Industrializing a Setting

[GreatWyrmGold]

The Necromantic Revolution is, I think, one of the easiest ways for industrialization in D&D
No slaves, nor serfs, nor menial workers, nor foot soldiers. just undead laborers.
In life people are made literate and pushed towards Mental-Stat jobs. Physical sorta become guards and the sort.
Debt becomes payable post mortem.
I have some other thoughts on the matter, but they're not suitable for this thread. (None of them involve immortalizing mortal labors.) I'll try to collect my thoughts and get a new thread up and running on them.

Let nobody say I don't deliver.

D&D is so high-fantasy that it needs a spacesuit to get any higher. (I hear Spelljammer's got them covered.) Naturally, people have tried figuring out how to bring the world of D&D into a more industrial age without bringing in the stuff that made our world industrialized (because that's kinda cheating). There have been all sorts of ideas thrown about (some of which ignore the rules in favor of fluff, some of which ignore the fluff in favor of rules, and some go full Tippyverse. I'm not going to intentionally follow any particular path, but I'm going to try and remain true to both rules and fluff until I say otherwise. With that in mind: What's the best way to achieve industrialization in a D&D setting? (D&ustrialization, if you will.)
For the record, I'm going to be using 3.5 rules (as the subforum should have indicated). Those are the books I have, and the rules which I'm most familiar with. Not to mention it has more support than Next.)

-----


I'll assume that you're more or less familiar with the basics; people invented stuff, letting everything get made better. But there are a lot of inventions which made up the revolution; it's not all steam engines. I checked several sources on the major inventions which were produced by and/or defined the Industrial Revolution and made a list of most of them.

Automobiles: Allow people to get from place to place quicker and easier. While it's initially just a toy for the rich and powerful, it's still a toy with practical effects even before it becomes cheap. (Fun fact: Cars were initially seen as making cities cleaner and quieter! This is because even a single horse makes loud clopping noises and leaves poo everywhere, but cars just glide on by and use a litter box. It wasn't until car density got higher than horse density ever could be that their noise and smog became a problem...)
Bessemer Process & Open-Hearth Method: An inexpensive way to turn lots of iron into lots of steel, quickly. It allowed for the creation of plentiful cheap steel; this allowed trains, cities, and so on to use steel in their construction, making them stronger and longer-lasting, letting them be larger and cheaper.
Bicycle: Made personal transport quicker, I guess, but seriously overshadowed by trains and steamboats on an industrial scale.
Dishwasher, Washing Machine, Vacuum Cleaner, Air Conditioner: Quality-of-life improvers without much effect on society at large. Especially because they were friggin' expensive back then.
Dynamite: An effective way to blast holes in the ground to make way for railroads, roads, and so forth. Probably obsolete if you can get enough mid-level casters to do that kind of stuff.
Electric Lights: Enabled 'round-the-clock work, assuming that you didn't need to sleep. Probably obsoleted by continual flame, everburning torches, and maybe even light if you can hire enough apprentice wizards to blow their cantrips on keeping your place lit at night.
Factories: Large, cramped, generally-mechanized working facilities. Require lots of workers and work for them to do. The Industrial Revolution provided both. (Some lists mention Ford's assembly line, but that took place at the end of what could possibly be considered the Industrial Revolution, so...)
Interchangeable Parts: A seemingly-simple concept which industrialization made possible and necessary.
Internal Combustion Engines: Diesel and otherwise. Provides mechanical power in even smaller packages than steam engines.
Locomotives: Ie, trains. Provide easy overland transport, rivaling even boats for speed and convenience in transport.
McCormick Reaper, Corn Planter, Grain Elevator, Cotton Gin, Tractor: Greatly reduces work required for agriculture, increasing productivity.
Mechanical Calculator: Useful for double-checking math in an era where precision engineering was becoming more and more important.
Steam Power: Before steam, mechanical power had to be provided from rivers or maybe wind.
Steamboats: A boat that can sail against currents and wind 24/7 by just lighting a fire under its decks. Needless to say, this accelerates transport greatly.
Spinning Jenny, Sewing Machine, Etc: These inventions allowed mechanical power to be used to make production of cloth ad clothing much easier. They were originally designed to be run by hand, but non-hand-driven versions were invented at some point.
Telegraph & Telephone: Shrunk the world by allowing rapid communication across continents.
Toilet Paper: Thank you, Industrial Revolution.
Vaccines (and other medical advances): Not industrial, but definitely a revolution.

To summarize, this list includes:
1. Transportation and telecommunication. It's hard to overstate the importance of "shrinking the world". No longer are cities islands in an ocean of distance, forced to produce almost all the necessities of life nearby, all but the wealthiest and most powerful practically cut off from people living more than a few dozen miles away. The huge factories everyone thinks of when they think of the Industrial Revolution would have been all but useless if they couldn't transport those goods across an area wide enough to properly utilize the economics of scale.
2. Improved production efficiency. From farming to weaving to heavy industry, everything could be made with less labor per unit thing. This has a number of interesting economic effects, which are probably the biggest source of economic change between the golden age of colonialism and the World Wars.
3. Portable power. Steam engines, internal combustion, Diesel. All of these inventions allowed for smaller and smaller devices to produce mechanical energy more and more easily. This had a variety of effects, mainly enabling the above advances.
4. Mass production. Related to but slightly distinct from #2, mass production here means "making large amounts of essentially homogeneous goods," as opposed to making small amounts of highly-variable goods in many places.


Constructs
These have potential, but they're too expensive. A homunculus-level construct without the bond (and accompanying irritations like "you can only make one of these" and "if it dies you take damage") would presumably cost an industry-minded wizard-duke around 1,000 GP and several dozen XP to create, which is a heck of a lot for a Tiny worker that's weaker than a human. Golems are even less cost-efficient. Going by things which have fixed rules for creation, undead are the way to go.


Undead

There are two spells to consider: Animate dead and create undead. (Create greater undead is neat and all, but incorporeal undead aren't very useful and devourers don't bring anything that would be worth the "might devour master's soul" thing, let alone the price tag.) Animate dead can make mindless skeletal workers for 25 gold and one commoner corpse apiece, or mindless zombie workers for 50 gold and a corpse each. (This doesn't count the cost of hiring the necromancer, of course; this would be at least 150 gold plus the cost of maintaining undead against their control limit, if you didn't do the work yourself or get a friend to work for free.) Create undead lets you make ghouls (and ghasts), mummies, and mohrgs; these cost 100/200, 400, or 700 gp if you don't get to use the templates. (Spellcasting costs are an additional 660/720, 900, or 1,080 gold.)

Mindless undead are perfectly fine for most endeavors; zombies have a slight strength bonus. A lot of necro-industrialization plans involve massive numbers of skeletal or undead workers. This plan has one flaw, however; you're sharply limited in the number of undead any one person can control. This isn't an insurmountable obstacle, but it does require a large number of necromancers (at least one per industrial facility); this may or may not be a problem, but it sure as frig will if there are neighbors who are a bit wary of the undead.

Ghouls (and ghasts) make good low-cost labor (about the same Str bonus as zombies), making them useful when you need to give your workers more intelligence or autonomy, for some reason. More importantly, it's contagious; sadly, the new ghouls aren't guaranteed to be particularly loyal, or for that matter non-brain-eaty. If you're going to use ghouls, you'll want some kind of therapy program in place to put them on the track to becoming a proper, productive citizen, but anything more complicated than a helm of opposite alignment or maybe sanctify the wicked would be beyond the rules' scope, and both of those get expensive fast (unless you figure out how to make a multi-use helm). Mummies are kinda boring for our purposes, though their massive strength (24!) makes them good for if you need really heavy lifting from a single body. Mohrgs are a bit weaker than mummies, but have an interesting trick.
Anything killed by a mohrg rises from the dead in a few days as a zombie, under its control. There is no limit to how many times this can be done. If you can get a loyal mohrg (either by creating one, controlling one magically, or just getting friendly with an undead mass murderer), you could potentially pay families to let it mercy-kill their sick or dying relatives and take away the bodies. There, indefinitely large labor force from nothing but corpses. This does have one slight problem, of course; it's dependent on the mohrg. If it turns against you, you're SOL. If it re-dies, you have a horde of uncontrolled zombies mucking up your works. And even if everything else works perfectly fine, there's a limit to how much one undead middle-manager can manage. The zombies have no spawn-creation ability (or the ability to intelligently direct spawn, for that matter), meaning that you can't have a multi-tiered managerial structure. But there is a type of undead which explicitly allows this.

If an ambitious nobleman wants necro-industrialization and immortality, turning into a vampire can kill two birds with one stone. This method has a few downsides; for instance, you can't create vampires with any spells (that I'm aware of), so you're basically relying on finding a helpful neighborhood vampire and hoping they don't keep you as a mind-controlled spawn. (This could be especially dangerous if your plans for necro-industrialization were well-known, since the vampire could covertly control your entire realm through you. What wannabe vampire count could resist?) However, if this worked out, it would be simple to create a multi-tiered layer of spawn. First, find some "regional managers" (high-leveled people who can cover large amounts of distance quickly; perhaps through teleportation, flight, or having a lot of monk levels). These vampires handle matters at multiple industrial facilities, partly through lower-level vampires ("local managers") at each facility. These local managers create the worker-spawn; these worker-spawn make up the bulk of the work-force. There may need to be an additional level (e.g, regional/local/departmental) if spawn limits of the lowest-leveled managers are expected to become an issue.
The big advantage to vampiric industrialization is, of course, this multi-tiered org-chart. It allows greater flexibility and/or control than any of the methods mentioned above, letting you bypass issues of uncontrolled undead and insufficient managers. It also lets you infinitely expand your organization, assuming there are enough highish-level people around to turn into vampires. (Just create a "multi-regional manager" title, promote everyone, and have your local/departmental managers make some new workers.) As an added benefit, vampires are significantly stronger than ghouls or zombies (+6 Str versus +2); they're still weaker than mohrgs and mummies, but those can't be mass-produced. The downsides are, of course, notable. Being blocked by holy symbols, garlic, and private residences shouldn't be much of a problem; however, running water and especially sunlight will be. Rivers are the lifeblood of civilization, and having all of your major staff members be completely blocked by them without assistance is inconvenient. More critical is the sunlight weakness. Anyone that has to be outside can only be active at night, which puts your workers barely above humans in terms of productivity. There are ways around this, of course; the simplest would be to focus exclusively on indoor operations, leaving agriculture to those who still need food. More creative solutions involve things like vampire necromancers in covered palanquins supervising their undead minions, covered fields with plants fed by continual flame or similar, and high-level rituals to block out the sun.
You might be wondering what the vampires eat. Well, the rules don't say anything about vampires needing to drink blood, but I'm sure you could find something. Maybe stick a chicken coop outside your factories or pay commoners for "blood donations" or something.

Wights deserve a brief mention. They can create spawn which they control, and which can create more spawn. It's not clear if this enables a complex spawn structure like vampires, but if not, there's no RAW limit to the number of spawn one can control. This is comparable to the friendly-mohrg strategy, but with "zombies" intelligent enough to trust more complex operations. (Speaking of which, wights also have the same +2 Strength bonus as zombies and ghouls. I wonder if there was a design note somewhere about that?)


All of these involve generating large numbers of workers that don't need food or sleep. But would this alone be enough to drive a industrial-scale revolution?
Does it help with transportation or telecommunication? Not really. Maybe if you set up some permanent teleportation circles or something alongside it, or invested in enough zombie horses, but that gets expensive...
Do they increase production? Potentially, but it would probably be only a bit better than what normal people could achieve. The big savings would be probably be workers you don't need to pay.
Can they provide mechanical power? Well, technically, but again it's not much more than a human could provide. They don't tire and tend to have superior Strength, so I guess that's a plus? Judging by some quick Googling, it would still take several undead to match one horsepower.
Do they enable mass production? The spawn probably could be expected to have a combination of skill and mind-controlled-ness to produce a product of excellent homogeneity by medieval (and probably early-Industrial) standards. So that's something.
Well, that was disappointing.


Extraplanar Creatures
Sadly, there aren't a lot of things one can do with these using just spells. Summoned creatures are gone in a minute or two, and planar allies cost at least 100 XP and several thousand gold for a one-day-pr-CL task. This is worse than constructs!
There are a few exceptions. For instance, lantern archons can cast continual flame at will. Summon Monster IV cast by a 9th-level caster costs 360 gold and gives you nine continual flames—40 gold per flame. (Lifehacks.)
But perhaps you can go to the Elemental Planes to catch an elemental, or convince a celestial that your plan is for The Greater Good. But that brings me to my next point...



The following methods aren't explicitly described in the rules, but nor do they don't contradict them.

Constructs
Still friggin' overpriced.

Elementals
Elementals are an obvious source of mechanical power. They don't need food, water, or sleep, after all, and can easily move things to provide mechanical power (directly or indirectly). I'd put using fire elementals as unending "coal" above using air or water elementals to turn turbines, since it's probably easier to bribe a fire elemental to hang around in a funny metal box than to get another kind of elemental to spin a gearbox 24/7. Earth elementals turning cranks is rated lower still, in general; my minimal knowledge of engineering suggests this would produce slower RPM and hence less overall power. They might be useful for heavy-duty, limited-use purposes (like raising drawbridges), but they're no steam engine equivalents.
After Googling some steam engine blueprints and trying to figure out what they meant, I came to the conclusion that Small or Medium fire elementals would probably fit into a locomotive engine, but that engine would probably not be small enough to fit in a sedan. Are there littler elementals on the planes anywhere? Would a steam engine scaled down that much actually work? I dunno, not an engineer. But it looks like magic elemental-powered trains are possible.

Outsiders
Planar ally and similar spells aren't gonna work in the long term; they make constructs look cheap. But maybe you can cut a deal with some demon, devil, or angel on the side?
Basically any fiend: Greater teleport at-will makes them excellent messengers and couriers. I'd recommend an imp or quasit—they're smarter than lemures and dretches, and cheaper than anyone else. You probably only need one at a time until
Arrowhawk: I don't suppose there's some way to make a crude generator that gets charged whenever a trained arrowhawk zaps it with its lightning? Though I guess that would require some more industrial-age tech of its own to use in any way...
Avoral, Bralani: Gust of Wind at will. Can you say "wind farm"?
Death slaad: Animate objects at will? He could run an automated workshop by himself. (Though why you'd trust a being of pure chaos with running an orderly workshop is beyond me.)
Efreeti: Efreet have enough fiery at-will spell-like abilities that you should be able to set something up. He's going to try to get you to accept some wishes
Glabrezu: Reverse gravity at will. Set up a reverse-gravity field, put a water wheel half-in and half-out of the field, and you've got yourself the power source for your factory. Connect it to some clever torture devices or weapons or something and see if the glabrezu won't permanency a reverse-gravity field as a wish for you, then disassemble the devices and set up your factory. (Tricking a mid-tier demon into giving you a free wish won't come back to bite you, surely?)
Hellhound: Firey breath at will, and with a reasonably small area of effect. Who's a good boy?
Leonal: Fireball at-will. That's one way to heat up a steam boiler! (For obvious reasons, a leonal-powered steam engine would work best at least 20 feet from anything flammable. And you might want to put up a fence.)
Mephits: They're like elementals, but moodier and often harder to use properly. If you can only get mephits, you can make do, but try to get real elementals ASAP.
Ravid: Every six seconds, a random object within 20 feet is animated for a couple of minutes. If you can teach a ravid to command those objects properly, it could potentially animate an entire workshop. You'd probably want some backup workers to fill in spots on the assembly line, though. (Or just have it turn a turbine and throw in a backup system.)
Solar: If a death slaad is too unpredictable and a ravid too feral, you could always bind the single strongest core outsider. I don't see how forcing such a holy creature to perform dull, routine tasks could possibly backfire...
Vrock: Telekinesis at-will. If you don't see any way this could get several turbines spun up at once, you aren't thinking hard enough. This requires constant attention and work from the demon, though, so you will probably need a decent salary for it. (The occasional child to sacrifice should do it.Consider running an orphanage and discouraging birth control...wait a second, doesn't the Vatican do both of those?)
Note that for all outsiders powering some kind of industrial device, you need at least one outsider per facility. (I mean, technically you could pull off the glabrezu-wish trick at a bunch of different facilities with one if you waited a month or two between founding them, but it'd probably catch on sooner or later.)

Undead
Um...I got nothing. I think I used all of my good undead ideas in the last section.

Miscellaneous Monsters:
Choker: I'm sure there's some way to leverage Quickness in an industrial setting.
Delver: Feed it some gems and let it shape some stone. I'm sure there's some kind of construction use for this kind of terrakinesis.
Hag coveys: Control weather three times a day. It's not good for industrial output (unless maybe you had a wind farm), but it would do wonders for agriculture.
Hippogrif: It's not much of an upgrade to the Pony Express, but it's something. And when the holy orders come knocking to ask about the enslaved angels and restless dead you're using to run your factories, you already have an air force!
Illithid: At-will levitate. Throw in a little engineering and you've got a nice spinning wheel.
Nightshades: They're Huge or larger and can haste themselves at will. If you need to chain something up to a giant wheel, it's hard to get better than this. High-level clerics on your security staff are a must.
Remorhaz: Like Huge fire elementals, except you need to feed them and don't need to go to the Elemental Plane of Fire.
Shocker Lizard: See Arrowhawk. Less voltage, but easier to catch and tame.
Troll: Cheap source of protein. I hear remorhazes burn hot on a diet of troll.

(There are probably a bunch of non-core monsters that would help, but I've scanned enough monster manuals for one section of this post.)

Spells:
Luckily, I found a list of core spells by duration (http://www.hahnlibrary.net/rpgs/spduration.html). Unfortunately, most long-duration spells don't help much for industrialization. There are a few exceptions, however. (Ironically, many of them are on the druid spell list.)
Communication spells in general: If you only have a few messages to send per day, this could work perfectly well. It can't replace a good telegraph, though...
Changestaff (7th-level): A staff-treant follows your commands for an hour per level (a solid work day by the time you could access this spell). Having a Huge Str 29 creature turn wheels or something probably isn't the best way to generate power, but it's there.
Control Weather (7th-level): Again, it's great for agriculture and windmills.
Fabricate (5th-level): This spell can transform raw materials into finished products in a heartbeat. Of course, finding enough mid-level wizards to get a reasonable production line set up is going to be nigh-impossible.
Not-Tenser's Floating Disk (1st-level): With a proper setup (including a ramp, so it's never more than 3 feet off the ground), you should be able to make a waterwheel turn indefinitely (two gallons at a time). It would probably pale in comparison to a real river, though...
Unseen Servant (1st-level): It's too weak and unskilled to do much, but its low level means a wizard should be able to create enough to do something.

Permanency:
This spell deserves its own section, for obvious reasons. They take neat spells too short-duration to be useful and make them awesome.
Animate Objects (CL 14+, 3k XP): Remember what I said about death slaadi, ravids, and solars? Well, what if you could do that without binding a creature of pure chaos, holiness, or non-work-ethic-ness to your workshop?
Not-Rary's Telepathic Bond (CL 13+, 2.5k XP): Even if it only links two creatures at once, this spell could be used to create a decent long-distance communication system (ideally supplemented by the Hippogrif Express).
Teleportation Circle (CL 17+, 4.5k XP): Makes long-distance transport of freight and passengers almost trivial.
Wall of Fire (CL 12+, 2k XP): I've seen ideas for WoF-powered boilers before, so I think you get the idea.
As you may have noticed, each use of permanency drains an unpleasant number of XP from the caster. Luckily, there are some remedies for this! The first ones which came to mind were liquid pain and ambrosia (probably because they're the only ones in books I personally own). Each dose provides the equivalent of 3 or 2 XP, but it's hard to mass-produce. A pain extractor or similar requires a full day to get a single dose, and the celestials don't have any similar device for extracting pleasure. (Not to mention that you need a really elated subject in the first place...) Sacrifice is another option, though it naturally requires industrially-processed sentient beings. (The dark forces stopped accepting livestock after some a-hole figured out how to clone goats.) The best solution available would probably be this one (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?334500-Experience-Collection), which requires using a sacrifice to wish for a pain pit, then casting persisted summon monster spells, sticking them with thinaun weapons (whatever those are), and tossing them into the pit. This seems workable, though it begs the question of where summoned animals come from. (Oh, and the church is definitely going to come knocking.)

Warlocks:
Warlocks have one big advantage over traditional casters when it comes to industrialization—they can use all of their spells all day long, no problemo. Bonus: In principle, anyone can become a warlock just by making a pact with a demon lord! (Isn't it weird that so many practical methods for industrialization involve meddling with dark forces?) Unfortunately, several of these are beyond the reach of the mere meddler; Lesser invocations require 6th-level warlocks, and Greater ones require 11th-level ones.
Brimstone Blast (lesser): Fire damage at-will. I've seen enough Avatar to know where this goes...
Chilling Tentacles (greater): It can probably pull stuff.
Earthen Grasp (least): Technically, this only holds people in place, but I can't think of a better place to put a suggestion to try turning wheels or pulling earthy carts with this invocation. Be creative; even if all you can do is pull pegs closer to the ground, you might still be able to work something out.
Repelling Blast (greater): Make a strong, tough turbine and this guy can get it spinning real good. (You could argue that this works with normal eldritch blasts, if you want.
Summon Swarm (least): Go read Worm and tell me Taylor Hebert couldn't revolutionize something with this incantation. Though that does likely require a higher level of control with swarms than the spell mentions...


...At least I will, once I industrialize everything.

Custom Spells
Something like continual flame which actually produces heat would be perfect for a steam engine. Maybe some kind of rock-heating thing?
An enhanced wall of iron spell which produces decent steel instead of plain ol' iron could make for cheap steel. A variation on fabricate which refined raw materials into better raw materials (e.g, iron ore into iron, iron and carbon into steel, crystals into cut gemstones) would also help.
A permanent version of minor or major creation would, obviously, allow you to bypass this whole "assembly" thing. I doubt anyone could convince a DM to let it come into their game world, though...

Custom Magic Items
Anything that can send or receive messages would be swell. (Say, sending at will?) I doubt you could make them as plentiful as cell phones, but you could at least put a few in each major city and one in each factory.
All sorts of spells and magic items grant temporary boosts to mobility. Creating cheap, permanent ones could improve communication and transport speed.
Fabricate and its Ilk
Mass-fabricate magic items would enable for mass industrialization more effectively than almost anything else, up to and including modern factories. A command-word-activated item of fabricate at CL 9 would cost about 81,000 gold pieces; specialized fabrication would almost certainly reduce the cost significantly (perhaps to around 16,000? DM's discretion, of course). This is without any kind of bonus to the relevant Craft skill; a nice +15 bonus would add another 22,500 gold, again with a likely specialization discount.
Other spells could substitute for fabricate in some circumstances. The obvious ones are stone shape, wood shape, and maybe prestidigitation. (Command-word items of the first two would cost 27,000 and 10,800 gp each, not counting specialization discounts. An item of prestidigitation would cost around 1,000 gp, but would need some kind of permanent-ing additional effect and probably a harsher specialization discount. Who knows what the final price would be?)

Micro-Constructs
By "micro-construct," I mean a very specialized magical device animated by some magical force which is designed to do only one thing. A golem-ey piston would be a microconstruct, but so would an undead arm animated to turn a wheel. In theory, these would be cheaper or easier to make than normal constructs. You might even argue that undead micro-constructs can be given specific orders to follow from animation to destruction without taking up a necromancer's control spots, making them easy to mass-produce.
Micro-constructs wouldn't allow for industrialization on their own, but they make individual parts of an machine to work better.

Efficiency
Wouldn't it be convenient if you could do some of the above stuff without paying as much in GP, XP, or magical energy? In the real world, of course, innovation can shave precious percentage points off of any costs in a system. Strangely, no work of fiction I'm familiar with lets magic be improved like that. There's a lot to say about that particular thing, but...


Industrialization was a complicated process, requiring the convergence of several new technologies which supported one another, exerting economic pressures on the world at large. Absent one of those technologies or a suitable replacement, the Industrial Revolution would have taken place differently or not at all. Clever use of D&D's supernatural elements can theoretically mimic any of those required elements, but these most of these solutions require unreasonable costs (whether in GP, XP, or the labor of mid-level spellcasters). With some creativity and a willingness to use powers traditionally considered "evil," one can get ahold of great amounts of cheap mechanical power...but without telecommunication or transport infrastructure, you're not going to have much use for a factory producing immense amounts of goods. Coordinating the transfer and sale of goods over long enough distances to find a large market becomes unwieldy, and transportation costs will quickly outweigh the economies of scale. Without additional developments of some sort, D&D words don't have the right kinds of magic to bring industrialization to the worlds without some help from technology.

Maybe if there are lots of mid-leveled wizards running about, trying to sell individual parts of industrial infrastructure to individual noblemen, some semblance of the required industrial infrastructure can be set up and then bootstrap itself into relevance. But I'm skeptical.


I'd like to hear what other folks think, especially if they have a take on the matter which is less pessimistic.

[flappeercraft]

One thing, Solars can't be planar bound, they have 20HD and GPB has an 18HD cap but a possibel solution to that is a Mindraped Ice Assassin and you could get the piece of Solar from a Gated Solar. Of course Thought bottles would be needed for industrializing easily. Also someone deviced a way to get basically limitless amounts of Ambrosia. IIRC it was detailed on the cost reduction handbook

[Gildedragon]

One could probably construct a stirling engine with mithril and two prestidigitation traps. Have one target a lb of air to cool it, another to heat a different lb of air...

As to communications. It'd just be a matter of making sending stones or earings of the wolf cheaper. Establish relays at the max distances, and you get a sort of telegraph/semaphore thing going on

Anyway my argument for a necromancy-induced revolution isn't so much for a sudden change, but the gradual elimination of the commoner NPC class as the free time let's them become educated and migrate to things like expert, magewright, and adept... If not full on PC classes

Perhaps interesting is to consider the other revolution that made industrialization possible: the green revolution. Druid magic or create food traps are probably the keys to that

[flappeercraft]

I would actually try still keep some commoners because Chicken infested flaw and similar things can be useful. For example Chicken infested would be perfect to solve world hunger

[atemu1234]

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of catgirls suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

[Karmea]

One thing, Solars can't be planar bound
Well, there's Implore (Sor/Wiz 9) from DMag 336 that allows binding to 22 HD.

[Florian]

Hm. regarding this topic, I always have the feeling that people look at our "real world" and take what we´ve achieved with technology as the most logical conclusion of things are done "best", trying to copy this with their intended version of the "industrial revolution" in D&D.
This is a trap when having a whole multiverse to exploit.

[Fizban]

Really, the main question is why the dnd setting hasn't already industrialized itself.

To start with, there's the timescale. DnD settings almost always have histories of civilization for thousands of years longer than our own, of races that live up to ten times as long, who apparently already invented magic and could have done all sorts of things to preserve, pass on, and advance the sciences. Even with regular apocalypses magic is still known and people should be digging up and recreating things as soon as they notice them. While it took a long time for certain technologies to allow the industrial (and other) revolutions, once available they happened in just a hundred years or so, nothing compared to DnD timelines.

As for those technologies, the main one I'm seeing here that's lacking is "Bessemer Process & Open-Hearth Method: An inexpensive way to turn lots of iron into lots of steel, quickly." However, I posit that the reason steel isn't in large supply in DnD is simply because without machining there's not enough demand. DnD readily assumes that people have had the ability to process all sorts of exotic materials for centuries if not longer: Mithril, Adamantine, creating Alchemical Silver, and all sorts of other materials from splatbooks. I see no reason to assume they haven't figured out how to efficiently process steel if they can do all that.

As for power, steam is already enough, and as noted there are multiple sources of infinite fire to fuel your steam. You don't even need to bind or compel a fire elemental in any way: they don't need to breathe so you can literally just trap one in an iron sphere it can't bash through and you're done. You can link the effective size of a fire to damage output to determine the strength of the flame, and while I suspect most elementals are weaker than a coal fire, not needing to carry coal means you can care a lot more imprisoned elementals. The ease of getting infinite fire is so great that I'd expect it to put a significant damper on research into other power sources, which can make a good excuse for why they haven't invented anything more advanced.

Spellcaster distribution? The standard DMG demographics don't supply enough spellcasters to revolutionize the setting through magic alone, but they're definitely enough to take the place of some things. Every Small City is likely to have at least one caster of a given class with 3rd level spells, and every Large City is guaranteed to have multiple people packing 5ths, and a Metropolis should guarantee at least half a dozen with 7ths. You can't do everything with hard-cast Fabricate, but you can absolutely skip a ton of difficulty in getting various components that would normally require a whole extra factory to produce. You only need one 17th level Cleric to start building portals (and each Metroplis has around an 80% of getting one).


Communication spells in general: the spell you want is Whispering Sand from Sandstorm (Drd/Sor/Wiz 3), which gives you 10 min/level of two-way conversation to anywhere with a bag of sand, at multiple locations, for a dash more than 2 hours at minimum.

Unseen Servant: capable of performing repetitive tasks a commoner could do. Like cleaning and assembling things. Also completely immune to health hazards that don't deal AoE damage and capable of fitting into small spaces, without even blocking the view of the director.

Pony Express/Hippogriff Express: the spell you want is Traveler's Mount (SpC Drd/Rgr 1), which adds +20 to the mount's speed and then effectively doubles it by allowing them to hustle without taking damage. Light horse improves to 16mph, and if your DM reads "speed" as allowing fly speed, hippogriff improves to 24mph off-road, or just 20mph with the main hustling effect.

Item sourcing: the Drow House Insignia is the most efficient source of underpriced low level spells, since while the prices are relatively close to formula, the caster level is fixed at 5th even for the 1st and 2nd level spells. For the cost of a few extra horses you can make one horse hustle most of the day. Conjure a worker who's immune to health issues. For 8,000gp at each of 5 locations you can have all them all connected 10 hours a day with 5 Insignias of Whispering Sand, it's no Permanent Telepathic Bond but it's also no Permanent Telepathic Bond.

With FR content, limited use Portals made with Portal Master get real cheap real fast. For 10,000gp (market price) you can have 6 seconds per day that transport anyone who can touch it to the target, or 15,000gp if you want two-way. An average person can carry 100lbs, how many people can you cram into a 40' radius? And these porters will learn quickly how to get the maximum number through in time. I'm reading 85 or so from just the semi-circle, 4 tons a day instantaneously across any distance seems pretty solid compared to the price of a ship or two, even if it's limited to carry-able goods between two specific points.

Edit: and that's to say nothing of Mythals or UA Incantations. Funny how when the epic casters of FR made these Mythals with tons of spell immunities and on-demand magical effects, they never included say, Move Earth or Stone Shape or Unseen Servant. With a Mythal it's even more trivial to create self-harvesting farmland and at-will Fabricate, since literally every attuned creature in the area can spam the chosen spells at will.

The Incantation factors are more and less abusable, but with permanent as an option you don't need much else. Just rustle up a large enough posse on a full moon with single expert and it's not too hard at all to get no-cost permanent well, anything. Self-harvesting farm, communications network, power source, heck with a proper skill check you can just do permanent summoned monsters. The main limit is of course that while players (and NPCs) are specifically allowed to develop epic spells, incantations must be created by the DM, so they're never "RAW" in the slightest. But it is a fig leaf someone wrote in a book once.

[flappeercraft]

Hm. regarding this topic, I always have the feeling that people look at our "real world" and take what we´ve achieved with technology as the most logical conclusion of things are done "best", trying to copy this with their intended version of the "industrial revolution" in D&D.
This is a trap when having a whole multiverse to exploit.

This is true, there are things that we should take inspiration from but no more than that as there ar ebetter options

[GreatWyrmGold]

One thing, Solars can't be planar bound, they have 20HD and GPB has an 18HD cap...
Details, details. I never said it was a good idea...and it looks like magic circle against good would work, if you could trick the solar into it.



One could probably construct a stirling engine with mithril and two prestidigitation traps. Have one target a lb of air to cool it, another to heat a different lb of air...
I deliberately left out magical traps, since the only times I've seen them used for anything other than...uh...traps have been blatantly game-breaking tricks (think the Tippyverse).


