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  1. - Top - End - #151
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    GreatWyrmGold's Avatar

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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    You’re in charge of a small city and its surrounding countryside, and the omens couldn’t be worse. A great mountain from above the sky is predicted to plunge down to earth, followed by a smothering darkness and a winter that may last a thousand years.

    Everyone has been receiving the same news, so it’s every community for themselves; there is nowhere on earth that will escape the impending calamity. Your city is more fortunate in two respects: you’re somewhat isolated in a steep mountain valley, and there are extensive caves nearby.

    You have a modest contingent of clerics, wizards and druids up to 12th level, food reserves that will last roughly two years, and a city of twenty thousand terrified citizens with nowhere to run.

    All of the more exotic escape options are right out—no wishes or miracles, no plane shifting or demiplane hideaways. Somehow you have to survive right there in your own secluded valley. You have only weeks to prepare before the catastrophe strikes and the snowdrifts are two hundred feet high. What’s your plan to survive?
    Travel further north to a crater with a steam engine inside?

    Jokes aside, you have access to almost every 6th-level spells that doesn't let you just ignore the question. Critically, this includes [url=https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/permanency.htm]permanency[/irl]. For a couple thousand XP (a small price when the lives of everyone you know and a metropolis besides are on the line), any of these spells on the cleric, druid, or sor/wiz lists can be made permanent. Three spells that jump out immediately are Darrson's fiery furnace, wall of fire, and wall of magma, all for the same reason—convection exists.
    Spoiler: Heating Analysis
    Show

    DFF probably costs 1,000 or 1,500 XP to make permanent, compared to 2,000 for WoF (and probably WoM). So if DFF can heat up more than 50-75% the space of WoF, it's definitely a better choice—it saves more 5th-level slots for permanency, on top of being more efficient XP-wise.

    DFF heats up to one 10-foot cube per level (12,000 cubic feet for a 12th-level caster), dealing 1d6 damage to anyone in that area. A WoF is 20 feet long per level and 20 feet high (4,800 sq ft at 12th level), dealing 2d4 damage to anyone within 10 feet of one side and 1d4 within another 10 feet (48,000 cubic feet each). A WoM can be up to one 5-foot square per level (300 sq feet at 12th level), but heats both directions, 2d6 within 10 feet and 1d6 within 20 (6,000 cubic feet each).

    A WoF heats up four times as much space as a DFF or WoM, but only in 20-foot-high increments; the WoM would be competitive, if it wasn't even higher-level, and the DFF is worth considering. Of course, none of these areas are places you'd want to live; it's just a way of roughly estimating how much useful heat each would produce. I'm not sure how to effectively channel that into a medieval-style city; that's a problem for engineers.
    A few dozen WoF's could surround a city a mile across. This wouldn't be enough for everyone—the population density would be around 25k per square mile, fairly dense even for modern cities. Then again, pre-car Rome crammed something like a million people in less than 14 square kilometers; it wouldn't be impossible, I suppose.
    Anyways, heating the whole city this way isn't terribly practical (not the least of which because most of the city would be really far from the walls), but it should be well within the capabilities of a "modest contingent" or 12th-level casters to create a decent-sized heated area, or at least enough epic permanently-blazing fires that keeping everyone warm is trivial.

    I'm a bit disappointed that the obvious, core-only answer is by far the best, but...oh well.

    I guess control temperature from Frostburn should be on the list too, but A. it lasts one hour per level (and so would need to be recast twice a day) and B. the wording on the area is vague but it sounds like it only affects 20 cubic feet per level (ie 240 cubic feet, a sphere about 7 feet from edge to edge), centered on the caster. If it's supposed to affect everything within 20 feet per level, that's quite another matter entirely! That would cover ~181,000 square feet, without subjecting anywhere to fire damage, a small price to pay for .

    Combine permanent walls of fire with sweaters and the heat issue should be solved. Next we have the basic necessities of life, food and water. I'll assume that any city of significant size already has a source of fresh water that can be used as long as it didn't freeze (and gee, we have solutions for that). So that leaves food.

    Goodberry is a 1st-level druid spell that imbues 2d4 berries with one meal and one hit point's worth of magical energy. Each casting could sustain about 2-3 people (depending on how thin you wanted to cut your rations), or more if you can supplement that with hunting/fishing/agriculture. Create food and water is much better, making enough food to feed three humans per level (that is, 36 humans) for a whole day. A 12th-level cleric has at least a dozen non-domain spell slots of 3+ level, while a 12th-level druid has at least 21 non-orison spell slots. This increases with high Wisdom scores; let's assume an 18 (they've had three ASIs, after all), giving the cleric up to 14 CFaW's and the druid up to 25 Gb's, feeding ~500 and ~60 people respectively. So, um, the druids should probably be the ones casting those walls of fire. Since it would take fully 40 high-level clerics to feed the entire town, we'll need to supplement this with traditional food production (while training acolytes, ideally).

    Spoiler: Plant Growth and Intensive Agriculture
    Show

    Speaking of food production, there's one spell worth discussing. Plant growth's Enrichment mode can affect all fields within half a mile, aka ~500 acres. One casting only increases yields by a third, but it's not clear what the effect of casting the spell multiple times on the same plot of land would do. (Unless it's subject to the normal rules for stacking spells, but it doesn't provide a numerical bonus, so it's arguable that RAW doesn't apply.) If I was the DM, I'd probably let the spell stack somewhat; if I was a setting-builder, I'd say repeated casting of plant growth would let you harvest multiple crops per year, possibly per month. With enough druids, you'd be limited by how quickly farmers can sow and reap the crops, not your druids; even so, it probably makes sense to improve the land in other ways (such as irrigation, permanent lights, and especially heating).
    Obviously, this kind of intensive farming would require a lot of labor, but we've got 20,000 souls crammed into this city and statistically speaking a lot of them are going to be farmers. The biggest problems are social rather than practical.

    We're also going to need plenty of fertilizer to keep the soil healthy, but there's probably a way to use these high-level spells to make that happen. (This might be the one time someone would have a use for that wall of crap spell Dungweller the Brown invented...)
    On that note, using the Overgrowth mode of plant growth and burning it between crops, a la slash-and-burn, probably won't do the trick. Each casting of that spell covers ~0.2 acres (if you pick the semicircle mode; the others cover slightly less area), and a 12th-level druid with 18 Wisdom can only cast it 14 times per day, for just under three acres per day. By my calculations, it would take 180 druid-days to completely rejuvenate the entire field this way. A plausibly-sized six-druid team spending all their magic on this would still take a month to overgrow the entire area, and at that rate you'll probably be fine just switching to legumes every second or third growth period.


    Anyways, if we have our heat and food situations sorted out, all we have left are social and fantasy issues, and while those are at least as interesting as the food and heat, we don't have any information on them in the quoted post. Though having some high-level spell slots set aside for divinations is a good idea.

    Spoiler: Shooting down plans
    Show

    Quote Originally Posted by Gnaeus View Post
    The underdark wouldn’t be significantly affected by this kind of disaster.
    Fair point. I didn't consider the fantasy resources available even with those constraints. Still, I'm not sure how practical underdark hunting/farming would be if you have a couple dozen high-level casters and thousands of low-level refugees. Even with a more typical level spread, with hundreds of mid-level adventurers, I'm not sure there would be enough people to sustain the entire community. Maybe if you used this ragtag company to clear out some fertile subterranean land and then patrol the border? You've got two years, after all...though this plan would require that we somehow get some crops that can grow underground, without sunlight, with cold winds wafting in from aboveground.


    Quote Originally Posted by Fouredged Sword View Post
    Yes, but you fail to consider that 12th castors place the city well within the means to extraplanar markets via 12 level characters using planeshift (cleric 5) and teleport (wizard 5).
    Extraplanar markets, on the other hand, are extremely reasonable to not consider, considering that plane shift was explicitly banned. Beyond that, liquidating a million GP worth of goods from the possessions of 20,000 refugees or cityfolk is...implausible. You'd basically have to take everything of value from every man, woman, and child in the city, possibly including many of the inhabitants, to sell it for some magical gunk that might eventually let some of them live better if they A. survive that long and B. trust these people. Neither of those can be guaranteed. How well do you think your casters would fare against riots? (And before you say "fireball," keep in mind how poorly soldiers shooting into protestors went in the early modern era...or other times, but those probably qualify as political.)


    Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post
    Now, here's the setting-breaking part. An Everfull Larder costs 15,000 gp. A common meal costs 0.3 gp. At the 60,000 meals rate a single Everfull Larder outputs 18,000 gp worth of meals per day. It literally pays for itself, plus interest, inside one day.
    This does, of course, require someone to have 15,000 gp worth of capital, a supplier for a fairly obscure magic item, and a market. There aren't many places in a medieval-style world where you could sell 60,000 meals per day, or even 1,000, whatever your prices.


    Quote Originally Posted by smasher0404 View Post
    Continual Flame could be used as a substitute, if self-resetting traps are not-kosher and desert plants that don't have high sunlight requirement can be found.
    Note that continual flame requires ruby dust. You'll need to set up serious mining operations if you want to illuminate anything more than a garden with that.



