Super Weapons!!

[Vixsor Lumin]

I was reading around on some forums and I noticed that alot of you guys haver played around with magic on high levels to make super weapons. Magna cannons on floating islands, rods from god, and planet cracking sun cannons. So I wanted to know what some of your best super weapons were and what your best ideas for one are.

[Trinoya]

As a player? I generally accelerate a small amount of matter to near light speeds and let it impact the target.

That or now I make anti-matter at level 1. Both are good.

[Ravens_cry]

Depending on your interpretation, you could use Major Creation to create a supercritical amount of a fissile Uranium or Plutonium isotope.
Can you Say Big Boom?
I can.
And unlike the Antimatter version, you don't have to worry about the complications of getting your hands on a chip of antimatter or convincing your DM that since there is no listed price for antimatter in the book, you can use Eschew Materials, which was too gamest and metagaming for my tastes.
Combine with a Simulacrum of yourself to cast the spell survive the blast, though you might not survive the thrown DMG, dice, DM screen, chair, table, car, another car, your car . . . .

[Vixsor Lumin]

Wow there is a whole realm of destruction I never even thought of! Vixsor want big boom but for a DM what would you do to counter these things? It would suck to have your BBEG vaporized by a nuclear explosion or decimated by a light speed pebble right?

[Ravens_cry]

As a DM?
Have the BBEG out in a resilient sphere. Or, more practically, say "No, we are not having atomic bombs in D&D." Because, as much as I like the idea, is not what most people want in their D&D.
The creation line of spells is also the key to the "Rods from God" concept, which actually has very similar energies to the atomic bomb and none of the messy fallout.
Minor creation also is wonderful because it means you can create massive amounts of one of the most deadly poisons in the game, black lotus extract. When you are literally creating hundreds of gallons of the stuff, anything not immune to poison might as well make a will.
Can holy water be used in conjunction with dust of dryness? If so, you can create a bomb, for surprisingly cheaply, that can take out any undead or evil subtype outsider that can die to hit point damage.

[DoctorGlock]

Wow there is a whole realm of destruction I never even thought of! Vixsor want big boom but for a DM what would you do to counter these things? It would suck to have your BBEG vaporized by a nuclear explosion or decimated by a light speed pebble right?

A few good counters. In my games, if there is only one planet, sun cannons are a bad idea. Heroic PCs do not blow up planets, if they try, they are the villains and must now counter lots of heroic parties and celestials gunning for them. Also near epic wizards with time stop contingency to redirect the blast (thinking with portals), with contact other plane they know it is happening.

On a more localized scale (anitmatter bombs, rods from god), alot of magic just says no. Resilient sphere, prismatic sphere, forcecage, heck, even wings of cover says no to your utter destructo doom. Contingencies, layers of "no" magics, really freaking deep adamantine bunkers, surface to air defenses, counter satellites. Why should the PCs be the first ones to discover this stuff? In a world where a single high level terrorist can decimate the planet, high level proponents of the social contract have to be hyper prepared. Divination helps.

However, most of the time my players realize "while we can start firing sun cannons, we end up removing more plot than we get to play. If every planet we encounter is a smoldering molten waste when we leave, we are not having a good story" and usually will avoid it. If the player is evil and a has a ritual that involves the obliteration of a world as part of his divine ascension, go for it, but it sure as heck will not be easy and sure as heck not in a game with only one world

As to what my games (as player and DM) have seen regarding superweapons?

Aforementioned sun cannon
Rods from god
Paradox Hits (Teleport through Time, make some alterations or just gank the BBEG's grandparents, the ensuing paradox shunts out huge swaths of existence unless you insert enough details into the time stream to remind your future/past self to make the needed changes)
Relativistic weapons, though probably inefficient in comparison to the better thought out ones (We used teleport circle in a vacuum assuming the teleport conserves momentum)
We tried to figure out a way to drop the moon on a planet once but couldn't think of anything.

[Roderick_BR]

Depending on your interpretation, you could use Major Creation to create a supercritical amount of a fissile Uranium or Plutonium isotope.
Can you Say Big Boom?
I can.
And unlike the Antimatter version, you don't have to worry about the complications of getting your hands on a chip of antimatter or convincing your DM that since there is no listed price for antimatter in the book, you can use Eschew Materials, which was too gamest and metagaming for my tastes.
Combine with a Simulacrum of yourself to cast the spell survive the blast, though you might not survive the thrown DMG, dice, DM screen, chair, table, car, another car, your car . . . .

