing ever gets free, the DM may very well smile and decide it wants revenge for being imprisoned so you could use it as a fracking mule to haul you, your buddies, and your crap around in the air. Pray like hell your enemies never figure out to shatter the dragonshard, however difficult it may be.


My character can keep the elemental charmed for control, so no dragonmarks necessary. Worst case scenario, our DFI bard also has a decent charisma modifier and speaks the elemental languages. Also, we have someone with the Fell Conspiracy feat in the party and I hope that our DM will rule that the bound (omni)elemental can be included in the ritual (e.g. have the dragonshard, through which you get line of effect to it, count as it's eyes/ears here) so that we can command the ship from anywhere within 100 ft of it. Even if not, this aspect is covered.

Fell Conspiracy would involve a willing creature, I think, and I can assure you without reservation that no elemental willing consigns itself to imprisonment and slavery, especially omnimentals.

But actually, there are still alternatives. Based on what I'm reading, Diplomacy and/or Intimidate are possible if you can establish communication with the elemental. The spells charm monster and dominate monster work if you touch the shard as well, and work pretty much as described for the spell (keep in mind, this means charm may be somewhat unreliable in certain situations). Clerics and others with the right elemental domain abilities can command the elemental as normal, but note this means it won't work on omnimentals (who are no specific element). Basically, any spell or ability that would work on a (fire/air) elemental will work on one bound to an airship, as long as you have line of effect to the shard and/or are touching it to communicate with said elemental.

If your DM just plain doesn't want to bother with dragonmarks, the best bet, it seems, is charm monster, which lasts for 1 day/level. Best part is, it's a 4th-level spell, so you can get yourself an eternal wand which will give you a week of control, twice per day if you flub the first one somehow. Or just make that damn bard do it, whichever.


You need 15 people (as per Eberron Campaign Setting) to properly fly the ship. We could hire a crew to make up for numbers, but my current plan is to use Unseen Crafters (depends on the DM ruling the "can command to craft" part to not mean "can only command to craft"). Still, this leaves the issue of having to micro-manage a whole lot of unseen crafters, in-disposing the party during flights.

I got a better idea than that, so that your enemies can't use antimagic or dispel to screw you over: buy a bunch of cheap-arse effigy humanoids to be robot crew members! It's not that expensive (not for fifteen 1 or 2 HD humans or whatever), and you can even arm them for battle if needed. If not effigies, consider making a slew of homunculi or other smallish constructs to do various tasks.

Seriously, though? There's nothing wrong with paying hireings. Use magic to check them for evil, or even flip it around and only hire good-aligned folks. Best bet if you run with a morally-grey group is Lawful Neutral minions: they're loyal to you long as you uphold your agreements with them, and they stick to the word of their bargains/contracts.


My current cheesy solution-plan for this: key a Glyph Seal (MIC) with the Unseen Crafters and have the bound elemental "touch" it, making him the center of the spell, allowing him to essentially control all the ship's minor functions by directing them with his own mental actions. The elemental thus becomes both the propulsion and the crew, all under our command.

Ew, no, never. If the elemental gets loose or refuses to cooperate, it'll shut down your ship. You never want to give up control of everything to something you literally enslaved to your service. That's a big nuh-uh right there.


If all goes as planned so far, we have a ship powered by the most badass of elementals, who autonomously operates the entire ship; all at the expense of 2.5 months, a lot of spell-casting/logging, and whatever monetary expenditure the DM deems can't be covered through said spell-casting/logging.

You don't want the most badass of elementals. Same reason as above: if it gets free, it's that much harder to deal with.

You actually want one with more HD only because it is cheaper to create an airship that way. There are no other uses. You can't just "let it loose" on your enemies, not unless you have it mentally controlled by you (or your buddies). And that's just one spell away from turning on you.

Don't worry, though. There's a LOT of other tricks to pull...


- Cloud cover. A Single Vapor Bottle (Fog subsituting Bottle of Smoke from Shining South) should be able to camouflage the entire ship as a streaming cloud on long journeys, or while it's "parked". By placing it so that the observatory at the bottom isn't included, the crew can continue to keep an eye on things outside with minimal chance of being spotted.

Won't work. If you ever move against the wind, you'll be discovered; it doesn't take a genius to realize clouds are blown in the same direction as wind. And the bottom observatory sometimes "bubbles" out from the bottom of the hull; moment sunlight hits that glass, you're made.

Seriously, just hide in clouds themselves. DM only has to use fog rules then, applying them to a Colossal-sized object.


- Emergency Sleep-smoke shield. Sleep Smoke is a cheap easy to craft inhaled poison from Waterdeep. Have vials of the stuff around the ship, so that the Unseen Servants can un-plug them to catch/dissuade invading enemies.

Remember, you're dealing with aerial combat. First, fast-moving aerial creatures are either going to avoid the smoke when they see something/someone fall out of the sky passing through it, and second, most of them are going to have good Fort saves (remember, flying creatures are universally higher CR, and Fort is usually the best save monsters get).

Poison is okay as a defense against low-level stuff that has poor saves against it, but against serious opposition poisons are bad. Still, it's a good idea to make sleep gas traps in places. Lock your dragonsharp up in a box with some sleep gas, for example, and you'll get kids and pets from screwing with your elemental.


- Sprayer system. Sprayers (A&E) turn liquids into 5x10 area effects and can be operated by Unseen Servants. It should be possible to get them hooked onto a central dispensary system for long-lasting shots. Upon attack, the Unseen Servants start spraying the invaders with whatever liquid is appropriate. Holy Water might be good (bye bye incorporeal undead). Suggestions for others welcome :smallsmile:

Once again, poisons are a bad thing against anything you're likely to meet in the air. Also, they have one shot and then have to be refilled, making it costly and slightly silly.

Remember those effigies? You can put merciful weapons in their hand that do nonlethal damage, and the target won't be getting a saving throw. It's hit or miss, but ammo is practically free if you're smart about.

Or hire some security troops who are expert NPCs with UMD and wand of whelm as a "stun gun".

There are dozens of better ideas than invisible guys with weak poison trying to stop invaders. Oh, and holy water costs a lot, and has no guarantee of killing any undead that board your ship. Heck, the magic-armed are better combatants there: incorporeal undead generally can't do jack to constructs (except ghosts, but only with telekinesis).


- Hallow. A ship should be able to be hallowed afaik, so having a good spell keyed to the hallow would be a big bonus. Suggestions welcome :smallsmile:

Death ward. Seriously, don't even question it. It's basically a full stop on save-or-die stuff, as long as it's magic, and it also stops energy drain, negative energy attacks, etc. This stops those pesky undead you mentioned for doing half the ridiculous harm they could once you're on the ship.

Either this or freedom of movement, which I consider technically more useful, but only when you know you need it. Death ward stops the enemy from weakening/killing you with magic before you have time to erect some sort of defense.


But you stopped there?! Oh, my lad, we are JUST getting started...

Spells
alarm: If you aren't using this put a permanent alarm on the dragonshard room door, you aren't doing it right. Use an audible alarm, and give your constructs the order "if the alarm goes off, subdue anyone in the dragonshard room".
animate objects: Have XP to burn? Have money to spare? Turn your furniture and other stuff into constructs, too, and tell them to bring you some wine before you order them to attack the intruders.
Mordenkainen's private sanctum: If you can't permanency it to the whole ship, pick a few key areas. One room for cargo (in case you need to hide something from divination), and/or the PC sleeping area should do nicely.
phase door: Ultimate security door. Depending on the necessity, you may want it to be a "badge access" door; trigger it to allow through those with the right badge, pendant, etc.
teleportation circle: Beam us down, Scotty, but be aware there is no beaming back up; you gotta teleport or fly back manually.
hallucinartory terrain: It won't move with your ship. But if you need time to repair and rest after a battle, drop the ship into a valley or gorge, then use this spell to cover it with the appearance of a mountain, a village, etc.
Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion: It's a spell of last resort, but you can use this to hide the door in some really out-of-the-way corner of the ship, hide inside, and come out later to retake your ship. Even better as a pseudo smuggling hold: has vast amounts of space, can hold a lot of stuff and people that you need to keep out of sight and/or divination.
fabricate: This is what you build magic ships with, not silly little non-men. Also great for repairs, building hasty shelters if you need to set camp somewhere, etc. Wizards who don't take this aren't very smart.
major/minor creation: It's not permanent, but it can help in a pinch with repairs, cargo, etc. One of my favorite Eberron tactics is to use it for huge parachutes to air-lift things; I zip up, create the chute, drop a crate of cargo for friends or a cage of dangerous creatures on enemies, wash, rinse, repeat.
animate rope: Very cool and handy way for you to rescue those who fall or are knocked over the side... or do the same to enemies. Feather fall is of course better for safety, but they can't fly back up when going overboard; this spell can both rescue them and get them back into the fight. Get this in a wand for a minion so they can be super-useful without being in combat.
wind walk: Divine version of flight, but I consider it even better as a DM. You can fly really fast overland, but it's slower when in "tactical" movement, so you have to solidify and walk normal.
wall of iron: Weird little spell, but with some very crazy uses. Aside from free ironwork and nails for your ship, one of the worst abuses of this spell is to pair it with...
transmute metal to wood: It's a druid spell, so you have to have that spell list available, and it can't come in a wand, only a staff or scroll. But if you need wood for repairs, houses, etc., this is free, nonmagical, permanent wood (shy of limited wish, wish, or miracle to reverse it). If you've got UMD, then keep 1-2 scrolls of this handy to go with wall of iron, and enjoy the free wood and iron forever (along with stone, if you have wall of stone).
awaken: Another druid spell, but if you have the XP to spare, this allows you to create a crew of shrubbery. No, I am not taking any pills, why do you ask...?
solid fog: Okay, that "cloud" idea wasn't... great. But this? This is very great. Don't use it to provide you cover, use it offensively. Cast it directly on a pursuing creature/ship's path, so that it's movement rate is super-slow, and possibly blocking their line of sight to you for a round or two. Due to the area size, if the target is an enemy airship, it's going to slow them down almost for three whole rounds or so, giving you a huge advantage either in getting away or in turning around and giving them what-for. Get a wand of this, and just fling out as many as needed. You can get an eternal wand for it, but you may need more than 2/day.
guards and wards: Um... yes. This is the ultimate "we've been boarded and this ish is fo' reals" spell. It's 6th level, but you don't need it often; get a scroll or three and that should be plenty.
quench: Fire is forever your enemy on that ship, because soarwood is still wood and burns. This is druid-only, so get it as a wand to hit with UMD. But DEFINITELY get it, because this could save your poor airship if your DM decides a red dragon is a good idea...
endure elements: I only mention it to point out that it gets COLD up there at mountain-high altitudes. Make sure you have this in an eternal wand if you can't cast it off your list or invocations.
hardening (SC): It's not just for your boat, use it on EVERYTHING. Use it on the dragonshard before binding the elemental, so people can't screw you over that way as easy. Use it on every piece of glass in a window, use it on every length of rope, etc. Use it until everything is harder to break.
glowing orb: Oh, wow, what a much cooler spell than continual flame! Creates variable amounts of light, and is relatively cheap to do. Create tons of them for the ship, keep it lit up like a starship. Remember, only creator has control unless someone makes an Int/Wis check to change the light.
submerge ship (SC): Hoo, boy. Want to really throw your DM for a complete loop? Get this spell and when things get too hairy up in the air, dive straight down into the water after using this spell. This turns your ship into a submarine for 1 hour/level, so enjoy it.
gemjump (SC): Beautiful return-teleport spell, just put the gem focus in your cargo section or somewhere else appropriate. It's basically "greater teleport but you can only go where your gem is". Oh, wait, you want a dirty trick to pull with this? If you need to board a ship, get a familiar or animal companion to fly the gem over to the enemy ship (preferably in their own dragonshard area), then use this to take a boarding party. Have fun.
freezing fog (SC): Something even better than solid fog, because it also damages anyone on the enemy ship (or the enemy themselves if it's a creature). Great offensive debuff for ship-to-ship combat.
(greater) sign of sealing (SC): Personally, I love these better than glyphs or symbols, if only because they are much more direct and to the point. Which is to say, they blow up things. Look them over, decide if this is a better spell for a given area or door than other things.
symbol of spell loss (SC): Best defense against casters trying to usurp control of your ship, but you have to be careful so that it doesn't trigger on you or your buddies.
wall of force: Use it as a block against enemy ships. It can't move, making it a collision problem.
dispelling screen and wall of dispel magic (SC): See wall of force, only this one debuffs your enemies who may or may not have spells. Best used against dragons and other flying spellcasters that might have pre-buffed on the way up.
repair damage spells (SC): Won't fix your ship, but it is vital to have these on wands if you took effigies/constructs as crew.
wingbind (SC): Vital against flying creature enemies. At the right altitude, some enemies could die from the fall, but mostly this is a save-or-ouch or save-or-suck effect.
greater floating disk (SC): Great for transporting small amounts of heavy cargo up and down.
false gravity (SC): Even better than spider climb, and it could be useful for fast evac. Put this on a wand, put it on everyone; when it's time to go, have the airship fly in low, have everyone chose "down" to be the bottom of the hull and enjoy your getaway. Note it permits a very crude form of "flying" by switching gravity around constantly.
servant horde (SC): Great for light-duty work, such as loading/unloading certain cargo, cleaning, etc.
dark way (SC): Another good one for fast evac, use this at the top of a tall tower, mountain, etc. to create a little "gangway" for getting onto a stationary airship.
greater alarm (SC): Better choice when you suspect extra-planar or other weird attacks to be inbound.
launch item (SC): Great if you need to chuck alchemist's fire to an enemy ship, but honestly you can just as well use siege weapons too.
resounding voice (HoB): To make sure your crew and buddies hear your instructions, advice, etc.
animate siege weapon (HoB): Exactly what it says on the box. This allows you to be flinging spells, bashing boarding parties, etc. while giving your siege weapon orders for targets to fire upon (including nearby enemy boarders).
hurtling stone (HoB): Kind of sucks, actually, but if you just refuse to use a catapult, a wand with this (and some UMD checks) can make you a self-propelled siege weapon.
aerial alarm (HoB): If the DM lets you permanency this on the airship, then you only need one or two to cover the whole thing, so you have a "intruders detected" alarm go off if you want. If you get really clever, lay the cylinder long-ways in certain areas and directions so that you get the most range for it. Remember this one only works on flying critters of Medium size or bigger; use (greater) alarm if you need something for regular walking types.

Equipment

Siege weapons: If your DM is gun-shy about using cannons from Stormwrack (pun intended), then take a look at the siege weapons up in Heroes of Battle. My personal recommendations are the heavy and light ballista, because they are direct-fire accurate weapons. Problem is, there's not listed emplacements for any siege weapons on an airship, so... talk to the DM. See if you can get one light and one heavy.

Personally, go for one +1 distance force heavy ballista; it'll strike even incorporeal creatures, overcomes DR, and has a range increment of 240 ft.; I shouldn't have to point out how ridiculous it is that you can turn cheap-o bolts into that kind of attack. If you get more money, upgrade with collision (automatic +5 damage, MIC) or explosive (area burst damage, Complete Warrior). You can even put weapon crystals on it, far as I know, so you can get energy damage for certain things, crystals that have bonuses against constructs, undead and fiends, etc.

If you want to set fires to enemy ships (a very valid tactics), and don't want to waste spells, see if the DM will let you put up a mangonel, either light or heavy (opposite the size of the ballista you got, so it fits as discussed above). Use them to fire an alchemist's stone (HoB pg. 134) or a firebomb (Storm pg. 104). Firespouts (Storm pg. 104) look cool, but aren't the best when using fire-and-maneuver tactics. Don't bother with fancy boarding tactic equipment; just maneuver over the enemy ship as best you can, and jump down, or grapple and pull in closer.

Miscellaneous Magic: Get a decanter of endless water both for drinking and for putting out fires. Get a lyre of building to do good repairs fast. Get a field provisions box (MIC) so you and your buddies can eat; if you get a hireling crew, upgrade to an everfull larder (SBG pg. 76). In general, this is the time and place to get things useful to a whole group of people, and/or to defend your new home-on-the-move. Get a pair of ring gates and set up one end in the cargo bay; now you can tote just a single ring gate around and have servants/hirelings deliver food and supplies as needed, as well as shoveling loads of loot back through to take everything away from that snarky dragon.

Miscellaneous Normal: Get a bunch of barrels, fill them with water, both for drinking and for putting out fires. Keep lots of empty barrels and sacks around for storing up loot and trade goods. Get a false hold (CS pg. 108) for smuggling stuff; put your gemjump gem in this area so you can secretly get into your ship, and secure with with Mordenkainen's private sanctum when possible. Basically, the trick is "think ahead" and cover any possible contingency, and don't be afraid to think big; your DM will love giving you guys all kinds of fun scenarios that aren't covered by just flinging the MM at you. (One of my favorites was the time we started the night rescuing a village from an exploding volcano flinging magma and pyroclastic ash onto a village; he had to risk both the ship and ourselves to save the people there.)


That should cover the starter stuff. Remember, crew that can really fight back are better than a few unseen nothings, and try to trick this out more like a stronghold than just a cart that flies. Think big.

[Jowgen]

Alright, got a lot to work with here :smallbiggrin:

Actually, replying to each point individually would take forever, so I'll do it by sub-topic *ba-dum-tiss*

Elemental -> Gem

Wish seems a bit too overkill for the binding purpose, but Limited Wish seems reasonable. We're level 13, so using a 7th level spell shouldn't rustle the DM's Jimmies. Still, I'm hoping for a more specific solution, even if it's a bit bendy. Magic Jar gets souls into gems, and Elementals are non-dual natured. Phylacteries hold souls. Thinaun pulls in the souls of dead creatures. There's bound to be something close-enough to what Bind Elemental does for the DM to adapt it or just let it count. :smallannoyed:

As a general point about the omnielemental: I plan to find one (we have the means), defeat it in honorable combat (it'll be tough but we ought to be able to handle it), and "convince" it to join our party's cause by becoming the soul of our ship. It'll be a tough sell, but we can make it. In fluff, it'll go off the "no regard for their original purpose" bit from their description, convincing it that it needs a purpose, and by being our ship it can have one/learn how to do that. In practice, I'll be using a protocol derived from the redemption rules in BoED; which incorporates extensive use of charm monster and hypnotism. The Elemental will end up with a permanent helpful/fanatic attitude towards the party in a form of Stockholm Syndrome so twisted only Exalted Good could have pulled it off.

This is partially to off-set potential Elemental freed & turning on party problems, but also as to give the DM the feeling that we proper earned having this elemental and the airship in general.

Hardness

The Hardening thing is starting to dismay me a bit. Firstly, upon closer reading, each ship section is treated as one object, and getting hardening cast 1000 times... Okay, lets assume the DM lets that slide. Calculating times (thanks for the relevant numbers Tysis, you're a star).

1000 sections, each 10 ft by 10 ft by 6 inches... 6 inches go into 10 ft 20 times, so 20 sections (taken as solid slabs) piled atop each other gives one solid 10 ft cube. 1000 sections divided by 20 = 50 cubic feet of solid wood is what it needs. Hardening affects 1 cube per CL, so I effectively need the spell cast for a total of 50 CL. A level 10 caster casting it 5 times, yielding a hardness increase of 5 to all the wood. Lets be nice to myself and assume I can get a magewright to do it at CL 10, so each casting costs me 400 gp. So 2000 to get the hardness of the whole ship up by 5. Not bad actually. Just maybe I can swing it to get a CL 20, as to get a +10 for 4000.

Now, if my DM is being real nice, he will let me stack the "Magically Treated" all augmentation from stronghold builder's guidebook onto there, which costs 12000 gp and doubles the walls hardness and HP. Even with just the CL 10, that would net me Adamantine-hard walls. If I can swing the CL 20, I get Obdurium hardness. That's the non-cheesy limit here I think.

The advantage here is that, if I get the wall augmentation, that ought to over-ride the spell, so that it getting dispelled doesn't matter. On that note, @ ExLibrisMortis, Dragonlance isn't considered 1st party by our DM (Dragonmag is fine though).

The Lancelot Shield Generator

I know this was a joke, but I think I found the next best thing. Stronhold Builder's Guidebook has the "Winguard" wall augmentation. It basically protects a stronghold's wall, as well as up to 10 ft above it, as per the Windwall spell. That takes care of dragonbreath arrows and alchemists acid and whatever other ranged stuff people might throw at the boat.

What is more, if we shape the ship correctly, and maybe get the cone-shape the spell itself mentions, we ought to be able to encase the entire ship in a constant wall of wind. No submarine-function there I think, but we DO get to ignore Solid Fog and go into space.

Everything Eisfalken

Your contribution is Epic. You are a righteous dude. Have 12 cookies. :smallsmile:

Our campaign setting is meant to be a sort of amalgamation of setting material (think Marvel's Battleworld), so we do have everything somewhere. If our DFA's Knowledge checks can't find enough trees to make 50 solid 10 ft cubes of soarwood; we do also have access to the Dreamtelling feat for commune-level information through dreams.

If I were to DM, I would also ask for knowledge checks along the lines you suggested; although with a base of "30, for really tough questions". Still, there is no chance of our DFA failing those, even if she were forced to roll and nat 1ed. Also on that note, we have 2 party members who can make DC 30 UMD checks without worries, so if that comes into play then awesome.

