Who can build a city in a day? Runecaster? Constructor? (Building a city thread 1.0)

[Gavinfoxx]

Let's presume one is ignoring cost reduction techniques to allow, say, an Artificer to make an At-Will item of Wall of Stone and Stone Shape and Fabricate, for now. I'm well aware of those! Those let anyone with appropriate skills make a city, I'm looking more for something that's more, the person actively using their abilities as an active part of the process.

I'm also not interested in a Malkonvoker making an army of Planar Bound creatures, to do all the construction for you. Or a Thrallherd turning a large group of people into slave labor. Or a Dread Necromancer focusing on massive armies of skeletons with hammers and nails.

No, what I'm interested in, is, using a small (ie, under 5) number of main actors (obtained by Leadership, planar ally, planar binding, craft construct, wild cohort, improved familiar, etc. etc.), what classes (and particular builds) are best suited to having the most ways to create large amounts of infrastructure by levels 12-13 or so? How would a Shaper going into Constructer go about this? A Conjurer or Transmuter going into Master Specialist? An Archivist going into Runecaster? Assume a few 1/day magic items of particular absolutely required spells are okay, as are day-long effects for some magic items, but at-will casting every six seconds is frowned upon.

Edit: I think I'm setting the standards too high. Assuming the person is, themselves, casting the spells and using their own abilities, how useful can someone be for construction projects by 13th level? Will a Constructor be actually good at construction? How can we maximize this?

Edit 2: Switching to a new thread: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?637127-Character-Concept-Help-Needed-Magical-Construction-Foreman!

[Psyren]

The easiest way would be some means of making illusions solid, then you can build any city your heart desires.

Alternatively, Create Demiplane lets you add "linked structures" whenever cast, which can explicitly be a series of connected towers or rooms. Just make {insert metropolis with skyways or subways} here. Each casting takes 4 hours so you can cover your plane in cities this way.

[Akal Saris]

Yeah, a Shadowcraft Mage that achieves 100%+ real illusions could be very flexible in mimicking any conjuration (creation) spells that you can think of, like Wall of Stone (and then pair with Fabricate). I'm not sure how to make demishadow illusions permanent though - none of the spells are on the Permanency list, and I think casting Permanent Image doesn't interact well with the shadowcraft mage's abilities.

My own suggestion would be to have somebody in the party with ranks in Perform to use a Lyre of Building (13K GP) from the DMG. As long as you have somebody with +17 to perform, they can auto-succeed on the lyre's checks to play continuously. If the character played for 16 hours straight, that would be the equivalent of 100 builders working for 48 days. The nice thing is that getting a +17 to perform can fit into a fairly wide set of builds when you're considering a party of five.

It could get pricey quickly, but casting a few scrolls of Polymorph any Object to create some key materials (such as 150 cubic feet of high-quality steel, marble, or fine timber) could help immensely to create on-the-spot materials for use with a Fabricate spell or with the Lyre. (Edit: Though Polymorph any Object can't create any objects of "great intrinsic value", so there's going to need to be some at-the-table discussion about which materials are 'common value' for building a city vs. 'great value' items. Maybe steel or marble is out of the question)

[Saintheart]

Runecaster's drawback on this is going to be that when you create the rune, you make any choices required at the time the spell is cast, i.e. likely it's the same shape of stone wall or length and dimensions each time. For real, proper, mass rune ab/use, an Archivist/Runecaster has to be level 13 minimum since you need to be at least Runecaster 8 to create X-use-per-day or permanent runes. Still, could be useful for good old Wall of Salt = fortune shenanigans, or Wall of anything you need.

[Gavinfoxx]

Level 13 is fine. How well would a Shaper/Condtructor with a few of the psionic crafting feats do at creating a workforce and creating truly real materials to work with?

Also, I'm interested in making something permanently real, primarily. Not just 'real for the time being' shadow-matter-backed illusions.

What profession skill is best for managing moderately large groups of magical laborers in construction and infrastructure projects?

What are some relevant feats that are useful in magically augmented construction of very large mundane things?

Aren't there rules for mechanical things and technological devices that replicate spell effects and don't require a caster level and 8 hours of work somewhere?

[AvatarVecna]

A small city has population from 5000-12000, and a large city has population from 12000-25000. Let's average at 15k for a Large City that's on the smaller side. The GP limit for a Large City (the maximum price of thing that can be bought/sold) is 40000 gp. The "amount of ready cash" in a community (that is to say, the max price of the sum of all of a particular thing that's available to be bought/sold) is half the GP limit times a tenth the population, so 0.5 x 40000 x .1 x 15000 = 30,000,000 gp. That means that if you wanted to purchase as many Rings Of Freedom Of Movement as you could, the community could cough up 750 of them before you ran them out of such rings (at least in theory).

