Self-expanding effects

[Uncle Pine]

Chances are most of you are acquainted with genesis. (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/spells/genesis.htm) Both of them. (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/genesis.htm)
Are there other spells, items, or effects that create something that grows at a rate of <some unit of length> per <some unit of time>? Maybe there's a spell that makes vegetation flourish in an ever-increasing area somewhere, or a creature in an obscure sourcebook can poop desecrating gallstones eventually leading to large areas infested with undeads, or maybe there's an otherwise plain water-spitting rod which you can stick into the ground to slowly build an ocean... Actually, I think I've seen that last one somewhere in the DMG. And someone already wrote down an apocaliptic scenario based on it (see #2 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=12463172&postcount=1))!

I was spitballing for a hypothetical Settling the Frontier (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SettlingTheFrontier) scenario, which led me to wonder what kind of "seeds" could someone possibly deploy to alter his or her surroundings. So, what D&D effects do you know that could with time shape a new territory if left unchecked?


Genesis
Decanter of endless water
Black sand
Self-resetting traps of any spell that creates stuff
Node Genesis
Voidstone (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?480986-The-Voidstone-Arsenal-For-when-you-really-want-stuff-gone)

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Anything that produces negative levels will wightify anything killed by said levels, and if not trapped or destroyed, said wight will continue making more wights (which will make more wights, which will make more wights, etc) in an ever-more-rapid pace until the entire infestation overruns the planet or is destroyed.

Likewise, anything that can produce a shadow will do the same, but much faster, since shadows are much, much more difficult to find, let alone destroy.

[edit] Black sand (Sandstorm) will produce more sand from the living creatures it kills.

[edit 2] A self-resetting trap of wish can produce more self-resetting wish traps, which can produce more of them ad infinitum. Just make sure they do something else as well to make them useful for something.

[Anthrowhale]

There is also Node Genesis which expands at 20 feat/year for caster level years.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Wouldn't a spell engine spell programmed to cast spell engine lead to a potentially infinite number of spell engine spells if magic is continually pumped into them?

[Telonius]

There's the classic "Plane Shift some Brown Mold to the Elemental Plane of Fire" prank. Depending on how you read the term "instantly" it will either become the Elemental Plane of Brown Mold immediately, or double in size each round.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

There's the classic "Plane Shift some Brown Mold to the Elemental Plane of Fire" prank. Depending on how you read the term "instantly" it will either become the Elemental Plane of Brown Mold immediately, or double in size each round.If it's the former, then congratulations. The multiverse requires the Plane of Fire for there to actually be fire. Replacing it with mold means that the multiverse is now composed of earth, water, air, and mold. Well done.

Ghaunadaur and Juiblex would be ecstatic.

[Uncle Pine]

Thanks all for the interesting suggestions, I've added them to the OP.


Anything that produces negative levels will wightify anything killed by said levels, and if not trapped or destroyed, said wight will continue making more wights (which will make more wights, which will make more wights, etc) in an ever-more-rapid pace until the entire infestation overruns the planet or is destroyed.

Likewise, anything that can produce a shadow will do the same, but much faster, since shadows are much, much more difficult to find, let alone destroy.
Anything living and able to reproduce will make more copies of itself if it has nourishment and is not trapped or destroyed: if the previous conditions are met, a pair of anthropomorphic rabbits will continue making more anthropomorphic rabbits in an ever-more-rapid pace until the entire infestation overruns the planet or is destroyed. However, I feel both them and more conventional undeads that make copies of themselves lack the kind of permancy vibe I'm going for.


Wouldn't a spell engine spell programmed to cast spell engine lead to a potentially infinite number of spell engine spells if magic is continually pumped into them?
I feel like I'm missing something, because I can't see anything in the spell engine spell about it being able to cast spells. :smallconfused:


There's the classic "Plane Shift some Brown Mold to the Elemental Plane of Fire" prank. Depending on how you read the term "instantly" it will either become the Elemental Plane of Brown Mold immediately, or double in size each round.

I had a couple questions stemming from this, so I went on and asked them to afroakuma himself (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22936308&postcount=561) as to not derail this thread. We'll see how that goes.

Voidstone (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?480986-The-Voidstone-Arsenal-For-when-you-really-want-stuff-gone) also came to mind. One could place a medium-sized chunk of voidstone somewhere and it'd slowly carve its way towards any living creature, carving its surroundings along the way.