From a DMing standpoint, I am somewhat inclined to agree on the matter of there being no reason to give extra benefits from having a more awesome elemental; except on a few points. First, Omnimentals have 120 ft blindsight, so I do think it should at least be able to remain aware what's going on in the ship, at least going from the Dragonshard if not from the ring. Second, an Omnimental can change what it's out layer is to do stuff like go underwater, so I think it ought to be able to switch between damage types for its ring. Third, there is the ships fire resistance. It seem like it's tied to the elemental's type, shouldn't it extend to all the energy types if you have an elemental of all types?

Also, What do you mean by "You actually want one with more HD only because it is cheaper to create an airship that way."? *intrigued* :smallconfused:

I can see your argument for a physical crew. Even though, as mentioned above, the plan is to have the Elemental complete and utterly surrendered/subservient (in the most BoED-Good-aligned way); an unseen servant crew lacks fexibility. I'll probably go with Lawful Neutral/Good hireling or Leadership followers (our yet undetermined 4th member might take it).All female, dressed as Battlemaids. Still, I would like to give the elemental something to do other than just propel the ship.

Air-to airship combat won't be much of a thing. We do have an unfriendly empire that uses flying vessels, but they're basically A&E Zepplins. Way too slow and too vulnerable to be a real threat. The only areal combat we're worried about is hungry vrocks, angry dragons and armies of flying fiends/undead. Okay, those are all pretty solid worries, but still.

In regards to my ideas for defense mechanisms, I see your point about the cloud thing. Still might want to keep the sleep smoke on hand though, not nessecarily for ship defense, but as something to humanely carpet-bomb angry mobs. The Holy Water sprayers I'll also probably keep, as we do actually have an infinite supply of the stuff (courtesy of a Sacred Vessel from BoED). At the very least they ought to serve as good fire extinguishers and vampire stay-deaders. Water supply is handled by a big tank linked to a room of Weeping Flasks (CM). I guess in our downtime we might fight forest fires. :smalltongue:

I like where you're going with the siege engines. Building those is a piece of cake. Ideally, what I'd like to go with is a single massive long-range weapon that'll strike fear into the hearts of the infidels (and call if Fleia). Any suggestions on where to start for that? :smallbiggrin:

In regards to Hallow and other spells, we mostly got negative energy protection covered amongst the party, so might key something else (if anything at all). I like a lot of your suggested general purpose spells and equipments and shall discuss which of them to invest in with the party. :smallsmile:

Also, thanks a lot for suggesting I think of it as a stronghold. That's what turned me onto the Stronghold Builders Guidebook, and thus the wall augmentations. :smallsmile:

[Tysis]

Personally, go for one +1 distance force heavy ballista; it'll strike even incorporeal creatures, overcomes DR, and has a range increment of 240 ft.; I shouldn't have to point out how ridiculous it is that you can turn cheap-o bolts into that kind of attack. If you get more money, upgrade with collision (automatic +5 damage, MIC) or explosive (area burst damage, Complete Warrior). You can even put weapon crystals on it, far as I know, so you can get energy damage for certain things, crystals that have bonuses against constructs, undead and fiends, etc.

I'd go with splitting instead of collision or explosive. Add a wand chamber with an eternal wand of hawkeye and gnomish crossbow sights. Now if the operator has far shot you have a weapon with a range increment of 540ft. So max range of 5400ft, you can now shoot stuff 1 mile away, if you can spot it. You get to ignore penalties for 2 range increments, and you get two attacks, each with damage 5d8+1+whatever DFI bonus your bard is pumping out.

[Eisfalken]

Wish seems a bit too overkill for the binding purpose, but Limited Wish seems reasonable. We're level 13, so using a 7th level spell shouldn't rustle the DM's Jimmies. Still, I'm hoping for a more specific solution, even if it's a bit bendy. Magic Jar gets souls into gems, and Elementals are non-dual natured. Phylacteries hold souls. Thinaun pulls in the souls of dead creatures. There's bound to be something close-enough to what Bind Elemental does for the DM to adapt it or just let it count. :smallannoyed:

If you really want to, there's actually no reason a spell can't replicate a feat here; this was actually the case in 2nd edition AD&D, where the spell enchant an item was used to carry out the enchanting process.

So why not do it again? Let's see, Bind Elemental requires CL 9th, which gives you access to 5th level spells. So. Let's invent a 5th level spell called bind elemental; casting time is equal to the amount of time needed to bind an elemental to the shard per the usual rules, and allows others with arcane caster levels to help do the same, all per the rules for the feat. Research cost/time same as a 5th level spell (5 weeks, 5000 gp, Spellcraft DC 15), plus cost/time to write into the book to use it.

I don't see that being any kind of fussy, and your DM should like the lower feat overhead it puts on his game.


This is partially to off-set potential Elemental freed & turning on party problems, but also as to give the DM the feeling that we proper earned having this elemental and the airship in general.

Be aware, this does alter the dynamic of elemental vessels in Eberron. They're meant to be slightly "stubborn" towards their controllers, hence the need for establishing control.

In addition, the freeing of the elemental is still a bad thing, because once the dragonshard is broken, you still have to find a new shard of the right size, and still rebind the elemental to move the ship. It's not a matter of it being docile, it's a matter that the elemental shard is, as mentioned, more of a magical engine than a mount.


1000 sections, each 10 ft by 10 ft by 6 inches... 6 inches go into 10 ft 20 times, so 20 sections (taken as solid slabs) piled atop each other gives one solid 10 ft cube. 1000 sections divided by 20 = 50 cubic feet of solid wood is what it needs. Hardening affects 1 cube per CL, so I effectively need the spell cast for a total of 50 CL. A level 10 caster casting it 5 times, yielding a hardness increase of 5 to all the wood. Lets be nice to myself and assume I can get a magewright to do it at CL 10, so each casting costs me 400 gp. So 2000 to get the hardness of the whole ship up by 5. Not bad actually. Just maybe I can swing it to get a CL 20, as to get a +10 for 4000.

Sorry, but spells can't be cast lower CL than the one they are available at. So wizard/sorcerer gets you CL 11, magewright CL 12. It's not much more expensive, just wanted to point that rule out.


Now, if my DM is being real nice, he will let me stack the "Magically Treated" all augmentation from stronghold builder's guidebook onto there, which costs 12000 gp and doubles the walls hardness and HP. Even with just the CL 10, that would net me Adamantine-hard walls. If I can swing the CL 20, I get Obdurium hardness. That's the non-cheesy limit here I think.

Be aware that there could be weight issues not being calculated here; those rules were for fixed fortifications that only get magically-enchanted move speeds of any sort (and all are slower than your airship, for the most part). I would ease away from armor plating if you can see your way to that; stick to augmenting/hardening. Besides, you'll seriously never need to worry about it, not until the DM is ready to end the campaign in fire and death.


The advantage here is that, if I get the wall augmentation, that ought to over-ride the spell, so that it getting dispelled doesn't matter. On that note, @ ExLibrisMortis, Dragonlance isn't considered 1st party by our DM (Dragonmag is fine though).

Strange, since it is 1st party, but no matter; it's a small issue.

Oh, BTW, if Dragon magazine is on the table? There's an even cooler siege weapon than the ballista to use: the dwarven stonebow! Dragon #295 pg. 88; does bludgeoning damage, and as a bonus, fires catapult shots like... alchemist's stones and firebombs. Definitely needs the +1 distance put on it; the range kind of sucks. But it is very clutch because it is a direct fire weapon, meaning none of that stupid indirect fire crapola which both slows down combat and makes it a headache on both sides of the table to deal with.

Try to get both a light ballista and a dwarven stonebow, just to be on the safe side.


I know this was a joke, but I think I found the next best thing. Stronhold Builder's Guidebook has the "Winguard" wall augmentation. It basically protects a stronghold's wall, as well as up to 10 ft above it, as per the Windwall spell. That takes care of dragonbreath arrows and alchemists acid and whatever other ranged stuff people might throw at the boat.

What is more, if we shape the ship correctly, and maybe get the cone-shape the spell itself mentions, we ought to be able to encase the entire ship in a constant wall of wind. No submarine-function there I think, but we DO get to ignore Solid Fog and go into space.

Oh, no, you can't space travel. The wall augment doesn't keep air in; it creates air movement. If you go into space, you have two problems: replenishing breathable atmosphere, and sealing yourself in with said atmosphere.

You could jury-rig the sealed spaces for strongholds to hold in air, as well as the augment to replenish air; look to doing it like an underwater stronghold. Be warned, this costs a LOT of money and/or XP. It really is not worth all this. You're way overthinking this if you're looking at space travel in D&D.

Let me put it this way: there are spells and items you can use to teleport your ship to other planes of existence. And the teleport spell can instantly jump to any point in the Material Plane, negating the "need" for space travel.

I definitely admire your gumption, but... you may be starting to overthink this thing. Ask your DM if teleportation or planar travel is being nixed; if so, space travel may be a thing. If not, let's throttle that thing down a bit.


Our campaign setting is meant to be a sort of amalgamation of setting material (think Marvel's Battleworld), so we do have everything somewhere. If our DFA's Knowledge checks can't find enough trees to make 50 solid 10 ft cubes of soarwood; we do also have access to the Dreamtelling feat for commune-level information through dreams.

Screw that, just got to maybe another plane of existence where you can find such things. Second layer of Acheron has potential (be careful not to stay too long, though). Mechanus almost certainly has something to help you figure it out. Sigil is another great place to find infinite knowledge.


From a DMing standpoint, I am somewhat inclined to agree on the matter of there being no reason to give extra benefits from having a more awesome elemental; except on a few points. First, Omnimentals have 120 ft blindsight, so I do think it should at least be able to remain aware what's going on in the ship, at least going from the Dragonshard if not from the ring. Second, an Omnimental can change what it's out layer is to do stuff like go underwater, so I think it ought to be able to switch between damage types for its ring. Third, there is the ships fire resistance. It seem like it's tied to the elemental's type, shouldn't it extend to all the energy types if you have an elemental of all types?

The problem being that earth elementals can't fly; the only way to justify getting any of that acid resist is you drop like a rock while you have it. Same for cold resist. BUT... I would give cold resist and underwater travel, because they do in fact have a submarine ship that works exactly like the airship only underwater (same movement, breathable air, etc.).

Oh, and blindsense doesn't matter; the elementals can't have ANY senses outside the shard. Why? Because it's not just a physical bind. Dismissal and banishment don't actually send the elemental back to their plane of existence, they only suppress the elemental for a time. The only things that can set it loose are breaking the shard physically (as in 0 hp, as in it can't be put back together even with magic), the freedom spell, and Mordenkainen's disjunction (which will completely eff up a lot of things on that ship if it goes off anyway).

Up the market value to... 120,000 gp (the submarine is 100,000 gp, we'll add more for air-worthy capabilities), and I wouldn't be opposed to a multi-function ship for air and water.


Also, What do you mean by "You actually want one with more HD only because it is cheaper to create an airship that way."? *intrigued* :smallconfused:

Magic of Eberron, pg. 13

While binding a larger elemental does not add power or extra abilities to the item, it does reduce the cost to create the item. When determining the gold piece cost in raw materials needed to craft the item, the elemental item’s creator reduces the base price by 5% per size category of the elemental above Medium (an elemental to be bound must have at least 4 Hit Dice). Thus, binding a Medium elemental to an item provides the same effect as binding a Huge one, but the former item costs normal price, while the latter item costs 10% less to create. This discount does not impact the market price of the item; savings on elemental item creation go directly back into the pocket of the creator—or the organization that employs the creator.


I can see your argument for a physical crew. Even though, as mentioned above, the plan is to have the Elemental complete and utterly surrendered/subservient (in the most BoED-Good-aligned way); an unseen servant crew lacks fexibility. I'll probably go with Lawful Neutral/Good hireling or Leadership followers (our yet undetermined 4th member might take it).All female, dressed as Battlemaids. Still, I would like to give the elemental something to do other than just propel the ship.

Oh, propelling the ship takes a lot of its power and focus. Keep in mind, soarwood only slightly lightens this beast. It is still massive, has inertia. That elemental has to extend itself into a matrix all over the ship just to move any of it. Imagine a computer that is altering fuel ratios, thrust computations, and all the other mechanical aspects of just firing up some rockets. That's what your elemental is doing. The process is just... different.

The crew's job is mainly altering those small vaned fins for steering, a process that is best done manually. (If the elementals were capable of steering, after all, in general they'd just slam into the nearest mountain to break the matrix and shard to get free.)

Now. Since you are brainwashing this omnimental, you might wheedle the DM into letting it steer. Again, that does mean the ship is effectively paralyzed beyond hope once someone gets to that engine room. So you have a decision to make there. Personally, I prefer to stagger the operation of a ship; tactically, if you divide up the duties at least a little, it makes it harder to usurp control of the ship. Just trying to give you a slight advantage in case the DM decides he went overboard too much.


Air-to airship combat won't be much of a thing. We do have an unfriendly empire that uses flying vessels, but they're basically A&E Zepplins. Way too slow and too vulnerable to be a real threat. The only areal combat we're worried about is hungry vrocks, angry dragons and armies of flying fiends/undead. Okay, those are all pretty solid worries, but still.

The same strategies work, but be aware most flying creatures are somewhat faster than you. Stay on the move, stay out of range of as much as you can, and take enemies down one at a time. Don't let them gang up on you.


In regards to my ideas for defense mechanisms, I see your point about the cloud thing. Still might want to keep the sleep smoke on hand though, not nessecarily for ship defense, but as something to humanely carpet-bomb angry mobs. The Holy Water sprayers I'll also probably keep, as we do actually have an infinite supply of the stuff (courtesy of a Sacred Vessel from BoED). At the very least they ought to serve as good fire extinguishers and vampire stay-deaders. Water supply is handled by a big tank linked to a room of Weeping Flasks (CM). I guess in our downtime we might fight forest fires. :smalltongue:

And keep in mind, while fire is of little consequence to adventuring parties with access to magic, it is still a huge weapon in the world in a fantasy setting. Fire can destroy food supplies, forests that supply repair material, etc. If your DM gets wise to this, be prepared to rain water straight down on whole villages and fields, if you can. That decanter will be a HUGE asset in those events. (Plus, it's funny to fire-hose enemies off your top deck and send them plummeting to the ground.)

Don't mistake my comments as total derision. Situations ALWAYS can change the landscape. So you do want some means of sparying holy water, sleep gas, etc. as a backup plan. Just don't lean to hard on them; remember, these are still D&D rules, and unless your DM goes changing the whole thing, poisons are "generally" bad at higher levels, holy water is "generally" less effective than certain other effects, etc. Always plan for the DM to get smart on you once in a while...


I like where you're going with the siege engines. Building those is a piece of cake. Ideally, what I'd like to go with is a single massive long-range weapon that'll strike fear into the hearts of the infidels (and call if Fleia). Any suggestions on where to start for that? :smallbiggrin:

You're talking about epic/artifact level weapons there. Please note that anime-level action does NOT translate terribly well in D&D, Tome of Battle aside. They do not look kindly on the "SDF Cannon" kind of effects, not until you are fighting gods and cosmic horrors.

Plus, there's a problem with the fact you actually can't aim those guns at the close ranges you'd be fighting flying beasts. Dragons will laugh as you try, and rip you to shreds as you spend action after action in combat trying to figure some way to make it work. That's why magic siege weapons are better: you can bring them to bear on the dragons, demons, griffons, harpies, AND zepplins, with faster firing time and better accuracy.

(As an aside, be aware that the pace of D&D is much, much faster than most anime. The heroes always have time to power up a mega-ultra "shot" to decimate enemies. You don't have that time in D&D without 9th level magic. You have seconds to start hammering on the enemy. Combat lasts no more than a minute or two at best. There are not long, drawn out fights in this game. The villain rarely has time or inclination to gloat.)


In regards to Hallow and other spells, we mostly got negative energy protection covered amongst the party, so might key something else (if anything at all). I like a lot of your suggested general purpose spells and equipments and shall discuss which of them to invest in with the party. :smallsmile:

If you're sure about the magic death/negative energy attacks not being a huge concern, freedom of movement is clutch. Stops the one thing that can make you tofu to many enemies: immobilization effects like entangle, web, etc. If you really don't need that either... heck, just get endure elements to make the ship a cozy little home.


Also, thanks a lot for suggesting I think of it as a stronghold. That's what turned me onto the Stronghold Builders Guidebook, and thus the wall augmentations. :smallsmile:

Well... some augmentations are okay, but check out the wondrous architecture for choice furniture that can heal the party, preserve stuff (including bodies), or just let you read any magic writings.

No, there's something far more ridiculous for you to abuse on that airship: magic traps. Go do a little research, and you'll find a treasure trove of ideas on them. Think "infinite cure spell trap".

Oh, FYI, if you want to give yourself some halfway decent "cloaking" device, get yourself minor sails of displacement from Stormwrack; 20% miss chance for the WHOLE SHIP seems pretty fracking amazing to me. Won't work against area effect attacks (breath weapons and such), but most of those aren't that long range in the end. It costs as much as the ship does, but... man, it's pretty damn worth it.

Also, talk to your DM for a variation of the planar helm that only performs a version of greater teleport on the ship. (Logic is thus: planar navigation works like plane shift only for a boat; plane shift is 7th-level spell; so a boat-wide spell at the same level should be functionally similar.) This gives you a "jump drive" for the ship, but keep in mind it doesn't go to other planes, just places you know about on the Prime Material.


I'd go with splitting instead of collision or explosive. Add a wand chamber with an eternal wand of hawkeye and gnomish crossbow sights. Now if the operator has far shot you have a weapon with a range increment of 540ft. So max range of 5400ft, you can now shoot stuff 1 mile away, if you can spot it. You get to ignore penalties for 2 range increments, and you get two attacks, each with damage 5d8+1+whatever DFI bonus your bard is pumping out.

Good call, forgot all about splitting and the wand chamber. Let me add, get a wand of targeting ray for close-in targets; not only will you get the bonus, so will everyone/everything else shooting at it.


Regarding crew suggestions, a human effigy crewman based on a 4 HD fighter costs 10,000 gp, and can have up to six combat-related feats, as well as proficiency with all armor, shields, and simple and martial weapons. It has construct immunities, DR 3/adamantine, and good Strength (with a hit to Dex, so... if you're building for ranged combat, take that into consideration). They don't sleep or eat, can see in the dark and in low-light conditions, making them great sentries. Give them the best weapons and armor you can muster. Make sure one of those six proficiencies is Ballista Proficiency (HoB pg. 96), so they can run your "guns".

Best option? Get only a few hirelings to be your "officers" who command groups of effigy constructs. Hire 3 2nd-level marshals (MH) as lieutenants to run each watch, and hire as many 2nd-level fighters as you have siege weapons to be gunners (make sure the marshals have lots of Cha, fighters have lots of Dex for ranged attacks). Hire a magewright, even if you got a PC artificer at the table; you need someone focused on the ship and effigies.

This means you have fewer people to keep track of (as far as possession, enchanting, etc. go), and you have a small group of constructs that can't be taken out by regular folk (so if you find them dead, you know you have a skilled enemy on the ship). You don't spend as much to keep living folks healthy, and you still got a hireling to make damaged constructs whole as well. And effigies have lots of Strength for big-labor jobs.

Hey, you could even make some effigy flying creatures as a "shuttle", if you want. Look for a Huge creature that can carry a 4-person howdah (A&EG) on the back.

[Jowgen]

Roughly a paragraph-by-paragraph reply:

Well, the entire Elemental -> Gem thing will need a lot of DM-adjucation regardless. Having the dude "brainwashed" -such an ugly word for "enlightened" :smalltongue:- should make it easier to get a reasonable set of prerequesites to get it done, but if the DM is on board with the general idea I'm sure we'll get it worked out. Hell, he might even allow something like a DC 40 UMD check (which apparently lets you act as if you're Pazuzu for purposes of controling his claw throne artifact thing) on the Shard to emulate some great specific elemental binder individual to get it working.

Dragonshard broken = bad, no matter the circumstance. Got it.

CL thing was an oversight on my part, didn't bother to check at what level you could get into Magewright.

The Magically Treated wall augumentation is seemingly based on the Augument object spell from the end of the chapter, which doesn't change any other stats, so I don't think it'll affect anything.

I checked out the Dwarven Strongbow, but I think I'll stick with just ballistae as per your original suggestion; as I'm now partial to Tysis' super-long-range approach. With a crew feeding into Fell Conspiracy our high-spot/listen character ought to get something sufficiently ridicculous to spot things way before they spot us, giving us quite a few round of us just firing at them from a mile away before they get to us.

The original idea behind the "Fleia" wasn't so much to epic/artifact, but more of a big-stick to carry around for negotiating purposes. Being able to demonstrate you can take down a building in one shot, even if doing so would actually turn out to be horrible impractical in combat, chances are people will be wanting to pay attention to your request to parley after you do. But being able to snipe a flag with a massive siege-bolt from a mile up and away should be able to accomplish the same thing. Might just put exploding or starburst on the thing for more of a wow-factor. And so that the name still kinda fits.

