AlexanderRM
2019-07-26, 08:33 PM
I’ve been reading some old threads that discussed this question (example (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?406061-What-would-E6-tippyverse-look-like)), but they didn’t usually go into the amount of detail I was looking for, so I thought I’d compile some thoughts into one place and ask if anyone else had input.
For those that don’t know, Tippyverse (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy) is a fanmade setting where most of the population lives in enormous cities linked together by teleportation circles and few by resetting traps of spells like Create Food and Fabricate, which I find fascinating both for the worldbuilding and because it’s designed to actually work as a setting PCs can have adventures in. E6 (https://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?206323-E6-The-Game-Inside-D-amp-D) is a modification of 3.5 where character levels cap out at 6th level and monsters above CR 6 are quite rare. So the question I’ve been wondering about is, how much of a Tippyverse is possible in E6, and to the extent that the standard one is not, what changes result from following similar lines of reasoning?
So first off, judging from previous threads there’s no way to duplicate mass-produced Teleport Circles (except possibly Node magic from Masters of Ruin/Underdark; I don’t have the book so I don’t know how common Nodes are but you could build traps of Node Door on one and build a city around it), but it’s still possible to create auto-resetting traps of Create Food and Water and some other useful spells. Another potential feature is Roads of Longstrider, The other major setting changes I can think of are the presence of spells like Detect Evil and Discern Lies, and various less revolutionary effects of magic on warfare and fortifications; these sorts of changes are also relevant for low-magic D&D settings where infinite magic traps aren’t usable.
I’m assuming that anything which is unavailable by 6th level without cheese, like 4th level spells, either just doesn’t exist or is too rare to impact the setting at scale; I’d also assume prestige classes don’t exist since in most cases you’d be taking at most 1 level of one without cheese, but if anyone finds one with interesting abilities obtainable before 6th level feel free to share- for example, a way to get Spring Attack at level 2-3 to get 3 or 4 levels of Jaunter for teleport and Plane Shift wouldn’t revolutionize society but would be neat to see.
The rest of my thoughts got pretty long, so I'm going to divide them by spoiler tags for relative ease of reading:
Spells I found that seem potentially useful for a city or town to make traps of; all magical traps require a spellcaster of at least 3rd level with Craft Wondrous Item; market price is double the materials cost if you hire a spellcaster:
0th level (250 gp, 20 xp): Cure Minor Wounds, Create Water, Purify Food and Drink, Mending, Prestidigitation (to flavor food), Light (to mass produce light sources, but hard to distribute with a 10-minute duration)
1st level (500 gp, 40 xp): Detect Chaos/Evil/Good/Law as a trigger for some harmless effect, Endure Elements, Protection from Chaos/Evil/Good/Law for cities concerned about mental control, roads of Longstrider (1 trap per 4 miles for medium or 3 miles for small characters), or of Mount for higher speed and twice the duration
With costly material components: Bless/Curse Water (1st level, 3000 gp, 40 xp) (produces 14,400 doses/day)
2nd level (3000 gp, 240 xp): Make Whole, Lesser Restoration
3rd level (7500 gp, 600 xp): Create Food and Water, Remove Disease, Remove Curse, Remove Blindness/Deafness
Obviously the most important ones will be Create Food and Water (which can feed a theoretical maximum of 216,000 people at 15/round if operated around the clock) and Remove Disease, with Cure Minor Wounds, Create Water, and Purify Food and Drink also being important because of their low cost. If Create Food food is so tasteless only starving people will want to eat it (and possibly has an imperfect nutrient balance?), cities will probably still import supplementary food from the countryside and more importantly be reliant on raw materials and trade, so they won’t grow nearly as giant as in the Tippyverse, but with two of the biggest constraints on population growth removed the society will still be a lot more urban and a lot more populous than the average medieval world- with common enough traps you could have a setting where the biggest constraint on population growth is monster attacks, if a DM wants to swing that way, although that would drive the population even more towards cities which would be better able to defend against them.
