Undead as Clean Energy

[Rater202]

A thought that popped into my head.

Assume a setting where Animate Dead produces true automatons(the soul is not affected and no spirits are forced into the corpse) and chunks of Onyx valued at 25 GP are relatively easy to get(Assume that, whatever means they're created or obtained, that it's as simple as finding a distributor and paying the appropriate amount.)

Assume an industrialized setting, up to the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution, with trade done between city-states. to exchange produced goods as needed/wanted.

One City-State, a Necropolis, uses Animated skeletons to produce electricity via turning turbines and as well as for doing all the ominous, automatable tasks that would have been done by wage-slaves(or actual slaves, in some cases) during the real Industrial Revolutions. The Necropolis prides itself, claiming that this (perhaps ironically) more ethical than burning smog-producing coal or exploiting the poor and needy

Assuming that only the upper crust are undead with the majority of the population being mortal with mortal needs, and that the skeletons are made from level 1 commoners, how big can the necropolis be before "skeleton powered" industry ceases to be cost-effective? What's the maximum size the city can be in terms of population while allowing everyone to benefit from genuine prosperity?

Assuming 3.5 rules, anything officially published goes for maximizing Undead efficiency(Dread Nec and/or Corpse crafter feets to maximize the number of undead per Necromacny, for example) and typical D&d economy rules and prices.

Alignment restrictions on classes, feets, and spells, at least in regard to Mindless undead, are off.

[NotASpiderSwarm]

Two things: First, you're not using human skeletons. Humans are slow-breeding, slow-moving by D&D terms, with terrible stats. Dogs may be 2 hd, but they're an order of magnitude better, and that's just dogs. There's plenty of non-human options that don't involve waiting for people to breed and die.

Second, the problem is that nothing you've mentioned is really relevant. Yes, undead horses pulling trains can transport supplies to sustain an actual metropolis, or provide easy public transit, but the bottleneck for a city is how many people the farmland around it and the water supply can support. Now, those farms will be far more efficient than normal, thanks to undead pulling plows eternally or building aquifers, but if there's farmland for 1,000 people, then the population is 1,000, it's just that there's fewer farmers now and more people running undead-powered onyx mines(and a far better quality of life). If you're talking about shipping food in from the neighbors, then it comes down to how much farmland the neighbors have. Sure, the neighbors want the goods supplied by Necrotopia, but if they can support 1,000 people each, and 90% of that is farmers or people involved in supporting the farms, then they can only add 100 people to Necrotopia under the best circumstances(and it will probably be fewer). No matter how many wonderful things the undead build, they still can only send you food for 100 people.

Short answer: Build a Create Food trap first, THEN use undead to break the economy. Once food is solved, you can build fantasy New York basically incidentally.

[Emperor Tippy]

Is there anything that lets you command corporeal undead raised from corpses without limit?

Because otherwise you run into the limit on how many undead a given individual can keep under control.

[FauxKnee]

Is there anything that lets you command corporeal undead raised from corpses without limit?

Because otherwise you run into the limit on how many undead a given individual can keep under control.

The spell animate dread warrior (unapproachable east) is not subject to the standard control limits, as far as I can tell.

[WhamBamSam]

Is there anything that lets you command corporeal undead raised from corpses without limit?

Because otherwise you run into the limit on how many undead a given individual can keep under control.If they're just turning turbines or the like, there's no real need to actively control them. Just chain them up appropriately and have a living creature sitting a bit out of reach or something to incentivize them to move.

[Silva Stormrage]

Is there anything that lets you command corporeal undead raised from corpses without limit?

Because otherwise you run into the limit on how many undead a given individual can keep under control.

Palemaster lets you animate infinite undead with its capstone ability but that's less than useful since it is only 1/day.

[Segev]

Is there anything that lets you command corporeal undead raised from corpses without limit?

Because otherwise you run into the limit on how many undead a given individual can keep under control.

Provided they're unintelligent undead, command undead and (better still) extend chain command undead can greatly magnify your control rating. Though getting the most efficient corpses for energy-generation becomes your goal, at that point, since this won't care about HD, only number of undead.

Making a command undead at-will item is only 10,800 gp, too, market value. That's usable by anybody, and every six seconds, gives you 3 days of control over another undead.

If you're willing to have somebody whose job is just to use the item for eight hours (being on site for 9ish, with breaks for lunch and bathroom not counting against the 8 hours), he could bring 8*60*10 = 2400 undead under his control in that time. Pay him an extra 10 minutes' wage to give the order to "obey the foreman" or whatever, in whatever detail is needed to hand them off, and you're good. Really boring job, but one guy could keep 7200 undead controlled that way, if it was perfectly efficient. Cut it down to 7000 to allow for some imprecision in how fast and efficiently he uses the item, or rotating them in front of him to re-up control.

There are various ways to improve efficiency, but this is just a bit of white-room numbers for the mind-numbing job of being the undead control processor.

[Karl Aegis]

It costs less money to pay untrained hirelings than it is to pay a spellcaster to cast a 3rd level spell with a 25 gold component. You pay the cost of the undead up front. It's more economical to use untrained hirelings than it is use skeletons for projects lasting less than ~4.8 years if your hirelings work 365 days a year.

[Fizban]

Assume an industrialized setting, up to the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution, with trade done between city-states. to exchange produced goods as needed/wanted.
Undead lose to fire elementals in boxes. Maybe you could build a super efficient mechanical turbine, which with significantly more advanced battery and electric engine tech, could compete, though they'll need still other tech advancements to replace all the other things that use fire with electrically generated heat (can't smith iron with a space heater). But if the setting's tech is Industrial Revolution, with the undead lords specifically mocking coal? Fire elemental in a box is all the power of coal with zero fuel cost, zero emissions, and nearly zero effort converting the existing machines to use it.

If you think the populace can actually be convinced that self-propagating fire has feelings and deserves rights, then you use permanent Wall of Fire instead. It's no good for mobile platforms, but neither are undead. Say you've got herds of elephants you can easily animate and Command Undead into pulling freight. Calculate their carrying capacity, and then look up how much a freight train can pull. It's a nice to have, and basic earth-moving just got a lot easier, but coal still beats it. And portals beat both.

Need ethical mindless labor for dangerous detail work? Apply custom magic item rulings of choice to Unseen Servant (or Eternal Wands/Drow House Insignia). They have more mind than skeletons anyway.

Assuming that only the upper crust are undead with the majority of the population being mortal with mortal needs, and that the skeletons are made from level 1 commoners, how big can the necropolis be before "skeleton powered" industry ceases to be cost-effective? What's the maximum size the city can be in terms of population while allowing everyone to benefit from genuine prosperity?

Assuming 3.5 rules, anything officially published goes for maximizing Undead efficiency(Dread Nec and/or Corpse crafter feets to maximize the number of undead per Necromacny, for example) and typical D&d economy rules and prices.

Undead don't break down, the only attrition is whatever amount you decide on, and as long as death is higher than undead attrition the labor pool is infinite over time.

Unless you're looking for available control pool vs DMG city generation ("efficiency" sounds like you are), in which case I can link this (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?537020-Use-of-Undead-A-Tangent&p=22522865&viewfull=1#post22522865) thread, where someone actually did the math (linked at that particular post. Warning: some trailing alignment and headbutting right after). Comes out to like 20-25% of the living population in undead control with every eligible spellcaster, with another 60% if you include every Expert UMD'ing wands. The first figure was reached after the target of 25% was called by considering Roman slave populations by another poster, though I later realized that since undead don't need to eat, they actually count for far more: those 25% slaves still need to eat, and things that eat are only worth 10% of their labor (as 90% of pre-industrial labor is food production). So the roman slaves are effectively worth 2.5%, and that is the point at which massed undead start to look pretty dang appealing.

But their raw energy output is still woefully low. Calculating it in useful work done is also a major pain, as every transition has to have more made up numbers applied: you can stick a fire elemental in a steam engine and make direct comparisons there, but for manual generation you have to use the encumbrance and speed to calculate work done, then figure out the efficiency of the hamster wheel, then the efficiency of the storage, then the efficiency of the device using the stored power. No thank you.

[AvatarVecna]

Is there anything that lets you command corporeal undead raised from corpses without limit?

Because otherwise you run into the limit on how many undead a given individual can keep under control.


Curse of the Revenancer (Su): Any creature slain by a yathrinshee of 5th level or higher rises immediately as a zombie under her control.

This potentially comes online at 9th lvl if you can cheese the spellcasting prereqs, or 13th if you can't. Although given that drow (particularly those worshipping Kiaransalee) aren't exactly team players, might be better to steal this ability from them in some fashion.

EDIT: Incidentally this also saves tons on time, spellcasting slots, and money for getting your undead capitalist empire up and running.

[Necroticplague]

Assuming that only the upper crust are undead with the majority of the population being mortal with mortal needs, and that the skeletons are made from level 1 commoners, how big can the necropolis be before "skeleton powered" industry ceases to be cost-effective? What's the maximum size the city can be in terms of population while allowing everyone to benefit from genuine prosperity?

Not particularly large. A problem with these kinds of necropolis's is that Undead invariably taint the area around them. As per BoVD, simply accepting the higher-ups hanging around qualifies it for a A Lasting Evil, which would definitely render the area unpleasant for those actually living there, and might run into problems with feeding them (as a potential Lasting Evil effect would ruin their ability to grow crops in-town, requiring food imports).