As for space-travel, I just figured it might be a nice thing to have in back-up in the unlikely event that Atropus shows up or some Illithid Nautiloids start gathering in space above an unsuspecting kingdom. You likely do have a point with the augmentation not sealing in air. On the other hand, the DM might accept an argument that Windwall is Evocation, which does "create something out of nothing", and let the constant magical air be enough to keep the insides pressurized. Eh, it's not a big priority either case.

I have gone ahead and read the magic of eberron section on binding (thanks for pointing me to that), and yeah, blindsense seems unfeasible. As does acid resist and cold resist, assuming a need to switch dominant element. I will have a look into the submarine possibility though. Seems reasonable, with the Windwall providing air and there being a ring of a massive water-elemental around the ship. Will look at book details :smallsmile:

I might make an argument for a friendly elemental reducing the number of crew members needed (I think the 5 are meant to work in 3 shifts anyways?); but yeah, that's about it.

I see your point about fire and back-ups. Better safe than sorry. Only you can prevent forest-fires and all that. :smallwink:

For a hallow-keyed spell, we'll probably leave the keyed-spell open until we know we're up against something in particular (e.g. sent out on campaign to deal with X-thing). That way, no money wasted on a year's worth of hallow.

I've checked the wondrous architecture/space-auguments section and haven't really found anything that seems particularly enticing. Might ask for a custom spell-one though, to take advantage of the cheaper formula. Repeating spell-traps are a big no though. Same with Spell-turrets. I am willing to go cheese, but not that cheese. :smalltongue:

I'm not digging the effigies. Not sure if it's the flavour or the bang-for-buck. I do like the idea of the officer system though. Having a select few good-quality "sailors", each with 3-ish Unseen Servants to direct, seems like an efficient way to get everything handled, avoid over-crowding, and not be completely at the mercy of things un-doing the servants. Yeah, thinking about it, the ship can stay afloat in an AMF suppressing the elemental, but without enough people to slowly maneuver it, we'd be sorta stuck.

I think that covers everything? Sorry if I left something out. Really, I should have taken the time to quote, but that's a bit late now. :smallfrown:

[Heliomance]

I was going to suggest looking at the Stonghold Builder's Guide, but it seems you've already found that one!



I like the idea of submarine capacity via hallow, but actually, why stop there? Surely there is a spell somewhere that'll shield the ship with air so we can go into space? :smallbiggrin:


To my mind, the most sensible way to do that is to get a Spelljamming helm. I'm pretty sure there's a 3.5 adaptation of the Spelljammer rules somewhere. Not first party, but I think it exists.

If you can finagle it somehow, giving your elemental levels in the Dungeon Lord PrC, with the ship defined as its dungeon, would increase your defensive options markedly.

[Bronk]

The easiest way to make a flying ship is to take any existing ship and add a 'cloud keel' to it (Arms and Equipment Guide, p49). It's 200,000g and allows a 40' fly speed.

Another way is to make a Halruan Sky Ship (Shining South), although those are 'dependent on the winds for horizontal movement', which would be annoying.



To my mind, the most sensible way to do that is to get a Spelljamming helm. I'm pretty sure there's a 3.5 adaptation of the Spelljammer rules somewhere. Not first party, but I think it exists.

The main Spelljammer adaptation to 3.5 is in Polyhedron 151 (although it leaves out Crystal Spheres), and has a lot of great ships to choose from. The interesting thing is that in the original Spelljammer lore, elven ships were all specially grown from magical trees called starfly plants, making them perfect candidates for awakening, if you want a sentient ship. If you can manage to get a supernatural wish, any of the spelljammer helms would get you extremely fast movement.

[Tysis]

I checked out the Dwarven Strongbow, but I think I'll stick with just ballistae as per your original suggestion; as I'm now partial to Tysis' super-long-range approach. With a crew feeding into Fell Conspiracy our high-spot/listen character ought to get something sufficiently ridicculous to spot things way before they spot us, giving us quite a few round of us just firing at them from a mile away before they get to us.

The original idea behind the "Fleia" wasn't so much to epic/artifact, but more of a big-stick to carry around for negotiating purposes. Being able to demonstrate you can take down a building in one shot, even if doing so would actually turn out to be horrible impractical in combat, chances are people will be wanting to pay attention to your request to parley after you do. But being able to snipe a flag with a massive siege-bolt from a mile up and away should be able to accomplish the same thing. Might just put exploding or starburst on the thing for more of a wow-factor. And so that the name still kinda fits.

Well if you have a level 11 cohort from one of your party taking leadership I have a recommended build for said cohort. Fighter8/Cragtop Archer3 now I realize that many fighter levels is generally frowned upon but using crossbows is very feat intensive and short of taking a bunch of flaws or using an elf and DCFS away their racial proficiencies I dont know of another way. Anyways using a human you should have 10 feats. You need PBS, Manyshot, Rapid Shot, Rapid Reload, Ballista Proficiency, Weapon Focus(Heavy Crossbow), Weapon specialization, Ranged Weapon Mastery, Mountain Warrior, and Improved Rapid Shot.

For the weapon you want a +1 Self Loading, Quick Loading, Distance, Splitting Light Ballista with Gnome Crossbow Sights for the low price of 98k gold plus the cost of the previously mentioned wand and chamber. Cast Haste on this Cohort and he can full attack at (assuming 22 Dex)22/22/22/22/22/22/17/17/12/12 at up to 1620ft. The Damage of each attack is 3d8+8+8d6(what I'm assuming your DFI is pumping out). Attack out to 8100ft at -4/-4/-4/-4/-4/-4/-9/-9/-14/-14, Obviously max range is likely reserved for structures or other vehicles(most vehicles have an AC between -3 and 3). So they fire 100 rounds a minute at just over 1.5 miles away. If you come across another 64k gold add Starburst, now your 10 attacks a round each affect a 20ft radius. Which, due to the way circles work on a square grid, would cover 1,100 square feet an attack. When it comes to Shock and Awe you can't go wrong with exploding spears from the Heavens to deal with some uppity peasants. Also you can put this ballista on a tenser's floating disk and take it with you if you so desire. At higher levels you could use WBL-mancy to cover your ship in these and use ice assassins to operate them. With a 4th iterative attack and 10 ballistae you cover a square mile in just over 21 minutes. I think if money wasn't a concern you could fit 100 of these ballistae on the ship and cover 1 sq. miles every 2 minutes. Not exactly the most cost efficient way to make it rain destruction, but hey you cant put price on style points.

Edit: Just noticed that firing at 8,100 ft means the bolts are flying at about 920mph. Bring some earplugs.

[Jowgen]

To my mind, the most sensible way to do that is to get a Spelljamming helm. I'm pretty sure there's a 3.5 adaptation of the Spelljammer rules somewhere. Not first party, but I think it exists.

If you can finagle it somehow, giving your elemental levels in the Dungeon Lord PrC, with the ship defined as its dungeon, would increase your defensive options markedly.

The easiest way to make a flying ship is to take any existing ship and add a 'cloud keel' to it (Arms and Equipment Guide, p49). It's 200,000g and allows a 40' fly speed.

Another way is to make a Halruan Sky Ship (Shining South), although those are 'dependent on the winds for horizontal movement', which would be annoying.

The main Spelljammer adaptation to 3.5 is in Polyhedron 151 (although it leaves out Crystal Spheres), and has a lot of great ships to choose from. The interesting thing is that in the original Spelljammer lore, elven ships were all specially grown from magical trees called starfly plants, making them perfect candidates for awakening, if you want a sentient ship. If you can manage to get a supernatural wish, any of the spelljammer helms would get you extremely fast movement.

I have gone and read the polyhedron issue for spelljammer material as well as reviewed the Cloudkeel and Shining South Ship, and had to conclude that the Eberron Airship is simply the better choice. Comparing the stats, the eberron ship is faster, bigger, cheaper and easier to maneuver than almost every other choice. I do love the style of some of the spelljammer ships, but the simple fact that an average Eberron Airship could take on an Illithid Dreadnaught kinda seals it for me. The addition of a Helm really wouldn't boost the speed and there are cheaper ways of going into space. The Eberron ones are just better. :smallfrown:

As for giving the elemental levels in Dungeonlord, yeah, based on what Eisfalken explained and I read about how the Elemental works, I don't see that happening.


Well if you have a level 11 cohort from one of your party taking leadership I have a recommended build for said cohort. Fighter8/Cragtop Archer3 now I realize that many fighter levels is generally frowned upon but using crossbows is very feat intensive and short of taking a bunch of flaws or using an elf and DCFS away their racial proficiencies I dont know of another way. Anyways using a human you should have 10 feats. You need PBS, Manyshot, Rapid Shot, Rapid Reload, Ballista Proficiency, Weapon Focus(Heavy Crossbow), Weapon specialization, Ranged Weapon Mastery, Mountain Warrior, and Improved Rapid Shot.

Actually, in what is yet another convenient party-design happenstance, our Bard also happens to have maxed out levels in Heartfire Fanner. With one bardic music use, he can grant most of the party 3 temporary fighter bonus feats, essentially allowing anyone to pick up e.g. Pointblank Shot, Far Shot and Ballista Profieciency when needed. It's a brilliant dragon mag bard PrC that I think ought to get more attention. We might have a swift hunter joining sometime, who already comes pre-loaded with the essential archery feats, so he could cover the role of canoneer when needed.


For the weapon you want a +1 Self Loading, Quick Loading, Distance, Splitting Light Ballista with Gnome Crossbow Sights for the low price of 98k gold plus the cost of the previously mentioned wand and chamber.

I plan to cheese my way around the reloading aspect via liberal use of unseen servants, who are directed to ready their full-round actions to complete all the necessary steps (3 servants able to take 10 on strenght checks ought to do). So Self-Loading a Quick Loading aren't needed. For extra range, I plan on making the balista out of Dragonbone (Drac, +20 range) and give it the Long Range Artisan craft benefit (Dragon 358 p. 42, + 20 range), for a base range of 160 pre modifiers. Distance for up to 320. Far Shot (either taken or via heartfire fanner) for up to 480. Wand of Hawkeye for 720. Max range 72000

Now, if I can swing it, this is also where I'll be (ab)using the wonderous architecture rules. I'll have the Ballista(e) on the raised platform on the bow of the ship, which shall function as an irremoveable piece of wondrous architecture giving those standing upon it one constant spell benefit: Guided Shot (SPC). That'll allow anyone operating the Ballista(e) to ignore range increment penalties as well as non-total cover and concealment. Shooting something behind a wall in fog a mile away becomes as easy as shooting something point blank. If this works, the crossbow sight isn't needed anymore I think (unless the DM rules that allows the weapon to exceed max range, which I don't think is the case). If getting it wondrous is out, another wand would do I guess.

Also, I'll have a number of Bolts with the +2 Phasing WSA on hand. That one's ammunition only and is from Dragon mag 330 p. 67. It ignores a single solid obstacle when fired, so if I can pinpoint an enemy behind a wall a mile away, he can get hit. As for how to pinpoint at that range... :smalleek: A Third Eye Sense (MIC) would be sure-fire solution. See enemy stronghold atop a mountain in the distance, zoom in, look around for decent target. With any luck, the local evil overlord will just be one wall away from getting hit by a most riddiculous snipe attack. Would like to find a way other than the Third Eye Sense though, although really, having that thing seems like a very solid investment to have on board regardless. The DFI bard churns out +10d6 btw (DM lets Words of Creation double Badge of Valor).

Also, in regards to regular ammunition, I think it might be possible to get a Ballista to fire the Force Javelins created by the Gloves of Endless Javelins (MIC) instead. Heroes of Battle describes balista bolsts as both Javilin and harpoon-like, and the Icechucker from Frostburn is a large crossbow that fires Javilins. Only hickup might be size, but if that comes to be, then a pair of Stronarm Bracers (MIC) should cover that. If this works, the need for the Force enchantment (DM has ruled such in the past) and hauling around regular ammunition would be obviated.

Summary: See potential target in the distance (Stormwrack spot rules should apply). Standard action third eye sense to perceive location up close. Pick target. Create Javelin & drop javelin or direct for use of Phasing Bolt, 3 servant use readied action to wind and load. Fire shot with no penalty for range, (non-total) cover or non-total concealment. Dex-denied target takes 3d8 force damage plus 10d6 fire damage, or just 3d8 + 10 force damage. Average damage 13 force and 35 fire (Decent chance to trigger a massive damage save), or 23 force. Target has little chance to spot what the hell hit it.

Adding Splitting to this would just be overkill at this point I feel. I think I'd rather avoid starburst, a) to keep the collateral damage to a minimum, and b) to strike terror into enemy hearts by claiming "we can shoot any of you at any time and you won't see it coming ever". Don't get me wrong, I love style points for reigning down mass destruction (and that was the original idea); but I think deadly cold pinpoint precision out of nowhere just instills more dread as opposed to panic, which is preferable to my ends. The sonic boom arriving just after the hit lands is just icing on the cake there. :smallsmile:

[Bronk]

I have gone and read the polyhedron issue for spelljammer material as well as reviewed the Cloudkeel and Shining South Ship, and had to conclude that the Eberron Airship is simply the better choice.

No doubt... they're just easier, because they both represent a single magic item that can be added to any ship to make it fly.


Comparing the stats, the eberron ship is faster, bigger, cheaper and easier to maneuver than almost every other choice. I do love the style of some of the spelljammer ships, but the simple fact that an average Eberron Airship could take on an Illithid Dreadnaught kinda seals it for me.

Well, it depends. They are using different ship creation rules (one continuous ship instead of 'sections'), but the main difference would be the status of the elf ships as a single, modified tree.

They also include an 'awesome' size, one bigger than colossal, which is admittedly weird.


The addition of a Helm really wouldn't boost the speed and there are cheaper ways of going into space. The Eberron ones are just better. :smallfrown:

The speed is interesting. The old Spelljammer rules ramped the tactical speed up based on the user's caster level. The rules from this article give a base tactical speed that depends on whether the helm is minor or major, and the size of the ship. This can be increased with magic items or having the pilot have levels in the 'spelljammer ace' class that's included in the article.

However, that's just the tactical speed, or the speed that you have when you're near a planet or another ship. Cruising speed is 'too fast to see', and gets you from one planet to another in just a few days while maintaining an air envelop and gravity. A normal eberron airship can only go 20mph, which would take more or less forever to get anywhere in space, plus you have all those air and gravity problems.

The good news is that if you ever decide to space it up in your game, you can just stick a helm onto your ship later. No big deal. Or there's the Crown of Stars artifact that you could quest for, to use on any craft, which is included in the article. In fact, if you delve into the older material, you can cast a spell that mimics a spelljammer helm for a while, which would probably be just as good for a short hop.

Either way, there are a few more items that could be good for your ship. The first are Planar Sails from Arms and Equipment guide. It's basically a 5 minute plane shift that works at will (as opposed to the planar helm from stormwrack that only works twice per day) and only needs a knowledge (the planes) skill check to work.

Also, for air issues during space missions, the srd has both the necklace of adaptation and the iridescent spindle ioun stone.


Edit: I just wanted to clarify: The rules for keeping gravity and an air envelope (for a while) in space are a background feature of Spelljammer, not dependent on having a spelljammer helm or not, or on being in a ship or not. If you were to convince your DM to have your space rules be spelljammery when necessary, a bunch of your problems would already be solved.


Other Edit: Speaking of which, there are a lot of awesome add-ons, magic items and even mundane items for ships in the old Spelljammer books. Extradimensional doorknobs, magic unseen sailors, sensors, super maps... grappling arms? Good stuff.

Also, from the Miniature's Handbook I believe, you can increase the the size of your ship's interior by putting up relatively inexpensive 'enveloping pits' on the walls, or even nest them if you need to. Those things are 10' wide and 50' deep, so you can put crew quarters in there, or munitions, or cargo, or whatever.

[Jowgen]

Thanks Bronk, I'll keep it in mind :smallsmile:


I have a quick question: is there any class or racial ability anywhere (including epic) in game that would allow a character to bind an elemental without use of the Bind Elemental Feat? Or explcitly gets the feat?

[Bronk]

Thanks Bronk, I'll keep it in mind :smallsmile:

No problem! At any rate, it's fun for me to talk about Spelljammer!



I have a quick question: is there any class or racial ability anywhere (including epic) in game that would allow a character to bind an elemental without use of the Bind Elemental Feat? Or explcitly gets the feat?

Well, it looks like 'High Elemental Binder' from the Player's Guide to Eberron requires it as a prerequisite, which is kinda close.

[PraxisVetli]

Jumping in to post this, maybe someone beat me to it, but I personally outfit all my airships with spell turrets from dmg2.

[Barbarian Horde]

Use Lyre of building for production to cut cost down.

[khadgar567]

actually if your dm like experiment a lot grab the steel forge supplement and add your fleja javelins both auto loader magazine and swift shot winder to turn Them rapid fire railguns( we already hit the super sonic ammo part)( this combo allows full iterative attacks with said balista with free action to reload the puppy)

[DrKerosene]

My google-fu is unable to find it, but someone on this forum made a flying airship of converting people to good. They also had lists for "minimum to get the results" and "if gold and level isn't an issues". I would recommend using it as a measuring stick as you approach level 20 (if a good forum member knows what I'm talkig about and posts a link for both of us).

Otherwise, I appreciate this post and the contributions, because I've been thinking about this idea at this power range recently, and it has helped a lot.

[Jowgen]

After doing quite a bit of tinkering, I've devised as what should be able to pass for a way to to Bind the Ominmental without the use of the Bind Elemental feat, Wish or home-brewed material. The process depends heavily on some shady readings of the RAW, but it should be workable so long as the following premises are accepted.

Premise 1: A greater Khyber Dragonshard qualifies as a magic item.

It doesn't, to my knowledge, give of a magic aura; but they are written to possess "magical binding properties" (MoE p. 18). If this is accepted, then the shard becomes a legal subject of the Use Magic Device check, meaning that its "magical binding properties" can be activate provided you can emulate the appropriate class (features) and such. Artificers can use UMD for shard-related purposes (see premise 3), which supports this notion.

Premise 2: The High Elemental Binder PrC's class-features can accomplish the needed type of binding.

Feats can not be emulated via UMD, but page 107 of PGtE has the following text in the adaptation section of the High Elemental Binder PrC: "If you are using Magic of Eberron, it is possible that a high binder could learn to bind elementals to different objects, recreating the effects of certain items in that supplement.". The Airship and the Khyber Dragonshard both appear in MoE, so if this "if you have book" adaptation" is accepted, then a High Elemental Binder, by virtue of being one or having the class-features he has, should possess the basic binding capacity required to activate a Khyber Dragonshard's "magical binding properties".

Premise 3: An Artificer's ability to emulate the casting of Planar-binding spells for binding can itself be emulated

As described in the Bind Elemental feat, an artificer doesn't have to cast a planar binding-spell to call and bind an elemental, he can emulate the casting for the purposes of a binding process. The qualifier to be able to do this is to be an artificer. When activating a magic item (i.e. a dragonshard), one can emulate being a member of a class with UMD if doing so is needed to activate the magic item. Therefore, one should be able to emulate levels in artificer using UMD in order to be able to make a UMD checks to emulate a Planar Binding spell. It's convoluted, but since it's all in order to be able to activate a magic item, this emulation-chain should work.

Premise 4: If required for the activation of a magic item, even Epic Class Features can be emulated

Ominimentals are too high in HD to be called with Planar Binding spells. The Wu Jen's Spirit Binding line is better (Elementals qualify as spirits), in that it can go up to 24 HD, but that is the limit of what can be done in spells only. Therefore, in order to activate a Dragonshard's magical binding properties to bind an Omimental, one must emulate one more class-feature: The 5th level Cosmic Descryer's Superior Planar Summoning ability. This raises the HD limit of any planar binding spell by 8 HD, which you apply to Greater Spirit Summoning (24+8 = 32), which works thanks to the spirit binding line explicitly stating to function like the planar binding line, making them a legal beneficiary of the ability.

If these premises are accepted, they come together to allow the following.

- "I wish to activate the Greater Khyber Dragonshard's magical binding properties to bind an Omimental"
- "I use the UMD skill to emulate being a character with the required class levels and therefore class features needed to activate the Greater Khypher Dragonshard for this
- Emulate being an Artificer 10 High Elemental Binder 10 Cosmic Descryer 5 (UMD DC 45).
- "By virtue of counting as an Artificer, rather than cast a binding-type spell for the shard-activation-process, I Emulate the casting of Greater Spirit Binder using UMD"
- "By virtue of counting as a Cosmic Descryer 5, my emulated Greater Spirit Binding spell can call this 32 HD elemental
- The Omimental is called. It doesn't have the SR, Planar travel capacity or Cha to break free.
- Some other character makes a DC 42 Concentration check to transfer the elemental
- Get a sufficient number of assistants for you all to total 64 caster levels. You are currently emulating a character with a CL of 23, so you need 41 CL levels worth of assistants (can include the concentration guy).
- Beat the Omnimental's opposed charisma check.
- Ominmental is bound into shard, put shard in airship containment compartment. Success.