And as a DM, I could argue that since there's nothing in any book about those material, you can't make them at all
Same reason that a lot of "bombs" won't work: D&D lacks the proper rules for them, and without the DM's permission, players can't make up stuff of reinterpret other rules.
In other words: There's no such thing as antimatter, plutionion, or whatever. No, it just doesn't. You are wasting spells and money on useless colored shinny goo. Now it's the rogue's turn. What you'll do now?

[The Reverend]

Its not a "super weapon" but dang powerful anyway.

Put a rolled up portable hole inside a bag o holding. In a birthright campaign our party tricked our dm into clarifying how it worked early on, is before the campaigns first game, the our nation took over the entire bag of holding and portable hole industry. Ostensibly it was to make our caravns, ships, and flying carpets more efficient, but we actually mounted them in special ballista bolts and used them in a wide variety of ways.

[gkathellar]

Wow there is a whole realm of destruction I never even thought of! Vixsor want big boom but for a DM what would you do to counter these things? It would suck to have your BBEG vaporized by a nuclear explosion or decimated by a light speed pebble right?

You say, "This is not a universe in which real-world physics apply, as is amply demonstrable. There are no subatomic particles in this reality, so atoms (which also don't exist) cannot decay, nor can they be anti-atoms. Your chunk of fissile plutonium is very heavy, and would probably be radioactive if radioactivity were a real thing in this universe. Your chunk of anti-matter is just regular matter."

The creation line of spells is also the key to the "Rods from God" concept, which actually has very similar energies to the atomic bomb and none of the messy fallout.

That would require the rules for falling damage to look anything like the way actual falling works. They don't, ergo any player who attempts this is claiming that the Creation line of spells gives them access to deus-ex-machina wholly reserved for the DM.

[Dr.Epic]

A weapon that threatens to crit on an even number. So statistically, 50% of all die rolls will threaten.

[The Reverend]

Could two wizards great a pile of matter from the negative energy plane and equal sized chunk from the positive material plane? Each summoning one type of course.

[Volos]

Wow there is a whole realm of destruction I never even thought of! Vixsor want big boom but for a DM what would you do to counter these things? It would suck to have your BBEG vaporized by a nuclear explosion or decimated by a light speed pebble right?

As a DM I simply explain that the god of such destruction and big booms, henseforth to be simply refered to as DAKKA, became aware of your plans as per Portfolio Sense and decided to remove you from the material plane. I set your character sheet on fire and hand you a new one.

Actually it would be much simplier, I would have screened you out of the possible list of players much earlier on.

[hydroplatypus]

That would require the rules for falling damage to look anything like the way actual falling works. They don't, ergo any player who attempts this is claiming that the Creation line of spells gives them access to deus-ex-machina wholly reserved for the DM.

Well you would end up with each rod (weighing 1 pound) doing 20d6 dmg. That might not seem like much, but hire some people to fill bags of holding with rods, teleport into orbit and empty them. Some bags hold like 1500 rods, and if you have lets say 10 bags you have 300 000 d6 of damage (1.05 million average). Not as much as other super weapons, but still a very respectable cluster bomb. Anything in the general area is probably going to die. Now that I think of it you don't even need to be in orbit, just get to the height for max fall damage and empty the bags for greater accuracy/more damage to selected target (if from orbit most probably miss).

[Beleriphon]

Wait, if you empty ten bags all you're going to get is 15,000 separate attacks at 20d6 each, which admittidly is a lot of attacks, its not the same as dealing all of the damage all at once to a single target.

As you point out, its more like a cluster bomb effect.

As for super weapons I'm fond of working up to stuff like Death Stars. I think one can even find stats for the Death Star superlaser for Star Wars Saga Edition somewhere (they are no official).

As for magical superweapons, chain gating Balors or Pit Fiends seems pretty good.

[TurtleKing]

I like the incredibly powerful and simplistic superweapon from ToM.

It requires a Truespeak roll.

Why travel back in time when you can do it from the present.

Yes the awesome Unname spell.