As to communications. It'd just be a matter of making sending stones or earings of the wolf cheaper. Establish relays at the max distances, and you get a sort of telegraph/semaphore thing going on
I'm not familiar with either of those magic items, but it sounds like they're only a bit more cost-effective


Anyway my argument for a necromancy-induced revolution isn't so much for a sudden change, but the gradual elimination of the commoner NPC class as the free time let's them become educated and migrate to things like expert, magewright, and adept... If not full on PC classes
Ah, I see.

I did a bit of googling, and found that a common rule of thumb is that medieval populations had about nine farmers for each non-farmer. This means that each produces about 1.1 "units" of food, with "unit" here being defined to mean the amount of food one farmer produces. Let's assume that a single skeleton worker can produce about 1.5-2 units (they can work longer hours, but need to be supervised by necromancers and don't have the aid of children or, likely, animals). A 5th-level cleric can cast animate dead and control 40 1-HD skeletons, for a total of about 60-80 units of food per cleric. A church capable of training lots of such clerics would be able to support a substantial non-agricultural population. The DMG suggests that there would be about half a dozen lower-level clerics for each 5th-level one (presumably as assistants, trainees, or the like), which suggests that a solid 8-10% of the population would be necromancers. That's a solid step forward.

However, the production of these undead would be far from free. Onyx is an obvious problem, but corpses are also going to be scarce. At most, human remains only stick around for 50 years or so, and bodies buried in less-optimal conditions will remain in good working condition for even less time. I'd guess that exhuming every animateable corpse in a given area could create about as many skeletons as people lived there last generation; replacing a significant number of farmers with undead would require exhuming (or creating) a good number of corpses.
And those skeletons won't last forever. Even today, with our advanced medicine and mechanized agriculture, hundreds of farmers die each year (out of a few million). Accidents by mindless undead using less-advanced techniques are likely to have higher rates of replacement. It's not clear if undead continue to decay after reanimation, but if so, they would continue to degrade—likely at a greater rate than normal decomposition. And if nothing else, you could potentially lose the whole skeleton team when the necromancer dies (unless you get a replacement to rebuke them or cast control undead before they caused trouble).
These problems aren't unworkable, but the practical and legal issues of reanimating dozens or hundreds of corpses are a major obstacle. And then there are logistics (e.g, transporting food across a wide enough area to make full use of these productive undead-run plantations).




Hm. regarding this topic, I always have the feeling that people look at our "real world" and take what we´ve achieved with technology as the most logical conclusion of things are done "best", trying to copy this with their intended version of the "industrial revolution" in D&D.
This is a trap when having a whole multiverse to exploit.
I tried to break down the Industrial Revolution into the problems it solved, and find ways to solve it. If you have a better way to solve those problems in mind, I'd love to hear them! If not, you're just rolling your eyes smugly and saying "There could be a better way".



-snip-
Lots of solid analysis, Fizban. I'd like to respond to a few of your points.


To start with, there's the timescale. DnD settings almost always have histories of civilization for thousands of years longer than our own, of races that live up to ten times as long, who apparently already invented magic and could have done all sorts of things to preserve, pass on, and advance the sciences. Even with regular apocalypses magic is still known and people should be digging up and recreating things as soon as they notice them. While it took a long time for certain technologies to allow the industrial (and other) revolutions, once available they happened in just a hundred years or so, nothing compared to DnD timelines.
Eh. It's a genre thing. It bugs me, too, but what can you do?
I tried to figure out what could be done without requiring significant technological advances beyond standard-medieval-fantasy.


However, I posit that the reason steel isn't in large supply in DnD is simply because without machining there's not enough demand. DnD readily assumes that people have had the ability to process all sorts of exotic materials for centuries if not longer: Mithril, Adamantine, creating Alchemical Silver, and all sorts of other materials from splatbooks. I see no reason to assume they haven't figured out how to efficiently process steel if they can do all that.
I have two points to make. One: Just because they can make metals we can't doesn't mean that they can make all the metals we can (especially since most of those metals seem to require unique questionably-mundane ores of some kind). Two: None of those materials are suggested to be abundant, so they can't replace cheap steel in any meaningful sense.


You don't even need to bind or compel a fire elemental in any way: they don't need to breathe so you can literally just trap one in an iron sphere it can't bash through and you're done.
It seems like kidnapping and trapping elementals on an industrial scale would probably not go over well with the leaders of the Elemental Plane of Fire. It's probably best to try and come to an agreement.


Item sourcing: the Drow House Insignia is the most efficient source of underpriced low level spells...

[A]nd that's to say nothing of Mythals or UA Incantations...
Sounds interesting. What source are they from?

[Gildedragon]

Sending Stones are MIC
Earrings of the Wolf are DragCom

Note that undead get better the longer they stay around (Evolved Undead template)
One probably wants to store the skellies in a fast time plane for a bit so as to buff the critters)
Their spell like abilities actually useable in the agricultural endeavor. Circle of Death and Cloudkill would be excellent pesticides and because of their magical natural won't linger on the crops.

A problem with Evolved Undead is that the template needs intelligence. Awakening becomes necessary. Ideally one could minimize its charisma and intelligence: make them receptive to orders and diplomacy...

Though perhaps spell clocks of War Unseen Servants are more effective...

[Fizban]

It seems like kidnapping and trapping elementals on an industrial scale would probably not go over well with the leaders of the Elemental Plane of Fire. It's probably best to try and come to an agreement.
Last I remember reading the Elemental Lords didn't give a fig about most elementals, treating the smaller ones like animals the same way the material plane does (despite their int 6).

Drow House Insignia are from Drow of the Underdark, the info for creating Mythals is in Lost Empires of Faerun (combined with the rest of the epic spellcrafting mechanics from Epic Level Handbook), and Incantations are in the book of variants Unearthed Arcana (both the ELH and UA content can be found on d20srd.org).

[WhatThePhysics]

You can provide cheap mechanical power and transportation with continuous items of Create Water. Set them up at the tops of towers at high elevations, preferably built in mountainous regions, then have the water spin some wheels. Once the water has gone through multiple wheels, it flows downhill into an artificial river fed by similar facilities, or it supplies an aqueduct. Both the rivers and the aqueducts should have water wheels. The water can be used to irrigate farms, then power watermills that crush the grain into flour.

Sure, 1 gallon every 3 seconds isn't a lot, but the item creation guidelines make these items cost 500 GP and 40 XP a piece. Even if 3rd level Clerics with Craft Wondrous Item are rare, just one could supply the XP to craft a few dozen of them. Since magic items can make saving throws with a bonus, their long term durability would improve their productivity.

[Fizban]

Or you can use the DMG standard Decanter of Endless Water which produces 30 gallons per round plus a "DC 12 strength check to avoid being knocked down" for 9,000gp without question. Harnessing water power is going to be faaaar more annoying and less portable than steam (assuming you're allowed to tech up to steam), and 9,000gp is significantly more expensive than Lesser Planar Binding+nonlethal damage+iron sphere.

With Forgotten Realms in play again, there's at least one item or special material that calls out knowledge of electricity in a non-magical sense, which could be used to justify skipping straight to electricity.

So if the only bottleneck is steel production, we just need to know what the old process was and what factor we need to increase it by via magic, since there's no official "create steel" spell (though a serious case can be made that Wall of Iron is actually Wall of Steel, as it has the same hardness and hit points and the terms are generally used interchangeably, or the case that in the DnD world physics are crude enough you don't actually need steel).

From what I can tell of the wikipedia entries, it sounds like turning iron into steel mostly consists of heating it up and maybe blowing air on it. The Bessemer Converter is just a self-contained setup that blows the air through the molten metal rather than on it (as had been done for centuries, below the faux-medieval tech level). The open hearth furnace seems to have supplanted it by simply being so energy efficient it could just cook without blowing (the actual advance being the recycling of waste heat to pre-heat incoming air). DnD gives us easy access to heat, wind, and even just inexhaustible air to burn. Heck, the plane of fire is actually hot enough to melt steel already, 3d10 is easily enough to roll the 22+ needed to beat object+hardness and whittle it down (a cl20 Empowered Maximized Wall of Fire would deal 45), but even if that doesn't do it you can use elementals/permanent wall of fire/the plane of fire to pre-heat your air for the fuel savings that make the processes cheap. Likely the salamanders and efreeti could already mass-produce steel if they wanted and would be surprised at how hard it is on the material plane. All it takes to figure out is calling a fire-plane smith and then having them tell you it's too cold to make steel "properly."



One: Just because they can make metals we can't doesn't mean that they can make all the metals we can (especially since most of those metals seem to require unique questionably-mundane ores of some kind).
No, but it does imply they have figured out how to work a wide variety of metals already, which took us quite a while.

Two: None of those materials are suggested to be abundant, so they can't replace cheap steel in any meaningful sense.
Never said they needed to. Nothing suggests iron is less abundant than it is on earth, all you need is processing. There's no officially printed "iron to steel" spell, but if you're allowed to use magically improved steam boilers, magically improved furnaces should produce all the steel you need.

Incidentally, cold substituted Wall of Fire Freeze should have some uses. Cooling areas enough for refrigeration is already child's play, but I'm told ammonia production for fertilizer requires both extreme heat and cold.

[WhatThePhysics]

Or you can use the DMG standard Decanter of Endless Water which produces 30 gallons per round plus a "DC 12 strength check to avoid being knocked down" for 9,000gp without question. Harnessing water power is going to be faaaar more annoying and less portable than steam (assuming you're allowed to tech up to steam), and 9,000gp is significantly more expensive than Lesser Planar Binding+nonlethal damage+iron sphere.
If we're aiming for ease of mass production, continuous Create Water items are 9 times cheaper to craft than a Decanter of Endless Water, and require crafters that are 4 levels lower. Decanters do output 15 times more water than minimum level Create Water items, but one Decanter is a greater liability than a distributed set of dozens of Create Water items.

As for how annoying or non-portable water power is, consider that it makes up for that with its range and multipurposeness. Farms, markets, and towns will form near artificial rivers and aqueducts. People will be hired to farm the irrigated lands. Goods and people will be shipped across aqueducts and rivers. Someone's going to have to build, maintain, and operate the water wheels and associated systems. This creates a demand for guards, lumberjacks, and other support services.

What's a single technomagical steam engine going to do, compared to all that?

[Fizban]

15 times the output at only 9-10 times the price, and GWG already set the bar at printed items, otherwise you can just make any spell at-will and you're done and there's no point in the exercise. You also need a heck of a lot more for anything you could call a river. Meanwhile the cost of trapping a fire elemental in a box is maybe 1,000 at most, so that's "one" steam engine per faucet, hundreds or thousands compared to an attempt at an artificial river. Trying to power a vehicle with a water spray is both messy and futile. And any advance in technology or new natural resource supports growth in the same way so. . . ?

[WhatThePhysics]

15 times the output at only 9-10 times the price, and GWG already set the bar at printed items, otherwise you can just make any spell at-will and you're done and there's no point in the exercise. You also need a heck of a lot more for anything you could call a river. Meanwhile the cost of trapping a fire elemental in a box is maybe 1,000 at most, so that's "one" steam engine per faucet, hundreds or thousands compared to an attempt at an artificial river. Trying to power a vehicle with a water spray is both messy and futile. And any advance in technology or new natural resource supports growth in the same way so. . . ?
I just reread GreatWyrmGold's first post, and I don't see any mention of "printed items only". On the contrary, they have a "Custom Magic Items" portion in the "Screw the rules, I have money!" spoiler.

Yeah, 2 gallons/round isn't a river, but that's why I said that a 3rd level crafter can supply enough XP to make dozens of Create Water items. Possibly hundreds, if they continue gaining XP.

Sure, it's cheaper to pay a 10th+ level Sorcerer with 15 Charisma 500 GP to cast Lesser Planar Binding on a Fire Elemental, and the elemental has a 0% chance to pass the Charisma check. But, you need to find the Sorcerer (generally requires a large city), convince them to take the deal (see below), have the steam engine on hand when the spell is cast (shipping fees), pay a mage to cast Magic Circle Against X before Lesser Planar Binding (at least 150 GP), hope the elemental doesn't pass the Will save (25% chance they do), ensure the Sorcerer and mage don't charge for each failed attempt (unlikely), and prepare for the possibility of the elemental escaping (extra fees).

Furthermore, if a spell has dangerous consequences, the spellcaster will certainly require proof that you can and will pay for dealing with any such consequences (that is, assuming that the spellcaster even agrees to cast such a spell, which isn’t certain).
Meanwhile, 3rd level Clerics can be found in large towns, temples to good deities producing holy water at cost implies they're more likely to work for you, water wheels are an ancient technology, and hydropower doesn't have the risk of fire elementals breaking out and destroying things. If you're not interested in artificial rivers or aqueducts, you could just build Create Water items to provide a city with local hydropower, irrigation, and sanitation.

You'll need a steady supply of water for steam power anyway, so these techniques aren't incompatible. However, you're better off using a continuous item of Matter Agitation on a metal water basin.

Also, I never suggested powering cars with Create Water or Decanters of Endless Water.

[Fizban]

I just reread GreatWyrmGold's first post, and I don't see any mention of "printed items only". On the contrary, they have a "Custom Magic Items" portion in the "Screw the rules, I have money!" spoiler.
Post #10, "I deliberately left out magical traps, since the only times I've seen them used for anything other than...uh...traps have been blatantly game-breaking tricks (think the Tippyverse)." I mentally extended that out to all custom items, becuase auto-resetting magical traps are just custom at-will magic items at 1/4 price (as is custom continuous/at-will wondrous architecture), even though the first post mentions custom items.

Yeah, 2 gallons/round isn't a river, but that's why I said that a 3rd level crafter can supply enough XP to make dozens of Create Water items. Possibly hundreds, if they continue gaining XP.
A 3rd level NPC crafter can supply 0xp for crafting, because NPCs don't use xp, and they craft however much the DM says they can. Even if they did use xp, they would have to be assigned a floating xp value by the DM, and thus can only craft as much as the DM says they can. And once you're allowed to grind xp in-universe you can break the game just by punching your friend in the face.

Sure, it's cheaper to pay a 10th+ level Sorcerer with 15 Charisma 500 GP to cast Lesser Planar Binding on a Fire Elemental, and the elemental has a 0% chance to pass the Charisma check. But, you need to find the Sorcerer (generally requires a large city), convince them to take the deal (see below), have the steam engine on hand when the spell is cast (shipping fees), pay a mage to cast Magic Circle Against X before Lesser Planar Binding (at least 150 GP), hope the elemental doesn't pass the Will save (25% chance they do), ensure the Sorcerer and mage don't charge for each failed attempt (unlikely), and prepare for the possibility of the elemental escaping (extra fees).
Or instead of assuming everything goes as bad as possible to marginally increase the price, you could not:

There is absolutely no need to involve charisma checks or even calling diagrams, because the actual plan is to immediately beat the elemental (a weak melee bruiser with no significant magical abilities aside from being on fire) into unconsciousness, which can be done simply by filling the room with 1sp mercenaries and blunt arrows.
Any service contract that says "call me a fire elemental" will involve payment based on number of elementals summoned, not "number of spell casts," and any caster that wants to actually get paid will accept this, let alone the possibility you're doing it yourself (GWG's assumption of spellcaster hiring is the weakest link in the plans if you ask me but it's a start if you're not the caster), and even if they did a 25% increase to the average LPB cost is only 90gp, whoopie.
And why on earth would you need the whole steam engine there? I've specifically said multiple times that you stick the elemental in a sealed iron sphere. That sphere is not only transportable but if anything modular, being a standard size with a standard heat, making standardized parts even more obvious and easy.


hydropower doesn't have the risk of fire elementals breaking out and destroying things. If you're not interested in artificial rivers or aqueducts, you could just build Create Water items to provide a city with local hydropower, irrigation, and sanitation.
Hydropower is great, if you understand electricity. While there are indications that steam exists and is understood in dnd, there are hardly any that suggest electricity (though I've pointed the one I know about out). Electricity does not solve the problem of mass-producing steel, and electrically powered engines for transporting require sufficient technology advancement and industrialization to produce. Trying to store and shift the mechanical energy of a waterwheel via springs and clockworkpunk requires the mass production of even more finicky parts than steam would, with coiled springs that could explode at any moment.

Meanwhile, a medium fire elemental is physically incapable of breaking the hardness of iron, making the only chance of a breakout a full industrial accident where a sphere is crushed or dropped. Surrounding a stationary facility with a moat ensures they couldn't escape even then, and with 26 hp they're only slightly harder to bring down than a horse.

Also, I never suggested powering cars with Create Water or Decanters of Endless Water.
If you aren't transporting things you aren't industrializing. Portals are nice, but in all likelihood still far too expensive to actually take the place of trains. They make a useful point to point kickstart, but don't actually connect everything to everything.

You'll need a steady supply of water for steam power anyway, so these techniques aren't incompatible. However, you're better off using a continuous item of Matter Agitation on a metal water basin.
Aside from being another custom item, Matter Agitation is a concentration power, which requires constant attendance, but sure it's more compact and gives a more precise temperature based on the melting point of lead. And obviously you'd use create water items (even existing create water items) in areas where water is harder to get. My point is that create water doesn't industrialize squat without a much huger technological leap, and even then you don't need artificial rivers or create water to produce hydropower.

There is no source of infinite power more efficient in dnd than trapping a magical creature to siphon. Elementals are the simplest, least dangerous, and easiest to do this with, and heat energy is the easiest form of energy to start climbing the tech tree. Barring a DM who says fire elementals aren't hot enough to boil water, nothing will compare without a custom spell or item.

[Cosi]

One interesting facet of D&DLand industrialization is capital formation. In the real world, capital (or really just "stuff in general") is produced rapidly and replaced frequently. Conversely, magic items are slow to produce, but will never wear out or stop functioning (assuming, of course, that the item in question is not a consumable of some kind).

Some Spells of Interest:

1. You could probably do something cool with merchants and divinations of various sorts.
2. awaken makes new people out of animals or plants.
3. Illusions let you make virtual or augmented realities.
4. Dropping curse of lycanthropy on people (the Complete Divine version) lets you graft them temporary superpowers.
5. energy transformation field turns cheap magic (such as at-will SLAs) into whatever magic you put into the field.

Honestly though, magic in D&D (particularly uncapped magic) is likely to look less like the industrial revolution and more like the singularity (a la Accelerando or The Quantum Thief).


What's the best way to achieve industrialization in a D&D setting? (D&ustrialization, if you will.)

Necromancy! Turn your people's bodies into skeletons that do mindless labor and their spirits into immortal ghosts that don't need to eat. Technically, you probably can't turn all your people into ghosts as there is not (off the top of my head) any way to force people to turn into ghosts. What should work is getting a Master of Shrouds to summon a spectre, have it kill whoever you want to make immortal, wait for them to come back as a spectre, kill the original spectre, and then force-march them through the Emancipated Spawn PrC to get back their class features.

Also, there's a bunch of other cool necromancy stuff out there, like awaken undead or haunt shift. Or Spell-Stitched Undead. Or magic jar.


These have potential, but they're too expensive. A homunculus-level construct without the bond (and accompanying irritations like "you can only make one of these" and "if it dies you take damage") would presumably cost an industry-minded wizard-duke around 1,000 GP and several dozen XP to create, which is a heck of a lot for a Tiny worker that's weaker than a human. Golems are even less cost-efficient. Going by things which have fixed rules for creation, undead are the way to go.

You're forgetting Animated Objects. A Cleric/Dweomerkeeper can use animate objects (made permanent with Supernatural Spell limited wish emulating permanency) to make robot servants, which can have whatever shape you need.


Mindless undead are perfectly fine for most endeavors; zombies have a slight strength bonus. A lot of necro-industrialization plans involve massive numbers of skeletal or undead workers. This plan has one flaw, however; you're sharply limited in the number of undead any one person can control. This isn't an insurmountable obstacle, but it does require a large number of necromancers (at least one per industrial facility); this may or may not be a problem, but it sure as frig will if there are neighbors who are a bit wary of the undead.

Eternal Wands of command undead let you scale much better.


Do they increase production? Potentially, but it would probably be only a bit better than what normal people could achieve. The big savings would be probably be workers you don't need to pay.

Also your workers are three-ish times as efficient. And they just keep accumulating, instead of eventually dying off. Industrialization in D&DLand needs to take a long view.


Sadly, there aren't a lot of things one can do with these using just spells. Summoned creatures are gone in a minute or two, and planar allies cost at least 100 XP and several thousand gold for a one-day-pr-CL task. This is worse than constructs!

Are we just skipping planar binding?


One thing, Solars can't be planar bound, they have 20HD and GPB has an 18HD cap but a possibel solution to that is a Mindraped Ice Assassin and you could get the piece of Solar from a Gated Solar. Of course Thought bottles would be needed for industrializing easily. Also someone deviced a way to get basically limitless amounts of Ambrosia. IIRC it was detailed on the cost reduction handbook

Being a Malconvoker of at least 8th level allows you to bind creatures of up to 20 HD with planar binding.


Really, the main question is why the dnd setting hasn't already industrialized itself.

The same "technologies" (spells) that allow you to industrialize the world also allow you to destroy it. If you can bind up a bunch of angels to make food for your people, you could also bind up a comparable number of demons to murder your people (or, more likely, someone else's people). What's more, there are organizations with the explicit goal of destroying the world. The Cold War almost ended in global thermonuclear war, and both the USA and the USSR simply wanted to rule the world. If one of them had wanted to simply destroy the world, it seems very likely they would have succeeded in doing so.

There may have been civilizations a million years ago in D&DLand, but those civilizations (and a bunch of ones between then and now) were probably horribly destroyed.

[WhatThePhysics]

Post #10, "I deliberately left out magical traps, since the only times I've seen them used for anything other than...uh...traps have been blatantly game-breaking tricks (think the Tippyverse)." I mentally extended that out to all custom items, becuase auto-resetting magical traps are just custom at-will magic items at 1/4 price (as is custom continuous/at-will wondrous architecture), even though the first post mentions custom items.
So, custom magic items are not prohibited.


A 3rd level NPC crafter can supply 0xp for crafting, because NPCs don't use xp, and they craft however much the DM says they can. Even if they did use xp, they would have to be assigned a floating xp value by the DM, and thus can only craft as much as the DM says they can. And once you're allowed to grind xp in-universe you can break the game just by punching your friend in the face.
Cohorts gain XP, so the idea that no NPCs get XP contradicts the rules.


Or instead of assuming everything goes as bad as possible to marginally increase the price, you could not:

There is absolutely no need to involve charisma checks or even calling diagrams, because the actual plan is to immediately beat the elemental (a weak melee bruiser with no significant magical abilities aside from being on fire) into unconsciousness, which can be done simply by filling the room with 1sp mercenaries and blunt arrows.
Any service contract that says "call me a fire elemental" will involve payment based on number of elementals summoned, not "number of spell casts," and any caster that wants to actually get paid will accept this, let alone the possibility you're doing it yourself (GWG's assumption of spellcaster hiring is the weakest link in the plans if you ask me but it's a start if you're not the caster), and even if they did a 25% increase to the average LPB cost is only 90gp, whoopie.
And why on earth would you need the whole steam engine there? I've specifically said multiple times that you stick the elemental in a sealed iron sphere. That sphere is not only transportable but if anything modular, being a standard size with a standard heat, making standardized parts even more obvious and easy.


From Lesser Planar Binding: "To create the trap, you must use a magic circle spell, focused inward." and "The creature can escape from the trap with by successfully pitting its spell resistance against your caster level check, by dimensional travel, or with a successful Charisma check (DC 15 + ½ your caster level + your Cha modifier)."
From Goods and Services: "The indicated amount is how much it costs to get a spellcaster to cast a spell for you." There is no 25% increase to the service charge. Rather, there's a 25% chance that the Fire Elemental will pass the Will save, requiring you to pay another 500 GP for another casting of Lesser Planar Binding, and another 150 GP for another casting of Magic Circle Against X.
Fair point.


Hydropower is great, if you understand electricity. While there are indications that steam exists and is understood in dnd, there are hardly any that suggest electricity (though I've pointed the one I know about out). Electricity does not solve the problem of mass-producing steel, and electrically powered engines for transporting require sufficient technology advancement and industrialization to produce. Trying to store and shift the mechanical energy of a waterwheel via springs and clockworkpunk requires the mass production of even more finicky parts than steam would, with coiled springs that could explode at any moment.

Meanwhile, a medium fire elemental is physically incapable of breaking the hardness of iron, making the only chance of a breakout a full industrial accident where a sphere is crushed or dropped. Surrounding a stationary facility with a moat ensures they couldn't escape even then, and with 26 hp they're only slightly harder to bring down than a horse.
Hydroelectricity is irrelevant to this. Hydromechanical power is quite useful, as evidence by this quote: "Chinese water wheels almost certainly have a separate origin, as early ones there were invariably horizontal waterwheels. By at least the 1st century AD, the Chinese of the Eastern Han Dynasty began to use waterwheels to crush grain in mills and to power the piston-bellows in forging iron ore into cast iron." Source (http://hydroenergy-waterwheel.blogspot.com/2009/07/water-wheel.html).


If you aren't transporting things you aren't industrializing. Portals are nice, but in all likelihood still far too expensive to actually take the place of trains. They make a useful point to point kickstart, but don't actually connect everything to everything.
If you have aqueducts in a local area, you can transport people and goods without adding to surface traffic. You can still industrialize without long distance transportation, as industrialization doesn't have long distance mass transit as a prerequisite.


Aside from being another custom item, Matter Agitation is a concentration power, which requires constant attendance, but sure it's more compact and gives a more precise temperature based on the melting point of lead. And obviously you'd use create water items (even existing create water items) in areas where water is harder to get. My point is that create water doesn't industrialize squat without a much huger technological leap, and even then you don't need artificial rivers or create water to produce hydropower.

There is no source of infinite power more efficient in dnd than trapping a magical creature to siphon. Elementals are the simplest, least dangerous, and easiest to do this with, and heat energy is the easiest form of energy to start climbing the tech tree. Barring a DM who says fire elementals aren't hot enough to boil water, nothing will compare without a custom spell or item.
Custom items aren't prohibited, and hiring someone to concentrate on the Matter Agitation item provides a safety benefit that enslaving a Fire Elemental does not.

[Fizban]

Cohorts gain XP, so the idea that no NPCs get XP contradicts the rules.
And if you want to have your Cohort do the crafting instead of yourself, go right ahead.


From Lesser Planar Binding: "To create the trap, you must use a magic circle spell, focused inward." and "The creature can escape from the trap with by successfully pitting its spell resistance against your caster level check, by dimensional travel, or with a successful Charisma check (DC 15 + ½ your caster level + your Cha modifier)."
From Goods and Services: "The indicated amount is how much it costs to get a spellcaster to cast a spell for you." There is no 25% increase to the service charge. Rather, there's a 25% chance that the Fire Elemental will pass the Will save, requiring you to pay another 500 GP for another casting of Lesser Planar Binding, and another 150 GP for another casting of Magic Circle Against X.

Bro, I do not care about the elemental breaking free, because it's going to be hit with two dozen arrows on round one regardless, roll charisma checks all you want it doesn't matter. I specifically said average price, because a 25% chance of spell failure averages to one extra casting for every four, which means you pay 125% of the amount over time. Personally I see no reason why you couldn't cast LPB without the trap, but even if you can't the total price for a Magic Circle and LPB from the same caster is 570, and unless the elemental does break the trap there's nothing that says you can't reuse it, so you're not even re-casting it all that often and the circle cost is divided by however many things you actually call during that session.


Hydroelectricity is irrelevant to this. Hydromechanical power is quite useful, as evidence by this quote: "Chinese water wheels almost certainly have a separate origin, as early ones there were invariably horizontal waterwheels. By at least the 1st century AD, the Chinese of the Eastern Han Dynasty began to use waterwheels to crush grain in mills and to power the piston-bellows in forging iron ore into cast iron." Source (http://hydroenergy-waterwheel.blogspot.com/2009/07/water-wheel.html).
Congratulations, you've made it up to where the game already starts, in the default faux-medieval setting where they already have windmills and waterwheels. Putting up a few more is not a significant revolution. If you want to actually improve harvesting capacity or pump out massive quantities of goods, you're going to need to replace farming and industrial equipment, which won't be powered by water unless you've invented electricity. I expect if it was actually do-able with a waterwheel we wouldn't have had to wait.

If you have aqueducts in a local area, you can transport people and goods without adding to surface traffic. You can still industrialize without long distance transportation, as industrialization doesn't have long distance mass transit as a prerequisite.
It kinda does? If you don't have long distance mass transit it doesn't matter how many goods you can produce. Transportation and communication are literally the first two things on GMW's list, I don't see how you can claim to have met the goal without fulfilling mass transit of goods and/or people.

Custom items aren't prohibited, and hiring someone to concentrate on the Matter Agitation item provides a safety benefit that enslaving a Fire Elemental does not.
And elementals can fulfill energy requirements without custom items, making them superior by default since they only require permission to cast the existing spell rather than invent a custom item. "Cast spell X infinity times" is hardly worth a thread.

[WhatThePhysics]

And if you want to have your Cohort do the crafting instead of yourself, go right ahead.
Alright, but saying that NPCs don't get XP is inaccurate.


Bro, I do not care about the elemental breaking free, because it's going to be hit with two dozen arrows on round one regardless, roll charisma checks all you want it doesn't matter. I specifically said average price, because a 25% chance of spell failure averages to one extra casting for every four, which means you pay 125% of the amount over time. Personally I see no reason why you couldn't cast LPB without the trap, but even if you can't the total price for a Magic Circle and LPB from the same caster is 570, and unless the elemental does break the trap there's nothing that says you can't reuse it, so you're not even re-casting it all that often and the circle cost is divided by however many things you actually call during that session.
Will the operator always have dozens of hirelings on hand to keep the elemental from fleeing? That'll cost extra, which lowers the general productivity of this method. I'd also suspect employing so many people to enforce slavery would become newsworthy, which would probably lead to people with anti-slavery mindsets getting involved.

The average minimum spellcasting cost of this method would be (500+150)*1.25 = 812.5 GP, not 570 GP. You also can't avoid the need for Magic Circle Against X, because Lesser Planar Binding explicitly requires that spell for this purpose. You also can't reuse Magic Circle Against X, because that spell has this clause: "When focused inward, the spell binds a non[alignment] called creature (such as those called by the lesser planar binding, planar binding, and greater planar binding spells) for a maximum of 24 hours per caster level, provided that you cast the spell that calls the creature within 1 round of casting the magic circle." Since Lesser Planar Binding has a casting time of 10 minutes, having a single caster pull off what you're describing requires extra resources that may not be guaranteed.


Congratulations, you've made it up to where the game already starts, in the default faux-medieval setting where they already have windmills and waterwheels. Putting up a few more is not a significant revolution. If you want to actually improve harvesting capacity or pump out massive quantities of goods, you're going to need to replace farming and industrial equipment, which won't be powered by water unless you've invented electricity. I expect if it was actually do-able with a waterwheel we wouldn't have had to wait.
But you're not just putting up a few more waterwheels. You're multiplying the amount of wheels per volume, because you can conjure water from the top of a tower, let it spin multiple wheels in said tower, then let it flow down an aqueduct, which pours it onto multiple other wheels, then let it merge with other magically created streams, that then spin ground level wheels, before it's directed into irrigation networks to improve agricultural output. The wheels could power everything from grain mills to saw mills to ore crushers to piston bellows, which would no longer need to be built near natural rivers that may dry up or change course.

Also, you're ignoring the sanitation revolution that emerges when you can spend a mere 1000 GP to conjure 28,800 gallons of fresh water per day, especially in an urban area that requires sewers to prevent epidemics.


It kinda does? If you don't have long distance mass transit it doesn't matter how many goods you can produce. Transportation and communication are literally the first two things on GMW's list, I don't see how you can claim to have met the goal without fulfilling mass transit of goods and/or people.
Mass producing fresh water provides water and power for "Dishwasher", Washing Machine", "Factories", "Grain Elevator", "Cotton Gin", and "Spinning Jenny, Sewing Machine, Etc". Having many more waterwheels where they normally wouldn't be present fulfills "Improved production efficiency" and "Mass production". If you mass produce Create Water items, you produce flows rates high enough for aqueduct shipping to exist. If you want to be clever with this technology, you could use deliberate flow rate changes to induce pressure differences at your destination, which could be a slow but long distance communication method.