Personally I’m picturing a setting where small cities have create food and remove disease traps, much of the population lives in large cities with multiple create food traps (vital if the city is reliant on them, in case of sabotage or accidents) and numerous more situational traps, while on the smaller end of things villages of even a few hundred will probably be able to afford at least one 0-level trap and small towns will have all three of the key ones (Cure Minor Wounds, Create Water, Purify Food and Drink). Some key questions up to the DM/worldbuilder are 1. do we go with the original idea that the average commoner earns 1 sp a day or the updated number of 1 gp a day and 2. how many years does it take for the maintenance cost of a magic trap, if any, to equal its’ construction cost. If peasants earn 1 gp per day then there’s a good chance even a community of a few dozen could eventually save up money and acquire all three if they can get a 3rd-level Cleric or Druid to build them.
A standard question in D&D is “how to we make society look exactly the same despite Detect Evil”; taking the spirit of Tippyverse gives us the question “what would some societies do, how can we still have interesting adventures in such societies, and why would some societies not do that?”.
I suspect most cities are not going to outright ban evil creatures, which make up a large minority of their population and most of whom are law-abiding when it serves their self-interest (which for 1st-level commoners in a world where authorities can haul in known evil citizens and cast Discern Lies on them, it usually is), but many places might have criminal justice systems that discriminate against evil characters, bar them from certain government positions, or even post Paladins or Detect Evil traps at the city gates and require evil visitors to attach black patches on their clothes to warn others of their alignment. This makes for an interesting twist as in addition to mustache-twirling villains, the PCs can also meet quite a few characters who are essentially normal people, love their friends and family, but face significant social stigma perhaps only because they don’t value the lives of strangers very much. A society which banishes evil characters would resemble a YA dystopia where children who have just reached adulthood are brought before the city paladins, scanned for evil, and summarily sent out the city gates into the wilderness beyond.
Requiring top government officials to ping as good on Detect Good means that Nondetection isn’t helpful, and fooling such a system requires more powerful magic difficult to acquire in E6- but not impossible for high-CR monsters or with artifacts.
Example Campaign: in the city of Chuulshire, the first Create Food trap built is activated by a Detect Good trigger. Every morning the king, high priest and head wizard must ritually collect food from the temple to distribute to their people, signifying their purity of heart and divine favor for their continued rule; for the rest of the day food is collected and distributed by novice priests and layfolk. In normal times this assures good governance of the city, but when the PCs tell the head knight of the city’s paladin order that the head wizard and high priest have been replaced by mind flayers, she doesn’t believe them: She knows her Detect Evil can be fooled and that clerics of dark gods can imitate many of the spells of good priests, but the Manna from the temple is infallible.
If alignment checks aren’t done partly by traps, then alignment detection is only based on the word of those who can cast such spells. This is a problem for small towns with only one Paladin, but larger cities with numerous casters to check each others’ alignments usually avoid this issue- usually.
Example campaign: The ruling council of Aenarhold identifies two of its’ members as having turned evil, although they flee the city before they can be arrested. They contact the PCs and claim innocence, arguing that the rest of the ruling council must have somehow been mind controlled or replaced with impersonators in just a day or two, or else had their Detect spells interfered with.
Some Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil power centers will impose restrictions on Chaotic characters anywhere in the same range as those which might be imposed on Evil characters in a good power center.
A handful of chaotic or even evil societies, styling themselves havens for outcasts, might exclude lawful or good characters on the basis of keeping them from setting up similar draconian policies there, although the majority of settlements probably hew closer to the standard D&D assumptions that simply being Evil or Chaotic is not a crime.
Mechnonomicon (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?446192-Mechonomicon) has a handy list of craftable constructs by required caster level, along with price; I haven’t read all of them but it looks like the best are useful but nowhere near cost-effective enough to displace either mobs of conscripts or 6th-level Fighters from the battlefield the way Shadesteel Golems provide all the mele in Tippyverse. Lesser Planar Ally/Binding are too high-level, so Animate Dead is probably the main way for casters to create their own mele forces, which is powerful but expected to be by standard setting assumptions.
Most battles probably hew relatively close to standard D&D assumptions described in the DMG, with large numbers of commoners, smaller numbers of elite warriors and casters and the occasional tame or allied monster having an impact but not dominating the battlefield, although even the presence of an occasional wizard throwing 6d6 fireballs will have an enormous impact on the viability of large formations. OTOH, since it is very nearly just Fireball along with Lightning Bolt and a couple others, the viability of battlefield counterspelling by a Sorceror or Warmage might increase greatly. Having more arcane spell slots than the other side could thus be a decisive factor in large battles.