They and all that they caused never happened.

[Gavinfoxx]

http://www.dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Megaton..._Epic_Spell%29

http://www.dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Tactica..._Epic_Spell%29

[TurtleKing]

If going to do that then just take a look at any of the Epic Spells. At least a fourth are apopocalypse inducing.

[The Reverend]

the actual Joule output of the DeathStar super laser were calcd out by some super nerds i think its something like 3-40^36 joules. something like the entire energy output of our sun over a week to a month. but delivered on a spot the size of new york city in microseconds.

i could be wrong on the exact numbers....but frankly at that level of power the practical effects wouldn't really be noticed.

[The Boz]

I like the incredibly powerful and simplistic superweapon from ToM.

It requires a Truespeak roll.

HAHAHAHA!
...
Good one.

[jseah]

Portable Hole:
A certain interpretation is that the interface works identically to normal space (transmits gravity, objects, spells, forces... everything), anything entering the "hole" doesn't interact with it until the object hits the bottom or sides and the interface hugs what would be the active surface of the portable hole if there was no "hole".
And that whatever the shape of the interface, the space inside the hole is a normal Euclidean cylinder. It just maps accordingly.

Basically, stick a portable hole onto a flexible piece of paper backing (to have a surface to active the "hole" against) and you have a magic portal to a cylinder that you can bend.

Which results in all sorts of shenanigans, like folding the hole into itself and ending up with a portable hole whose edge goes into the hole (and thus in normal space, the ends are disconnected).
This "hole" can be used a weapon since anything going through the interface will suddenly end up being pushed into itself (and twisted into some exceedingly weird shapes) and the "hole" doesn't interact with that at all.
So you can simply swing the "hole" through some object and completely destroy it without needing to push at all.

And if general relativity applies, folding the hole into certain shapes will result in the whole thing collapsing into a singularity. Which, if you animate it, results in a controllable singularity that gives you access to singularity manipulation. Warp drives, gravity weapons, space-reflective shields...


the best thing since sliced bread
A less screwy application is this automatic slicer. Which depends on the interpretation that "anything across the interface when the interface shuts gets sliced".

Stretch the "hole" on a metal ring made to fit. Exactly 1 inch below the "hole" is a piece of paper that serves as a backing to activate the "hole". Except that its not in contact with the portable hole fabric and thus the "hole" is now 'off'.

Place object on the fabric. The weight of the object makes the portable hole bend downwards, into contact with the paper. This activates the "hole" and the objects is now on the interface.
However, that object is now no longer touching the portable hole fabric (since objects in the interface do not interact and thus don't push it down).
The fabric, under tension, now springs back up to the 1 inch height. The "hole" deactivates and slices away a neat 1 inch portion of the object.
The object (1 inch shorter) is now resting on the "hole" in its original position. This weighs down the "hole", which activates the "hole" and it springs back up to slice another 1 inch off the object.

This repeats until the object is rendered down to 1 inch slices, with a chunk left that is too light to weigh down the fabric.

Tada, automatic bread slicer. Paper shredder included free!
Caution, do not step on "hole".


Ring Gate:
On a certain interpretation, stuff going into a Ring Gate does not interact with the gate. (ie. if you push something through the gate, the force of pushing comes out the exit end of the gate instead of ending up on the gate itself)

With this, you can break conservation of momentum. Which leads to a number of nasty things, including the ability to break *anything* that you can piece together.

With temporal stasis, you can have an unbreakable object. This means the force in the setup goes to infinity (the "breaking anything" property is due to the forces accumulating instead of canceling)
Which vapourizes everything with a blast of infinite energy in a sphere expanding at the speed of light.

A more mundane use is to have reactionless drives and 1st order perpetual motion machines.
Oh, and since Ring Gates (and portable holes) qualify for transmitting line of effect due to being big enough, you can use them to move spells around. Even if those spells weren't normally mobile. Or extend an area of effect.

[Vixsor Lumin]

Spoiler

Show

Portable Hole:
A certain interpretation is that the interface works identically to normal space (transmits gravity, objects, spells, forces... everything), anything entering the "hole" doesn't interact with it until the object hits the bottom or sides and the interface hugs what would be the active surface of the portable hole if there was no "hole".
And that whatever the shape of the interface, the space inside the hole is a normal Euclidean cylinder. It just maps accordingly.