As per the mechanics of helping this thing be more effective, taking advantage of Haunting Prescences (through the Haunt Shift spell) can let you create machines that can operate their own parts, so you can design them more like modern machines without needing spaces for a physical operator. So instead of skeletons standing their walking on a turnstile, they just appear to turn themselves to mundane senses.

[Rater202]

Two things: First, you're not using human skeletons. Humans are slow-breeding, slow-moving by D&D terms, with terrible stats. Dogs may be 2 hd, but they're an order of magnitude better, and that's just dogs. There's plenty of non-human options that don't involve waiting for people to breed and die.It's not exactly sporting to ignore one of the assumptions for the question.

Dogs might be more efficient that humans... But don't have fingers. They can't be made to do most of the simple tasks on, say, an assembly line. So all of those jobs would need to be done by mortals who can't work round the clock and would presumably want to be payed. If the goal is a prosperous population, they're going to want to be paid a lot.


It costs less money to pay untrained hirelings than it is to pay a spellcaster to cast a 3rd level spell with a 25 gold component. You pay the cost of the undead up front. It's more economical to use untrained hirelings than it is use skeletons for projects lasting less than ~4.8 years if your hirelings work 365 days a year.

Again, hirelings would presumably want to be paid regularly and can't work constantly. They'd need to stop to eat sleep and stop to eat and presumably would want to go home. Assuming that the factory/power plant is run by the Necromancers it's more cost-effective to just pay the 25 GP once for a single worker that doesn't need to eat and can just be ordered to keep walking forward to generate power or whatever.

[Aotrs Commander]

It costs less money to pay untrained hirelings than it is to pay a spellcaster to cast a 3rd level spell with a 25 gold component. You pay the cost of the undead up front. It's more economical to use untrained hirelings than it is use skeletons for projects lasting less than ~4.8 years if your hirelings work 365 days a year.

I don't think your maths is right. An untrained hireling is 1 sp per day (I think you used per week), so it's only 250 days before you've paid the 25 gold (250/3 => 84 days if you account for 24 hour working, since the working day is assumed to be 8 hours). Scaled directly by undead HD; if you're using zombies (though why would you?), it'd be 167 days before a human zombie paid for itself in unskilled labour.



However, the major problem with this is the sharp limitations on what you can do with animated Undead (as intelligent Undead are either spirit-bound with the soul of the original creature in it, or you've cast Awaken Undead and made a new person). So you can do significantly less with an animated skeleton than you can with an unskilled labourer - further, any PROBLEMS wil be much larger, since animated Undead are by definition incapable of independant thought. So if your skeleton diggers run into a big rock, they won't remove unless you're directing them. Whih means they all have to be surpervised at all times.

So no, you can't use skeletons to farm (I mean, that's literally a skilled profession,a nd trust me, I'm a forme gardener.) You can maybe just about scarpe by with cleaning and very careful instructions.

Even having them sitting on an exercise bike or something to generate electiricy isn't going to get you a lot of power, in truth. 150 watts (maximum, and more likely to be the average of 100 watts) per hour isn't a huge amount. So. 2400 watts per day (assuming 24 hour operation - in reality of course, you also need to factor in maintenance time for the machinery. So no, you CAN'T just set them running and leave the doing that forever, because you need to get them to stop to replace parts. It's never that simple).

Okay, so after trying to find some applicable statistcs that fit best (a lot of the electiciry output/usage figures don't tell you over what time) but I found something that says an average American home uses 7200 KILOwatts per year. 7200000 watts in a year or 19726 watts per day. So for every house, you need EIGHT skeletons running constantly. (More like nine or ten, because of maintenance downtime, because while your skeletons won't wear out, your machinery WILL.) And that's just for your one house.

There is a reason why electric bike power isn't particularly a thing, other than for taking a bit of the edge off.

Very real possibility that, bugger the up-front labour cost savings, it's very likely just more efficient and cost-effective to generate electricity by other means.

And beyond that, there's not much you can do with an animated skeleton that doesn't requrie a lot of controller micro-management. (Unless you develop WAY more advanced forms of animate spells which fundementally have a better set of "programming" (which the Aotrs do have), but even then, it's not much different to a slightly different nonsapient robot.

[Nifft]

I don't think your maths is right. An untrained hireling is 1 sp per day (I think you used per week), so it's only 250 days before you've paid the 25 gold (250/3 => 84 days if you account for 24 hour working, since the working day is assumed to be 8 hours).

You still need to pay the spellcaster for the service of casting the spell.

This is important, because the spellcaster is in full control of these undead "workers", so if you fail to pay the spellcaster you might expect something less pleasant than a mere walk-out.

[Aotrs Commander]

You still need to pay the spellcaster for the service of casting the spell.

This is important, because the spellcaster is in full control of these undead "workers", so if you fail to pay the spellcaster you might expect something less pleasant than a mere walk-out.

I was assuming that the spellcaster was casting the spell himself (professional hazard, you sometimes forgot other people can't do it1). Okay, so assuming you always use a 5th level cleric, thats 150+25gp per skeleton, which is 1750 sp per skelton... Nope, okay, Karl Aegis was right, co-incidently, that does actually come out to about the 4.8 year margin, thought again, it's actually 1.6 years before it's paid for itself by dint of 24-hour work shifts.




1'Course, Aotrs animate spells aren't D&D, and don't have an arbitatary "I don't want the PCs to have an unlimited ability to raise skeletons" money limitation.

Notably, the Aotrs does not use animated undead for power generation. Heck, we really only use animated dead for cleaning job when someone as skill as Lord Death Despoil explictls spirit-binds someone's soul helplessly into an animated body so they can be fully aware of themselves spending the rest of eternity doing menial work in the very depths of the Citidel for punishment.

[Segev]

Okay, so after trying to find some applicable statistcs that fit best (a lot of the electiciry output/usage figures don't tell you over what time) but I found something that says an average American home uses 7200 KILOwatts per year. 7200000 watts in a year or 19726 watts per day. So for every house, you need EIGHT skeletons running constantly. (More like nine or ten, because of maintenance downtime, because while your skeletons won't wear out, your machinery WILL.) And that's just for your one house.

8 1-HD skeletons is only 200 gp worth. The equipment they're biking on probably costs more. And it's only the machinery that needs redundancy, so you only need 8 skeletons. But, just to be save, let's go with 10; that's 250 gp of black onyx to make them.

Stick them in a small basement or side room; we're building a house for at least moderate wealth, if they can afford hundreds of gp worth of additions.

It wouldn't be hard for a middle-class house to have a standard "undead generator room" as part of it at that point, assuming the machinery itself was comparably affordable. I think houses that are more than one-room peasant shacks are in the tens of thousands of gp. (I could be wrong, though; I've only seen this quoted around here second-hand.)

[Nifft]

Can mindless undead be trained to pedal bikes?

Would evil undead follow directions to help the living, even after you take your eyes off them?

[Psyren]

Yes, provided you dispense with the "weaken the veil" theory from Libris Mortis and BoVD, (negative energy radioactive waste, basically) that comes with routinely animating undead, they would be a source of clean energy and that could be the basis of a campaign world. D&D proper doesn't seem to like this notion however.

[Rater202]

Can mindless undead be trained to pedal bikes?

Would evil undead follow directions to help the living, even after you take your eyes off them?

It depends on your interpretation: Mindless automatons will just keep doing the last thing they were told to do while "malevolent animating spirit" will attack the living if freed from control.

We're going wth the automaton interpretation.

[Aotrs Commander]

8 1-HD skeletons is only 200 gp worth. The equipment they're biking on probably costs more. And it's only the machinery that needs redundancy, so you only need 8 skeletons. But, just to be save, let's go with 10; that's 250 gp of black onyx to make them.

Stick them in a small basement or side room; we're building a house for at least moderate wealth, if they can afford hundreds of gp worth of additions.

It wouldn't be hard for a middle-class house to have a standard "undead generator room" as part of it at that point, assuming the machinery itself was comparably affordable. I think houses that are more than one-room peasant shacks are in the tens of thousands of gp. (I could be wrong, though; I've only seen this quoted around here second-hand.)

Except it ISN'T 25gp per skeleton to start with, it's at least 175gp per skeleton - and that's only the start-up costs.

The machinery is the bit that's going to be expensive, though, as well as the infrastructure. (Let's also point out the more primative your technology, the less you're going to get out of your bikes - you're getting 100 watt-hours out of 21st century technology, you're not getting that out of 19th century gear.)

It's not EVEN saving you money in the long-run, because - as was pointed out - you're having to pay the spellcaster (and not just for the animated, you still have to pay them for the control

('Cos I tell you now, if you're taking up portions of MY control limit, you're bloody well paying full premium price for it, mate, in the same way I don't just scale my CAD models without a commission price; I don't work for free. The animated skeletons might, but necromancers (or evern people making scrolls and wands) sure as hell won''t.)

And you're paying a caster at a rate of 1 house per 2 caster levels (bit more with Dread Necromancers and with Rebuke Undead control limits) and you're still paying for the mechanics and technicians (and the admin people who collect those people's wages, and collecting money costs money).