Fortification design would change significantly but it’s dealing with the likes of fireball, fly, spider climb and levitate, not with teleportation circle or gate, so the basic principles are still viable; I actually didn’t see any core spells of 3rd level or lower that would be much use at opening gates or knocking down walls.
A major difference from the middle ages is traps of Create Food and Water plus Remove Disease making sieges vastly harder, and even Create Water and Purify Food and Drink would be a big advantage to defenders. Capturing a fortification would require either sabotaging the Create Food traps (destroys part of the value of the city, will be under heavy guard if they know you’re coming, plus they can be rebuilt in 15 days if they have a crafter and the materials) or an assault, which would largely rely on nonmagical siege weapons unless the attacker has artifacts or epic magic (medium magic items or 4th-level spells), so capturing cities by invasion would probably happen very rarely.
Traps of buffing spells could be stationed near city gates or guard posts to buff characters before battle, but those with durations of 1 minute/level wouldn't be too useful; the main one used would probably be Mage Armor for forces of unarmored conscripts or militia, along with Longstrider and Cure Minor wounds which are both useful during peacetime as well. Otherwise offensive traps at choke points to hit invaders would likely be more effective.
Edited to add: Thanks for all the suggestions of PRCs with access to spells at lower level than normal, but my intent was to suggest a world where while otherwise almost all cheese is allowed, an E6 universe would mostly work as if the rules had been created with only 6th level or lower characters in mind: So not only do 4th-level spells just not exist except when deities are involved, 3rd level bard spells and 2nd level Paladin or Ranger spells also don't exist, the same way no amount of optimizing will let you cast a 7th-level Bard spell in 3.5. Any monsters that have them as SLAs would lose those or have them downgraded to lower-level versions, unless they're being used to represent demigod-tier creatures like Archfiends (which could be a creature as low as CR 10 in E6- the Enworld thread on the subject, which appears to be down, suggested that something like a CR 12 Aspect of Orcus could represent actual Orcus).
Likewise most PRCs are 1-level PRCs and those that aren't normally accessible before 6th level don't exist at all, similar for feats requiring things like caster levels above 6th, and so on.
For those that don’t know, Tippyverse (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy) is a fanmade setting where most of the population lives in enormous cities linked together by teleportation circles and few by resetting traps of spells like Create Food and Fabricate, which I find fascinating both for the worldbuilding and because it’s designed to actually work as a setting PCs can have adventures in. E6 (https://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?206323-E6-The-Game-Inside-D-amp-D) is a modification of 3.5 where character levels cap out at 6th level and monsters above CR 6 are quite rare. So the question I’ve been wondering about is, how much of a Tippyverse is possible in E6, and to the extent that the standard one is not, what changes result from following similar lines of reasoning?
So first off, judging from previous threads there’s no way to duplicate mass-produced Teleport Circles (except possibly Node magic from Masters of Ruin/Underdark; I don’t have the book so I don’t know how common Nodes are but you could build traps of Node Door on one and build a city around it), but it’s still possible to create auto-resetting traps of Create Food and Water and some other useful spells. Another potential feature is Roads of Longstrider, The other major setting changes I can think of are the presence of spells like Detect Evil and Discern Lies, and various less revolutionary effects of magic on warfare and fortifications; these sorts of changes are also relevant for low-magic D&D settings where infinite magic traps aren’t usable.
I’m assuming that anything which is unavailable by 6th level without cheese, like 4th level spells, either just doesn’t exist or is too rare to impact the setting at scale; I’d also assume prestige classes don’t exist since in most cases you’d be taking at most 1 level of one without cheese, but if anyone finds one with interesting abilities obtainable before 6th level feel free to share- for example, a way to get Spring Attack at level 2-3 to get 3 or 4 levels of Jaunter for teleport and Plane Shift wouldn’t revolutionize society but would be neat to see.
