Which spells/abilities solve common medieval problems

[frogglesmash]

I want to make a small compilation of spells, powers, and abilities that completely negate quintessentially medieval problems if they are readily available. My main concern is with lower level effects as they are by their bet nature, easier to write than higher level effects.

Some examples would be effects that cure diseases, create food\water, create permanent resources, or provide ready, instantaneous transportation.

Note: I'm aware that there are several very obvious candidates, but I am currently on my phone, so I will be listing them later.

[Godskook]

Basically all spells solve "medieval problems" depending on how you define "problem". Do damage spells count cause they solve a uniquely medieval problem(bypassing fortifications)? Do spells like Zone of Truth count, even though the spell's unique solutions are something we need as much today as ever? What about Create Food and Water? That spell was relevant since the dawn of time until the industrial revolution, but not really anymore. Does that one count?

[Zanos]

I think we should also define scale. Create Food and Water solves a local problem; my buddies and I need food. It does not solve the problem of starving villages unless you have a pretty decent number of decently leveled clerics around dedicated to that, you'd need roughly 1 5th level cleric per 30 people, and people will go without food and water if that cleric needs to use those 3rd level slots for something else or moves.

[Gildedragon]

Prestidigitation:
No more making sure the fire doesn't go out
Quick sewing of clothes
Spices in a spell
Cleaning clothes and self becomes a breeze, regardless of weather

Mending
Fix all manner of mundane items

[Mauvar]

Prestidigitation could be made to create pumps, water systems, even basic electricity. There's not much a perpetual motion machine that generated excess energy couldn't ultimately accomplish. For
the stronger task, use a heavy duty Greased Telekinisis engine .

Now that we have sewage and water system, may as well have purify food and water on every faucet and toilet (press quench to flush).

Hello animate object...plough that field. Watch out for those pesky "Objects have rights too!" protesters.

Polymorph any object to remove any semblance of food scarcity. Hello mouse...you're steak.

Replace sweat shops with items of fabricate, minor creation and major creation (I see you have a replicated dress, hand crafted Wizards robes are where fashions at...).

Silent image, minor image or major image movie theaters (or those risque peep shows...also useful entertainment when stranded overnight in a rope trick). You may also need to create an item of locate object...so you can find the remote to turn down the volume.

Silent image could also be used to create an ebook device. Load an Ipad with silent image...and keep your spellbook there. Don't study too long or the screensaver will start...

House Keys of knock and arcane lock.

Geas, get those rebellious kids to do their homework.

Hallucinatory terrain/Mirage Arcana: Have the garden you always wanted without the maintenance.

A compass of know direction and sails of gust of wind for the traditional traveler who wants to rough it without teleport.
Ovens of heat metal...or when you are too lazy use the microwave of create food/water.

Mosquito spray of repel vermin for your medieval picnics.

Politically correct jousting matches, where illusions joust and no one gets hurt.

[Yahzi]

Note: I'm aware that there are several very obvious candidates, but I am currently on my phone, so I will be listing them later.
The one everybody misses is Cure Minor Wounds. It's not the 1 pt of healing that matters; it's the automatic stabilization. This means no one bleeds out anymore. Which basically means women don't die in childbirth anymore. Which is huge.

The second effect is Remove Disease. Even at only once per day, it dramatically changes the death rate (after all, they still have regular medicine too).

These have huge effects on population growth. Which is good, because all those monsters that subsist off of people as a main diet need more population growth! :smallbiggrin:

The next big one is Zone of Truth. Medieval justice was pretty rough without forensics or cameras or any of the modern tools we have for getting at the truth. ZoT, on the other hand, is 100 times better than all of our tools.

By contrast, things like "Plant Growth" just act like modern fertilizer. Meh.

(You might be interested in my worldbook on DriveThruRPG.)

[weckar]

Purify Food & Drink is a quite decent one. Who needs medicine if you won't get ill from what you eat all the time?

[Yahzi]

Purify Food & Drink is a quite decent one. Who needs medicine if you won't get ill from what you eat all the time?There are other vectors for disease. :smallbiggrin:

Food poisoning wasn't that big of a deal back then. Getting food in the first place, now that was a challenge.

[logic_error]

Making magic items and ivent non-magical machines. Gnomes are good at it. You have to be an artificer that makes crazy machines which make the job of rural populous easier. As an alchemist invent fertilisers and pesticides. Make robots (read homunculi/constructs) and keep them on guard/ farming duty, getting water, cleaning the place up. There you solved 99% of all the causes of real problems such as famine, disease etc. You will then only need to make rounds and cast make whole / mend on stuff that broke down. Economy broken. Become patron saint of prosperity. Maybe, even the god of it if enough people realise what you did for them.

