I need DnD equivalent WMDs

[Dark Herald]

I (the DM) accidentally started a communist revolution, and the next natural step is to have a nuclear war. My campaign is high fantasy, with flying castles and a complex magical banking system. But:

I need something that destroys cities and devastates the population. My original though would be multipule deployed launch tarasques, but I think there is some less permanent way to level cities. This "Technology", whatever it is, has just recently been discovered, or just recently become affordable, justified, available. What I need from you is some mechanical way to do lots of destruction.

• Needs to level cities and kill people, obviously.
• Should cost about 10 million gold
• If any magic is involved, it should be practical, not humerous or convoluted.
• Does not need to leave radiation, but it could
• I'd prefer nothing too bizarre

I don't want a spell that summons a billion chickens into the city square. I do want something that explodes once, has devastating consequences, and is relatively simple, but still hard to produce.

Thanks to those that help

[Mongoose87]

They're called Arcane Spellcasters.

[Random832]

Locate City.

[Pharaoh's Fist]

Summon a giant worm and use it to sink the city.

[Prime32]

For 10 million gold, you'd probably be looking into some custom effect anyway. Do you want an exact damage figure? Because if it's high enough to kill everything anway, there's not much point.

Just give the item the effect of "destroys everything within a few miles". Everything other than that is just fluff - maybe it pulls a large amount of energy from the Negative Energy Plane into a "capacitor" then releases it in a massive burst. Maybe everyone within the area is affected by flesh to stone. Maybe it drives everyone within the area insane so that they kill each other.


If you wanted something significantly cheaper, you could use a metamagicked locate city spell, or put two ring gates which have been modified for unlimited use in a vacuum to accelerate an obdurium rod to relativistic speeds before firing it at the target.

[hamishspence]

Apocalypse from the Sky as written is a bit like a low-powered nuke- it requires an artifact as a focus (or component, sources are divided on the subject) but has a radius of 10 miles per caster level and does 10d6 damage to everything (buildings, objects, ground, creatures- everything) within the area.

Damage is fire, sonic, or acid- your choice.

Casting it is very bad for the caster though- massive corruption damage.

Aside from rules-bending like the Locate City bomb, this is one of the largest area damage spells.

[Reptilius]

Are we talking about something on the scale of The Mourning, or just destroying a city?

[Mongoose87]

Are we talking about something on the scale of The Mourning, or just destroying a city?

In my group, we caused the Mourning.

[Oslecamo]

Catapults that fire balls miniaturized by magic(there's a spell for it, cant remember the name), and then return to normal in midair., crushing everything below.

Just imagine, you're happily living your life, when you see some dust falling in the sky, and then it expands to hundreds or even thousands of building-sized rocks wich pllumet to the ground.

Not exactly an explosion, but it will leave big craters.

[ZeroNumerous]

You really only need three things to make a WMD.

1) Locate City Bomb magic item that casts the spell when a specific phrase is spoken. Add Heighten to the Locate City Bomb and try to raise it as high as possible.

2) Someone capable of casting Magic Mouth, Animate Object and Rary's Telepathic Bond. Cast it on the magic item then encase the magic item in a box of steel or something similar. Tell the mouth to say the phrase when it seems the ground come within five feet(remember to keep it 15 feet in the air at all time at this point). Cast Telepathic bond on the animated rug.

3) A colossal animated flying rug.

The rug flies over whatever area you want to devastate with the item on it's back. When the rug is over the target you tell it to drop the item. Item drops, magic mouth goes off, item casts Locate City Bomb. 10 miles/CL is now utterly devoid of civilian life.

[RTGoodman]

With that much gold, you could basically just create an epic spell that eradicates all life in a sufficiently-big radius and leaves "radiation" that lasts for a year and a day or somesuch. Take a look at some of the examples, and then figure out what seeds you need and go to town.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Item drops, magic mouth goes off, item casts Locate City Bomb.

I think that would break the "magic mouths can't use command words or trigger magic" rule, but you could turn the rug into an animated item and have it just use the bomb itself.

[BigPapaSmurf]

How about a magical material which when burned in a particular way gives off a vapor which has an exteme corrosive effect on metal/stone.