The rest of my thoughts got pretty long, so I'm going to divide them by spoiler tags for relative ease of reading:
Spells I found that seem potentially useful for a city or town to make traps of; all magical traps require a spellcaster of at least 3rd level with Craft Wondrous Item; market price is double the materials cost if you hire a spellcaster:
0th level (250 gp, 20 xp): Cure Minor Wounds, Create Water, Purify Food and Drink, Mending, Prestidigitation (to flavor food), Light (to mass produce light sources, but hard to distribute with a 10-minute duration)
1st level (500 gp, 40 xp): Detect Chaos/Evil/Good/Law as a trigger for some harmless effect, Endure Elements, Protection from Chaos/Evil/Good/Law for cities concerned about mental control, roads of Longstrider (1 trap per 4 miles for medium or 3 miles for small characters), or of Mount for higher speed and twice the duration
With costly material components: Bless/Curse Water (1st level, 3000 gp, 40 xp) (produces 14,400 doses/day)
2nd level (3000 gp, 240 xp): Make Whole, Lesser Restoration
3rd level (7500 gp, 600 xp): Create Food and Water, Remove Disease, Remove Curse, Remove Blindness/Deafness
Obviously the most important ones will be Create Food and Water (which can feed a theoretical maximum of 216,000 people at 15/round if operated around the clock) and Remove Disease, with Cure Minor Wounds, Create Water, and Purify Food and Drink also being important because of their low cost. If Create Food food is so tasteless only starving people will want to eat it (and possibly has an imperfect nutrient balance?), cities will probably still import supplementary food from the countryside and more importantly be reliant on raw materials and trade, so they won’t grow nearly as giant as in the Tippyverse, but with two of the biggest constraints on population growth removed the society will still be a lot more urban and a lot more populous than the average medieval world- with common enough traps you could have a setting where the biggest constraint on population growth is monster attacks, if a DM wants to swing that way, although that would drive the population even more towards cities which would be better able to defend against them.
Personally I’m picturing a setting where small cities have create food and remove disease traps, much of the population lives in large cities with multiple create food traps (vital if the city is reliant on them, in case of sabotage or accidents) and numerous more situational traps, while on the smaller end of things villages of even a few hundred will probably be able to afford at least one 0-level trap and small towns will have all three of the key ones (Cure Minor Wounds, Create Water, Purify Food and Drink). Some key questions up to the DM/worldbuilder are 1. do we go with the original idea that the average commoner earns 1 sp a day or the updated number of 1 gp a day and 2. how many years does it take for the maintenance cost of a magic trap, if any, to equal its’ construction cost. If peasants earn 1 gp per day then there’s a good chance even a community of a few dozen could eventually save up money and acquire all three if they can get a 3rd-level Cleric or Druid to build them.
A standard question in D&D is “how to we make society look exactly the same despite Detect Evil”; taking the spirit of Tippyverse gives us the question “what would some societies do, how can we still have interesting adventures in such societies, and why would some societies not do that?”.
I suspect most cities are not going to outright ban evil creatures, which make up a large minority of their population and most of whom are law-abiding when it serves their self-interest (which for 1st-level commoners in a world where authorities can haul in known evil citizens and cast Discern Lies on them, it usually is), but many places might have criminal justice systems that discriminate against evil characters, bar them from certain government positions, or even post Paladins or Detect Evil traps at the city gates and require evil visitors to attach black patches on their clothes to warn others of their alignment. This makes for an interesting twist as in addition to mustache-twirling villains, the PCs can also meet quite a few characters who are essentially normal people, love their friends and family, but face significant social stigma perhaps only because they don’t value the lives of strangers very much. A society which banishes evil characters would resemble a YA dystopia where children who have just reached adulthood are brought before the city paladins, scanned for evil, and summarily sent out the city gates into the wilderness beyond.
Requiring top government officials to ping as good on Detect Good means that Nondetection isn’t helpful, and fooling such a system requires more powerful magic difficult to acquire in E6- but not impossible for high-CR monsters or with artifacts.
Example Campaign: in the city of Chuulshire, the first Create Food trap built is activated by a Detect Good trigger. Every morning the king, high priest and head wizard must ritually collect food from the temple to distribute to their people, signifying their purity of heart and divine favor for their continued rule; for the rest of the day food is collected and distributed by novice priests and layfolk. In normal times this assures good governance of the city, but when the PCs tell the head knight of the city’s paladin order that the head wizard and high priest have been replaced by mind flayers, she doesn’t believe them: She knows her Detect Evil can be fooled and that clerics of dark gods can imitate many of the spells of good priests, but the Manna from the temple is infallible.