Balance-wise, the only thing that strikes me as abuseable in this is that one can take a Khypher shard and then, at will, emulate Calling spells to call powerful elementals. Sure, they won't like you, but there is still so much abuse to be had by the looks of it. Strangely, that's not so much a problem of the process here, but of the Bind Elemental feat's clause about Artificers all in itself. A 9th level artificier with the feat can, by the looks of it, simply walk around spawning elementals everywhere wherever he goes, so long as he has a shard. To forestall this as a DM, I'd personally at least enforce a 1 elemental calling/shard rule (i.e. the magical binding properties are only good for one use). Still, shard's are cheap, so this remains abuse-able, lest I am missing something. :smallannoyed:


My google-fu is unable to find it, but someone on this forum made a flying airship of converting people to good.

It is I...! Me! :smalltongue:

Yeah, you're thinking of the Redeeming Sun, the example "I have all the money to spend" Redeemery from my handbook on the topic. Link's in my sig. :smallsmile: Priceyness aside, it's strategic purpose is different from the Damocles.


Use Lyre of building for production to cut cost down.

As mentioned, the army of unseen crafters is used instead.


Jumping in to post this, maybe someone beat me to it, but I personally outfit all my airships with spell turrets from dmg2.

They've been mentioned.

[Fizban]

Allow me to preface by saying that I've read that "airship handbook" before and took issue with several of it's assumptions, as well as the whole bound elemental shtick in general (there is not and has never been a reason it was needed other than "ECS says so"). It's not mentioned in the first post, but I assume you're playing in Eberron, however if not I'd say to ignore it. There's no reason to tie yourself to the absurd inconsistencies, particularly the aircraft carrier size and soarwood discrepancies. That said, I'll see if I have any useful suggestions.

As a general note, you have all sorts of crazy plans, but building a crazy ship for it's own sake is just pointless. What is the purpose? For a merchant it's safe transport of cargo, for the military it's scouting and skirmishing. For an adventurer, an airship is merely a convenience. Adventurers don't need airships to transport their usual magic item and gem cargo since those fit in Bags of Holding, nor do they need one for scouting or combat because they have spells and class features. for an adventurer, and airship is an Inn that goes where you want it, a way to carry more cumbersome loot if the DM says "Adamantine Doors," and a way to save on overland travel costs. In particular, an airship is spell slots: no need to cast Rope Trick/Secure Shelter, Phantom Steed/Overland Flight/Shadow Walk/Wind Walk, Create Food and Water (because you brought a bunch), and so on. Spending a bunch of extra money on magic that only affects the ship and the surrounding environs is only useful if the DM immediately shifts a significant portion of conflict to the airship itself, which while not unreasonable given that it's a big expensive unique magic item, is not necessarily going to be the case. Unless the campaign already involves situations where the party needs to move tons of cargo or people back and forth or provide continuous air support, pimping the airship may not be wise.


Pearly Okimono of the Sea Dragon (Dragon Magic): +5 hardness and more for only 7,500gp. An airship is also a seaship so it works.

Fharlanghn's Lines (Arms and Equipment Guide): reduces the number of required crew. Rename them Fharlanghn's Aelerons and do it for an airship. Three or four sets at 8,100gp each will do it. Any plan relying on Unseen Servants or Unseen Crafters fails to acknowledge that sailors are not performing one simple repetitive task, and as such cannot be replaced with those effects.

Lightning Ballista (Heroes of Battle): Face it, any sort of normal siege weapon is pointless. No mook will hit anything important, and no PC should be sitting around waiting for a Ballista to be readied. With an air elemental this is Lightning Bolt every round for 15k. It's restricted to 60' range for no reason, tell your DM to override that. Now any crewman can toss in 17.5 damage/ref half each turn. Not as spectacular as you may have expected, and that's the best I've found.

Other Ballistae/Siege: Unseen Servants might be able to help with these, but I'd still note that they're not creatures and don't have any full round actions or readied actions (also you can't ready a full round action), and it can't make str checks for that matter (if they could, at str 2 their take 10 results in a 6). If you ignore that then a ballista could hit 1 shot per round, but for a catapult the time and sequence required should mean you can't fire it every round. A platform that grants continuous Guided Shot is less an abuse of Wondrous Architecture and more an abuse of your DM if he lets you craft an infinite duration version of a 1 round duration spell. A personal magic item with limited charges per day will do the job just fine and be plenty cheap enough to break anyway. Splitting is the one enhancement I'd say it actually worth putting on a ballista, but it's still OP enough I'd not want it showing up on either side and it's 32,000gp to get it.

Human Effigy: Effigies don't have class levels, they won't get fighter feats, and for that matter they don't have the skill be be sailors. If you did somehow get a ruling that let an Effigy be a sailor (it can at least roll skill checks unlike an Unseen Servant), then it would be more efficient to use something Small like a Halfling (maybe a seafaring subtype of halfing with a Profession [Sailor] bonus), total market price 3,000. Still cheaper and safer to use Fharlanghn's Lines in the first place.

Skeletons: not using skeletons? At least as likely to work as Effigies, cheaper, and more traditional.

Ornithopters (Arms and Equipment Guide): if you can ignore the line that says they only carry a "Small rider," at 4,000gp these are the perfect landing craft to load on an airship. And they're awesome because ornithopters.


It would seem that you've got the DM to count a ship as a stationary structure for certain area spells such as Hallow. This should allow you to use Energy Transformation Field (SpC) as either a defense or easy method of spamming literally any spell*. Anyone with an at will supernatural or spell like ability can power an Energy Transformation field indefinitely, it's a perfectly valid alternate method of creating the airship in the first place. It's a 7th level spell, and a scroll will cost you 8,525 xp, though there could be an issue with the "three drops of your blood" component (use collaborative crafting if necessary) and it never says how you choose the spell it's tied to so you may need to know it personally, cast it out of your personal spells, cast it from a scroll, or just pick any spell without any restrictions! *Can't hold gp or xp cost spells, can do expensive foci.

ETF casts the spell at a point within the field, otherwise you could use it for doom cannons as well. That said, crafting a piece of Wondrous Architecture attached to a fixed point (as you've been treating an airship as a fixed point rather than a semi-mobile one so far) that only activates 1/day should reduce the price to spell level*caster level*100gp, which is low enough that even a 9th level spell at CL20 is only 18,000gp. So there's your scary doomsday weapon. If anyone so much as mentions spell turrets I'm leaving :smallfurious: (Edit: oh, guess they already had been mentioned).

Attack crew: You have a super buffer bard but you still need people to make ranged attacks, and you need them to have enough attack bonus to hit. Fill an ETF on the ship's deck with a Summon Monster spell for something with a bow. I was going to suggest Legion Devils (Fiendish Codex 2), but unlike some other monsters in the book they don't have a listed method of adding them to a list (though at 3HD you can Planar Bind them easily enough). Legion Devils get a ridiculous +4 attack for each extra LD nearby and carry a longbow standard, do the math. Failing that, go to Arrow Demons (MM3), which can do +14/14/9/9 bowshots out of SM7. Put an SM9 in the ETF for 1d4+1 Arrow Demons, use the DFA to get free Arrow Demons every 2-3 rounds, use the Bard once there's a good gang in place and rain death on your enemies.


Back to what I was saying at the beginning, the size and pricing and everything on the Eberron ships is madness and the books all contradict each other. I don't know what sort of spliced together sort of pricing scheme you're going to use for the dragonshard and binding the elemental and creating the airship without having the feat and what the ship's made out of and how much it costs. What I will say, is that you should not use the size given in Explorer's Handbook and quoted in the minmax handbook. ECS says it's airships are supposed to "a large craft, similar to a sailing ship, surrounded by a Huge fire elemenal." The biggest ship in Stormwrack, the Greaship, is 150x40x40, and the Explorer's handbook ship is 300x90x50. Pretty sure that is literally aircraft carrier size. There is no way that makes sense.

There are a couple directions I would go from here. I think the most sensible is to base it on the Caravel, what is supposed to be the "sailing ship." This is based on a price/cargo ratio I worked out ECS and the other Stormwrack ships and AaEG aiships at roughly 10x the price and 1/4 the cargo for an airship. This also fits the size given for the elemental: in 5' cubes, Huge creature=27 cubes, which should be just enough to make a 40' diameter ring around a 20-28' diameter ship. And finally, if you take a Caravel (speed wind*30'), set the wind factor to maximum (*3), and double the speed because flying or soarwooding or something, you get 18mph, which could round up to 20mph. The Caravel is 60x20x20 with a watch of 7 and a maximum crew compliment of 30, which is still plenty reasonable for an adventuring group, with 2 light and 1 heavy mounts. The price of 92,000gp here remains arbitrary, but you're not going to be using standard pricing anyway.

Alternatively, you could start from what I'm sure was the original pricing method for the ECS airship: from the DMG, a Galley (40k)+ Wings of Flying (52k), which comes to 92k exactly. Not sure exactly how speed and cargo were assigned, but they're close to late steam/early combustion engine historical airships at 20mph and 30 tons. The Galley from the DMG is equivalent to the Greatship from Stormwrack, so an Eberron airship would be a Greatship that flies at an arbitrary 20mph and carries 30 tons of cargo for 92,000gp. I don't think this is as sensible, but if you and your DM want big airships then at least this is still a medieval sized ship. It's 150x40x40, watch 20, and compliment 500, with 12 light and 4 heavy mounts.


Your line of reasoning for using UMD to bind an elemental is as sound as any ridiculous UMD shenanigans (good but still easily blocked). Since you're mentioning a specific build I'd ask if that build is actually legal as summoning PrCs can't usually be entered by Artificers. As the point of the High Elemental Binder is their quick, temporary binding, I'd say it's pretty obvious the adaptation is referencing that ability, and so it doesn't work. And of course the ability to emulate Planar Binding spells does not give you the ability to emulate Wu Jen specific Spirit Binding spells. Furthermore, getting the elemental into the shard doesn't make a ship into an airship, since an airship is still a magic item that requires a specific feat to craft. At best you could try substituting Craft Wondrous to build an item waiting for a power source.

As for spawning elementals everywhere, I'd think it was pretty obvious they're only supposed to be able to do that during item creation and the elemental only appears in the context of fueling the item.

[Jowgen]

Welcome Fizban, I thank you for a most excellent contribution.


What is the purpose?

The Damocles' main purpose is simply to be impressive. Politically, it is our "Big stick" a la Roosevelt, providing any local powers we encounter with a pretty solid incentive to talk to us peacefully and respectfully. To potential allies, it is meant to demonstrate the scale of what we can accomplish, so that they know just how much we could help them. To potential enemies, it is both a warning and an invitation to come at us if they dare. For practical use, it is convenient party transportation, a means to move about large quantities of good and people (e.g. disaster relief, evacuation, etc.), and a safe place to rest our heads.


Pearly Okimono of the Sea Dragon (Dragon Magic): +5 hardness and more for only 7,500gp. An airship is also a seaship so it works.

That is awesome. I mean, the hardness itself is rather worth it, the +5 to Profession(Sailor) for everyone on board is just icing on the cake. Thank you.:smallbiggrin:


Fharlanghn's Lines (Arms and Equipment Guide): reduces the number of required crew. Rename them Fharlanghn's Aelerons and do it for an airship. Three or four sets at 8,100gp each will do it. Any plan relying on Unseen Servants or Unseen Crafters fails to acknowledge that sailors are not performing one simple repetitive task, and as such cannot be replaced with those effects.

That is 5 sailors for 8.100 gp. Hmmm... I suppose at least one set to get the watch down to 10 might be a good investment. That way, even if we only have 5 party-members to sail, the DCs to sail properly don't get too out of hand. Either way, yeah, I have by this point moved away from a purely unseen servant crew. Rather than that, I am thinking maybe 1 servant under control of each sailor; which means each sailor who uses a standard action to do something about the ship can as a move action also direct the servant to do something else, doubling their usefulness.


Lightning Ballista (Heroes of Battle): Face it, any sort of normal siege weapon is pointless. No mook will hit anything important, and no PC should be sitting around waiting for a Ballista to be readied. With an air elemental this is Lightning Bolt every round for 15k. It's restricted to 60' range for no reason, tell your DM to override that. Now any crewman can toss in 17.5 damage/ref half each turn. Not as spectacular as you may have expected, and that's the best I've found.

If I can get the 60 ft range scrapped I might consider getting one; but even then they wouldn't benefit from the Bard's buffing. Really, the super long-range Ballista idea that's been worked on strikes me as just the better option.


Other Ballistae/Siege: Unseen Servants might be able to help with these, but I'd still note that they're not creatures and don't have any full round actions or readied actions (also you can't ready a full round action), and it can't make str checks for that matter (if they could, at str 2 their take 10 results in a 6). If you ignore that then a ballista could hit 1 shot per round, but for a catapult the time and sequence required should mean you can't fire it every round.

Winding a ballista winch is a simple task even an unskilled commoner can do. If the servants don't get actions in the initiative order, but work regardless of it like spell-effects generally do, then that works out great, as it's command to wind this winch back to full will be executed over and over whenever needed, without the need for delays, readies or anything of the sort. The Strenght check bit is add mittedly tricky. Neither Heroes of Battle nor the DMG list the DC 10 strenght check as part of the full-round action, only Stormwrack does. I guess I'll play the primary sources card.


A platform that grants continuous Guided Shot is less an abuse of Wondrous Architecture and more an abuse of your DM if he lets you craft an infinite duration version of a 1 round duration spell. A personal magic item with limited charges per day will do the job just fine and be plenty cheap enough to break anyway. Splitting is the one enhancement I'd say it actually worth putting on a ballista, but it's still OP enough I'd not want it showing up on either side and it's 32,000gp to get it.

I personally don't see my DM having an issue with the Guided shot thing. A worn continuous item would obviously be a broken thing, but as a specific location a character can stand in to be able to hit things with great accuracy from far away? I think at most the DM might require a x4 on the price, because of the round duration thing, but still. I agree on splitting.


It would seem that you've got the DM to count a ship as a stationary structure for certain area spells such as Hallow.

As a Stronghold, actually. Its well big enough, and flying strongholds are explicitly a thing in the book.


Energy Transformation Field (SpC)

That spell is a can of worms I do not want to be the one to open at our table.


Back to what I was saying at the beginning, the size and pricing and everything on the Eberron ships is madness and the books all contradict each other. I don't know what sort of spliced together sort of pricing scheme you're going to use for the dragonshard and binding the elemental and creating the airship without having the feat and what the ship's made out of and how much it costs.

I totally get what you're saying about the ridiculous size. As written, those things are basically the Insight Carriers from Captain America 2. I personally always rationalized that they needed to be that size in order to allow that whole soarwood-lighter-than-air-buoyancy thing. I myself actually plan to have the size cut down a bit, to 250x90x50, but that's just an aesthetics thing. I think the fact that we plan to bind the biggest meanest type of elemental also reduces the ridiculousness of the size.

As for the pricing, this is what I've got. We're using ship-building rules from Stormwrack as the base. In them, out of 100% item price, you have to pay 50% raw materials and 25% to pay laborers. Labor is all us, so we're at 50%. These 50% are part the cost of the soarwood, part the cost of the dragonshard, part the cost of getting the elemental bound, and lastly a bit for everything else (e.g. the glass for the observation dome). We're getting the soarwood ourselves (price would be 4 times the price of 50 10 ft cubes of wood if we bought it), harvesting a shard ourselves and binding the elemental ourselves. Binding a Colossal elemental is meant to take 15% of the price, but I don't think we'll need to factor that in. In essence, we're treating the dragonshard with the elemental as an add-on engine to a seperately built regular ship, rather than the whole ship as a wonderous item. We're basically doing a miniquest to get what we need to build us the ship and then paying for whatever extras we want ourselves.


Your line of reasoning for using UMD to bind an elemental is as sound as any ridiculous UMD shenanigans (good but still easily blocked). Since you're mentioning a specific build I'd ask if that build is actually legal as summoning PrCs can't usually be entered by Artificers.

UMD only mentions meeting Alignment requirements, and DC 40 is enough to emulate something as ridiculous as a Lord of the Abyss, but if this doesn't get handwaved on that basis, one could emulate a creature with Gate & a planar spell as an innate SLA to meet the PrC prerequisite.


As the point of the High Elemental Binder is their quick, temporary binding, I'd say it's pretty obvious the adaptation is referencing that ability, and so it doesn't work.

The High Elemental Binder thing is the shakiest of the building blocks. It's the best I could find. With UMD not really detailing how PrC emulation works, and at the same time prohibiting specific feat emulation, its all rather uncertain. A High Elemental Binder's are obviously completely reliant on possessing the basic Elemental Binding ability. That ability comes from them having the feat, i.e. an High Elemental Binder without the Bind Elemental ability/feat is impossible. The part about the adaptation is simply a RAI-stomping attempt to wiggle some RAW in there.

The ideal solution here, in my mind, is if I could find some form of creature that actually possesses an ability similar to the elemental binding feat, and then emulate that. Any creature that can force another into a crystal type item would do really.


And of course the ability to emulate Planar Binding spells does not give you the ability to emulate Wu Jen specific Spirit Binding spells.

Other spells can be used for binding, and I think spirit binding having the "This spell functions as [...]" clause, just as the higher level planar bind spells do, is sufficient to let it be classed as "a planar binding spell" for this purpose.


Furthermore, getting the elemental into the shard doesn't make a ship into an airship, since an airship is still a magic item that requires a specific feat to craft. At best you could try substituting Craft Wondrous to build an item waiting for a power source.

As mentioned, the plan is the treat the ship as mundane (like the Theurgeme technically is), and treat the elemental as an add-on engine. I think this actually has quite a bit going for in from a rule-wise perspective. An Airship that has it's Dragonshard destroyed is till an airship and can still float/fly thanks to its lighter-than-air buoyancy, just at a much slower speed. Additionally, the whole description of the elemental binding process doesn't at all deal with creating the item that the elemental powers. Sure, the ship needs to be designed in a way that allows the elemental's power to flow through it appropriately, but that would fall under the Architecture & Engineering part of shipbuilding.

[Fizban]

This got pretty long so I'ma dump it into a spoiler

The Damocles' main purpose is simply to be impressive.
Sounds like that confirms you have a pretty open-ended game then, which makes that a reasonable enough purpose.

Really, the super long-range Ballista idea that's been worked on strikes me as just the better option.
It doesn't need to be a ballista at all though, composite longbow has only 10' less range, or a bone bow from Frostburn has the same 120', and those can full attack. If you actually got a discount on ballista enhancement due to being obnoxiously bulky that would be one thing, but as is there's no reason not to just use a bow since 3d8 base is not good enough to give up full attacks. If a stationary platform is allowed, make it big enough to hold a whole formation of archers who can use full attacks/area volleys/concentrated volleys as needed. It sounds like you're not interested in keeping a living crew around, but I still feel like there might be ways to summon up groups of archers (you could just use infinite traps instead of ETF, but that's too easy).

The Strenght check bit is add mittedly tricky. Neither Heroes of Battle nor the DMG list the DC 10 strenght check as part of the full-round action, only Stormwrack does. I guess I'll play the primary sources card.
The problem with that line is that it completely invalidates any sort of update. You could use the same reasoning to play any of the old 3.0 spells that have been updated in Spell Compendium, many for good reasons. When the newer source clearly has more detailed information and is actually focused on the topic which is central to it's purpose, you can't really claim the old source has primacy over it. Especially when you're using other rules from the same book.

I personally don't see my DM having an issue with the Guided shot thing. A worn continuous item would obviously be a broken thing, but as a specific location a character can stand in to be able to hit things with great accuracy from far away? I think at most the DM might require a x4 on the price, because of the round duration thing, but still. I agree on splitting.
Obviously I'd be banning it outright, but you might also consider how big the platform is allowed to be. SBG has some effects that hit the whole room and others that are only a 5' square, I'd expect personal-only Guided Shot to be a 5' square at best. Otherwise, see above.

As a Stronghold, actually. Its well big enough, and flying strongholds are explicitly a thing in the book.
Flying strongholds are also ridiculously slow and expensive, but if you've got it you've got it.

that whole soarwood-lighter-than-air-buoyancy thing.
Which is inconsistent at best if you ask me. Contrary to my stance above regarding updated sources, for Eberron stuff I actually do take ECS as more primary in this case. It seems clear to me that ECS was written with certain simple ideas in mind, and then later books by various writers just went nuts with them. Soarwood in ECS is never mentioned as being lighter than air, merely magically buoyant and doubling the speed of a ship it's crafted from, and in fact weighs 75% of normal. It then seems to me that when someone decided to expand on the airships, they realized the whole elemental propulsion stance didn't account for lack of lift, and reconnected soarwood into being lighter than air. No one ever changed the actual properties of soarwood though. I don't think that makes me a hypocrite either, since the airship stats/redesign I advocate don't rely on any of the assumptions from looney books.

We're getting the soarwood ourselves (price would be 4 times the price of 50 10 ft cubes of wood if we bought it), harvesting a shard ourselves and binding the elemental ourselves.
Wha? The cost for soarwood is a x4 multiplier on the overall cost of the ship, volume has nothing to do with it. If you paid for it you'd be paying .5x4= twice the original price in gp. Which is still negated if you acquire all the raw materials through other means, but I'd expect that the raw materials assumed in those construction times are processed timber and such. You'll need some amount of extra time for lumber processing. Not to suggest a DM should hit you with fractal crafting patterns, but I think it would be reasonable to add an extra step from pile of raw trees for carpentry skill, then processed trees into shipbuilding skill. The shard is just a rock you dig up and the binding has been covered.