Wizards towers exploding should always cause epic disasters for the surrounding area. A city sized stone to mud spell, if its raining you get a bonus lahar for extra damage.

Open a portal to a massive planet/object and have the gravity start pulling everything in.

Open a portal to a plane and have an army of rust monsters flow out of it.

Theres always new ways to combine portable holes with bags of holding.

Or you could just go with one of the ten thousand natural ways a city could be destroyed, a thousand yard sinkhole for example, opening previously unknown underdark areas...pyroclastic flow/tsunami

Or a good old fashioned house-sized meteor

If the city was built on sandy/moist soil, an earthquake could cause liqufaction on a large scale causeing every building to sink into the ground and vanish...

Or there is the always reliable, piss off a really powerful NPC/monster method.

How about invasive species, anyone from the SW USA can tell you how the kudzu vine is slowly covering the entire region threatening to kill/cover everything in it's path, fantasy plants can be much more destructive/speedy. Vines and roots can tear down buildings like nothing.

there you go..

[Dark Herald]

Edit That ^ is what i'm talking about. thanks.


thanks for the replies. I was hoping, though, for something besides "magic explosion". But that type of effect may be part of the whole.

The other part of the bargain is that it can't just be something that anyone high enough level could produce. The locate city bomb, in addition to being questionably legal, has no significant costs or time requirements. These need to be something that only the major powers can get a hold of, because the players using these would probably not work out well, for several reasons.

I imagined something besides epic spell with XDX damage and a 10 mile range. Something to really fit the fantasy nuke theme instead of emulating a modern nuke. Whatever. Don't look a gift post in the mouth. It's not like the LCB is completely useless.

[aivanther]

Decanter of Endless Water Acid. ;)

Bag of Holding/Portable Hole thrown together in center of town, especially next to a central keep or something

Staff of Power retributive strike cluster bomb

I'm sure there's a few other ways you could get creative

[MickJay]

I thought it was finally established that Locate City would, at best, make people jump a few feet up (or drop them on their knees)? It's not "rule bending", it's outright misinterpreting them.

[hamishspence]

I imagined something besides epic spell with XDX damage and a 10 mile range. Something to really fit the fantasy nuke theme instead of emulating a modern nuke. Whatever. Don't look a gift post in the mouth. It's not like the LCB is completely useless.

Apocalyse isn't technically epic.

Erupt from Serpent Kingdoms is shorter ranged, but also pretty nasty- 9th level cleric spell, 10 fire damage per caster level (summons up lava from underground), 100 ft radius per caster level, sets things on fire, and:

"leaves the area a blackened ruin upon which nothing will grow for a full year"

On minus side, 0 ft range- you cast it at your feet.

[Random832]

I imagined something besides epic spell with XDX damage and a 10 mile range. Something to really fit the fantasy nuke theme instead of emulating a modern nuke. Whatever. Don't look a gift post in the mouth. It's not like the LCB is completely useless.

To fit the fantasy nuke theme - I've always liked the idea of a spell that leaves a neat spherical hole in the terrain.

Maybe an Epic Plane Shift to some hostile environment?

[This is my first time designing an epic spell]
Transport Seed (27 base)
Interplanar: +4
Change from personal to Area: +15
Area: 20 foot radius: +2
Area incr. 100%: +4
Area incr. 100%: +4
Area incr. 100%: +4 (40 foot radius*)
Repeat 10 more times : +120 (40960 ft ~= 7 miles**)
Total Spellcraft DC: 176
[I couldn't find how to change the range when it starts out as Touch, so the caster apparently has to go to the city and then shift himself out after it is done]

(Incidentally, why is there no Mitigating Factor for expensive material components?)

* I interpret this as taking three applications of this factor to double a radius
**From the movement tables, a mile in the D&D world is 6000 feet.

This relies on two questionable rule interpretations - allowing the "area increase" factor to stack exponentially (without which the DC would be in the millions), and allowing changing from target to area to make it ignore the weight limit (without which the DC would be in the trillions) - it could be made more manageable by not shifting a ridiculous amount of worthless underground stone, but then the crater wouldn't look as cool.