Basically, stick a portable hole onto a flexible piece of paper backing (to have a surface to active the "hole" against) and you have a magic portal to a cylinder that you can bend.

Which results in all sorts of shenanigans, like folding the hole into itself and ending up with a portable hole whose edge goes into the hole (and thus in normal space, the ends are disconnected).
This "hole" can be used a weapon since anything going through the interface will suddenly end up being pushed into itself (and twisted into some exceedingly weird shapes) and the "hole" doesn't interact with that at all.
So you can simply swing the "hole" through some object and completely destroy it without needing to push at all.

And if general relativity applies, folding the hole into certain shapes will result in the whole thing collapsing into a singularity. Which, if you animate it, results in a controllable singularity that gives you access to singularity manipulation. Warp drives, gravity weapons, space-reflective shields...


the best thing since sliced bread
A less screwy application is this automatic slicer. Which depends on the interpretation that "anything across the interface when the interface shuts gets sliced".

Stretch the "hole" on a metal ring made to fit. Exactly 1 inch below the "hole" is a piece of paper that serves as a backing to activate the "hole". Except that its not in contact with the portable hole fabric and thus the "hole" is now 'off'.

Place object on the fabric. The weight of the object makes the portable hole bend downwards, into contact with the paper. This activates the "hole" and the objects is now on the interface.
However, that object is now no longer touching the portable hole fabric (since objects in the interface do not interact and thus don't push it down).
The fabric, under tension, now springs back up to the 1 inch height. The "hole" deactivates and slices away a neat 1 inch portion of the object.
The object (1 inch shorter) is now resting on the "hole" in its original position. This weighs down the "hole", which activates the "hole" and it springs back up to slice another 1 inch off the object.

This repeats until the object is rendered down to 1 inch slices, with a chunk left that is too light to weigh down the fabric.

Tada, automatic bread slicer. Paper shredder included free!
Caution, do not step on "hole".


Ring Gate:
On a certain interpretation, stuff going into a Ring Gate does not interact with the gate. (ie. if you push something through the gate, the force of pushing comes out the exit end of the gate instead of ending up on the gate itself)

With this, you can break conservation of momentum. Which leads to a number of nasty things, including the ability to break *anything* that you can piece together.

With temporal stasis, you can have an unbreakable object. This means the force in the setup goes to infinity (the "breaking anything" property is due to the forces accumulating instead of canceling)
Which vapourizes everything with a blast of infinite energy in a sphere expanding at the speed of light.

A more mundane use is to have reactionless drives and 1st order perpetual motion machines.
Oh, and since Ring Gates (and portable holes) qualify for transmitting line of effect due to being big enough, you can use them to move spells around. Even if those spells weren't normally mobile. Or extend an area of effect.

You sir, have a gift for destruction. I really am starting to think I should become an engineer just so I can get the mind set to think of things like these hahaha

[DoctorGlock]

Spoiler

Show

Portable Hole:
A certain interpretation is that the interface works identically to normal space (transmits gravity, objects, spells, forces... everything), anything entering the "hole" doesn't interact with it until the object hits the bottom or sides and the interface hugs what would be the active surface of the portable hole if there was no "hole".
And that whatever the shape of the interface, the space inside the hole is a normal Euclidean cylinder. It just maps accordingly.

Basically, stick a portable hole onto a flexible piece of paper backing (to have a surface to active the "hole" against) and you have a magic portal to a cylinder that you can bend.

Which results in all sorts of shenanigans, like folding the hole into itself and ending up with a portable hole whose edge goes into the hole (and thus in normal space, the ends are disconnected).
This "hole" can be used a weapon since anything going through the interface will suddenly end up being pushed into itself (and twisted into some exceedingly weird shapes) and the "hole" doesn't interact with that at all.
So you can simply swing the "hole" through some object and completely destroy it without needing to push at all.

And if general relativity applies, folding the hole into certain shapes will result in the whole thing collapsing into a singularity. Which, if you animate it, results in a controllable singularity that gives you access to singularity manipulation. Warp drives, gravity weapons, space-reflective shields...


the best thing since sliced bread
A less screwy application is this automatic slicer. Which depends on the interpretation that "anything across the interface when the interface shuts gets sliced".