If you're insisting on only using 5th level clerics for animation (to keep the caster level cost down) - that'd be an interesting task in and of itself, keeping them from levelling higher, assuming you can even GET that many 5th level clerics - that's 25 skeletons per caster, so you have to pay a 5th level cleric basically full time for every three houses (less than that, because as I said, that's an estimate and not a set value and a system without redundacy DOES NOT WORK in the real world), so you're looking more like every two houses needs a 5th level cleric. (Incidently, going from Pathfinder's downtime rules for earning money based on your class abilities, which this would seem to be, that means that a 5th level cleric (assuming a 15 Wis) is costing you 10 +5 (character level) + 2 (Wis mod) -5 (flat modifier) = 12 gp per DAY). Plus the cost of your mechanic's wages (though that at least wiuld be about the same as whatever else you were doing).




So instead of paying for a power plant that does hundreds on things at once, you're paying a lot of highly skilled specialists to make very little energy in a very inefficient manner.

In short, no, it really is not economically plausible. I'm sure that you can far more easily Tippy-verse up a solution you could get infinite enegy from far, far easier that this. (Hell, a bit of magic on something that uses a Ranking cycle can proably deal VASTLY more dividends than arsing around with what is fundementally a REALLY inefficient way of producing energy. Cartoons LIED to guy guys; treadmills and bicycles are actually REALLY inefficient means of generating power. That's why prisions are full of bicycle power-generators to make the criminals do something useful while they're incarcerated (among many other reasons).

Some dude might have it as novelty in his house somewhere as a gismo, but for mass production? It just is not practical.




Can mindless undead be trained to pedal bikes?

Trained? No. Mindless. Can't learn anything. You could probably either assume they can manage a simple task like that on instruction or on modification of basic set of commands from the spell itself, though. If not, you've failed before you start.


Would evil undead follow directions to help the living, even after you take your eyes off them?

If they're not mindless, that statement doesn't apply to any Undead regardless of alignment, because then you're either using what is functionally mind control (and you're right back to the morality problem) and non-mindless Undead either do nothing at all on their own or go berserk if uncontrolled, depending on how inept the necromancer that made the local version of your Animate Dead or equivlent, becaus that's their basic program.



But, as I say, you CAN'T have them uncontrolled, because the machinery they are generating the power from is not Undead. It will wear out. Quickly, because it's a bike and you're using without a stop, putting it under significant pressure. (I mean, my Dad has to do maintenance on his bike after one ride, and you're talking about having a mechanical system like that running continuously for 24 hours). And guess what? Uncontrolled undead are not going to follow any commands to stop so you can replace the dynamo, or the bearings etc. (And when you dismantle the machine to fix somethign serious and so it can do longer be cycling and stops because it can't do that anymore, it won't start again.) And the more you upgrade your machine to minimise maintenance, the more expensive (usually drastically) it becomes, so you one advanatge that you thought it was cheap disappears up in smoke.

Any solution you can come up with to fix that (which is going to be extremely expensive) is then better applied to anything else that would do it more efficiently. (Hell, a simple set of permentant Prestigitations set to boil water would be likely be a VASTLY more efficent than a skeleton on a bike, because the Rankin cycle is actually pretty efficient.)

Doesn't matter how cool you think it sounds, it's just not remotely plausible as anything other than a novelty.

[Nifft]

Trained? No. Mindless. Can't learn anything. Correct.


If they're not mindless, that statement doesn't apply to any Undead Skeletons are explicitly mindless.

So, they are.

[Rater202]

I'm operating on the assumption that the Necromancers are the ones operating the power plants or whatever.

[Psyren]

Instead of pedaling a bike, just chain them to something like Conan's Wheel of Pain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5KYZ74OAak) where all they have to do is endlessly walk forward - no skills required.

[Maat Mons]

No, no, I've got it. You use the variant Fiery Skeletons from Libris Mortis (page 162). Then you use the Lightning Skeleton variant of that (same page). And finally, you shackle them up and harvest that sweet, sweet electricity.

[StevenC21]

Well, I think that idea works pretty well actually.

[the_tick_rules]

in modern times we could just polymorph some uranium, solar panels, whatever you like.

[Nifft]

No, no, I've got it. You use the variant Fiery Skeletons from Libris Mortis (page 162). Then you use the Lightning Skeleton variant of that (same page). And finally, you shackle them up and harvest that sweet, sweet electricity.
It would be evilectricity.

It wouldn't power your devices, it would only damage them (1d6 per turn).


in modern times we could just polymorph some uranium, solar panels, whatever you like.
Is uranium a material with intrinsic value?

[NigelWalmsley]

Skeletons are explicitly mindless.

You could always pop Awaken Undead on them. Also, they can at least arguably do simple crafting if you give them a skill bonus somehow.

[WhamBamSam]

Yes, provided you dispense with the "weaken the veil" theory from Libris Mortis and BoVD, (negative energy radioactive waste, basically) that comes with routinely animating undead, they would be a source of clean energy and that could be the basis of a campaign world. D&D proper doesn't seem to like this notion however.The undead could also be animated by a Hellbred, whose Evil Exemption presumably means that they don't increase the amount of evil in the world by casting traditionally [Evil] spells, because if it they did, then they'd still be committing an evil act by using them.

[Nifft]

You could always pop Awaken Undead on them. Also, they can at least arguably do simple crafting if you give them a skill bonus somehow.

Mindless undead have no Intelligence score -- not +0, but rather a nonability -- so I think the skill bonus would not be usable.

If you Awaken them, they could use skills, but they'd also gain the ability to unionize.

You'd end up with a shop full of Woke Necroletariat.


The undead could also be animated by a Hellbred, whose Evil Exemption presumably means that they don't increase the amount of evil in the world by casting traditionally [Evil] spells, because if it they did, then they'd still be committing an evil act by using them.

I thought Hellbred had basically Soul Teflon™, so their [Evil] acts didn't stick to them personally.

Nothing about their [Evil] acts not being bad for the environment or whatever.

[WhamBamSam]

I thought Hellbred had basically Soul Teflon™, so their [Evil] acts didn't stick to them personally.

Nothing about their [Evil] acts not being bad for the environment or whatever.Their evil acts *do* stick to them personally. The rules specifically say that you can cast [Evil] spells or use evil magic items, but you can't use them to evil ends. If they still serve evil ends by virtue of their use alone, then the ability does nothing.

[Nifft]

Their evil acts *do* stick to them personally. The rules specifically say that you can cast [Evil] spells or use evil magic items, but you can't use them to evil ends. If they still serve evil ends by virtue of their use alone, then the ability does nothing.

Huh, maybe I'm thinking of something different... they could take [Evil] feats while being non-evil, right? Sorry if I got that confused.

Anyway, if they can't use [Evil] spells to do evil things, then it's up to the DM whether they can use an [Evil] spell to raise a bunch of neutral evil skeletons.

Increasing the number of evil monsters sounds like increasing evil in the world, no matter what the metaphysics turn out to be.

[Quertus]

There are plenty of ways around paying that 25 GP for onyx, and ways around paying for casting. So let's go with a 1-time item cost. Or an immortal Tainted Sorcerer.

You have a supply of unread as big as society can muster. Your limiting factor in city size is still, primarily, food.

The undead can be left uncontrolled. They will simply do whatever they had last been instructed to do.

However, this is a problem, because you want them to change jobs - at the very least, when equipment wears out (unless "turn any wheels in this room clockwise" or something equally resilient works).

However, must equipment wear out? Can Make Whole, Miracle, something simply fix the generators?

So your limiting factor is how many Clerics to turn them, items to control them, etc, you can afford.

8 undead power a house. Maybe. Estimates vary. Fine. Can you centralized that - and does centralization matter?

Maybe undead make poor farmers. OK. Does having zombie half-dragon hamster powered farm equipment make farming more efficient?

(Yes, clearly, we need a lascivious dragon breeding with everything, making it stronger, to provide stronger undead for us to animate. Our Half-Dragon warhorses are legendary on the battlefield, taste great when rations run low, and their bones get animated for slave labor turning giant turbines to power the city after their death. Or something. The one Tainted Sorcerer necessary to create this city can take the Dragon as its Cohort.)

Clerics get the respect that they deserve in this city, as they are essential for keeping things running smoothly (unless undead accept general orders of "use any x").

Eventually, many of the undead will get repurposed to assembly lines, effectively using untrained aid another rolls to boost craft checks into the stratosphere. This will make the Necropolis a major industrial power (as Milo of Harry Potter and the Natural 20 discovered).

So, the undead will crank out skeletal half-dragon warhorse-drawn generators, crank out zombie half-dragon hamster powered farm equipment, and PlayStations. The people (assuming "food" is a solved problem) will enjoy the comforts of not really having to work any more, staying home and playing on their Nintendo Xboxes (and, as a side effect, subsequently not spreading diseases - another big issue in cities). The clergy will be the not-so-secret masters, dictating how everything is run. And the entire city is powered by a single lone Tainted Sorcerer and his frisky dragon Cohort.

So… who are the real zombies here? :smallamused:

[Vaern]

If we're talking about using 3.x magic to power technology an industrial type of setting, wouldn't it make more sense to just enchant an item with a permanent [electricity] effect to output an infinite supply of power?

[Efrate]

Just make the bikes or whatever out or more undead. Should be pretty simple to use pieces of an undead to make the equipment so it also will not wear out. A spine is a chain, pedals are carved theigh and hip or shoulder joints or any other ball and socket joint. Seems plausible enough.