If you combine this with Matter Agitation, you have hot water for some of those categories, steam for "Steam Power" and "Steamboats", and fulfill the need for "Transportation" and "Portable power".


And elementals can fulfill energy requirements without custom items, making them superior by default since they only require permission to cast the existing spell rather than invent a custom item. "Cast spell X infinity times" is hardly worth a thread.
If custom items that aren't traps are explicitly allowed, I don't see what the problem is. You're just expressing an opinion that isn't shared by GreatWyrmGold.

[Florian]

[QUOTE=GreatWyrmGold;21950919]I tried to break down the Industrial Revolution into the problems it solved, and find ways to solve it. If you have a better way to solve those problems in mind, I'd love to hear them! If not, you're just rolling your eyes smugly and saying "There could be a better way".

The problem discussing this topic is, that we tend to talk about what rules are there and try to fit them in retroactively, looking at how they would change "life" in a given setting. What we don´t do is look how said rules and discreet rules elements would actually look like when we start a setting at point zero and start extrapolating from there.

The thing is, we´re used to things having their apparent worth based on rarity or complexity in their creation, but what we´re actually doing is trying to find a way to negate those two aspects.

Once you get stable and permanent access to the Inner Planes, rarity ceases to be an issue as you now have access to the building blocks of the multiverse.
Once you get a firm understanding of how the Outer Planes work and you understand how "souls" truly work, this will also change how things should be done.

This is the real problem here. Why do we talk about using spell traps and walls of iron when the Elemental Plane of Earth is an infinite source of iron?

[Darth Ultron]

The problem discussing this topic is, that we tend to talk about what rules are there and try to fit them in retroactively, looking at how they would change "life" in a given setting. of

The real trick is that life in such a world would be very, very different from the Earth model. And very much so from the ''core D&D model'' that makes no sense. The ''core idea'' is that the fantasy world is exactly like Earth about 1300 or so, with magic and monsters sprinkled in, but not changing the Ye Old Earth. But, even though the ''in the game universe'' things like magic and monsters have been around for at least 2,000 to 10,000 years before the ''1300 time setting''.....nothing has changed. And that makes no sense.

Just take the ''magic is rare'' idea in the ''core idea''. We are told it's a true fact, but no real reason why...and no reason why it can't change. Like if someone in the ''1300 like time'' took like a couple days they could say light a whole castle or street with continual torches or they could create a bucket of endless water. Both are very obvious and reasonable. But why must ''someone'' wait until the ''1300 ish time'' to do so? If magic has existed for, say 5,000 years....well why did not guy say 4,000 years think of something so simple as ''I'll cast continual torch a couple times and light up my house....forever.''

And then comes the real twist. Guy 4,000 years ago...and say like oh 100 other people...would say ''wow that endless free light is really useful'' I'm going to look into and use some of this 'magic' stuff! So, within a short time..you'd have lots and lots of spellcasters. Really, anyone with even a slight bit of intelligence would want to learn magic. So in a short time, you'd have a world with a lot of spellcasters.

And the twist continues as ''that guy'' and like say oh 1000 other spellcasters say ''hum, endless light is great...but what if?'' and they sit down and make 100's of piratical useful spell's and magic items. And then this goes on for 1,000's of years......then ''default 1300 ish or so'' is nothing like ''what Earth in 1300 was like''.

[Florian]

@Darth Ultron:

You´ve got to admit, the guys over at Paizo did a good job with Golarion.

Basically, Azlant is the kind of magical society we aim for. The rune lords are the bastardized outer fringe of this, but still basically still functioning on the Star Trek level we talk about.
Now with Starfall, the setting experienced an extinction level event that killed off both cultures, leaving enough remnants of the rune lords to get some research going for those that survived.

Now the interesting part is that it is strongly hinted at that the schools of magic are illusionary, as is the distinction of different types of magic.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I seem to have forgotten just how much neat stuff there is outside of core.



A problem with Evolved Undead is that the template needs intelligence. Awakening becomes necessary. Ideally one could minimize its charisma and intelligence: make them receptive to orders and diplomacy...
I wrote my post under the impression that the big advantage of skeletons and zombies had over ghouls and such was that, being mindless, you didn't have to pay them.


Though perhaps spell clocks of War Unseen Servants are more effective...
This is the part where I ask what sources something interesting-sounding is from. This time, I have two things to ask about—spell clocks and War Unseen Servant.



Last I remember reading the Elemental Lords didn't give a fig about most elementals, treating the smaller ones like animals the same way the material plane does (despite their int 6).
Yeah, that seems odd. Maybe I'm just projecting my own values onto the setting and rules, but treating sentient beings like animals just seems...off, even if they only have an Intelligence score of 6.



No, but it does imply they have figured out how to work a wide variety of metals already, which took us quite a while.
Ayup. We didn't figure out how to work copper until a bit after 9,000 BCE or so, tin around 7,000 BCE, bronze didn't show up until around 4,500 BCE, and non-meteoric iron was too hard to smelt until around 2,500 BCE. The astute reader will note that we already had a wide variety of metals available to us millennia before feudalism was a twinkle in the Karlings' eyes. Simply having a wide variety of metals around doesn't really prove anything.



5. energy transformation field turns cheap magic (such as at-will SLAs) into whatever magic you put into the field.
Hm? Sounds interesting...
Googles the spell
Holy frig, that would be useful. Though the mechanics don't seem that consistent; spell level if available, caster level or hit dice if not? A fireball is three points, dragon's breath is dozens?


You're forgetting Animated Objects. A Cleric/Dweomerkeeper can use animate objects (made permanent with Supernatural Spell limited wish emulating permanency) to make robot servants, which can have whatever shape you need.
Googles dweomerkeeper
I'd feel dirty for using that trick. I mean, I see why it works, but...it feels wrong to exploit a system that the designers clearly didn't think through.


Eternal Wands of command undead let you scale much better.
Huh. Coulda sworn there was a HD limit in there, too...


Also your workers are three-ish times as efficient.
Assuming you can get them to work 24/7. If you have


Are we just skipping planar binding?
No, we're forgetting that it's a separate spell.



The thing is, we´re used to things having their apparent worth based on rarity or complexity in their creation, but what we´re actually doing is trying to find a way to negate those two aspects.

Once you get stable and permanent access to the Inner Planes, rarity ceases to be an issue as you now have access to the building blocks of the multiverse.
Once you get a firm understanding of how the Outer Planes work and you understand how "souls" truly work, this will also change how things should be done.

This is the real problem here. Why do we talk about using spell traps and walls of iron when the Elemental Plane of Earth is an infinite source of iron?
I'm...not impressed by this argument. The Elemental Plane of Earth might have an infinite amount of iron, but that doesn't really matter. The asteroid belt has an immense amount of iron, gold, and so on, but it doesn't affect the availability of those metals because it's really hard to get at. Same with the Elemental Planes; you might have an infinite amount of iron, but without the ability to open portals directly to rich iron veins, you're still going to have a practically-finite supply. (To say nothing of the expenses of mining and refining the stuff...)

[Gildedragon]

Spell clocks are from wizard's clockwork wonders articles link (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cw/20070312a)
They're essentially self resetting self triggering spell traps

And war spells are from Dragon 309. It is a sort of metamagic that takes a lot to cast, but is essentially Mass X or Hyper-Widen X...

[Fizban]

Alright, but saying that NPCs don't get XP is inaccurate.
No, not letting this go actually. There is one specific type of NPC that gets xp, specifically because they are attached to a PC, and that's it. Claiming that "NPCs" in any general sense use xp mechanics is straight bull.

Will the operator always have dozens of hirelings on hand to keep the elemental from fleeing? That'll cost extra, which lowers the general productivity of this method. I'd also suspect employing so many people to enforce slavery would become newsworthy, which would probably lead to people with anti-slavery mindsets getting involved.
By all means, run some actual numbers. Or I'll just repeat again the cost of 1sp mercenaries and the fact that the general public don't know anything about elementals. Really, trying to claim that anti-slavery sentiments are a problem when it comes to balls of murder fire? Worrying about the enslavement of elementals is a post-revolution concern that I've never seen anyone actually address. Eberron doesn't raise the issue. I'm fairly certain no one ever complained about all the enslaved elementals powering the golems of the tippyverse. If they even see it as a creature rather than a fire, they'll see it as a beast, and people have always used beasts. That's a plot hook, not an obstacle.

The average minimum spellcasting cost of this method would be (500+150)*1.25 = 812.5 GP, not 570 GP. You also can't avoid the need for Magic Circle Against X, because Lesser Planar Binding explicitly requires that spell for this purpose. You also can't reuse Magic Circle Against X, because that spell has this clause: "When focused inward, the spell binds a non[alignment] called creature (such as those called by the lesser planar binding, planar binding, and greater planar binding spells) for a maximum of 24 hours per caster level, provided that you cast the spell that calls the creature within 1 round of casting the magic circle." Since Lesser Planar Binding has a casting time of 10 minutes, having a single caster pull off what you're describing requires extra resources that may not be guaranteed.
Oh, it does? My mistake. Of course you're still assuming a 10th level caster for no other reason than to be contrary. You're actually lowballing me now, as I've got 900 on the average cost for the circle and binding both from a 9th level caster. Of course there's still no point in trying to penny pinch it, since the extra costs required to use your supposedly inexpensive create water traps custom items are much worse. You've managed to get the price of infinite fire up to that of a faucet.

And while you're trying to nickel and dime me on it, you're using an item that costs more than the printed version. You say this is because it's easier to find crafters, but number of crafters is the least of your problems. You're assuming multiple crafters making a custom item that costs more than normal so you can maybe finish the magic item crafting slightly faster, when your bottleneck is everything else. It's harder to mess up a greater number of weaker items? There's no reason for any of them to be exposed at all, and if anyone with enough levels to get through your defenses goes after them it's not going to matter.

And all I have to do to reduce the price is get the spellcaster to not charge money, such as by playing them myself, dominating, diplomancing, or otherwise convincing them it's a good idea. You can't avoid the crafting cost at all. The effective cost of harnessing elemental power is rock bottom, as should be obvious from literal manifestations of infinite energy.

Also, you're ignoring the sanitation revolution that emerges when you can spend a mere 1000 GP to conjure 28,800 gallons of fresh water per day, especially in an urban area that requires sewers to prevent epidemics.
To use your own phrase "the two aren't mutually exclusive." You've yet to show any evidence that water dropping, which is more expensive and requires more infrastructure to even attempt harnessing for purposes other than being water, is better than steam at powering industry. So you want to build a tower which costs thousands of gp in order to multiply the effect of water which costs thousands of gp and requires thousands of gp in drainage digging in order to power machines which have to be built into the tower. I'm sure you can produce some huge number for energy generated by creating that mass of water at a height, but the amount you can actually use is going to be a fraction of that, and it's costing a ridiculous amount of money to set up. Or you can build a steam boiler that can spin whatever you want wherever you want for a fraction of the cost.

Mass producing fresh water provides water and power for "Dishwasher", Washing Machine", "Factories", "Grain Elevator", "Cotton Gin", and "Spinning Jenny, Sewing Machine, Etc".
Still not seeing mass transit.

If you want to be clever with this technology, you could use deliberate flow rate changes to induce pressure differences at your destination, which could be a slow but long distance communication method.
*Snort*

If you combine this with Matter Agitation, you have hot water for some of those categories, steam for "Steam Power" and "Steamboats", and fulfill the need for "Transportation" and "Portable power".
So no, the water doesn't do squat without heat, and you have nothing better than elemental power without a DM approved custom item.

If custom items that aren't traps are explicitly allowed, I don't see what the problem is. You're just expressing an opinion that isn't shared by GreatWyrmGold.
Nah, I'll double down. Tell me how another thread about casting spell X infinite times with a specially DM approved custom item is more interesting than trying to solve the problem without doing that. Or how it's easier to go around building hundreds of water producing items and dedicated infrastructure than it is to simply cast a spell however many times per day as is available, then let the labor force finish the job and haul the power source wherever it needs to go. And while GWG hasn't been back since we started bickering (Edit: speak and he appears), I get the feeling he didn't realize that custom infinite items and magic traps are only separated by the 1/4 price multiplier.

Seriously, your answer to his "I deliberately left out magical traps" is "Well you left in the same thing at 4x price so that wins!" You know what else you can do with a custom at-will/continuous item? Have 600 Unseen Servants. For 2,000gp a combined output of 1,200lbs of carrying capacity or direct force, applied however you want, no infrastructure required. Yay, all that's left is measuring how many you need to power any particular thingy, wasn't that fun.

Still doesn't cover transportation since they're so slow though.


This is the real problem here. Why do we talk about using spell traps and walls of iron when the Elemental Plane of Earth is an infinite source of iron?
Because the moment you say anything more complicated than "cast spell X infinite times," people can start making things up to try and say it doesn't work. WTP is trying to make a big deal about a couple hundred gp in the initial cost on my elemental balls, while completely ignoring the thousands it would take to build his towers and aqueducts, and I in turn am punishing him with building costs while ignoring the fact that I don't actually have a price for the boiler itself.

I did in fact address the impact of the Plane of Fire already: moving your steel operations there should let you skip straight to large scale steel production. The difficulty in shipping the materials back and forth makes this cost prohibitive however, as you need to either break it down to carryable chunks, use big enough beasts of burden to carry it through the portal, load it onto plane shifting ships, or find that one spell that swaps two locations temporarily (can't remember if it was 3rd party either). You also need to protect your workers on the plane and in the end it's much easier to stay on the material plane with souped up permanent Walls of Fire. But, since the occupants of the City of Brass probably have an easy time making their steel, attempts to advance the field would likely run into them and let you turn up that advancement much more easily than it was discovered in our world.

So thinking with the dnd cosmology, instead of waiting for someone to figure out how to build a better steel converter, you consult the master metalshapers of the Plane of Fire, find out you need more heat, and use fire magic since it's easier than portals.

The Plane of Earth already has rules for prospecting in Manual of the Planes: you've got about a 4% chance every 8 hours of digging to find a metal seam worth a considerable amount of metal. You also have about an equal chance to find a potentially dangerous elemental pocket, or a potentially hostile creature up to some significant CRs. And while the Elemental Lords don't much care about their lesser brethren, the Dao are big into enslaving other people to do their mining for them so it's inevitable that your own mining operation will eventually run into territorial problems with planar powers.

The Plane of Water is what you would actually use to generate infinite water, except once again there's no reliable printed effects to do so because they don't want players dumping lava on people through gates. Permanently open gates pouring out fire or water or lava are mentioned in fluff all over the place, but actually making one requires DM involvement.


Ayup. We didn't figure out how to work copper until a bit after 9,000 BCE or so, tin around 7,000 BCE, bronze didn't show up until around 4,500 BCE, and non-meteoric iron was too hard to smelt until around 2,500 BCE. The astute reader will note that we already had a wide variety of metals available to us millennia before feudalism was a twinkle in the Karlings' eyes. Simply having a wide variety of metals around doesn't really prove anything.
My main thinking is essentially "if dwarves are so good at mining and smithing and have done harder materials than steel for thousands of years, they should know how steel works by now," but I've since come up with an alternative source for the knowledge even if the dwarves haven't figured out how to build a better smelter.

Not counting of course the classic "ask the god of metal how to make metal faster" plan.

[Cosi]

EDIT: I forgot to say, the whole "why isn't the world already industrialized" is essentially the Fermi Paradox. We know that interstellar civilization magictech industry is possible, yet we don't observe any interstellar civilizations magictech empires. There's a bunch of speculation about why, and it turns out that all the answers to that question make for pretty cool adventures.


Yeah, that seems odd. Maybe I'm just projecting my own values onto the setting and rules, but treating sentient beings like animals just seems...off, even if they only have an Intelligence score of 6.

I dunno. I would imagine that there's the same gap between the Elemenal Lords and the 6 INT elementals as between people and animals, even if the elements are smarter than animals. It's a question that comes up in any discussion of things way smarter than humans.


Though the mechanics don't seem that consistent; spell level if available, caster level or hit dice if not? A fireball is three points, dragon's breath is dozens?

It's either that or having certain things not work (because the equivalent spell level isn't specified). You could always change it to half of CL/HD.


I'd feel dirty for using that trick. I mean, I see why it works, but...it feels wrong to exploit a system that the designers clearly didn't think through.

D&D is supposed to be a fantasy pastiche. Any industrialization is already exploiting the system to do things designers didn't intend.


Assuming you can get them to work 24/7. If you have

I think you forgot some words?


No, we're forgetting that it's a separate spell.

Yeah, but the quoted line looked like it was supposed to be listing all the options for recruiting outsiders.


No, not letting this go actually. There is one specific type of NPC that gets xp, specifically because they are attached to a PC, and that's it. Claiming that "NPCs" in any general sense use xp mechanics is straight bull.

Level loss sets a character's XP to the midpoint between their current level and their previous level. No mention of being PC only.


Permanently open gates pouring out fire or water or lava are mentioned in fluff all over the place, but actually making one requires DM involvement.

energy transformation field tuned to gate and powered by at-will SLAs (which should work if you use the travel version) creates a portal that recharges on a timescale shorter than its duration. That's not strictly permanent, but it's pretty close. greater plane shift plus some kind of courier also works pretty well for moving material.

[Florian]

@Cosi:

The problem with the Fermi Paradox is with the question whether an ever-expanding magi tech society really is the end-point of evolution.

Consider the basic point that Fizban understood and GWG apparently missed: Unlimited access to the basic building blocks of the multiverse is quite powerful but will stifle further advancement because you don´t have to cope with lack.

[Darth Ultron]

No, not letting this go actually. There is one specific type of NPC that gets xp, specifically because they are attached to a PC, and that's it. Claiming that "NPCs" in any general sense use xp mechanics is straight bull.


Well, the NPC classes use levels and XP.....so is that not using ''xp mechanics?''


But this is an example of a much bigger problem: D&D rules, even more so 3X and 4E and 5E only focus on the ''PC adventurer'' and ''kill, loot, repeat''. To even say ''your an NPC'' just does not make any sense. After all ''who'' says ''who'' is a PC, NPC or a monster?

And like if ''a character'' has a farm or some other way to make money...how do they ''stop'' making money if the reach the WBL limit? And if they can just ignore that ''limit'', why does it even exist?

And so on...

[Florian]

@Darth Ultron:

D&D is a very specific game and gives you rules for playing that exact game. What it doesn´t give you are the rules for creating and simulating a specific world.

[Zombimode]

Well, the NPC classes use levels and XP

They don't. The advancement and XP reward rules only talk about player characters.

NPCs obviously have levels, but their advancement (outside of chohorts) is not specified. Anything you add on this is outside the rules.

[WhatThePhysics]

No, not letting this go actually. There is one specific type of NPC that gets xp, specifically because they are attached to a PC, and that's it. Claiming that "NPCs" in any general sense use xp mechanics is straight bull.
I didn't claim that, but just mentioned a way for NPCs to get XP. Leadership is also not PC-exclusive. Barring a shortage of challenges, and NPCs with Leadership, nothing stops NPCs from getting Cohorts that get XP.

Also, you did say that "NPCs don't use xp, and they craft however much the DM says they can." If NPCs can craft everything from potions to wands, shouldn't they be able to craft other items?


By all means, run some actual numbers. Or I'll just repeat again the cost of 1sp mercenaries and the fact that the general public don't know anything about elementals. Really, trying to claim that anti-slavery sentiments are a problem when it comes to balls of murder fire? Worrying about the enslavement of elementals is a post-revolution concern that I've never seen anyone actually address. Eberron doesn't raise the issue. I'm fairly certain no one ever complained about all the enslaved elementals powering the golems of the tippyverse. If they even see it as a creature rather than a fire, they'll see it as a beast, and people have always used beasts. That's a plot hook, not an obstacle.
I reread the cost for hiring a mercenary, and it's actually 3 SP/day.

If a hireling is a level 1 Human Warrior with a 13 or 12 Dexterity, and the Point Blank Shot feat, they have a 40% chance to hit a Medium Fire Elemental. If you want 24 arrows to hit the Elemental in 1 round, you'll need 60 hirelings, which costs 18 GP/day, assuming they all stand guard 24/7. By day 11, you've spent more than you would to buy a Create Water item. By day 67, you've spent more than you would to buy that, a Matter Agitation item, plus the hireling operator fee for the latter. In the long run, enslaving Fire Elementals is not economical, relative to the steam engine I've described. This ignores the costs of the mundane components and associated systems.

What evidence do you have that the general public doesn't know anything about elementals?

Then there's this: ""Evil" implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others." Beating Fire Elementals into submission when they try to escape is hurting them, and enslaving them is oppression. Both actions may attract negative attention from those with Chaotic and Good alignments. Whether people also disapprove of "balls of murder fire" is another matter. Just because people from Eberron haven't been said to disapprove of elemental slavery, or nobody here has complained about elemental slavery in the Tippyverse, doesn't mean alignment descriptions don't matter.

Also, "A creature of humanlike intelligence has a score of at least 3." Fire Elementals have >3 Intelligence.


Oh, it does? My mistake. Of course you're still assuming a 10th level caster for no other reason than to be contrary. You're actually lowballing me now, as I've got 900 on the average cost for the circle and binding both from a 9th level caster. Of course there's still no point in trying to penny pinch it, since the extra costs required to use your supposedly inexpensive create water traps custom items are much worse. You've managed to get the price of infinite fire up to that of a faucet.
I misread the spell description when I first started posting, and thought the Charisma check would be important in this scenario. That's why I went with a 10th level Sorcerer, as their 15 Charisma would improve the odds of the elemental not breaking out of the trap. Sorry about that. :smalleek:

In that case, you'll pay a 9th level caster 450 GP for Lesser Planar Binding, and a 5th level caster 150 GP for Magic Circle Against X, for a total of (450+150)*1.25 = 750 GP. At that rate, you'll spend more than you would to buy a Create Water item in 14 days. By day 70, you've spent more than you would to buy that, a Matter Agitation item, plus the hireling operator fee for the latter.


And while you're trying to nickel and dime me on it, you're using an item that costs more than the printed version. You say this is because it's easier to find crafters, but number of crafters is the least of your problems. You're assuming multiple crafters making a custom item that costs more than normal so you can maybe finish the magic item crafting slightly faster, when your bottleneck is everything else. It's harder to mess up a greater number of weaker items? There's no reason for any of them to be exposed at all, and if anyone with enough levels to get through your defenses goes after them it's not going to matter.
Are there printed versions of continuous Create Water items? If you're talking about Decanter of Endless Water, that requires Control Water.

How is it easier to mess up over a dozen Create Water items, compared to a single Decanter?

Foes of sufficiently high level can penetrate almost any defense, so I don't see your point with that.


And all I have to do to reduce the price is get the spellcaster to not charge money, such as by playing them myself, dominating, diplomancing, or otherwise convincing them it's a good idea. You can't avoid the crafting cost at all. The effective cost of harnessing elemental power is rock bottom, as should be obvious from literal manifestations of infinite energy.
Dominating a 9th level caster sounds risky.

If we're going down the path of "let's exploit the rules, but ignore traps", I could just summon Pazuzu to become Pun-Pun at 1st level, then avoid crafting costs by procuring an infinite amount of items at will. Elemental power is not rock bottom, and some infinities are greater than other infinities.


To use your own phrase "the two aren't mutually exclusive." You've yet to show any evidence that water dropping, which is more expensive and requires more infrastructure to even attempt harnessing for purposes other than being water, is better than steam at powering industry. So you want to build a tower which costs thousands of gp in order to multiply the effect of water which costs thousands of gp and requires thousands of gp in drainage digging in order to power machines which have to be built into the tower. I'm sure you can produce some huge number for energy generated by creating that mass of water at a height, but the amount you can actually use is going to be a fraction of that, and it's costing a ridiculous amount of money to set up. Or you can build a steam boiler that can spin whatever you want wherever you want for a fraction of the cost.
I don't know of any listed prices for things like waterwheels or piston bellows.

Can you provide a source for the "thousands of gp in drainage digging"?


Still not seeing mass transit.
Right, I'm just listing the other uses, because the technology doesn't have to be for transit to make industrialization easier.


*Snort*
I felt the same way when I realized one could just put packages inside of watertight containers, and let them flow to their destination. :smallsmile:


So no, the water doesn't do squat without heat, and you have nothing better than elemental power without a DM approved custom item.
I don't, but GreatWyrmGold has okay'd the use of continuous items.


Nah, I'll double down. Tell me how another thread about casting spell X infinite times with a specially DM approved custom item is more interesting than trying to solve the problem without doing that. Or how it's easier to go around building hundreds of water producing items and dedicated infrastructure than it is to simply cast a spell however many times per day as is available, then let the labor force finish the job and haul the power source wherever it needs to go. And while GWG hasn't been back since we started bickering (Edit: speak and he appears), I get the feeling he didn't realize that custom infinite items and magic traps are only separated by the 1/4 price multiplier.

Seriously, your answer to his "I deliberately left out magical traps" is "Well you left in the same thing at 4x price so that wins!" You know what else you can do with a custom at-will/continuous item? Have 600 Unseen Servants. For 2,000gp a combined output of 1,200lbs of carrying capacity or direct force, applied however you want, no infrastructure required. Yay, all that's left is measuring how many you need to power any particular thingy, wasn't that fun.

Still doesn't cover transportation since they're so slow though.
What you find interesting is irrelevant to this, as your preferences don't override the scenario provided by GreatWyrmGold.

I did mention the Matter Agitation items, but you're ignoring that because it's a custom item.

Also, many continuous items have a price difference greater than x4 that of its trap equivalent, if you factor in their spell duration, spell material component costs, and spell XP costs.

Now that you mention it, you might be better off using command word Levitate items to move 30 chained masses that weigh 300 pounds each. With a collective mass of 9000 pounds moving 20 feet/round, you can apply 2073 newton-seconds at 50% efficiency. Might not be as effective as a Matter Agitation or Fire Elemental steam engine, but it's better than a horde of Unseen Servants.

[Darth Ultron]

They don't. The advancement and XP reward rules only talk about player characters.

NPCs obviously have levels, but their advancement (outside of chohorts) is not specified. Anything you add on this is outside the rules.

What? The NPC rules say ''NPC's gain experience and advance just like Pcs''. So...


To add another thing: D&D does not just have magic, it has lots of intelligent creatures not found on Earth.

*Flying creatures--are really a huge world changer by themselves. Intelligent people that can just fly is amazing. Even for really simple things like scouting and map making. To even just fly up a couple feet, look down, and draw a map of the area is a big deal. Also sending long, complex messages over a distance and at great speed is easy. Also sending items and supplies by flight is huge too. And large or bigger creatures can fly with a lot of stuff

*Aquatic creatures--intelligent humanoids that live underwater are a huge world changer. Even for just mundane things like ''building the supports of a bridge''. You also get sending messages and items too.

*Extreme Environment Creatures--The most obvious ones are the Fire types that can, for example mine a volcano. But there are dozens of creatures that can live and work in extreme places....places that are difficult or even impossible even in the 21st century.

*Giant Creatures--Humanoid giants are an amazing bonus as they can move and reach a lot more then ''normal sized humans''. Even a single giant humanoid, say building a house can not only do the work of a lot of ''normal men'', but they can also do things easily.

Giant creatures for food also deserve a special mention. A giant food animal can feed a ton more people then a normal sized animal.

*Special Mention- Oozes, like a black pudding, are a huge boon as they eat ''all'' organic stuff...like waste. And having a great way to get rid of waste...is great.

Mimics can ''become any object''. And this is huge...as say a mimic doing construction can become any helpful object needed...at will.

And all the above are not even adding magic in. Like a single hippogriff can fly miles ''as the crow flies'' with a ton of stuff say shrunken with the spell Shrink Item or any item of holding or extra dimensions.

[Florian]

The number and variety of creatures has another interesting side effect. More civilizations rise up at around the same time, blocking the path for migration and expansion, keeping the size of nations and populations relatively small. This can only be overcome by species that manage to share the same living space.
It´ll also impact regular industry. No one sane will try logging in a forest invested by fey.

[Telok]

Fire elemental containment: ability drain Int to zero. The caster who can summon them can do this.

Easy power: permanent unseen servants. Individually they are weak, put them on a cam shaft.

Animate a solid iron millstone: permanent voice activated flywheel.

The real trick is the agricultural revolution. Without that you can't move enough of the population off the farms to get a good revolution going.

[Florian]

The real trick is the agricultural revolution. Without that you can't move enough of the population off the farms to get a good revolution going.

I think this is only a problem when focusing on RL animals and plants. We have megafauna and -flora, as well as magical ones, a huge amount of fungi and a lot of plant creatures.
With the ability to influence the weather, use basic items like a decanter of endless water to prevent draughts and zombies as cheap laborers and....erm... fertilizer and maybe using the frozen regions of the plane of water for mass storage, food seems to be a non-issue.

[Fizban]

Also, you did say that "NPCs don't use xp, and they craft however much the DM says they can." If NPCs can craft everything from potions to wands, shouldn't they be able to craft other items?
There's a difference between crafting a few items for adventurers, and crafting an arbitrary number of magic items to force industrialize.

I reread the cost for hiring a mercenary, and it's actually 3 SP/day.
My DMG clearly lists it at 2sp, so we're both wrong.

If a hireling is a level 1 Human Warrior with a 13 or 12 Dexterity, and the Point Blank Shot feat, they have a 40% chance to hit a Medium Fire Elemental. If you want 24 arrows to hit the Elemental in 1 round, you'll need 60 hirelings, which costs 18 GP/day, assuming they all stand guard 24/7. By day 11, you've spent more than you would to buy a Create Water item. By day 67, you've spent more than you would to buy that, a Matter Agitation item, plus the hireling operator fee for the latter. In the long run, enslaving Fire Elementals is not economical, relative to the steam engine I've described. This ignores the costs of the mundane components and associated systems.
I feel like you're being deliberately obtuse, as you seem to be assuming I'm putting a massive guard on these elementals after sealing them in an iron prison they physically cannot escape. The mercenaries are part of the "construction" cost, you only need them on the days you're filling spheres.

Also, "A creature of humanlike intelligence has a score of at least 3." Fire Elementals have >3 Intelligence.
Never said it was a Good plan. See also the centuries of slave trade in real life, of other human beings rather than balls of murder fire that can't even speak your language, and the many evil societies in DnD.

By day 70, you've spent more than you would to buy that, a Matter Agitation item, plus the hireling operator fee for the latter.
So for the price of a single faucet and fire of infinity I can have 70 permanent fires of infinity?. You seem to be under the impression that I need to keep producing elementals infinitely. I don't, that's the whole point. You need a huge number of infinite create water items to create artificial rivers, I only need a finite X elementals per machine plus any reasonable source of water to replace the boil off.

Are there printed versions of continuous Create Water items? If you're talking about Decanter of Endless Water, that requires Control Water.
And?

How is it easier to mess up over a dozen Create Water items, compared to a single Decanter?
Foes of sufficiently high level can penetrate almost any defense, so I don't see your point with that.
It's not easier, and it's not harder. It's not a defense. Any defense you can use of one, you can use of the other.

Dominating a 9th level caster sounds risky.
Which is why I laugh at any plan that includes it, especially since Dominate is the same level as LPB, Wall of Fire, and Permanency, so it's completely unneccesary unless you banned conjuration or can't wait till next level to learn LPB. But for some reason Dominate doesn't seem to get banned as much as diplomancy, so it's an option. Earning plot tier allegience via side quests is better, but the obvious assumption for any "fix the world with magic" plan is that it's being executed by a caster already. The point remains that boxing elementals can be reduced to the cost of the boxes and some thugs, while infinite create water items cannot.