This is also how we solved the problem in our real life. Fertilizers + medicine + cleanliness + machines = Biggest life savers there are.

EDIT: If you can invent a level 1 spell-like item for the unseen servant, then he will farm the place and clean it up all the effing time, no energy costs. Just appoint proper supervisors.

[noob]

If you want to feed an entire village planar bind one of those creature that have create food at will.(they feed like 12 persons per casting and cast 14400 times per day totaling 172800 fed persons)

[Khedrac]

There are other vectors for disease. :smallbiggrin:

Food poisoning wasn't that big of a deal back then. Getting food in the first place, now that was a challenge.

Food poisoning perhaps, but the number of waterborne diseases that one has to be careful of even today is staggering. Perhaps most won't kill you, but just depressing your immune system can lead to something else killing you.
Don't forget, a lot of these won't just be cast on/for the people, but on the livestock.

It also can make water that is obviously completely undrinkable into drinkable water, which has got to be useful generally.

[weckar]

There are other vectors for disease. :smallbiggrin:

Food poisoning wasn't that big of a deal back then. Getting food in the first place, now that was a challenge.I wasn't thinking contamination, i was thinking spoilage.

[noce]

You could provide them with food, remove diseases and the like, but you would only solve problems locally.

There's a big difference between real world middle age and d&d medieval setting: commoners can read and write.
In 1970, 35% of world population was illiterate, while in 2015 still 15% of humans were illiterate.
Now imagine what a fully literate population can do (except those barbarians that refuse to spend two skill points).

Given this, I'd vote for Amanuensis, very readily available being it a cantrip.
Just "print" as many books as you can, make those commoners read, and in a couple years they'll start Industrial Revolution on their own.

[Zanos]

If you want to feed an entire village planar bind one of those creature that have create food at will.(they feed like 12 persons per casting and cast 14400 times per day totaling 172800 fed persons)
It has a 10 minute casting time.

[noob]

It has a 10 minute casting time.
I guess it means that it feeds 100 time less people.
It is immediately a lot less good.

[Tohsaka Rin]

One wondrous item of create water at will per town. Total cost? 1k gold.

Cheaper, if you've invested in crafting-cost reduction feats.

I mean, if we're making a list.

There's also stuff like the Stove of Everlasting Flame (A&EG)

Everlasting Rations (HoB)

Even a small town can accrue enough gold over a couple of years to acquire/craft items that produce food/water daily. Eventually that stuff begins paying for itself. At that point, you're using it to sell food/water to nearby, smaller towns that don't have easy access to such things, and even if you're charging under cost, you're still coming out ahead, because once paid for the items, everything after is gravy.

Really, access to any magic item crafting, and even a small bit of capital, and you've got the ability to print money, given enough time.

[Telonius]

Cloudkill does a pretty good job of taking care of invasions and raids.

Owl's Wisdom/Fox's Cunning can help out with the, "Our king is a moron" problem that cropped up fairly often.

Amanuensis could really help out with the spread of literacy. Also cuts down on carpal tunnel syndrome in (small-m) monks.

[Zanos]

Custom magic items are at DM discretion, so they don't solve problems unless the DM wants them to.

Trail rations cost 5sp per day, so everlasting rations only break even after 700 days, almost 2 years. Most peasants aren't going to be able to front 350 gold, even if they pool their wealth. That's also the same cost as "good" meals, in reality peasants are probably eating Common(3sp) or Poor(1sp) meals, which would mean they'd have to front the cost of 3.2 years of food or 9.6 years of food.

Everlasting rations only solve anything if you forget these people operate under the same restriction as the reason that real world people don't invest into a lot of long term items; they don't have any significant capital. And if they can manage this, well suddenly you have a poorly defended area that has goods of an immediate value of 350 gold per person, which is basically a fortune.

[Tohsaka Rin]

Custom magic items are at DM discretion, so they don't solve problems unless the DM wants them to.

Trail rations cost 5sp per day, so everlasting rations only break even after 700 days, almost 2 years. Most peasants aren't going to be able to front 350 gold, even if they pool their wealth. That's also the same cost as "good" meals, in reality peasants are probably eating Common(3sp) or Poor(1sp) meals, which would mean they'd have to front the cost of 3.2 years of food or 9.6 years of food.

This is a very good point. It distinctly depends on what length of time we're talking about here. Average human? Or an Elan/Elf/any other long-lived race.