    Quote Originally Posted by Maat Mons View Post
    Stronghold Builder's Guide has a magic item called Everfull Larder. It conjures enough food for 5 people each time it's opened. And it can be opened an unlimited number of times per day. The only upper limit on on how many people you can feed out of one of those is how fast you can open the door, get in, grab food, get out again, close the door, and repeat. Unless it's one of those larders that's a cabinet rather than a room. Then skip the part about getting in and out.
    Excellent point. Everfull larders would be pretty great.
    It's not mentioned as consuming stronghold spaces, so it's probably more of a cabinet than a room. If we assume it takes a couple minutes for the larder-unloader to properly unload the larder, 150 people can be fed per hour, or 3,600 per day if you keep someone at it 24/7. It's not clear whether the food produced is enough for five people to have a meal, or to survive an entire day; this makes the difference between being fine with seven and needing seventeen.


    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    True, as worded it’s not especially well-thought-out. Were there ever any errata or updates for 3.5?
    I'd be surprised; a ladder-splitting business is more practical.


    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    I can't help but goggle at the number of people who look at a scenario involving massive population loss, where the gods will be weakened by the lack of followers, and respond with, "let's solve this by making more Clerics!"

    I expect most gods will die off during this fiasco.
    Clerics can worship abstract non-anthropomorphized forces, such as light, elemental earth, or hand puppets. Reject the gods, mortals; you have nothing to lose but your chains. (Well, and the millions of people dying of cold, but the gods weren't gonna save them either way.)


    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    1) lots of ways. Cloak of Resistance +5 (placed over the statue's shoulders shortly before "soft"), Fate of One, probably some alchemical mixture or another...
    Nitric acid, maybe?
    Okay, someone else referenced Dr. Stone before me, but not so specifically.


    Quote Originally Posted by smasher0404 View Post
    Assuming one had a suitable Cleric with the Warforged Domain, the city could teleport their clerics to the Waste, offend the Anhydruts enough to force them to come out of Mechanus (exact method would depend on the DM), command them using the Warforged Domain, and then use their spell-like ability to effectively artificially maintain a livable (albeit uncomfortable) enviroment.
    I love any plan that involves deliberately tricking agents of the Outer Planes into doing your work for you. It's so Coyote.


    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    So, ½ population working, only ½ of the time (off weekends, holidays, sick days, etc), "food by outsider" consumes 21/29 of the minimal baseline productivity of your civilization.

    Possible, but painful.
    Considering how many historical civilizations got by with ~27/30 of their baseline productivity being food? Not really.


    Quote Originally Posted by Jack_Simth View Post
    3.5's Polymorph line does change types. But then, a dragon polymorphed into a humanoid produces half-dragon children, so it does seem that seed is largely unchanged.
    I assume that's where dhampirs come from.


    Quote Originally Posted by Maat Mons View Post
    Bumblebees do great in greenhouses.
    lightbulb
    searches for a "wall of glass" spell
    smashes lightbulb in irritation

    There's a wall of ooze, a wall of salt, a wall of freaking scales, but not glass?


    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    Other than a hungry basilisk, who would bother breaking statues?
    Dammit, I'm trying to limit my Dr. Stone references!
    Season 2's pretty good so far though.


    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    *record scratch*
    Thanks, but no sacrifices in this particular city.
    I understand that some people think humanity will be willing to abandon its social norms and morals as soon as the going gets tough, coldly willing to do whatever it takes to survive, and I desperately hope that I'm never trapped in a crisis with those people.


    EDIT: This article references winter wheat being planted in antiquity, so I think its fair to say it'd be available.
    Last edited by GreatWyrmGold; 2021-02-19 at 11:49 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by The Blade Wolf View Post
    Ah, thank you very much GreatWyrmGold, you obviously live up to that name with your intelligence and wisdom with that post.
    Quotes, more

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  2. - Top - End - #152
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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Yup, noticed that. I’m very open to more historically grounded estimates of workforce per acre. My numbers are based on a very quick search and could be completely off, so better numbers are more than welcome.
    Per the Wikipedia article for ‘acre’:

    Traditionally, in the Middle Ages, an acre was conceived of as the area of land that could be ploughed in one day by a team of eight oxen.
    So about one worker per person fed if you ploughed the whole thing in one day, assuming you could get the equivalent of eight oxen for each of them.

    But given that this is a year’s supply of food being grown in that area and people don’t generally eat their entire year’s rations all at once, you could probably spread it out over a week or two, thus splitting the number of workers you’d need and saving some for defense.

    Also is some of that farmland being used for livestock instead of crops? Not sure what the shepherd-to-sheep-herd ratio is.

    Quote Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold View Post
    lightbulb
    searches for a "wall of glass" spell
    smashes lightbulb in irritation

    There's a wall of ooze, a wall of salt, a wall of freaking scales, but not glass?
    Why not Wall of Force? Make your greenhouses out of that. Spell description says it’s invisible, just put your heating spells inside of it. Might take some fudging for things like doors; what I’d try is to repurpose a barn or shed or other building that’s mostly outer walls, knock off the roof and maybe the upper walls and replace them with the spells, pack insulation around the edges. You want to get fancy Wall of Stone/Stone Shape the foundation and then build in things like irrigation trenches, an empty space under the floor so you can heat it non-magically, whatever you can mold.

    Or maybe Fabricate glass panes; they don’t have to be perfect just let light through, and then you could skip the XP cost for Permanency on all the Walls of Force.

  3. - Top - End - #153
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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    Get as many herbivor animals as possible inside the citty, and have them breed. Most of the townpeople who have no class levels will be farmers.

    Get as many seeds as possible; Plant everything, and have the Local druids use Overgrowth on them (Both versions of the spell). This will feed the animals, and provide wheat etc. Every harvest, plant half the consumable seeds, and use the rest for consumption. They will also Move Earth the ground around the boarders of the town with multiple castings of Move Earth together with the Wizards. This shall put the town around 100 feet underground.

    Then, wall of stone will be used multiple times to create a dome above the citty and walls to support the sides, as well as stairs that lead above the citty. Some slides will be made on the dome, that lead to a series of holes. This holes will have 100 feet tubes, connecting the surface of the dome to the citty bellow it, and valves at the end. The base of the Dome, will have many oppen sections for oxygen to flow in the citty. At the center of the dome, a multi-layer of Permanent Walls of Fire will be casted, to act as an artificial Sun to provide the citty with the necessary heat and the plants with all the nourishment they need. The Heat of the Wall of Fire will heat the dome as an oven, melting the snow/ice that forms on it's top, and providing hot water for the citty. Using the hot water, modern plumbing is conceivable to be created. Finally, a large sewer system under the town will lead the "contaminated water" in a second, independant underground chamber (again, applications of Move Earth and Wall of Stone).

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  4. - Top - End - #154
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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    Let's have the cats add the classic meme: the floor is lava (via PaO). That should kill off most settlements Not so good for looting, though.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga View Post
    A white dragon/remorhaz/anything large enough to decide that a cave system big enough to hold a town of 20,000 would make an awesome new lair just as soon as it got rid of all those funny shaped rocks. If the statues get smashed out of ignorance rather than malice the people would still be dead.
    That is a problem.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga View Post
    Alternatively, if the statues remain undamaged but a huge tribe of goblins/pack of wolves/whatever has moved in by the time the contingency de-petrifies everyone, that could likewise be problematic.
    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    For all anyone knows, those statues could reanimate at any minute, so safer to break them while it’s easy.
    Did I miss a memo here? I thought that the idea was to manually release them - did someone somehow add Contingency to the plan?

    Because never have I witnessed an adventuring party see a bunch of statues, and suddenly start smashing them because they were worried that they could spontaneously reanimate at any moment.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga View Post
    Ooo. *makes note*


    Quote Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga View Post
    I suspect the few weeks available before the apocalypse hits would be insufficient to convince a living populace to set aside a lifetime of conditioning against the undead to reanimate their dead relatives. Maybe decades or centuries in, but not soon enough for the initial craziness of trying to convince the townspeople to go along with the survival plans.

    (I’m assuming a town of 20,000 would have an extensive enough graveyard and access to enough onyx that the issue of supply for making lots of undead wouldn’t be an issue.)
    Immediately? No, this is long-term PR plan.

    Also, not all undead are Wee Jas hipsters - some are more "god of (karmic) Justice" approved variants. He tried to kill you? He will serve as your immortal shield. He tried to burn your crops? He will toil forever in your fields.

    Convincing people to animate bandits for great justice is an intermediate step towards building a brighter future.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga View Post
    Plus the general population knowing they’re effectively trapped and only a tiny handful of people can unblock the exit...I can see it causing morale problems. :/
    Muh Freedoms! … Yeah, I think it could, at that.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    There could be any number of reasons why a crusade wasn’t mounted earlier. The likeliest is that the potential crusaders were otherwise occupied with more immediate threats, and the necropolis—despite its high opinion of itself—was rather far down on the target list.