If we're going down the path of "let's exploit the rules, but ignore traps", I could just summon Pazuzu to become Pun-Pun at 1st level, then avoid crafting costs by procuring an infinite amount of items at will. Elemental power is not rock bottom, and some infinities are greater than other infinities.
Really, I'm the one "exploiting the rules" now? Even though I've used the least cheesy and most direct methods out of any suggested? You're the one who wants to exploit the item creation guidelines for DMs, who jumped straight to Pazuzu wishes in order to counter the simple fact that elementals are the most easily exploitable method of free energy.

Can you provide a source for the "thousands of gp in drainage digging"?
DMG p101, table 3-27, "Moat with bridge, 50,000gp"
Stronghold Builder's Guidebook p47 elaborates, breaking it down to 100gp per 10'x10'x5' excavation. And you need drainage all the way out of town at least.
The price increase for building extra tall towers (SBG 33) hits 3,000gp per room at 50' and keeps going up from there. Medieval construction techniques don't handle height well.

I felt the same way when I realized one could just put packages inside of watertight containers, and let them flow to their destination. :smallsmile:
That's not any faster than a messenger, it doesn't significantly change anything. Instantaneous communication is already solved with Whispering Sand, as close as it's going to get without inventing electricity.

What you find interesting is irrelevant to this, as your preferences don't override the scenario provided by GreatWyrmGold.
Well I did post here because I thought a thread about industrializing DnD without lol infinite spells would be interesting, and GWG spend most of his post on "Working Within the Rules," leaving infinite items to the "Screw the Rules" section. Which is why I was rather annoyed that not only did you go straight to custom infinite items, but did so in order to spend more money to get the same effect as an item that already exists. And the first time I get someone to engage with the fact that you don't need lol$ to make Eberron magic items in order to use fire elementals and it's someone trying to argue that falling water is better than infinite heat for boosting the tech level? Them's fightin' words.

I did mention the Matter Agitation items, but you're ignoring that because it's a custom item.
I have already acknowledged that infinite Matter Agitation is most likely superior to trapped fire elementals due to the precision of its given heat specs. There's nothing more to be said about it, infinite spell=win, yawn. If I was making a custom item it would just be "magical everburning boiler" priced at whatever the DM says it should be, because that's how custom items work.

You can beat infinite Matter Agitation with infinite Control Flames though, if you can discover a fire that burns more than twice as hot (to counter the 2 sq ft vs 1 sq ft area) and then simply sustain it indefinitely, though the area increase from extra ml on Control Flames is worth it. Amusingly the flame would deal little damage despite the heat, but then the same goes for Matter Agitation's 1d6 per round while melting lead, as XPH rules that the size of the fire is where the damage comes from.

Also, many continuous items have a price difference greater than x4 that of its trap equivalent, if you factor in their spell duration, spell material component costs, and spell XP costs.
Which are conveniently ignored when someone wants an at-will spam item instead of a continuous one, which is always for these purposes. It's quite easy to see that the pricing guidelines, as much as they were "balanced," are based on a continuous effect for a single person, not spamming a spell infinitely. There are precious few truly at-will items with instantaneous effects, almost as if they're not a standard thing.

Now that you mention it, you might be better off using command word Levitate items to move 30 chained masses that weigh 300 pounds each. With a collective mass of 9000 pounds moving 20 feet/round, you can apply 2073 newton-seconds at 50% efficiency. Might not be as effective as a Matter Agitation or Fire Elemental steam engine, but it's better than a horde of Unseen Servants.
Levitate also costs 6x as much. Not sure where you efficiency loss is but factoring both of those in each 2,000gp is getting you 750 lbs at 4/3 the speed, for 1000lbs*15' vs 1200lbs*15' converted to match (though I'd round it down to 1000 to account for lost rounds from the user on the servant item). Also requiring a giant weight setup which only does the one thing, that's just asking for an industrial accident, rather than a bunch of intangible shapeless forces that can apply force directly in a number of ways. I get to claim the "smaller distributed items bonus," and a force of 600 Unseen Servants can do a ton of other things natively that a falling weight can't. If infinite fire would slow other research due to ease of use, infinite Unseen Servant would probably halt it entirely.

Permanent Shrink Item on lead weights will get you some 10,000lbs for 7,500gp and change, up to nearly 20,000lbs with more caster level. And no custom item creation. If you must focus on dropping weights, that's the effect you should be using. Or at least it would be if it didn't lock to the original caster.


Speaking of the first post:

Are there littler elementals on the planes anywhere? Would a steam engine scaled down that much actually work? I dunno, not an engineer. But it looks like magic elemental-powered trains are possible.
There are in fact. Elementite Swarms in the Planar Handbook are made up of tiny versions of the basic elementals. They also have only int 2, if that's a factor, but since they're only statted up in swarms it's much much harder to get them in the box without mishap- unless you can invoke the part of the swarm mechanics that say beating one with nonlethal damage disperses it, in which case you can break a single Elementite Swarm into 300 Tiny Fire Elementals. Weather or not they can still attack or are unconscious or what is up to the DM.

How hot an elemental actually is, or rather how much energy it puts out, is also up to the DM, which is what actually controls how well it would function. You could assume that the elemental is mostly "tall" flames extending a long distance from a very small infinitely burning point (making the outer flames significantly cooler), or you could assume that every bit of the elemental is it's own infinitely burning point (meaning anywhere you touch is right at the base of the flame for maximum heat). The more natural assumption is what you've gone with, a sort of "volume" that's effectively using a fuel base filling an area as wide across as the elemental is. Based on that, if the elemental fills the fuel box then it ought to power the thing, as any fire is hot enough to boil water.

[unseenmage]

One of the issues I see technological or magitech revolution bumping into is the lack of continual improvement (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continual_improvement_process) on spells and magic items.

Without custom spells or custom magic items the basic mechanics of the gameworld are frozen and unimprovable.

Whereas in our world the first basic computer took up a whole room, now I'm typing this message on a pocket computing device that is arguably smarter than I am.

From what I'm understanding constraiming the effects of constant improvement to the machines made from spells and magic items alone will hamper the efforts to revolutionize the setting.

It's like being forced to design fancy modern ceramic and plastic potato peelers when all you're allowed is stone knives because stone knives are RAW.

[Florian]

@unseenmage:

The question is whether improvement is actually necessary. A lot of spells are directly concerned with the end-point of technical evolution, "fixing" it in one go. I think one of the weirdest examples here is "Endure Elements". Once you´ve that as a continuous item, you´ve basically negated the human struggle against the environment.

[Gildedragon]

@unseenmage:

The question is whether improvement is actually necessary. A lot of spells are directly concerned with the end-point of technical evolution, "fixing" it in one go. I think one of the weirdest examples here is "Endure Elements". Once you´ve that as a continuous item, you´ve basically negated the human struggle against the environment.

Progress is in making these spells cheaper and more readily accessible

[Florian]

Progress is in making these spells cheaper and more readily accessible

Is it?

Earlier in this discussion, I posed the question on whether the reality on the inner and outer planes should be taken into account.

This could change the answer significantly.

[Gildedragon]

Is it?

Earlier in this discussion, I posed the question on whether the reality on the inner and outer planes should be taken into account.

This could change the answer significantly.

Pretty much, yeah.
Say: wall of iron / steel
Wonderful spell for resource production, but its high level makes it a luxury spell.
Lowering the spell cost is integral for its widespread use.
This is something eberron sorta kinda tackles, with artificers getting early spell access and easy spell use items like eternal wands and lesser schemas... And the unstatted ordinary schemas which are said to allow cheap production of magic items an technomagical wonders.

[Fizban]

Do the rules distinguish between the two?
The rules don't guarantee anything for purchase without DM consent, but we assume some amount for ease of use. How much does one assume? The less you have to, the better.

If alignment demographics on material planes are equal, non-Evil Chaotic and Good characters outnumber Evil characters. If the action economy adds to magic's force multiplying effects, it might be harder to maintain the slavery than it would be in real life.
You're assuming chaotic people will fight slavery on principle? No no no. Good fights for others, neutral fights for themselves, and evil exploits others. You want equal? 2/3 of the population is neutral or evil, doesn't care or wishes they'd had the idea first. And still ignoring the absolute fact that most people, especially uneducated people from a faux-medival society, will not see elemental as people, will not recognize it as slavery at all.

That was referencing hiring 60 mercenaries each day.
Ah, figured that math was odd but couldn't resist saying 70 infinite fires.

I wasn't sure what you were referring to. Mind clarifying on "you're using an item that costs more than the printed version"?
You said yourself that infinite create water items produce less per gold than the Decanter of Endless Water. Decanter is 15 times the water for 9 times the price. You're spending more money to get less.

Distributing your Create Water items across multiple towers makes it harder to destroy all of them at once. That's a defense.
No, it's just spreading them out, which allows you to potentially force attackers through more layers of defenses, which themselves cost money. Have you calculated how much water you need at the top of each tower to get useful results? Cause you're gonna need more than 2 gallons to get anything useful. If it takes 9 or more there's no reason at all not to use the decanter.

If you're using Diplomancy to avoid paying spellcasting fees, I don't see the problem with Pun-Pun. RAW is RAW, right?
If you can't tell the difference between different levels of cheese there is no point in discussion. If you're using infinite create water traps, I don't see the problem with Pun-Pun, RAW is RAW right? Nevermind that the only reason to use diplomancy is because you've decided to enact this plan starting with a diplomancer rather than a spellcaster who can cast the spells personally.

Thanks. I'd suggest creating artificial lakes or aqueducts to avoid these costs, but I suspect those will cost more. Then again, do you need to spend money on drainage digging, when you can just use the water for sewer systems?
Just what is a "sewer system?" You need to have sewers before you can dump the water in them, which means you need to build those first. Sure you wanted to build them already, but it's still a massive extra cost required before you try to make infinite water towers a significant energy source.

Depending on the flow rate and terrain, it could be faster than a messenger. I think the spellcasting fee for Whispering Sand is 150 GP, which might make aqueduct mailing more desirable in some cases.
I already detailed the daily magic item. I also find it highly unlikely that an artificial water channel will go much if any amount faster than a horse messenger, and they charge 2cp per mile with the added benefit of having a person make sure it actually goes there.

Wouldn't continuous Control Flames items need a manifester level of 5th or 6th to cause the same damage as Matter Agitation? Doesn't seem as effective, in terms of cost.
Wouldn't molten lead deal more damage than a campfire or boiling water? The point is that every effect uses its own rules and none of them translate into anything except what they are. Control Flames cast on a fine dollop of burning thermite to sustain it deals 1 point of damage, because that's what the power says, nevermind that it's hot enough to melt most things. The power checks for size and puts a cap on maximum damage but says nothing about temperature. Exploiting that is the same as any other attempt to exploit physics loopholes, like Matter Agitation's note about melting lead giving it a temperature.

I don't know how your Dungeon Masters calculate custom item prices, but I've always gone with prices that factor in all the extra costs I mentioned. Even standard items include spell material component costs and spell XP costs into their prices, so I don't see where you're coming from.
A spell measured in "rounds" has a x4 multiplier. A 1 round spell is not measured in rounds, but some people like to pretend it also uses a x4 multiplier. Is it not odd that an at-will/continuous spell which lasts for a round is 4x as expensive as an at-will spell with an instantaneous effect that lasts forever? I say again, there are precious few truly at-will items, and they are always specifically designed to not do the things you want them to do for this sort of thing, otherwise you wouldn't need to invoke the custom item "rules." There is no everburning (actual)fireplace, because it can so obviously mess with the setting that it should only exist if the DM decides they want it to, so it's not statted.

What are some actual RAW at-will items, spammable non-personal effects? Ring of Elemental Command (200,000gp), Ring of Telekinesis (getting a 4% discount at 75,000gp), Amulet of the Planes, Cubic Gate, (120,000+gp for creature only plane-shifts), Crystal Ball (42,000gp and "as the spell scrying" implies 1 hour casting time), Decanter of Endless Water (not actually at-will, it's a unique continuous effect, most likely grandfathered in from previous editions), Eyes of Charming and Doom (25-50,000gp for 1st level spells), Hand of the Mage, Harp of Charming (multiple significant drawbacks), Helm of Telepathy/Medallion of Thoughts, and Pipes of Pain, Sewers, and Sounding. That's the DMG. The only truly at-will blasting item I'm sure of are Gloves of the Uldra Savant, with Ray of Frost, and there's a Decanter of Endless Sand to match the water. Using those guidelines it's quite clear indeed what sort of effects are appropriate for an at-will item and at what price.

To continue. A continuous item of an instantaneous spell does nothing, no duration. A use-activated item must be used. A use-activated item of an instantaneous spell must be used constantly, so for starters you're going to need people standing up there all day using the item, so your constant free water is actually costing you 3sp per day for three shifts of dirt-wage workers per create water item.

When it comes to using magic to power technology, I usually go with 50% efficiency to stay on the safe side.
That's a number I suppose.

I don't see where your math is coming from. Each round, someone with a command word Levitate item can direct a 300 pound weight to move up or down for 3 minutes at a speed of 20 feet/round. That's 30 weights in a cycle, or 9,000 total pounds, which can produce 2,073 newton-seconds at 50% efficiency. Each round, someone with a command word Unseen Servant item can direct a servant to lift 20 pounds, or drag 100 pounds, for 1 hour at a speed of 15 feet/round. That's 600 servants per cycle, or 12,000 total pounds lifted, 60,000 total pounds dragged, or some combination thereof, which can produce 2,765 to 13,825 newton-seconds at 50% efficiency. Unseen Servant is more powerful, and has greater utility, so long as you stay within Close range to prevent the servants from ceasing to exist.
I do seem to have dropped a zero at some point. Unseen Servant keeps doing what you tell it to (that's the servant part, if it can sweep a house it can push a crank), applying 20lbs of force to whatever for an hour, times 600 servants active at once, for 12,000lbs over 15' per round, every round . Each round one disappears, you create a new one, and order it to push (either a free action to speak or a move action to direct an active spell), maintaining a total of 600 or so once you've "spun up" during the first hour. Its infinite item formula cost is 2,000gp.

I had originally taken your 9,000lbs as per round force, but it looks like you're totaling some amount over a greater time period. Regardless, with levitate you lift a 300lb weight 20', then 3 minutes later it falls, and after 3 minutes you have one weight falling every round. Its infinite formula cost is 12,000gp.

It's been a long time since I've physics'd, but:
(300lb*20'*32.17ft/s^2)*(1/6)s= 32,170 lb*f/s, vs (12,000ft*lb/s^2)*6s= 72,000 lb*f/s. Infinite Unseen Servant seems to have twice the whatever that ending unit is when calculated based on force value. It goes down a bit if you use push/drag at 5 ft/s, for 60,000 lb*ft/s.

I don't see the industrial hazard in using Levitate, as you can walk beside 300 pound weights at ground level, direct each to rise as you pass them, move away from the weights, remotely direct each weight to descend when they reach their apex, remotely direct them to rise when they reach ground level, repeat the last two steps until the spell expires, then approach the weights when they reach ground level again.
I was imagining a great loop of rising weights traveling across and then falling, but no loop is required. The apex at close range is 30' high, so you're basically there in the first round. I think you might be under the impression levitate moves things when you're not directing it: it doesn't. Due to the move action direction you can control two at once and always be lifting even while you're dropping, so the free drops I was counting as necessary for full output aren't. With just two weight rather than a series waiting for freefall, yeah it's only as dangerous as normal.

Even if it worked as desired, I'm not sure Permanent Shrink Item is cost effective, relative to Levitate or Unseen Servant.
You'd run it as a counterweight system with itself. Unlike the others there's no hard cap on distance. You drop weight #1 from say 300' up instead of 20', it yanks the shrunk #2 weight up to the top, then you shrink #1 and expand #2, repeat. You get 200,000lbs over 300', say every other round. 5,000,000 lb*ft/s at 15,000gp in xp costs and cl 20 spell hire 1,600gp. Plus tower cost, round up and call it 100,000 total. Coming out 50/1 on the shrink weight tower vs 30/1 on the servants, nearly a 2:1 value and potentially more if you build higher, the ease of use and versatility of infinite Unseen Servants still crushes it utterly, though if Permanent Shrink Item was transferable it might have a use.

Except I'm fairly certain Permanent Wall of Fire can still beat everything. The enthalpy of fusion for water is 333.6 J/g, vaporization is 2257 J/g. That's 0.1478 melt/vaporize. Frostburn does give us a fire damage-> heat conversion if you don't already have a temperature for your fire: 10 points of fire damage melts 1 cubic foot of ice. Even assuming that ice is already close to melting, we have a certain amount of energy from fire damage. For the same amount of energy we can vaporize 0.1479 cubic feet of sufficiently hot water into steam. That sounds like quite a lot to me, but let's figure it differently.

28,316 grams of water in a cubic foot* 333.6 joules= 9446 kJ /10 points of fire damage. That's about 1/4 of a kilogram of good coal per round, 15kg per hour, can easily boost WoF damage to 40 or so, convert back to lbs, 132 lbs worth of coal per hour of a boosted wall. Sounds reasonable until googling indicates trains burning as much as 9 or 12 tons and 500 gallons of water per hour (scattered forum posts). Turns out the values given for instantaneous targeted spells don't do much for massive permanent spells.

Edit: though even if the wall only technically damages each target (it says creature but any DM who says Wall of Fire doesn't damage objects is getting the eyebrow) once per round, we can circumvent that with a a radiator method Multiply that energy from damage by splitting the water through pipes, now instead of taking some standard dnd facing like per 5' or 10' you're getting as many as you can fit. Which taken to the extreme basically means as many square feet as the wall itself (at which point you just say that the Frostburn data should be applied per square foot of surface area), a 10'x10' section of wall is worth 1300lbs of coal, getting better, and you've got 4 of those per caster level. To work a smaller area you can use the ring version and/or layer more copies, drives up the price but it'll get there.

[Darth Ultron]

It's like being forced to design fancy modern ceramic and plastic potato peelers when all you're allowed is stone knives because stone knives are RAW.

This is always D&D's problem as the game was never made to be a ''reality simulation''.

It is easy to see continual flame and create water spells changing the world just as written. But it is not really any leap of the imagination for a world to make more useful spells that are not all about the ''pew..pew...lets kill monsters!''

Take spells and/or magic items like ''continual cooking fire'' or ''create anything''.

And just look at the spells that exist as ''what is possible''. Like say mount. Summon a horse for a couple hours. So, now picture 100 more ''summon single animal'' type spells that would be very useful.

Or ''greater mending'' or even ''repair''. The list is endless....

[GreatWyrmGold]

I should really check the forum more often.



No, not letting this go actually. There is one specific type of NPC that gets xp, specifically because they are attached to a PC, and that's it. Claiming that "NPCs" in any general sense use xp mechanics is straight bull.
I have to side with WhatThePhysics on this one. We have a type of NPC that gains XP, high-level NPCs, and essentially no mechanical differences between PCs and NPCs. All of this supports the idea that NPCs in general can earn XP. I look forward to seeing the evidence that they don't.


Still not seeing mass transit.
Canals, maybe? Water can help with that. Heck, in theory you could have raised aquaducts to provide flowing water both ways on sufficiently flat terrain...though creating a large number of artificial rivers running across the landscape would almost certainly have some serious environmental effects if you don't have a portal to some infinite plane somewhere along the line....


But, since the occupants of the City of Brass probably have an easy time making their steel...
Not that you're wrong*, but my brain did a double-take there.

*At least, not by my limited knowledge of metallurgy. Maybe keeping metal hot all the way through smelting messes it up somehow.


My main thinking is essentially "if dwarves are so good at mining and smithing and have done harder materials than steel for thousands of years, they should know how steel works by now," but I've since come up with an alternative source for the knowledge even if the dwarves haven't figured out how to build a better smelter.
They know how to make steel, they just don't know the sorts of mass-production methods we use today. There's more than one way to skin a cat; some are easier with medieval tech, some are more efficient.


Not counting of course the classic "ask the god of metal how to make metal faster" plan.
Divine intervention is effective, but boring.


That's a number I suppose.
For the record, I did a bit of Googling which suggested a figure around 60% for water wheels (specifically the kind that catches water in buckets), and something like 85-95% for modern water turbines.



Consider the basic point that Fizban understood and GWG apparently missed: Unlimited access to the basic building blocks of the multiverse is quite powerful but will stifle further advancement because you don´t have to cope with lack.
I'm not convinced that any of that is true. I'm not convinced that industrialization was triggered or driven by a scarcity of raw resources (if anything, the opposite seems to be the case), and I'm not convinced that access to the Elemental Planewould truly bring about a post-mineral-scarce economy.

Let's first say that we can freely open portals to the Elemental Plane of Earth. Whoo. It's not solid useful-minerals, though; it's solid-every-mineral. It's going to take a significant amount of effort to find veins and clusters of ores and gems and so on. Once you find them, it's going to take plenty of effort to extract those minerals. When you get down to it, mining the Elemental Plane of Earth isn't that different from mining the Material Plane. On one hand, you have a theoretically limitless supply of earth (assuming the material plane is finite, which I've never really seen a reason to do) and the ability to put mines wherever you like (say, near big port-cities with lots of labor and shipping); on the other hand, you can't check surface rocks for traces of minerals and the Plane has some special dangers of its own (as Fizban pointed out).
But let's say you have a practically infinite supply of minerals. So what? You still need to process them. Or you could try making hematite swords; go ahead, give it a shot. That's going to require labor and tools and fuel. "But coal!" Well, again, you can't just take bituminous rocks out of the ground and burn them—you need labor and tools to process them. Maybe you've shifted the limiting factor from raw minerals to tools and labor, but that's it. (And that's assuming minerals were consistently the limiting factor in pre-industrial societies. I know that was true with at least some societies—the Greenland Norse come to mind—but I don't know enough about pre-industrial economics to say for certain.)

But let's say that you've managed all of that. Thanks to super-mining in the planes, you've managed to provide such a supply of minerals that all the dwarves in Thorbardin can't keep up with it. So effing what? There's still incentive to develop methods to process those minerals faster, and to turn the metals into useful stuff faster, and transport the stuff across the world faster, and to do all of the stuff the Industrial Revolution let us do. You haven't actually solved any of the problems that drove the Industrial Revolution forward. You haven't solved any problems that drove major revolutions forward. You've saved the Greenland Norse and that's about it. Congraturations, a winner is you.



The number and variety of creatures has another interesting side effect. More civilizations rise up at around the same time, blocking the path for migration and expansion, keeping the size of nations and populations relatively small. This can only be overcome by species that manage to share the same living space.
Um...not really.
Let's say that the population of medieval Europe was 50 million. (It was at some point.) With the climate, crops, technology, etc available at the time, that's more or less the carrying capacity of the continent. In other words, if 20 million people immigrated from Antarctica, the population would begin starving until there were about 50 million people again, and if 20 million people died from a war against the Aztecs, the population would grow over the next few generations until it reached 50 million again. (I am, of course, assuming that massive immigration and wars would have no effect on the carrying capacity of Europe—in other words, that those huge events wouldn't change anything. This is not true in reality.) Now, which seems more likely—that medieval Europe could support 50 million humans, 50 million elves, 50 million goblins, etc, or that medieval Europe would support around 50 million people in total?
Granted, some of these might use less or different resources than humans, but that would just increase potential population density. This could have some effects, but not nearly as serious as the ones you're suggesting. I guess racial tensions could affect things, but given how the English and the French hated each other for centuries when the only difference between English and French nobles was the color of their heraldry, it's probably more likely that we would just change who those tensions were aimed at.


It´ll also impact regular industry. No one sane will try logging in a forest invested by fey.
25,000 years prior...

It also change normal food-getting. Only stupids try hunt deer in forest with lots of dire bears.
Everything is relative, Florian. Where there's a will, there's a phantasmal killer.


...a huge amount of fungi and a lot of plant creatures...
I'm not convinced these would change things. If fungi actually extract energy from their environment like real fungi (and there's nothing suggesting they eat magic), you're not going to get much from it. (There's a reason mushrooms aren't a staple crop of anywhere.) As for plant creatures...they're plants, but they waste tons of energy moving around. Wheat is far more efficient at producing calories than a shambling mound ever could be. (Plus, there's no way that plant creatures have much edible tissue. At that size, they have to be built more like trees than veggies.)



Giant creatures for food also deserve a special mention. A giant food animal can feed a ton more people then a normal sized animal.
Wrong! I mean, technically right but useless. Sure, a slaughtered elephant can feed ten times as many people as a cow (I'm rounding), but it takes ten times as much food to get to that point (still rounding). What matters for the efficiency of food creatures is:
1. How fast it eats food
2. What food it eats
3. How efficiently it turns the food into other food
Point #2 is especially important, since #1 and #3 aren't as likely to change*. Carnivores will never be more efficient at producing meat than the things they eat, because thermodynamics are a bitch. (If you can feed a carnivore entirely on things you couldn't practically eat—say, scattered critters in a field or toxic frogs—then you might be able to get somewhere.) Fructivores have a similar problem. That's why livestock are almost exclusively grazers or poultry.

*I mean, an elephant eats a lot faster than a goat, but a herd of goats eats about as much as an elephant. (For a certain size of herd, at least.)


Take spells and/or magic items like ''continual cooking fire'' or ''create anything''.
For the record, major creation is a spell.




I dunno. I would imagine that there's the same gap between the Elemenal Lords and the 6 INT elementals as between people and animals, even if the elements are smarter than animals. It's a question that comes up in any discussion of things way smarter than humans.
I am...uncomfortable with the suggestion that the mental difference between a dog (Int 2) and a below-average orc (Int 6) is comparable to the difference between said orc and a normal human (Int 10). It gets worse when you realize that, if a normal person's attributes are simply 3d6 (which is the impression I get from the alternate attribute generation rules), about 10% of regular human people are going to have Int 6 or lower. I'd rather imagine that WotC didn't think their fluff through than that they intentionally wrote the mental attribute rules to imply all of that.


It's either that or having certain things not work (because the equivalent spell level isn't specified). You could always change it to half of CL/HD.
My point being, roughly, "Why didn't WotC write it like that?"


D&D is supposed to be a fantasy pastiche. Any industrialization is already exploiting the system to do things designers didn't intend.
There's using the rules as intended to produce a setting which wasn't intended, and then there's using the rules as not intended to do the same.


I think you forgot some words?
Probably. Sometimes, with big posts, I'll skip from one section to another and go back to


Yeah, but the quoted line looked like it was supposed to be listing all the options for recruiting outsiders.
Let me translate that into 100%-clear-talk:
"If I remembered that spell existed, I would have put it in the OP."


Do the rules distinguish between the two?
Yeah. One is more expensive.

[Coidzor]

I suppose if one blanches at Int 6 elementals, there's always Elemental Animals.

Unfortunately I don't think it applies to Vermin, so no guilt-free imprisonment of mass quantities of Fire Elemental Monstrous Spiders.

[Fizban]

Not that you're wrong*, but my brain did a double-take there.
*At least, not by my limited knowledge of metallurgy. Maybe keeping metal hot all the way through smelting messes it up somehow.
Mine did to, I found it amusing. Salamanders specifically have blacksmithing bonuses and wield metal weapons, so they must be capable of some amount. A DM aiming to avoid upsetting norms could rule that on the fire-plane you have the opposite problem: instead of smelting the steel, it's getting it to cool quickly enough and long enough to properly set and temper the blade. But once the two knowledge bases meet they can figure it out.

For the record, I did a bit of Googling which suggested a figure around 60% for water wheels (specifically the kind that catches water in buckets), and something like 85-95% for modern water turbines.
Presumably that's for mechanical energy being directly converted to electricity. Just transferring the mechanical energy will quickly get worse the further away you need to move it, as the resistance of friction builds up with every point of contact. Steam is horrible of course, getting all of 1-10% for most purposes, but since dnd fires aren't rated by mass and type of fuel there's no starting energy to plug in.

On one hand, you have a theoretically limitless supply of earth (assuming the material plane is finite, which I've never really seen a reason to do) and the ability to put mines wherever you like (say, near big port-cities with lots of labor and shipping); on the other hand, you can't check surface rocks for traces of minerals and the Plane has some special dangers of its own (as Fizban pointed out).
The plane of earth might be more productive than a material plane mine, but to compare the two you'd need fairly detailed data on medieval prospecting and mining.

Now, which seems more likely—that medieval Europe could support 50 million humans, 50 million elves, 50 million goblins, etc, or that medieval Europe would support around 50 million people in total?
Goblins are the kicker there, they eat half as much food and grow faster than humans. As soon as they invent throwing spears it's pretty much game over for anything larger than them, unless their -2 charisma keeps social groups so small they can't use those numbers. No synergy though, just replacing mediums with twice as many smalls.

Everything is relative, Florian. Where there's a will, there's a phantasmal killer.
Dire Bears are about as tough and dangerous as Elephants that don't travel in herds. People have been killing elephants for a long time. All you need is enough dudes with ranged weapons in a nice big ring, and Dire Bears pose an active threat. If the woods have Dire Bears, that's the first thing people will hunt, to make way for civilization.

I'm not convinced these would change things. If fungi actually extract energy from their environment like real fungi (and there's nothing suggesting they eat magic), you're not going to get much from it. (There's a reason mushrooms aren't a staple crop of anywhere.) As for plant creatures...they're plants, but they waste tons of energy moving around. Wheat is far more efficient at producing calories than a shambling mound ever could be. (Plus, there's no way that plant creatures have much edible tissue. At that size, they have to be built more like trees than veggies.)
Basically the standard fluff given whenever there's a dungeon that doesn't have enough food is "magic mushrooms." Creature-wise, you just find something with regeneration, magically remove its need to eat (Ring of Sustenance), put it in a permanent coma, and carve steaks until the end of time (someone had a fluff writeup for a city that did that with the Tarrasque and started mutating because of it). Pretty sure there's at least one animal-int creature that can fit the bill.

[Florian]

@GWG:

I think you really underestimate what it means to have unlimited access to resources.

There´s a good Torchwood episode where someone got their hands on a regenerating alien whale, trapped it an warehouse and started selling slices as "tuna". Look it up on Youtube, it´s quite funny.

Now I´m in the beer brewing business myself, so I can give you an example on how that would affect how I work and calculate things, you can work from there.

The main problem is power to get things started, followed by consuming resources to get it done.

Let´s say I place my brewery on the plane of fire, use a decanter of endless water and cultivate a Mu Spore to harvest, maybe keeping it on the border region of the elemental planes and positive energy plane. Done, endless resources, endless flow of beer.

[GreatWyrmGold]

The plane of earth might be more productive than a material plane mine, but to compare the two you'd need fairly detailed data on medieval prospecting and mining.
I don't see any reason to assume the Elemental Plane of Earth is more productive than Earth earth.


Goblins are the kicker there, they eat half as much food and grow faster than humans. As soon as they invent throwing spears it's pretty much game over for anything larger than them, unless their -2 charisma keeps social groups so small they can't use those numbers. No synergy though, just replacing mediums with twice as many smalls.
I'm not convinced by this argument. I'm certainly not convinced by the argument that because goblins are so plentiful, everything will be more crowded and all that other crap.


Dire Bears are about as tough and dangerous as Elephants that don't travel in herds. People have been killing elephants for a long time. All you need is enough dudes with ranged weapons in a nice big ring, and Dire Bears pose an active threat. If the woods have Dire Bears, that's the first thing people will hunt, to make way for civilization.
That was my point, yes.



I think you really underestimate what it means to have unlimited access to resources.

There´s a good Torchwood episode where someone got their hands on a regenerating alien whale, trapped it an warehouse and started selling slices as "tuna". Look it up on Youtube, it´s quite funny.
That's great and all, but the Elemental Plane of Earth isn't a regenerating space whale. It's a bunch of rock with some useful stuff mixed in.
Could regenerating space whales (or trolls or tarrasques or whatever) being tied up and harvested for food change food production? Sure. The devil's in the details, but sure. It's obvious, it's been thoroughly explored, and it's only tangentially related to an industrial revolution.

[Darth Ultron]

Wrong! I mean, technically right but useless. Sure, a slaughtered elephant can feed ten times as many people as a cow (I'm rounding), but it takes ten times as much food to get to that point (still rounding). What matters for the efficiency of food creatures is:
1. How fast it eats food
2. What food it eats
3. How efficiently it turns the food into other food


This over looks D&D has giant everything, including food. There is a 'giant ' ecosystem. Now the rulebooks don't go into this, but the world is full of giant animals, so they need to eat something. But the D&D rules don't have a Castles and Crops book with full write ups of ''wheat'' and ''corn''.

