Fun With Quintessence

[Lysander]

Quintessence is silvery slime that's basically congealed time. You can coat things with it to put them into stasis. What's neat is that quintessance once created is a lasting item. Anyone can use it, store it, and put it on and off things. It can even be reused sometimes. It also has the side effect of hampering psionics in large quantities.

What are your best ideas for how to use quintessence? Something like preserving food or putting a creature in stasis is an obvious use. But there are a lot of clever ways to exploit it.

It can for instance protect magic items from disjunction. Coat whatever you want to preserve - it won't function but since its frozen in time disjunction can't affect it.

It can also save spells for later. Cast a spell with a limited duration on an object. Then coat the object with quintessence, freezing the spell in time. Later scrape off the quintessence and the spell is still functioning.

This would also work on a creature. You could have a dominated monster in storage with dozens of buffs on it, cast over several days. Cast gaseous form on them and you can carry the buffed monster around in a bottle covered in quintessence. Shatter the bottle to end the stasis quickly and let them out. You could do the same with an ally.

[Yukitsu]

Use it as a trap. If you have a bunch of pits with a silvery yet harmless liquid that adventurers have to move, wade or swim through, they'll get complacent, and get horribly time damaged, or stasised when they jump into the quintessence one.

[JeminiZero]

I imagine someone with a lot more time on their hands than me can use it to augment the Psionic Save Game Trick.

[Lysander]

Use it as a trap.

Nice...Or use it as a weapon. Take a small steel plate, coat the edges with sovereign glue, put a tiny drop of quintessence in the center. Stick it on a creature and they have a drop of quintessence touching them they can't get off, dealing one damage per round with no save. They'll have to rip off their skin unless they have universal solvent or die.

Another thing to keep in mind is that quintessence, once created, isn't an ongoing psionic or magical effect. So you can freeze creatures normally immune to things like temporal stasis. It might even freeze deities and artifacts.

[lord_khaine]

Unfortuntely, ripping off a bit of skin wont even do that 1 point of damage quintessence does, and will be pretty easy to do.

[Soonerdj]

Put it in someone's food or use it as weapon venom. I'm not sure how the rules would handle it but it would certainly be devious.

[Lysander]

Unfortuntely, ripping off a bit of skin wont even do that 1 point of damage quintessence does, and will be pretty easy to do.

Maybe for an intelligent creature. But if you can slap it on a giant monster's back where they can't reach then you can sit back and watch it slowly die. Or to be a real jerk, put it on an intelligent creature who has no way of bypassing their own damage reduction. You could even use Stoneskin with it as an offensive spell. Muahahaha.

[druid91]

Well the way it is worded is that it is a liquefied moment in time, see if you can get enough of it with one manifesting to make a one-way gate to the past.

[Lysander]

Well the way it is worded is that it is a liquefied moment in time, see if you can get enough of it with one manifesting to make a one-way gate to the past.

I'm not sure it's a particular historical moment per se. A DM could homebrew some kind of time portal effect if they wanted.

[Adonis1x23]

Could you put some into a bag of holding and transport people that way?

It would be cool if you could somehow get a god into said bag of holding.

[Lysander]

Could you put some into a bag of holding and transport people that way?

It would be cool if you could somehow get a god into said bag of holding.

You could freeze a bag of holding, but the contents of the bag of holding are in another plane and unaffected. It would be a good way of protecting the contents from being lost with a disjunction though.

[Optimystik]

Fill your bag of holding with it every night with your spare PP, then when you think you have enough, throw it over a bad guy's head and sunder the bag in mid-air.

[Lysander]

Fill your bag of holding with it every night with your spare PP, then when you think you have enough, throw it over a bad guy's head and sunder the bag in mid-air.

That would cause you to lose all the quintessance. But instead of coating the bag of holding you can FILL the bag of holding so creatures could enter and immerse in it to become frozen. By the rules you'd lose about 75% of the quintessence every time you pull something out though, but if it's for long term storage or a special circumstance that could work.

[Optimystik]

That would cause you to lose all the quintessance. But instead of coating the bag of holding you can FILL the bag of holding so creatures could enter and immerse in it to become frozen. By the rules you'd lose about 75% of the quintessence every time you pull something out though, but if it's for long term storage or a special circumstance that could work.

I did say to fill it

And the idea is for it to fall on the bad guy's head. It only evaporates if you scrape it off something it was preserving; if there was nothing else in the bag then you won't lose any.

[Lysander]

I did say to fill it

And the idea is for it to fall on the bad guy's head. It only evaporates if you scrape it off something it was preserving; if there was nothing else in the bag then you won't lose any.

I meant fill it for bag of holding stasis storage. Using it as a splash weapon might work, but you wouldn't want to sunder a bag of holding. Just use a regular sack filled with the stuff. The target wouldn't be frozen in time since coating every inch of their body (including the bottoms of their feet!) is very unlikely. But they'd take disruption damage after a while if they can't get it off.

[Mastikator]

Well the way it is worded is that it is a liquefied moment in time, see if you can get enough of it with one manifesting to make a one-way gate to the past.

It's not a moment in time, just liquefied time in general. Making a big gate-looking object, and then walking into it would only make the one who walks in stuck in there until it dissolves. Which may or may not be a very... VERY long time.