    Post-catastrophe, if the necropolis is known to have survived, then it might well be the last bastion of necromantic lore, which could make it worth crusading against. If there’s a chance that necromancy could finally be wiped from the world, that could be reason enough.
    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    The city as I envision it is somewhat isolated in its valley, but not really on the edge of civilization per se.
    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    In practical terms, this is probably far more niche than the PrCs that smasher0404 brought up. As I envision it, the city in this scenario is in an Alpine-style valley, with no Sandstorm-style wastes for thousands of miles in any direction.
    I was actually picturing the necropolis as living on the border between the Elven Nation and the Great Wastes. It would explain why nobody had wiped them out (friendly neighborhood), and what the Elven liches were doing there.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    You’ve changed your claims here—from your original claim that the average winter temperature is 70°, to a new statement that 70° is possible. Those are very different things.
    Not at all!

    Also, in a temperate climate, by definition, the *average* winter temperature can reach almost 70°.
    Originally Posted by Quertus
    …over 70 is clearly possible for a temperature zone winter day.

    Let's look at what I said: the average is nearly 70, so over 70 is clearly possible. This is just simple extrapolation based on observations of temperature variance, and understanding simple math concepts like "average". Do I need to spell it out in more detail for you?

    Actually, based on "Druids and bees", I probably do. We don't come at things from anywhere near the same starting point.

    A quick Google search tells me that the temperature in Washington DC (presumably one of the best known places in what I think was labeled "temperature zone" on Wikipedia) in January of 2021 ranged from 33°-59°.

    If the average being used was simply the midpoint of those numbers (it isn't, but to make the example simple), then the average temperature would be… 46°.

    Yet, despite having *average* temperatures in the 40's, magically, temperatures in the 50's were *possible*. And I'd imagine that the *record* temperature for January weather in DC (ie, the *limit* for what is *known* to be possible) might be higher still.

    So what is *possible* in a temperate zone (especially an area naturally a bit warmer than DC) could be quite comfortable, even in winter. And in summer could clearly allow for crop growth.

    Have I explained it in a way that you can grok yet? I hope so, because I'm about out of easy ways to explain that those two sentences are *complimentary*, not *contradictory*.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    At any rate, it’s not especially relevant twice over: first, because the spell isn’t available to casters in this scenario; and second, as mentioned, it wouldn’t create conditions amenable to agriculture.
    Again, 1,000 years is a *long* time to gain levels. It'll be available.

    Heck, if bandits come preemptively knocking, or someone commits an adventurer standard "home invasion", it could easily be available before the mountain drops.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    More broadly, the Walker’s Greater Drought ability is a pinpoint on the landscape, and if a Walker tried that on top of a hundred-foot snowpack the results could be…amusing, at least from a safe distance.
    Indeed.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    On the other hand, a Walker who goes full dry lich might declare a personal crusade against the Great Ice and begin an endless journey attempting to melt all the ice in the world. That’s just comedy gold.


    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    *record scratch*

    Thanks, but no sacrifices in this particular city.

    That said, it might be an approach taken somewhere else.
    Actually… with standard alignment distribution, and the general hopelessness of the situation, I think that it would be bad role-playing for there to be even a single city this size where at least 1 of its citizens didn't go "lawless bandit" / dark side enough to be willing to attempt this path.

    So, even if it wasn't state approved or optimized, the necropolis might, in fact, be the *only* city where its citizens were unconcerned enough that the practice never occurred.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    This is interesting, but two challenges occur.

    First, if the city can’t find enough workers to work and defend the 8000 arable acres created by one orb, they’re going to have a real problem with ten more orbs. That’s another 80,000 acres requiring 320,000 workers, which is an immense number of people. It’s sixteen times the population of the original city.

    Also, if these orbs are the hot property I’m assuming they’ll be, then a concentration of eleven of them in one spot will be a target for anyone out there hoping to add to their collection. Odds are a high-level team will pop in, take the orbs and vanish—and probably take the crafter as well.
    This brings up 2 additional ideas (one I've hinted at already): areas naturally warmed by magma ("hot springs"), and areas with a "natural" magical climate effect already in place.

    Hard to "scry and loot" either of those.

    Speaking of scry and snatch - I imagine someone grabbed up any "Walker in the Waste" resources. So let's add a new city… Wise Aridia, whose insightful loremongers traded <things most cities thought were useful> for a "useless" Cowl of Warding, to protect their most valued resource: their abducted Walker in the Waste, content to wage his invisible war against the encroaching ice. Or something like that.

  5. - Top - End - #155
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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    Quote Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold View Post
    lightbulb
    searches for a "wall of glass" spell
    smashes lightbulb in irritation

    There's a wall of ooze, a wall of salt, a wall of freaking scales, but not glass?
    Quote Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga View Post
    Why not Wall of Force? Make your greenhouses out of that. Spell description says it’s invisible, just put your heating spells inside of it. Might take some fudging for things like doors; what I’d try is to repurpose a barn or shed or other building that’s mostly outer walls, knock off the roof and maybe the upper walls and replace them with the spells, pack insulation around the edges. You want to get fancy Wall of Stone/Stone Shape the foundation and then build in things like irrigation trenches, an empty space under the floor so you can heat it non-magically, whatever you can mold.

    Or maybe Fabricate glass panes; they don’t have to be perfect just let light through, and then you could skip the XP cost for Permanency on all the Walls of Force.
    Glass is super-fragile, and Wall of Force explicitly requires it be vertical (so no roof). You want Invisible Spell (+0 metamagic, Cityscape) on Wall of Stone. Transparent, reasonably tough, can shape it however, no XP cost.

    Quote Originally Posted by Asmotherion View Post
    Get as many herbivor animals as possible inside the citty, and have them breed. Most of the townpeople who have no class levels will be farmers.

    Get as many seeds as possible; Plant everything, and have the Local druids use Overgrowth on them (Both versions of the spell). This will feed the animals, and provide wheat etc. Every harvest, plant half the consumable seeds, and use the rest for consumption. They will also Move Earth the ground around the boarders of the town with multiple castings of Move Earth together with the Wizards. This shall put the town around 100 feet underground.

    Then, wall of stone will be used multiple times to create a dome above the citty and walls to support the sides, as well as stairs that lead above the citty. Some slides will be made on the dome, that lead to a series of holes. This holes will have 100 feet tubes, connecting the surface of the dome to the citty bellow it, and valves at the end. The base of the Dome, will have many oppen sections for oxygen to flow in the citty. At the center of the dome, a multi-layer of Permanent Walls of Fire will be casted, to act as an artificial Sun to provide the citty with the necessary heat and the plants with all the nourishment they need. The Heat of the Wall of Fire will heat the dome as an oven, melting the snow/ice that forms on it's top, and providing hot water for the citty. Using the hot water, modern plumbing is conceivable to be created. Finally, a large sewer system under the town will lead the "contaminated water" in a second, independant underground chamber (again, applications of Move Earth and Wall of Stone).
    Not a problem, but this will need regular inspections and repair: Lots of snow produces glaciers & ice sheets, which flow towards the empty areas. They melt fastest at the contact point with your hot dome, so the bottom of the stuff over your home melts first. This means you've got large chunks of ice held on by their sides, with progressively more of the ice being held on the side as more gets pushed in. Eventually, these large chunks fall, and you have several thousand pounds of ice falling 50 feet to hit the rock dome. The chunks then melt (the stone's hot) clearing the way for more chunks of ice to do the exact same thing. The rock dome has a lot of HP (it's several feet of ROCK), but the ice chunks will exceed it's hardness quite regularly. Which means you'll need to repair it regularly, or eventually have a very nasty cave-in.

    Note that this effect also advertises your town's position ("calving" as it's called, is very, very loud).
    Last edited by Jack_Simth; 2021-02-20 at 10:01 AM.
    Of course, by the time I finish this post, it will already be obsolete. C'est la vie.

  6. - Top - End - #156
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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    Combine permanent walls of fire with sweaters and the heat issue should be solved.
    Interesting analysis of the various wall spells. I’ve been thinking that in the cave system, there would be heating stations involving Heat Metal and tubs of water. Huge walls of fire, etc. might be overkill, certainly a safety hazard, and might also cause issues with oxygen in the caves.

    And beyond this—if we assume a normal cave system with fine cracks and fissures leading up to the surface, then heated air rising through those cracks would create steam and telltale melting, which could be a giveaway that a refuge is somewhere below.

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    Speaking of food production, there's one spell worth discussing. Plant growth's Enrichment mode can affect all fields within half a mile, aka ~500 acres.
    Yup, I mentioned Plant Growth a little earlier, and I’ve been assuming it will be a factor in any kind of agriculture.

    Originally Posted GreatWyrmGold
    Obviously, this kind of intensive farming would require a lot of labor, but we've got 20,000 souls crammed into this city and statistically speaking a lot of them are going to be farmers.
    Working out the exact labor requirements is certainly key to knowing whether this approach will work.

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    We're also going to need plenty of fertilizer to keep the soil healthy….
    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    …we've got 20,000 souls crammed into this city….
    I see fertilizer as the flip side of waste management, which will be a real issue.

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    There's a wall of ooze, a wall of salt, a wall of freaking scales, but not glass?
    There’s your solution. A thin sheet of salt would essentially be frosted glass.