Giant carnivores are easy, the game is full of meat monsters. But even if you wanted to go all hard core on ''only what is in the books'', then you could still feed the giant animals all the giant ''monster'' plants.

Magic, of course can feed your giant animals too.




For the record, major creation is a spell.

I'd was talking more about level 1-3 spells like just ''create wood'' or ''create stone'', the same way ''create water'' does.

[unseenmage]

...

That's great and all, but the Elemental Plane of Earth isn't a regenerating space whale. It's a bunch of rock with some useful stuff mixed in.
Could regenerating space whales (or trolls or tarrasques or whatever) being tied up and harvested for food change food production? Sure. The devil's in the details, but sure. It's obvious, it's been thoroughly explored, and it's only tangentially related to an industrial revolution.

Infinite. The elemental planes are infinite spaces. They, and their resources, never end.

[Coidzor]

Infinite. The elemental planes are infinite spaces. They, and their resources, never end.

Indeed, the biggest issue is that they are infinite, so some amount of time must be spent finding the next cluster of resources. IIRC there's no resource clusters that are also infinitely big themselves within the Elemental plane of Earth, anyway.

Of course, one could probably set it up so that one is always producing a steady amount of such and such goods made from metal or earth or stone, which should eventually reach the point of being able to satisfy all normal material requirements.

A sudden need for a massive amount of them above and beyond the society's regular needs may or may not tax this system depending upon its efficiency and the resources dedicated to its scope and distribution systems.

[Endarire]

Sim Industrialization
My main method for starting an industrial revolution is Mirror Mephits (Expedition to the Demonweb Pits 208). Use planar binding or planar ally to get one, then pay it properly (perhaps in very shiny gold coins!) to use its simulacrum (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/simulacrum.htm) SLA to make another Mirror Mephit (preferably advanced to as many HD as the original can muster with simulacrum) completely loyal to you. Dismiss the original Mirror Mephit.

As a brief, VITAL note for simulacrum (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/simulacrum.htm). "At all times the simulacrum remains under your absolute command. No special telepathic link exists, so command must be exercised in some other manner." This may mean you need to use dominate monster or charm monster or a high Diplomacy check to persuade certain beings to be loyal to you. (Alternatively, if you're paranoid about the initial creature betraying your minion chain and you, just cast simulacrum at full cost from a spell slot, scroll, item, or other trusted means to make a Mirror Mephit.)

Use this Sim MM (simulacrum Mirror Mephit) to make a Sim Efreeti. Use the Sim Efreeti's wishes to grant you caster level booster items (http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?471411-Raising-Caster-Level-(Psly4mne)) (like a Ring of Arcane Might and Orange Ioun Stone). The next day, have this same genie make another Sim Efreeti with more hit dice (thereby increasing its caster level for wish). Keep doing this until you can make a Sim Solar.

Use the Sim Solar as you see fit. It casts as a level 20 Cleric in addition to bein' quite powerful. Remember, you can keep boosting caster levels to get Sim Solars (and other units) with higher HD and higher caster levels and stats.

Throughout this time, keep using Sims to generate more Mirror Mephits, Efreet, and Solars (and anything else you want) to get your desired results. Keep boosting an Efreet's caster level and he'll eventually be able to make a Sim Deity, like a Sim Mystra. Also, wish for whatever items and inherent stat boosts are within limits to make life better for you and yours.

(I'm pretty sure it's RAW legal to use wish to mimic psychic reformation (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/psychicReformation.htm) due to magic psionics transparency. If so, have a Sim Solar or Efreeti wish to reform certain units' feats to grant them other caster level boosters like the feat Reserves of Strength. The feat Arcane Thesis: wish (Player's Handbook II) debatably would also work.)

Remember, you aren't actually stealing away genies or angels or whatever from the planes (besides perhaps the initial Mirror Mephit) and these beings are or should be completely loyal to you. (Remember also, these Sims are or should be prioritizing you and yours as their #1 goal, even above their own safety, because 'completely loyal' is just that!) I recommend limiting the GP value of things you can get via wish, else you can get an infinitely-priced item for nothing due to wish's EXP cost being bypassed by these Sims.

Circle Magic
For this trick to work, you need these things:

-The aforementioned Sim Trick at the Sim Solar level.

-PsyRef to work on a Sim Solar or several.

-Circle Magic that supports divine casting. (Red Wizards, Hathran, and Halruaan Elders are the official classes for Circle Magic, but only Hathran seemingly use Circle Magic for divine spells.)

-Someone who can lead a Circle. Very preferably, this is you. Very preferably, you are a Female Human Wizard/Hathran5/Incantatrix3 (or higher level in Hathran or/and Incantatrix) for this trick to work.

-The ability for polymorph or draconic polymorph or one of its derivatives to last long enough to complete a Circle Magic ritual (1 hour) and PsyRef (10 minutes) I recommend being an Incantatrix3 to persist a form of polymorph.

-Have a Sim Solar use a miracle to reproduce a draconic polymorph effect on itself to turn it into a female Human from Rashemen (which may require 2 to 4 ranks of Knowledge: Local (Rashemen)) then wish for PsyRef to change its feats to include Ethran for Circle Magic participation. Ensure during this time you use your Incantatrix ability Cooperative Metamagic or Metamagic Effect to make draconic polymorph (or the like) last all day. This Sim Solar now qualifies to pay spell slots into Circle Magic. (Preferably, have at least 5 Sim Solars contribute spell slots this way.)

-If needed, see Shining South 18 for rules on picking a region and regional feat for creatures with a level adjustment or racial hit dice.

-You could probably also incorporate Shalanthra's delicate disk (Lost Empires of Faerun, Sor/Wiz6, Conjuration (Creation), 200G material component) into this trick somehow, using wish to avoid paying the G cost.

[GreatWyrmGold]

This over looks D&D has giant everything, including food. There is a 'giant ' ecosystem. Now the rulebooks don't go into this, but the world is full of giant animals, so they need to eat something. But the D&D rules don't have a Castles and Crops book with full write ups of ''wheat'' and ''corn''.

Giant carnivores are easy, the game is full of meat monsters. But even if you wanted to go all hard core on ''only what is in the books'', then you could still feed the giant animals all the giant ''monster'' plants.

Magic, of course can feed your giant animals too.
I...I don't think you're understanding the core of my argument. Why would you need giant cows to eat giant wheat? What's wrong with regular cows? (Or, for that matter, grinding the giant wheat into flour?) And why would you raise giant wolves as livestock by feeding them giant cows when you could just eat the gorram giant cows? Heck, why grow giant wheat instead of wheat? You get ten times as much wheat per plant, but you can only grow one-tenth as many plants per unit area!
That's the thing. A hundred tons of cattle are going to consume and produce about as much food and so on, regardless of if they're normal cattle or giant cattle. The only difference is how old your kids have to be before it won't accidentally step on them.


I'd was talking more about level 1-3 spells like just ''create wood'' or ''create stone'', the same way ''create water'' does.
Ah. Yeah, those don't exist.



Infinite. The elemental planes are infinite spaces. They, and their resources, never end.
Yeah. So? The limiting factor to industrial development in medieval times was never how much iron ore (or whatever) existed, period; if anything, it was how much iron ore was nearby and easy to mine. The presence of an Elemental Plane of Earth wouldn't change that.



-snip-
It sounds like this idea is basically:
1. Get a minor outsider to make a similacrum'd copy of itself that's loyal to you.
2. Use that copy to make more similucra of the most broken outsiders you can think of.
3. Profit.
That's...valid, but it seems like it should be kept in the same box as shenanigans involving Pazuzu, candles of invocation, infinite wishes, and/or Manipulate Form.

[Darth Ultron]

I...I don't think you're understanding the core of my argument.

I guess your saying that it would be too big of a problem, for no reason, for ''medium'' sized humans to use giant sized animals?

A single cow can feed a family, a giant cow can feed several families. It does ''cost more'' to feed a giant animal, but you are getting a ''bigger reward '' too. And it goes beyond just food as lots of animals can do lots of work too.

And magic can do wonders with a custom item like a ''Collar of Sustenance'' or even a ''half'' strength and cheaper item that provides ''half a creatures needs'' . And tons of other magic items like the Everlasting Feedbag. A divine caster to create food and water works too. Goodberry makes a berry ''one medium meal'', so it would take a couple to make ''one large meal'', but it is doable.

Plus Spell turrets, Spell clocks, and Boon Devices. And Wondrous Architecture, like say a Barn of Sustenance.

[Cosi]

The problem with the Fermi Paradox is with the question whether an ever-expanding magi tech society really is the end-point of evolution.

Well sure, one possible solution to the Fermi Paradox is that for whatever reason people don't end up building the things we currently expect them to even though nothing explicitly stops them. That's still the Fermi Paradox though.


Indeed, the biggest issue is that they are infinite, so some amount of time must be spent finding the next cluster of resources. IIRC there's no resource clusters that are also infinitely big themselves within the Elemental plane of Earth, anyway.

First, it doesn't need to be "infinitely big". It just has to be "bigger than you'd ever need". There's no really difference between "infinity food" and "enough food to feed everyone all the time" if you need to feed people.

Second, past a certain point, size doesn't matter because your supply lines on the Elemental Plane of Earth start getting long enough that it makes sense to open up new portals, and those can be wherever resources are (which can be as far from your current location as you like).

Third, if the Elemental Plane of Earth is in fact infinite (though honestly, it shouldn't be infinite because that is really dumb), it has to have an infinite amount of something in it. Possibly more than one kind of thing. Not necessarily iron (or even anything you particularly care about), but certainly something. Or maybe a finite about of an infinite number of kinds of things, but infinity is confusing.


I am...uncomfortable with the suggestion that the mental difference between a dog (Int 2) and a below-average orc (Int 6) is comparable to the difference between said orc and a normal human (Int 10).

Urg.

First, you would be well within your rights to assume that 2 v 3 INT is a fundamentally different shift than 3 v 4 or 8 v 9 INT. I seem to recall there being explicit support for that in game (with 3 INT giving you the ability to have a language), though I can't track down anything that says so explicitly. Also, that distinction is kind of dumb because animals are supposed to have 1 or 2 INT, while some animals (e.g. Gorillas) can totally learn language. It's not unreasonable to say that 3 to 18 INT represents normal human variation, while stuff outside that represents animals (at the low end) or kooky post-humans (at the high end).

Second, that said, the fact that the scores are just linear numbers provides some support for the notion that the difference between 6 INT and 14 INT is the same as the difference between 2 INT and 10 INT. That's kind of creepy, and pretty offensive in some ways, but it's also a reasonable course to take.

Third, the idea of post-human entities that don't understand human intelligence as meaningful is something that has served pretty well in a variety of fiction. Having there be Elemental Lords that treat humans the same way we treat animals is an interesting piece of world building to do.

All that said, the question of whether Elemental Lords get mad about you enslaving their subjects or not seems a lot less relevant than the question of why you consider it okay to do so.


There's using the rules as intended to produce a setting which wasn't intended, and then there's using the rules as not intended to do the same.

What do you think is unintended about a Dweomerkeeper using limited wish to emulate permanency on animate objects? Certainly it seems unlikely anyone though up that exact interaction in advance, but it also doesn't seem terribly abusive. You're ignoring an XP cost for something you could already do. That's cheesy, but hardly excessively so.


Sim Industrialization
My main method for starting an industrial revolution is Mirror Mephits (Expedition to the Demonweb Pits 208). Use planar binding or planar ally to get one, then pay it properly (perhaps in very shiny gold coins!) to use its simulacrum (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/simulacrum.htm) SLA to make another Mirror Mephit (preferably advanced to as many HD as the original can muster with simulacrum) completely loyal to you. Dismiss the original Mirror Mephit.

You can also use whatever version of Improved Familiar grants Mephit (Any) as a 7th level choice. Level to 14th. Make a copy of yourself. It is 7th level and therefore has a Mirror Mephit Familiar. Have it instruct its familiar to make a copy of you. That copy of you is also 7th level, and therefore also gets a Mirror Mephit familiar. Repeat until you are satisfied with your copyclan. simulacrum probably also copies templates, so if you load up with e.g. Spell Stitched Undead you get extra value from your clones.

Though it bears noting that this sort of thing ends up looking much closer to The Singularity than the Industrial Revolution.

[Coidzor]

First, it doesn't need to be "infinitely big". It just has to be "bigger than you'd ever need". There's no really difference between "infinity food" and "enough food to feed everyone all the time" if you need to feed people.

Second, past a certain point, size doesn't matter because your supply lines on the Elemental Plane of Earth start getting long enough that it makes sense to open up new portals, and those can be wherever resources are (which can be as far from your current location as you like).

Third, if the Elemental Plane of Earth is in fact infinite (though honestly, it shouldn't be infinite because that is really dumb), it has to have an infinite amount of something in it. Possibly more than one kind of thing. Not necessarily iron (or even anything you particularly care about), but certainly something. Or maybe a finite about of an infinite number of kinds of things, but infinity is confusing.

Even so, searching for enough in one place is still searching for a needle in an infinitely large haystack. While competing with an infinite number of other material planes, planar factions, and natives. Now I've got an infinity headache.

Your second point is accounted for by it taking a certain amount of time to do the necessary scrying and opening of portals. You're always going to have some amount of a supply train and time from when the material is found to when it reaches its destination to be put to use in its final finished form, even if it's not stretching terribly far from any given portal to or from the Elemental Plane of Earth, simply because no one is going to want to make every square foot of everything into Teleportation Circles and the majority of at-will forms of Greater Teleport have a weight limit. I know you can have multiple portals.

Your third point doesn't really seem to intersect with what I said. :smallconfused:

[Fizban]

It occurs to me that digging through the plane of earth looking for iron is kinda moot, when the first layer of Acheron is literally an infinite space full of floating iron cubes. Really the only thing that needs to be compared is how much you can cut+haul out vs how much you could mine on the material plane for the same effort. That gets us back to portals and gates, all printed versions of which I can think of having creature based limits.

I found the location swap, but it's a feature of the Planeshifter PrC requiring ECL18. An at-will feature, but too high to seriously help here. That pretty much leaves packing things into Portable Holes as the best mass transport method for things you can't carry through the cheap limited use portals. Elephants are big enough they'll have trouble getting through en masse, and the Planar Navigation spell doesn't seem to give you any control over the destination. The price of a Portable Hole is high enough that you'd be close to an infinite portal, but infinite use portals still require creatures that can carry the load.


My reason for avoiding Decanters is the rarity of casters that can actually craft them. I don't recall the demographics in the Dungeon Master's Guide, but I think 7th level PC class casters aren't 9 times rarer than 3rd level PC class casters, though they are rarer than 3rd level Adepts. Make of that what you will.
7th level casters are twice as rare as 3rd level casters, or rather, you'd get two 3rd level for each 7th. While we're generally accustomed to counting up (thinking of everyone growing all the time), the DMG city generation starts at the top and counts down (to account for most people not actually getting many levels). You get one guy at the highest level, two at half that (rounded down), and doubling on down to 1st level. This means that you only get a handful in the upper range, but the lower range is also only a few handfuls. The level of the highest level member of each class is mostly dependent on the size of the city, and you get more for the bigger cities. The end result is a pretty big gap where anything smaller than a small city only has even odds of a 5th level member of a particular class, but anything from small city and up definitely has at least two of 7th+ for every class (DMG classes).

Really I'd say the bigger limiting factor is the assumption of feats. I'd expect most NPC casters of 5th or higher to pick up some sort of crafting feat just because it's good business, but I wouldn't assume that every 3rd level caster immediately takes Craft Wondrous.

Can you please provide the power output for a permanent Wall of Fire with a caster level of 7th, preferably in the form of watts? It can be for the sheet or ring form of the spell, but ideally the one with a higher output. I'm finding multiple energy densities for coal, and I'd like to have exact figures.
To recap: How much energy output the Wall of Fire has depends on how you interpret the Frostburn ice melting rule. It gives damage-> volume, ignoring the volume of the damage effect. The example given says a cl10 Fireball would melt 3.5 cu ft of water, but then goes on about flashfloods, which could be read to imply the real meaning is "3.5 feet of depth across the whole area," which would be necessary in order to actually produce a flash flood via fire damage. We can force this interpretation by splitting our heating area into an arbitrary number of pipes, so I'm going to assume the energy output is per square foot of area hit by the fire spell. Also remember that fire spells can be cast underwater with a spellcraft check, producing steam that deals the same amount of damage, implying we could simply have the spell active within the boiler directly heating the water.

First I'll re figure the energy from 10 points of fire damage, since I should have used ice:

I'm getting 26,020 grams of ice in a cubic foot from this calculator. 10 points of fire damage melts that, which requires 333.6 joules per gram, for 8,680 kJ. Divide that by 6 second rounds for a 1/round effect to get 1447 kJ per second, which is 1447kW.*

An unaltered cl 7 Wall of Fire averages 13.5 points of damage, for 1953 kW per square foot. The maximum area is 20'x20'x7, or 2,800 sq ft, assuming you have room for a 140' long 20' high vertical wall. 1953* 2800= 5,468 MW for a fully utilized basic cl7 Wall of Fire.

In order to save space, a cylindrical wall might be used. At cl 7 that has a radius of 15', for 1885 sq ft of area, for 3,601 MW.

Damage is easily boosted. Sudden Empower or a Rod of Empower Spell boosts damage to 22.5 at cl7, for 9,117 MW on the long wall. Blistering Spell, Maximize Spell, caster level boosts all apply. If the DM applies the effects of the Ring of Mystic Fire to every round of a continuous spell, that's another 4d6.

*This is assuming the ice is already at 0C. The specific heat of water is 4.181 joules per gram or so, which means we could eke out some more energy by assuming the Frostburn ice is below that, but it wouldn't be a huge amount. 333.6+ (4.181* degrees below 0C) instead of 333.6.


Now, permanent Walls of Fire aren't useful for anything that isn't stationary, since they don't move (unless the DM allows you to anchor stationary spells to vehicles, in which case you're set). I'd find the value of 1953 kW per square foot more interesting, since that's what you'd get if you made a custom item that puts a continuous Wall of Fire across a plate.

You can also use other tricks to change how you want to figure the cost and design a truly custom item, like bending the area of a single wall across the interior of a box to conserve space, using an X/day price+the spell's concentration duration rather than continuous, possibly even a mechanical interface that allows people to trade off "concentration." All these tricks amount to are a fancy way of justifying whatever price tag you want the item to actually land at though, which is why it's more expedient to just say "magic boiler, Xgp." Fun, but still custom.

I might try running the numbers based on damage for the surface area of a fire elemental, it's obvious the lower damage die will make them strictly inferior to a bent Wall of Fire effect.

[Fizban]

So, I was right in thinking 7ths aren't >9 times rarer than 3rds. I might be wrong about this, but I think Adepts get higher level NPCs on average/ and therefore more lower level NPCs of 3rd+ level, compared to Clerics, Druid, Sorcerers, and Wizards. I think it's worth factoring in those demographics.
Adepts have the same roll as clerics (d6+community modifier). Their advantage is is bonus 1st level adepts equal to 0.5% of the remaining population (after treeing out the rolled classes, the remaining population is 1st level commoners, with smaller percentages of warriors, experts, and at the very end aristocrats and adepts). IIRC, when I ran the numbers the bonus 1st level adepts weren't that huge either, it's only 125 at 25,000 pop.

Even a small city is likely to have 48 1st level full casters, 72 guaranteed for large city, and at least 128 when you tick over to metropolis. The bonus 1st level adepts are most significant at the large town tier, where you have a base of 16 1st level full casters vs 10-25 1st level adepts, but basically the 1st level adepts will end up about equal to the combined 1st level full casters.

As for feats, I imagine NPC casters of any level would consider picking up a crafting feat to sell items they make. This is due to the profit margin and risk-reward ratio, relative to adventuring or charging for spellcasting. Other evidence for this would be how common it is for random and named NPCs to own magic items, and the odds of getting magic or alchemical items from encounters with standard treasure. Technically, alchemical items go off the Craft skill, but there still seems to be a relatively high chance that any caster is also a crafter.
There's also very little market for magic items overall, and much like the level distribution those sales will tend to go the few most powerful who've established a name for themselves. There are also surprisingly few wondrous items you can craft at 3rd level.

More elementals to be forthcoming, I'm collecting various methods of calculating their surface area.

[Darth Ultron]

[QUOTE=Fizban;21968878]

Really I'd say the bigger limiting factor is the assumption of feats. I'd expect most NPC casters of 5th or higher to pick up some sort of crafting feat just because it's good business, but I wouldn't assume that every 3rd level caster immediately takes Craft Wondrous.

QUOTE]

The funny bit is, 3X somehow assumes a world overloaded with magic items. But the rules don't really say ''where'' the infinite magic items come from. Past 5th level or so, NPC creatures and monsters need magic items to be ''balanced encounters'' for the PC. So that 10th level human cult guard needs to have magical armor, a magic weapon, and maybe a magic item. Just check out the tables in the DMG that show NPC's loaded with magic items. And note it is all NPCs, so even the orc living in a cave ''somehow'' has magic items.

And that is just the combat encounters, as non-combat NPC's will have at least a magic items or two.

And that is on top of loot. The game has magical items in the loot at lot past 5th level or so..amazingly just enough to make it ''worth it'' to the Pcs.

And that is even if you don't count the Magic Mart of ''whatever the player wants to buy at character creation''.

So, it would seem a lot of NPC spellcasters are creating magic items.........

[unseenmage]

...

Yeah. So? The limiting factor to industrial development in medieval times was never how much iron ore (or whatever) existed, period; if anything, it was how much iron ore was nearby and easy to mine. The presence of an Elemental Plane of Earth wouldn't change that.

...

You seem to want to discuss this revolution of a magic world as if magic doesnt exist. Gate and Create Portal are both a thing. Meaning, when accessing an infinite plane of infinite configurations of ore, the resource is infinitely available.


It occurs to me that digging through the plane of earth looking for iron is kinda moot, when the first layer of Acheron is literally an infinite space full of floating iron cubes. Really the only thing that needs to be compared is how much you can cut+haul out vs how much you could mine on the material plane for the same effort. That gets us back to portals and gates, all printed versions of which I can think of having creature based limits.

...

This. Between infinite resources on many planes of existence, portals and gates, and divination magic the idea that resources are scarce is pretty much bunk.

This is a gameworld where basic physics do not work. Entropy effectively doesn't exist; especially for magic and magic created stuff.

You express a distaste, I suppose that's the right word, for Tippyverse in the OP but that seems to be right where we're headed.
The constructive use of infinite resources, travel, and energy to accomplish a post scarcity.


Perhaps one of the reasons the Industrial Revolution is untenable in a magical gameworld is that it gets skipped over.
Maybe it happens, but it's just a transitive phase of society and, thanks to magic, societies' transition from primitive to modern and beyond is too fast for us to recognize the 'revolution' in the sense we are familiar with it.


This thread kind of reminds me of a steampunk arguement. Artificial constraints put in place to limit tech levels and societical growth just to service the author's vision.
Not that that's necessarilly a bad thing, I do love me some steampunk. I'm just trying to explain where I see this headed is all.


A game or story encapsulating the, probably very brief, magical industrial revolution of a setting could be pretty cool.
Admittedly, Tippyverse discussions did always seem to be more about how things got that way than about what happens after. The journey being more entertaining than the destination and all that.

[Sheepherder]

Earth elementals turning cranks is rated lower still, in general; my minimal knowledge of engineering suggests this would produce slower RPM and hence less overall power. They might be useful for heavy-duty, limited-use purposes (like raising drawbridges), but they're no steam engine equivalents.

This is not correct.

Power = Force x Velocity

A turbine in the Three Gorges Dam turns at a stately 75 revolutions per minute and puts out 700 Megawatts, simply because it has 600-950 tonnes of water pushing through the turbine in that minute.

Also, you seem to be all over the place in terms of what the industrial revolution means, citing things like vacuums, automobiles, and electric lights. Here's the thing: the mass production of those things is very recent. The initial application of water and steam power wasn't to generate electricity for creature comforts, it was to provide shaft power directly to machinery for water pumps to drain mines, power trip hammers, turn lathes, and the like. During the early industrial revolution the role of lighting wasn't served by electricity, but by coal gas that was readily available in the coal-producing regions which became the industrial centers.

[Florian]

Also, you seem to be all over the place in terms of what the industrial revolution means, citing things like vacuums, automobiles, and electric lights. Here's the thing: the mass production of those things is very recent. The initial application of water and steam power wasn't to generate electricity for creature comforts, it was to provide shaft power directly to machinery for water pumps to drain mines, power trip hammers, turn lathes, and the like. During the early industrial revolution the role of lighting wasn't served by electricity, but by coal gas that was readily available in the coal-producing regions which became the industrial centers.

Once development of magic becomes serious, every other technical evolution becomes a moot point, as spells can be designed to do exactly what you want. We can skip the whole "create tools that help us create tools that help..."-process entirely.
"Transforming Mythic Europe" for Ars Magicka is an excellent resource for this, as it goes deep into the ramifications and social impact this can have.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I guess your saying that it would be too big of a problem, for no reason, for ''medium'' sized humans to use giant sized animals?

A single cow can feed a family, a giant cow can feed several families. It does ''cost more'' to feed a giant animal, but you are getting a ''bigger reward '' too. And it goes beyond just food as lots of animals can do lots of work too.
Um...let's break this down.
I'm not saying it would be "too big a problem" for medium humanoids to raise giant animals. I'm saying it would be pointless. (Though there would be more new problems introduced than old ones solved.)
So what if each giant cow can feed several families? It requires as much food as several cows, too. If it took the food of two cows and produced enough milk and so on to feed five, it would be better, but a basic understanding of biology and/or the laws of thermodynamics should be more than sufficient to cast doubt on this notion. And the idea that giant creatures can do more work is just...it's technically true that one giant cow could do more work than one normal cow, just like it's technically true that one giant cow provides more food, but that doesn't matter, because the cost is higher. In fact, a single giant cow is probably less efficient for most tasks because it can only do one thing at a time. A bunch of cows can simultaneously plow a bunch of fields on a bunch of farms, but a single giant cow can only do one at once, and probably not fast enough to make up the difference.


And magic can do wonders with a custom item like a ''Collar of Sustenance'' or even a ''half'' strength and cheaper item that provides ''half a creatures needs'' . And tons of other magic items like the Everlasting Feedbag. A divine caster to create food and water works too. Goodberry makes a berry ''one medium meal'', so it would take a couple to make ''one large meal'', but it is doable.
Plus Spell turrets, Spell clocks, and Boon Devices. And Wondrous Architecture, like say a Barn of Sustenance.
I doubt any of those are going to be cost-effective enough to become common. And if magic is that common, why bother with giant cows at all? Why feed Goodberries to cows when you could just eat the Goodberries? Why not slap a necklace of sustenance on some of your citizens, if you've got enough to slap on their livestock? Why not make everlasting rations instead of everlasting feedbags? It's just so damn stupid that I can't believe you took it seriously. Goodberries and Create Food/Water are even stupider because they don't address the issue that you can feed several normal cows for the same number of spells as a giant one, just like with normal food! Just...do you think your arguments actually prove your point, or did you start with the point and work backwards?


You seem to want to discuss this revolution of a magic world as if magic doesnt exist. Gate and Create Portal are both a thing. Meaning, when accessing an infinite plane of infinite configurations of ore, the resource is infinitely available.
*facepalm*
I've already explained this. This is only true if you can freely open portals to an infinitely large array of ore veins that you know where they are, and then mine them infinitely fast. As I've explained, these assumptions are stupid, stupid, stupid, and anyone who actually thinks this argument through and still thinks it's not stupid is also stupid, and I'm sick of explaining the same gorram points over and over so COULD YOU ALL PLEASE GET IT THIS TIME?!? At least make an argument that isn't the same as every other dang argument that's already been made on the subject?




First, you would be well within your rights to assume that 2 v 3 INT is a fundamentally different shift than 3 v 4 or 8 v 9 INT. I seem to recall there being explicit support for that in game (with 3 INT giving you the ability to have a language), though I can't track down anything that says so explicitly. Also, that distinction is kind of dumb because animals are supposed to have 1 or 2 INT, while some animals (e.g. Gorillas) can totally learn language. It's not unreasonable to say that 3 to 18 INT represents normal human variation, while stuff outside that represents animals (at the low end) or kooky post-humans (at the high end).
Second, that said, the fact that the scores are just linear numbers provides some support for the notion that the difference between 6 INT and 14 INT is the same as the difference between 2 INT and 10 INT. That's kind of creepy, and pretty offensive in some ways, but it's also a reasonable course to take.
I'm not sure how to parse this. It seems like you basically took what you already said and what I already said, then reworded it to demonstrate that...something?


Third, the idea of post-human entities that don't understand human intelligence as meaningful is something that has served pretty well in a variety of fiction. Having there be Elemental Lords that treat humans the same way we treat animals is an interesting piece of world building to do.
"Longstanding trope" != "Interesting worldbuilding". And just because it's a longstanding trope doesn't mean it makes sense.


All that said, the question of whether Elemental Lords get mad about you enslaving their subjects or not seems a lot less relevant than the question of why you consider it okay to do so.
I don't. Which I thought was implicit from the beginning, but hey.


What do you think is unintended about a Dweomerkeeper using limited wish to emulate permanency on animate objects? Certainly it seems unlikely anyone though up that exact interaction in advance, but it also doesn't seem terribly abusive. You're ignoring an XP cost for something you could already do. That's cheesy, but hardly excessively so.
...Again, not sure what the point is. This particular trick wasn't brought up previously, and you ask what's unintended about "ignoring an XP cost," which you call "cheesy" and say nobody thought about that interaction.



This is not correct.
Power = Force x Velocity
A turbine in the Three Gorges Dam turns at a stately 75 revolutions per minute and puts out 700 Megawatts, simply because it has 600-950 tonnes of water pushing through the turbine in that minute.
If you're generating electricity or something like that, yeah. But most earlier Industrial applications seem like they wouldn't get much use out of a lot of power with a slow RPM.
And more to the point, I'm not convinced that an earth elemental would provide enough force to make up for the relatively low velocity.


Also, you seem to be all over the place in terms of what the industrial revolution means, citing things like vacuums, automobiles, and electric lights. Here's the thing: the mass production of those things is very recent.
The sources I found were pretty vague about it, too. And I did specifically mention at least a couple of times that I didn't think they were talking about being mass-produced.

[unseenmage]

...

*facepalm*
I've already explained this. This is only true if you can freely open portals to an infinitely large array of ore veins that you know where they are, and then mine them infinitely fast. As I've explained, these assumptions are stupid, stupid, stupid, and anyone who actually thinks this argument through and still thinks it's not stupid is also stupid, and I'm sick of explaining the same gorram points over and over so COULD YOU ALL PLEASE GET IT THIS TIME?!? At least make an argument that isn't the same as every other dang argument that's already been made on the subject?
...
Seeing as I'm clearly unwelcome, I leave you with one of the better bits of advice I've ever read online. Lightly modified for the situation.

'If everyone else in the room seems like they're being particularly thick, then maybe it is in fact you who are being thick.'

[Darth Ultron]

[QUOTE=GreatWyrmGold;21969978. I'm saying it would be pointless. .[/QUOTE]

It's kind of like your saying Industrialization is pointless, though. Everything done will make problems and/or not be worth it, depending how you want to spin it. There will always be Luddites.

I guess you can say ''magic gets expensive when it is something I don't like'', but if your going to use the old cost excuse then that means everything in your first post won't work as it is all ''too expensive.''


I wonder why your so opposed to Gate Mines too? Sure it is ''hard'' to find things of value in the ground, but again it is worth the time and effort to look. And you really do seem stuck on the mundane ''guy with a shovel looks for stuff in the ground''. Magic can sure find things quickly. Divinations are made for this type of thing. Plus you can conjure up all sorts of Earth type creatures that can glide right through the ground and look for stuff.

