Lyre of Building - how much does it do?

[Firechanter]

The description of the Lyre's effects is pretty vague. There don't seem to be any useful RAW, so let's try and figure out what might have been intended.

The text says,
30 minutes of playing is equal to the work of 100 humans laboring for 3 days

but ofc this leaves a lot of questions open. Such as:

- where does the building material come from? Does material just spring into existence from nothing? Does it have to be provided beforehand? Can the Lyre produce its own building material from resources in the area (logging timber, hewing stones, shaping and baking bricks)?

- how much progress is 300 man-days actually worth? It says "100 humans laboring", which is not necessarily the same as "100 labourers".

Personally I am inclined to handle it as follows:

1. the lyre can process building material from the surroundings, i.e. chop trees etc, which counts against the labour provided
2. here I'd split the difference and assume humans with a +0 Craft / Profession check, which results in a productivity worth 5GP per person per week.
--> 30 minutes of playing = 250GP of progress.

So of course this gets interesting if you have a halfway competent Bard that can make the Perform check automatically, and you have a way of keeping him awake - if the minstrel manages to play the lyre for 6 days straight without interruption, that's 72.000GP of construction work.

[ciopo]

the lyre of building doesn't magically make raw material appear, it transform the raw material that is already there into the finished product, like the spell Fabricate

Stronghold guide could probably help with estimating what that labor translates to in relation to the time it would be needed to make *something*

300 man-days per 30 minute of playing is a lot, I would say, and it doens't really equate well to a +0 profession check

let's see, I'm going to use a "clearing a mine approach", per dungeon rules, a wall of unworked stone has an hardness of 8 and 900 hp, thats a 5 feet cubic. I'll approximate a miner doing his work to process one "unit" of stone only on a nat 20 with his pickaxe (heavy pick), because he doens't overcome the hardness otherwise. so a crit on average every 120 seconds for an average of 3.5=14 damage, minus the hardness 900/6 rounded up, 150 crits to destroy one cube of 5ft. stone, so 120*65 = 18000 seconds. One work day is 8 hours, or 28800 seconds, so we have 1.6 cubes of stone "processed" by one person on average in one day, so the lyre "destroys" 160 5feet cubes of stone every 30 minutes. To put it in a tunnel perspective, that's a 2x2x40 long tunnel every 30 minutes, through solid rock, per 30 minutes...

[Firechanter]

Arrrrrgh had a crash in the middle of writing a reply -.-

So where was I.

First off, I have no idea if the numbers you present have any basis in reality, bc I've never seen anyone hammering away at rock with a pickaxe. So let's have a look:
One 5 foot cube of rock (granite) has a mass of some 9 tons. So those 1.6 cubes a labourer is supposed to chop up in a day amount to some 15 tons of rocks turned to rubble. By someone with no physical strength to speak of (Str 10), might I add. As I said I don't know, but intuitively I'd say this figure is entirely outlandish.

So now we have two ways of dealing with that figure: either we accept it as face value, i.e. yes, any Str 10 commoner can crush 15 tons of rock in one work day. We can do that, but then we don't need to wonder about the consequences of that fact, such as that lyre digging through 40 feet of rock in 30 minutes.

BTW just crushing that rock isn't enough, we also have to clear that rubble out of the way. Do the dungeon rules also present math regarding how many tons a single guy can carry far enough away from the construction site?

Of on the other hand we say "Wait, 15 tons per day, that can't be right", then we have to stop here and do more research or come up with a better model that gives more plausible figures.

[ciopo]

that profession (0) isn't representative of a week (56) hours of hard labor either, but yeah I was just trying to estimate something out of rules that could be applied.

I simply took "unworked stone" from https://www.d20srd.org/srd/dungeons.htm and estrapolated how long it'd take to break down one section if a str 10 commoner were to be using an heavy pick ( to approximate a pickaxe)

the stronghold handbook says 10000 gp of value of a stronghold takes one week to be done, but I'm not finding how to translate this to manhours

the reverse of that, on my math above, is that it takes one person 5 hours to "break down" a 5x5x5 cube of stone, with a pickaxe, that sounds passably okay to me?