Stretch the "hole" on a metal ring made to fit. Exactly 1 inch below the "hole" is a piece of paper that serves as a backing to activate the "hole". Except that its not in contact with the portable hole fabric and thus the "hole" is now 'off'.

Place object on the fabric. The weight of the object makes the portable hole bend downwards, into contact with the paper. This activates the "hole" and the objects is now on the interface.
However, that object is now no longer touching the portable hole fabric (since objects in the interface do not interact and thus don't push it down).
The fabric, under tension, now springs back up to the 1 inch height. The "hole" deactivates and slices away a neat 1 inch portion of the object.
The object (1 inch shorter) is now resting on the "hole" in its original position. This weighs down the "hole", which activates the "hole" and it springs back up to slice another 1 inch off the object.

This repeats until the object is rendered down to 1 inch slices, with a chunk left that is too light to weigh down the fabric.

Tada, automatic bread slicer. Paper shredder included free!
Caution, do not step on "hole".


Ring Gate:
On a certain interpretation, stuff going into a Ring Gate does not interact with the gate. (ie. if you push something through the gate, the force of pushing comes out the exit end of the gate instead of ending up on the gate itself)

With this, you can break conservation of momentum. Which leads to a number of nasty things, including the ability to break *anything* that you can piece together.

With temporal stasis, you can have an unbreakable object. This means the force in the setup goes to infinity (the "breaking anything" property is due to the forces accumulating instead of canceling)
Which vapourizes everything with a blast of infinite energy in a sphere expanding at the speed of light.

A more mundane use is to have reactionless drives and 1st order perpetual motion machines.
Oh, and since Ring Gates (and portable holes) qualify for transmitting line of effect due to being big enough, you can use them to move spells around. Even if those spells weren't normally mobile. Or extend an area of effect.

You sir have won this thread and I will be incorporating many of your ideas into my upcoming game. Especially the rift blade. Truly the mind of an engineer (or sci-fi aficionado) is a truly horrifying place. I don't see how the second one is building infinite energy however, you'll have to explain it better.

[jseah]

Oh, I can't claim all the credit for this. This stuff is *old* and partially dates back to the crazy thread on the WotC boards when Doc. Rocktopus wanted an engine design that could move the moon out of orbit.

All the portable hole stuff derives from him. Well, apart from the bread slicer. That one is mine.

Some diagrams of the ring gate stuff:
First one explains how to get an infinite force bomb

Spoiler

Show

http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/h...comparison.jpg
Note: "up" in the picture is actually "downwards" with respect to gravity (its drawn this way so you can see the gates)

This will drive your rods into the ground with a force up to the breaking point of your rods (if the ground is harder than that, your rods break instead)
You might note that from the rod's point of view, the drive casing and ring gates don't exist.

If the rods and the ground are invulnerable, the force accumulates to infinity.

http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/h...eAmplifier.jpg
In this one, any movement of the inner drive casing forces the outer drive casing to move along, as long as the rods are invulnerable.

http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/h...pringDrive.jpg
Basic design of the "spring" drive. Twist the holes relative to each other and the force the spring exerts will pull the drive casing, without any reaction force (the reaction force is 'reflected' by the ring gate to cancel itself)

http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/h...nipulation.jpg
If ring gates transmit gravity, weirdness results.

http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/h...cRingGates.jpg
More screwiness results if you "shrink item" one side of a ring gate...

I don't have any diagrams of the portable hole stuff since that one can't be drawn on a flat piece of paper. Space becomes distinctly non-Euclidean when bent portable holes come into the picture... and drawing that stuff is *hard*.

EDIT:
Maybe someone might think about what happens if I have a 1foot tall Wall of Force and I loop a ring gate over one end... and then waggle the other end.

Baseball anyone? and I have a twenty foot long bat made out of pure force.

And it moves as fast as I swing it, regardless of whatever hits the other end.

[DoctorGlock]

So, unless i am much mistaken this works because the drive casing is in constant motion with nowhere to move (aside from a force cycle) and no equilibrium is reached since our conception of physics does not cover wormholes. The force of this constant non movement goes somewhere, and that somewhere is a feedback loop held in check only by the structural integrity of an indestructible object. Thus you have something that contains roughly infinite energy until it is no longer indestructible, in which case boom.