Binding a Colossal elemental is meant to take 15% of the price, but I don't think we'll need to factor that in. In essence, we're treating the dragonshard with the elemental as an add-on engine to a seperately built regular ship, rather than the whole ship as a wonderous item.
That's where ECS is just flat contradicting you though. An airship is a magic item that requires 46,000gp and 3,680xp to craft, over the course of 92 days. Even if the elemental binding is given extra sub rules, the core construction remains the same. This also allows it to bypass the enormous cost of a soarwood vessel of that size (40k for an actual sailing ship, or 240k if it was based on a Greatship). The oversized elemental discount only works in that context, and thus reinforces the fact that the ship is a magic item and not just nicely carved boat with an elemental on board. Obviously your DM disagrees or is willing to allow it anyway, but for anyone else wishing to attempt the same feat I must warn them that's simply not how it works.

UMD only mentions meeting Alignment requirements, and DC 40 is enough to emulate something as ridiculous as a Lord of the Abyss, but if this doesn't get handwaved on that basis, one could emulate a creature with Gate & a planar spell as an innate SLA to meet the PrC prerequisite.
I'm not sure what all's going on here, but I know you can't UMD to enter prestige classes. Qualifying to use an item as if you're a certain race doesn't make you count as having the same SLAs either.

That ability comes from them having the feat, i.e. an High Elemental Binder without the Bind Elemental ability/feat is impossible. The part about the adaptation is simply a RAI-stomping attempt to wiggle some RAW in there.
Don't understand this either. I'll be more precise: an HEB has the Bind Elemental feat, so they can already craft the items from Magic of Eberron without an adaptation. The only ability that "different objects, recreating the effects of certain items" could refer to is the HEB's Instant Bind ability, which allows you to choose specific magic item effects off a list. This ability lets you put an elemental into a completely mundane object for a short period of time without use of a Khyber shard. Even if an HEB could use Instant Bind to create a (very) temporary airship, the Instant Bind ability never interacts with a Khyber shard, and thus could not be used as justification for activating a shard.

The ideal solution here, in my mind, is if I could find some form of creature that actually possesses an ability similar to the elemental binding feat, and then emulate that. Any creature that can force another into a crystal type item would do really.
Supposedly if you chain Magic Jars or something you can take over a body permanently and/or leave someone stranded. I never quite got the chain of events down. Not that I'd count that as a bound elemental, but if you're allowed to I'd expect that would be the easiest way.

Other spells can be used for binding, and I think spirit binding having the "This spell functions as [...]" clause, just as the higher level planar bind spells do, is sufficient to let it be classed as "a planar binding spell" for this purpose.
Can be used by people who can cast them, not by Artificers using the Bind Elemental feat's clause. Bind Elemental happens when you craft a magic item that requires Bind Elemental, which always have a Planar Binding line spell as a prerequisite. Even if you wrote a magic item that listed both Bind Elemental and a Spirit Binding spell as a prerequisite, the feat only allows Planar Binding. It's still a ruling that requires DM fudgery, and when asked why the reason is specifically so you can exceed limits of the allowed spells.

As mentioned, the plan is the treat the ship as mundane (like the Theurgeme technically is), and treat the elemental as an add-on engine. I think this actually has quite a bit going for in from a rule-wise perspective. An Airship that has it's Dragonshard destroyed is till an airship and can still float/fly thanks to its lighter-than-air buoyancy, just at a much slower speed. Additionally, the whole description of the elemental binding process doesn't at all deal with creating the item that the elemental powers. Sure, the ship needs to be designed in a way that allows the elemental's power to flow through it appropriately, but that would fall under the Architecture & Engineering part of shipbuilding.
All addressed above, but in summary: the primary source of Soarwood it not lighter than air, the description of the elemental binding process actually reinforces the fact that the airship is wholly reliant on magic item crafting rules, and UMD shenanigans don't work on me. As for the Theurgeme: heh, yeah I like that part too. The Theurgeme, as well as the Dirigible, Zepplin, and Ornithopter from AaEG all rely on unspecified permanent magically animated parts, the likes of which it's practically impossible to create with existing spells or magic items.


So, you want to impress people with the might of your fully operational battlestation. Simply the fact that it's a massive flying troop transport and ranged attack platform is already more than enough (note that height should be convertible into extra range, but I don't think HoB has rules for that). Being able to shoot someone from 1/4 mile or even a full mile away with a single shot isn't too impressive when you already move at 20mph. Come to think of it, what's your full party and magic item shop access anyway? Considering the lengths you're going through to avoid any item creation feats I'd guess you don't have any, but you've taken magic item/wondrous architecture plans. What casters do you have to draw spells from?

Ballistae actually rather suck for scaring enemy armies or fortifications, but since you've got 30 tons of cargo capacity and an absurd amount of deck space you could mount a good three Light or one Heavy Trebuchet with room left over. Being on an airship completely negates the main military weakness of a stationary siege weapon and you can slowly rain death from above. You don't need fireballs or lightning bolts to intimidate an enemy commander when you can destroy his castle from the sky without casting a single spell. As a bonus, once you've got the targeting set you can just move the ship to line up the next shot instead of re-aiming.

Hmm, you know what's a cool spell? Lightning Ring (SpC, Sor/Wiz 8). Some sort of ship based adaptation would be an excellent 1/day way to make the ship relevant. Deals 10d6 per round to adjacent creatures, if built into the ship it could possibly set up a massive energy field frying potential boarders. Also launches a pair of 5d6 bolts every turn.

Fire. You don't really need alchemists fire or anything, just being able to drop flaming projectiles all over a city with impunity is good enough. Your ship is either nigh impossible or completely impossible to shoot down so even if they hit it with siege they can't stop you. Just big barrels of pitch and oil and stuff to dip in it.

Water to Acid (Stormwrack, Sor/Wiz 3): convert tons of water to standard PHB acid at absolutely no cost. Protip: despite rumors to the contrary, acid does not bypass hardness (it merely avoids having it's damage cut in half), but filling a barrel likely deals the 10d6 full immersion per round to the barrel from the inside. Still, the ability to instantly turn a barrel of water into a barrel of pain is pretty nice. If we assume glass is immune to acid: build the observation bubble to be retractable, fill it with water, convert water to acid, open bomb bay doors.


Now, how to get piles of archers on command for your Bard to buff? A ship is a troop transport after all.

-State soldiers: the best and most obvious option, if you work for/with a country they should happily provide you with crew and soldiers to man your ship, and free beats any sort of magic solution.

-Humanoid mercenaries: cheap, questionable loyalty, need food. The second best option.

-Maug mercenaries: awesome, but not actually good at range and far more expensive, might not be inspirable.

-Skeletons: did I mention skeletons? Questionable weather they could do volley attacks or discern long range targets. Also not inspirable.

-Horn of Valhalla: make a wondrous architecture version to cut the price to 1/4, 12,500 for a squad 1/week, still not good enough. And it says they're constructs so might not be inspirable.

-Summon Monster architecture: outsiders have proficiency in all martial weapons, Lemures from SM2 or Dretches from SM3 can absolutely fire small longbows if armed, and can be summoned in groups with higher level spells, but they're really beneath you.

-Summon Undead architecture: hah, SU1 brings Human Warrior skeletons, which can wield bows. Still need to be armed and are mindless.


Sigh, fine. Binding for minions it is.
-Magma Hurlers (Minis Handbook, 4HD): short range (max 150'), but they hurl gobs of magma indefinitely. Now, you don't want to use ETF, but how far are you willing to take Lesser Planar Binding? Some people seem to think it's possible, nay-the default, to browbeat the monster into indefinite service at no cost. If that's how your group rolls, a pack of these even without bard buffing is an excellent supplement to the military terror of the skies. These guys actually deal more damage than the ballista, which ought to count their thrown doom rocks as siege weapons. Tell your DM to switch out their Weapon Focus (Magma Rock) to Brutal Throw and make their ranged attack go to +11.

-Of course, if you're willing to Planar Bind you could get any number of minions, but the Magma Hurlers are on-theme and relatively low-key compared to demanding the permanent service of multiple Arrow Demons. If they went to huge size I'd say this would be the most badass airship "fire" elemental.

-Pixies: 1HD fey, as in spirits, as in valid for Spirit Binding. Solid +5 attack with d6 longbows, also that whole permanent invisibility thing making them perfect scouts and making it look like arrows are just appearing out of thin air and raining down from above your ship.

-Call Faithful Servants (Book of Exalted Deeds, Sor/Wiz 5): gets you up to 1 creature/level, 1d4 at a time, of Lantern Archons/Coure Eladrins/Musteval Guardinals. No gp cost, no xp cost, no loyalty problems, no warnings that getting your called minions killed will result in dire repercussions. Just need a way around that pesky Celestial component. An Artificer might be able to do it a few ways, or you could duplicate it with Limited Wish and pay an xp cost. They range in use from long range scout/messenger/buffer (Lantern), indoor wall-phasing scout (Coure), or infinite Magic Missile battery (Musteval). Not very good archers, but they're all so tiny they can't eat much.

[Tysis]

Ballistae actually rather suck for scaring enemy armies or fortifications, but since you've got 30 tons of cargo capacity and an absurd amount of deck space you could mount a good three Light or one Heavy Trebuchet with room left over. Being on an airship completely negates the main military weakness of a stationary siege weapon and you can slowly rain death from above. You don't need fireballs or lightning bolts to intimidate an enemy commander when you can destroy his castle from the sky without casting a single spell. As a bonus, once you've got the targeting set you can just move the ship to line up the next shot instead of re-aiming.

Did you even read the posts about the ballista? Now a heavy trebuchet would be far, far cheaper but also much less effective.The previously mentioned ballista and operator could blow a 10x10 hole through several feet of adamantine before a heavy trebuchet could even get in range. If the starburst property were added to the ballista it could cover 1100sq. ft. an attack(they have 10 per round, but half of them are from splitting so only 5 targets) with an average of 37 damage DC15 Reflex save for half. It would deal this damage from 8100ft away. The starburst property essentially turns the ballista bolts into high explosive artillery shells and, they'd be firing 100 rounds a minute.

Now trebuchets can be scary, no doubt. However, a 100 round per minute artillery barrage from over a mile and half away against people armed with pointy pieces of metal is probably going to create a higher demand for clean underwear.

[Bronk]

Did you even read the posts about the ballista? Now a heavy trebuchet would be far, far cheaper but also much less effective.The previously mentioned ballista and operator could blow a 10x10 hole through several feet of adamantine before a heavy trebuchet could even get in range. If the starburst property were added to the ballista it could cover 1100sq. ft. an attack(they have 10 per round, but half of them are from splitting so only 5 targets) with an average of 37 damage DC15 Reflex save for half. It would deal this damage from 8100ft away. The starburst property essentially turns the ballista bolts into high explosive artillery shells and, they'd be firing 100 rounds a minute.

Now trebuchets can be scary, no doubt. However, a 100 round per minute artillery barrage from over a mile and half away against people armed with pointy pieces of metal is probably going to create a higher demand for clean underwear.

You would have to go out of your way to make your ballista bolts out of stone though. The starburst property doesn't work with other materials.

[Fizban]

Did you even read the posts about the ballista? Now a heavy trebuchet would be far, far cheaper but also much less effective.
The previously mentioned ballista and operator could blow a 10x10 hole through several feet of adamantine before a heavy trebuchet could even get in range.
Did you notice there part where the 98,000gp ballista you suggest costs more than the airship in the first place, which the OP is specifically cheesing his way around paying for? Please enlighten me as to how you're supposedly chewing through adamantine that fast, since the average damage even if you're allowed to add that +8 from wherever is only 21.5 vs hardness 20, and the fire damage is completely negated (8d6/2=4d6, avg 14 vs hardness 20). Or for 33,000 you could have an infinite trap of Disintegrate, or for 4,500 you could have three light trebuchets that don't even require a show of force because any numbskull who looks at them knows exactly what they can do.

If the starburst property were added to the ballista
Yeah, well, unfortunately stone shot ballista are not standard for Heroes of Battle. I actually prefer the siege engines from the Warcraft Alliance and Horde Compendium which have higher damage, stone shot, and even iron shot, but you won't be firing those multiple times per round either. Of course your assumption that you can apply both Quick Loading and Self-Loading and get any extra effect is already bogus since Self-Loading leaves a minimum 1 round reload time and Quick Loading only applies to crossbows.

[Tysis]

Did you notice there part where the 98,000gp ballista you suggest costs more than the airship in the first place, which the OP is specifically cheesing his way around paying for? Please enlighten me as to how you're supposedly chewing through adamantine that fast, since the average damage even if you're allowed to add that +8 from wherever is only 21.5 vs hardness 20, and the fire damage is completely negated (8d6/2=4d6, avg 14 vs hardness 20). Or for 33,000 you could have an infinite trap of Disintegrate, or for 4,500 you could have three light trebuchets that don't even require a show of force because any numbskull who looks at them knows exactly what they can do.

Why would hardness apply to the fire damage? It's all one attack, the fire damage is halved and then all damage collectively is reduced by 20. We seem to reading the rules differently for hardness so i'll ignore the fire damage.

Anyways the +8 damage should actually be +9: 1 from the enhancement bonus, 2 from weapon specialization, 2 from ranged weapon mastery, and 2 from Strike From Above from cragtop archer(I'm assuming the airship is above the target). The DMG states that the ballista is a huge heavy crossbow that's how I applied both reloading abilities. The op said he's able to use unseen servants to cheese his way around reloading so now its a 32,000gp ballista.

This particular situation leaves a lot of time so I'll ignore the attacks from haste. So 8 attacks per round at 2.5 average damage each. The trebuchet's max range is 2500ft, the ballista 8100. The airship in Explorer's Handbook has a speed of 100ft so, it takes 56 rounds for the trebuchet to get in range. So 8x2.5x56=1120/40= 28inches of Adamantine.

Although with the fire damage negated it makes sense to drop splitting and pick up the force ability making it an 18,000gp ballista. Then it's easily affordable by a party of level 13 characters one of which has leadership and then the hardness doesn't matter.

[Fizban]

You could make an argument for the bolt+fire counting as one damage source I suppose, the hardness rules obviously weren't written with energized weapons in consideration. The DMG says a ballista is "essentially a Huge heavy crossbow," but if were actually a Huge heavy crossbow it would weigh 32lbs, take 1 full round action to reload, fire Huge crossbow bolts, and deal half damage to objects. A ballista weighs 400lbs, takes two full round actions to wind even if you don't have to roll a strength check, fires ballista bolts, and might deal full damage to objects. We've also both forgotten that Stormwrack, which has the more detailed rules, cuts ballista damage in half against enemy ships. Furthermore a heavy crossbow with the Quick Loading enhancement takes a move action to reload, and you all seem to be forgetting the fact that actions take place concurrently during the 6-second round, which allows anyone with any iota of common sense to point out that you can't reload the weapon more times in one round with help than you could normally. And the Force enhancement has nothing to do with hardness.

Even if you're allowed to count a ballista as both a siege weapon and a heavy crossbow whenever it's convenient in order to use the heavy crossbow's loading speed with the DMG's siege engine designation to deal full damage to objects in spite of Stormwracks obvious overruling, the most anyone might have to allow you is two reloads per round (two move actions), because you can't reload while you're reloading. Your uber ballista has problems at every level of it's construction and requires a party member's active participation, my trebuchet is bog-standard and requires nothing more than some cheap mercenaries. Your move.

*Oh, regarding speed: the Explorer's Handbook airship has the wrong speed. Airships are supposed to move at 200' per round, and ships only move once per turn, but whoever wrote that statblock messed up and assumed ships double-moved each turn. The correct closing time is then 28 rounds, you're dealing at most 2.5 per attack at 2 attacks per round, so 140 damage while the trebuchet gets in range. Not that you'd be attacking a fortress made of solid adamantine in the first place.

Okay, so, you've got your soldiers, how do you use them? You could just put them on deck, but that does risk them being fireballed or dragon breathed. You put them belowdecks behind arrowslits for +8 AC and improved evasion, that's better. You also have more room for arrowslits than a normal ship since you don't have a water line to worry about. Arrow volleys do not require ballistic arcs, just contiguous squares, so every 10 archers down the line can fire a volley (or the whole line as one). The save DC for the volley drops with range penalties, but if you've swung cheap constant Guided Shot architecture then penalties aren't a problem. Even better, you can use concentrated volleys to hit single targets for 1/5 the full damage while ignoring AC (just one attack vs AC 20), and of course your archers can all be buffed by the bard. But back to keeping them alive, here's the new idea I had: install shutters on the arrowslits, which are all linked mechanically or magically to a single control. If someone shouts a warning, the man at the end with the readied action pulls the switch and boom, full cover no one gets nuked. Shutters may or may not count as part of the ship and require their own reinforcement since if they don't survive the blast it passes through.

If you don't have a big enough catapult or trebuchet to damage something, just get enough height that dropping the stone deals 20d6 anyway. If there's an extra murderhole layer of the ship on the bottom, you can do bombing runs where you just drop 1lb rocks from 240' up for 3d6 damage across the whole area. As always, you have your army of Unseen Crafters to make piles of arrows and carve up cliff faces into stones of varying sizes.

So the ship rolls up and starts immediately bombarding the target fortification with trebuchets or scorpion catapults that have been pre-targeted, while ranks upon ranks of bard-buffed archers fire continuously out of every exposed square of the ship, port, starboard, and even the bottom. If something big shows up, they can fire concentrated volleys out of whatever side of the ship while the adventurers cover the top, and close the shutters in response to any AoEs. Seriously, the power of a ship is in carrying and defending large numbers of troops, not having a place to put a magic doom cannon. If you could face a full compliment of 500 archers at a single target they'd deal up to 100d8 in concentrated volley fire depending on how many commanders hit AC 20, while multiplying any sort of buff you could put on them (mostly just bard, but there could be other spells).

[Tysis]

You could make an argument for the bolt+fire counting as one damage source I suppose, the hardness rules obviously weren't written with energized weapons in consideration. The DMG says a ballista is "essentially a Huge heavy crossbow," but if were actually a Huge heavy crossbow it would weigh 32lbs, take 1 full round action to reload, fire Huge crossbow bolts, and deal half damage to objects. A ballista weighs 400lbs, takes two full round actions to wind even if you don't have to roll a strength check, fires ballista bolts, and might deal full damage to objects. We've also both forgotten that Stormwrack, which has the more detailed rules, cuts ballista damage in half against enemy ships. Furthermore a heavy crossbow with the Quick Loading enhancement takes a move action to reload, and you all seem to be forgetting the fact that actions take place concurrently during the 6-second round, which allows anyone with any iota of common sense to point out that you can't reload the weapon more times in one round with help than you could normally. And the Force enhancement has nothing to do with hardness.

Even if you're allowed to count a ballista as both a siege weapon and a heavy crossbow whenever it's convenient in order to use the heavy crossbow's loading speed with the DMG's siege engine designation to deal full damage to objects in spite of Stormwracks obvious overruling, the most anyone might have to allow you is two reloads per round (two move actions), because you can't reload while you're reloading. Your uber ballista has problems at every level of it's construction and requires a party member's active participation, my trebuchet is bog-standard and requires nothing more than some cheap mercenaries. Your move.

*Oh, regarding speed: the Explorer's Handbook airship has the wrong speed. Airships are supposed to move at 200' per round, and ships only move once per turn, but whoever wrote that statblock messed up and assumed ships double-moved each turn. The correct closing time is then 28 rounds, you're dealing at most 2.5 per attack at 2 attacks per round, so 140 damage while the trebuchet gets in range. Not that you'd be attacking a fortress made of solid adamantine in the first place.

You're right about the force enhancement, I mixed it up with damage reduction.

Stormwrack repeats that a ballista is a Huge heavy crossbow fixed in place. The reload process was as follows: Self-Loading reduces to 1 full-round action, Quick Loading reduces to move action, feat Rapid Reload reduces to free action. Granted Rapid Reload normally only makes a move action reload into a free action reload for light and hand crossbows only. Considering the type of DM that's running this game I didn't think that would be a problem. The reloading argument is rather moot though since they already said they can cheese through it with unseen servants.

It doesn't require a party member's active participation it requires their cohort's. So if unseen servants get you 2 reloads then you get 4 attacks because of splitting. So 3d8(avg12.5)+9+10d6(avg30.5) 52avg damage per attack. When attacking objects and vehicles 26avg damage(I dont see a reason to halve the fire damage twice). So 4 attacks per round at 6 damage for adamantine, 18 average damage against stone, and 21 average damage against wood, each attack. 84 average damage a round against a ship compared to a heavy trebuchet's 11.55(14d6 for the stone avg42.5 plus half of 10d6 avg15.25 from DFI then 1 round to reload and 4 rounds to aim) per round and the ballista can be more than 5 times further away.

The ballista I described is more or less out of the picture because yes it was too expensive. The op decided to make a +1 distance heavy ballista which is 9,300gp plus whatever cost of the special materials he's using and use his party's bard to provide necessary feats to its cheap hireling operator. So it would have 1 attack a round at 52 average damage per attack halved for objects and vehicles to 26. So 21dpr against a wooden ship. The damage is more inline with the trebuchets now although still higher it has almost 5 times their range. However, due to the ballista's size the airship can handle multiple and I'm assuming they can afford several. To me though the real key to the ballistae is that it's more than just a siege weapon. You can attack creatures just easily as destroying ships and fortifications. Which means you could in theory line your ship with ballistae and go dragon hunting.