I'm thinking how long it would take me to dig an hole on soft earth with a shovel, not something I've done, but the closest I can think of is when I helped grandfather with breaking up earth for planting potatoes, with a hoe, It's been a looong time since I was free labor such as that :D but my fuzzy memory puts that hoeing at about "the garden potato lot took about one morning of hoeing", or 4 hours for ehhhhh about 3x15 meters, much wiggle room here I don't live there anymore!

So I, as an untrained early teen, would hoe 10x50 feet of earth in 4 hours of work to a point it was good enough to plant potatoes.

I would say I could easily dig a 5x5x5 hole in a day, perhabs even half day.

So, I don't know about making a mine, but in "dig a hole in the ground", 8 hours are plenty for making at least one 5 feet cube of hole. Size up to 300 mandays, shave off work time for clearing the debris, here you have something to visualize, maybe?

[Firechanter]

Well, I certainly wouldn't try to belittle your experience with hoes :smallbiggrin: but soil and rock are two very different stories ofc. Soil is just little particles of dirt packed together and has literally zero hardness, whereas granite is way up on the Mohs scale, clocking in at about 6-8 out of 10 (10 being diamond)

But your story reminds me of a similar one concerning my parents' house: at one point, the light wells on one side had to be replaced, and that meant that a lot of earth had to be moved. Like you, I don't remember the exact figures, but from memory I would guess that it was something like 6m along the wall, 1.5m wide and 2m deep. Ignoring the existing lightwells, that would be a gross 18 cubic meters of various layers of soil; gravel, sand, clay. Still nothing as hard as solid rock.
We got tenders from two contractors: one wanted to bring about five or six workers to dig it up manually, and scheduled a whole week for the job. So that would be something like 200 man-hours just for digging (and then filling in the hole afterwards).
(We ended up hiring the other contractor, who brought a lyre of building an excavator and finished the job in a day)

So anyway, if those estimates from the other contractor were halfway correct, we might round that off to: one man [who's probably stronger than a Str 10] can move 10 cubic metres of earth [not rock!] in one day.

Now as for digging through actual rock... well I tried to do some research on pre-modern tunneling projects, but didn't find any useful figures right now. But trust me on this, breaking up solid bedrock into carriable chunks of rubble is certainly MUCH harder and therefore slower than digging up a backyard potato patch. ;) Having to make a wild guess, I'd say _at least_ by factor 10.

[Jowgen]

I think Stormwrack is a good book to consult.

The most time consuming Ship you can build is an Iron Clad, taking 18 months and a large shipyard, i.e. 548 days.

Our 30 min to 3 days gives us a factor of 144, so it'll instead take to 3.8 days.

And that's without anything else to cut the time. If you just wanna crank out a regular longboat, with a build time of 2 months, you can do 1 in a mere 4.2 hours, easy.

Considering that labourers are meant to be compensated a quarter of a ship's cost, and an ironclad costs 50.000 gp, that's 12.500 gp's worth of labour done in 4 days, not counting the massive time saving benefit.

[Firechanter]

Why does Stormwrack deviate from the standard rule for crafting so massively? Normally 2/3 of a mundane item's cost are labour, not 1/4.

[3SecondCultist]

Ah, the Lyre of Building. I always took the meaning of '3 days of work' here to assume around 8 hours of work a day performed by halfway proficient laborers. Not necessarily experts, but not useless either (I'd give them a +2 or +3, not +0). That would be 24 man-hours per labourer, or 2400 man-hours in total for 30 minutes of playing. Keep in mind that when the Lyre of Building is being used, the Perform check doesn't even come into play until the end of the first hour, so really you're looking at 4800 guaranteed work hours per single performance.

I actually had the Lyre of Building be integral to a setting I made back in my 3.5 days. The world was an unstable volcanic plane with lots of badlands and deserts (similar to Athas from Dark Sun), where constantly shifting tectonic plates and chain eruptions made large parts of the world very difficult to live in. So in order to survive, the big magical metropolis of the setting called Scoria collected nine Lyres of Building and trained an entire bardic tradition - called the Obsidian Orchestra - in stone lore and had them memorize every single street, building, and monument (a way of fluffing Bardic Knowledge). These bards would train their entire lives, practicing string instruments until their fingers bled (Skill Focus: Perform String) and learning magic to aid them in their task.