As to the gravity one, I think by RAW you can only shove objects (matter) through a ring gate, and whatever magic counts as. Gravity... is sorta different. Especially as gravity pulls towards the center of highest density. With the positioning of that ring gate in the diagram the gravity center is no longer behind the gate. It might get more bizarre than 2g and have the location between the gates as 0g though, i'd have to consult one of my engineer buddies.

My head hurts. There's a reason I'm studying humanities.

[jseah]

Its a classic case of unstoppable force meets unbreakable wall.

There is actually a problem with that diagram. The "ground" in that diagram actually needs to be another drive casing of the same thing heading the other way.

Basically, you need to take two of them and smash them against each other.
Otherwise, you get the invulnerable rods + ground plate falling into your planet at 9.81 m s-2. With a big enough ground plate, you could push the world. With its own gravity. (this is probably a bad idea)

[DoctorGlock]

How do we increase the mass of our ground plate? (Assuming the gravity drive does not work)

[jseah]

Why would you need to?

You can simply substitute the gravitational attraction on the rings with some other simple force provider (a low-efficiency reactionless drive like a Gust-of-Wind-in-a-box will do just as well)

Of course, this is basically just the drive amplifier. It's just that two invulnerable drive amplifiers going in opposite directions hitting each other will generate an infinite amount of force.

[The Reverend]

If any of you have read or play Dragon Star, you now have everything you need to Win or just make huge gobs of money.

[Doorhandle]

Try using earthquake or a similar spell near a volcano.

INSTANT ERUPTION! MUTI-NUCLEAR DETONATION!

[kieza]

In my world there are a couple...some of them are based on the magitech prevalent in the setting; basically, there are alchemically treated metals which conduct magic like normal metal conducts electricity. You can run magic through them to convert the magic into some other form of energy (thermal, electric, EM, kinetic...), or you can do the reverse and absorb ambient energy to produce magic. The most commonly used reaction is kinetic energy to magic, which lets people power spells with steam engines. But there are others, and a lot of them have horrible side effects. For instance:

--You can convert ambient thermal energy to magic, which rapidly lowers the local temperature. Usually, the extreme cold causes a mechanical failure eventually, but a few people have managed to make devices that worked for days or weeks at a time, causing localized winters.
--A sufficiently powerful device converting magic into visible light becomes a literal death ray. Loads of would-be tyrants have these engines mounted on their fortresses to threaten their rebellious subjects.
--A nastier form of conversion accelerates exothermic chemical reactions and absorbs the emitted energy; the visible result is that anything within a small radius of the engine oxidizes before your eyes; wood turns to ash, iron rusts, people rot...and without any fire or heat.
--Still nastier, someone recently discovered a way to absorb atomic binding energy, which (unknown to the researchers) releases lots of subatomic particles as atoms fall apart. The damage was limited to a few deaths by radiation poisoning, but then somebody tried the process on a certain kind of yellow rock...cue mushroom cloud.
--And, topping the list is the mysterious event that left a mile-wide crater where there used to be a small town, and simultaneously overloaded every magical device within 50 miles. (Somebody managed to convert the relativistic rest mass of his laboratory directly into energy...for the most part. Enough of it seems to have "leaked" to cause some damage. Thankfully, nobody knows how the lone madman managed it.)

And that's without getting into the elven void bomb, which completely and permanently drains an area of magic, or the effect of destabilizing a ley-line tap, or even what a dozen high-level warmages can do when they act in concert using a properly empowered circle. Heck, my setting's gunpowder artillery can be pretty devastating in its own right. Everything but the artillery is banned under the Waystone Conventions, along with chemical and biological weapons, most varieties of super-soldiers, and a dozen forms of magic, but every nation out there has a stockpile, just in case.

Actually, the "superweapon" that scared my players the most was something fairly mundane, and found in the real world: mustard gas. They were defending an underground complex from the enemy, and when the enemy got tired of trying to force them out, they just opened gas canisters into the air vents. Since mustard gas is heavier than air, it just kept going down, level by level, until it got to the players. The party alchemist made his knowledge check, found out what the (horrific) symptoms were, and suggested that the party try to find a way out before they were exposed.