So yeah, I'll concede the ballista I described was too expensive, couldn't be operated by everyone, and required a questionable reading of the rules. However, the ballista it aided the op to design is quite affordable and more useful than a heavy trebuchet. More importantly its what they want. Because having an ballista, on your airship a mile and a half away, firing supersonic, phasing spears on fire that can thread the eye socket of the king's adviser at a meeting in the middle of a keep just to make a point is awesome.

Edit: While writing this post I noticed trebuchets only get 5 range increments instead of 10 and have a max range of 1500ft. Doesn't really change anything just thought its odd.

[Fizban]

To me though the real key to the ballistae is that it's more than just a siege weapon. You can attack creatures just easily as destroying ships and fortifications. Which means you could in theory line your ship with ballistae and go dragon hunting.
However, the ballista it aided the op to design is quite affordable and more useful than a heavy trebuchet. More importantly its what they want. Because having an ballista, on your airship a mile and a half away, firing supersonic, phasing spears on fire that can thread the eye socket of the king's adviser at a meeting in the middle of a keep just to make a point is awesome.
I'd actually prefer three light trebuchet rather than one heavy, since the light still deals 10d6 per hit and loads faster, much more dps than a heavy (we disagree on almost every dps calculation there is here though). But the ballista, you say it's more than a siege weapon, I say it's less than a normal weapon. Almost all your "ballista" damage is coming from the bard, and you can use all the same distance effects with a longbow for the same cost. The only reason it's a ballista is because you enchanted a ballista instead of a bone bow. I would actually support a price break for enhancing siege weapons to match the price break for wondrous architecture (of course I wouldn't be counting a ship as a stronghold so it'd be 1/2 instead of 1/4), which would make emplaced weapons actually have a reason to exist. Otherwise the only reason to consider a specific weapon in a specific spot is due to wondrous architecture constraints, which the OP seems to figure won't be a problem (I'd give a Guided Shot platform a 5' square at best [not that I'd allow it anyway], so it would make sense to put a ballista there for mooks that can't full attack when the party's not there to use it).

For dragon hunting, see the entire shipful of archers firing concentrated volleys. Each arrow gets the same bard bonuses so even if you can't get a Legion's Magic Weapon (MoE, 2nd level burst that should be ripe for architectural integration) they'll be able to penetrate all but the thickest DR, and I think most DMs allow energy damage on weapons to land even if the main damage doesn't.

For a larger payload, there's nothing stopping you from trying to build an even bigger ballista except the vague/arbitrary nature of the current stat methods. Two more size increases on a heavy crossbow would bring the damage to 6d8, but that's only 1d8 more than the heavy ballista in HoB. Sizing that 5d8 ballista up two times should produce 7d8->10d8 (I believe it works such that each pair of d8's adds a third when you size up). Who knows what the size and weight would be though, since it says a normal ballista is a 5' square and 400lbs, while a heavy is a 15' square and 2,000lbs. Using standard size categories: if we up a 15' square creature twice it goes to 30' square. Weight should be x8 as we've doubled the dimensions, for an 8 ton beast. Price continues to not matter since you're harvesting the materials and building it via magic, but I reckon 5k ought to be enough to cover a 12 ton siege weapon based on the table.
Edit: duh, they took "size increase" as "doubled dimensions," which increases weight by x8. Heavy crossbow=8lbs, x8x8= =512lbs. Same with the bolts, 1/10x8x8=6.4lbs.

So if you want a ballista that's worth noting, build a colossal heavy ballista that takes up a 30' square and deals 10d8 base damage. It still won't fire more than 1/round without a colossal creature to arm it (with feats and magic to help), but a full team of 8-10 might be able to all heave on the winch and keep it firing at that speed. Attack penalty would go up to -8, or -4 with Ultra Ballista Proficiency, and at that size the 24+lb iron-tipped rails it fires should probably count as a proper siege weapon vs objects. There's no such thing as a heavy+++ mount, but if you're just using deck space then you've got plenty. That ought to impress in payload size, raw damage, and technological advancement, just don't try and kid anyone that you're finding a 30'+ dragon thighbone to build it out of.

(You may wonder why anyone would use a Heavy Trebuchet if they could make an Ultra Ballista: the HT has longer range, less range penalty, only has to hit the target square, stays aimed once you hit, no -8 on the attack roll, indirect fire, and is cheaper to produce. The Ultra Ballista is a short range hail mary weapon meant to be crewed by a specialist against priority targets like elephants or iron shod battle wagons. Or basically: my size up extrapolations aren't any more broken than the ballista/trebuchet gap already was, it just makes a massive ballista available. The actual breaking is still done by magic.)

[zyggythorn]

As far as I can gather, the main big gun is more for forced intimidation checks,.

Ie: snipe the castle's flag from 1/2 mile+ away, while loading light balistae for side 'guns' or arrow slits and longbows/modified dart traps for actual combat.

What are we looking at for party make up?
How many cohorts? How big a total crew- minus Unseen servant/crafter's?

As far as ship improvements, have you.considered creating demiplaned within the hold? I know that reeks of Gouda, but always something to consider if you have a Wizard or Sorc in your party.

Or ramp it up to disgusting levels with Druid and Genesis.

Lastly, you could instead Wood Shape the vessel in layers,, making some math a touch easier. Wood to stone, then stone to metal the outermost layer, add in iron wood to sublayers for further make a true Ironside battleship.

[Tysis]

As far as I can gather, the main big gun is more for forced intimidation checks,.

Ie: snipe the castle's flag from 1/2 mile+ away, while loading light balistae for side 'guns' or arrow slits and longbows/modified dart traps for actual combat.


Yeah that's pretty much what they wanted.


I know that reeks of Gouda, but always something to consider if you have a Wizard or Sorc in your party.

If we wanted to get really cheesy we could put shapechange into a energy transformation field around the ship. Then power the field with immovable rods.


As a side note could you use a lightning ballista to power a lightning turbine? I realize its probably too expensive for the ship in question but I'm curious.

[Jowgen]

First, Tysis & Fizban, you two are awesome. The sheer volume and quality of your contributions to this thread have far exceeded my expectations. Thou hath our gratitude.

I'm not sure what type of siege weapon is technically better; but I will go with the Ballista on the basis of its flavor. It just sits better with me, from that perspective. I won't be going for a massive-sized one though. I want my bolts to fit through windows to snipe pesky people, after all. :smalltongue: I'll probably go for a wand-chambered MW Dragonbone Distance one to start off with and then feel my way along with what to upgrade it. 1600 ft max range still outranges even the longest ranged attack spells.

I do agree that the volley archer army approach has way more damage potential, and I would at the very least design the ship to accommodate for it; but the entire idea powerfully conflicts with a ship feature I don't think I can miss out on: The Windguard Wall enhancement. By making it so it encloses the ship, I flat out deny small and smaller invaders (baring incorporality and such), don't have to worry about a volley of archers hitting me, and most importantly, I don't have to worry about Solid Fog & Co. It's a really important thing to counter, because it plain and simply grinds the ship to a near halt when mobility is such an important factor. The trade-off is obviously that I can't have archers firing out of the ship, but as defense matters to me more than offense on this thing, that's a sealed deal.

Oh yeah, I should mention, I decided to switch from an Omimental (MMIII) to a Tempest (MMII). They actually get all the appropriate powers related to the 4 elements, which is a) cooler, and b) might earn more gifted benefits from the DM.

But yeah, speaking of defense, I've been working on optimizing the ship's hardness. As I don't have access to circle magic, and loops of any variety don't fly at my table, I've once again come back to the ever reliable cheese factory that is UMD. Specifically, getting a Staff containing the Hardness spell. In order to activate it, one must have the spell on their list (which none of us do), so one -in very plain RAW- emulate the appropriate casting class with it on its list. Staffs use the wielder's caster level for their spell effects. The Level in the emulated class, and thus caster level, is the check - 20. If we stockpile all our resources onto our strongest UMD user, we can hit a 54, meaning a CL of 34 (we're basically emulating an epic wizard); so hardness improves by 17.

Add the Okimono +5 and the base 5 atop that, and we get 27, which Magically Treated doubles to 54. That is more Hardness than Deities and Demigods' Corellon has Damage Reduction, which is just plain cool. Also, HP/section goes up to 120, which is very decent; so to destroy a section in a single shot, and enemy needs to deal 174 damage in a type that deals full damage. Considering normal projectiles are blocked, they either need their own siege engine of doom, or someone to close to melee. Moreover, the ship is now virtually immune to having it's protection dispelled thanks to that epic caster level; and it has a +29 modifier on all saves; which odd to ward of anything short of the meanest disintegrate.

This awesome hardness should also have offensive benefits, by letting us ram things with more impunity. Which leads me to ask a rather obvious question: how should one determine the Ramming-damage here? The statblock says 12d6... according to storm-wrack that applies per 10 ft of movement... according to Fizban's very convincing argument based on it's 20 mph speed, the ship can move 200 ft/round... and to top it all, downwards movement costs half, so one could take a 400 ft straight down dive towards the thing we want dead. That's 480d6 of damage. I mean, really? :smallannoyed:

On the other hand, I halved the ship's size in my sketch; which should reduce the ram damage. How much by?


Also, would anyone happen to know if they ever published numbers that could be used for airship related spot & listen? The closest thing I know are the Stormwrack at-sea rules, but those don't fully translate. There is no "aerial terrain" with proper modifiers to my knowledge (not even in any of the elemental plane of air resources I checked). Weather should have a powerful impact on spot I imagine. Listen might be best treated as mountain terrain maybe? Seriously, I have no solid idea here. :smallannoyed:

[Tysis]

Well I'd cut the ram damage to 6d6 which lines up with other ships of a similar size. So 240d6 ram damage when headed down at full speed. You can only descend at a 45 degree angle though due to poor maneuverability.

Trebuchets are more effective against stationary structures and ballistae more effective against vehicles. However, you're in an airship, just empty a chest full of orc shotputs over the railing and watch their castles crumble.

I dont see a problem with the spot rules from Stormwrack. It gives a base DC for spotting things while flying. The listen rules for mountains is also +1DC every 20ft which I dont see a problem with either.

[Fizban]

1600 ft max range still outranges even the longest ranged attack spells.
I still say there's absolutely no point in using a ballista if range is your goal, it has the same range as a normal heavy crossbow, the same as a bone bow and only +10' more than a composite longbow. If you insist on the ballista for range, then I'd suggest getting the DM to modify stats. It's clear that weapon ranges go up with size, but the weapon size increase rules don't account for this. If we look to giants, the biological siege weapons, we see that while most large giant's thrown rocks have a 120' range increment, large stone giants have 180', huge cloud giants have 140', and most importantly: huge storm giants wield composite longbows with a range of 180'. If you can get a base 180' range then I'll concede that a ballista may have a point, moreso if you can get a 50% bulky item wondrous architecture discount. You're only right about attack spells as long as Enlarge Spell stays out of it, but a Lesser rod will kick a cl10 Fireball out to 1600' easy for only 1,000gp/cast/day.

One of the other spells/items I was going to suggest was Molten Strike, a 2nd level spell with Long range, but once you start applying metamagic and boosting caster level for range you might as well use Fireball instead.

I flat out deny small and smaller invaders (baring incorporality and such), don't have to worry about a volley of archers hitting me, and most importantly, I don't have to worry about Solid Fog & Co. It's a really important thing to counter, because it plain and simply grinds the ship to a near halt when mobility is such an important factor. The trade-off is obviously that I can't have archers firing out of the ship, but as defense matters to me more than offense on this thing, that's a sealed deal.
Hmm. Unless your foes use pixie gangs or swarms I wouldn't be too worried about that, the better small creatures you can Planar Bind en mass all have teleport or incorporeality anyway. If you bar the arrowslit shutters from behind they should be impervious to lockpicking. Solid Fog can be dealt with in other ways, if nothing else simply by arguing that your elemental ring is already producing strong enough winds to blow it away. Personally I prefer a minimum power Fireball, except now that I've checked it seems that Fog Cloud does not have the same line as Obscuring Mist. Regardless, covering the whole ship in Windguard Walls will be quite expensive compared to a wand or a few scrolls of something else.

But yeah, speaking of defense, I've been working on optimizing the ship's hardness.
Staff of Hardness also seems rather expensive, but anyway. I'd suggest getting some sonic and acid protection on there as well, since there are still plenty of spells that flat ignore hardness.

That's 480d6 of damage. I mean, really? :smallannoyed:
On the other hand, I halved the ship's size in my sketch; which should reduce the ram damage. How much by?
I expect if you calculate how much energy is carried by an aircraft carrier sized ship traveling at 20mph and convert that into damage (the standard seems to be comparing to lbs of tnt) you'll find it's not so crazy, but I can't say I know the calculations. I'm pretty sure a car vs a meatbag at 20mph can be plenty lethal, remember that a lot of modern medicine is the equivalent of pulling you back to life from deep negatives. You said you'd reduced the size before but it wasn't by half, what's the exact size you're using now? If it's Greatship sized (150x40x40) then 6d6, if it's significantly bigger I'd up it to 8d6. I think it's obvious they doubled the ram damage because they doubled the size, but it looks to me like the ram damage actually goes up 2d6 at a time. A lot of that ship size is empty space rather than added mass after all. And of course you should keep the 10' multiplier intact, if the ram damage is so low it can't destroy the ship that's what would really make no sense. As for aiming, the ship may be propelled by an elemental, but it's still a ship. It moves on initiative count 0, and I'd say that you have to declare your heading during your turn. Any creature that sees an airship trying to ram can delay until after the heading is set and dodge before the ship moves, or ready an action even if that doesn't work.

Also, would anyone happen to know if they ever published numbers that could be used for airship related spot & listen?
I agree with Tysis, Stormwrack's fine for spot and yeah mountain listen distance should be fine. Human eyes can only see so much detail, and Hawk/Eagle eyes are only worth a +8 on spot checks. I might be persuaded to allow multipliers if you're using a magic that reduces your spot range penalties. You should also ask your DM what a Spyglass does since they don't have any actual mechanics, I expect most people would have it double the range.

Weather penalties for spot and listen are under weather effects, I'd also note that if you've moving at 20mph you should be adding that to the relative strength for any wind you're flying into. Driving head-on into a Severe wind of 30+mph will result in a Windstorm level effect that will start knocking over crew.

[Tysis]

Could the Windguard enhancement surrounding the ship lessen the effects of wind speed for those standing on the deck? I realize the rules dont cover it, but shouldn't surrounding your airship in a wind wall create a boundary layer to divert air around the ship? If your DM is willing to hear the argument I would ask if Wind Wall blocks Gust of Wind. If it does then your ship should be able to ignore wind speed up to and including severe winds.

With regards to surrounding the ship with the windguard enhancement, is there a way for you to temporarily suppress that? It seems like it would make loading supplies difficult, and any passengers smaller than Medium would have to be teleported on to the ship. Also how does this react to

[Jowgen]

After the latest re-design, the ship is now quarter of the volume of the model one from EH: 140 x 60 x 40 compared to 300 x 90 x 50. That should be 250 sections, making it slightly larger than a greatship (150x40x40, 240 sections, 12.5 10 ft cubes of soarwood). Ram damage should be 6d6 with that.

Should the smaller size impact speed somehow?

As I am made up upon getting the windwall effect (even if it's just to go with the tempest's flavor), I do need a siege engine of some kind to be able to shoot out. For range, even the basic ballista remains good since we'll either have someone with Far Shot, or the Bard can grant it when needed (3200 ft). I don't think the DM will let far-shot apply to non-crossbow-like siege engines. Then there is flexibility and precision. A Catapult could destroy structures much more easily, but for sniping things (e.g. through a window) and avoiding collateral damage (e.g. that pretty mansion I want to gift someone whole rather than in pieces), the ballista is better. It just suits my needs more.

The Hardening Staff will be expensive-ish, but we only need it for at most 3 castings (6 charges) before re-selling, and the sheer massive increase to hardness we can get out of it is unreal and a real catch-all defense. Hardness Ignoring effects are rather far in between, and as far as I understand it, magic items do get to save against Disintegrate.




Could the Windguard enhancement surrounding the ship lessen the effects of wind speed for those standing on the deck? I realize the rules dont cover it, but shouldn't surrounding your airship in a wind wall create a boundary layer to divert air around the ship? If your DM is willing to hear the argument I would ask if Wind Wall blocks Gust of Wind. If it does then your ship should be able to ignore wind speed up to and including severe winds.

With regards to surrounding the ship with the windguard enhancement, is there a way for you to temporarily suppress that? It seems like it would make loading supplies difficult, and any passengers smaller than Medium would have to be teleported on to the ship. Also how does this react to

Well, gases can't pass through the wall, and air is a gas; so by RAW I'd actually argue that all wind is blocked (note to self: go hang out in hurricanes). If I wanted to murder catgirls, I could probably also use the wind to power a bunch of windmills for perpetual mechanical energy, but lets not go there.

As for letting friendly small creatures get on, they will have to be carried by someone, who might need to make the reflex save to hold onto them. Beyond that, I don't feel like making things easier. I mean, what small or smaller creature actually has a good reputation for purposes of getting on our ship?

[g3taso]

I just had an idea for your airship that would be inexpensive, practical, and damned sensible.

Brakes.

Somewhere in your ship, secured by reinforced housings that can withstand the 8,000lbs/ft of energy they are absorbing are a number of immovable rods. When activated, the ship can stop on a dime. Keep some crewmen nearby or a couple skellies or something with a PA system and tell them to click their little buttons and you can come to a screeching halt.

[Fizban]

Should the smaller size impact speed somehow?
Nah, the Eberron ship runs at fiat speed, no reason it'd get faster. Even among the Stormwrack ships bigger is not necessarily slower, the Greatship is actually faster than many smaller ships.


As I am made up upon getting the windwall effect (even if it's just to go with the tempest's flavor),
How much are you paying? I got around to cracking the SBG back open and see that Windguard is on the cheapest tier, but even at freestanding wall costs you'll need 330,000gp to cover the whole surface area of the ship..

but for sniping things, (e.g. through a window) and avoiding collateral damage (e.g. that pretty mansion I want to gift someone whole rather than in pieces), the ballista is better. It just suits my needs more.
Hey, a 20' long pole fits through a window, it just might stick out a bit. As for collateral damage, that's what Unseen Crafters are for :smalltongue:

Hardness Ignoring effects are rather far in between, and as far as I understand it, magic items do get to save against Disintegrate.
Not so rare your enemies won't have them as soon as they see the ship. Resonating Bolt is the main suspect, although Shatterfloor gets a mention as it automatically "pulverizes" the floor with no save. You fear being trapped in a Solid Fog for a few rounds, but a few well placed Sound Lances could tear a big hole in the ship and widen it as collateral damage piles up. Okay, I can't actually find all that many now that I go looking, but one's enough and there are a few monsters too (there's a really nice one in Dragonlance but who needs to make repeated spell hits against a wooden object in any situation other than this?).

Come to think of it, the Hardness spell has a limited volume, as in the object cannot have more volume than 10 cubic feet per caster level. Not 10' cubes mind you, but cubic feet. Even at CL 34 that's only about three and a half 10' cubes of wood. Each ship section has at least 30hp worth of wood (60, but collateral damage cuts it in half), so that's 10'x10'x4" converted to walls, x240 sections= 8,000 cubic feet bare minimum. The ship is untargetable by the spell, and while I know that means you'll just say you're casting it on separate chunks before completion you will still need significantly more than 6 castings: 24 assuming you can sustain that UMD and your DM doesn't realize that's not how ships are built.

Well, gases can't pass through the wall, and air is a gas; so by RAW I'd actually argue that all wind is blocked (note to self: go hang out in hurricanes). If I wanted to murder catgirls, I could probably also use the wind to power a bunch of windmills for perpetual mechanical energy, but lets not go there.
That is an excellent way to get your entire crew asphyxiated. Please tell your perpetual wind+rain+lightning beast that requires no food, air, or water about all the catgirls that would murder.:smallconfused:

I mean, what small or smaller creature actually has a good reputation for purposes of getting on our ship?
None that you can think of until it's of dire importance. The familiars/servants/messengers of allies are most likely, although as a flying fortress you're the obvious destination for anyone in need of rescuing and it would be quite amusing if you suddenly found yourself with a group of small flying creatures who needed saving but couldn't get on the ship. Or you know, any friendly NPC that happens to be of Small size and is trying to land. Really I'm more wondering what creatures are of such horrible reputation that you'd take such drastic measures, you never answered before. Is your DM fond of wandering faerie hordes?

Now that I think about it, how is that Windguard Wall shaped? It can only be applied to one side of a wall, I assume you're using the exterior of the ship, but if it's meant to perfectly seal the ship then it must cover the deck as well. I can't expect that to make for good footing. Otherwise it only extends up to 10' past the edge of the gunwales.