And you don't even need to go to other planes, as you can mine right on the planet, anywhere, by making a portal to that spot.

But you can go to the Elemental planes, and other places too.

[Sheepherder]

If you're generating electricity or something like that, yeah. But most earlier Industrial applications seem like they wouldn't get much use out of a lot of power with a slow RPM. And more to the point, I'm not convinced that an earth elemental would provide enough force to make up for the relatively low velocity.

The sources I found were pretty vague about it, too. And I did specifically mention at least a couple of times that I didn't think they were talking about being mass-produced.

It's trivial to vary the rotational rate. Either a belt and pulley with dissimilar wheel sizes or a gear system will do it. Leather and wood would have been the materials of choice, which limits strength, but not unreasonably so. Both methods were in use by about the 8th century CE, though for low speed operations like moving a grindstone there's a monastery in Northern Ireland that used a tidal dam as early as the 6th century CE, and within about two centuries we start to see sawmills appear.

That's the thing: a lot of the earliest examples of these things were in no way functional, those 18th century automobiles and electrical experiments were the playthings of rich people. Instead things that economized on labour costs, improved worker productivity, facilitated trade, or exploited cheap resources were favoured projects. Basically, the pressing needs of industry, economy, and security rather.

Which is why high fantasy pen and paper settings are weird, because from my perspective just about the most pressing need in D&D is a functional surface to air missile. :smallamused:

[Florian]

Which is why high fantasy pen and paper settings are weird, because from my perspective just about the most pressing need in D&D is a functional surface to air missile. :smallamused:

PF has the Cannon Golem for this purpose, or a bit more extrem, golemized buildings that can use their own defensive weaponry. (Weirdest unique Cannon Golem actually has been retrofitted with twin railguns and a rocket launcher).

[Fizban]

I think a bunch of people are missing the difference between industrializing and having infinite resources. That's why I keep mentioning bottlenecks, particularly in transportation. Infinite resources matter, but until the finite resources on the material plane run out, they only matter if you can mine them more efficiently. Provide numbers proving that you can do so, and the deed is done.

Across an arbitrary period of time, unlimited perfectly reliable items will always pay for themselves, but how long does it take? How do the startup costs compare to that of just digging another material plane mine? The research sounds annoying and a lot of numbers will need to be made up, which is why I've been avoiding it. Power generation is much easier.


It's trivial to vary the rotational rate. Either a belt and pulley with dissimilar wheel sizes or a gear system will do it. Leather and wood would have been the materials of choice, which limits strength, but not unreasonably so. Both methods were in use by about the 8th century CE, though for low speed operations like moving a grindstone there's a monastery in Northern Ireland that used a tidal dam as early as the 6th century CE, and within about two centuries we start to see sawmills appear.
You do lose more energy that way, but as noted most energy conversion methods are terribly inefficient to begin with. Never heard about early tidal generators though, that's cool. I assume they filled up a reservoir at high tide and then let it drain at low?

Which is why high fantasy pen and paper settings are weird, because from my perspective just about the most pressing need in D&D is a functional surface to air missile. :smallamused:
Define surface to air missile. I'm guessing what you mean by missile is not a fireball, but a dozens or more miles long self guided weapon that delivers a fortification crushing payload, high rate of speed also useful. The solution is a teleporting or flying creature dropping of a item of earth shattering kaboom. If all you want is something that can kill flyers, a combination of effects to ensure a certain long-range hit with a Slaying Arrow or similar effect should work.


Possible surface areas for medium fire elementals:

Human surface area is around 18.30 sq ft. Elementals have fewer fine appendages, but are also 8 ft tall, and human surface are calculators (apparently used frequently in medicine) depend on human weight.
Air elementals weigh 2 lbs, as do fire. Air at room temperature has a specific weight of 0.07495 lb/cu ft, for 26.68 cu ft. A rectangular prism of 2x2x6.67 holds that with a surface area of 61.36 sq ft.
Earth elementals weigh 750lbs. Assuming a density between loose dry dirt and solid stone that's about 6 cu ft, which forms nicely into a rectangular prism of 1x1x6 for 26 sq ft.
Water elementals weigh 280lbs, which gives us 4.375 cu ft, as a simple rectangular prism we get 19.5 sq ft.
Assuming a spherical elemental, air goes to 43.18 sq ft, earth goes to 15.97 sq ft and water goes to 12.94 sq ft.


Depending on their depiction, elementals come in a variety of shapes. MM1 descriptions suggest that air should be a sphere, earth is a rough humanoid, and fire and water are apparently "central humanoid figures" surrounded by more flames and water. However, since the fire elemental has the same weight as air, it must have at least as much volume, if not more due to the reduced density at higher temperatures (only 70% or less of room temperature, though there could be weightier "fuel" that compensates). Therefore I think the spherical surface area from the air elemental is most appropriate, which while the most efficient shape in terms of area/volume still gives us a surprisingly large figure thanks to that volume.

Fire elementals deal fire damage and burn with slam attacks, and also when hit by a natural weapon. The DM has another option to limit things here, as technically fire elementals do not deal damage for simply being in contact with something: maintaining a grapple deals no damage, only striking or being struck by one. We will assume that they do anyway, because fire.

The next question is how to factor the burn ability. It doesn't actually function by ingiting clothes or body, which use a flat DC 15 save and continue until extinguished. The burn ability uses a con based DC and automatically goes out after a number of rounds, implying it's actually an extra flame. The point being we can possibly count this as an extra 1d6 per round to each target to double the energy output.

With all that in mind:
3.5/10*1447 kW= 506.5 kW per sq ft
43.18 sq ft* 506.5 kW= 21,870 kW
x2 for burn= 43,740 kW

Thinking about grappling, we can also consider the maximum number of creatures grappled: 64 fine creatures can grapple a medium creature, regardless of shape. Using that instead of surface area we get:
64* 506.5 kW= 32,420 kW
x2 for burn= 64,840 kW

And for completeness, we'll try increasing the surface area of a human by 33% (a factor of 1.33^3= 2.353)
18.3*2.353= 43.06 sq ft.
And that's so close to the sphere I'm not going to bother.

So, depending on how you count burn, a medium fire elemental should put out anywhere from 21.85 MW to 64.84 MW, assuming it cannot avoid burning things. Compared to the 5,468 MW of a fully utilized Permanent Wall of Fire, you'd need a cost of trapping less than 90gp or so in order to compete for stationary uses, but without a custom effect the elementals are still the only thing you can use for a vehicle.

Custom Wall of Fire item:

For a custom effect that wraps a cl7 Wall of Fire around the interior of a 20' cube, casting it 1/day and maintaining the effect as long as someone pumps the magical bellows, we get a formula price of 11,200gp (and I do consider the daily formulas quite solid). This has a surface area of 2,400 sq ft, for an output of 4.687 MW.
Shrunk to a 5' cube we have a surface area of 150 sq ft, for 293 MW. The price might be reduced, multiplying by the fraction of the area used, down to 700gp.


As expected, the custom Wall of Fire boiler crushes the elemental with nearly 5 or more times the output, and if you're basing your calculations on spell hiring costs the 700gp crushes that too. Crafting is slightly slower at a maximum of 1/day, but no extras are needed.

Of course all of those values are just for the fire output itself. You also need to build a steam engine, and your early steam engine will only get 1% of that energy in actual work done, but you never need fuel. Cheap fuel is cheap, but free fuel is free, and you have a bit more hauling room. Multiplying the cost will give you more activations per day in case someone slips and lets the fire go out. It sounds like water fueling stations were also a pain to setup, so a water source would be useful by whichever preferred method, and would again return some hauling room by reducing the needed tank size.



So WhatThePhysics, with the energy in watts how are we comparing to various other things?


Edit: as I search about for medieval coal prices and production, we can swing back to dnd terms. The 700gp figure is only a bit more than the price of actually building a workshop in the first place (Stronghold Builder's Guidebook), and firewood is listed at 1cp per 20lbs (PHB). No prices given for coal, but we can use that to evaluate things that run on wood. 700gp is worth 700 tons of wood, in order to replace wood with an unskilled laborer (which could be your kid for free labor, or 1sp/day, a surcharge of 200lbs of wood).

It can also be noted that any source of magical heat is superior to coal for iron processing, since there's no impurities that can get in the metal to mess things up, unless the DM decides there are.

[Florian]

@Fizban:

It´s not really the concept of having access to infinite resources that´s the "make it, break it" point in this discussions, it´s the divergent path technological advancement will take when magic comes into it.

See, you want to replace the power source with magic, we replace the entire machine that should be powered with magic.
Because we are at that topic, consider the whole way mining developed. Don´t even try to sum up what the whole process of the last 2K years cost in lives, manpower and money. What we do is jump to the point when you can develop a "Mining Golem" and put it to use. Once created, it has a phenomenal ROI as it doesn´t have any consumption, doesn´t decay, works on forever (and never goes on a strike).

Let´s help the farmers. Working the soil is actually the hardest but most important work. We might consider a +1 Plow at first, then thing about the draft animal an go over to the animate object plow.

We could go on and on, but in the end, we´d have replaced "labor" with "magic". The individual scale of the workshops or factories we do it is not interesting, because as you don´t have any follow-up costs like maintenance or wages, there´s no gain by engaging more cost-benefit-ratio enhancing developments.

Maybe read up on the Club of Romes "1 Percent is enough" to understand the rest. What we´ve done is create a society that had no need to further evolve beyond the "magical revolution", but will be very decentralized, spread thin and with a focus to limit population growth.

[Esprit15]

My DM in recent campaigns had one nation in his world that was industrialized, using standard undead tricks. They invented mass farming, replaced labor with undead, and humanoids were basically free to pursue whatever they wanted to. After death, people were turned into undead and served as either laborers or military (or parts were used for both).

Of course, the leader of the nation was a lich and later demilich, so... bad things, but it was probably pretty sweet for those who lived there.

[Fizban]

See, you want to replace the power source with magic, we replace the entire machine that should be powered with magic.
Because we are at that topic, consider the whole way mining developed. Don´t even try to sum up what the whole process of the last 2K years cost in lives, manpower and money. What we do is jump to the point when you can develop a "Mining Golem" and put it to use. Once created, it has a phenomenal ROI as it doesn´t have any consumption, doesn´t decay, works on forever (and never goes on a strike).
Nothing here I didn't already acknowledge? If you make a custom item that does whatever you want, it wins. And if we're using arbitrary custom effects, I've yet to see anything that beats Unseen Servant spam for labor replacement. Which can be upped to Unseen Crafter spam for craft-skills.

Mining is a pretty odd choice for a perfectly reliable magic item, since it's a fairly unpredictable and dangerous task which could very well destroy the golem. Which means it's not perfectly reliable, and when it inevitably does fail that creation cost is going to matter.

We could go on and on, but in the end, we´d have replaced "labor" with "magic". The individual scale of the workshops or factories we do it is not interesting, because as you don´t have any follow-up costs like maintenance or wages, there´s no gain by engaging more cost-benefit-ratio enhancing developments.
Sure it's interesting. How are you going to do it? Particularly either within existing rules or at least reasonable custom effects with enough clout to convince most people they're reasonable. How long will it take to produce wide-spread effects-> how long ago it would have to be set to have those effects in place at the start of the game? How hard it is to fix if broken? Who is needed to fix it? Obviously magic can in theory end all problems, let's see some of that theory put into practice. It turns out that it's a lot harder to do within the rules than people think, as they immediately start relying on infinite loops or custom infinite items.

Cost-benefit ratio is absolutely important. No one's going to adopt something that won't make back the starting cost within a time frame they consider reasonable. The world is still full of people willing to burn tons of resources in order to make a bit more profit today, with no care for how much more profit could be made tomorrow if they started now. If magic cannot push hard enough it won't be adopted. If it can't push hard enough without DM handwaving, the setting effects are nothing but DM handwaving.

You want to say there's some benevolent long lived race that's been working on the problem for centuries (hi elves)? Sure, now return to original questions. Also worth considering would be how the inequality produced by the slow advance of perfect magical utopia will automatically invite more conflict than something that can be implemented cheaper and quicker for more people.

Maybe read up on the Club of Romes "1 Percent is enough" to understand the rest. What we´ve done is create a society that had no need to further evolve beyond the "magical revolution", but will be very decentralized, spread thin and with a focus to limit population growth.
Googling produces an article that, aside from the interesting point of reducing growth intentionally, says nothing I don't already know. Doesn't have any bearing on the question of how to magically industrialize a setting with the standard 3.5 rules though. Socially engineering a better society is not the topic at hand.

[Sheepherder]

You do lose more energy that way, but as noted most energy conversion methods are terribly inefficient to begin with. Never heard about early tidal generators though, that's cool. I assume they filled up a reservoir at high tide and then let it drain at low?

Define surface to air missile. I'm guessing what you mean by missile is not a fireball, but a dozens or more miles long self guided weapon that delivers a fortification crushing payload, high rate of speed also useful. The solution is a teleporting or flying creature dropping of a item of earth shattering kaboom. If all you want is something that can kill flyers, a combination of effects to ensure a certain long-range hit with a Slaying Arrow or similar effect should work.

You assume correctly how tidal mills were constructed. As you note: efficiency isn't a big deal when you're dealing with, say, the tidal movement of water.

I'm thinking of something that is capable of delivering a significant hit to a dragon or other flying beastie, doesn't cost an absurd amount, and can be employed by NPC militiamen. A trap casting animate object on a rocket with a necklace of fireballs warhead (which gives the option of a variable yield by simply adding more necklaces) or Tanglefoot Bag (low cost option for medium sized fliers) would be fun. No idea if there's stats for rockets anywhere though. There ought to be, but then D&D is funny about excluding gunpowder and derivatives.

[Florian]

@Fizban:

The main difference is that we have to talk about "Aristolean Physics", so a widely different set of physics than we´re used to IRL.

[Fizban]

The main difference is that we have to talk about "Aristolean Physics", so a widely different set of physics than we´re used to IRL.
Sorry, but it sounds to me like you're trying to dodge by claiming the topic is impossible. Dnd has game mechanics. Where those are insufficient, we can support them with or convert them to physics equations. If Aristolian Physics has equations you'd rather use, then use them. But it seems like you're trying to say we should stop talking about practical uses of rules and equations in order to make up ideas based on theorycrafting ways to skip industrialization, which is not the topic.


I'm thinking of something that is capable of delivering a significant hit to a dragon or other flying beastie, doesn't cost an absurd amount, and can be employed by NPC militiamen. A trap casting animate object on a rocket with a necklace of fireballs warhead (which gives the option of a variable yield by simply adding more necklaces) or Tanglefoot Bag (low cost option for medium sized fliers) would be fun. No idea if there's stats for rockets anywhere though. There ought to be, but then D&D is funny about excluding gunpowder and derivatives.
Burning a whole Necklace of Fireballs at once is quite an absurd cost, but if that's sufficient you can substitute summoned or called flying creatures, possibly with fire immunity. If all you want is a Tanglefoot Bag into a dragon that's easy, wand of Launch Item+Tanglefoot Bag, 57.5gp per shot with 110' range, Enlarge it to 75gp per shot with 220' range, substitute whatever other alchemical seems appropriate. A custom use-activated consumable of the spell would be 25gp (50 for Enlarged), 3x the price of the wand but distributable amongst many creatures for mass firing. Actually, as an object targeting spell Launch Item is legal to put in an Oil with Brew Potion already.

Basically any consumable is expensive enough it must be supplied by an organization of significant size, and the cheapest versions will always be wands. You'll basically always want consumables since daily items won't bring down a dragon, but burning a bunch of wands will. That said, SR will cripple the actual long-range spells, and a single wand has lower dps and is easily stolen. Distributed use-activated items also let you game NPC wealth/monster treasure if you're following it strictly, since they can't pool it but they can almost always afford a couple potions and alchemicals.

More expensive standard items that don't use attack rolls like Slaying Arrow include the Bead of Force for 5d6 no-save (but you'll need a ruling that makes it burst on contact with a ranged touch attack when fired with Launch Item), and the Javelin of Lightning (which as a weapon can actually be full attacked, but militia have plenty of bodies anyway). Arms and Equipment Guide has Javelins of Chain and Greater Lightning, Disintegrate, and the Moonsilver Shard (Magic Missile with some free range). Still, nothing's going to ever deal a "serious" hit to a dragon since dragons are supposed to be tough enough that a single hit isn't serious. The Necklace of Fireballs' legacy "drawback" of exploding all at once sets a bar that's basically impossible to top.

You mention gunpowder: even without 3rd party or Forgotten Realms, Stormwrack has cannons with not insignificant damage (3d10 and 6d10). The problem is hitting, which once again is best addressed through a series of buffs (True Strike followed by Sniper's Shot), allowing a shot out to maximum range that might hit.

The Thayan Bombard from Unapproachable East is an expensive Telekinesis powered cannon (though still a bit less than three Great Bombards) which fires expensive magic bombs full of AoE spells. That mitigates the ranged attack roll problem, but we're back to a single even slower "wand."

Shards of Chardalyn from the More Marches web enhancement is perhaps the most flexible. For a flat gp cost it can store an area spell indefinitely and release it upon impact. Assuming the spell comes out as it was originally cast*, you can figure out the rest.
*The Ring of Spell Storing has a clause that cuts the stored spell down to minimum caster level, but I don't think any other spell storing style items do (the weapon ability doesn't, nor does Chardalyn), but it's a possible nerf.

Well there's also the usual Fire Trap/Explosive Runes stacking. Slightly less cheesy would be sticking a Glyph Seal in your shield. I'm sure there's a line somewhere that says moving a Glyph of Warding makes it dissipate, but I'm not seeing it here. So that's another method of storing a more powerful spell for cheap, which can be carried into range and activated by your delivery creature.

Thinking about the Thayan Cloudkill bomb and a relatively guaranteed no SR 1 point of con damage, I'm reminded of other con damage effects. Like Slime Wave, or the far more potent Slime Hurl from Champions of Ruin. If you can poach the spell from an Initiate of Ghaunadaur, that's a devastating volley of three shots with 1d6 con damage each, another 1d6 con damage per round after the first, and each glob requires a separate action to remove. It's a ridiculously OP spell (unsurprising for Champions of Ruin), but it doesn't use any fancy tricks. The short range is the only problem. You could also use it to justify/price an arrow/bomb version for longer range delivery, which might only do one patch for less brokenness, and while I said "area" spells for Chardalyn it actually just says the spell is centered on that point, so you could try to stuff a conjuring effect spell in there. Alternatively you can weaponize the slime directly, after creating it with Slime Hurl or a Slime Pot from BoVD. Green slime makes a nice "nuclear" option, as it's always a threat to any living creature regardless of size, but after the fight you have to clean up the extremely lethal slime which can grow and infest the area.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Seeing as I'm clearly unwelcome, I leave you with one of the better bits of advice I've ever read online. Lightly modified for the situation.
'If everyone else in the room seems like they're being particularly thick, then maybe it is in fact you who are being thick.'
...I'd like to inform you that your attempts at subtly insulting me are not half as subtle as you think. Because that's all this post amounts to. I mean, if you had backed up your locquacious version of "You're a dummy" with an actual response to any of my points, I might actually care. But as it stands, I could echo your own advice and it would be equally valid.



It's kind of like your saying Industrialization is pointless, though. Everything done will make problems and/or not be worth it, depending how you want to spin it. There will always be Luddites.
I guess you can say ''magic gets expensive when it is something I don't like'', but if your going to use the old cost excuse then that means everything in your first post won't work as it is all ''too expensive.''
I wonder why your so opposed to Gate Mines too? Sure it is ''hard'' to find things of value in the ground, but again it is worth the time and effort to look. And you really do seem stuck on the mundane ''guy with a shovel looks for stuff in the ground''. Magic can sure find things quickly. Divinations are made for this type of thing. Plus you can conjure up all sorts of Earth type creatures that can glide right through the ground and look for stuff.
And you don't even need to go to other planes, as you can mine right on the planet, anywhere, by making a portal to that spot.
But you can go to the Elemental planes, and other places too.
Both of these have the same problem. They're a lot more expensive for no benefit over more mundane ways of doing the same (or using magic differently, in the former case).
Small herds of giant animals don't provide more benefits than normal herds of normal animals, and you can't have enough giants without applying some sort of magic—magic which, if available on industrial scales, could be applied equally well to normal animals or just to people directly. (Similarly, divination works as well for guys with shovels as for wizards with gates...but given how long mines last and how well people manage with traditional prospecting techniques, it likely wouldn't affect much.)
No planar mining schemes which have been proposed would provide more minerals than normal mining schemes unless the Material Plane is suffering some sort of "peak iron" crisis. Which...no. We don't have that kind of problem today. The closest are concerns about the environmental impact of mining, and I guess that those wouldn't be a problem with planar mines if we found a good place to dump all the mine waste.

And no, not everything in my first post would be ineffective. It focuses on methods which have much lower costs than making magic items (e.g, contagious undead and mid-level spells without an XP or expensive material component), for this very reason.



It´s not really the concept of having access to infinite resources that´s the "make it, break it" point in this discussions...
That's what I've been saying, and what I think Fizban was saying. But everyone else is focused on it, so we must be, too.


See, you want to replace the power source with magic, we replace the entire machine that should be powered with magic.
If magic is cheap enough, sure. But it probably won't be. Let's say that the mining golem you mention costs 10,000 GP and is as productive as five miners (considering its strength, un-tiring-ness, etc). Five miners cost something like half a gold piece per day (it doesn't have to be the same five guys every day, so as long as not everyone takes a break at the same time you should be good). If you can keep that golem running for 55 years, you've turned a profit...but that would require some luck. Even if we assume that enchantments can't be damaged and don't degrade over time, the golem itself can be. If the price of golem parts drops and wage expectations rise, golem-based industry might become viable...but those sorts of economic trends are what you'd expect to be caused by industrialization, not what you'd expect to cause it.
A permanent animate object is expensive (requiring a 5th-level spell cast by a 14th-level caster, a 6th-level spell cast by an 11th-level caster, and 3,000 XP for a total of 16,360 gold...though if you bump that up to 16,390, you should be able to get three Large objects out of it). Let's round down and call it 5,000 GP for an artificial plow-horse, which is 25 times as much as a heavy horse, meaning that your animate object needs to last a century or two to be anywhere near economically viable.
If a +1 plow costs 500 gold (probably a lowball price) but doubles a farmer's output, it would take a while to pay off (it's hard to calculate since farmers don't need to plow every day)...probably longer than the lifespan of a plow (though I can't find any sources on how long that is). But let's take this concept and move it somewhere more grounded in rules and generic. Profession lets you earn half your check result in gold per week, so an item which gave you a +2 competence bonus (to farming or shopkeeping or whatever) would increase your income by one gold per week. It would also cost somewhere around 400 gold, if I recall my DMG guidelines correctly, meaning it would take several years to pay off (which is at least better than automation). But that barely impacts the wider world; it represents an increase in productivity of somewhere around 10-20%, unless the guy buying the trinket is really bad at his job Consistently doubling output would probably require around a +15 competence bonus, for 22,500 gold and a weekly bonus of 7.5 gold...and suddenly we're back into the several-decades-to-pay-off territory (somewhere around 57 years). The whole "+1 plow" thing is vague enough that you could probably make up numbers until they fit, but I doubt it would turn out economically viable in the same universe as the previous examples.
In D&D, magic is so expensive and labor so cheap that simply mass-producing magic items will never create an economically-viable industrial revolution. This kind of labor automation would work after the cost of magic dropped enough and the cost of labor rose enough, which has obvious parallels to the modern world—hence your references to modern speculative economic theories. But the modern world is only getting to that state because automation is becoming so cheap and labor so expensive, which was caused by the Industrial Revolution. You can't "skip a step" unless you have some economic forces which produce effects similar to the step you want to skip, and D&D's take on magic just isn't that.

(P.S. Judging by the results of some Googling, that book is called Reinventing Prosperity: Managing Economic Growth to Reduce Unemployment, Inequality and Climate Change in English. I can't find anywhere that describes the "13 reasonable proposals," but if it adds up to a pain-free transition to the sort of naive post-scarcity utopia you describe, I suspect I'd be skeptical.)



I'm thinking of something that is capable of delivering a significant hit to a dragon or other flying beastie, doesn't cost an absurd amount, and can be employed by NPC militiamen. A trap casting animate object on a rocket with a necklace of fireballs warhead (which gives the option of a variable yield by simply adding more necklaces) or Tanglefoot Bag (low cost option for medium sized fliers) would be fun. No idea if there's stats for rockets anywhere though. There ought to be, but then D&D is funny about excluding gunpowder and derivatives.
The first thing that comes to mind is something which served a very, very similar role in the real world—longbows. You might need a bunch of acolytes or apprentice wizards or something to cast magic weapon on them, but there's no need to get complicated.
There's a reason I'm trying to borrow from history so much in this thread. People are really good at finding efficient ways to do stuff; figuring out why those methods were efficient and if fantastic elements would complicate them is often a good place to start with this kind of thing. Which is why I started where I did.

[Fizban]

The first thing that comes to mind is something which served a very, very similar role in the real world—longbows. You might need a bunch of acolytes or apprentice wizards or something to cast magic weapon on them, but there's no need to get complicated.
Legion's Magic Weapon has you covered if you can draw from Magic of Eberron, but only for a few rounds. Greater Magic Weapon can be divided across arrows to arm multiple people at once, though as a 3rd level spell the oil is expensive enough you might be better off with a crate of 1st level Magic Weapon oils. The main problem is that you need a very very large number of people to threaten a dragon that way, since even with volley fire you can only get about 1d8/10 people through.

I am quite liking the path this request has sent me down though. Dragon shows up, militia captain opens the "do not open" chest. Passes out several thinly wrapped packets of oil and fragile looking stones with orders to wait until target is within 200', smear grease on stone, aim for center of mass, and for the love of the gods do not drop it. The dragon swoops in for an attack and a militiaman steps out, raises his arm, and throws, the stone zipping straight at it and bursting into a wave of slime that consumes the dragon in seconds. Ooze covered bones fall to the ground as the captain starts shouting for torches and firebreaks to contain the fallout. At least the slime can't do strafing runs. . .

Mind you, those mid-tier Chardalyn stones are 3,500gp each (plus priming spell cast), but serious dragon attacks should be super rare and rebuilding costs more than that. Engulfing Terror could fit in the 1,000gp pieces but won't appear mid-air.

[Coidzor]

@Fizban:

The main difference is that we have to talk about "Aristolean Physics", so a widely different set of physics than we´re used to IRL.

You mean aside from the fact that the game has real world physics except where magic and the game mechanics explicitly alter things?

[Florian]

You mean aside from the fact that the game has real world physics except where magic and the game mechanics explicitly alter things?

Yes.... Ok, that one was funny, pass the beer.

[GreatWyrmGold]

The main problem is that you need a very very large number of people to threaten a dragon that way, since even with volley fire you can only get about 1d8/10 people through.
Oh, right. I forgot that D&D's box mechanics don't really fit "peasant-conscript armies mow down charging knights" as well as "mighty warrior rages across the battlefield, pincushioned with arrows".



Yes.... Ok, that one was funny, pass the beer.
He's not wrong. Funny thing is, I wrote a Reddit post about that just a couple days ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/68gj33/physics_and_fantasy_like_reality_unless_noted_vs/).

[unseenmage]

...I'd like to inform you that your attempts at subtly insulting me are not half as subtle as you think. Because that's all this post amounts to. I mean, if you had backed up your locquacious version of "You're a dummy" with an actual response to any of my points, I might actually care. But as it stands, I could echo your own advice and it would be equally valid.

...
For the record, my statement was genuine advice honestly given. If I wished insult, then insult I'd have given.
Unlike yourself I see no need to resort to name calling nor denigration when I am disagreed with.

As far as applying my words to myself, I do. Often. In this instance everyone else has explained themselves and their position responsibly and without insult. Only you chose to be negative to the point of insulting.


Infinite resources aren't the only issue myself and others were trying to bring attention to. Infinite manpower (Awaken Sand, Minor Servitor), infinite spellcasting (Spellclocks (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cw/20070312a)), infinite time (immortality, there are several options) and space (the aforementioned infinite planes) colliding with non-infinite dimensions.... All of it seriously contributes.

Bottlenecks between an infinite resource and the industrial-becoming society could be an issue, sure. But why? Are we assuming a time limit on our industrial revolution? If not then infinite work gets done eventually even at a snail's pace.

That real physics are being applied in a gameworld composed entirely of 5' cubes is also problematic. Are you adjusting for that in your calculations at all?
That is RAW how space is measured in the game after all.
Specificity within the rules is fine. I prefer it even. Cherry picking only the bits that support one's discussion and relegating anything one will not (or can not) engage is less fine.


I guess what I'm getting at is that I have no problem being wrong, that is a useful state of being. I have a problem being dismissed and insulted.

My apologies if this response rambles. Just wanted to make it known that my intent was not to insult, merely to contribute.

[GreatWyrmGold]

For the record, my statement was genuine advice honestly given. If I wished insult, then insult I'd have given.
Unlike yourself I see no need to resort to name calling nor denigration when I am disagreed with.
My mistake. To me, making a statement that, given your clearly-stated take on the situation, unambiguously calls me an idiot seems like just an elaborate way of insulting people.


As far as applying my words to myself, I do. Often. In this instance everyone else has explained themselves and their position responsibly and without insult. Only you chose to be negative to the point of insulting.
Coulda fooled me. Insults aside, I put "actually respond to peoples' counterarguments" under "explaining themselves and their position responsibly". And for that matter, I did explain my point responsibly and without insult. It was only when I had to repeatedly state the same position repeatedly that I became frustrated.
Speaking of responding to counterarguments...how does your point not apply to you as much as to me? Some people disagree with me, and I am frustrated with how they make their points. people disagree with you, and you are frustrated with how they make their points.


Infinite resources aren't the only issue myself and others were trying to bring attention to. Infinite manpower (Awaken Sand, Minor Servitor), infinite spellcasting (Spellclocks (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cw/20070312a)), infinite time (immortality, there are several options) and space (the aforementioned infinite planes) colliding with non-infinite dimensions.... All of it seriously contributes.
Then why did people keep bringing up the Elemental Plane of Earth's infinite resources so much more than any of that other stuff? Why did they not bring up the points you're bringing up? Could it be...you aren't part of a universal force of rational-minded individuals opposing some rude moron with a gold dragon avatar?


Bottlenecks between an infinite resource and the industrial-becoming society could be an issue, sure. But why? Are we assuming a time limit on our industrial revolution? If not then infinite work gets done eventually even at a snail's pace.
...You missed the point. Obviously, given infinite time an industrial revolution will occur. If nothing else, they'll figure out the same stuff we did. That's the obvious answer. That's the boring answer. We're not here for obvious, boring answers.
Oh, and you still haven't explained how "bottlenecked infinite resources" are practically different from "bottlenecked finite-but-vast resources". Unless your proposed method of industrialization is so horrendously inefficient that the planet is going to run out of minerals before you get anywhere?


That real physics are being applied in a gameworld composed entirely of 5' cubes is also problematic. Are you adjusting for that in your calculations at all?
That is RAW how space is measured in the game after all.
Specificity within the rules is fine. I prefer it even. Cherry picking only the bits that support one's discussion and relegating anything one will not (or can not) engage is less fine.
...Do you not understand the concept of abstraction? It should be pretty goshdarn obvious that things smaller than five feet exist in the D&D world. This is made abundantly clear by both the mechanics* and fluff† in the books. It should also be obvious that, for instance, the existence of spells which create walls of fire is not an abstraction, supported by both mechanics and fluff in the books.‡

* For instance, several Tiny creatures can exist in a single square, and the HP of inch-thick wooden walls is provided.
† For instance, halflings are stated to be shorter than five feet, and coins are smaller than Rai stones.
‡ For instance...please tell me I don't need to explain this.


I guess what I'm getting at is that I have no problem being wrong, that is a useful state of being. I have a problem being dismissed and insulted.
I never intended to dismiss you, merely your points. If you can't see the difference, you should probably stick to echo chambers, because your feelings are going to be pretty fragile otherwise.
Also, irony? You don't like being dismissed, but you apparently didn't take a minute to consider "Could this quote which all but explicitly says the other guy is being thick be seen as an insult?"