A simple house costs 1000 gp. A grand house costs 5000 gp. This means that, if you brought enough cash to buy literally every single building, they would be able to sell you 30000 simple houses and 6000 grand houses (with all other buildings being too expensive to even consider purchasing in a settlement this size). Keep in mind that while it says "houses", this is also the kind of buildings you would purchase for use as the storefront for a business, so while there's more buildings than people by a wide margin, it's not quite as problematic as it seems. Some richer people may well own many houses/grand houses, either as alternate homes or just to make one big home. In any case, that puts the property value of the whole city at a grand total of 60 million gp.

If you started with 20 million gp worth of raw materials, you would need to make 4.2 billion sp worth of progress in a week in order to build the city in a day. With 5 people working, we can cut that down to 840 million sp worth per person. If all five of them can maintain a +28978 bonus to all the craft skills necessary to build a city, and they're properly abusing epic Accelerated Crafting rules, then the five of them would build 60004124.39 gp worth of buildings in a day. If we wanna be really careful, then we could note that the DCs won't always play nice (accelerated crafting raises DC by 10 points each time, so sometimes you won't end up with the DC you like, and heck, you're not rolling that many dice anyway - it's possible bad rolls will screw you over. To protect yourself from low DCs and bad rolls, probably best to have at least a +28987 bonus to the skills you'll be using.

Cancer Mage 1 getting Festering Anger will have NI Strength after waiting long enough. Shiba Protector 10 can use their highest attribute instead of the normal attribute when rolling a thing (up to [highest attribute modifier] times per day). Somebody with both would be very feat-starved unless they were stealing class abilities, but it's a possible build. Savage Progression Illithid {whatever} 7/Illithid Savant 7 could eat the brain of a cancer mage and a shiba protector and steal both abilities, for example. Downside to this method is that it takes ~80 years to build up that much strength...although if you're an Illithid Savant, you can add three creature's ranks to your own (bypassing the normal HD on max ranks). So 17 ranks from yourself, and then three times however many you can find in an easy-to-eat brain. Maybe you went to three metropolises, found three Commoner 28s specializing in the craft skills you wanted, and ate them for +31 ranks each? That has you at 110 ranks, and now it only takes...79 years. >.>

...

Something that might be easier to pull off (and is therefore cheesier than Illithid Savant pulling NI skill shenanigans) would be some neat synergy among easier-to-get abilities. The gist here:

1) We have a wizard who has full ranks in autohypnosis, a single rank in each of the relevant craft skills, and access to the masochism spell. Casts masochism on self.

2) We have a cleric who casts delay death and divine insight on the wizard.

3) We have a marshal boosting the wizard's wis checks (specifically for autohypnosis).

4) We have a d2 crusader attack the wizard.

All of this should happen the same round. Delay Death makes it so you can't die from HP damage for the duration regardless of how low you get. Epic Autohypnosis makes it so that no matter how low into the negatives your HP gets, you're still conscious and acting normally. Marshal, divine insight, and full ranks are making sure the Wizard can nail the DC 30 Autohypnosis to be awake and active. Masochism gives the wizard a bonus to all skill checks equal to 1/10th the damage the wizard took last round. The wizard took NI damage, so he has +NI/10 to all skills, which is still +NI. Every round, the wizard finishes crafting NI amounts of that craft skill's contribution to the city-building. Let's say this requires 10 different craft skills, so the wizard spends 10 rounds crafting the entire city, basically regardless of how big it is, and then collapses dead because he's taken 10*NI damage, and received no healing. Cleric casts Revivify.

I'm sure there's some other methods, but I'm still woozy from vax.

[Gavinfoxx]

Ya, those particular rules aren't really what I'm going for, they don't work overly well, as can be shown with your example. But ways to do extra amounts of work and labor and creating and shaping of materials to bypass those gp worth of value checks entirely is more what I'm going for.

[loky1109]

Beholder with Disintegration Finesse feat.

[Maat Mons]

Does the "no cost reduction" thing only apply to magic item prices? If so, using metamagic reducers can allow you to Persist the Undermaster spell for ludicrous stoneworking abilities.