Brakes. . . a number of immovable rods.
Interesting. There's no way you can actually concentrate that at a point without creating the same effect as a straight ramming, but if spread throughout the ship it might be possible to avoid. I'd run it as a collision at speed, dividing the ram damage between each section being stopped. Even assuming Hardness 54 (it should be obvious by now there's no way I'd agree to that stacking but anyway), you'd need 8 rods to get the average damage low enough to negate it at 15d6 per section. That's 40k before whatever method you intend to use for synchronized remote activation, which must be in place at all times if you intend to have an emergency brake.

Someone mentioned traps earlier, sans the "magical," and you know if it weren't for magical traps being insane I think these would get a lot more press (or maybe I've just missed it). Note that there's no rules for trap targeting, only triggering. While it's generally assumed that the trap is built to target the location that triggers it, I've read more than one published trap that just says "whoever's first in this line," including some that are explicitly the sort where a defender pulls the lever. Most importantly, traps can have huge attack bonuses for cheap. If you've got the cash/fabricate/unseen crafters, you can absolutely make an auto-turret that just keeps shooting everything within an area until you turn it off or it runs out of ammo. Probably best not to try reducing the search DC to 1 in order to reach negative price.

[g3taso]

Interesting. There's no way you can actually concentrate that at a point without creating the same effect as a straight ramming, but if spread throughout the ship it might be possible to avoid. I'd run it as a collision at speed, dividing the ram damage between each section being stopped. Even assuming Hardness 54 (it should be obvious by now there's no way I'd agree to that stacking but anyway), you'd need 8 rods to get the average damage low enough to negate it at 15d6 per section. That's 40k before whatever method you intend to use for synchronized remote activation, which must be in place at all times if you intend to have an emergency brake.

Actually, you can. You just attach it to the ships structural pieces. In the real world, the turbines or rotors that provide motive power to a boat (or braking) transfer energy to and from the structure of the vessel in the same way.

[nijineko]

Um. anyone consider using the stronghold builders guidebook?

with material from that i was able to make a ship that could fly, phase through solids, submerse and breath underwater plus speak with animals on the deck, is airtight, purifies the internal air constantly, never ending source of food and water, teleport, plane shift, fireproof, regenerate itself, contains numerous extradimensional spaces, heals injuries, has a jail, forge, training rooms, a library, banquet hall, sleeping quarters, storage rooms, a lab, unseen servant staff, can steer itself, can shift into a caravel, pinnace, rowboat, or briefcase, predict weather, control weather, sense ships in a few miles radius, auto-maps the surroundings, plus more i haven't mentioned, (and my next purchase is to use the SBG rules to embed a hallucinatory terrain that WILL travel with the ship - i.e.: instant cloaking field). cost me under 700,000gp and 3-4 years or so to enchant it all. it's basically a personal luxury cruiser that i can fit in my backpack, or can carry and support a crew of around 50 depending on configuration.

^^


and i wasn't even really trying to optimize it, that was just being thrifty. if i'd been trying to optimize it, i would have made it an item familiar too, which would allow me to enchant it further without the need for any item creation feats of any sort at all. then it would be intelligent and self directing, i could animate it so it could self-control all aspects of itself, and that's just getting started.

[khadgar567]

Um. anyone consider using the stronghold builders guidebook?

with material from that i was able to make a ship that could fly, phase through solids, submerse and breath underwater plus speak with animals on the deck, is airtight, purifies the internal air constantly, never ending source of food and water, teleport, plane shift, fireproof, regenerate itself, contains numerous extradimensional spaces, heals injuries, has a jail, forge, training rooms, a library, banquet hall, sleeping quarters, storage rooms, a lab, unseen servant staff, can steer itself, can shift into a caravel, pinnace, rowboat, or briefcase, predict weather, control weather, sense ships in a few miles radius, auto-maps the surroundings, plus more i haven't mentioned, (and my next purchase is to use the SBG rules to embed a hallucinatory terrain that WILL travel with the ship - i.e.: instant cloaking field). cost me under 700,000gp and 3-4 years or so to enchant it all. it's basically a personal luxury cruiser that i can fit in my backpack, or can carry and support a crew of around 50 depending on configuration.

^^


and i wasn't even really trying to optimize it, that was just being thrifty. if i'd been trying to optimize it, i would have made it an item familiar too, which would allow me to enchant it further without the need for any item creation feats of any sort at all. then it would be intelligent and self directing, i could animate it so it could self-control all aspects of itself, and that's just getting started.
dude are you reading the treat correctly ship is basically a flying tippty verse city crying out loud with probably enough area to spare build in farm and if you read the steel forge you may lose that last int score to

[Fizban]

Actually, you can. You just attach it to the ships structural pieces. In the real world, the turbines or rotors that provide motive power to a boat (or braking) transfer energy to and from the structure of the vessel in the same way.
I don't think there's any real-world ship of that size that can literally go from full to stop in under 6 seconds.

[gadren]

The last campaign I played in I built an airship with my artificer.
The most powerful thing I did to it, which I've not seen mentioned here, is turning then entire airship into an animated object.
Now, that was a bit easier because we had a gargantuan ship instead of a colossal one (and made up for space with portable holes), but it is still doable for a colossal ship if you take Craft Construct and your DM allows the Alternate Construction Rules (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/constructs/animated-object) for animated objects.

The reason that animating an airship is so great is that, as a creature, it can be targeted by any spell that would works on constructs, such as haste, resist energy, invisibility, blur, repair x damage, etc. It can also pilot itself at your command.

On my airship, I intentionally built in a huge detailed figurehead of a woman that I could put a helm, necklace, rings, and bracers on, and give a weapon to wield (I crafted the spear from Ghostwalk that doubles movement speed). How well that works out depends on your DM.

Anyways, my 2cp rom experience.

[Bronk]

The last campaign I played in I built an airship with my artificer.
The most powerful thing I did to it, which I've not seen mentioned here, is turning then entire airship into an animated object.


In my game, a PC druid obtained an Elven Warbird spelljamming craft, which is a gargantuan tree. It was outfitted with quite a number of enhancements, including grappling arms...then awakened, with the spell cast both maximized and empowered. The craft became a sentient ally, and after some diplomacy checks, agreed to become part of the party, as well as becoming a druid itself. Long story short, it had all the advantages of your construct ship, could think for itself, could be healed just like a normal creature, cast spells, and after taking the 'humanoid wild shape' fangshield ACF, was able join the party on adventures unobtrusively. It was also able to use the same sizing crossbow in both forms, with it basically being the equivalent of a self wielded ballista in ship form.

[Fizban]

The problem I always have with animating the ship is that the hit points take a nosedive and the ship becomes destructible in a single spell. You can definitely do some cool stuff though, no argument there. Wielding a sizing crossbow at both humanoid and ship size is genius.

Hmm, was just investigating ship speeds, googled up a thread and the AaEG/Stormwrack discrepancy has been noted. AaEG says vehicles double move, but Stormwrack says they just get moved their speed at the end of the round. Stormwrack uses the same speeds from AaEG for identical ships, so a bunch of ships got nerfed (Stormwrack is internally consistent with it's overland table). Going back to primary sources, the PHB/srd gives the intended speeds for it's ships, so we have:

Galley: SRD 4mph, AaEG 4mph (rowed) or 3mph (light), Storm 2mph (rowed) or 1.5mph (light)

Keelboat: SRD 1mph, AaEG 2mph, Storm 1mph (rowed or light)

Longship: SRD 3mph, AaEG 3mph (rowed) or 2mph (light), Storm 2mph (rowed) or 1.5mph (light)

Rowboat: SRD 1.5mph, AaEG n/a, Storm 1mph

Sailing Ship (Caravel)*: SRD 2mph, AaEG 4mph (light), Storm 3mph (light)

Warship: SRD 2.5mph, AaEG 4mph (rowed) or 3mph (light), Storm 3mph (rowed) or 2mph (light)


And the minmax board post I googled up has a guy saying that real life longships are much faster at 5-11mph, up to 17mph under ideal conditions, which none of those sail speeds can approach.

*More discrepencies, as SRD says 150 tons cargo, Stormwrack gives 120, but a Dungeonomics post I just read said that should be 50.


Still doesn't matter in regards to Eberron's fiat airships, but it does seem possible that Stormwrack screwed up dropping a lot of ship speeds accidentally. Or it could be that AaEG made some of them too fast with it's hidden double-move setup. The question is if I want to do a bunch of medieval sailing ship research like I did for airships, and the answer is not really.

Also: if you want to mix and match your stronghold and ship enhancements, one stronghold space is equivalent to four ship sections. If we take the Caravel and apply a stronghold's Flying enhancement, the price is. . . 90,000gp. That number just keeps coming up.

[ExLibrisMortis]

You could perhaps animate the ship into sections, then give them this legion devil/scouring construct ability:

A scouring slinger within 100 feet of another scouring slinger or a scouring stanchion shares a single pool of hit points. This pool is the sum of the hit points from all creatures that have the collective health ability and are within 100 feet of each other. Subtract any damage taken by one creature from the overall pool. No creature that has collective health is destroyed until the pool reaches 0 hit points, at which time all creatures sharing the pool are destroyed simultaneously. If a scouring slinger is separated from others in its hit point pool, divide the damage taken proportionally among the creatures within the pool. For example, if a collective of five stanchions and slingers has lost 100 hit points, each creature that separates from the pool has taken 20 points of damage.

Note that scouring constructs are craftable, by druids. They cost 117.000 and 105.000 gp each (42 and 30 HD), respectively - so this ability is totally within reach.

You can add a bit of hive-mind and telepathy to give the impression of a single ship consciousness.

Going this way might also appease some DM concerns that the ship as a whole becomes too easy to buff/conceal/arm etcetera.

[gadren]

Another cool idea with permanently animated objects, even if you can't/don't want to make your ship into a construct, you can make it into a flying aircraft carrier by permanently animating huge or large flying constructs (at a fraction of the price) designed to each hold a party member.

[Tvtyrant]

Don't forget you can use enveloping pits to make transdimensional hallways for cheap. Each one is 10/10/10/50 ft, so just a few could double the size of your ship and actually make it lighter. Add a few dozen and it is the size of a town, a few hundred (you can nest them in each other) and you have a city.

[Fizban]

Collective Health is a good idea, though I'd expect it to swing all the other way and make the ship much stronger. Normally it only takes destroying 1/4 the sections to sink the ship, but if they have Collective Health then you can't destroy the ship by parts. There is a tradeoff on how many sections you'd animate in the difficulty of buffing them, but I think even Colossal chunks will result in the ship being harder to down. A Colossal Animated Object is worth 27 ship sections: 27x60= 1,620hp for most wooden ships (including the Eberron example), compared to 256hp on a standard 3.5 AO, or 151 with the Pathfinder version. With Collective Health you must destroy all chunks instead of 1/4 sections, effectively multiplying that hp by four to 1024 or 604. That's assuming Colossal, but Large AOs have 52hp for both 3.5 and P, so that nearly quadruples the effective hit points of the ship. In any case the AC of each section becomes more than 5, so that's also a massive boost to defense. The only weakness is that it loses the object energy reduction (1/3 fire/electricity, 1/4 cold).

Just using an airship as transport for a Scouring Slinger and repairmen is an excellent idea, pushed to cheese with the usual magical traps. Repair Moderate will average more than the 10 hp it takes per round to sling Scorpions indefinitely. Following that, any sort of creature that spawns minions would be a good choice for locking up somewhere near the bottom. A Graveyard Sludge from the same book animates any creature that dies within 20' for example, though getting it line of effect without allowing escape would be. . . difficult. Still, a nice low bombing run that also animates everyone that dies for free is pretty awesome. Other creatures with constant damage auras would work, a Magmin could be bound and bound (with Binding) for 1,500gp to simply sit in the bottom of the ship and bake everyone below (and above of course, a Frost Salamander would be less dangerous but not easily found). Probably better options around, but note that Binding is a [compulsion] so there's tons of stuff it won't work on, like that Graveyard Sludge. Of course you could just tie a permanent Wall of Fire to the outside of the ship, but that highlights why treating a ship as a stationary stronghold is overpowered.

I've also noticed yet another massive advantage of the Eberron elemental airship: no rigging. Even the largest sailing ship from Stormwrack caps out at 4 rigging sections (most are 2-3), which have no hardness and just wave around in the air asking to be shot. This is an excellent equalizer since if you can stay out of their main firing arcs and destroy their rigging they're dead in the water no matter how big they are and you don't have to bore through 1/4 of their full ship sections. Eberron's elemental vessels have no rigging, making it impossible to "target the engines" and disable them short of smashing 1/4 of the ship and forcing it to sink (obviously much more difficult if you're using the printed ship with 1,000 sections).

A proposed fix: make the elemental ring the rigging section. Bonus: you can even use the elemental's hit points, as Huge Air and Fire elementals both have 136hp, a tad more than 1.5x the usual 80hp on rigging sections of well built ships. Double bonus: if the elemental ring is destroyed, the elemental has been slain and you'll need to bind a new one. This gives an elemental ship a serious downside, as their "rigging" has fewer hp than that of a normal ship and can't be as easily replaced. Counter: the elemental ring may retain it's DR 5/- and fire subtype (though this starts suggesting the elemental is just in the open and can be insta-killed with other spells), and as a creature it's much easier to heal than an object so a party ought to be able to keep their ship moving no problem. Of course Jowgen's plan to bind a Tempest would yield 324hp and make this less of a worry, but this fix gives an actual reason to do that other than cool points.

Huh, just noticed a point of contention one could drop there: I've mentioned plenty of times that the Eberron ship runs at fiat speed, but another justification that can be considered is the Air Elemental's fly 100', which if double moving (as the AaEG does) results in 20mph. This doesn't hold up for Fire Elementals only have speed 50' and hustling constantly will still kill an Elemental without a separate immunity, but the point is that I noticed the Tempest only has fly 60'. So if one prefers the "Air Elementals double move speed" justification, a Tempest is much slower. Also regarding Tempests: you said they have abilities for all four elements but I don't see any earth powers :smallfrown:

I've also been considering mobile strongholds. Obviously with elemental airships they don't mean much, but against stuff with more reasonable speeds they have a place. No cargo weight limit (only volume) and better walls you can make as thick as you want with no extra movement cost. Just 1mph should be enough to stymie most mundane military action so even a crawling stronghold will only face interesting dangers, which can include more than just dragons for once. You can do golem cheese too: use the Landlord feat to pay for your standard mobile/flying box and a golem to "guard" it, deploy golem.

[nijineko]

dude are you reading the treat correctly ship is basically a flying tippty verse city crying out loud with probably enough area to spare build in farm and if you read the steel forge you may lose that last int score to

sorry, what? your incomprehensibility is rendering your post into inapplicability.




what about making the ship an item familiar? whole thing becomes a magic item, it's intelligent, and then can even be made able to control itself. plus it gets to use whichever saving throw is better, its own or the owner's. not to mention that being an item familiar removes all item creation feat prerequisites for all subsequent modifications.

also, using m's magnificent caravel does give unseen servants that can sail and serve as basic crew for the easy stretches (i.e.: autopilot).

strongholds can be mobile, which allows for normally non-mobile effects to be embedded into the architecture of the stronghold, which then becomes mobile along with the stronghold, so long as every stronghold space is enchanted with the same mobility type. just figure out how many stronghold spaces the ship volume (plus sails, mind you) contains.


if the ship is wood, i prefer living wood over soar wood. self-healing and all that.

[Jowgen]

Lots of interesting stuff here, lets see...

First things first, ship's been properly brought in line with a Galley in terms of size: 135 x 60 x 40 (240 sections, ), which ought to make the ring 80 ft diameter.

I managed to find another printed Airship from Dragon 329 p. 80. It's called Aircutter, it's 40 x 15 x 10 (a more narrow Cog, basically), moves 3 mph (so 30 ft/round), average maneuverability, binds a large elemental, can be flown by a single individual, and costs 55000 gp. Also, I found a Dragon mag article (294 p. 49) that has vehicle rules, but that seems to just be a re/pre-print of A&E.


Brakes. I don't really see the appeal here. The Dragon mag article does have a little side-bar on optional rules to make momentum more realistic, but even that doesn't cover an issue with stopping. I think at worst the DM might require an expenditure of 10 ft of movement to come to a sudden halt, plus some reflex saves for those on board to not fall over; but other than that...


Nah, the Eberron ship runs at fiat speed, no reason it'd get faster.

Well, the Aircutter moves at 30 rather than 20; but yeah, the difference is too minute compared to the size difference for me to make an argument here.


How much are you paying? I got around to cracking the SBG back open and see that Windguard is on the cheapest tier, but even at freestanding wall costs you'll need 330,000gp to cover the whole surface area of the ship..

The exact price will come down to how much the DM thinks the Tempest having a Windwall SLA at will should factor into it. As is, my base argument is to argue for it to be priced as freestanding wall and for it only to need be applied to the hull (if need be, I'll have them in appropriate sections first and then piece them together after enchanting). Then it comes to the question of how the DM counts the 800 square ft: Lenght x width, or lenght x height. If it's lenght x width then I'll be in luck. At max girth, the ship has a circumference of 350 ft and The walls are 1/2 ft thick so 175 square ft. Even if one were to count every 10 ft of height as extra wall, at 40 ft height that would make it 4 x 175 circumference walls, so 700. That would leave 100 ft spare. If the DM goes lenght x height (i.e. outer surface area), then there will be a massive maths headache of calculating that and it'll get rather pricey.


Not 10' cubes mind you, but cubic feet.

Ah. True. Well that's quite a bit of a hickup. By my math, one section is 50 cubic ft, so 12000 cubic ft for whole hull. At CL 34, that'll require us to burn through about 35 charges of a regular staff. At that point, it might be better to ask for an Improved version of the Okimono, maybe one that uses Hardening rather than Ironwood as the base spell. Might need to compromise for a lower hardness rathing overall though. Should still be able to get to 30. Maybe 40, if lucky.


I don't think there's any real-world ship of that size that can literally go from full to stop in under 6 seconds

I actually recall reading that it takes a vehicle in D&D 10 ft of movement to get up to max speed for ramming purposes. The reverse ought to apply. Either case, I'm pretty sure that kind of acceleration/deceleration is not very real w... do I hear catgirls?


Animated Object & such

I do see the appeal and the potential, but that course of action just ain't for me. I like my ship being just a ship, following standard ship targeting and collision rules and so forth. Same for collective health pools and such. But, someone else interested in their own Damocles might find this info useful in the future, so please don't let me stifle your discussion on those fronts.


Living Wood

I would, however, very much like for the wood to count as alive and have self-regenerating properties. Now, there are 3 kinds: Livewood from ECS, Living Wood from SBG, and Wildwood from RotW. Problem is, Soarwood is its own kind of tree. Livewood comes with a whole host of weird rules, and is a specific type of tree; Wildwood is more straight forward, but comes from a specific kind of tree... Living Wood, however, is just "specially bred wood" made by elves, and heals way faster than either of the other two. Maybe it's possible to treat is as a template of sorts, like Feycraft? Unless anyone happens to know another way, I may have to negotiate with the DM on this one. We do have a Fey character who can speak with plants and bleed forever as well as an endless supply of holywater at hand for fluff purposes...


Enveloping Pits

Got that covered. :smallwink:


I've also noticed yet another massive advantage of the Eberron elemental airship: no rigging

I think rather than treating the ring as the rigging section, it might be better to use the binding struts. After all, the ring is really just energy that damages things that hit it. Using the struts would give the ship 2 secondary and 2 primary "rigging sections", they'd get their own rather beefy hp pool, and I'd rule that a ship that looses one of the mains or both of the supports just looses propulsion until that's fixed. With that, the airship still has a noticable advantage, but they basic mechanic stays roughly the same.


Also regarding Tempests: you said they have abilities for all four elements but I don't see any earth powers

Well I'll be... oh that's just wrong. Then again, the only thing Earth Elementals get is Earth-glide. I mean, I'd love for the Ship to be able to do that very much; but it just doesn't fit the fluff imo. So yeah, sad times :smallfrown:

However, based on the whirwind ability, I will make a passionate argument than rather than just getting damaged by touching the ring, a creature needs to make the Reflex save or be sucked into it as per the ability. And be set on fire. Just imagine the wow-factor there. Something goes in the ring, spins around the ship in its 20 ft radius storms ring and slowly burns lest it can fly and makes the rather steep relfex save. Oh the hilarity.


item familiar?

That... okay, I never really looked into item familiars because they just reek of cheese, but just the crafting feat part looks like it would just fix so many problems. The binding of the elemental would be no trouble. Adding Magically Treated and Windguard would a) be easier and b) cheaper. Okay, I'm gonna have to do some reading up on what to do with this...

[Fizban]

I think at worst the DM might require an expenditure of 10 ft of movement to come to a sudden halt, plus some reflex saves for those on board to not fall over; but other than that...
Ships have a maximum speed change per turn based on their maneuverability. Unless elemental vessels have some extra rules somewhere, you're looking at a max speed change of 5' per turn with that poor maneuverability. At least in Stormwrack.

As is, my base argument is to argue for it to be priced as freestanding wall and for it only to need be applied to the hull -snip-
Uh, yeah that'd be the whole surface area. You could just put it on the front as that's most likely where you'd hit a solid fog, but if you want it over the entire surface you'll need to pay for the entire surface. For a rectangular prism that's 2(wh+wl+lh), though the ship doesn't fill the full prism so you might ad-hoc some small percantage off. You seem to have mixed up some volume in there, it doesn't matter how thick the walls are, but you could instead use a cylinder at 2pi*rh+pi*r^2.