Being immune to nonlethal damage basically means immune to wear and tear so no maintainece. Seems like a fun project for a cabal of necromancers, make the all bone perpetual motion machine which can never wear out and looks suitably epic.

[Rater202]

If the removed bones of a still-living person can be reanimated as an Undead, then it's possible that if an Osteomancer can be obtained that the equipment could be sculpted from bone matter that counts as though it were made of Adamantine(Though it'd need a logical conclusion about how Dr/Adamantine works.)

[Karl Aegis]

Necromancers cost significantly more to hire to cast fourth level spells than third level spells.

Maintenance rules were taken out this edition.

[Rater202]

Necromancers cost significantly more to hire to cast fourth level spells than third level spells.

Maintenance rules were taken out this edition.

The Necromancers aren't hiring themselves.

[Karl Aegis]

The Necromancers aren't hiring themselves.

The municipality is. You can't expect workers to work for free.

Using Necromancers instead of clerics boosts the cost of a skeleton to 280 gold coins +25 gold per skeleton. You need your skeletons to work over 8 years around the clock to pay for themselves. Some untrained hirelings, like maids, do have around the clock jobs so you can't discount the skeletons for working longer shifts.

[Elkad]

A human skeleton should do more like 400 watts. Same as a fit human doing heavy work, except it doesn't get tired.
Uncontrolled it has to do the Conan thing, or climb a stairmaster forever. Still useful to turn a bellows, triphammer, pump water uphill for irrigation, or similar.
Rowing a galley is a classic one, makes for cheap high-speed water transport.

What we need is a way for a farmer to control an undead ox. Magic yoke or something.

[Rater202]

The municipality is. You can't expect workers to work for free.It's a Necropolis: The Necromancers are the municipality.

Also, Necromancer is being used generally, not to wizards specialized in the Necromancy School. Hell, the "Necromancer" could be a Death Master if they'll keep their Evil deeds to their own time(Death Masters get Animate Dead as a second level spell and Rebuke as a Cleric.)

[Asmotherion]

Or planar bind a fire elemental. Best fuel ever.

[Powerdork]

Y'all are just creating Eberron.

[Fizban]

Undead lose to fire elementals in boxes.

150 watts (maximum, and more likely to be the average of 100 watts) per hour isn't a huge amount. So. 2400 watts per day. . . There is a reason why electric bike power isn't particularly a thing, other than for taking a bit of the edge off.

A human skeleton should do more like 400 watts. Same as a fit human doing heavy work, except it doesn't get tired.
Uncontrolled it has to do the Conan thing, or climb a stairmaster forever. Still useful to turn a bellows, triphammer, pump water uphill for irrigation, or similar.
Rowing a galley is a classic one, makes for cheap high-speed water transport.
Aotrs's value is electricity generation, it will not have the same efficiency as direct mechanical work, which is where I presume the 400 watts comes from.

Or planar bind a fire elemental. Best fuel ever.
And stick it in an iron sphere that it can never escape, yes. A single medium fire elemental generates 21.85 to 64.84 MW (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?522922-Industrializing-a-Setting&p=21972239&viewfull=1#post21972239) of heat, depending on how you figure the Burn ability. The earliest steam engines have an efficiency as low as 0.5% (the Newcomen engine in 1710), so the low end is 109 Watts, or 324 with the better Burn. Watt's improvements brought this to 2.5%, for 546 to 1,621 Watts, and finally wikipedia says well-built steam engines got to 7-8%. As trains are the big worldbuilding target, that's 1,638 to 4,863 Watts. (Modern steam turbines can go up to 40%, but that's a bit far ahead). You need 2-4 Medium fire elemental spheres to run a train (replacing about 10 tons of coal per hour), depending on ruling. The price ranges from the raw iron for the sphere to maybe 1,000gp, depending on how much you are or aren't paying the spellcaster.

The problem is that those innovations had a strong pressure to happen due to the cost of fuel. With a fire elemental, the fuel problem is gone. A desire for greater power and precision will provide some pressure, but once the trains are running I wouldn't expect much advancement. But the same problem applies to undead fairly equally.


Y'all are just creating Eberron.
Sure, if Eberron actually supplied any justification for any of its tech. But it doesn't. The most important part of the Lightning Rail, the powerstones which make up the track, just so happen to lack any pricing info. Karnath just DM fiat'd themselves an easy to make intelligent undead to sidestep control problems. Bound elementals are literally just normal magic items that have a bunch of extra minutiae about X gp being from a dragonshard of Y size filled with an elemental.

Eberron's big claim to fame of being a "high magic" setting is based on nothing but Dragonmarks, fiat, and fluff description. The Dragonmark system putting certain spells into 25% of the population (or so I'm told, don't know the source) does indeed fix the problem of not enough casters. For those specific spells. Which. . . don't do much. The high level dragonmarks still require high level NPCs, which are still limited by city generation, unless DM fiat. The bound elementals are still super expensive magic items that require a very high level spellcaster, which were paid for and constructed by DM fiat. And so on. Eberron is not Eberron because of some clever optimization or logical deductions, it's Eberron because the DM said so.

[Nifft]

Eberron's big claim to fame of being a "high magic" setting is based on nothing but Dragonmarks, fiat, and fluff description.

Eberron explicitly denies being "high magic".

Eberron claims to be wide magic, and so far as we've seen it seems able to defend that claim.

[Fizban]

Eberron explicitly denies being "high magic".

Eberron claims to be wide magic, and so far as we've seen it seems able to defend that claim.
Sure, but then plenty of people describe it as high magic (there was just one, or was it two threads on appropriate amounts of magic items, where I'm fairly certain that specific example was made). Mostly because the term "high magic" means different things to different people and thus is near-useless to begin with, but it's the phrase to use. If the devs want to make up a second term and try to differentiate between them, well I'll have to point out that their setting is still "higher" magic than the default, and I expect whatever criteria they're using for "high" isn't actually reflected by any major published setting (though it sounds like you're quoting something, and if they did define "high" there I'd love to hear it). How can you add a bunch of arbitrary high level magic items and SLAs in addition to standard 3.x item availability, level progression, NPC generation, and not end up with "higher" magic? Is there some other set of restrictions I missed? Or are they assuming the "standard" level of magic is FR's dozens of epic level NPCs when the 3.5 DMG has barely a stub section on the topic, and only because it was printed after ELH?

But defining "high" magic is another (almost certainly fruitless) thread. My point remains that actually doing the work from the ground up to justify a setting with a post-medieval standard of living via applied game mechanics, is not what Eberron did- they used a bunch of DM fiat. So we're not "creating Eberron." It's a fine enough setting, and well-considered fiat is the best way to do things, but it's not the same thing.

In undead related news, I just checked the cargo capacity on Soarwhales and Zaratan, and zombified versions of those could actually carry significant amounts. You just need to get past ~1mph speeds. The easiest method of which is teleportation, or portals. Or it would be, but I just noticed that Shadow Walk and Wind Walk don't actually care about the size of the targets, unlike Teleport. So if you can animate them, you can almost certainly speed boost them. You just need sufficient casters or items to either post along the path or assign one to each convoy. It's not a purely undead solution, but there was never going to be. The main reason I don't usually consider them is that they're the kind of thing either the DM wants to exist or not, rather than something you could work towards.

[Powerdork]

Eberron's big claim to fame of being a "high magic" setting is based on nothing but Dragonmarks, fiat, and fluff description. [...] Eberron is not Eberron because of some clever optimization or logical deductions, it's Eberron because the DM said so.

Yeah, the DM said "If it's cool with you, we're playing in Eberron" and you agreed to play in Eberron, and that's how a lot of D&D in published campaign settings works. Thing is, Eberron incorporated the public use of undead and constructs as a workforce and the idea of corporate exploitation of elementals over 15 years ago, and since it's the premise of the thread, I figured I'd at least mention that it's been done. That way, people know what the baseline is for their attempts to build something better, and people who didn't know might be able to find a new favourite setting.

[Xervous]

I for one believe we are very far from Eberron here what with the lack of budding conspiracies, ASMR brainwashing aliens and Illuminati dragons.

[Nifft]

Sure, but then plenty of people describe it as high magic (...) it's the phrase to use.

If many people are wrong in the same way, that's not a reason to change the facts.

It's just many people being wrong together.

[Psyren]

It might be helpful to agree on a definition of "high magic" before having this debate.

What I can say is that Eberron tends to limit powerful spellcasters in the more commonly explored parts of its setting (e.g. Khorvaire) than some other settings like Faerun and Athas do - but things like epic spells and artifact creation do still exist.

[Segev]

It might be helpful to agree on a definition of "high magic" before having this debate.

What I can say is that Eberron tends to limit powerful spellcasters in the more commonly explored parts of its setting (e.g. Khorvaire) than some other settings like Faerun and Athas do - but things like epic spells and artifact creation do still exist.

How does it limit powerful spellcasters only in specific areas? :smallconfused: I'm not extremely familiar with Eberron.

[Rater202]

How does it limit powerful spellcasters only in specific areas? :smallconfused: I'm not extremely familiar with Eberron.

IIRC, the 3.5 stats Potiff Jaela, the "Pope" of the Church of the Silver Flame, set her as the single most powerful Spellcaster in the setting at level 13. With the Note that this is becuase the Silver Flame, one of the few "Gods" of Ebberon confirmed to actually exist physically exists in the Material Plane and Jaela is almost always in its presence and that she's (IIRC) only level 3 on her own merits. Which is still very high for a preteen, but still.