Since you said custom all-day items are okay, an item that continuously keeps the wearer under the effects of the Undermaster spell would also be kosher. Or, if you don't like that, and Artificer could use Metamagic Spell Trigger to spend 7 charges from a custom staff has the Undermaster spell in it, to cast Persistent Undermaster.

Another option is to finagle the services of a Sun Giant.

[SangoProduction]

Spheres of Power.
Creation sphere. Create Materials + Fabricate = permanent creation.
For Fabricate: "You must succeed at the appropriate skill check to make complex items and work at a rate of 1 round per 10 cubic feet when working in this manner."
This gets us 144,000 cubic feet in 24 hours. Unless I messed up my rounds to days conversion. (Just say cubic feet = square feet, because ow, brain hurts)

The smallest city and country is the Vatican city, which is 0.17 square miles... while 144,000 square feet is only 0.0052 square miles, or around 3.3 acres.

So... not quite, but that's definitely one impressive construct for one day's work. It also ignores the need to move within range, since surely whoever hired you would have a team who would carry you. Or pull a cart at least.

[Eurus]

A character with 10 levels of Metamind and Synchronicity shenanigans can do it, one standard action at a time... that's normally level 15 without early entry cheese, though. There might be a way to get the infinite PP to pull it off earlier with Bestow Power combos, I'm not sure.

[Gavinfoxx]

Does the "no cost reduction" thing only apply to magic item prices? If so, using metamagic reducers can allow you to Persist the Undermaster spell for ludicrous stoneworking abilities.
.Another option is to finagle the services of a Sun Giant.

How would you make this work at level 12?? And metamagic reducers is okay, the point is to be a person who is, with what they bring to the table, a construction company


Spheres of Power.


WotC 3.5 please.

[Darg]

Does it need to be a permanent city? And how are we defining a city? By population density, total population, number of buildings?

[Gavinfoxx]

Permanent city, or as much of one as possible. In general, I'm looking for the best 'By what they bring to the table, this person and their cohorts and summons are the best possible caster based construction crew, whose role cannot be duplicated merely by stealing their gear'.

[Maat Mons]

An 11th-level Artificer could activate a scroll of Undermaster, and use their Metamagic Spell Completion class feature to apply the Persistent Spell metamagic feat to it. A Wizard 5 / Incantatrix 3 could activate a scroll of Undermaster, and use their Metamagic Effect class feature to apply the Persistent Spell metamagic feat to it.

A [whatever] 5 / Malconvoker 8 can call a 14-HD creature with Planar Ally/Binding. Or a [whatever] 11 with the Infernal Bargainer feat can do the same thing. That's enough for a Fiendish Sun Giant. Or it's enough to call a Planetar. A Planetar casts as a 17th-level Cleric, so they could use Greater Planar Ally or Gate to bring you things you couldn't call on your own.

A 1012th-level Telepath could control a small army of Sun Giants. Maybe pay a Druid to cast Return to Nature on them a few times, to make them more portable. Though their normal Huge size could be handy in it's own right for construction.

[Jack_Simth]

Perhaps a bard with a lyre of bulding? Use Warforged or Necropolitan to ignore fatigue issues. That item puts out massive quantities of labor very quickly, so as long as basic city materials are available (say, a forest to fell for wood), it would do pretty well.

[Particle_Man]

If you allow pathfinder classes, an Earth based kineticist could be good at moving the earth around at will (shift earth, greater; stone sculpted; arguably seismic master).

[Gavinfoxx]

An 11th-level Artificer could activate a scroll of Undermaster, and use their Metamagic Spell Completion class feature to apply the Persistent Spell metamagic feat to it. A Wizard 5 / Incantatrix 3 could activate a scroll of Undermaster, and use their Metamagic Effect class feature to apply the Persistent Spell metamagic feat to it.

A [whatever] 5 / Malconvoker 8 can call a 14-HD creature with Planar Ally/Binding. Or a [whatever] 11 with the Infernal Bargainer feat can do the same thing. That's enough for a Fiendish Sun Giant. Or it's enough to call a Planetar. A Planetar casts as a 17th-level Cleric, so they could use Greater Planar Ally or Gate to bring you things you couldn't call on your own.

A 1012th-level Telepath could control a small army of Sun Giants. Maybe pay a Druid to cast Return to Nature on them a few times, to make them more portable. Though their normal Huge size could be handy in it's own right for construction.

Again, I'm looking to maximize usefulness in running a magical construction firm where they bring the primary mojo and it isn't stuff they buy or have crafted for them, but the value their innate abilities add to the project. How much utility can a single person bring to a construction project via their class abilities and a SMALL amount of permanent cohorts and minions?