By my math, one section is 50 cubic ft, so 12000 cubic ft for whole hull.
Just pointing out you've used a more expensive estimate than me here, mine came out to 33.3 cu ft per section.

I think rather than treating the ring as the rigging section, it might be better to use the binding struts.
That would be the other option, I just like the ring because it's more unique and potentially more dangerous (for the ship). I wouldn't assume the struts have some great gobs of hp: unless you can get exact strut dimensions I wouldn't give them more than 2 section's worth, and converting volumes of wood with exact dimensions might get you less.

Then again, the only thing Earth Elementals get is Earth-glide.
Not quite, they also get Push: free bull rush on hit.

However, based on the whirwind ability, I will make a passionate argument than rather than just getting damaged by touching the ring, a creature needs to make the Reflex save or be sucked into it as per the ability. And be set on fire. Just imagine the wow-factor there. Something goes in the ring, spins around the ship in its 20 ft radius storms ring and slowly burns lest it can fly and makes the rather steep relfex save. Oh the hilarity.
Immediately invalidated as air elementals already have whirlwind, fire elementals already have burn, and neither ring type has either effect.

That... okay, I never really looked into item familiars because they just reek of cheese, but just the crafting feat part looks like it would just fix so many problems. The binding of the elemental would be no trouble. Adding Magically Treated and Windguard would a) be easier and b) cheaper. Okay, I'm gonna have to do some reading up on what to do with this...
The link (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/itemFamiliars.htm) if anyone's lost. The first line that seems problematic is, "has a permanent magical effect the character can (and knows how to) use." This means the ship needs to already be magical, and I could argue that it must have an actively used power rather than a passive enhancement (even armor is still used directly by the character, rather than just being a tough object you own). Then there's the item creation feat avoidance, which doesn't remove any of the other prerequisites. Unless you have the specific ability to emulate spells from Artificer, Warlock, or similar, you can't UMD your way through that, though you could have a party member help.

As for weather or not it works at all, well if you're actually counting the ship as a single item then sure. I might even let the familiar ego try to dominate the elemental directly. If you're counting it as a stronghold and giving different sections different enhancements, I'd say that clearly means the item creation rules applying to the ship no longer count it as a single item, so you can't item familiar it.

There's also the problem that you'd have to retrain a feat or wait until 15th to get it. But hey, you're already counting it as a stronghold and you're past 9th level, why not just use the Landlord feat? It has the most deliciously open wording: "The exact nature of the resources depends on your campaign; you and your DM should decide on this beforehand." The two examples given are "land grant" and "free labor," but there's no reason it couldn't be, say, "a powerful spirit imbues my stronghold with magic because I'm awesome." Since it's an outside source there is literally nothing you need to make it work other than the Landlord feat itself, and at 13th you'd already have 150,000gp to work with, plus funds to match anything you pay out of pocket. The only downside it the level requirement but you're already past that.

Other methods for getting free stuff/avoiding crafting rules include Ancestral Relic, which would actually be an awesome way to magically enhance a ship all the way from the start of the game, and DMG2 bonding rituals.

[Jowgen]

Ships have a maximum speed change per turn based on their maneuverability. Unless elemental vessels have some extra rules somewhere, you're looking at a max speed change of 5' per turn with that poor maneuverability. At least in Stormwrack.

Hmmm... I never noticed that part. Interesting. I can see a case for it in that it mostly makes sense that something that big can't just stop dead. On the other hand, airship propulsion does work quite differently from ship propulsion, and an airship's weight to volume ratio is very different from that of regular ships. Even disregarding the whole "light than air buoyancy" thing, it would still be 1/4 the weight. Then again, airships cant turn in place and -to my knowledge- cant reverse, so they certainly lack any sort of break. I'll just have to ask the DMs opinion here I guess and go with whatever his first instinct is.



Uh, yeah that'd be the whole surface area. You could just put it on the front as that's most likely where you'd hit a solid fog, but if you want it over the entire surface you'll need to pay for the entire surface. For a rectangular prism that's 2(wh+wl+lh), though the ship doesn't fill the full prism so you might ad-hoc some small percantage off. You seem to have mixed up some volume in there, it doesn't matter how thick the walls are, but you could instead use a cylinder at 2pi*rh+pi*r^2.

I personally find it to be a bit more ambiguous on how the free-standing walls are counted for enchantment purposes.


Just pointing out you've used a more expensive estimate than me here, mine came out to 33.3 cu ft per section.

Lets see. Section HP is 60. Soarwood as 10 HP/inch. It follows that each section in 6 inches thick. 10 ft x 10 ft x 0.5 ft is 50 cubic ft. That's my calculation.


That would be the other option, I just like the ring because it's more unique and potentially more dangerous (for the ship). I wouldn't assume the struts have some great gobs of hp: unless you can get exact strut dimensions I wouldn't give them more than 2 section's worth, and converting volumes of wood with exact dimensions might get you less.

Well, the struts will at least be noticeable more durable than rigging. If the DM wants more danger... I do believe there is some dungeon adventure to do with a crashed airship, and the text talks about any more damage risking the elemental being freed... so my guess would be that, unless the elemental is suppressed at that point, the breaking of a main binding strut results in the elemental having a way out. Fits with the whole "magic maze" thing.


Not quite, they also get Push: free bull rush on hit.

I check the Push thing, and all it does according to the SRD is allow them to not provoke AoO when bull-rushing. No free on hit in there. You might be thinking of a different ability with the same name? Or did the earth elemental get some update?


Immediately invalidated as air elementals already have whirlwind, fire elementals already have burn, and neither ring type has either effect.

Granted on the burn, but in case of the whirwind, the Tempest's version is special in that it can go in the water and become a vortex. Clearly far more powerful of an ability. Also, this opens up some interesting questions on what damage the elemental ring should deal. It has the Fire's Burn as you mentioned and the Fire subtype, suggesting fire; but its whirlwind deals 4d6 (untyped? It's sand, so I guess... bludgeon/pierce/slash?)... then again, the flavour would really favor electricity.


The first line that seems problematic is, "has a permanent magical effect the character can (and knows how to) use."

Soarwood has "magical buoyancy" and dragonshards have "magical binding properties", so between those I think the ship as a whole can be argued as having a permanent magical effect of some kind. More reliably so than the UMD approach at least.


and I could argue that it must have an actively used power rather than a passive enhancement (even armor is still used directly by the character, rather than just being a tough object you own).

Well, designing the ship and all certainly qualifies for knowing how to use its powers, and knowing/being able to fly the ship even without an elemental in it would qualify as active use in my book. Horrible ineffective, yes, but still.



Then there's the item creation feat avoidance, which doesn't remove any of the other prerequisites. Unless you have the specific ability to emulate spells from Artificer, Warlock, or similar, you can't UMD your way through that, though you could have a party member help.

My plan was to use scrolls. "access through another magic item or spellcaster is allowed" after all.


As for weather or not it works at all, well if you're actually counting the ship as a single item then sure. I might even let the familiar ego try to dominate the elemental directly. If you're counting it as a stronghold and giving different sections different enhancements, I'd say that clearly means the item creation rules applying to the ship no longer count it as a single item, so you can't item familiar it.

It is a rather messy overlap of categories to be sure. The EH entry is a clear mix of Stormwrack statblock and magic item statblock. As per the example for Daern’s Instant Fortress, a magic item can be a stronghold. There are cases of magic items that consist of several modular pieces that can be modified individually. I don't think there are any clear definitions that stand in the way of treating it as a single magic item that happens to have mix-n-match sub components.


There's also the problem that you'd have to retrain a feat or wait until 15th to get it. But hey, you're already counting it as a stronghold and you're past 9th level, why not just use the Landlord feat? It has the most deliciously open wording: "The exact nature of the resources depends on your campaign; you and your DM should decide on this beforehand." The two examples given are "land grant" and "free labor," but there's no reason it couldn't be, say, "a powerful spirit imbues my stronghold with magic because I'm awesome." Since it's an outside source there is literally nothing you need to make it work other than the Landlord feat itself, and at 13th you'd already have 150,000gp to work with, plus funds to match anything you pay out of pocket. The only downside it the level requirement but you're already past that.

We've got retraining rules in play and our DFA has an feat-slot we left effectively open for this sort of thing (its surprisingly tricky to find worthwhile feats for a knowledge focused DFA...:smallannoyed:). The Landlord feat... I'm not saying that it's any more cheesy than Item Familiar is here, but I think that Item Familiar is a bit more versatile in terms of adding more stuff. I mean, being able to craft anything onto the ship with just a scroll of the spell... I'm getting chills just thinking about it.


Other methods for getting free stuff/avoiding crafting rules include Ancestral Relic, which would actually be an awesome way to magically enhance a ship all the way from the start of the game, and DMG2 bonding rituals.

Ancestral relic is cool, but the alignment requirement won't fly. I'm familiar with the Bonding Rituals, and as far as I recall none of them really have any particular crunch to them.


EDIT: I've been reading up on Item familiar and think I've come up with some good approaches on how to integrate it into the ship, DM permitting of course.

The basic idea is to work off the "Unlock abilities" thing to essentially unlock the Elemental's abilities for the ship. The elemental is the sapience of the ship, i.e. no separate ego. Up until level 7, item-familiar binding essentially suppresses or just plain up wiped out the elementals mind, which is actually a bit more ethical in my opinion that it being imprisoned like that while fully self-aware. At level 7, when sapience is granted, the Elemental's mental faculties are partially restored, but with a strong imprint of its master (hence the alignment change and such). At level 10, Improved Sapience is added, and the elemental actually comes out with better mental stats than it had while still normal. Whether or not it recalls its former life is questionable; but the point is that at this point it is happy serving its purpose. Also, it now gets the communication abilities needed for the master to command the ship from anywhere withing 120 ft of it. Lastly, at level 14, Spell Use is chosen; which in this adaptation simply allows the Tempest to use its own innate SLAs (i.e. lighting bolt, windwall, gust of wind, chill touch).

Also, as a general balancing factor; I'd rule that any bonus exp gained from the feat goes into an artificer-like pool that can only be used to improve the item familiar. Either way, this approach integrates the weird Item Familiar and Airship mechanics, really brings out the flavor of having a Tempest powering the ship, makes the binding of the tempest more ethical, and reduces the OPness of Item Familiar. I think my DM would be happy to go for it, whatcha think? :smallsmile:

EDIT#2: Notable discovery. Dugeonscape p. 144 lists wall variants, including the simple "Hardened". It increases base hardness by 5. This represents superior materials and craftmanship and is "essentially a masterwork wall". Thus, this is easily achievable through mundane means, so I can get the hull base hardness up to 10 without trouble.

[Fizban]

Quick response before work:


I can see a case for it in that it mostly makes sense that something that big can't just stop dead. On the other hand, airship propulsion does work quite differently from ship propulsion, and an airship's weight to volume ratio is very different from that of regular ships.
You'd also have to consider that air has a lot less drag than water.

I personally find it to be a bit more ambiguous on how the free-standing walls are counted for enchantment purposes.
I'm curious as to where you see the ambiguity: it looks pretty clear to me that it's either per stronghold space or per 800 sq ft of freestanding wall.

Lets see. Section HP is 60. Soarwood as 10 HP/inch. It follows that each section in 6 inches thick. 10 ft x 10 ft x 0.5 ft is 50 cubic ft. That's my calculation.Huh, don't know where I'd got 4" from. I basically gave the whole thing 50% off due to the collateral damage rules though, since destroying one section cuts the hp the next in half.

Well, the struts will at least be noticeable more durable than rigging. If the DM wants more danger... I do believe there is some dungeon adventure to do with a crashed airship, and the text talks about any more damage risking the elemental being freed... so my guess would be that, unless the elemental is suppressed at that point, the breaking of a main binding strut results in the elemental having a way out. Fits with the whole "magic maze" thing.
Also good.

I check the Push thing, and all it does according to the SRD is allow them to not provoke AoO when bull-rushing. No free on hit in there. You might be thinking of a different ability with the same name? Or did the earth elemental get some update?
Huh, I could have sworn that used to be on-hit. Maybe 3.0 or errata or just the only way the ability would have had any use.

Granted on the burn, but in case of the whirwind, the Tempest's version is special in that it can go in the water and become a vortex.
Just an extension of water elementals doing a vortex, you'd need to find a line where a water-bound ship did the same thing.

Well, designing the ship and all certainly qualifies for knowing how to use its powers, and knowing/being able to fly the ship even without an elemental in it would qualify as active use in my book. Horrible ineffective, yes, but still.
One could argue that proficiency in this case would mean sufficient ranks in profession [sailor] or one of the feats related to controlling elemental ships. I wasn't gonna that strongly though.

My plan was to use scrolls. "access through another magic item or spellcaster is allowed" after all.
Don't forget that you need to cast the spell *every day* when crafting a magic item, scroll cost quickly eclipses the money saved by crafting on big items.

Ancestral relic is cool, but the alignment requirement won't fly. I'm familiar with the Bonding Rituals, and as far as I recall none of them really have any particular crunch to them.
What do you mean by crunch? They work just fine, I particularly favor fireballing people until they can craft magic items.

[nijineko]

i'm getting curious about what your final gp cost is going to look like, not to mention the final stats.

i'd like to compare it to mine and see how it holds up (or falls short).

[Jowgen]

I think this thread is slowly but surely coming to a close as options are mostly exhausted now. Please be assured that, once my table gets around to this project (not sure how long that'll take), I shall update on how it goes for those interested. But for now, time to carry on.


I'm curious as to where you see the ambiguity: it looks pretty clear to me that it's either per stronghold space or per 800 sq ft of freestanding wall.

Well, walls are three dimensional objects. A square foot measurement only covers two of those dimensions. On one hand, it seems sensible to use it's lenght times its height, as in surface area, since that is what augumentations usually cover. On the other hand, size measurements in D&D are almost always done in at top down view onto the battle grid, as in length times width. I don't SBG ever species which is too be used. If, for example, it said anywhere that a taller wall was more expensive to enchant than a shorter one then there'd be no question; but I didn't find anything to the like.


Just an extension of water elementals doing a vortex, you'd need to find a line where a water-bound ship did the same thing.

Well, I'm not sure whether it's the eberron submarine or a submarine printed elsewhere that has bound elemental fluff, but I clearly recall a piece of text talking of how the elemental powered it by displacing the water around the ship. That's something.


Don't forget that you need to cast the spell *every day* when crafting a magic item, scroll cost quickly eclipses the money saved by crafting on big items.
[...]
What do you mean by crunch? They work just fine, I particularly favor fireballing people until they can craft magic items.

I had a detailed read of the things again, and only now noticed the part where they're incredibly beneficial to crafting.

Combining this with Item Familiar (which works well fluff-wise), performing one of the rituals a) gets rid of the need to cast the spells, and b) reduces the time needed to just that of the ritual. If you collect internets or cookies or whatnot, you most certainly get one for bringing this up. :smallbiggrin:

Plan: DFA makes ship his item familiar. DFI bard uses the Heartfire Fanner Inspired Fight ability to grant the DFA some fighter bonus feats, although the only one that matters is: Mage Slayer. DFA's caster level drops by 4. Now, we use a dismissable enchantment effect to turn the Bard Unfriendly to the DFA (by defintion becomes an enemy) and makes him cast some spell with a duration. The DFA uses voracious dispelling as often as needed to dispel the spell before the song runs out. Upon successful Dispel, we dismiss the enchantment and the DFA begins the 8 hour meditation and expends the gold/exp to add one of the effects we want on the ship via the ritual of magic.

Alternatively, we might just capture some creature with a decent caster level and a non-harmful SLA that we can compel it to use, as to avoid enemy/ally hairsplitting for effects. Either way, this allows us to save on the casting of the spell and essentially add 1-2 new things to the ship/day, so long as we have the gold and exp. Also, thinking about it, I'm not sure whether Item Familiar is still needed, but I guess its benefits are still considerable and I feel like it makes the whole process more fool-proof :smallsmile:

[Fizban]

Ancestral relic is cool, but the alignment requirement won't fly.
I also wanted to toss off a one-liner about how "oh, not a single good character in the party?" but it's a specific character that has the feat open.

EDIT: I've been reading up on Item familiar and think I've come up with some good approaches on how to integrate it into the ship, DM permitting of course.
Also, as a general balancing factor; I'd rule that any bonus exp gained from the feat goes into an artificer-like pool that can only be used to improve the item familiar. Either way, this approach integrates the weird Item Familiar and Airship mechanics, really brings out the flavor of having a Tempest powering the ship, makes the binding of the tempest more ethical, and reduces the OPness of Item Familiar. I think my DM would be happy to go for it, whatcha think? :smallsmile:
All a little too convenient to me, but then that's knowing the real reason was to get rid of other item creation feats. I'd fully axe the xp and skill related item familiar effects and be done with it, and since I like lampshading the whole slavery of elementals thing I wouldn't gloss it over like that, but the latter is mostly personal taste.

EDIT#2: Notable discovery. Dugeonscape p. 144 lists wall variants, including the simple "Hardened". It increases base hardness by 5. This represents superior materials and craftmanship and is "essentially a masterwork wall". Thus, this is easily achievable through mundane means, so I can get the hull base hardness up to 10 without trouble.
Of course there is. Well, good to know there's a structural equivalent to the Dwarvencraft add-on. I'd veto using it without at least coming up with a price modifier, it's in the same section as walls made of souls and flesh which are supposed to be set-piece effects.

Well, walls are three dimensional objects.
Magic only cares about dimensions when it says so. The Hardening spell uses volume, so it uses volume. Wall augmentations use stronghold spaces or square footage depending on the target. Any objections regarding "square footage of which surface?" are rejected for being willfully obtuse, you know exactly which surface. As for building it taller: the freestanding wall sections are 10'x10' and there's a whole bit on how you have to add extra thickness when you're building taller, the height is whatever you build it as. Verticality is already accounted for in the square footage.

Combining this with Item Familiar (which works well fluff-wise), performing one of the rituals a) gets rid of the need to cast the spells, and b) reduces the time needed to just that of the ritual. If you collect internets or cookies or whatnot, you most certainly get one for bringing this up. :smallbiggrin:
Well combining them with anything is wholly unneccesary, but you do have to deal with finding a ritual that works on an airship, and with the fact that no-one but the bonded person can use the item. Now that I've re-checked, the bonding rituals are more specific than "wondrous item," and none of them say "ship," so you'll have to create a new ritual (actually I expect you'll say it counts as a "container"). It's pretty clear they're intended for use with personal gear and shouldn't be allowed to work at all on stuff that affects more than on person, like riding on an airship, but it is a first-party example of crafting without any character resources except money. The speed is quite nice too, that's why I like the fire: the equivalent of a punch to the gut gets your item crafted in an hour instead of weeks or months with the other non-combat options.

Plan: DFA makes ship his item familiar. DFI bard uses the Heartfire Fanner Inspired Fight ability to grant the DFA some fighter bonus feats, although the only one that matters is: Mage Slayer. DFA's caster level drops by 4. Now, we use a dismissable enchantment effect to turn the Bard Unfriendly to the DFA (by defintion becomes an enemy) and makes him cast some spell with a duration. The DFA uses voracious dispelling as often as needed to dispel the spell before the song runs out. Upon successful Dispel, we dismiss the enchantment and the DFA begins the 8 hour meditation and expends the gold/exp to add one of the effects we want on the ship via the ritual of magic.
Wha? Oh, I see, yeah the dispel ritual is a bit less clear-cut since it asks for an enemy. The ritual of magic doesn't work with anything I'd call airship-like though, fire's easier and weapon/armor/shield is close to ramming cover box. A bit short on options otherwise.

As for the thread coming to a close, well I'm always ready for airhsips. It's true that any individual setup must eventually be finalized, and a more open thread would probably be general chaos and lots of repeats. If anything I'm probably more interested in their place in the game world rather than individual use. Usually if the party is in a game where they will need an airship, one will be provided or a hook at least offered without the players needing to take the initiative. Conversely, in a game where PCs take the initiative, good use of personal magic still trumps just about anything without need for the investment. But figuring out how the airships should actually work when/if they come up, who has them and what they can do with them, using a path from the rules without just hand-waving it? That I still have not fully discovered.

[nijineko]

i'd still like to see the final build, please. ^^


my airship was only mildly optimized, more of being thrifty with funds and whatnot. i had to design for the whole party after all.

the base template is a folding boat from the dmg. noted in stormwrack that a folding boat in largest size is a pinnace. noted pinnace dimensions and cross referenced with SBG to conclude that a pinnace is 1 ss in volume, including masts, sails, and rigging (i added two retractable sails for when in air mode). since it is 1 ss, that makes adding stuff easy - it's all just the listed price. added lots of extradimensional spaces all fitted out with stuff from SBG (used the architecture formulas to build it into the structure of the ship. noted that speed of ship can be the same as speed of wind + it's own motive force, so i added a weather control item from SBG along with lots of other enhancements. between the landlord feat and the rest of the party's contributions, i think we only spent between 6 and 700,000 gp for a seriously decked out mode of transportation.