[Cosi]

I don't think an Industrial Revolution is something that makes sense as a result of D&D's rules. That's not to say that you can't get radical social changes as a result of applying progressively higher levels of D&D magic, but it doesn't really look like an Industrial Revolution. So what might you see instead?

Well, to answer that I'm going to take some liberties with D&D. I'm going to take some liberties (assuming some new classes exist, assuming not all classes appear at the same time, stuff like that), but this seems vaguely reasonable to me:

To start with, what class is least suited to using magic on a societal scale?

Well, obviously the people like the Rogue and the Fighter who don't have any magic. But of the casters, I think the answer is the Sorcerer. The disadvantage of Sorcerers is that they don't have the consistency in their magic that other casters do. All 8th level Dread Necromancers know animate dead. If your society can train a bunch of 8th level Dread Necromancers, it can also produce undead armies. All 6th level Warmages know fireball. If your society can train a bunch of 6th level Warmages, it can deploy them as magical artillery. And so on for Beguilers, Clerics, Druids, and hypothetical casters like the Summoner (fixed list Conjuration Specialist) and Warden (fixed list Abjuration Specialist). But this is not how Sorcerers work. A 6th level Sorcerer knows a 3rd level spell. Depending on how you read the fluff, he may not have any control over what it is. Certainly you don't.

What does this mean? Well, it means that while Sorcerers have useful magical abilities, it's hard to integrate them into armies (or societies) on a broad basis. Someone who can cast stinking cloud or fireball or haste or major image is a valuable military asset. But if your casters are Sorcerers, you can't know which spells they'll be able to cast. This means your military can't have combat doctrine based on casters bringing particular spells to the table. You can't deploy your casters as combat artillery if only a fraction of them know fireball. You can't use them for infiltration if most of them don't know dimension door. And so on and so forth.

As a result, I think you see two big trends in Sorcerer-only world:

1. Any force relying on combined arms of casters and non-casters has to be small (or at least, organization has to occur at a relatively small level) to take advantage of its caster's abilities.
2. Magical creatures have an inflated value. The abilities of a Goblin spellcaster are variable, but the abilities of a Bargest are not, and as a result having a bunch of Bargests to support your force allows for better magical integration than a comparable number of casters does.

There are other things too. For example, Dragonpacts are useful because they give you the ability to empower your casters with consistent and specific set of abilities. So overall, you get a world in which most nations are ruled by an overclass of specific magical monsters (like the aforementioned Bargest or Aboleths or Sphinxes), with Dragons being the most effective. Among humanoids, magic is most useful coming from powerful single individuals (high level Sorcerers) who can use the particular magic they have strategically and adapt their armies tactics around that. This seems like a reasonable equivalent to the pre-industrial world.

So what changes?

One possibility is the accumulation of magical items. While an individual Sorcerer has unpredictable capabilities, it he makes an Eternal Wand of fireball that's a permanent and stable source of fireballs for whatever military has access to it going forward. In theory, sufficient proliferation of magic items could overcome the limitations of Sorcerer casting (you could also do some interesting things with Spell Stitched Undead in a similar vein). However, I think this uninteresting for two reasons. First, it doesn't promote much by way of diversity in terms of civilization. Everyone is just getting the average of a bunch of Sorcerers, which is going to be fairly homogeneous. Second, you end up with a setting containing only Sorcerers, which isn't very interesting to play in.

I think the better answer is the development of fixed list casters.

A Beguiler is not massively better than a Sorcerer from the perspective of raw power. In some ways, it's worse (for example, no native access to alter self or fireball). But it has major advantages in consistency and number of spells known. Every single Beguiler can cast silent image. There is no Beguiler anywhere (barring truly bizarre choices like the 8 INT Beguiler) who cannot do so. This means that a nation which trains Beguilers can rely on them as magical assets in a way that one which trains Sorcerers cannot. It can also rely on Beguilers to provide a large number of more niche magical effects that might not have been available to a nation reliant on Sorcerers.

So, Sorcerer-world sees the development of fixed list casters, presumably with more variety that the three (four if you count the Healer) which exist in 3.5. This breaks the advantage held by nations lead by magical races (because they are no longer the only source of consistent magical support). You might reasonably make parallels to the end of the divine right of kings and the enlightenment here.

But it's not just military applications that open up. Having Dread Necromancers running around means that someone gets to start doing all kinds of cool necromantic industrialization. Having people who can cast wall of stone consistently makes building cities easier. Having enough casters to throw plant growth on all your fields is a mini Green Revolution. And so on for all the spells that make life better in various ways.

So now you have a world that's characterized by a variety of societies which each depend on access to large number of spellcasters who can deploy a particular suite of spells. What can you do to shake that up? Well, the obvious answer is to throw Wizards into the mix. Wizards walk in with the ability to benefit from the spell research of other Wizards, which is a massive network externality that potentially turns even a small nation that starts training Wizards into the next superpower. You could also sprinkle in the various things that cause hard takeoff singularities all on their own (like unrestricted versions of high end form changing or summoning magic), or some more potent magic items, or some rules for rituals, or some kind of high level outsiders.


I don't see any reason to assume the Elemental Plane of Earth is more productive than Earth earth.

If the Elemental Plane of Earth is infinite (which, again, is stupid, but it still holds if it's merely "really big"), we would expect the law of large numbers to ensure that the largest iron deposits there are larger than the largest ones in the real world. Though again, it probably doesn't matter much, because if you add a second portal (or whatever you use for interplanar travel) to your mine, it doesn't much matter if you add it in the same mine or somewhere else.


Even so, searching for enough in one place is still searching for a needle in an infinitely large haystack. While competing with an infinite number of other material planes, planar factions, and natives. Now I've got an infinity headache.

See, this is why the Elemental Planes (and the other planes) should just be *really big* rather than *infinite*. Infinity is stupid, and putting it in the game makes stupid stuff happen.

In any case, it should be possible to scry out deposits of the desired size, so it shouldn't be too much trouble to find the mine you need.


Your third point doesn't really seem to intersect with what I said. :smallconfused:

It's more a nitpick about your claim that the Elemental Plane of Earth wouldn't have infinite resources in it. It has infinity of some resource in it, even if that resource may be not terribly useful.


It occurs to me that digging through the plane of earth looking for iron is kinda moot, when the first layer of Acheron is literally an infinite space full of floating iron cubes.

Aren't those made of rust?


The funny bit is, 3X somehow assumes a world overloaded with magic items. But the rules don't really say ''where'' the infinite magic items come from.

Magic items don't go away. While it's quite possible that the civilizations which produced them collapse in the face of demon invasions or undead explosions or whatever, magic swords just sit around until they're destroyed, and in most cases there's no real reason to destroy them.


I'm not sure how to parse this. It seems like you basically took what you already said and what I already said, then reworded it to demonstrate that...something?

Basically, there are two ways to look at it:

1. 1 and 2 INT are "off the scale" and don't linearly compare in the way that 3 and 4 INT do. The advantage of this is that it lets you sweep the whole "relative intelligence" issue under the rug. The disadvantage is that it's not really what the rules seem to imply at face value.
2. INT is linear. This is simpler, but causes some issues.


"Longstanding trope" != "Interesting worldbuilding". And just because it's a longstanding trope doesn't mean it makes sense.

Well the problem is that it's a hard question to answer because, as humans, we don't have access to anything with superhuman intellectual ability. But things like the Great Old Ones or posthumans of various kinds do exist and do make for good stories.


...Again, not sure what the point is. This particular trick wasn't brought up previously, and you ask what's unintended about "ignoring an XP cost," which you call "cheesy" and say nobody thought about that interaction.

Ignoring an XP cost doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me. It doesn't allow you to do anything new, it just makes doing what you could already do less obnoxious, and it's not even a particularly cheesy way of beating XP costs (like e.g. draining a level, spending XP, then restoring the level).


The main difference is that we have to talk about "Aristolean Physics", so a widely different set of physics than we´re used to IRL.

No, we don't. Because we can't talk about "Aristolean Physics" because they don't work. If you postulate that the world functions off of "Aristolean Physics" rather than "real physics (modulo magic)", you have to find alternate answers for all of physics since Newton. Because of that, you can no longer rely on player's intuitions for the behavior of the world. Aristotle predicted that objects of different sizes experienced different accelerations due to gravity. How does that difference work? How much faster does a tennis ball fall than a bowling ball? If I tie several tennis balls together, how fast does the whole fall? What if I put them in a bag? If you want to use "Aristolean Physics", you have to answer all those questions. And a bunch more from people who are actual physics majors, or just spent the time to do some research.

[Coidzor]

I don't think an Industrial Revolution is something that makes sense as a result of D&D's rules. That's not to say that you can't get radical social changes as a result of applying progressively higher levels of D&D magic, but it doesn't really look like an Industrial Revolution. So what might you see instead?

Well, to answer that I'm going to take some liberties with D&D. I'm going to take some liberties (assuming some new classes exist, assuming not all classes appear at the same time, stuff like that), but this seems vaguely reasonable to me:

To start with, what class is least suited to using magic on a societal scale?

Well, obviously the people like the Rogue and the Fighter who don't have any magic. But of the casters, I think the answer is the Sorcerer. The disadvantage of Sorcerers is that they don't have the consistency in their magic that other casters do. All 8th level Dread Necromancers know animate dead. If your society can train a bunch of 8th level Dread Necromancers, it can also produce undead armies. All 6th level Warmages know fireball. If your society can train a bunch of 6th level Warmages, it can deploy them as magical artillery. And so on for Beguilers, Clerics, Druids, and hypothetical casters like the Summoner (fixed list Conjuration Specialist) and Warden (fixed list Abjuration Specialist). But this is not how Sorcerers work. A 6th level Sorcerer knows a 3rd level spell. Depending on how you read the fluff, he may not have any control over what it is. Certainly you don't.

What does this mean? Well, it means that while Sorcerers have useful magical abilities, it's hard to integrate them into armies (or societies) on a broad basis. Someone who can cast stinking cloud or fireball or haste or major image is a valuable military asset. But if your casters are Sorcerers, you can't know which spells they'll be able to cast. This means your military can't have combat doctrine based on casters bringing particular spells to the table. You can't deploy your casters as combat artillery if only a fraction of them know fireball. You can't use them for infiltration if most of them don't know dimension door. And so on and so forth.

As a result, I think you see two big trends in Sorcerer-only world:

1. Any force relying on combined arms of casters and non-casters has to be small (or at least, organization has to occur at a relatively small level) to take advantage of its caster's abilities.
2. Magical creatures have an inflated value. The abilities of a Goblin spellcaster are variable, but the abilities of a Bargest are not, and as a result having a bunch of Bargests to support your force allows for better magical integration than a comparable number of casters does.

There are other things too. For example, Dragonpacts are useful because they give you the ability to empower your casters with consistent and specific set of abilities. So overall, you get a world in which most nations are ruled by an overclass of specific magical monsters (like the aforementioned Bargest or Aboleths or Sphinxes), with Dragons being the most effective. Among humanoids, magic is most useful coming from powerful single individuals (high level Sorcerers) who can use the particular magic they have strategically and adapt their armies tactics around that. This seems like a reasonable equivalent to the pre-industrial world.

So what changes?

One possibility is the accumulation of magical items. While an individual Sorcerer has unpredictable capabilities, it he makes an Eternal Wand of fireball that's a permanent and stable source of fireballs for whatever military has access to it going forward. In theory, sufficient proliferation of magic items could overcome the limitations of Sorcerer casting (you could also do some interesting things with Spell Stitched Undead in a similar vein). However, I think this uninteresting for two reasons. First, it doesn't promote much by way of diversity in terms of civilization. Everyone is just getting the average of a bunch of Sorcerers, which is going to be fairly homogeneous. Second, you end up with a setting containing only Sorcerers, which isn't very interesting to play in.

I think the better answer is the development of fixed list casters.

A Beguiler is not massively better than a Sorcerer from the perspective of raw power. In some ways, it's worse (for example, no native access to alter self or fireball). But it has major advantages in consistency and number of spells known. Every single Beguiler can cast silent image. There is no Beguiler anywhere (barring truly bizarre choices like the 8 INT Beguiler) who cannot do so. This means that a nation which trains Beguilers can rely on them as magical assets in a way that one which trains Sorcerers cannot. It can also rely on Beguilers to provide a large number of more niche magical effects that might not have been available to a nation reliant on Sorcerers.

So, Sorcerer-world sees the development of fixed list casters, presumably with more variety that the three (four if you count the Healer) which exist in 3.5. This breaks the advantage held by nations lead by magical races (because they are no longer the only source of consistent magical support). You might reasonably make parallels to the end of the divine right of kings and the enlightenment here.

But it's not just military applications that open up. Having Dread Necromancers running around means that someone gets to start doing all kinds of cool necromantic industrialization. Having people who can cast wall of stone consistently makes building cities easier. Having enough casters to throw plant growth on all your fields is a mini Green Revolution. And so on for all the spells that make life better in various ways.

So now you have a world that's characterized by a variety of societies which each depend on access to large number of spellcasters who can deploy a particular suite of spells. What can you do to shake that up? Well, the obvious answer is to throw Wizards into the mix. Wizards walk in with the ability to benefit from the spell research of other Wizards, which is a massive network externality that potentially turns even a small nation that starts training Wizards into the next superpower. You could also sprinkle in the various things that cause hard takeoff singularities all on their own (like unrestricted versions of high end form changing or summoning magic), or some more potent magic items, or some rules for rituals, or some kind of high level outsiders.

Pretty interesting thought, that. Certainly could make for an interesting setting focusing more on the strategic end of things.


See, this is why the Elemental Planes (and the other planes) should just be *really big* rather than *infinite*. Infinity is stupid, and putting it in the game makes stupid stuff happen.

In any case, it should be possible to scry out deposits of the desired size, so it shouldn't be too much trouble to find the mine you need.

Yeah, I suppose the biggest thing to keep in mind is that there are hazards to doing that, even if it's not initially claimed or in the sights of someone, some group, or some thing, it could become a source of contention going forward.


It's more a nitpick about your claim that the Elemental Plane of Earth wouldn't have infinite resources in it. It has infinity of some resource in it, even if that resource may be not terribly useful.

I meant more that you might not get actual post-scarcity, you might just get access to a whole heck of a lot of it, depending upon the level and rate at which they could scry, make portals, and exploit said portals.


Aren't those made of rust?

Well, on that front, I think iron oxides are iron oxides, and I believe most forms of iron ore are iron oxide in something, with delicious impurities, or in different configurations. I think Acheron's cubes (or spheres or what have you) are rust-covered iron, and you wanna smelt it down anyway to make steel so I think that'd be fine.

Now, weird planar properties for being from Acheron, those might either not be fine or lead to having some unintended beneficial effects.

As far as I recall, only Gehenna and Baator have special types of iron or steel in them or made by the denizens there from their evil ores of evil iron.

[Florian]

What wrong with planes having infinite size? Planes are conceptual things with no real regard to physics.

[atemu1234]

What wrong with planes having infinite size? Planes are conceptual things with no real regard to physics.

Well, for starters, they'd then have infinite mass. Which messes with newtonian physics seven ways to sunday.

[Florian]

Well, for starters, they'd then have infinite mass. Which messes with newtonian physics seven ways to sunday.

Considering that we have planes with subjective gravity or ones that actually react to the condition of your soul, I´d say newtonian physics are not involved.

[GreatWyrmGold]

If the Elemental Plane of Earth is infinite (which, again, is stupid, but it still holds if it's merely "really big"), we would expect the law of large numbers to ensure that the largest iron deposits there are larger than the largest ones in the real world. Though again, it probably doesn't matter much, because if you add a second portal (or whatever you use for interplanar travel) to your mine, it doesn't much matter if you add it in the same mine or somewhere else.
I don't think you understand the point. The term "productive," in that argument, was supposed to mean "ore gained per unit effort". As for arguments about adding new portals...I haven't run the numbers, but it seems like that would cost more than hiring a few prospectors to trek around the mountains.


Aren't those made of rust?
To be fair, hematite is also basically rust.


Magic items don't go away. While it's quite possible that the civilizations which produced them collapse in the face of demon invasions or undead explosions or whatever, magic swords just sit around until they're destroyed, and in most cases there's no real reason to destroy them.
By RAW, sure. But then again, by RAW nothing degrades or breaks over time. Food doesn't spoil, rope doesn't rot, armor doesn't rust, lockpicks don't break. Heck, there aren't even aging rules for horses. Should we therefore assume that we can work a single horse hard for centuries without getting a new one?
Also, a few of the cursed magic items say that they were normal magic items whose magic degraded over time, so there's a decent argument to be made that degrading magic items were the intended fluff.


Well the problem is that it's a hard question to answer because, as humans, we don't have access to anything with superhuman intellectual ability. But things like the Great Old Ones or posthumans of various kinds do exist and do make for good stories.
...Not sure how any of that connects to what I was talking about.


Ignoring an XP cost doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me. It doesn't allow you to do anything new, it just makes doing what you could already do less obnoxious, and it's not even a particularly cheesy way of beating XP costs (like e.g. draining a level, spending XP, then restoring the level).
You do know what a cost is, right? Saying that removing costs is OK is a problem, because everything is balanced by costs in some form or another. Claiming that "beating XP costs" doesn't let you do anything you couldn't do before is just ridiculous. After all, you can't cast an indefinite number of permanancy'd spells if you have to pay the XP cost each time.



Well, for starters, they'd then have infinite mass. Which messes with newtonian physics seven ways to sunday.
Though it's spread over an infinite volume. If it's homogeneously spread throughout the plane there would be no net gravity, but lots of planes have subjective gravity, so...that helps.

[Coidzor]

Well, for starters, they'd then have infinite mass. Which messes with newtonian physics seven ways to sunday.

Thankfully not in any way that interacts with game mechanics, unless we wanna say the unique properties of each plane/layer are a result of that and whatever makes action possible there, so it's unlikely to interfere with anything of interest to our purposes for this thread, other than particle physics experiments or trying to make some really complicated tech there.

Could be interesting to tule that Ethergaunt tech doesn't work on infinite planes, due to being too advanced and the physics breaking down.

[Sheepherder]

The first thing that comes to mind is something which served a very, very similar role in the real world—longbows. You might need a bunch of acolytes or apprentice wizards or something to cast magic weapon on them, but there's no need to get complicated.

There sort of is. Ideally, I want the dragon to be dead or crippled at maximum range, before it even knows what's happening to it.

Dwarven Guard: "Oy, there's a dragon scoping us out. There, a league away!"
Dwarven Battery Commander: "Aye, so there is." [strokes beard] "Well, looks as he's more than curious."

[they nod to each other and each pull out a key, inserting them into a console and turning. A long cylinder tapering into a cone drops from the ready rack into the launching rail, a third dwarf begins turning the azimuth and elevation control wheels]

Dwarven Battery Commander: "Send my regards to Tiamat." [pushes button]

No breath weapons, no charmed defenders, no need for fire suppression or reconstruction efforts, no need for heroes to save the day. The dragon is circling around the town at three miles pondering how best to achieve its destruction when it spots a bright flash and a finger of smoke reaching out towards it. The smoke trail peters out and the dragon dismisses it as a bit of dwarven trickery, attempting to hide themselves from his mighty wrath. Then the world seems to buckle around it as its shattered body falls from the sky.

Dwarven Battery Commander: " 'Genius level intellect,' the zoologist says. If'fn so I 'aven't seen it. That one look like a genius to you, boy-o?"

[GreatWyrmGold]

There sort of is. Ideally, I want the dragon to be dead or crippled at maximum range, before it even knows what's happening to it.

Dwarven Guard: "Oy, there's a dragon scoping us out. There, a league away!"
Dwarven Battery Commander: "Aye, so there is." [strokes beard] "Well, looks as he's more than curious."

[they nod to each other and each pull out a key, inserting them into a console and turning. A long cylinder tapering into a cone drops from the ready rack into the launching rail, a third dwarf begins turning the azimuth and elevation control wheels]

Dwarven Battery Commander: "Send my regards to Tiamat." [pushes button]

No breath weapons, no charmed defenders, no need for fire suppression or reconstruction efforts, no need for heroes to save the day. The dragon is circling around the town at three miles pondering how best to achieve its destruction when it spots a bright flash and a finger of smoke reaching out towards it. The smoke trail peters out and the dragon dismisses it as a bit of dwarven trickery, attempting to hide themselves from his mighty wrath. Then the world seems to buckle around it as its shattered body falls from the sky.

Dwarven Battery Commander: " 'Genius level intellect,' the zoologist says. If'fn so I 'aven't seen it. That one look like a genius to you, boy-o?"
Of course, since D&D dragons have genius-level intellect and the power of a mid-level sorcerer, they'd probably have some answer to any plain ol' artillery battery. A young adult red dragon, for instance, could have access to the likes of darkness, invisibility, or mirror image. Or it could use tactics subtler than "fly at the enemy stronghold in broad daylight".

[Cosi]

I meant more that you might not get actual post-scarcity, you might just get access to a whole heck of a lot of it, depending upon the level and rate at which they could scry, make portals, and exploit said portals.

I dunno. I'm not sure "we don't have enough iron" is the barrier keeping the real world from being post-scarcity, and we have to get by with just the iron on the parts of one planet that we can mine reasonably easily.


Well, on that front, I think iron oxides are iron oxides, and I believe most forms of iron ore are iron oxide in something, with delicious impurities, or in different configurations. I think Acheron's cubes (or spheres or what have you) are rust-covered iron, and you wanna smelt it down anyway to make steel so I think that'd be fine.

I will defer to others on the topic. I was under the impression that rust wasn't industrially useful. If that's not the case, you can mine all the rust you want.


What wrong with planes having infinite size? Planes are conceptual things with no real regard to physics.

Well, infinity causes all kinds of problems when you plug it into pretty much any equations. What's the benefit to planes that are "infinite" rather than "really big"? If the Elemental Plane of Fire is "just" the size of the Earth, that's enough space to fit upwards of 7 billion people even when all of them need to eat and much of the real estate is uninhabitable to various degrees for various reasons. What do you need to do that requires more space than that? Even if you do need more room, that's still a pretty small volume all things considered. I don't see any difference between a plane the size of a solar system or galaxy and an infinite one other than a profound need to say "infinite".


By RAW, sure. But then again, by RAW nothing degrades or breaks over time. Food doesn't spoil, rope doesn't rot, armor doesn't rust, lockpicks don't break. Heck, there aren't even aging rules for horses. Should we therefore assume that we can work a single horse hard for centuries without getting a new one?

Magic items lasting forever is a pretty established fantasy trope. Sauron is not terribly concerned that the One Ring will break down into dust before he gets his chance to conquer Middle Earth.


You do know what a cost is, right? Saying that removing costs is OK is a problem, because everything is balanced by costs in some form or another. Claiming that "beating XP costs" doesn't let you do anything you couldn't do before is just ridiculous. After all, you can't cast an indefinite number of permanancy'd spells if you have to pay the XP cost each time.

Supernatural Spell is supposed to negate the XP cost. That's one of the things it does. It's like getting mad that Eschew Materials negates the need for a spell component pouch or that crafting things saves money over buying them.


Of course, since D&D dragons have genius-level intellect and the power of a mid-level sorcerer, they'd probably have some answer to any plain ol' artillery battery. A young adult red dragon, for instance, could have access to the likes of darkness, invisibility, or mirror image. Or it could use tactics subtler than "fly at the enemy stronghold in broad daylight".

This is true. D&D dragons aren't dumb brutes. They're intelligent, magically gifted, and generally quite wealthy. They won't just "miss" someone developing cannons that OHKO from outside engagement range, and if they someone do it's unlikely to permanently deal with something that can shapeshift, probably has a variety of minions, and has enough magic and intelligence to develop technology of its own.

[Florian]

@Cosi:

Post-scarcity also means post capitalism/market/money/worth. Everything always available at no production/transportation cost? It´s free.

[Fizban]

Finishing the train:

If a train uses 10 tons of coal per hour, and that coal has 34 MJ/kg of power, we need (9,072 kg* 34MJ)/60 minutes/60 seconds= 85.68 MW of fire to match it. That's roughly two medium fire elementals or 1/3 of a 5' cube WoF item. Dropping the cube to 3' on a side is still enough for 105 MW and drops my cheapest reasonable item price down to 252gp (I should probably re-figure them into cylinders or spheres, but eh). Even if coal is the same cost as wood (1cp/20lb), that's 10-11gp per hour, you'll make that back in three days of operation and the cost of the fuel-less boiler is almost certainly a tiny fraction of the cost of the rest of the train.

So I'd say yes, fire elementals and custom WoF items can jumpstart the heck out of steam technology by completely eliminating the need for fuel. Water items are pricier but exist and can completely eliminate the need for any dedicated infrastructure beyond the track itself, and steamboats don't even need that. That's zero to steamboats as soon as someone puts two and two together, with trains or even less efficient land (or hot-air) vehicles soon after.



There sort of is. Ideally, I want the dragon to be dead or crippled at maximum range, before it even knows what's happening to it.
Then if you don't want to package other effects for delivery, you're going to need to invent a weapon based on the good 'ol standbys of physics abuse in dnd: generic energy calculations compared to lbs of tnt (which have a rating in d6's of damage in some book). Because every damage based effect in the game is bent towards not letting you swat dragons out of the sky, the only way it's going to happen is if you use physics conversions to violate the normal damage limits. Typically this is done via heavily custom effects to store gravitational energy by portal looping or pressurizing things to impossible limits within walls of force, calculating the stored energy, then saying you point it at the target and they take ni d6 damage.

The DragonMech setting is all about steam powered giant robots with steam canons that were invented to fight moon dragons, if you wanted a sourcebook for that, but it still uses normal attack rolls and damage numbers.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Well, infinity causes all kinds of problems when you plug it into pretty much any equations.
Judging by the number of 20th-century scientific theories which played nice with relativity and such while suggesting an infinite universe, I'd guess that spreading infinity over infinity leads to enough finities for things to work out, especially given how quickly every force fades to nothing over infinite distance. Uniform infinity is pretty nice like that.


What's the benefit to planes that are "infinite" rather than "really big"?
It sounds better?


Magic items lasting forever is a pretty established fantasy trope. Sauron is not terribly concerned that the One Ring will break down into dust before he gets his chance to conquer Middle Earth.
I notice that you ignore examples of magic going sour in fantasy...including examples from D&D itself. In fact, you failed to quote the part of my post mentioning that. Hm...


Supernatural Spell is supposed to negate the XP cost. That's one of the things it does. It's like getting mad that Eschew Materials negates the need for a spell component pouch or that crafting things saves money over buying them.
I'm not sure that was part of the design intent. If it was, the folks at WotC are even worse at game design than I realized, because that's a major part of how basically every spell with an XP cost is balanced.
Also, Eschew Materials only lets you ignore materials that weren't intended as a balancing mechanism.



Post-scarcity also means post capitalism/market/money/worth. Everything always available at no production/transportation cost? It´s free.
Not really. Post-scarcity just means that a given set of resources are not scarce, ie are not a limiting factor on production. Everything else you mention is just speculation about what a hypothetical post-scarcity economy would look like.
The thing is, true post-scarcity is impossible. There are too many unique goods that literally can't be mass-produced to meet demand; some can't be produced (wine of a given vintage, natural beachfront property, etc), while others would lose their value if you tried to mass-produce them (famous paintings, misprinted postage stamps, etc). And then there are services...Post-scarcity is an interesting abstraction, but it'll never apply to the economy as a whole. Maybe someday we'll be post-electricity-scarcity, or post-metal-scarcity, or something, but we'll never be post-everything-scarcity.



Then if you don't want to package other effects for delivery, you're going to need to invent a weapon based on the good 'ol standbys of physics abuse in dnd: generic energy calculations compared to lbs of tnt (which have a rating in d6's of damage in some book)...
I'm a bit...iffy about rulesy calculations which require breaking out rules intended for one purpose and using them for another purpose only tangentially related. Especially if there's some other set of rules which arguably fits better (e.g, falling objects rules).
Pressurization works better, because that's actually directly comparable to TNT. I'm not sure how you'd do that, though.

[Fizban]

I'm a bit...iffy about rulesy calculations which require breaking out rules intended for one purpose and using them for another purpose only tangentially related. Especially if there's some other set of rules which arguably fits better (e.g, falling objects rules).
Pressurization works better, because that's actually directly comparable to TNT. I'm not sure how you'd do that, though.
I had a sneering tone in my head when I wrote it, as far as I'm concerned it's worthless. Find the amount of heat an elemental or work a waterwheel puts out? Not stepping on any toes, suggested in fluff without mechanics most likely, go right ahead. Damage is the one thing the game regularly tries to limit the most and has plenty of existing mechanics, the idea of weapon of any sort that deals 50, 100, or more damage in a single hit without a high level character or consumed resources behind it goes completely against the intent. Nothing in dnd but the fluff says the world couldn't be at a higher tech level, but tons of mechanics say you should not be making infinite loop powered mass drivers.

The falling object rules naturally don't work for an attack in any direction but above, but you've reminded me of the other one: hulking hurler builds with lead/uranium/lolium spheres. As thrown weapons those won't work either. Filling the force walls used (what else) Decanter of Endless Water, ignoring the fact that the pressure would crush the decanter, but then they'd just use "riverine" (one of the stupidest pieces of garbage ever printed, yup) to make everything out of force. I don't think that was ever converted into a directional weapon, just that you'd either release containment at some point after the explosion would level everything in sight, or wait until a black hole formed for the lulz.

[Cosi]

Judging by the number of 20th-century scientific theories which played nice with relativity and such while suggesting an infinite universe, I'd guess that spreading infinity over infinity leads to enough finities for things to work out, especially given how quickly every force fades to nothing over infinite distance. Uniform infinity is pretty nice like that.

Not necessarily complex physics equations, but stuff that's relevant like "why hasn't the world been conquered by demons"? If there are infinitely many demon lords, and finitely many people defending the Prime, why haven't they been overwhelmed.


I notice that you ignore examples of magic going sour in fantasy...including examples from D&D itself. In fact, you failed to quote the part of my post mentioning that. Hm...

I mean, one fluff hint that doesn't have any rules to go with it sounds pretty iffy as a basis to suggest items generally decay.


I'm not sure that was part of the design intent. If it was, the folks at WotC are even worse at game design than I realized, because that's a major part of how basically every spell with an XP cost is balanced.

A Supernatural Spell is exactly like a regular spell, except it ignores costs like XP and components. What other purpose would the ability have than allowing you to ignore those costs?

[Coidzor]

Saying all items decay because some items may or may not decay in particular circumstances is shaky ground, it's better to take it as a suggestion not to put them in certain conditions indefinitely and move on.

I mean, unless you wanna spend a lot of time houseruling what will or will not sour a magic item or break it from normal wear and tear.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I had a sneering tone in my head when I wrote it, as far as I'm concerned it's worthless.
Oh. Poe's Law (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PoesLaw) in action.


...but then they'd just use "riverine" (one of the stupidest pieces of garbage ever printed, yup)...
Yup. I mean, seriously, what? I can get that someone said "We're making an underwater sourcebook, wouldn't it be neat if we could figure out some way to wear water as armor?", but by the time they finished drafting they forgot to make sure that adding the water still made sense. And then the mechanics guys looked at the concept, shrugged their shoulders, and threw something simple together.
At least it's not as bad as truenaming.



Not necessarily complex physics equations, but stuff that's relevant like "why hasn't the world been conquered by demons"? If there are infinitely many demon lords, and finitely many people defending the Prime, why haven't they been overwhelmed.
Presumably, the Prime Material Plane is also infinite, with either an infinite number of realistic planets or an infinite expanse of land and water.


I mean, one fluff hint that doesn't have any rules to go with it sounds pretty iffy as a basis to suggest items generally decay.
We're discussing fluff, and a fluff hint is "iffy"?
Besides, as I've said, your same damn argument works for saying that literally anything without an explicit statement of "This is when it dies/breaks" can last forever. Considering that true dragons have such a statement and pseudodragons, dragon turtles, and so on don't, it's hard to imagine anyone taking this seriously. Your claim that magic items don't decay over time ignores not only the fluff to the contrary, but the consequences of its own logic. If we reject the idea that pseudodragons are immortal, since they don't have a stated maximum age, we must also reject the only logic you've actually constructed for your argument.