Eberron is considered to be a low power setting: If your PCs get to Wizard-King or CoDzilla levels you're probably the first people to get that high.

[hamishspence]

IIRC, the 3.5 stats Potiff Jaela, the "Pope" of the Church of the Silver Flame, set her as the single most powerful Spellcaster in the setting at level 13. With the Note that this is becuase the Silver Flame, one of the few "Gods" of Ebberon confirmed to actually exist physically exists in the Material Plane and Jaela is almost always in its presence and that she's (IIRC) only level 3 on her own merits. Which is still very high for a preteen, but still.

Eberron is considered to be a low power setting: If your PCs get to Wizard-King or CoDzilla levels you're probably the first people to get that high.

She's actually a bit higher level than that (18th) However it's true that there's very few truly high level NPCs, and most of those are difficult to access.

There's one 20th level Druid Awakened Tree though.

[Nifft]

How does it limit powerful spellcasters only in specific areas? :smallconfused: I'm not extremely familiar with Eberron.

By mostly focusing on those areas, and not sufficiently describing populations elsewhere.

The areas of Eberron which are detailed for play, and the versions of BBEGs which are officially published, exclude high-level spellcasters.

That's kind of the point of the setting. Magic is common, but not the sorts of high-level spellcasters which would warp the setting away from the genres that it wants to remain playable.

[Xervous]

Illumimati dragons (150 “elders” a singular group among the various arrangements on Argonessen), lords of dust, much like a fast food quality AAA game there’s these beings of massive power off in the background but the closest you’ll ever get is a quicktime event. In other words it’s all scenery that the setting provides, plot scenery on rails that the party most likely won’t get to interact with much because putting that stuff in motion upends the setting. Never mind that most of these high level creatures are rarely of relevance to subjects or events. You could cull the number of dragons to a small fraction, replace the lords of dust with whatever fits your fancy and the supermajority of campaigns wouldn’t blink an eye.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

It might be helpful to agree on a definition of "high magic" before having this debate.

It's not an official definition or anything, but "high" magic in a D&D context tends to be used in one to three ways:
Common, broad, or wide magic, where magic is everywhere and incorporated in most parts of daily life;
Universal or unrestricted magic, where pretty much everyone can become a magic-user if they want and many people do; and
Powerful magic, where high-level casters and spells dramatically impact the world on a regular basis.
Contrast this with the common usage of "low magic," which implies one or more of "rare magic" (magic is obscure/forgotten/mysterious and most people aren't familiar with it, or it's largely inaccessible for other reasons), "limited/restricted magic" (very few people have the Gift/Talent/etc. necessary to use magic themselves, or there are social/cultural/etc. restrictions on becoming a magic-user), and "weak magic" (things cap out at low-level spells and +1 swords and such, or at least heavily skew towards the low end). Whether a given setting is higher or lower magic depends on how many of those boxes it ticks and how much that factor dominates the others.

Khorvaire is "high magic" in breadth and restriction, but not power (there are tons of casters and magic items, but most are low-level); Sarlona is "high magic" in breadth and power, but not restriction (psionics are used for everything from magical lights to a teleportation circle network, but all of the power lies in the hands of the Inspired ruling caste); Argonnessen is "high magic" in all three senses (all the dragons are casters and there are plenty of great wyrms around).

Xen'drik can be considered "low magic" as it has power to some degree, but not breadth or restriction (there are some ancient giantish artifacts lying around, but the current inhabitants are largely primitive tribes without much magic of their own), but could also be "high magic" in some campaigns given that that's the default dumping ground for powerful artifacts and lost magical traditions so it might turn out much more powerful and common than is generally described in the splatbooks.


How does it limit powerful spellcasters only in specific areas? :smallconfused: I'm not extremely familiar with Eberron.

There's not an in-world limit or anything; high-level casters don't hit a hard cap at some point like how high-level githyanki get ganked by the Lich-Queen. Rather, most "named" NPCs on the main continent of Khorvaire (heads of Dragonmarked Houses, national leaders, religious leaders, etc.) tend to top out around 12th or 13th level because it just came out of a century-long war and everyone higher-level than that died off during the war, and all of the lower-level characters are scaled down as a side effect (see here (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ebds/20040712a) for details).

Also, importantly, all of those top-tier characters are focused or restricted in some way so that they don't get too involved in day-to-day events like the top-tier characters of other settings. Merrix d'Cannith spends all his time tinkering with warforged, Mordain the Fleshweaver spends all his time on crazy experiments, Oalian is literally rooted in place, Jaela Daran is much less powerful when away from the Flame, King Kaius III can't use all of his power or people will realize he's a vampire, Vol is obsessively researching her lost dragonmark and doesn't spare much thought for her underlings, and so on and so forth.

Other areas outside of Khorvaire have plenty of high-level characters, but those are all on the continents of Argonnessen (home to tons of dragons), Sarlona (home to an Orwellian psionic dictatorship), and Xen'drik (the spot on the map marked "here be monsters" expanded into a whole continent), making them basically "opt-in" regions for high-level adventures.


Illumimati dragons (150 “elders” a singular group among the various arrangements on Argonessen), lords of dust, much like a fast food quality AAA game there’s these beings of massive power off in the background but the closest you’ll ever get is a quicktime event. In other words it’s all scenery that the setting provides, plot scenery on rails that the party most likely won’t get to interact with much because putting that stuff in motion upends the setting. Never mind that most of these high level creatures are rarely of relevance to subjects or events. You could cull the number of dragons to a small fraction, replace the lords of dust with whatever fits your fancy and the supermajority of campaigns wouldn’t blink an eye.

On the contrary, having those powerful factions on the other continents is a necessary part of the setting, for two reasons. First of all, the basic setting premise is that there are a bunch of different factions and plots hanging in a fragile balance with one another, a powder keg just waiting to explode when the lit match that is the PCs is introduced to it. You can achieve that in a normal pseudo-Medieval setting with a bunch of scattered cults and individual dragons and the like, but in the early-1900s-ish Khorvaire with its better communications and transportation, standing armies, and other more modern aspects, you really need to have cults backed by the Lords of Dust, dragons backed by the Chamber, and so forth to pose credible threats.

Secondly, if you don't have a "release valve" of sorts for characters who eventually reach high level, then those characters are guaranteed to upend the setting when that occurs, much more so than the remote factions are. The ability to move those high-level threats into position at that point lets you keep the campaign going without either breaking the setting itself or breaking its internal logic by upscaling all of the existing threats.

[Xervous]

I agree that high end threats are necessary for a setting that plays by the rules of 3.5e where the party’s power skyrockets after a time. However the necessity for the existence of such threats does not by itself make the Eyes of Chronepsis or the Lords of Dust absolutely integral to the presentation of the setting. For all the dragons tend to do on an immediate narrative level they are functionally a detail in the backdrop or a portion of the box art up until their cinematic plays or the players are starring in Eberron: The Draconic Prophecy: The Musical. The draconic prophecy and its keepers are a footnote when it is not the focus of a campaign’s plot whereas dragonmarks touch upon many aspects of the primary setting. Mention not a blip of TLoD or TEoC and Eberron moves along fine. Ignoring dragonmarks on the other hand produces large gaps in the setting that players will bump into rather quickly unless we are looking at an isolated nonstandard region.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I agree that high end threats are necessary for a setting that plays by the rules of 3.5e where the party’s power skyrockets after a time. However the necessity for the existence of such threats does not by itself make the Eyes of Chronepsis or the Lords of Dust absolutely integral to the presentation of the setting.

Oh, granted, the specific factions in play aren't as important, I wasn't objecting to that part; you could do things like swap the Chamber for a resurgent or never-fallen Giantish Empire in Argonnessen, or swap the quori-worshiping Inspired for some Khyber-worshiping cults in Sarlona, and things would hum along just fine.

What I took issue with is the idea that all of them are merely "scenery and quick-time events" that are rarely interacted with, because that's a whole 'nother kind of bad guy faction.

The dragons/Inspired/etc. are a very real threat to Khorvaire that are constantly, if not actively, involved in the world and have their own goals, strengths, weaknesses, and, importantly, some reasons that explain why the setting has survived their presence thus far and how the setting can survive them getting involved in Khorvaire if need be. Those aren't just scenery, and in fact you really need something in that slot to provide the high-level experience I mentioned before; take them out or reduce their impact and the setting and game are noticeably changed for the worse

Then you have the demons of Shavarath, the daelkyr in Xoriat, and similar. They aren't actively involved in the world, they're much more one-dimensional, and can have varying levels of setting-breakage from "a balor/daelkyr starts a cult in the Mror Holds for shiggles and causes a bit of local trouble" to "the world is now drowning in vrocks/beholders and everything is on fire/on tentacles." In the latter case they can be more scenery/QTE villains, but don't have to be; reducing or removing their impact limits a DM's options and is bad for the lore, but doesn't change the game all that much.

And then you have the Rakshasah Rajahs, Khyber itself, il'Lashtavar itself, the Dark Six themselves (if they're real), whoever the daelkyr's bosses are (if they care about the Prime), and so forth. Those are the big spooky Game Over villains that have to be limited to scenery or QTE lest the setting implode when they get involved; you can ditch them entirely and make a tiny tweak to the lore to paper it over and basically nothing changes.