[Telonius]

The thing about the "brown mold" trick is, the section of the rules where you find Brown Mold is vaguely worded. It doesn't specify if the fire that causes it to expand is extinguished or not. It doesn't say whether the brown mold is always considered one unified thing, or if each part of it has to be dealt with in pieces. (i.e. if you have a 10-mile-wide clump of Brown Mold, does a single point of Cold damage anywhere kill the whole thing, or do you have to freeze it square by square? Does lighting a match next to the 10-mile-wide clump make it a 20-mile-wide clump, or just affect the square it's next to?) And that's just stuff you'd have to deal with on the Material plane, where not everything around it is going to be on fire all the time.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Vampires are another self-replicating undead, though they do so much more slowly than shadows or wights.


Anything living and able to reproduce will make more copies of itself if it has nourishment and is not trapped or destroyed: if the previous conditions are met, a pair of anthropomorphic rabbits will continue making more anthropomorphic rabbits in an ever-more-rapid pace until the entire infestation overruns the planet or is destroyed. However, I feel both them and more conventional undeads that make copies of themselves lack the kind of permancy permanency vibe I'm going for.Except the change from living creature to virulent undead takes mere seconds, and each of the resulting monsters can make others of its kind just as fast. An entire forest of animals, unaware of the coming apocalypse and unable to defend themselves, can be wiped out in an hour or less, with potentially millions of self-replicating undead spreading to nearby communities. Meanwhile, rabbits take weeks, they only reproduce during certain times of year, and they are restrained by lots of predators with little-to-no risk to the predators themselves. Rabbits are also restrained by limited resources (food), but wights and shadows don't have that problem, and are much more difficult to kill, and they don't have dedicated predators outside of undead hunters, which are quite likely to become part of the problem after a couple of battles. Wights and shadows can reach apocalyptic proportions in mere minutes, and there's no way to kill them fast enough unless you destroy them before they can reach more than one or two victims, meaning there can't be more than a few such undead in extremely remote areas with no living creatures around and where they can't spread. And considering how easy it is to inflict negative levels on other creatures, the fact that there haven't been multiple world-ending apocalypses yet is unbelievable.


I feel like I'm missing something, because I can't see anything in the spell engine spell about it being able to cast spells. :smallconfused:Which spell is it that converts spell energy into a specific spell? I could've sworn it was spell engine, but apparently not. Wasn't there a version of spell engine that did this?

[Jormengand]

Which spell is it that converts spell energy into a specific spell? I could've sworn it was spell engine, but apparently not. Wasn't there a version of spell engine that did this?

Energy transformation field.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Energy transformation field.Ah. Thanks. Why is that not "spell engine"? Seems like the names should be swapped.

[Uncle Pine]

Unfortunately you can't link an energy transformation field to energy transformation field, as "spells that have a costly material component or an XP cost cannot be linked to a field" and ETF has both of those (5,000 gp component and 250 xp cost). Awesome spell to fit in an arcane building though, I wonder if that plus Halaster's fetch is what was used to populate that megadungeon under Waterdeep.

[Jormengand]

The notable things about energy transformation field are that 1) you can keep popping an infinite-use item like an immovable rod inside the field for a number of spell levels only limited by how many actions you're prepared to waste (or have someone else waste), 2) at least one effect, namely truenamers who are polymorphed into garblers, can produce a spell of arbitrarily-high level and 3) there's probably some way that you can get one or more ETFs to do something that is both useful and also provides them all with more charges than it costs them.

[Uncle Pine]

The notable things about energy transformation field are that 1) you can keep popping an infinite-use item like an immovable rod inside the field for a number of spell levels only limited by how many actions you're prepared to waste (or have someone else waste), 2) at least one effect, namely truenamers who are polymorphed into garblers, can produce a spell of arbitrarily-high level and 3) there's probably some way that you can get one or more ETFs to do something that is both useful and also provides them all with more charges than it costs them.

You can also just park something with an at-will spell-like ability inside one of them and get unlimited charges, similarly to the rod trick.

[unseenmage]

You can also just park something with an at-will spell-like ability inside one of them and get unlimited charges, similarly to the rod trick.

That one summon spell that conjures a celestial songbird to heal you is my go-to.