When the diviners predicted that Scoria was about to be destroyed in an earthquake or buried in ash, the people would abandon it en masse and travel to a new pre-scouted site. There, nine of the best Obsidian Orchestra members - and its considered the highest honour to be chosen to be one of the Nine - are given the Lyres of Building from the city's treasury and play for three days straight, rebuilding the city from solid rock perfectly from memory, exactly as it was. They are of course aided by other spellcasters (Clerics keep them standing through Create Food and Water and magically removing fatigue etc), but generally have a high enough bonus to auto-succeed on the 71 Perform checks they will need to make.

For reference, at a 1:4800 ratio of hours played to hours worked, that's 115,200 work hours per day of playing elapsed, or 345,600 work hours per performance. The total work hours for all nine of the Obsidian Orchestra is 3,110,400. Keep in mind that a Earth calendar year has about 8670 hours in total. So all told that's 358.75 work years, completed in 72 hours.

Sorry, that was slightly off-topic but I wanted to share a cool story about what I imagine Lyres of Building can actually do. It is a very underrated item in 3.5. :smallwink:

[Albions_Angel]

Why does Stormwrack deviate from the standard rule for crafting so massively? Normally 2/3 of a mundane item's cost are labour, not 1/4.

Probably for a number of reasons, the chief among them being the least satisfying - it "felt" right for the book and the flow of the game. It was probably a mix of the designers doing some research into how long things like that took to make in the real world, and then tempered with "how much downtime and material costs does this need for the game to still be fun". And that would have been based on their own internal metrics - ie, the regular in house friendly games that would have been going on.

But there are some other ways of looking at it.

Crafting rules in 3.5e are largely focused around equipment. In fact, while mundane crafting is the basis of all crafting in 3.5e, the system is clearly there to support the crafting of magic items, which are expensive, and which can be made cheaper by the party themselves.

Because of this, those rules focus on generally highly skilled individuals or very small teams building bespoke, high quality items to order, in a very short space of time.

Its not a simple matter of going "It costs X to make a wand, and a boat is Y times the size, so it costs Z=X*Y to make the boat". Thats not how boats get built.

Think of old footage of dockyards and shipyards from the early 20th century. And remember that while the tech changed, the working environment was much the same as it had been for hundreds of years.

Your Shipwrights, the guys who design the ship, and handle construction of the mission critical parts, they are equivalent to your wand makers. They are getting 2/3rds of the material costs (actually, its less than that, even for regular items. You pay 1/3rd for materials if you make it yourself, but the labour doesnt cost 2/3rds in that instance - you are also paying for markup on the materials, convenience of not doing it yourself, storage and transportation costs, middle men, tariffs, taxes, etc - labour is just one cog in the machine). But most of the people that work on the boat? Sure, they are "skilled" riveters, and I cant do what they did. But a riveting apprenticeship, while making you trained in riveting, doesnt make you a high skill worker. Thats the entire point. They are not getting paid loads and loads. They are getting paid peanuts. Because sure, they have been trained, but the training is days long, not years long, and there are, in theory, loads of people that could replace them.

So there is an "in universe" explanation. 1/4 is the price of labour rather than 2/3rds because its the average non-material cost between one or two shipwrights and 20-200 blokes with a hammer.

[Firechanter]

@3secondcultist
Cool story, bro ;) -- no honestly, this is exactly what a reasonable administration would do if it had access to multiple lyres of building. ^^
However, did you actually run the numbers to figure out how long that orchestra would need to rebuild the entire city? Bc even though there's 9 of them, 72 hours seems pretty short. More elaborately, if 72 hours of Obsidian Orchestra is worth some 3 million man-hours, that sounds like a frickin lot, but actually it's just what 100 living, breathing humans (who have to sleep and eat) can pull off in 12 years (working 8/6).
In short, I suspect that actually 100 workers with pre-modern, non-mechanized tools can't build a full city in 12 years. :p

(Not that it changes much for your setting... just have the orchestra play 3 weeks instead of 3 days or whatever... the citizens can live in tents for a while)

Whether those phantom "lyre workers" have a skill check of 0 or +4 -- well yeah it's a difference, but it's just 20% or so, so not a big deal either way compared to the general potential of the magic item.