    There is the issue of its dissolving in water (including snowmelt) but as an alternative, a very thin sheet of sandstone would also be translucent. Either way would still be extremely fragile, though.

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    This article references winter wheat being planted in antiquity, so I think its fair to say it'd be available.
    Excellent, thanks.

    Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
    Also is some of that farmland being used for livestock instead of crops? Not sure what the shepherd-to-sheep-herd ratio is.
    A good point. There would likely be oxen for plowing and some sheep, but I’ll need to look into that further.

    Originally Posted by Asmotherion
    Then, wall of stone will be used multiple times to create a dome above the citty and walls to support the sides….
    Wizards aren’t architects or engineers, so they won’t have any special understanding of how to design load-bearing structures. And a dome like you’re suggesting would be radically different from anything they had done before, so there would be a lot of trial and error.

    Beyond this, it would take a great many castings of Wall of Stone to create a dome over an entire city, probably too many to accomplish before the impact happens and the heavy snows begin. It might be part of a long-term plan to return to the city, but if so it will take more effort than the spellcasters may be able to afford. And of course it will attract attention from anyone or anything else moving through.

    Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
    Alternatively, if the statues remain undamaged but a huge tribe of goblins/pack of wolves/whatever….
    Originally Posted by Quertus
    Because never have I witnessed an adventuring party see a bunch of statues, and suddenly start smashing them because they were worried that they could spontaneously reanimate at any moment.
    We’re not talking about adventurers here; we’re talking about monsters, bandits, scavengers and marauders, anyone who might find their way in.

    Originally Posted by Quertus
    Do I need to spell it out in more detail for you?

    Actually, based on "Druids and bees", I probably do.
    This tone doesn’t help.

    Originally Posted by Jack_Simth
    You want Invisible Spell (+0 metamagic, Cityscape) on Wall of Stone. Transparent, reasonably tough, can shape it however, no XP cost.
    If it works, this is an excellent solution.

    Originally Posted by Jack_Simth
    Lots of snow produces glaciers & ice sheets, which flow towards the empty areas. They melt fastest at the contact point with your hot dome….
    Extremely good points here.

    Also worth remembering that as glaciers flow, they drag along a carpet of stones on their underside, so there will be rocks and small boulders falling together with the ice chunks, as well as constantly scraping and gouging at the roof of the dome.

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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    On Repairs; That seems logical. I don't expect the whole thing to keep operating on it's own.

    On a defence system; I designed this with the sole purpose of surviving the winter. I could include a defence system if you want. I would however like to have an exact number of Casters for each level. Otherwise, "everyone spams magic missile" sounds like a solid deffance plan.

    On knowing how to build it; That's just a matter of ranks in Architecture & Engineering, not only an Int skill, but also a class skill for a Wizard. I'm pretty sure a bunsh of people, each with over 12 ranks and an average +17 bonus in A&E will be able to figure it out, if not by taking 10, definitelly by taking 20.
    Last edited by Asmotherion; 2021-02-20 at 11:42 AM.

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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    Quote Originally Posted by Jack_Simth View Post
    Glass is super-fragile, and Wall of Force explicitly requires it be vertical (so no roof). You want Invisible Spell (+0 metamagic, Cityscape) on Wall of Stone. Transparent, reasonably tough, can shape it however, no XP cost.
    *looks it up* I’m not seeing anything in the description suggesting it wouldn’t work with Wall of Stone. But since Palanan mentioned Heat Metal what about Walls of Iron instead, and then combine them to deal with snow buildup blocking the sun? I admit to being unsure how to deal with the rust problem.

    Quote Originally Posted by Asmotherion View Post
    On knowing how to build it; That's just a matter of ranks in Architecture & Engineering, not only an Int skill, but also a class skill for a Wizard. I'm pretty sure a bunsh of people, each with over 12 ranks and an average +17 bonus in A&E will be able to figure it out, if not by taking 10, definitelly by taking 20.
    On Architecture and Engineering, does it have to be the caster who makes the check? Because in a city of 20,000, I would think odds would be good someone would build new buildings for a living and have those ranks. Just hire them to do your design work, and have the casters do the heavy lifting.

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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    Originally Posted by Asmotherion
    That's just a matter of ranks in Architecture & Engineering, not only an Int skill, but also a class skill for a Wizard.
    Is there a DC for building a stone dome over a city?

    I’ve never heard of a stone dome over any city in any setting. There’s probably one somewhere, but not anywhere in the Realms or other settings that I’m familiar with.

    So, this will be something completely new the spellcasters are attempting. That will involve a lot of failures, which means a lot of falling stone, so there’s potential for damaging sections of the city.

    Beyond this, there’s the issue of time.

    Spoiler
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    Using the much-cited example of medieval Troyes, the city walls enclose an area roughly 2000 x 4000 feet, or roughly 180 acres. The total length of the walls is 12,000 feet. If our twelfth-level wizard is doing the casting, then each casting of the spell creates a strip of stone five feet high and 60 feet long.

    Assuming an Int of 22, he can cast the spell seven times a day. That gives us a strip of stone five feet high and 420 feet long for a day’s casting. It takes him nearly a month to create a five-foot-high strip of stone running around the city walls. With a handful of other wizards cooperating, it might be possible to make that strip 15 or 20 feet high in that month, but that still leaves the city open to the sky—and this doesn’t include the necessary extra mass for structural elements, which are explicitly called out in the spell description.

    So, there’s no way the city can be domed over before the catastrophe hits—and there will probably be other urgent needs for those spell slots. Doming over the city might be a long-term project, but the work would have to continue through the constant snow and other hazards of the post-catastrophe world. I could easily see the remains of the city being occupied by all manner of things, which could make the doming project all the more complicated.


    More than likely the attempt would be abandoned partway through the first few years, although it might be revived at some point in centuries to come. But even if the project is completed, there will be a lot of other challenges to deal with, as Jack_Simth pointed out.

    Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
    On Architecture and Engineering, does it have to be the caster who makes the check? Because in a city of 20,000, I would think odds would be good someone would build new buildings for a living and have those ranks. Just hire them to do your design work, and have the casters do the heavy lifting.
    Possibly, but again, this sort of structure has never been attempted before by anyone in the city, and probably nowhere in the world. This is an oblong dome covering nearly two hundred acres, so it’s on a scale no one has any experience with. I have no idea what the DC would be for that.

    Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
    I admit to being unsure how to deal with the rust problem.
    To say nothing of the rust-monster problem.

    Last edited by Palanan; 2021-02-20 at 01:10 PM.

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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    DC 30 or 40 for the engineering check at max. Easily doable.

    Also, any reason not to immovable rod/wall of force to stop the thing falling? Giving time and a bit of resources can probably make it land if not safely at least non-disastrously. Falling from 2 feet above ground for example with no momentum is a lot less severe than say terminal velocity from whereever in space.

    As for the wall of stone, make your outer wall stone, then the inner fall supporting the stone wall of force. Probably need dark crafting XP but its doable and makes your city more or less impenetrable. Just use architecture and engineering/necklaces of adaptation/dungeoneering to fix the issues with air flow and such and you are good.

    Defense of the denizens of your cities should be pretty easy. The creatures that live and thrive in winter do not really need to assault you. They are adapted. Some might want more/easier resources, but they live just fine in cold climes so it is not an issue.

    So your foes are likely to be humanoid raiders looking for stuff, whether it be home or a nomadic people expanding territories. Most humanoid raiders if they can already survive likely have something making them able to survive, and trekking to BFE mountain valley is not exactly in their best interest. Nomadic peoples likely just want easy pickings because if they live on the move there is not exactly a lot of stuff they could take with them.

    So you have other societies that survived in spite of this, which means they likely have a reasonable approach and already have things taken care of, or they were underdark folk or something which makes it less of an issue. Folk from the underdark likely are not adapted to endless winter, living in geothermal hot spots underground, and they would need to find access to you from underground to strike at you. The domed city idea shuts a lot of that down, sieging in winter when your target has more or less limitless supplies is a nice way to kill your army whose supplies are not limitless.

    Your biggest issue as always is hostile casters. But if you are set up to survive, they probably are too. Trade and information seems reasonable in those circumstances. Most non-dragons monsters if not defeated by walls of stone are easily dealt with by casters of reasonable levels. Especially in the case of consolidating resources by petrification/undeadification of residents. Dragons looking to increase their hordes might fall back at resistances, and the wall of force supporting walls of stone really limits what can get in, needing disintegration, a burrow speed, or dimension door or the like. And mutual beneficial pacts between such players are going to be better the the long run. Maybe your temperate dome and some controlled breeding of livestock gets you an ally of a metallic dragon, and whites are the ones most likely to attempt and assault in winter and are the weakest of all dragons. Maybe a few silver or gold dragons hang out in a warm area with free food, and "tribute" of some type as a protection fee. They ruthlessly murder interlopers. They get accolades, free food, built up hordes, and a nice place to live. Wins all around.

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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    Quote Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga View Post
    *looks it up* I’m not seeing anything in the description suggesting it wouldn’t work with Wall of Stone. But since Palanan mentioned Heat Metal what about Walls of Iron instead, and then combine them to deal with snow buildup blocking the sun? I admit to being unsure how to deal with the rust problem.