[Just_Ice]

Kind of reminds me of the Emotion ooze from Ghostbusters II... Only instead it has a time flavour. It'd be awesome in a chrono-trigger-style campaign, or stopping a doomsday device/villain by encasing them in enough of it.

Would they resume function as soon as someone casts time stop?

[Lysander]

Would they resume function as soon as someone casts time stop?

Time stop doesn't actually stop time, it just speeds up the caster so much everything else appears frozen.

[Optimystik]

Just use a regular sack filled with the stuff.

The reason I said bag of holding is the carrying capacity - you can stuff enough in there to squash an ogre.

[subject42]

This could make a nice gentle repose alternative as well.

[Yuki Akuma]

A few dozen manifestations of a level 4 Shaper-only power (meaning most psions will need to be at least level 9 to manifest it) is a nice alternative to a spell clerics can cast at level 3 and wizards at level 5?

Yeah, sure.

[Lysander]

This could make a nice gentle repose alternative as well.

It's much better as a preservative than gentle repose since it has no maximum duration. You could keep a corpse preserved for eons. The downside is that unlike gentle repose it requires many manifestations to produce enough quintessence to cover a medium corpse, instead of being able to cast one spell. Plus there's the unpleasantness of scraping quintessence out of a corpse's buttcrack later on.

Here's another use: anti-psionics areas. Create one pound accumulations of quintessence and hide them in containers under the floor or within walls. It's not a null-psionics field of course and isn't too hard to overcome with will saves, but it can be used to hamper psionics to some extent.

[subject42]

A few dozen manifestations of a level 4 Shaper-only power (meaning most psions will need to be at least level 9 to manifest it) is a nice alternative to a spell clerics can cast at level 3 and wizards at level 5?

Yeah, sure.

If you don't have a cleric or a wizard, it beats carting around a rotting corpse.

[Optimystik]

It's much better as a preservative than gentle repose since it has no maximum duration.

Neither does Gentle Repose - just keep casting it.

Unlike Gentle Repose, however, Quintessence can store anything, even weapons, potions, poisons and buildings.

I just had an idea for an epic power that blankets a whole city in a snow of Quintessence to save it from a natural disaster of some kind. Not sure how I'd make it a hook though

[2xMachina]

Slather your sword with Quintessence, and attack with it? Leaves Quintessence behind on wounds. Extra damage.

[Optimystik]

Slather your sword with Quintessence, and attack with it? Leaves Quintessence behind on wounds. Extra damage.

For it to be left on the target, that would have to count as "scraping it off" your sword, resulting in a 75% chance of it evaporating each time.

[Lysander]

I just had an idea for an epic power that blankets a whole city in a snow of Quintessence to save it from a natural disaster of some kind. Not sure how I'd make it a hook though

Hmm. Maybe it's the city of some ancient evil empire, and now that the quintessence has come off its ruler wants to take over the world again.

Or maybe there's some kind of massive disaster about to befall and the players need to get an artifact that can protect their city from it.

Here's another use. Summon a monster and have it cover itself in quintessence. Now the remaining rounds of the summoning spell are saved for later. You could have dozens of Summon Monster IX critters standing on pedestals like statues all around your castle. When you need them just use Mage Hand to scrape away a tiny bit of slime and they'll unfreeze.

[Lycanthromancer]

Take 2 dollops of quintessence; one of them you encase in a perfectly spherical piece of amber created via psionic minor creation, which you encase in the other dollop to prevent it from expiring. Now you have sling grenades that deal extra damage round after round (assuming you don't want to just lob the dollops manually).

Too bad slings suck, but if all else fails you can make yourself some hollowed-out arrows from amber.

This is generally a good use of quintessence anyway - preserving items created using psionic minor creation.

It's also too bad that you can't create a local time-dampening field without completely coating something; it'd help with those romantic evening interludes when you were so ready to go that very morning. Might make for some uncomfortable questions if your clothing got disintegrated during the day, but whatever.

And don't forget those delayed blast fireball grenades. Coat the firey bead in frozen time, then lob them when you need a big bang.

Could make for a handy dandy alternative to permanency when it comes to trapping hallways with runes and glyphs. Anyone steps on the floor, they remove some of the pool of quintessence, and the rune activates. Doesn't cost any XP or money; just time and power points.

You could coat your hands in a glove of the stuff (since it doesn't harm you), and use it to buffer yourself from damaging effects. Depends on if the DM things that liquefied time can be damaged by temporally-affected effects.

[Lysander]

One thing to keep in mind when designing quintessence weapons is that the damaging effect doesn't take place until after 10 continuous rounds of contact. So in most cases the person will have time to scrape it off of themselves, probably as a move action since at that point it would count as retrieving an item.

Delayed blast fireball coated in quintessence is an incredible idea. You could keep an arsenal of explosions in your pocket.

I don't think quintessence is invulnerable. Hitting it probably has a 75% chance of making it vanish. Maybe it would block temperate so you could touch very hot or cold things, but it wouldn't block physical forces.

Going back to covering enchanted items, casting Darkness on a pebble and covering it in quintessence would let anyone gain concealment in a pinch.

You could also use it to deactivate sentient magical items.

[Dvandemon]

You could preserve Gingerbread Golems. Now you have permanent, fast and intelligent messengers/assassins