@OP, might want to add Spellscribed undead, Runic Guardians, and Spellsong Nightingales (basically creatable creatures with customizable SLAs) to the list. Especially as they can act as mobile terrain altering turrets with the right spell loadouts.
Create Water + Water to Acid being a favorite if mine.

Spellclocks are basically really expensive magic traps that can theoretically trigger every second.

Summoned creatures with wizard or cleric innate spellcasting are great too. Especially with that one summoning variant rule (in the DMG I think?) that lets you summon the same creature every time so it can learn and enact long term plans.

[mabriss lethe]

Deepspawn (Lost Empires of Faerun) can basically manufacture people/creatures. It just needs to be fed one and it can then make exact copies of that individual over and over again. Get one under your control and feed it enough different creatures and it could conceivably be a seed for an entire world, given enough time.

[ShurikVch]

There are spells which are can easy get out of hand, if there will be enough people around:
Blackfire (Spell Compendium) - necromantic fire burning the life force away, and anybody adjacent can catch it too; the fire can't be extinguished by non-magical means (except for three consecutive successful saves)
Epidemic (Masters of the Wild) - this variant of Contagion is actually... well... contagious - in 30' radius; any new infected starts spread infection too; successful save gives immunity... for 1 day
Were-doom (Book of Vile Darkness)

Also, Signs of Elder Evils are tend to spread until the whole world is affected, and, say, Zargon is just 18 HD, which is well within the power of Gate spell

[Dalmosh]

"An entire forest of animals, unaware of the coming apocalypse and unable to defend themselves, can be wiped out in an hour or less, with potentially millions of self-replicating undead spreading to nearby communities."
No, while they may well drain every animal in the forest for sustenance due to their Inescapable Cravings, the animals don't become spawn, because that only happens with humanoid targets.

Shadows could quickly kill all larger animals in an area, but probably wouldn't bother with normal invertebrates as their stats are seemingly too low to confer enough strength (It takes a whole swarm of insects just to get 1 point of strength). Basic shadows (before levelling up and evolving) don't get Lifesense, so would struggle to find most animals of size Diminuitive or smaller. At the very least you are going to produce swarms of insects this way.

Wights on the other hand wouldn't be much better than humans at killing animals, beyond not needing to sleep, and being very stealthy. They would just as likely create booms of invertebrates, rats, mice, sparrows and pigeons just like human habitat modification tends to.

Note that these two scenarios only create spawn from humanoids. That means Planetouched, Giants, yuan-ti, dragons and so forth are potential food, but not vectors. They might even benefit from this scenario depending how good their societies are at producing clerics and dread necromancers.

Another similar (but MUCH scarier) vector is Planar Binding a civilized Ekolid and sending it out on a rampage in a city on the Prime. It's progeny would rapidly turn the city into a giant resin temple to Obox-ob, and likely open permanent portals to Zionyn before spreading onwards and outwards. Unlike the above two examples, Ekolids can implant larvae into any "creature" capable of failing fortitude saves.

[Falontani]

Any energy drained creature reduced to 0 HD turns into a wight. So a squirrel hit by a wight, would indeed die of negative levels (as wights deal negative levels on every hit) and would turn into a wight the following night.



Basic shadows (before levelling up and evolving) don't get Lifesense, so would struggle to find most animals of size Diminuitive or smaller. At the very least you are going to produce swarms of insects this way.

Just want to point out, while it is true that a "basic" wight/shadow indeed does not possess Lifesense, not every single one of them are "basic". Otherwise every Dwarf Warrior in every world will have Weapon Focus: Dwarven Waraxe. Which doesn't follow. So if 10,000 bees are turned into 10,000 wights, then maybe 1 in 10,000 might have lifesense

[MaxiDuRaritry]

No, while they may well drain every animal in the forest for sustenance due to their Inescapable Cravings, the animals don't become spawn, because that only happens with humanoid targets.Except anything killed by negative levels becomes a wight, according to the rules on negative levels. The only exceptions are specifically noted in the entries for creatures and specific effects.


A character with negative levels at least equal to her current level, or drained below 1st level, is instantly slain. Depending on the creature that killed her, she may rise the next night as a monster of that kind. If not, she rises as a wight.So if a wight kills a humanoid via negative levels, it becomes a wight. If it kills any other kind of creature via negative levels, it also becomes a wight.