    On Architecture and Engineering, does it have to be the caster who makes the check? Because in a city of 20,000, I would think odds would be good someone would build new buildings for a living and have those ranks. Just hire them to do your design work, and have the casters do the heavy lifting.
    It doesn't necessarily have to, I'm just pointing at their profficiency to do so, and that it's not unheard of to have a Wizard who maxes out all his Knowlage Skills. The whole point is, it's not unlikelly for there to be a Master Architect in the city to make the design.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Is there a DC for building a stone dome over a city?

    I’ve never heard of a stone dome over any city in any setting. There’s probably one somewhere, but not anywhere in the Realms or other settings that I’m familiar with.

    So, this will be something completely new the spellcasters are attempting. That will involve a lot of failures, which means a lot of falling stone, so there’s potential for damaging sections of the city.

    Beyond this, there’s the issue of time.

    Spoiler
    Show
    Using the much-cited example of medieval Troyes, the city walls enclose an area roughly 2000 x 4000 feet, or roughly 180 acres. The total length of the walls is 12,000 feet. If our twelfth-level wizard is doing the casting, then each casting of the spell creates a strip of stone five feet high and 60 feet long.

    Assuming an Int of 22, he can cast the spell seven times a day. That gives us a strip of stone five feet high and 420 feet long for a day’s casting. It takes him nearly a month to create a five-foot-high strip of stone running around the city walls. With a handful of other wizards cooperating, it might be possible to make that strip 15 or 20 feet high in that month, but that still leaves the city open to the sky—and this doesn’t include the necessary extra mass for structural elements, which are explicitly called out in the spell description.

    So, there’s no way the city can be domed over before the catastrophe hits—and there will probably be other urgent needs for those spell slots. Doming over the city might be a long-term project, but the work would have to continue through the constant snow and other hazards of the post-catastrophe world. I could easily see the remains of the city being occupied by all manner of things, which could make the doming project all the more complicated.


    More than likely the attempt would be abandoned partway through the first few years, although it might be revived at some point in centuries to come. But even if the project is completed, there will be a lot of other challenges to deal with, as Jack_Simth pointed out.



    Possibly, but again, this sort of structure has never been attempted before by anyone in the city, and probably nowhere in the world. This is an oblong dome covering nearly two hundred acres, so it’s on a scale no one has any experience with. I have no idea what the DC would be for that.



    To say nothing of the rust-monster problem.

    I think Dark Sun and Eberon have something like that? Not sure though.

    In any case, it's very DM dependant, how to implement a new Design. I don't think there is a direct way to calculate the DC. My take would be basing the concept on a Colosal Pyramid, and working your way from that. Nothing a DC 37 check wouldn't take care of.

    If we're talking about FR specifically, a similar design could be implemented in the Underdark, by connecting the Surface with a smaller version of the dome.

    Sure, it will need more effort to defend a town in the underdark, but with enough 12th level casters, it's not that hard, at least from non-exceptional threats.

    Also, 7 castings, each covering an area of 120 sqare feet, means each caster can provide 840 feet of Work per day. Assuming at least 4 Casters able to cast Wall of Stone, this would make for 3360 feet of work per day, more than half a mile. It's not an exageration that the Dome would be ready in more or less 5 days. And, let's not underestimate the work force of 20.000 citizents, who may not be experts, but their sheer number reduces the time needed to complete any job significantly.

    Finally all casters have access to summon spells, and more importantly, Wizards have access to Planar Binding, which means they can get Specialised Work at will (Things with Burrow Speeds, Water Elementals for Water supply, Earth Elementals to move Large Bulders etc)

    Finally, the end goal is to turn the whole city into a stronghold, and apply stronghold logic to it, which I will latter use in the "defences" section (but honestly, I don't have time to right now).

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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    To say nothing of the rust-monster problem.

    Their environment is listed as underground. If we’re building invisible greenhouses outside then by definition we are not underground. And they only scent metal up to 90 feet away so that wouldn’t be a problem either.

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    Glass is mostly just quartz. And the stuff that's not quartz is only really needed to reduce the melting point. You only care about the melting point if you use normal, muggle processes to manufacture things.

    So just cast Wall of Stone and Stone Shape to get some greenhouse-shaped structures. Then cast Stone Metamorphosis to change it from granite to quartz. Or one of the many other transparent minerals.

    … Oh wait, someone already said Invisible Spell? … Yeah, that's a much better idea. … I keep forgetting that exists.

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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    Originally Posted by Efrate
    The creatures that live and thrive in winter do not really need to assault you. They are adapted. Some might want more/easier resources, but they live just fine in cold climes so it is not an issue.
    They live just fine in cold climates by preying on whatever they can find.

    Originally Posted by Asmotherion
    Also, 7 castings, each covering an area of 120 sqare feet, means each caster can provide 840 feet of Work per day.
    Your math seems a little off here. A single casting of Wall of Stone at 12th level gets you 12 five-foot squares, which is 12 squares of 25 square feet, or 300 square feet. Seven castings will get you 2100 square feet per day.

    Simply roofing over the city, which takes less stone than a dome, requires covering an area of 2000 x 4000 feet, which is eight million square feet. That’s 3810 wizard-days of casting, or more than ten years.

    A dome will require a greater amount of stone, so ten years is a steep underestimate. And a dome of stone that size won’t be able to support its own weight, so it will need a superstructure of pillars and buttresses to keep it up. Per the spell text, that superstructure will reduce the area of each casting by half, so at a minimum it will take twenty years.

    Also, snow weighs 20 pounds per cubic foot, so even with only a hundred feet of snow (half of what's predicted) there’s an additional 2000 pounds on each square foot of the dome. Given that it’s only three inches thick, the dome will almost certainly pancake down once snowpack begins to accumulate.

    As Jack_Simth pointed out, if the city is heated then the snow will be melting on contact, but a hundred feet of snow won’t melt all at once, and there will still be the other issues already mentioned.

    Originally Posted by Efrate
    Also, any reason not to immovable rod/wall of force to stop the thing falling?
    The immovable rod is great for adventurers, but I’m not sure if it works as magical rebar.

    A four-inch thick slab of granite weighs 60 pounds per square foot (according to the fine folks at Troy Granite), which means 1500 pounds per five-foot square. One immovable rod can support 8000 pounds, so one rod can support five (5) five-foot squares.

    A sheet of rock 2000 x 4000 feet is 8 million square feet, or 320,000 five-foot squares. That works out to 64,000 immovable rods. That’s probably more immovable rods than have ever existed in the history of the world. The cost to craft that many would be 160,000,000 gp.

    And of course that doesn’t take into account the extra 2000 pounds per square foot from the snowpack.

    Originally Posted by Efrate
    Your biggest issue as always is hostile casters.
    Which could be a real headache if you’re using walls of force to hold up your city’s 480-million-pound stone roof.

    Originally posted by Kareeah_Indaga
    Their environment is listed as underground. If we’re building invisible greenhouses outside then by definition we are not underground. And they only scent metal up to 90 feet away so that wouldn’t be a problem either.
    Beware the cold-adapted, surface-roaming rust monster!

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    Or maybe start breeding cold-adapted rust monsters as livestock.

    Now that'll deter attackers. Especially high-level ones. Nobody's gonna risk loosing tens of thousands of gp-worth of gear just to take whatever it is you have that they want.

    It'll be a bit of a pain to redesign your entire civilization to use no metal. But maybe worth it?

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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    Quote Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga View Post
    So about one worker per person fed if you ploughed the whole thing in one day, assuming you could get the equivalent of eight oxen for each of them.
    Note: You can't get a team of eight oxen for every worker. Historically, such livestock were pretty rare, usually being owned either communally by a village or by a local sristocrat (who would "rent" them out to peasants, usually in exchange for working on his land). More information on ancient/medieval farming.

    Why not Wall of Force?
    Because I didn't realize it was only 5th level.
    Also, I'm not sure whether it's transparent to infrared or not. If it is, then the greenhouse would only trap moisture and keep pests out, which isn't nothing but it's not the most pressing issue.

    Or maybe Fabricate glass panes; they don’t have to be perfect just let light through, and then you could skip the XP cost for Permanency on all the Walls of Force.
    Fabricate makes a lot more stuff per casting than I realized. I'm not sure whether you'd need to provide it an equal quantity of glass (which would defeat the point) or if sand would do.


    QUOTE=Asmotherion;24937503]Get as many seeds as possible; Plant everything, and have the Local druids use Overgrowth on them (Both versions of the spell).[/quote]
    I assume you mean plant growth? The overgrowth version doesn't give any indication that the plants will be usable in any way, only that they become overgrown (which I don't consider
    a synonym for "ready to harvest). The enrichment version absolutely improves yield, but it doesn't make harvest come any sooner and I'm not sure it stacks. Maybe some use of plant growth would enable massive rapid harvests by RAI, but RAW it's on shaky ground at best.


    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    Because never have I witnessed an adventuring party see a bunch of statues, and suddenly start smashing them because they were worried that they could spontaneously reanimate at any moment.
    Your friends must never have heard of stone golems. Or animated objects. Or gargoyles.
    Or you're just being more restrictive in your use of "spontaneously".