--


On a more general note, regarding the cost calculation for "material" and "labour":
Keep in mind that in a pre-modern society (without magic), at the end of the day, virtually _everything_ is labour. There are no machines that do the work for you and have to be written off. (Very few exceptions for things like wind- or watermills.) As such, and seeing how 3E skill rules work, there basically isn't a cost for materials, bc that cost is _also_ just the gross income of the person who supplies the materials. Wood needs to be cut, iron mined and refined, you get the idea.

Also, as a side note, per 3E rules a mundane professional of any vocation can't be under- or overpaid -- you make a Profession or Craft check, and half of that is your weekly income in gold pieces, end of story. For a shipbuilder to get a ~1/3 cut of the invoice "just" for knowing how to build a ship, she'd have to have a Shipwright check around +110. :p

[unseenmage]

The skill check mining rules are in Races of Stone in the kobold section iirc.

Because the adjudication for digging a hole definitely needed to be hidden in an obscure late publication splat book and definitely NOT in the DMG. *sigh*

[Albions_Angel]

@3secondcultist
Cool story, bro ;) -- no honestly, this is exactly what a reasonable administration would do if it had access to multiple lyres of building. ^^
However, did you actually run the numbers to figure out how long that orchestra would need to rebuild the entire city? Bc even though there's 9 of them, 72 hours seems pretty short. More elaborately, if 72 hours of Obsidian Orchestra is worth some 3 million man-hours, that sounds like a frickin lot, but actually it's just what 100 living, breathing humans (who have to sleep and eat) can pull off in 12 years (working 8/6).
In short, I suspect that actually 100 workers with pre-modern, non-mechanized tools can't build a full city in 12 years. :p

(Not that it changes much for your setting... just have the orchestra play 3 weeks instead of 3 days or whatever... the citizens can live in tents for a while)

Whether those phantom "lyre workers" have a skill check of 0 or +4 -- well yeah it's a difference, but it's just 20% or so, so not a big deal either way compared to the general potential of the magic item.


I think you are VASTLY underestimating the amount pre-industrial people could get done in a short space of time. I did some digging and found that 2-3 million man hours gets you a reasonably sized medieval stone fortress (https://www.medievalists.net/2015/09/medieval-fort-building-101/#:~:text=Manual%20Labour&text=At%20approximately%202%2D3%20million,to%20fin ish%20the%20entire%20fortress.). Now, I will grant, you, a fortress is not a city, but it will house several hundred people and protect them if it needs to. And thats for a timber and stone fort with moat. Similar figures seem to be floating around for other castles throughout Europe (especially the UK). Out of interest, it turns out that castles tended to engage about 2000 people, from master craftsmen to labourers to people to dig the ditches and quarry the sand for mortar, and took about 4-6 months.

Now castles are at one end of the scale (excluding cathedrals, which are religious buildings and tended to be built with a extreme degree of care).

The other end of the scale are roundhouses. Roundhouses are fantastic. Most commonly used in the UK and Ireland, from the Bronze Age through to, in some cases, pre-industrial times. Roundhouses come in a variety of styles and sizes, typically between 5 and 15m in diameter (15-45 feet). They would house an extended family, and a few livestock for the bigger ones. Wattle and daub walls (sometimes partially or fully stone instead, but if so, usually drystone construction), a timber roof, and some sort of thatch or turf. Exceedingly simple, but estimates of how long it would take to make them are hard to come by. Modern roundhouses, and modern reconstructions of ancient roundhouses seem to take between 200 and 400 man hours (https://tlio.org.uk/tony-wrenchs-roundhouse-a-short-history/). This is where things get tricky though, as man hours probably dont scale linearly. Man hours implies that a job that takes 2 people 100 hours total (i.e. 200 man hours) would take 20 people 10 hours total. But I dont exactly buy that. Still, its all we have. So lets say a roundhouse for 8 people (not an unreasonable number from what I have read - remember, it would be easy to get 3 or even 4 generations under one roof - people dying young in ancient times is a fallacy created by average life expectancy being pulled down by high infant mortality and not early death in your 40s) takes 400 man hours start to finish. Our 3 million man hours gets us 7,500 roundhouses, or accommodation for 60,000 people. Thats... thats a lot of people. Bear in mind that the Doomsday book records Salisbury as having 102 households in 1086, placing it in the top 20% of cities by population in England at the time (https://opendomesday.org/place/SU1332/salisbury/), or if we use our estimate of 8 people per household, approximately 800 people. THAT is a medieval city. Canterbury had 262 households (https://opendomesday.org/place/TR1557/canterbury/) (1700 people). Note, the Doomsday book didnt list populations of very big places for... reasons? Still, for reference, an atypical city, like London, had a population of 30,000 in 1200 (https://www.britannica.com/place/London/History), while Jorvik (Viking York), another atypical city, had 15,000 in the mid 900s. (https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2017/research/researchers-bring-old-norse-language-back-to-life/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIn%20AD960%2C%20Jorvik%20was%20a n,Old%20Irish%20and%20Middle%20Welsh.%E2%80%9D) If we assume 2/3rds of the time goes to building roundhouses for people to live in, that is still accommodation for 40,000 people (larger than Medieval London), with another 1 million man hours for other buildings!