[Fizban]

Yeah, the DM said "If it's cool with you, we're playing in Eberron" and you agreed to play in Eberron, and that's how a lot of D&D in published campaign settings works. Thing is, Eberron incorporated the public use of undead and constructs as a workforce and the idea of corporate exploitation of elementals over 15 years ago, and since it's the premise of the thread, I figured I'd at least mention that it's been done. That way, people know what the baseline is for their attempts to build something better, and people who didn't know might be able to find a new favourite setting.
Fair enough, it's not like everyone starts out knowing everything. But their "public use of undead" is not the same as most people's idea when they look at Animate Dead and go "hey wait a second." Or at least it doesn't look like it to me. Obviously I think it's pretty easy to do better in terms of practical mechanical use, and am somewhat annoyed by Eberron being held up as an example whenever someone tries to actually do that, because it doesn't.

The funny thing of course is that you could just rip out the main problems: dump conductor stones for just actual rails, and replace bound elementals with Wall of Fire based items (which make box-shaped fires with smaller area than normal, for cheaper) running steam boilers. Oh, you want airships? Yeah, turns out hot air and hydrogen ballons are a thing, and you've already got zero-fuel steam engines for propulsion. Actually sectioning the airships with magic boiler and gas production and explosion negating balloon would mean that you could in fact use a large team of lower level casters to build the ships, which the fluff claims only to be immediately ignored by the rules text. Pick some better spells/write better magic items for doing various other things, etc. Heck, there are published spells to auto-animate people on death which Karnath could have been casting on entire squads from a single NPC, boom no need to justify where you're getting all the animators from (though admittedly, there might be a bunch of details on their undead creation and use somewhere, I haven't looked that far into it).

There's not an in-world limit or anything; high-level casters don't hit a hard cap at some point like how high-level githyanki get ganked by the Lich-Queen. Rather, most "named" NPCs on the main continent of Khorvaire (heads of Dragonmarked Houses, national leaders, religious leaders, etc.) tend to top out around 12th or 13th level because it just came out of a century-long war and everyone higher-level than that died off during the war, and all of the lower-level characters are scaled down as a side effect (see here (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ebds/20040712a) for details).
Well that's an incredibly important article, which does in fact do the exact thing I would require of a setting claiming to have "lower" magic, so well done I guess. Aside from not putting that in, ya know, the main setting book (or if it's in there, it's sure in the wrong place 'cause I've never gone past it). I wonder just how much critical material is found only in archived articles you have to already know about to look for?

I was going to say this is made even more amusing by the fact that the cities they wrote books about are full of people way past those limits, but I googled a list (https://www.enworld.org/threads/eberron-npc-list.178621/) and it turns out that it's just so happened almost every NPC I've stopped to look at skimming the books has been a high level caster (though many of them do have plenty of non-caster levels, or boosted CR by being monsters, and I already spotted at least one 17th level telepath not referenced on the list). Still, I'll admit, they've met that a bit better than I'd been seeing.

(Though it still immediately shoots itself in the foot with the article text, saying that the PCs could be beset by a trio of 12 level assassins, when the table they're about to present says that (presuming these assassins are optimized for challenging an 18th level party) it would take all the top level rogues of a metropolis all happening to be assassins and all hired together, or pulled from multiple metropoli.)


Incidentally, for more comparisons to make with undead: A Permanent Large Animated Object clocks in at around 5,490gp on my item table (presumably from a cl 12 animate/14 permanency, and yeah the math's probably a bit off), with Medium and Small being 1/2 and 1/4 of that of course. More expensive and potentially stopped by "no they don't have xp to cast it) as well as requiring higher level casters initially, but with absolutely zero ethical concerns or control limits and the ability to cut out the middleman. Though you need to rule that animated carts/carriages/etc get the x4 and take penalties as if they were pulling themselves. Undead are always cheaper, which is essentially why they have all the Evil problems connected to them.

Hmm. It's probably possible to calculate something useful for an animated machine tool, as you could use either their carry weight or physical weight to get a simple pressure figure. . .

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The funny thing of course is that you could just rip out the main problems: dump conductor stones for just actual rails, and replace bound elementals with Wall of Fire based items (which make box-shaped fires with smaller area than normal, for cheaper) running steam boilers. Oh, you want airships? Yeah, turns out hot air and hydrogen ballons are a thing, and you've already got zero-fuel steam engines for propulsion. Actually sectioning the airships with magic boiler and gas production and explosion negating balloon would mean that you could in fact use a large team of lower level casters to build the ships, which the fluff claims only to be immediately ignored by the rules text.

See, I don't find the new spells and items to be "problems" at all, and in fact I'd say the reverse is true, that failing to introduce the new stuff would have been a mistake. Having a magical setting duplicate the exact real-life progression of certain technologies in exactly the way that real life did safe for specific details taken care of with magic is lazy and boring (because "I wanna make X, but use a magical Y instead of a technological Z" is something any DM or player can throw together); it's the anachronistic and schizophrenic "Medieval Europe, but with magic!" problem, just with a higher starting tech level. In contrast, a totally novel solution that feels like it could have been created by someone without knowledge of the real-world tech progression is not only more immersive but can prompt a lot more ideas with that different inspiration and give more tools to do even more out-there things with the new material.

Eberron's lightning rails are merely a background feature of the setting, because lightning rails are literally just "electricity-powered maglev trains, but with magic!" that don't have any particular need to incorporate a bound elemental (there are tons of lightning and/or magnetism spells that could do the same), and the fact that any PC can build something similar by merely plugging together a few spells and items from core is a bad thing, not a point in their favor.

The Eberron airship, meanwhile, is absolutely iconic and a symbol of the setting as a whole, because (A) "sailing ship with elemental attached" feels like something that could have been developed in a world where steam power isn't a thing and "hydrogen" and "helium" are different configurations of air and fire atoms rather than fundamental elements, (B) it actually requires the bound elemental, and uses it to achieve things that the technological equivalent can't do (like omnidirectional thrust), and most importantly (C) it's immediately visually identifiable as such and distinctly different from any other setting's airship. Stick a blimp in the sky above a castle, and you can be in any DM's vaguely-steampunk homebrew setting; stick a hovering ship surrounded by a ring of fire in the sky above that castle, and you're definitely in Eberron.


Pick some better spells/write better magic items for doing various other things, etc. Heck, there are published spells to auto-animate people on death which Karnath could have been casting on entire squads from a single NPC, boom no need to justify where you're getting all the animators from (though admittedly, there might be a bunch of details on their undead creation and use somewhere, I haven't looked that far into it).

The key differentiator for Karrnath's undead is that they have all the benefits of normal skeletons and zombies (cheap, disposable, can use gear designed for standard humanoids, can be controlled en masse by low-level clerics if they go rogue, etc.) while having Int 11 rather than being mindless to give them much better tactics and coordination. No existing means of reanimation gives you the same benefit; other ways of getting intelligent undead either give you much stronger undead by default (which is a bad thing for an army, since you get fewer of them, you need more and stronger clerics to deal with rogue ones, and they might reanimate with memories of their life and not want to fight for you) or leave you with skeletons and zombies but require more expensive and higher-level magic (animate dread warrior is 6th, awaken undead is 7th, and both have XP costs; Bone Knights can animate Karrnathi skeletons and undead several levels earlier and for free).


Well that's an incredibly important article, which does in fact do the exact thing I would require of a setting claiming to have "lower" magic, so well done I guess. Aside from not putting that in, ya know, the main setting book (or if it's in there, it's sure in the wrong place 'cause I've never gone past it). I wonder just how much critical material is found only in archived articles you have to already know about to look for?

I was going to say this is made even more amusing by the fact that the cities they wrote books about are full of people way past those limits, but I googled a list (https://www.enworld.org/threads/eberron-npc-list.178621/) and it turns out that it's just so happened almost every NPC I've stopped to look at skimming the books has been a high level caster (though many of them do have plenty of non-caster levels, or boosted CR by being monsters, and I already spotted at least one 17th level telepath not referenced on the list). Still, I'll admit, they've met that a bit better than I'd been seeing.

The reason that that chart is online instead of being in the ECS is that it was published as a reaction to exactly the phenomena you noticed. Sharn is the iconic city of the setting and has many more higher-level NPCs than the rest of the setting; they congregate there for the same reason software type congregate in Silicon Valley and finance types in New York City. Thus, a lot of peoples' first Eberron campaigns started in or spent a lot of time in Sharn, and people playing there after the Sharn book was published got the impression that because Sharn had high-level NPCs that that was the case everywhere, and DMs, instead of carefully placing high-level NPCs like the ECS and early splatbooks told them to (and set the example of doing) were randomly generating high-level NPCs like they were in Faerûn or Krynn.

Publishing explicit demographic charts was an attempt to readjust peoples' setting expectations and avoid DMs blindly following the DMG demographics rules instead of paying attention to Eberron's flavor; you'll notice that the article keeps hammering the "high-level NPCs aren't supposed to be common" point when that's something players have been told since the opening chapter of the ECS.


(Though it still immediately shoots itself in the foot with the article text, saying that the PCs could be beset by a trio of 12 level assassins, when the table they're about to present says that (presuming these assassins are optimized for challenging an 18th level party) it would take all the top level rogues of a metropolis all happening to be assassins and all hired together, or pulled from multiple metropoli.)