    Quote Originally Posted by Jack_Simth View Post
    Glass is super-fragile, and Wall of Force explicitly requires it be vertical (so no roof). You want Invisible Spell (+0 metamagic, Cityscape) on Wall of Stone. Transparent, reasonably tough, can shape it however, no XP cost.
    I'd be shocked if invisible spell was opaque to infrared, so see above. Also, I think that arguing the wall would be invisible would be a bit like arguing that an invisible fireball's damage would also be invisible.


    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Interesting analysis of the various wall spells. I’ve been thinking that in the cave system, there would be heating stations involving Heat Metal and tubs of water. Huge walls of fire, etc. might be overkill, certainly a safety hazard, and might also cause issues with oxygen in the caves.
    And beyond this—if we assume a normal cave system with fine cracks and fissures leading up to the surface, then heated air rising through those cracks would create steam and telltale melting, which could be a giveaway that a refuge is somewhere below.
    1. Who said anything about caves?
    2. Heat metal doesn't last long enough to be an effective civil heating solution.

    There’s your solution. A thin sheet of salt would essentially be frosted glass.

    There is the issue of its dissolving in water (including snowmelt) but as an alternative, a very thin sheet of sandstone would also be translucent. Either way would still be extremely fragile, though.
    The problem being that a wall of salt/stone isn't arbitrarily thin—it's five feet thick.

    Wizards aren’t architects or engineers, so they won’t have any special understanding of how to design load-bearing structures.
    They don't need such understanding, they just need a friendly architect and to know how blueprints work. Given how many settings have Gothic-style cathedrals for major gods, I'd say they could dig up an architect able to design a single dome. Hell, there were big domes in antiquity, never mind the late medieval period! Not on this scale, but the physics scale up even when designs don't.


    Quote Originally Posted by Maat Mons View Post
    Glass is mostly just quartz. And the stuff that's not quartz is only really needed to reduce the melting point. You only care about the melting point if you use normal, muggle processes to manufacture things.
    So just cast Wall of Stone and Stone Shape to get some greenhouse-shaped structures. Then cast Stone Metamorphosis to change it from granite to quartz. Or one of the many other transparent minerals.
    … Oh wait, someone already said Invisible Spell? … Yeah, that's a much better idea. … I keep forgetting that exists.
    For the third time this post, I'm going to point out that greenhouse materials need to be opaque to infrared light, so quartz is probably better.


    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Simply roofing over the city, which takes less stone than a dome, requires covering an area of 2000 x 4000 feet, which is eight million square feet. That’s 3810 wizard-days of casting, or more than ten years.

    A dome will require a greater amount of stone, so ten years is a steep underestimate.
    Not that steep. Assume a circular city and hemispherical dome, even though a flatter (= lower surface area) dome would probably be more practical. The area of the city would be equal to πr2, where r is the radius of the city (duh). A sphere with a radius r would have a surface area of 4πr2, so the hemisphere's area would be only twice the circle's. So we're talking a couple decades if just the one wizard is working on it.

    And a dome of stone that size won’t be able to support its own weight, so it will need a superstructure of pillars and buttresses to keep it up.
    This is a problem. But even a modest four-wizard team would still only take about a decade to build the whole hemispherical dome, and less if they didn't build it as high.

    As Jack_Simth pointed out, if the city is heated then the snow will be melting on contact, but a hundred feet of snow won’t melt all at once...
    If it's heated before the snow falls, or as the dome is built (ie before 100 feet of snow can fall), then you just need to melt snow faster than it falls. Which isn't exceptionally hard, compared to the effort of heating the roof at all.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Beware the cold-adapted, surface-roaming rust monster!
    Truthfully Wall of Stone would probably be simpler - I think it’s a lower level spell, and thus more accessible, if nothing else. We could probably use Unseen Servant to clean off snow or just some guys with ladders and shovels.

    (If it’s not obvious, I’m fond of solutions that don’t completely rely on our high level casters - or casters in general - doing everything. It makes it less likely they’ll run out of magic before the mountain hits, frees them up for stuff that only they can do, and provides redundancy if they all get up and leave.)

    Separate topic, you mentioned acid rain at one point I believe? Do the divinations give us any idea of how long that will last? We’re going to need some way of keeping it out of our drinking/irrigation water. (Yes, I remember someone brought up the Decanter of Endless Water already. Redundancy.)

    Quote Originally Posted by Maat Mons View Post
    Or maybe start breeding cold-adapted rust monsters as livestock.

    Now that'll deter attackers. Especially high-level ones. Nobody's gonna risk loosing tens of thousands of gp-worth of gear just to take whatever it is you have that they want.

    It'll be a bit of a pain to redesign your entire civilization to use no metal. But maybe worth it?
    If we have Druids, we’ll be fine.

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    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    First problem: giving all the citizens a 1000 year life time. Even normal circumstances, few races would survive 1000 years. If, instead we set the community, not individuals, this part can be skipped.

    Second problem: Find (or make) somewhere with livable temperatures.

    Third problem: secure a source of renewable food.

    4th problem: keeping a way to restore the countryside when the winter ends.

    I feel all of these problems have been solved in previous responses.

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    Quote Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold View Post
    I'd be shocked if invisible spell was opaque to infrared, so see above.
    A greenhouse needs to trap infra-red only if sunlight is it's primary source of heat. If you've got another source of heat (such as say, a Permanent Wall of Fire sealed between some walls of stone to bypass questions of oxygen), that's not particularly necessary.
    Quote Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold View Post
    Also, I think that arguing the wall would be invisible would be a bit like arguing that an invisible fireball's damage would also be invisible.
    Where do you get that equivalency from? A fireball's visual effect is fire. A Wall of Stone's visual effect is stone.
    Of course, by the time I finish this post, it will already be obsolete. C'est la vie.

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    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    Your friends must never have heard of stone golems. Or animated objects. Or gargoyles.
    In my current campaign I had a ranger who spontaneously attacked a stone hearth. We’re still not sure why.

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    1. Who said anything about caves?
    The OP specifies that the city has access to a nearby cave system, so much of the discussion has involved transferring the city’s population to the caves.

    Given the chaos and destruction of the impact, and the overall disintegration of society in the aftermath of the catastrophe, taking refuge in the caves offers a much greater chance of survival than trying to ride it all out in the city.

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    2. Heat metal doesn't last long enough to be an effective civil heating solution.
    On its own, probably not. I’m thinking of using it to heat metal ingots, which can be dumped into metal tubs of water. The ingots are “searing hot” for three rounds, which should heat the water nicely. If this is done in an enclosed area of the caves, it should serve as a workable space heater.

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    Given how many settings have Gothic-style cathedrals for major gods, I'd say they could dig up an architect able to design a single dome. Hell, there were big domes in antiquity, never mind the late medieval period!
    It’s not a given that this city will have a cathedral, but even if it does, it could be centuries old and the architect and builders long dead. Although that could be a nice low-level task during the run-up to the catastrophe—search the city’s archives for the long-lost plans of the cathedral, since they may hold secrets that will help the city survive.

    As for domes in antiquity, the original Hagia Sophia had a dome over a hundred feet across, which was one of the largest if not the largest at the time of its completion in ca. 538. It took six years to build, but it was a rush job; the structure was notoriously unstable and collapsed twenty years later. It had to be completely rebuilt, which may be a note of warning for attempts to dome an entire city.

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    So we're talking a couple decades if just the one wizard is working on it.
    Even though the city isn’t circular, your estimate of twenty years lines up nicely with mine.

    We can assume there will be at least a couple other wizards working on this, and maybe a couple druids with Stone Shape, so we might be able to shave this down to fifteen years—but that’s still hella long time to be out in the blizzards, and a lot of things can happen in fifteen years.

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    If it's heated before the snow falls, or as the dome is built (ie before 100 feet of snow can fall), then you just need to melt snow faster than it falls.
    As Jack_Simth and I both pointed out, it’s not just a question of falling snow, but sheets of ice building up and flowing across the landscape.

    Not to mention that during the fifteen-plus years of dome construction, the snow will be constantly falling, quickly smothering the entire city. You might finally finish covering the city with a protective dome, but the city will already be entombed in ice.

    Walls of fire might help with that, slowly, but you’ll have millions of cubic feet of meltwater to deal with, not to mention the risk of fire damage to the mainly wooden buildings. End result, the city will be a mess.

    I’m just not seeing how building a dome over the existing city won’t end up being far more trouble than it’s worth. Rather than trying to build one huge structure, which would take decades and way too much effort from the higher-level casters, I think it would be much easier to start small, with a few stone yurts that can be easily set up, and then grown in a modular fashion.

    Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
    I’m fond of solutions that don’t completely rely on our high level casters - or casters in general - doing everything. It makes it less likely they’ll run out of magic before the mountain hits, frees them up for stuff that only they can do, and provides redundancy if they all get up and leave.
    I endorse this view wholeheartedly.

    Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
    Separate topic, you mentioned acid rain at one point I believe? Do the divinations give us any idea of how long that will last?
    The acid rain is a direct result of the huge amounts of water and sulfur blown into the stratosphere, which will combine to form sulfuric acid rain as well as sulfuric aerosols. I can’t say how long the acid rain would fall, but it’s probably a shorter-term effect, and as a guess I’d say the worst of it would be over in two or three years.