A Supernatural Spell is exactly like a regular spell, except it ignores costs like XP and components. What other purpose would the ability have than allowing you to ignore those costs?/QUOTE]
Thank you for keeping yourself deliberately ignorant of the point I was making.
Somatic and verbal components are omnipresent; they're not a cost applied to specific spells, they're a drawback of spells in general. (And that's assuming we can call something with precisely zero effect beyond the immediate a "cost" rather than, say, a "requirement".) Situations where spells don't require somatic or verbal components are the exception. The same goes for attacks of opportunity and spell resistance, the latter of which may have been the main problem Supernatural Spell was intended to handle.


[QUOTE=Coidzor;21984534]Saying all items decay because some items may or may not decay in particular circumstances is shaky ground, it's better to take it as a suggestion not to put them in certain conditions indefinitely and move on.
I mean, unless you wanna spend a lot of time houseruling what will or will not sour a magic item or break it from normal wear and tear.
Um...there aren't rules for when mundane items break from normal wear and tear, or how fast they rot or rust into uselessness. There's also no point in spending a lot of time houseruling that. Does that mean that mundane items also last forever and ever and ever?
Not that I expect you to pay attention to this point. I've made it before, and you apparently ignored that, too. What was it Albert Einstein said about insanity? (Though I'm not doing the exact same thing. I'm a lot more sarcastic this time.)

[Bohandas]

Has anuone mentioned the possible use of Decanters of Endless Water to not only turn waterwheels but to do so, and hydrate the populace, in places that don't have any water

EDIT:
Also the water wheels wouldn;t need to be fixed in place; you could run a vehicle with them

EDIT:
Also you could make a coilgun out of multiple wands of scatterspray or launch bolt

[Bohandas]

Well, for starters, they'd then have infinite mass. Which messes with newtonian physics seven ways to sunday.

Yes, but since they're also infinite in extent: 1.) They don't have infinite density and 2.) The pull in any direction is always canceled out by equally strong pull in the opposite direction

[Fizban]

EDIT:Also the water wheels wouldn;t need to be fixed in place; you could run a vehicle with them
Creating a ridiculous mess everywhere you go.

EDIT: Also you could make a coilgun out of multiple wands of scatterspray or launch bolt
You could invent an arbitrary magic item which used those spells as prerequisites. A custom item would do nothing, since those spells do their own discreete damage. If you want to derive energy by calculating acceleration based on distance traveled within a round and then compare to tnt, I would not be surprised at all if you found every ranged weapon could deal lol damage.


Now that we've covered steam, I think it's time to move elsewhere. Two new considerations:

We have no transmute iron to steel spell (and with free heat we don't need as much tech advancement to do it anyway), but we do have a Hardening spell, which might help. Depends on if dnd hardness equates to real life hardness and how much hardness contributes to various strength estimates. I'm guessing it's actually not all that much.

But that's fine, since we also have an Augment Object spell (SBG) which increases break DC, hardness, and hp, for much more thorough comparisons. I expect an item that pings Augment Object 1/week on something would allow a much less advanced machine to handle more than usual.

And while we're at it, I've never run the numbers on mobile strongholds. Another system that scales down to super cheap, while ships measure their capacity in tons, mobile strongholds are limited only by area. There's no mention of towing capacity so it's probably best to assume they can't tow anything that's not stored in a dock space, but there's potentially room to abuse height by having a normal interior space and then piling some extra stuff on top. Furthermore, as strongholds can be made of stone or iron with no impact on their carrying capacity, instead of a boat you have a mobile stronghold. This is actually the most promising of all purely magical transports thanks to the cargo capacity, but a train will still crush it if invented.

[Gildedragon]

Creating a ridiculous mess everywhere you go.
That's called being a wizard.


This is actually the most promising of all purely magical transports thanks to the cargo capacity, but a train will still crush it if invented.
there is the eberron lightning rail... But those are not elaborated on in the least. They use elemental binding and the mysterious standard schemas to function. So those are SooL

A lyre of building could establish flat paved roads between cities. Possibly even underground roads, protected from animals and brigands...permanent grease on the walls to facilitate sliding and a spell like gust of wind or defenestrating sphere could push capsules down the chute between cities

[Fizban]

there is the eberron lightning rail... But those are not elaborated on in the least. They use elemental binding and the mysterious standard schemas to function. So those are SooL
The lightning rail coach is actually statted relatively well in ECS: it has a price and is capable of towing "a large number of" carts that carry 200 passengers or 100 tons each-it's the rail itself which has no price and is thus completely useless.

[Gildedragon]

The lightning rail coach is actually statted relatively well in ECS: it has a price and is capable of towing "a large number of" carts that carry 200 passengers or 100 tons each-it's the rail itself which has no price and is thus completely useless.
No price nor means of construction... Which is kinda blah. I could see a cool adventure around building a new line.
Even if the tools used to make it were (lesser) artifacts, it'd give support to enterprising players to lay new tracks...

[Florian]

No price nor means of construction... Which is kinda blah. I could see a cool adventure around building a new line.
Even if the tools used to make it were (lesser) artifacts, it'd give support to enterprising players to lay new tracks...

Well, same as with Artefacts.

Thing is, the whole "crafting" formulae are tied into what the designers thought is a balanced game, same as WBL. Now consider that everything that is really interesting is tagged as an artifact...

[GreatWyrmGold]

Well, same as with Artefacts.

Thing is, the whole "crafting" formulae are tied into what the designers thought is a balanced game, same as WBL. Now consider that everything that is really interesting is tagged as an artifact...
I guess the idea is that you'd need to go on adventures for the really interesting stuff, specifically forbidding the use of Magic-Marts to get that stuff.



Creating a ridiculous mess everywhere you go.
It would require setting up specialized roads with ditches to drain the water. It could presumably play double-duty as irrigation. Disposing of all that water would be a problem, of course; just draining it into nearby rivers would greatly increase the water supply on the planet/in the region, leaving to all sorts of unfortunate effects. Rising sea levels, increased humidity...changes in weather patterns...metaphor for global warming...scribble scribble...I'll get back to you on that...

[Schattenbach]

How well does Golem tech (particulary when it comes to golems with very high STR scores (and thus high carrying capacity ... and carrying capacity scales like crazy once the strength score goes past 40) when it comes to producing energy (either directly or indirectly ... but as plenty of ways to generate energy use some mechanical step in between before converting it to some other form of energy that#s more according to whats necessary, this shouldn'treally matter all that much)? Regular golems could get pretty expensive withput being able to advance/improve them at low cost, but picking some creature with particulary outstanding strength score as effigy or so might also work?

[Bohandas]

Of course, since D&D dragons have genius-level intellect and the power of a mid-level sorcerer, they'd probably have some answer to any plain ol' artillery battery. A young adult red dragon, for instance, could have access to the likes of darkness, invisibility, or mirror image. Or it could use tactics subtler than "fly at the enemy stronghold in broad daylight".

Or its own artillery pieces

[Fizban]

There's even Dispel Water which destroys quite a large amount of water, but would be similarly expensive. It looks like the decanter's geyser mode is basically a firehose, which I have a hard time believing will power a vehicle of significant size. Especially not when we have perfectly good vehicles and power sources for far cheaper.


The problem with a mobile stronghold's carrying capacity being in volume rather than tons, is that it's in volume rather than tons. Which makes it difficult to compare to everything else which is listed in tons. Presumably there are cargoes of low enough density that a ship wouldn't be able to fill the full weight, but I don't think those are generally a problem. It's the loads of metal that are hard to move. Iron is 491 lbs/cu ft, while grains seem to be around 30-50 lbs/cu ft (see below), and there's so many woods I'm gonna just throw at 40-50 lbs/cu ft. So for most loads of processed goods we can probably assume 50lbs/cu ft on average, with a massive advantage on raw heavy materials. Call it 75 tons "standard" goods, 750 tons metals per fancy storage space (the storage space has aisles, it could hold more as just a packed cube but that's less useful overall).

The 1/day Portal built with the Portal Master feat is 15,000gp between two specific points (any plane) and can probably move at least 4 (but no more than 8) tons of goods that can be strapped to teams of people per daily use. Heavy horses can carry up to 650lbs each (after saddle) with a handler to Push them. Each heavy horse takes the space or 4 people (400lbs) and costs 200gp. For heavier goods you need teams of elephants, which can carry up to 3 tons each with a handler to Push them. Each elephant takes the space of 9 people (or 900lbs), but costs 2,000gp and is likely harder to train for the coordinated portal rush. The cost ranges from 3750gp/ton with a semicircle of basic humans to 960gp/ton with a circle of 17 elephants (a max of 51 tons). The price of the elephants can be equated to that of a ship if they circuit through multiple portals, said "ship" costing 34,000gp.

The unlimited portal with Portal Master is 75,000gp, but still needs a team of elephants and handlers to move heavy loads and only connects two points. Cost is reduced to labor and horses/elephants, to 667gp/"tonday" (depending on how many loads you can get on and off the elephant per day) for a dedicated team shifting from one side to the other. The problem is that portals only go to one place, and that's just not good enough to beat a proper vehicle on a large scale. An unlimited portal is best viewed as a canal cutting out thousands of miles of travel (assuming it does that), if you can get your stuff through it. The end result depends on how much traffic vs how many defenses/red tape, which will move towards some balance of extra time/money vs the savings of time/money in funneling through the portal.



The Caravel is the most efficient ship, carrying 120 tons for 10,000gp (83.3gp/ton) at a speed of 6mph (4mph after load penalty) across water only.

The Greatship is the biggest ship, carrying 500 tons for 60,000gp (120gp/ton) at a speed of 5mph (3mph after load penalty) across water only, before modifications.

An Earth Keel Greatship carries 500 tons for 210,000gp (420gp/ton) at a speed of 5mph (3mph after load penalty) across water and earth, taking overland penalties as appropriate.

A Cloud Keel Greatship carries 500 tons for 260,000gp (520gp/ton) at a speed of 4mph through the air.

An Eberron Airship carries 30 tons for 92,000gp (3062gp/ton) at a speed of 20mph through the air.

(Dividing each ship's cost/ton by the speed to normalize the costs we get: Caravel (full load) 20.8gp, Greatship (full load) 40gp, Earth Greatship (full load) 140gp, Cloud Greatship 130gp, Eberron Airship 153gp. This makes it easy to compare which is better between the ships, with Caravel giving an extremely low baseline and Cloud Greatship actually beating the faster Eberron ship on large loads over time, until you count crew costs.)



Finally, mobile strongholds.
A Fancy Storage space gives 3,000 cu ft of storage, equaling 736 tons of solid iron. Or 54.3 tons of rough rice (hulls on), 72.2 tons of wheat, 74.9 tons of sugar, or 133 tons of honey (about the heaviest medieval food on this page). This actually isn't that great compared to a sailing ship for "standard" density loads, but we're not here for standard loads, we're here to look at non-train solutions for heavy transport.

The next question is how much you want to fort up. There's no room in the hold for people to fire, so if you want that you'll need guard posts, increasing the size and quickly negating the "one room" exploit. We'll start with one-room prices, with standing room on the roof.

An Incredible Crawling and Sailing Fancy Hewn Stone Storage Space costs 36,000gp and zips across land and sea at 10mph. Flying would instead cost 47,000gp. At a "standard" density of 50 lbs/cu ft that's 75 tons, for 480 gp/ton or 627 gp/ton, traveling 200 miles per day (assuming 20 useful hours).

An Inner or Outer-Plane Linked Fancy Hewn Stone Storage Space costs 22,000gp and moves back and forth between a specific point on each plane, similar to a discount 1/day portal.

A Teleporting Fancy Hewn Stone Storage Space costs 57,000gp and can Greater Teleport 1/day.

A Teleporting and Planeshifting Fancy Hewn Stone Storage Space costs 82,000gp and can Plane Shift and Greater Teleport 1/day each.



Beating portals:
For the same price as a discount daily portal, a Caravel and a half can transport 30 times as much up to say, 80 miles (with 20 hours of sailing per day). If there's a sea route you'd need a distance of at least 2,400 miles for the portal just to beat a non-magical ship.

For about 50% more than the discount daily portal, a plane-linked FHSSS can carry (731/2 for every other day)= 365.5 tons of iron between a single point on each plane instead of 4-50.

For the price of three discount daily portals you can get a flying zoom box which carries 2-6 times the weight (in standard goods) out to 200 miles in the same day, such that the portal network must be at least 400 miles wide to compare, or 4,000 miles if you're transporting metals.

A Teleporting box costs a bit less than four discount daily portals, and can carry around 1.5-4 times the total weight in standard goods out to the same distance (on the same plane), but not locked to those four points.

For a bit more than the price of a single discount unlimited portal between two specific points, you can have a Planeshifting Teleporting box that takes the 75/750 tons of goods/metal per day from any point to any other point, with only a 1 day delay in productivity if there's nothing to load where you land.

And for a bit more than that (or twice the cost of the flying box), you can have the eberron airship: twice the speed of the flying box for a bit less than half the standard cargo, with room to carry passengers instead, probably the best alternative vehicle without trains.


Nothing competes with mobile strongholds for moving heavy stuff, as expected. Furthermore, the planeshifting and teleporting properties require only cl 15 rather than 17 and only require Craft Wonderous, significantly increasing the pool of potential NPC crafters. In sort, the discount daily portal sounds nice because portals, but is actually quite outclassed by mobile strongholds. Even though flying and plane-linked require cl17, they still don't require Portal Master. Portals are good for being portals, a doorway you can stick anywhere (including inside a mobile stronghold, possibly even a ship) which instantly transports people to a specific point. Unlimited portals don't really compete with vehicles at all simply because they're tunnels through which only creatures may pass.


As for beating trains, got no train data so, welp. I'm sure there's a price somewhere for the non-powered lightning rail carts, but I can't seem to find it. Ignoring conductor stone costs, with the price and capacity of a full train we could at least compare that to portals and enhanced ships, and ignoring the conductor path costs I'd fully expect the magic train to win. Cost for a steam train could be taken from a 3rd party, but of those I'm familiar with: Sorcery and Steam doesn't do trains, Warcraft doesn't do trains, and Dragonmech does impossible giant mecha. Even so, almost any price on the locomotive is still going to crush multiple portals/ships/strongholds since the train just has more capacity from towing un-powered cars, applying to both cargo and passengers.

I'm quite certain there's no way to monkey around costs and undercut rails without finding another supernatural creature to exploit (say, with permanent super-grease). Pretty sure a narrow aqueduct won't actually work at high speeds since instead of a crisp wheel on rail you're grinding dirt and dragging water. Wall of Stone spam is just a different way of building a rail with less hardness that probably wouldn't stand up to the weight. Repulsion/levitation/friction reduction spells are all quite high level/rated by weight/both. And so on.

[Bohandas]

Regarding animated dead as a workforce (which IIRC was broached before), I think that mass use of Unseen Servant might be more viable, because even though it has to be recast every few hours it's a level 1 spell, as opposed to level 3 for clerics and level 4 for wizards, so a lot more people are going to be able to cast it.

[Gildedragon]

Regarding animated dead as a workforce (which IIRC was broached before), I think that mass use of Unseen Servant might be more viable, because even though it has to be recast every few hours it's a level 1 spell, as opposed to level 3 for clerics and level 4 for wizards, so a lot more people are going to be able to cast it.

A benefit from using the dead is the freeing up of the land that'd normally be set aside from the dead.
With careful flaming one can get 2 undead per person. 1 skellie and 1 skinkite; haunt-shift the latter into a turbine or the like...

[Bohandas]

Since we're still discussing power sources, a 9th level Wizard casting Major Creation (Uranium) can conjure up to 4.9 megagrams of pure uranium, which would produce an explosion worth up to 4.8 petajoules. The Wizard would most likely cast Resilient Sphere beforehand to survive the blast, and Teleport to vacate the sphere before it expires, which would make the spellcasting fee 1260 GP. Not sure how much it'd cost to set up the shielding and energy storage systems, though the profits seem immense.

You'd have to assemble the detonation device in under a minute though as rare metals only last 1 round per level

[Bohandas]

The Earth's glaciers contain ~6 quintillion gallons of water, and its oceans contain ~352 quintillion gallons. If you set a million Decanters of Endless Water to "Geyser" mode, it'd take you ~7 thousand and ~372 thousand years to double those quantities. If you factor in all the extra clouds you'll be producing through steam power, the albedo increase could drastically lower global temperatures.

Of course, if you can craft a million Decanters of Endless Water, you could probably spam Disintegrate or Gate to get rid of the excess water.

I don't understand the "it'd take you ~7 thousand and ~372 thousand years" part. Is there a "between" missing or is there a second situation being concurrently considered that I'm not seeing?

[Cosi]

Presumably, the Prime Material Plane is also infinite, with either an infinite number of realistic planets or an infinite expanse of land and water.

But then you have to figure out the relative scaling of the infinities for each plane. Also, you very likely have only a finite number of interesting things on each plane, so why are you making them infinite? You've added complication to the game, required a bunch of other stuff to be infinite (for example, an infinite maze either has infinite guardians or guardians paroling infinite areas, neither of which is good), and all you get out of this is using a word you like.


Besides, as I've said, your same damn argument works for saying that literally anything without an explicit statement of "This is when it dies/breaks" can last forever. Considering that true dragons have such a statement and pseudodragons, dragon turtles, and so on don't, it's hard to imagine anyone taking this seriously. Your claim that magic items don't decay over time ignores not only the fluff to the contrary, but the consequences of its own logic. If we reject the idea that pseudodragons are immortal, since they don't have a stated maximum age, we must also reject the only logic you've actually constructed for your argument.

That's spurious. There's a general rule that things die at their maximum age. Presumably Pseudodragons have such an age, even if it's listed somewhere. Are there any such rules that apply to magic items?


Somatic and verbal components are omnipresent; they're not a cost applied to specific spells, they're a drawback of spells in general. (And that's assuming we can call something with precisely zero effect beyond the immediate a "cost" rather than, say, a "requirement".) Situations where spells don't require somatic or verbal components are the exception. The same goes for attacks of opportunity and spell resistance, the latter of which may have been the main problem Supernatural Spell was intended to handle.

The Dweomerkeeper's ability is already restrained to spells that take a Standard Action or less to cast (so that you can't abuse it with major creation). If WotC hadn't wanted it to allow you to skip XP costs, they would have added language to that effect. The cheesy part isn't even getting around the XP cost, really, so much as it is using limited wish to get around the casting time restriction.


Creating a ridiculous mess everywhere you go.

Sphere of Annihilation should solve that. Or Dust of Dryness. I seem to recall a magic sponge that soaked up a lot of water but only wrung out a little, but I have no idea where it was mentioned.

[Bohandas]

Your claim that magic items don't decay over time ignores not only the fluff to the contrary, but the consequences of its own logic.

What about all the completely functional magic items found in ancient tombs and ruins

[GreatWyrmGold]

How well does Golem tech (particulary when it comes to golems with very high STR scores (and thus high carrying capacity ... and carrying capacity scales like crazy once the strength score goes past 40) when it comes to producing energy (either directly or indirectly ... but as plenty of ways to generate energy use some mechanical step in between before converting it to some other form of energy that#s more according to whats necessary, this shouldn'treally matter all that much)? Regular golems could get pretty expensive withput being able to advance/improve them at low cost, but picking some creature with particulary outstanding strength score as effigy or so might also work?
It looks like effigies are going to have a cost of at least several thousand gold. I believe an ogre effigy costs 9,000, for instance. This is much cheaper than a golem, but I'm not sure it's going to be more cost-efficient than normal human laborers.



The Earth's glaciers contain ~6 quintillion gallons of water, and its oceans contain ~352 quintillion gallons. If you set a million Decanters of Endless Water to "Geyser" mode, it'd take you ~7 thousand and ~372 thousand years to double those quantities.
You make it sound like you'd need to double those quantities of water to cause serious effects. If I recall my statistics correctly melting all of Earth's glaciers would raise the sea level by either 300 feet or 300 meters (I don't remember if the book I was reading at the time gave it in feet or normal scientific measurements). And you'd need a lot of water to run a lot of waterwheels. For reference, the Hoover Dam is roughly equivalent to 3,000 Decanters on its own.



But then you have to figure out the relative scaling of the infinities for each plane.
Why? Why would some planes by countably infinite and others uncountably infinite? And for that matter, why would it matter if plains were infinite in different ways?


Also, you very likely have only a finite number of interesting things on each plane, so why are you making them infinite?
Presumably, it's so adventures and supplements set in the same plane don't have to cross-reference each other to make sure they don't contradict one another.


You've added complication to the game, required a bunch of other stuff to be infinite (for example, an infinite maze either has infinite guardians or guardians paroling infinite areas, neither of which is good), and all you get out of this is using a word you like.
...How does any of that add complexity without the arbitrary addition of some a-hole asking about infinity?


That's spurious. There's a general rule that things die at their maximum age. Presumably Pseudodragons have such an age, even if it's listed somewhere.
That's two assertions that you'll have to back up. I'll wait.


The Dweomerkeeper's ability is already restrained to spells that take a Standard Action or less to cast (so that you can't abuse it with major creation). If WotC hadn't wanted it to allow you to skip XP costs, they would have added language to that effect.
Let's look at the language in question, because either you haven't or you're ignoring it.

The spell functions as it normally
would and is expended normally, but the dweomerkeeper does not require any components, does not provoke attacks of opportunity, and ignores the target’s spell resistance, just as if she were using a supernatural ability instead of a spell.
Now tell me, which seems more likely—that the people developing the dweomerkeeper intended to clearly say that XP costs were removed, or that they didn't consider that XP costs technically fall under components? If the former were the case, they would have added a parenthetical to the effect of (including material and experience costs). All things considered, the latter seems more likely.


Sphere of Annihilation should solve that. Or Dust of Dryness. I seem to recall a magic sponge that soaked up a lot of water but only wrung out a little, but I have no idea where it was mentioned.
Dust of Dryness is one-use and limited, the "magic sponge" in Sandstorm releases as much water as it absorbed, and Spheres of Annihilation will destroy the rest of your machine, too.



What about all the completely functional magic items found in ancient tombs and ruins
What about all the completely usable coins, recognizable art, and so on in those tombs? It's almost as if items in abandoned tombs and ruins deteriorate more slowly than ones being used 24/7...

[Schattenbach]

It looks like effigies are going to have a cost of at least several thousand gold. I believe an ogre effigy costs 9,000, for instance. This is much cheaper than a golem, but I'm not sure it's going to be more cost-efficient than normal human laborers.

Ogres aren't exactly the best investment here to begin with as their strength score isn't particulary good despite them being large sized.

Something with greath strength for reasonably low investment would be ideal here ... depending on where they're used, special movement modes (i.e. flight) might be helpful ... its obviously better if they're smaller, but its not like that matters all that much as long as space is not an issue (it sometimes is, though).

Some random but decent picks might be the Titan (20 HD with 43 STR ... to bad its Huge already ... advances to next size category at 30 HD ... ) or either the Chaos Roc (33 HD with Colossal size, 42 STR as well as 120 ft flight speed) or the somewhat smaller (but with comparable strength score once advanced to Colossal size at 33 HD ... it is quite a bit slower, though) ... creating/advancing constructs even further with Circle Magic to up to 40 HD doesn't seem like much of an issue here. With some strength boosting equipment (and/or buffs and such), their maximum load gets even higher.

About food-related issues ... Oriental Adventures has the "Everproducing Rice Mortar" that can, once per day, produce pretty much any type of food sufficient for 100 people.

[Coidzor]

The Eversoaking Sponge is not in Sandstorm. From what I can gather and recollect, it was in the Arms and Equipment Guide and featured in the Dry Spell adventure that WOTC released for free on their site ages ago.

It seems to absorb around 1,000 gallons per round and has a cap either of 225,000 gallons of water absorbed per day, or the same number is absorbed before it has to be wrung out and used to soak up more water.

[Fizban]

So you want to replace your magic trains with a portal network, a proper one where you go through one portal and end up at any destination. SBG gives the simplified version, but the Portal Master feat with that 50% discount comes from PGtF, and FRCS has much more detailed portal rules, which is where we got the super-discount 1/day portal.

FRCS does mention "Portals often come in pairs or networks." A portal with multiple destinations costs 25% more for each extra destination, which seems like a steal. The problem is, that doesn't upgrade the portal at the other end. For each portal you have to pay the +25% for each portal, exponential costs ahoy. The Portal Master market price for a network of portals that all link to each other is 50k+[12.5k*n]+[25k*(n+1)]+n*[12.5kn*+25k*n], where n+1 is the total number of destinations (for n+2 portals).

There are two ways to attempt reducing that price.

The first method uses a central variable portal, with return portals at each destination. This costs 50k+[12.5k*n]+[25k*(n+1)], and allows anyone at one of the destinations to reach the hub, then turn around and go to any other destination. Because portals always shunt past creatures there's no problem with crowding as long as there's enough open space. If you like the idea of a hub you can leave that as is, but personally I think a constantly swirling vortex of people trying to run back to the center is ugh, so instead one could use a much smaller handwave to turn them into a proper network from there- either people don't materialize at the hub at all, or they do so for only a brief moment before it sucks them back in. Problems with attacking the hub portal are obvious, but damage is somewhat limited in that all the destination portals remain unaffected.

The second is to deliberately read the portal rules wrong: they clearly state that a "two-way" portal is actually a one-way portal, with a second one-way portal that links back to the first created with a base cost of 25k instead of 50k. Instead of creating a second portal, simply deciding that a two-way portal is different and a variable two-way portal naturally links all destinations both ways, you get a price of 75k+(18.75k*n), which is dirt cheap. This version has a critical weakness in that by treating the whole thing as a single variable+returning portal, destroying one destroys the whole spidery thing.

Oh, and the portal key is simple, just set them to respond to the name of the destination on a piece of paper.

You could also just use a ring of portals, one at each destination in sequence and you just run the loop to get back to the start. Shutting down one portal cuts off the loop, and there's also a problem with adding new destinations. While you can (possibly) apply the normal rules for upgrading magic items to add more destinations to a hub or spider portal, adding a new portal to a loop is basically just going to cost more, since you either need to make two portals or add a variable to an existing part of the loop, you spend 125-200% of what you were initially spending. Still, this is the simplest and possibly most natural method, with the lowest cost of replacing any destroyed portals.


In addition to Teleportation Circle+Permanency, there's another spell that creates portals, or close enough: Create Crossroads and Backroad from Magic of Faerun (Druid 7). This has its own problems though, as in addition to a 3.5k experience point cost (nearly as much as a proper portal), it requires users to negotiate with the guardian, the guardian doesn't like urbanized areas, and if the guardian (an incorporeal creature with almost no offense and a 50' tether) dies that entry point is destroyed. Aside from the obvious mind crushing, low-level professional diplomancers could get people through without much trouble on an "oft-traveled" route, but the DC 25 you'd need for a "trade route" (hostile to indifferent) is gonna be much worse.

Both the detailed portal creation and crossroads/backroads rules are rather Forgotten Realms specific, but we've skipped another abusable item from back in the SBG: The Platform of Jaunting, Greater costs 76,500gp, allows anyone to steps on it to Teleport Without Error Greater Teleport anywhere they want. And that's it, no pretense of limitation like with a portal. Build one of those at each material plane destination and you don't need to involve portal math since they already go anywhere, at the slight cost of swiss cheese'd security for literally everywhere that isn't dimensionally warded. It's actually a bit more expensive than the minimum formula would have it, at 9th*17th*2,000gp/4 for wondrous architecture/magic trap.

For transporting goods alone across planar boundaries, I should have checked Planar Handbook before now: Ring Gates, Planar are exactly that. Unlike the basic DMG Ring Gates which only move 100lbs per day, these move up to 10,000lbs per day. That's 5 tons per day from point A to B for 200,000gp. You could link a few continuous portals for that cost, but you couldn't move them around and you'd need to distribute the load, or you could get a couple heavy transports for that cost, but they wouldn't be instantaneous. Another solid option for part of the overall network.


We have a number of purely magical methods of transportation we could use in place of inventing steam trains, but unlike those trains which require only a small and relatively cheap power sources, these require much higher level casters and resources, so we need to determine distribution of high level casters. Well we already know that per city, but that begs the question: how many big cities are there anyway? If you're altering an existing setting you just look at the list of big enough cities, but the two big settings that come to mind don't really count, since Eberron already has magic trains and dragonmarks, while Forgotten Realms is full of high level NPCs that clearly refuse to enact industrialized plans and/or counter anyone else who does.

The Medieval Demographics Made Easy (http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm) page I like seems to indicate that the number of sufficiently large cities, and thus sufficiently high level casters, will be quite small indeed. Much like the high level NPCs themselves, only one city is the biggest while each after that is smaller by an average of half. You'd need to game it by dividing the overall population into kingdoms of 3 million each to get the highest number of metropolises, out of which maybe 2/3 will have a single Cleric high enough level to create Portals. Stuff that can be produced in dnd large cities (min 12,000 pop, min 3 NPCs of 10th level for each class with a good chance of a 13th level rep) is much more reliable, as you can get several large cities from a large enough starting pop even without gaming the system.

For massive transit, without trains the lowest level option is Crawling/Sailing Strongholds, at CL 11, which can carry immense loads with ease but not so much people, and only go up to 10mph.

I wanted to do a comparison on the costs of portals or other magical transit vs Eberron's Lightning Rail Coaches, which cost a hefty 58,000gp on their own before the unknown price of conductor stones for the track and trailing coaches, but I have no idea how many active lightning rails there are in Eberron and I don't feel like digging to find out. Obviously anything less than 20-30mph isn't going to cut it in comparison, and it's essentially impossible to reach that with anything less than a ship using soarwood (from Eberron itself), or a dragon or other creature with a massive fly speed.


The best custom item I'd suggest would be in contrast to the Greater Platform of Jaunting, a Platform of Wind Walking. Shadow Walk goes at 50mph but has an imprecise landing point, requires you to physically walk, and involves mention of the shadow plane which is full of lethal undead. Wind Walk pushes you along with a magical wind at 60mph, allows you to land precisely where you desire, and only exposes you to material plane dangers along the route you travel. Obviously there's still plenty of downside compared to the train: can't have overnight trips, check bags, do other stuff while you travel, getting stranded much more problematic, vulnerable to winds, but the upside of any-time departure and double train speed is quite useful. There is still a problem with the Gaseous Form effect allowing infiltration, producing magically airtight seals or positive pressure is even more expensive than covering everywhere with Forbiddance (which is actually a bad idea since it will kill people), but you're a highly visible white cloud that moves very slowly and has no armor. Or we could just use some custom license to alter the effect again, and just have the item not allow that (producing a Wind Walk/Gaseous Form effect that simply lacks Gaseous Form's pass through narrow openings clause).

The formula price for a Platform of Wind Walking is 33,000gp, with a range of 240 miles (in 8 hours of travel, with some to spare) for anyone who uses it. Cuts 15 or more days off a trip compared to foot travel. As a 6th level spell they also don't require a metropolis to build, same CL 11 as the Crawling/Sailing Strongholds.

For unlimited personal transport over longer distances, a combination of portals between sufficient towns and networks of Wind Walk platforms is probably most effective, though again not neccesarily the most efficient without knowing how many trains they replace. Which will never be a direct comparison anyway, since trains move people and cargo, while magic has to split the two.


Going back to city size though, here's a thought: a continuous two-way portal is essentially a tunnel straight to another point. If you link two cities with a continuous portal, you've basically combined the two into a single city. Which would let you hack your city sizes, once enough time passed for everything to mix and benefit from the increased whateverness. Also, a circle of radius 240 miles at average 75 people per square mile has a population of 13.5 million, easily enough to support one and maybe two metropolises, even though we only need one large city to produce a single Platform of Air Walk that can reach from the center to the edge in a day. A quick eyeballing of the part of the Faerun map I'm somewhat familiar with seems to suggest that it would be child's play to link the major cities via portals and WWPs if anyone actually bothered.