Perhaps a bard with a lyre of bulding? Use Warforged or Necropolitan to ignore fatigue issues. That item puts out massive quantities of labor very quickly, so as long as basic city materials are available (say, a forest to fell for wood), it would do pretty well.

Thank you for giving me a reasonable answer, but I am somewhat more interested in stuff that's very obviously not as 'stealable' as the Lyre of Building. Any suggestions?


If you allow pathfinder classes, an Earth based kineticist could be good at moving the earth around at will (shift earth, greater; stone sculpted; arguably seismic master).

Sadly, no Pathfinder or 3rd party without WotC imprint.

[Maat Mons]

Perhaps you could be more specific on why you don't like the Sun Giant plan? You said some minions are okay. And it's not like you need very many of them, so the comment about number of minions seems really off-base.

Each Sun Giant gets you 4,800 castings of Wall of Stone in an 8-hour workday. And each casting is 500 cubic feet of stone. How big is this city? Using a random figure from Google, the keep of the Château de Langeais contains 42,012 cubic feet of stone. You can pop out 57 of those every day with just one minion.

[Yogibear41]

Dao (8hd outsider, manual of the planes) can cast Wall of Stone at will. So Planar Ally/Binding one of them can get alot done for you. However Wall of Stone more or less only connects two already existing pieces of stone, so if you had a decent amount of ground work already it could accomplish a lot in a very little amount of time. Its not a solution in and of itself, but it could be a pretty important piece.

[Malphegor]

How would you make this work at level 12?? And metamagic reducers is okay, the point is to be a person who is, with what they bring to the table, a construction company
.

Oh thanks to Sublime Chord being able to access high level sor/wiz spells at a very low caster level, an Artificer can hit 9ths at around level 6 to 7 by emulating one since their crafting works off caster level emulation. This will almost certainly be refused by any DM, but by RAW yeah artificers are the quickest to 9ths afaik to be able to access that kind of thing.

The only caveat is since you’re emulating a sublime chord you might have to hum a tune while you’re building!

[AvatarVecna]

As far as the Lyre Of Building goes, it doesn't even specify how fast it builds since it doesn't clarify the bonus of the "human laborers". Craft can't be done untrained, so this isn't like the "day laborers" thing mentioned in the Profession skill description. A reasonable assumption might be +10 (4 ranks, Int +1, skill focus +3, masterwork tools +2). Such a person will aim for DC 11, average rolling 20.5 total, and will thus average 22.55 gp of progress per week. Lyre assumes 100 people putting in 3 days of effort, so that's ~966.42 gp of progress per half-hour playing the lyre. If 5 people played Lyres for 24 hours straight, they would make ~231942.86 gp of progress.

Smaller bonuses will accomplish less, partially because smaller successes, but also because craft DC don't tend to go lower than 10.

[Doctor Despair]

As far as the Lyre Of Building goes, it doesn't even specify how fast it builds since it doesn't clarify the bonus of the "human laborers". Craft can't be done untrained, so this isn't like the "day laborers" thing mentioned in the Profession skill description. A reasonable assumption might be +10 (4 ranks, Int +1, skill focus +3, masterwork tools +2). Such a person will aim for DC 11, average rolling 20.5 total, and will thus average 22.55 gp of progress per week. Lyre assumes 100 people putting in 3 days of effort, so that's ~966.42 gp of progress per half-hour playing the lyre. If 5 people played Lyres for 24 hours straight, they would make ~231942.86 gp of progress.

Smaller bonuses will accomplish less, partially because smaller successes, but also because craft DC don't tend to go lower than 10.

Wouldn't builders generically be taking 10? It's not as though they need particularly inspired work individually when working in a crew of 100

[noob]

Be a psion with a strongheart vest(one feat) and that self consuming power point recovering feat.
Recover power points as fast as you want this way.
Get bitten by a psionic mole and get an awesome psionic disease that forces you to cast 1 more power each turn(so turn 1 you use one, turn 2 you use 2 and so on).
By casting 207360000 psionic abilities (which is what happens over less than 24 hours if you caught the sickness a day ago) you can probably build a city.
Your city building rate will keep increasing at a linear rate forever or until you stop being ill.

[Gavinfoxx]

Perhaps you could be more specific on why you don't like the Sun Giant plan? You said some minions are okay. And it's not like you need very many of them, so the comment about number of minions seems really off-base.