    So the sulfuric acid rain will destroy crops and other vegetation around the world, leading to wide-scale famines and forest die-offs, which in turn will lead to massive loss of topsoil without living vegetation to keep it in place. The topsoil loss should be stabilized once the snowpack starts building up, but that's still an immense volume of soil lost to future generations.

    As for water security, I’m not sure how much of the acid rain will work its way down into the aquifers, or how the chemistry will change once it does—that’s something else worth looking into.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    The acid rain is a direct result of the huge amounts of water and sulfur blown into the stratosphere, which will combine to form sulfuric acid rain as well as sulfuric aerosols. I can’t say how long the acid rain would fall, but it’s probably a shorter-term effect, and as a guess I’d say the worst of it would be over in two or three years.
    ‘No, Kareeah, using Control Weather for two or three months to cause a drought is not going to save the local forests/soil fertility in any meaningful way, save the resources to do something else’ is what I’m hearing.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    So the sulfuric acid rain will destroy crops and other vegetation around the world, leading to wide-scale famines and forest die-offs, which in turn will lead to massive loss of topsoil without living vegetation to keep it in place. The topsoil loss should be stabilized once the snowpack starts building up, but that's still an immense volume of soil lost to future generations.

    As for water security, I’m not sure how much of the acid rain will work its way down into the aquifers, or how the chemistry will change once it does—that’s something else worth looking into.
    This is admittedly the very first article I found on the subject, but my takeaway is ‘it depends on what the soil is made of.’ Marble and limestone are better at neutralizing acid rain than granite. This one is a little more informative, and mentions combating the effects on crops with crushed limestone. (They also need to fire their editor because they mention an experiment with chalk and white sugar where I’m reasonably certain they meant to say white vinegar - but I digress.) I gather the big danger with drinking water isn’t the acidity itself so much as the fact that it dissolves other things into the water (metals were mentioned) that may be toxic. And the longer it’s in the ground the more the ground affects it.

    Tentatively: if the vault has a deeply-sourced natural spring that was safe to drink out of before, it will remain safe. And if the Underdark exists its ecosystems aren’t going to spontaneously die from the water supply turning acidic, the acidity might not even reach them. I would avoid using rain/snow as drinking water or for irrigation where possible.
    Last edited by Kareeah_Indaga; 2021-02-21 at 08:12 AM.

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    Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
    ‘No, Kareeah, using Control Weather for two or three months to cause a drought is not going to save the local forests/soil fertility in any meaningful way, save the resources to do something else’ is what I’m hearing.
    Pretty much. And causing a drought would only stress the local forests even further, making them more vulnerable to the acid rain.

    Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
    …my takeaway is ‘it depends on what the soil is made of.’
    Very much so. Local soil composition, geomorphology and drainage patterns all have an effect, so not everything will die off equally. But what the acid rain doesn’t kill outright will be weakened severely and more vulnerable to the cold.

    Interestingly, there’s what’s called a “fern spike” after some impacts, since some ferns are more tolerant of soil acidity, so they’ll take advantage of the loss of competition and grow up thickly among the dead trees and woody vegetation. But many ferns are also sensitive to freezing temperatures, and of course they’ll be killed off beneath deep snow.

    Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
    …they mention an experiment with chalk and white sugar where I’m reasonably certain they meant to say white vinegar….
    Well-spotted. They also wrote “bowl white sugar” instead of “bowl of….”

    Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
    Tentatively: if the vault has a deeply-sourced natural spring that was safe to drink out of before, it will remain safe. And if the Underdark exists its ecosystems aren’t going to spontaneously die from the water supply turning acidic, the acidity might not even reach them. I would avoid using rain/snow as drinking water or for irrigation where possible.
    Most water in caves enters from above and seeps down, and since rainwater is naturally slightly acidic that contributes to cave formation. Caves close to the surface would probably receive a strong dose of the sulfuric acid rain.

    If you’re lucky enough to have thermal caves, then you’ll be fine, since the water emerging in the thermal springs has been percolating through deep stone for thousands of years. If there’s any kind of Underdark, then it should be relatively insulated, but in this scenario as I envision it there’s no direct connection to the Underdark.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Pretty much. And causing a drought would only stress the local forests even further, making them more vulnerable to the acid rain.
    Drought issues over a short term could be countered with irrigation (I’m assuming a city containing 20,000 people has a working well, or something along those lines). But keeping it going for years on top of whatever weather control methods is probably going to be a bigger drain on resources than any benefit the vault would get.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Most water in caves enters from above and seeps down, and since rainwater is naturally slightly acidic that contributes to cave formation. Caves close to the surface would probably receive a strong dose of the sulfuric acid rain.
    So it sounds like if our cave complex has water of its own it’s going to need to be purified before use.

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    Purify food and drink is a 0 level cleric/druid spell, and pathfinder has unlimited 0 levels thats easily taken care of.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jack_Simth View Post
    A greenhouse needs to trap infra-red only if sunlight is it's primary source of heat. If you've got another source of heat (such as say, a Permanent Wall of Fire sealed between some walls of stone to bypass questions of oxygen), that's not particularly necessary.
    If it's transparent to infrared, the infrared will escape whether or not the original radiation comes from the sun.

    [quite]Where do you get that equivalency from? A fireball's visual effect is fire. A Wall of Stone's visual effect is stone.[/QUOTE]
    A fireball's effect is fire damage. That's what it does. A wall of stone's effect is making a stone wall.
    Also if anyone tried to do that in a game I was DMing I'd shoot it down hard. You might as well argue that you get a free greater invisibility spell on any summoned/called creatures, for instance, and that's definitely not what's supposed to happen.


    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Given the chaos and destruction of the impact, and the overall disintegration of society in the aftermath of the catastrophe, taking refuge in the caves offers a much greater chance of survival than trying to ride it all out in the city.
    Why? Caves suck if you're trying to build a society; ventilation alone makes the prospect untenable without a lot of magic and/or technology, to say nothing of whether or not there's enough space in the caverns for 20,000 people and the tens of thousands of acres of good farmland you need to feed them. (Assuming you can get good farmland down there!) Let's consider the dangers:

    1. Cold. That's what the walls of fire are for.
    2. Starvation. This will be trickier to solve; we don't have a clear snow-melting radius for our wall of fire (we just know it's probably bigger than the radius for the other spells I looked at). However, it isn't unsolvable, and it's a lot easier to solve on the surface, with its topsoil and sunlight. You don't need to be a farmboy to know that you need a lot more handwavey magic to farm in a cave.
    3. Refugees. Maybe this is just my crass empathy showing, but I don't consider it a bad thing if we can rescue more people. Besides, 20,000 people is pretty close to a D&D metropolis; I assumed that figure already included a fair number of refugees from the surrounding countryside. Meanwhile, if it is just a near-metropolis city, we desperately need those refugees, because blacksmiths and potters don't know how to farm.
    4. Bandits, raiders, etc. This is a potential problem, but most spells in D&D are combat-focused and most people who would become desperate enough to raid peaceful settlements are low-level. It's not a problem.
    5. Monsters. I don't see this being a bigger problem now then it was before the meteor impact/ice age.

    On its own, probably not. I’m thinking of using it to heat metal ingots, which can be dumped into metal tubs of water. The ingots are “searing hot” for three rounds, which should heat the water nicely. If this is done in an enclosed area of the caves, it should serve as a workable space heater.
    Imagine turning the stove to high, putting a pot of water on it for 40 seconds, and taking it off. Will the water be boiling? Will it stay boiling for hours on end? That's basically what you're proposing, just from the inside out. (Heating the pots themselves would probably work better, just because there's more surface area in contact with the water, but the duration is still too low for enough heat flow.)

    It’s not a given that this city will have a cathedral, but even if it does, it could be centuries old and the architect and builders long dead.
    Because as we all know, there was one big rush of cathedral construction, after which the church didn't spend any money on architecture at all. (Not to mention that, barring heavy magic use, if there's a cathedral in town there's a good chance that it's still under active construction!)
    My point wasn't "There's a new cathedral in town! We can talk to whoever designed that!" and more "People build cathedrals, architecture isn't a long-lost intellectual treasure".

    As for domes in antiquity, the original Hagia Sophia had a dome over a hundred feet across, which was one of the largest if not the largest at the time of its completion in ca. 538. It took six years to build, but it was a rush job; the structure was notoriously unstable and collapsed twenty years later. It had to be completely rebuilt, which may be a note of warning for attempts to dome an entire city.
    Note that Justinian's architects didn't have access to magic. That makes it a little easier (and safer) to rush a bit.

    Even though the city isn’t circular, your estimate of twenty years lines up nicely with mine.
    Your estimate was "way more than 10 years because domes are bigger than circles". Mine was "20 years under the worst possible set of assumptions". Those are not the same estimate.
    And the circular thing was just to establish a relationship between city area (which we know) and dome area (which we don't)—the latter wouldn't be more than twice the former unless we really stretched the definition of "dome".