...I can see this being a fun side-game. Sort of Harvest Moon-ing (that came out wrongish) up a town over the decades from a thorp to a large city...

[Gildedragon]

Cloudkill does a pretty good job of taking care of invasions and raids. and pests in crops. Cloudkill doesn't target plants.


Amanuensis could really help out with the spread of literacy. Also cuts down on carpal tunnel syndrome in (small-m) monks.
they still have to paint the fiddly little images and learning aids. Amanuesis is more powerful in making town records more secure. Things like town council minutes to birth, marriage, and death certificates can now be kept in triplicate with ease; everyone can have a copy of their own family records, as well as keeping one at the local parish, and at the local government building.

[noce]

Amanuensis could really help out with the spread of literacy.

As I said in my post, commoners are already literate. Every commoner is.

[Telonius]

As I said in my post, commoners are already literate. Every commoner is.

D&D commoners, sure. Medieval commoners, not so much.

[Sagetim]

With just create water (or a decanter of endless water, whatever floats your boat) and engineering you could solve a lot of problems ranging from power (by using falling water to spin a wheel), clean water supply (by putting that falling water through pipes to supply people), to sewage (by having the waste water pipe also carry away sewage). Now, one of the important things you don't want to do is destroy sewage outright. Human and Animal waste are part of the whole natural recycling of nutrients and energy going on. So if you start eradicating all the waste coming out of people, then you're removing that from the equation, which could be potentially bad for soil fertility down the line.


Now, if you want to be a crazy person about it, get some druids for heat metal and try to get some large widgets enchanted to heat up consistently. Then set those at the bottom of a large pit that you're pouring a steady supply of water into from create water/a decanter of such. Use the evaporating water to power a steam engine and you have yourself an electric generator that doesn't require fuel to function. If nothing else, it would be handy for artistically electro-plating some armor, or running a current through some 'divine artifacts' to get the locals to 'feel the power of god' and worship whatever you're trying to sell them on.

That's all within the bounds of a level 3 druid, or the services thereof.

Oh, then there's ray of frost. Arguably, you can aim that sucker at water to make ice cubes (you may need a tray to get cube shaped ice, or to use wooden tumblers). Between commanding heat and cool, you can solve a lot of problems (like not dying because it's cold outside and avoiding heat stroke). Furthermore, with a large scale enough operation you can possibly affect weather patterns by injecting huge loads of steam into the air. Now, that's probably not going to HELP anyone, but changing the weather by creating an artificial warm front is pretty cool to me.

And while Create Food and Water technically feeds a sum of people, Goodberry might get you more mileage, especially because goodberries probably don't need to be reflavored. Best part is you can use the spell on poisonous berries to make inedible things edible. As a first level spell, it's somewhat more spammable than Create Food and Water, and would be much cheaper to implement as a magic item. Bear in mind, the important part bout feeding people with magic instead of the food they harvest, is that the food they harvest can be potentially preserved and sold instead.

Animate Dead can provide more than just undead combat minions, you can deploy them to the fields weeding and plowing. They might be unintelligent, but they can follow orders. So as long as the caster who raised them is willing to oversee the project, you can have tireless skeletons doing much of the backbreaking labor of farming. Extra points if you've established a god of the harvest that utilizes dead believer's bodies in this manner while their souls pass on to an afterlife of pleasant rest. This nets you clerics that have a reason to have profession (farming) to be the overseers at these farms, and since they don't need to cast animate dead every day, they can supplement the food income with create food and water for the regulars in the community (or the wayward murder hobo's that pass through town).

[Fouredged Sword]

There is a locker in Stormrack that I'm pretty sure does better on a cost per person food basis, and it can be a secondary food source. Go for quarter rations and one of those can support I think around 100 people. Supplement with a little farming and hunting and you are pretty much famine proof. It can't do everything itself, but you can stretch the food you DO grow for a VERY long time. Half rations and quarter rations for pure survival. You can go three days without food before you need to start making constitution checks. That means a food item can support 4x the listed people in a survival situation. Everyone eats on a 4 day rotation and starves the rest of the time. Not fun, but you survive. You can go even further if you have some healing to pass around.

And that's not counting for something as simple as a person who can reliably make DC 15 survival checks and/or plants winter berries and has an item of goodberry. It feeds 1d4+1 people per use and you can use it as frequently as you like. You just need to plant some berries that you know will freeze onto the bush and can be picked latter. Winter grapes or blueberries would work, and there are several varieties of berry that are harvest-able in the winter without human intervention.