But roundhouses are just about as simple as it gets. Both London and Jorvik had 2-3 story buildings, made of timber and plaster. In fact, any medieval city of prodigious size is likely based on Imperial Rome, which utilised Insula or "islands" - high rise tower blocks housing 40-50 people, made of timber and mud bricks... and extremely flammable. These things were thrown up extremely quickly, but I cant find a figure for how quickly or how many man hours. Still, at 40 people per Insula, you only need to construct some 750 of them to house Medieval London, and I doubt each one takes (if we stick to our 2/3rds time for housing) 2.5 thousand man hours.



On a more general note, regarding the cost calculation for "material" and "labour":
Keep in mind that in a pre-modern society (without magic), at the end of the day, virtually _everything_ is labour. There are no machines that do the work for you and have to be written off. (Very few exceptions for things like wind- or watermills.) As such, and seeing how 3E skill rules work, there basically isn't a cost for materials, bc that cost is _also_ just the gross income of the person who supplies the materials. Wood needs to be cut, iron mined and refined, you get the idea.

Also, as a side note, per 3E rules a mundane professional of any vocation can't be under- or overpaid -- you make a Profession or Craft check, and half of that is your weekly income in gold pieces, end of story. For a shipbuilder to get a ~1/3 cut of the invoice "just" for knowing how to build a ship, she'd have to have a Shipwright check around +110. :p

Yeah, no. This has a number of issues with it. Not virtually everything is labour. It was the medieval period that saw Feudalism transition and give way to not just a lower and a ruling class, but a healthy and EXTREMELY wealthy MERCHANT class. Markups for trading, transporting, storing and even insuring goods were ludicrous. Medieval into Renaissance Italy basically built its wealth and power that way. Even before that, master craftsmen were very, very well paid.

And even before THAT, in the height of Feudalism, the cost wasnt mostly labour. The cost was mostly tax, tithe, and whatever else the landowner and church wanted. Up to 50% of a serf's income or produce could be sent to the landowner, then there was a tithe to the church, then there was rent (though often that was waved by the land owner, keeping the serfs in a perpetual debt). Labour was literally dirt cheap until after the black death when rural peasants vastly outnumbered city folk, and forced a change in the system. And even after that, things only got a little better.

And this is GitP. You know as well as I that while exploiting NPCs being built on the same chassis as PCs is part and parcel for this forum, you ALSO know that the rules break down for NPCs, because NPCs are not supposed to make profession checks. They are not supposed to roll for a living. They are not supposed to make spot checks unless it is directly relevant to the party. Because if they do, the game falls apart. You think the local blacksmith is charging 18 gp to every farmer that comes by for a prehistoric lawnmower? No, the clever clogs spots the adventuring party coming and marks up all his stuff. And dont say "war scythes are not grain scythes" because you ALSO also know that everyone who takes a scythe on their character draws or finds a picture with a nice, curved, Death-like grain scythe. This HAS to be true, or no farmer could ever harvest their crops - they only earn 1 gp per year. Not net. Gross. That is in the books (somewhere), and actually directly contradicts the average earnings from Profession (farmer) which work at somewhere near 5 gp per week.

[Bayar]

The skill check mining rules are in Races of Stone in the kobold section iirc.

Because the adjudication for digging a hole definitely needed to be hidden in an obscure late publication splat book and definitely NOT in the DMG. *sigh*

Races of the Dragon actually.

[Albions_Angel]

Races of the Dragon actually.