That's exactly the point. In Faerûn, 12th-level assassins are a dime silver piece a dozen and every large city or metropolis can have a handful of them as mid-level enforcers for the local Assassins Guild. In Eberron, a party of 12th-level assassins is a House Thuranni spec-ops team assembled from their best agents in Khorvaire and specially equipped for specific missions on behalf of House interests.


Incidentally, for more comparisons to make with undead: A Permanent Large Animated Object clocks in at around 5,490gp on my item table (presumably from a cl 12 animate/14 permanency, and yeah the math's probably a bit off), with Medium and Small being 1/2 and 1/4 of that of course. More expensive and potentially stopped by "no they don't have xp to cast it) as well as requiring higher level casters initially, but with absolutely zero ethical concerns or control limits and the ability to cut out the middleman.

It's the XP and CL that make that an issue, yeah. When skeletons come online at CL 5 with animate dead and are limited by expensive material components (a resource that's plentiful at the societal level and fungible with other resources) and permanent animated objects come online at CL 14 and are limited by XP (a scarce resource that can't be shared between casters), the skeletons are by far the more ecomical and sustainable option and are possible to bootstrap much earlier with a smaller starting community.

[NigelWalmsley]

It's the XP and CL that make that an issue, yeah. When skeletons come online at CL 5 with animate dead and are limited by expensive material components (a resource that's plentiful at the societal level and fungible with other resources) and permanent animated objects come online at CL 14 and are limited by XP (a scarce resource that can't be shared between casters), the skeletons are by far the more ecomical and sustainable option and are possible to bootstrap much earlier with a smaller starting community.

You can circumvent the XP issue by using the Dweomerkeeper's Supernatural Spell on Limited Wish emulating Permanency. Undead are also limited by control limits, while Animated Objects aren't. In the long run, a Cleric/Dweomerkeeper will be able to produce more animated minions than you'll be able to get out of necromancy. He'll also be able to produce some other nifty effects, like permanent Wall of Fire-based steam generators, Wall of Force buildings, or Telepathic Bond communications. Plus he's also a 13th level Cleric. The disadvantage is mostly that it creates a single point of failure, leading to long-run instability.

[Fizban]

I'm going to spoiler this because it's still a tangent, and intend for this to be my last response (and have no desire to start a whole thread of arguing with people about what I like or don't like about a setting they like). And let's be clear- you're arguing with my opinion that the things that Eberron does are "problematic," making half of this a conflict of subjective taste, and do nothing to refute my point that you could replace those things with ground-up mechanical extrapolations. Disliking them does not make them invalid, and ground-up mechanical extrapolations are what the OP called for (about undead, which naturally tends to make people point out all the easier ways to do things, etc).

Having a magical setting duplicate the exact real-life progression of certain technologies in exactly the way that real life did safe for specific details taken care of with magic is lazy and boring (because "I wanna make X, but use a magical Y instead of a technological Z" is something any DM or player can throw together); it's the anachronistic and schizophrenic "Medieval Europe, but with magic!" problem, just with a higher starting tech level. In contrast, a totally novel solution that feels like it could have been created by someone without knowledge of the real-world tech progression is not only more immersive but can prompt a lot more ideas with that different inspiration and give more tools to do even more out-there things with the new material.

Eberron's lightning rails are merely a background feature of the setting, because lightning rails are literally just "electricity-powered maglev trains, but with magic!" that don't have any particular need to incorporate a bound elemental (there are tons of lightning and/or magnetism spells that could do the same), and the fact that any PC can build something similar by merely plugging together a few spells and items from core is a bad thing, not a point in their favor.
These two statements. . . are the same thing. You say that "X but with magic!" is bad, and then praise them for making trains but with magic. You want things to be different for difference's sake? Then at least make them competitive. Don't wimp out and leave the conductor stones unpriced, the creation of Karrnathi Undead undetailed, and so on. You want inspiration? What's inspiring about "the DM said these items exist at this price, and these undead are created somehow?" Clearly I disagree.

And no actually, you can't just make a maglev train (or elemental steam train, or airship) by plugging together things from core, or splats. None of those magnetic or electricity effects work that way, so you need DM fiat to use them to make a train (and it would be hella expensive, which is the main gotcha I level at Eberron's "Conductor Stones"). There is no useful steam engine in a 1st party book, so powering one with an elemental requires DM fiat to let you build and iterate on a steam engine. There's a reason I focus on elementals in boxes and permanent Wall of Fire, because they're the only things that actually work out of the box, and even then they still don't actually work out of the box.

The Eberron airship, meanwhile, is absolutely iconic and a symbol of the setting as a whole, because (A) "sailing ship with elemental attached" feels like something that could have been developed in a world where steam power isn't a thing and "hydrogen" and "helium" are different configurations of air and fire atoms rather than fundamental elements, (B) it actually requires the bound elemental, and uses it to achieve things that the technological equivalent can't do (like omnidirectional thrust), and most importantly (C) it's immediately visually identifiable as such and distinctly different from any other setting's airship. Stick a blimp in the sky above a castle, and you can be in any DM's vaguely-steampunk homebrew setting; stick a hovering ship surrounded by a ring of fire in the sky above that castle, and you're definitely in Eberron.
There's nothing novel about the eberron airship's mechanics, which don't even make sense. Soarwood is just wood that fllies (depending on which book you read), and elementals don't work that way. The whole elemental binding thing is just blatant refluffing of fiat items- it doesn't need the elemental to work that way, it works that way because the DM said so in spite of anything that elemental could do. The concept is novel, but inserted into DnD 3.5, it falls flat on its face; An iconic visual because they put rings of fire around the airships, and that's about it. Sailing ship+ levitate is the more obvious tech path, which FR used, but they actually wrote the more powerful Suspension spell and charged roughly the appropriate amount for enough continuous Suspension items to fly their ship, which is thus far more expensive, and less popular. So Eberron has an iconic visual, and magic items that don't care about standard pricing*.

You know what the Eberron airship's price just so happens to match? A PHB Galleon+ Wings of Flying. Which is an incredibly clever quick and dirty pricing to be sure, but continues to have nothing to do with elementals. And uses a completely arbitrary speed, which just so happens to be a little slower than a train, because they have magic trains and the airship has to have some disadvantage I guess (the speed is also similar to that of gas-engine airships). And if that's not where the price is from- then what is it? The DMG doesn't always follow the rules, but you can at least see what they're starting from. The Eberron Campaign Setting book pulls an ingenuous misdirection between its grandiose fluff and simple/absent mechanics, which is great- as long as you don't try to compare it to other things that have some substance under their fluff, because it's not a fair comparison (take your pick).

*Just like any other mechanic, changing the spell levels or pricing of something is a perfectly valid way to make something easier or harder and thus establish setting identity. Eberron just fails to make it explicit what's going on.

The key differentiator for Karrnath's undead is. . .
None of which refutes the point that they're not even created by any visible mechanic.

The reason that that chart is online instead of being in the ECS is that it was published as a reaction to exactly the phenomena you noticed.
Which does not speak to the setting having been built correctly (in terms of bottom-up mechanics) to begin with. They claimed that the setting had fewer high level NPCs without actually supporting it mechanically, and then were surprised at the result.

avoid DMs blindly following the DMG demographics rules instead of paying attention to Eberron's flavor
Lemme stop you right there- people actually following the DMG are the ones in the wrong here? No, that's the setting's problem. If you want to change something that has rules in the DMG, you have to write your own rules, duh. The people who actually use the demographic rules wouldn't have had that problem if the setting book had changed the demographics- meanwhile people who throw out dozens of high level plot NPCs and armies of mid-level Fighter soldiers, don't care about demographic tables to begin with.

you'll notice that the article keeps hammering the "high-level NPCs aren't supposed to be common" point when that's something players have been told since the opening chapter of the ECS.
Which ironically, is already true of DMG city generation, because only the largest possible cities actually have many NPCs above 12th. What's lacking is a bit in the DMG about how common cities of X size are supposed to be, so people just drop max-size cities wherever they feel like, rather than using a more appropriate say, 1-3 in the whole setting region and only one which appears in the campaign.

That's exactly the point. In Faerûn, 12th-level assassins are a dime silver piece a dozen and every large city or metropolis can have a handful of them as mid-level enforcers for the local Assassins Guild. In Eberron, a party of 12th-level assassins is a House Thuranni spec-ops team assembled from their best agents in Khorvaire and specially equipped for specific missions on behalf of House interests.
None of which is in the text. It says you might have to get creative, but still slings out three 12th level assassins in response to an 18th level party without actually acknowledging, stating directly, how rare that is supposed to be. Heck, by invoking the spooky guilds, which seem to be full of sufficiently high level NPCs whenever neccesary, in any other context it would be implying that these assassins just poof out of nowhere. If it followed with "of course, as the demographics indicate, only a particularly unified city of maximum size or all the elites of a guild could produce even one team of such caliber, so this is likely a once-per-campaign event," then it wouldn't be shooting itself in the foot.

It's the XP and CL that make that an issue, yeah. When skeletons come online at CL 5 with animate dead and are limited by expensive material components (a resource that's plentiful at the societal level and fungible with other resources) and permanent animated objects come online at CL 14 and are limited by XP (a scarce resource that can't be shared between casters), the skeletons are by far the more ecomical and sustainable option and are possible to bootstrap much earlier with a smaller starting community.
I also find it worth noting that 3.0 Animate Dead was 5th level for arcanists, and used size-only based stats, with fewer hit dice and strength than almost anything of those sizes. I'd think there would be somewhat less question of whether they could do anything significant without the 3.5 buffs, but Animate Objects wasn't Permanent-able until 3.5 either.


