Resounding Voice and Bardic Music

[SLOTHRPG95]

So, I've never really read through Heroes of Battle before, but the minute I did this spell stuck out to me. At first, I thought Resounding Voice was just meant to allow troops to hear commands in the din of battle, but then why give it to Bards but not to Sor/Wiz? Then I remembered that Inspire Courage doesn't have a hard limit on AoE or number of targets, and the pieces fall into place. Throw in two levels of Seeker of Song for Combine Songs and a level of Dirgesinger (of all things), and suddenly you can be simultaneously buffing all allies and debuffing all enemies within 100 ft./CL. Sure, it's not a huge shift in either direction, but I can't think of any mass buff/debuff that targets nearly as many people. High-lactose optimization isn't really my thing, but I'm sure those more experienced could come up with some ridiculous things based on it. Playground, have at it.

[Goaty14]

Cool, but an Alphorn (Song & Silence, 3.0) already does a similar effect, only for 1d10 miles instead of 100 ft/level*. So unless the DM is particularly adverse to 3.0 material, there are better options :/ I mean, I will say though that using a Natural Horn instead grants an additional +1 to IC, and I think the 100/lvl range is enough for the DM to basically handwave it.

*In other words, you'd have to get a CL of 52 to replicate what would happen using an Alphorn 10% of the time.

[SLOTHRPG95]

Yeah, two problems with the Alphorn: DM adversity to 3.0 material that comes from a book that has a 3.5-equivalent (even if the material itself wasn't updated), and DM saying, "sure it can be heard 1d10 miles if there's no other noise, but that won't help in the middle of a pitched battle." Otherwise I'd totally just use one.