I mean, its not that bad. The DMG and PHB came out when the game was still "go in dungeon, kill monsters, get loot, find another dungeon". Digging holes, building ships, settling down and raising kids wasnt what mainstream adventurers did. AND a ton of rules got added when they released PHBII and DMGII. AND there was the rules compendium and spell compendium.

Take a moment and look at 5e, where they have said they wont release a DMG 2 or PHB 2, or even a MM2, so "how to be a good player" and "maybe you should have a session 0" is shoved in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft for some bonkers reason, and Tasha's Cauldron introduced "optional" rules for races (no fixed racial bonuses, no monster alignments) because its an optional book, which were then used as standard in literally every release since, meaning those new things cant work without Tasha's.

For how sprawling and long running 3.5e, I think it did a good job of condensing rules.

[Yogibear41]

Some Medieval Castles took years to build, possibly even up to a decade. Might give you an idea on time.

[Firechanter]

And this is GitP. You know as well as I that while exploiting NPCs being built on the same chassis as PCs is part and parcel for this forum, you ALSO know that the rules break down for NPCs, because NPCs are not supposed to make profession checks. They are not supposed to roll for a living. They are not supposed to make spot checks unless it is directly relevant to the party. Because if they do, the game falls apart. You think the local blacksmith is charging 18 gp to every farmer that comes by for a prehistoric lawnmower? No, the clever clogs spots the adventuring party coming and marks up all his stuff. And dont say "war scythes are not grain scythes" because you ALSO also know that everyone who takes a scythe on their character draws or finds a picture with a nice, curved, Death-like grain scythe. This HAS to be true, or no farmer could ever harvest their crops - they only earn 1 gp per year. Not net. Gross. That is in the books (somewhere), and actually directly contradicts the average earnings from Profession (farmer) which work at somewhere near 5 gp per week.

The key here is to spot data point outliers and eliminate them. Actually, the D&D price lists are, with the exception of fantasy materials or magic, surprisingly consistent. Of course the actual prices look inflationary compared to historical european medieval or renaissance price lists, but with the exception of ridiculous outliers like salt, they line up pretty well. And by the same metric, the "Earn a Living" rules also work out pretty well when you assume the typical NPC to be a lowlevel mundane, who may very well have maxed out ranks and a Skill Focus in their trade.

It's not the 18gp for a scythe that makes no sense, it's the ridiculous idea that a farmer would only make 1gp per year in a world with D&D-like currency values. Honestly I have no clue where that idea comes from. It's just as grotesque as the claim an unskilled labourer would make only 1sp per day -- if that was true, those unskilled labourers would be half starved and malnutritioned, dressed in rags because they could NEVER afford any clothes, and sleep in mud. Again, going by historical sources, such workers made maybe 20-30% less than a skilled worker -- which again lines up pretty well with what the Earn A Living rules predict.

Back to the income of a farmer: with typical pre-modern crop yields (European scenario), a single farmer could bring in a total crop yield of about 9 tons of grain per year. Even if 2/3 of those were taken away in form of socage, taxes and tithes, he'd still get to keep 3 tons for himself. Suppose he needs 1 ton to feed his own family of, he could still monetize 2 tons (which includes the possibility of using it as animal feed, then selling or trading those animals for other goods and services). According to the standard price table, the trade value of that disposable grain would be some 80GP. Keep in mind this is after a 66% tax burden, and on the other hand doesn't include any income outside of grain farming.
They won't be rich, but they make a lot more than 1gp/year.

I did check the historical price of a scythe, England 15th century: stated as 24 silver pennies, that's about 6 day's wages of a farmhand. So yes, the blacksmith charging 18gp is certainly ripping off the adventurers, but "only" by around factor 3 or so, not 300. Still, 18gp might actually be reasonable for a special-made "war scythe" whose blade is the same quality as a sword.

You know what's also a ripoff, btw? Full Plate armour. Lining up the historical price lists to D&D coin values, a full set should cost only some 600gp or so, not 1500. Without fabricate. xD

TL;DR, and going back to the Lyre of Building:
1gp per day is a pretty good baseline the daily productivity of a simple worker, going by D&D price lists (ignoring nonsensical outliers).