Wights on the other hand wouldn't be much better than humans at killing animals, beyond not needing to sleep, and being very stealthy. They would just as likely create booms of invertebrates, rats, mice, sparrows and pigeons just like human habitat modification tends to.

Note that these two scenarios only create spawn from humanoids. That means Planetouched, Giants, yuan-ti, dragons and so forth are potential food, but not vectors. They might even benefit from this scenario depending how good their societies are at producing clerics and dread necromancers.Wights create wights from their energy drain regardless of type or kind. See above for why. A wight finds a beehive? Say hello to thousands of wightbees, and goodbye all animals in the forest shortly thereafter.

[Dalmosh]

A character with negative levels at least equal to her current level, or drained below 1st level, is instantly slain. Depending on the creature that killed her, she may rise the next night as a monster of that kind. If not, she rises as a wight..
A "character". Normal beehives and squirrels are not playable. Give the writers some credit here, they do not intend you to make wight bees.

Savage species gives us a defined category of beings that "wight" can be applied to as a template for exactly this kind of scenario. This corresponds to the wight's Create Spawn ability in MM1, in that it specifically only applies to humanoids.

A Wight's Create Spawn and Energy Drain are two separate abilities that only intersect regarding humanoids.

Most undead are very restricted to certain kinds of creature, with Zombies, Skeletons, Corpse creatures and Bone Creatures being notable broader exceptions. But they don't create spawn, so that is probably intentional.

[Falontani]

A "character". Usually Normal beehives are not playable. Give the writers some credit here, they do not intend you to make wight bees.

Fixed that for you

[MaxiDuRaritry]

A "character". Normal beehives are not playable. Give the writers some credit here, they do not intend you to make wight bees.According to the glossary in the PHB: "Character: A fictional individual within the confines of a fantasy game setting. The words “character” and “creature” are often used synonymously within these rules, since almost any creature could be a character within the game, and every character is a creature (as opposed to an object)."

Bees are therefore characters, even if those characters are played by DMs instead of as PCs.


Savage species gives us a defined category of beings that "wight" can be applied to as a template for exactly this kind of scenario. This corresponds to the wight's Create Spawn ability in MM1, in that it specifically only applies to humanoids.And yet any creature can be turned into a wight, so long as they can die from negative levels.


A Wight's Create Spawn and Energy Drain are two separate abilities that only intersect regarding humanoids.And yet any character capable of dying from negative levels can become a wight, regardless.


Most undead are very restricted to certain kinds of creature, with Zombies, Skeletons, Corpse creatures and Bone Creatures being notable broader exceptions. But they don't create spawn, so that is probably intentional.Wights, however, can apparently be made from any creature that can be killed via negative levels, according to the rules on negative levels.

I also believe there's a wight template (http://www.realmshelps.net/monsters/templates/wight.shtml) out there that can be applied to bees, just so you know.

[Dalmosh]

Interesting.

Adopting that works for squirrels but not bees.

Mechanically speaking, individual bees are treated more like "objects" than "characters"
Wight Energy drain is dependent on physical attacks that the Swarm would be immune to.

A necromancer could create a wightbee swarm using area effects, but a normal wight could not.

If you wanted to rule based on the MM1 swarm fluff text that a bee is indeed a "fine" creature, then you would have to concede that the basic swarm rules assume that it is unable to affect the bees around it in any meaningful way, i.e they overpower it immediately.

Edit. This is from the Rules Compendium, which has been updated from the SRD you quote. Whether or not you put primacy on RC over SRD, I'd argue that it at least clears up the RAI on this.

Death Due to Energy Drain
A creature that has negative levels equal to its current level or
Hit Dice is instantly slain. A creature slain by energy drain
in this way might rise as an undead of the same type as the
energy draining creature. Such an occurrence is detailed in
the energy draining creature’s description. If this isn’t the
case, a creature slain by energy drain rises as
a wight (if it can).

That means that wightbees (and other vermin and animals) are entirely by DM fiat provided your table allows agreed upon Dragon Magazine content. If you are only using actual book content, then you need a creative interpretation of the rules and some weird homebrewing in order to make this work, which has indeed been addressed subsequently. I'll stick to the Savage Species template and the answer... no, only humanoids can be wights.