You can circumvent the XP issue by using the Dweomerkeeper's Supernatural Spell on Limited Wish emulating Permanency. Undead are also limited by control limits, while Animated Objects aren't. In the long run, a Cleric/Dweomerkeeper will be able to produce more animated minions than you'll be able to get out of necromancy. He'll also be able to produce some other nifty effects, like permanent Wall of Fire-based steam generators, Wall of Force buildings, or Telepathic Bond communications. Plus he's also a 13th level Cleric. The disadvantage is mostly that it creates a single point of failure, leading to long-run instability.
Indeed, more cheese makes more possible, and the OP did effectively ask for maximum OP. However, nothing says you can't hand control of Animated Objects over to someone else with the simple "obey this person" order. Well, assuming you can give them other orders, since it seems the spell only says they attack your enemies immediately.


Returning to the OP- well we've has estimates of 8 humanoid skeletons to power one modern house, but since that's in terms of raw number you don't get the number magic benefit of not having to feed them. In raw numbers without shenanigans, the control pool caps out at either 25%, or 85% with experts UMDing wands. But you need the undead to outnumber people eight to one. So no, masses of humanoid skeletons cannot sustain modern electrical power requirements. They can supply sufficient slave output to greatly exceed Rome, but to match Industrial Revolution total power? You'd have to take a particular city, total up the horsepower of all the machinery they use, and then compare that to the undead numbers. This might actually be possible with enough research- the various wikipedia articles on steam engines include a bunch of figures of X engines in use at whatever year for example, but narrowing it down and accounting for all the other human labor you might want to replace? That's a passion project, if you find someone with the passion. Best bet is to hope someone wrote a book on a city of that era with all the information you need already assembled, but at that point you'd need to buy a book.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

You can circumvent the XP issue by using the Dweomerkeeper's Supernatural Spell on Limited Wish emulating Permanency. Undead are also limited by control limits, while Animated Objects aren't. In the long run, a Cleric/Dweomerkeeper will be able to produce more animated minions than you'll be able to get out of necromancy. He'll also be able to produce some other nifty effects, like permanent Wall of Fire-based steam generators, Wall of Force buildings, or Telepathic Bond communications. Plus he's also a 13th level Cleric. The disadvantage is mostly that it creates a single point of failure, leading to long-run instability.

Well, again, the "you" in this case isn't necessarily a high-level adventuring party doing stuff with just their followers and stronghold, it's a whole society. If said Dweomerkeeper decides one day to create a necrotech utopia, then that's easy for him to kickstart, but as you say it's entirely dependent on that one cleric. A society, meanwhile, is going to want something that is easier to start and easier to maintain; the lower-level something is, the easier it is to get started because there are more low-level NPCs around to do so, and the less exotic the costs are (black onyx that you can have skeletons mine for a literally self-sustaining system vs. the XP of a high-level character with a finite amount of it and many other things to spend it on) the easier it is to keep the system running in the case of shortages, catastrophes, betrayals, etc.

Also, population participation and buy-in is a factor. If your First United Church of Wee Jas is churning out low-level clerics from the local community to control all your new skeleton laborers, then hey, those skeletons can't be that scary or dangerous--Bob the neighbor's boy is one of those clerics (And isn't his red clerical robe adorable? You should really try to set him up with that niece of yours at the next town potluck!) and there are many more known and trustworthy clerics from the area in his graduating class as well who certainly wouldn't get involved in anything "evil," no sirree.

If, on the other hand, you have a cleric show up, say "This box produces infinite heat and steam, this other building is being held up by invisible walls, everything's perfectly safe, trust me, now put the box of high-pressure explosions in your grain mill and it'll put your miller and his entire family out of work, it'll be great!", and teleport out, then even if the cleric is obviously a servant of Celestia, goddess of Primary Colors, Cuteness, and Giving Puppies to Orphans, it'll be a pretty hard sell to the general populace.


I'm going to spoiler this because it's still a tangent, and intend for this to be my last response (and have no desire to start a whole thread of arguing with people about what I like or don't like about a setting they like).

It's pretty rude/hypocritical to say you're going to drop a tangent but then make a big response anyway to effectively get the last word in.

But I'll respect that, and just summarize things on my end to tie things off: you initially objected to Eberron doing its own thing mechanically and flavor-wise instead of extrapolating from existing rules, and my overall point was that a published setting (which needs its own flavor and visual identity and should support different play experiences than the generic rules to give people a reason to play in it, and really should do magitech/magicpunk in a novel way) has very different needs than a homebrew setting (which needs to work for a single campaign and doesn't tend to hugely diverge from the core rules because that's a lot of work for a single DM, and generally wants to do magitech/magicpunk in a way that can heavily draw on the rules and real life), and faulting Eberron for being the former and not the latter is unfair.

[Fizban]

I could also say it's rude to cut in on a response to a different poster with a wall of text, but I've done that too, so yeah. But this:

my overall point was that a published setting (which needs its own flavor and visual identity and should support different play experiences than the generic rules to give people a reason to play in it, and really should do magitech/magicpunk in a novel way) has very different needs than a homebrew setting (which needs to work for a single campaign and doesn't tend to hugely diverge from the core rules because that's a lot of work for a single DM, and generally wants to do magitech/magicpunk in a way that can heavily draw on the rules and real life), and faulting Eberron for being the former and not the latter is unfair.
Is not what I was reading and sounds like it'd be interesting, so sure we can do a new thread for that.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I could also say it's rude to cut in on a response to a different poster with a wall of text, but I've done that too, so yeah.

Eh, that's the nature of asynchronous forum communication; responses aren't unidirectional, quote boxes get split, tangents happen. And ignoring or stopping responding to a tangent is totally fine, too, it's just that responding-then-bowing-out makes it look like you're trying to effectively "win" a tangent, though I assume that wasn't actually your intention in this case.


But this:

Is not what I was reading and sounds like it'd be interesting, so sure we can do a new thread for that.

If that wasn't coming across, my bad; I could have used more examples so it was clearer exactly what in the initial quote I was responding to. I don't know if "is Eberron a 'good' published setting and what should similar homebrew settings do or not do to be 'good' too" deserves its own thread, but if one were started I'd certainly put my 2 coppers in.

[el minster]

there are easier ways; decanters of endless water to power a hydroelectric power plant

[Icewraith]

there are easier ways; decanters of endless water to power a hydroelectric power plant

Decanters have... significant... environmental side effects over time. In all probability they were invented by cultists of Dagon as an astoundingly successful long-term plot to flood the material plane.

Over generations, the territory of aquatic terrors that serve Dagon advance inexorably as sea levels inevitably rise and land masses erode from the output of the decanters.

[Rater202]

Decanters have... significant... environmental side effects over time. In all probability they were invented by cultists of Dagon as an astoundingly successful long-term plot to flood the material plane.

Over generations, the territory of aquatic terrors that serve Dagon advance inexorably as sea levels inevitably rise and land masses erode from the output of the decanters.

Mayby once the decanter turns the turbine the water is redirected to serve as drinking water or there''s a Gate back to the Plane of water at the bottom?

[TheCount]

i always thought there are natural portals/rifts connecting the material plane with the elemental ones, fire near the volcano and close to the core, earth in, well, the earth and stone of the continents, air in the sky and water in the oceans, underground springs that balance these out.

But it would be a hell of an effective plot by the cultists.

[el minster]

Mayby once the decanter turns the turbine the water is redirected to serve as drinking water or there''s a Gate back to the Plane of water at the bottom?

yeah I was thinking it could be the cities water source just destroy the rest

[Nifft]

Decanters have... significant... environmental side effects over time. In all probability they were invented by cultists of Dagon as an astoundingly successful long-term plot to flood the material plane.

Over generations, the territory of aquatic terrors that serve Dagon advance inexorably as sea levels inevitably rise and land masses erode from the output of the decanters.

You're just replacing what's lost to Spheres of Annihilation, through Gates, and by disintegrate spells every year.

Remember that 80% of every bastard you disintegrate is water.

When it's a dragon (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0186.html), well... lotta water.

[el minster]

You're just replacing what's lost to Spheres of Annihilation, through Gates, and by disintegrate spells every year.

Remember that 80% of every bastard you disintegrate is water.

When it's a dragon (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0186.html), well... lotta water.

if you use it irresponsibly you could still destroy a city.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

i always thought there are natural portals/rifts connecting the material plane with the elemental ones, fire near the volcano and close to the core, earth in, well, the earth and stone of the continents, air in the sky and water in the oceans, underground springs that balance these out.

In most settings there are, but it varies based on the local planar physics. Dark Sun doesn't have any, or at least so few they're a rounding error, hence why everything is a parched dead wasteland; Forgotten Realms has oodles, since it has tons of connections to pretty much every plane.


You're just replacing what's lost to Spheres of Annihilation, through Gates, and by disintegrate spells every year.

Remember that 80% of every bastard you disintegrate is water.

That's a very Material Plane-centric statement, you insensitive clod! An ice or ooze paraelemental is at most 50% water, and demons aren't made of elemental matter at all!