[Venger]

I think we should also define scale. Create Food and Water solves a local problem; my buddies and I need food. It does not solve the problem of starving villages unless you have a pretty decent number of decently leveled clerics around dedicated to that, you'd need roughly 1 5th level cleric per 30 people, and people will go without food and water if that cleric needs to use those 3rd level slots for something else or moves.

build a trap.

[Zanos]

build a trap.
Much like the rules for crafting custom magic items, those are entirely subject to the whims of the universe.

And of course, magical traps worth several thousand gold are still very tempting targets for the more heavily armed.

[Nightcanon]

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned how much difference magical lighting (domestic and street) would make...

[Gildedragon]

I was gonna suggest Zone of Truth. But in all,fairness the miscarriages of law were A) more towards the Renaissance and B) mostly mob mentalities and scapegoating: the spell wouldn't have prevented that.

[Sagetim]

Much like the rules for crafting custom magic items, those are entirely subject to the whims of the universe.

And of course, magical traps worth several thousand gold are still very tempting targets for the more heavily armed.

And that's assuming that yo don't have to put money down for researching a new magical item (which may not be explicit in the rules, but it's not that hard a jump to make from the rules to research new spells that wizards use). So, not just a few thousand gold for the item, but as a research material for anyone wanting to replicate the effect, it may be worth far more.

But that would be wandering off topic. Doesn't goodberry do a lot more than 1d4+1 goodberries per casting? I thought it was 2d4 or something in 3.5. I've been abusing it the most in 5e games, where it's like, 10 berries with no material components, you just magic them up out of nothing. So my memory of it in previous editions is a little eroded by memories of feeding the party and tossing the extra's out, then winding up with some really fat squirrels following the party...then making plans to market goodberry fed cows as a specialty meat product. And, you know, Goodberry milk and Goodberry cheese along the way. In fact, that may be one of the more stretchable uses of Goodberry- use it to feed big livestock. If each berry supports a cow for a few months until it's grown, those cows can be slaughtered for more meat to feed people with than the goodberries would have covered. In addition to providing a variety of products like milk, butter, and cheese up until you slaughter them.

Oh, and if you've got mid level spells, Wall of Stone, Stone Shape, and Fabricate can be handy for generating stone that you can form into bricks that people can then build with. Having fire proof houses is kind of it's own reward.

[Frosty]

Just google tippyverse. You'll get your answers, OP.

[Khedrac]

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned how much difference magical lighting (domestic and street) would make...

Domestic - perhaps quite a bit, especially for travelers not in a town and for villages.

Street lighting? - well it will put out of work the people who carried lamps/torches to light people's route home after dark, it won't actually change much else (depress the price of fuel?)

[Sagetim]

Domestic - perhaps quite a bit, especially for travelers not in a town and for villages.

Street lighting? - well it will put out of work the people who carried lamps/torches to light people's route home after dark, it won't actually change much else (depress the price of fuel?)

Proper street lighting tanks the crime rate in areas where it is implemented. It's Much harder to get away with anything when the only shadows available to hide in are in a handful of alleyways instead of all over the damn place. This would be especially effective if you could channel the light from a single immovably large source underground into basically empty lamp posts using mirrors, which wold be much easier and cheaper to replace than, say, having a bunch of continual flamed individual items (one for each lamp post).

Consistent good lighting (especially if you don't have to pay for it) also encourages people to extend their legitimate business hours beyond sundown, allowing for longer and more varied business hours that would promote a more resilient economy in which an individual can not only work their day but still have time afterwards to do things like pick up fresh food on the way home and cook for themselves.

It's not Just 'oh, well, now some shady individuals can't nearly blackmail people into paying for lighting to get home safely' there's a dominoing effect that lighting provides.


As for Goodberry: oh, well, I suppose it's not going to be nearly as effective if you have to drop 3 berries per cow per meal instead of per day or 1 per day. Especially when the spell gives you between 2 and 8 berries per casting, you just aren't getting enough food per casting to warrant the spell expenditure. It works better in 5e, being that the berries feed for a whole day and you get a consistent 10 per casting.

[Thunder999]

You could light up the alleys too, after all summon monster for lantern archons means it's practically free (you'd have to pay for the casting of summon monster at most), no reason not to cast it everywhere.

[Tohsaka Rin]

You could light up the alleys too, after all summon monster for lantern archons means it's practically free (you'd have to pay for the casting of summon monster at most), no reason not to cast it everywhere.

I'll do you one step better, Lantern Archon city watch.