[Chronos]

Quoth Firechanter:

First off, I have no idea if the numbers you present have any basis in reality, bc I've never seen anyone hammering away at rock with a pickaxe. So let's have a look:
One 5 foot cube of rock (granite) has a mass of some 9 tons. So those 1.6 cubes a labourer is supposed to chop up in a day amount to some 15 tons of rocks turned to rubble. By someone with no physical strength to speak of (Str 10), might I add. As I said I don't know, but intuitively I'd say this figure is entirely outlandish.

Well, no less an authority than Tennessee Ernie Ford tells us that, in our world, a miner can be expected to process 16 tons per day (and be impoverished by his wages in the process). So 15 tons doesn't sound outlandish at all.

On the other hand, the rulebooks explicitly say that hardness can be bypassed by the proper tool for a job, and gives the specific example of a mining pick breaking through stone. So we shouldn't assume the laborer only does damage on a natural 20.

[remetagross]

I actually had the Lyre of Building be integral to a setting I made back in my 3.5 days. The world was an unstable volcanic plane with lots of badlands and deserts (similar to Athas from Dark Sun), where constantly shifting tectonic plates and chain eruptions made large parts of the world very difficult to live in. So in order to survive, the big magical metropolis of the setting called Scoria collected nine Lyres of Building and trained an entire bardic tradition - called the Obsidian Orchestra - in stone lore and had them memorize every single street, building, and monument (a way of fluffing Bardic Knowledge). These bards would train their entire lives, practicing string instruments until their fingers bled (Skill Focus: Perform String) and learning magic to aid them in their task.

When the diviners predicted that Scoria was about to be destroyed in an earthquake or buried in ash, the people would abandon it en masse and travel to a new pre-scouted site. There, nine of the best Obsidian Orchestra members - and its considered the highest honour to be chosen to be one of the Nine - are given the Lyres of Building from the city's treasury and play for three days straight, rebuilding the city from solid rock perfectly from memory, exactly as it was. They are of course aided by other spellcasters (Clerics keep them standing through Create Food and Water and magically removing fatigue etc), but generally have a high enough bonus to auto-succeed on the 71 Perform checks they will need to make.

For reference, at a 1:4800 ratio of hours played to hours worked, that's 115,200 work hours per day of playing elapsed, or 345,600 work hours per performance. The total work hours for all nine of the Obsidian Orchestra is 3,110,400. Keep in mind that a Earth calendar year has about 8670 hours in total. So all told that's 358.75 work years, completed in 72 hours.

Sorry, that was slightly off-topic but I wanted to share a cool story about what I imagine Lyres of Building can actually do. It is a very underrated item in 3.5. :smallwink:

Man, is that an awesome setting. Hat's off :smallsmile:

[Firechanter]

Well, no less an authority than Tennessee Ernie Ford tells us that, in our world, a miner can be expected to process 16 tons per day (and be impoverished by his wages in the process). So 15 tons doesn't sound outlandish at all.

That's after the invention of dynamite, though. ;)

[Ruethgar]

let's see, I'm going to use a "clearing a mine approach", per dungeon rules, a wall of unworked stone has an hardness of 8 and 900 hp, thats a 5 feet cubic. I'll approximate a miner doing his work to process one "unit" of stone only on a nat 20 with his pickaxe (heavy pick), because he doens't overcome the hardness otherwise. so a crit on average every 120 seconds for an average of 3.5=14 damage, minus the hardness 900/6 rounded up, 150 crits to destroy one cube of 5ft. stone, so 120*65 = 18000 seconds. One work day is 8 hours, or 28800 seconds, so we have 1.6 cubes of stone "processed" by one person on average in one day, so the lyre "destroys" 160 5feet cubes of stone every 30 minutes. To put it in a tunnel perspective, that's a 2x2x40 long tunnel every 30 minutes, through solid rock, per 30 minutes...

Untrained labor using RotD mining rules puts is at an untrained average of a human doing 2.5x5x5 per day so for 300 that would be 150 5ft cubes per day.

[rel]

Interesting, I didn't know there were actual mining rules somewhere.
My own house rule is 5 cubic feet per hour + an additional 5 feet per point of strength bonus. Tools required, cave ins likely if you don't have shoring materials or fail a profession miner or knowledge architecture check.

[thompur]

If your Bard is a Warforged, they can play a lot longer.