[Asbestos]

Catapults that fire balls miniaturized by magic(there's a spell for it, cant remember the name), and then return to normal in midair., crushing everything below.

Just imagine, you're happily living your life, when you see some dust falling in the sky, and then it expands to hundreds or even thousands of building-sized rocks wich pllumet to the ground.

Not exactly an explosion, but it will leave big craters.

Are you perhaps talking of Shrink Item?

[hamishspence]

(Incidentally, why is there no Mitigating Factor for expensive material components?)

Mythals can have some form of exotic mitigating factor.

For example:
Lost Empires of Faerun
You die with no ressurrection possible: -50 DC. (this can be taken for all the casters in the epic spell).

Champions of Ruin
Destroy minor artifact: -50 DC.
So, if an artifact is your spell component, DC drops quite a lot.

[subject42]

How advanced are your cities?

Given epic level casting and standard fantasy construction, Warp Wood + Stone to Flesh could be pretty devastating.

Any wooden structure or support member would immediately break down or collapse as the weight of the structure above it was suddenly transmitted in odd directions. Any stone would collapse into a pile of lean meat, taking down buildings and destroying flagstone roads. If water is transferred through aqueducts, it would trash infrastructure pretty badly, too. Once it started to rot, it would attract vermin that would then spread disease and generally skeeve out the population.

Is utter destruction, disease, and rotten meat enough?

[Fostire]

Apocalyse isn't technically epic.

Erupt from Serpent Kingdoms is shorter ranged, but also pretty nasty- 9th level cleric spell, 10 fire damage per caster level (summons up lava from underground), 100 ft radius per caster level, sets things on fire, and:

"leaves the area a blackened ruin upon which nothing will grow for a full year"

On minus side, 0 ft range- you cast it at your feet.

Well, he has 10 million gold to spend, so maybe he can craft a custom magic item that can cast it at a higher range.

Another nasty one is the anti-osmium bomb

[Elderac]

A massive Fuel Air Explosive might work. It might require some magic to get a significant quantity of something like methane pressurized and sealed in a jar and then a delayed fireball to act as a trigger when the jar is broken and mixes with the local air. Dropping alchemist fire might work as well.

For delivery, you could very well have the jar rolled into the city on a wagon and left somewhere an agent could shatter the jar (more like huge vase) toss the alchemist fire and get out of Dodge.

Magic might be required for the agent to reach minimum safe distance.

I don't know if this would level a large city, but should be devastating to most smaller settlements and the resulting fires should destroy what the initial concussion does not. The city walls might remain, but not much else.

Just quick thought on something not entirely magical.

[Indon]

Custom-created Wights to be much higher-HD, allowing for a super-power Wightocalypse?

[Curmudgeon]

Pay the list prices for flasks of acid, and drop them from flying carpets using the volley rules in Heroes of Battle. 10 million gp should buy quite a bit of acid damage.

[Erts]

How about a massive transmutation spell that shrinks a city so it can fit in a hand, and then the wizard crushes it in his hand?

[Mongoose87]

How about a massive transmutation spell that shrinks a city so it can fit in a hand, and then the wizard crushes it in his hand?

This one would probably be worth the most Cool Points.

[VirOath]

Custom made, giant sized Portable Hole, then put it in a Bag of Holding.

The depth of a Portable Hole is 10 feet, which is the dimension of the space around it that is sucked out of the plane. Increasing that depth should increase the blast radius.

Or you can see SCS's Campaign Archive. Lots of ideas there.

Custom-created Wights to be much higher-HD, allowing for a super-power Wightocalypse?

Standard Wrights can do this. Basic numbers in Spawn Rules, let them loose in a city. 90% of the commoners will fall, and the higher level NPCs will get overrun. You just need a lot of Wrights to start with.

[Erts]

Hmmmmm..... The problem with this is that you need a solution which destroys souls, as a powerful enough being could undo all the damage.

[Yora]

Custom-created Wights to be much higher-HD, allowing for a super-power Wightocalypse?

Win, I'd say. ^^