If alignment checks aren’t done partly by traps, then alignment detection is only based on the word of those who can cast such spells. This is a problem for small towns with only one Paladin, but larger cities with numerous casters to check each others’ alignments usually avoid this issue- usually.
Example campaign: The ruling council of Aenarhold identifies two of its’ members as having turned evil, although they flee the city before they can be arrested. They contact the PCs and claim innocence, arguing that the rest of the ruling council must have somehow been mind controlled or replaced with impersonators in just a day or two, or else had their Detect spells interfered with.
Some Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil power centers will impose restrictions on Chaotic characters anywhere in the same range as those which might be imposed on Evil characters in a good power center.
A handful of chaotic or even evil societies, styling themselves havens for outcasts, might exclude lawful or good characters on the basis of keeping them from setting up similar draconian policies there, although the majority of settlements probably hew closer to the standard D&D assumptions that simply being Evil or Chaotic is not a crime.
Mechnonomicon (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?446192-Mechonomicon) has a handy list of craftable constructs by required caster level, along with price; I haven’t read all of them but it looks like the best are useful but nowhere near cost-effective enough to displace either mobs of conscripts or 6th-level Fighters from the battlefield the way Shadesteel Golems provide all the mele in Tippyverse. Lesser Planar Ally/Binding are too high-level, so Animate Dead is probably the main way for casters to create their own mele forces, which is powerful but expected to be by standard setting assumptions.
Most battles probably hew relatively close to standard D&D assumptions described in the DMG, with large numbers of commoners, smaller numbers of elite warriors and casters and the occasional tame or allied monster having an impact but not dominating the battlefield, although even the presence of an occasional wizard throwing 6d6 fireballs will have an enormous impact on the viability of large formations. OTOH, since it is very nearly just Fireball along with Lightning Bolt and a couple others, the viability of battlefield counterspelling by a Sorceror or Warmage might increase greatly. Having more arcane spell slots than the other side could thus be a decisive factor in large battles.
Fortification design would change significantly but it’s dealing with the likes of fireball, fly, spider climb and levitate, not with teleportation circle or gate, so the basic principles are still viable; I actually didn’t see any core spells of 3rd level or lower that would be much use at opening gates or knocking down walls.
A major difference from the middle ages is traps of Create Food and Water plus Remove Disease making sieges vastly harder, and even Create Water and Purify Food and Drink would be a big advantage to defenders. Capturing a fortification would require either sabotaging the Create Food traps (destroys part of the value of the city, will be under heavy guard if they know you’re coming, plus they can be rebuilt in 15 days if they have a crafter and the materials) or an assault, which would largely rely on nonmagical siege weapons unless the attacker has artifacts or epic magic (medium magic items or 4th-level spells), so capturing cities by invasion would probably happen very rarely.
Traps of buffing spells could be stationed near city gates or guard posts to buff characters before battle, but those with durations of 1 minute/level wouldn't be too useful; the main one used would probably be Mage Armor for forces of unarmored conscripts or militia, along with Longstrider and Cure Minor wounds which are both useful during peacetime as well. Otherwise offensive traps at choke points to hit invaders would likely be more effective.
Edited to add: Thanks for all the suggestions of PRCs with access to spells at lower level than normal, but my intent was to suggest a world where while otherwise almost all cheese is allowed, an E6 universe would mostly work as if the rules had been created with only 6th level or lower characters in mind: So not only do 4th-level spells just not exist except when deities are involved, 3rd level bard spells and 2nd level Paladin or Ranger spells also don't exist, the same way no amount of optimizing will let you cast a 7th-level Bard spell in 3.5. Any monsters that have them as SLAs would lose those or have them downgraded to lower-level versions, unless they're being used to represent demigod-tier creatures like Archfiends (which could be a creature as low as CR 10 in E6- the Enworld thread on the subject, which appears to be down, suggested that something like a CR 12 Aspect of Orcus could represent actual Orcus).
Likewise most PRCs are 1-level PRCs and those that aren't normally accessible before 6th level don't exist at all, similar for feats requiring things like caster levels above 6th, and so on.