Each Sun Giant gets you 4,800 castings of Wall of Stone in an 8-hour workday. And each casting is 500 cubic feet of stone. How big is this city? Using a random figure from Google, the keep of the Château de Langeais contains 42,012 cubic feet of stone. You can pop out 57 of those every day with just one minion.

A lot of it is about visibility/obviousness, and how much they'd expect to be paid, and how many you might need, and the fact that they'd be visibly casting the spell over and over again (even if a spell like ability, there's still a certain level of obviousness), and how big they are with regards to fitting in odd areas of a job site. Also, there's no Stone Shape, Greater Stone Shape, Stone Metamorphosis, Fabricate here... :(


Be a psion with a strongheart vest(one feat) and that self consuming power point recovering feat.
Recover power points as fast as you want this way.
Get bitten by a psionic mole and get an awesome psionic disease that forces you to cast 1 more power each turn(so turn 1 you use one, turn 2 you use 2 and so on).
By casting 207360000 psionic abilities (which is what happens over less than 24 hours if you caught the sickness a day ago) you can probably build a city.
Your city building rate will keep increasing at a linear rate forever or until you stop being ill.

What specific psionic powers, and relatively easy to get CSTPE legal spells let you build a city? What specific Shaper/Constructor powers?

[noob]

What specific psionic powers, and relatively easy to get CSTPE legal spells let you build a city? What specific Shaper/Constructor powers?

Stone wall, shape stone, teleport all converted to psionic powers and granted to you through psionic surgery.

[Gavinfoxx]

Is the Constructor's Utility Construct actually useful for utility in construction?

[AvatarVecna]

Wouldn't builders generically be taking 10? It's not as though they need particularly inspired work individually when working in a crew of 100

For some reason I've been under the impression that you can't take 10 on craft checks as a result of the possibility of failure and wasting materials. If taking 10 is allowed, that changes the average "roll" from 10.5 to 10, so unless the DC is being raised to compensate, that's actually worse? We could raise the DC to 20 then (provided we're ignore the possibility of failure this would usually carry), and that could have a lyre of building putting out 1714.28 gp of progress per half hour, or (if we have a party of 5 each using a lyre for a full 24 hours) 411428.57 gp of progress. It helps a bit, but not that much.

[Gavinfoxx]

Alright. I think I need to remake this thread with lessons learned in how to ask for what I actually want help with..

[RandomPeasant]

Stone wall, shape stone, teleport all converted to psionic powers and granted to you through psionic surgery.

Pretty sure that fails the "reasonably easy to get" test he's asking for.

[Eurus]

I mean, there aren't really any obvious neat-and-tidy spells and powers that are intended to do this, you know? You're asking for a fairly extreme feat, so it's probably going to involve some manner of either really specialized character building, really intensive prep-work, or finding some quirk in the rules and abusing it until it cracks open (arbitrarily high skill checks, infinite minions, etc). And there's no single "create city" spell, so you're almost certainly going to be finding a somewhat appropriate spell like Fabricate and casting it a few thousand times. *shrug*

[noob]

If you are willing to have a false city you can use mirage arcana.

[Gavinfoxx]

Switching to a new thread: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?637127-Character-Concept-Help-Needed-Magical-Construction-Foreman!

[AvatarVecna]

I mean, there aren't really any obvious neat-and-tidy spells and powers that are intended to do this, you know? You're asking for a fairly extreme feat, so it's probably going to involve some manner of either really specialized character building, really intensive prep-work, or finding some quirk in the rules and abusing it until it cracks open (arbitrarily high skill checks, infinite minions, etc). And there's no single "create city" spell, so you're almost certainly going to be finding a somewhat appropriate spell like Fabricate and casting it a few thousand times. *shrug*

This, essentially. Big scale stuff isn't off the table for 3.5 in general, but you need to be either mid-epic or really cheesy for it to be feasible, or very deep epic/NI cheese for it to be trivial. Persisted Undermaster is probably the least cheesy method you're gonna find, at least outside "epic spell that isn't mitigated to hell and back".

Closest you might get out of the box is the "Ice Castle" spell, which creates a single keep that lasts 24 hours and is also made of ice.

[Gavinfoxx]

This, essentially. Big scale stuff isn't off the table for 3.5 in general

Thanks, but Ive changed the scope of my question. See the edit and the link to the new version.

[AvatarVecna]

Thanks, but Ive changed the scope of my question. See the edit and the link to the new version.

Yes, I saw.