    Walls of fire might help with that, slowly, but you’ll have millions of cubic feet of meltwater to deal with, not to mention the risk of fire damage to the mainly wooden buildings. End result, the city will be a mess.
    1. Cities already deal with millions of cubic feet of meltwater. It's called rain.
    (Snark aside, all rain starts its life as snow in the upper atmosphere, so it is technically meltwater.)
    2. Walls of fire are only deal fire damage within 20 feet of one side. But you can melt snow and ice with heat that wouldn't deal fire damage (citation: I watched a snowflake melt on my finger the other day), so it would clear snow out from a much larger area than its fire-risk zone.

    I don't think doming the city is a practical solution, but it's not as impossible as you're making it out to be.

    I endorse this view wholeheartedly.
    You're not wrong, but at the same time mundane solutions are mostly an excuse for history buffs to flex their muscles and everyone else to show how badly they understand historical societies. Not to mention that, historically, there's a reason our magic-free societies didn't have big cities in the Ice Age.
    Quote Originally Posted by The Blade Wolf View Post
    Ah, thank you very much GreatWyrmGold, you obviously live up to that name with your intelligence and wisdom with that post.
    Quotes, more

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    Quote Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold View Post
    If it's transparent to infrared, the infrared will escape whether or not the original radiation comes from the sun.
    Right. So? Plants don't need infra-red, they need heat and light. Trapping infra-red makes greenhouses warmer than the surrounding area, sure, but it's really just a way of avoiding heat loss. You could duplicate the effect from another direction by way of a double or triple layer Invisible Spell Wall of Stone with air gaps. But then, when you have a permanent wall of fire warming the place, it really doesn't matter.

    Quote Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold View Post
    Where do you get that equivalency from? A fireball's visual effect is fire. A Wall of Stone's visual effect is stone.
    A fireball's effect is fire damage. That's what it does. A wall of stone's effect is making a stone wall.
    Also if anyone tried to do that in a game I was DMing I'd shoot it down hard. You might as well argue that you get a free greater invisibility spell on any summoned/called creatures, for instance, and that's definitely not what's supposed to happen.
    A fireball still evokes a ball of fire whether anyone's in the area to get damaged or not.

    Summoning and Calling spells transport a creature - it's brought from elsewhere and controlled. Wall of Stone creates stone. They're completely different classes of spells.
    Last edited by Jack_Simth; 2021-02-21 at 04:14 PM.
    Of course, by the time I finish this post, it will already be obsolete. C'est la vie.

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    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    Caves suck if you're trying to build a society; ventilation alone makes the prospect untenable without a lot of magic and/or technology, to say nothing of whether or not there's enough space in the caverns for 20,000 people and the tens of thousands of acres of good farmland you need to feed them.
    These and other issues have been extensively discussed earlier in the thread.

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    4. Bandits, raiders, etc. This is a potential problem, but most spells in D&D are combat-focused and most people who would become desperate enough to raid peaceful settlements are low-level.
    Two points here. First, the raiders will be coming in numbers, and flashy spells will be a sure sign that there’s something worth protecting. That news will get out, and bring more raiders and potentially higher-level threats.

    Second, spell slots used to fight off raiders are spell slots not being used to support the community in other ways. If there’s a way to avoid having to fight the raiders at all, e.g. avoiding their notice in caves, then that’s the smarter solution.

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    5. Monsters. I don't see this being a bigger problem now then it was before the meteor impact/ice age.
    It’s safe to assume that prior to the impact, there was a functioning society with the usual range of kingdoms and other principalities, with military and civil resources to protect their citizens.

    With those kingdoms and principalities now gone and buried under snow, there’s nothing to prevent magical predators and other things from spreading far and wide, and those which are cold-adapted will obviously have the competitive edge. What used to be humanoid regions will now be monstrous regions, with many more monsters than there were before. By definition it’s a bigger problem.

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    Note that Justinian's architects didn't have access to magic. That makes it a little easier (and safer) to rush a bit.
    Are there specific spells you’re thinking of that would harden or augment the stone from Wall of Stone?

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    My point wasn't "There's a new cathedral in town! We can talk to whoever designed that!" and more "People build cathedrals, architecture isn't a long-lost intellectual treasure".
    The architects who built those cathedrals zealously guarded their techniques, so that information isn’t likely to be public.

    Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold
    I don't think doming the city is a practical solution, but it's not as impossible as you're making it out to be.
    I never said it was impossible, only time-consuming and very likely more trouble than it’s worth.

    .
    Last edited by Palanan; 2021-02-21 at 04:31 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    This tone doesn’t help.
    First things first: apologies for coming across like I was taking a tone with *you*. My frustration is, as usual, with *myself* - both at my inability to find a means to communicate to my audience effectively, and at my own… inability to enjoy or even tolerate conducting any but the most trivial of research.

    So, again, apologies if my frustration with myself bled through to my post.

    However, i must ask - do you have any suggestions for what *might* help?

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Interesting analysis of the various wall spells. I’ve been thinking that in the cave system, there would be heating stations involving Heat Metal and tubs of water. Huge walls of fire, etc. might be overkill, certainly a safety hazard, and might also cause issues with oxygen in the caves.
    This is an interesting question: *does* Wall of Fire consume oxygen?

    Are there any canon locations with the combination of, say, "sealed area" and "permanent Wall of Fire" to suggest that it doesn't? Any official ruling in either direction?l

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    And beyond this—if we assume a normal cave system with fine cracks and fissures leading up to the surface, then heated air rising through those cracks would create steam and telltale melting, which could be a giveaway that a refuge is somewhere below.
    So, the necropolis has *no* need of heat (undead); the halfling Furries have minimal heating needs (small, furry). So, all things being equal, they would be the hardest to find (among those in caves)?

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Yup, I mentioned Plant Growth a little earlier, and I’ve been assuming it will be a factor in any kind of agriculture.
    When life serves you Druids…

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    I see fertilizer as the flip side of waste management, which will be a real issue.
    Yup. Well, it's only a problem for those relying on magical food, because fertilizer.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Wizards aren’t architects or engineers, so they won’t have any special understanding of how to design load-bearing structures. And a dome like you’re suggesting would be radically different from anything they had done before, so there would be a lot of trial and error.
    C'mon, Druids can know anachronistic facts about plant reproduction, but you're gonna grief 12th level characters with access to spells to give 20 point bonuses on skill checks about building something *round*, when that was well within the capabilities of the ancients on this purportedly e7 world?

    Honestly, I'm a software engineer, not a physical one - I have no concept how hard a *stable* city-sized dome should be to design.

    OTOH, I feel comfortable saying that if 100 cities tried, at least 90 would rush the project, and it would collapse due to cutting corners, *unless* Divinations could be used to say, "I *told* you that was a dumb idea".

    However, whether backed by magic (like Wall of Force) or not, this *feels* vulnerable to enemy attack.

    Then again, cave dwellers have even *more* rock over their heads, which, supposedly, if heated will be noticeable, so I'm not sure that there *is* a winning answer.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Beyond this, it would take a great many castings of Wall of Stone to create a dome over an entire city, probably too many to accomplish before the impact happens and the heavy snows begin. It might be part of a long-term plan to return to the city, but if so it will take more effort than the spellcasters may be able to afford. And of course it will attract attention from anyone or anything else moving through.
    This *is* a potential problem.

    However…

    What's the full list of classes with Wall of Stone?

    What's the full list of "X characters of Level Y" in the town, capable of casting the spell?

    What's the max "Pearl of Power", "Necklace of Prayer Beads", etc support that we can give them?

    What if they started in the *middle*, and worked their way out? What if they attached the supports to existing structures / used existing structures *as* the supports?

    And how much help can muggle craftsmen be?

    So, let's say, for the sake of argument, that there were existing sturdy stone structures, well-placed watchtowers, etc, that could actually serve as *half* the necessary support structure, so that they only need 150% of the "dome-sized" castings.

    Let's further suppose that, between chemistry and magical plants, the anachronistic Druids have no problem devising ways to counteract the acid rain and reclaim the soil.

    And that they utilize the Lich "seed arc", build their own rooftop gardens, and otherwise do absolutely everything they can (Plant Growth, Create Food and Water, etc) to stretch their rations.

    Can they - if left unmolested (perhaps by dent of having a friendly Dragon see their efforts, and decide that it would like a nice warm home too) - manage to build their dome before their stockpile runs out?

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    We’re not talking about adventurers here; we’re talking about monsters, bandits, scavengers and marauders, anyone who might find their way in.
    Sure, but… the logic just didn't follow from what I knew, *and* was not irrational behavior that I had seen before.

    Also, seems to me that most of those willing murder innocents might well be willing to sell them into slavery. Or even eat them. Breaking the statues is just… odd.

    For humans. Monsters, Yeah. Sure.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Also worth remembering that as glaciers flow, they drag along a carpet of stones on their underside, so there will be rocks and small boulders falling together with the ice chunks, as well as constantly scraping and gouging at the roof of the dome.
    So you just need to melt the ice in a larger radius?

    Quote Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold View Post
    Your friends must never have heard of stone golems. Or animated objects. Or gargoyles.
    Or you're just being more restrictive in your use of "spontaneously".
    Actually, I'm being "more restrictive" on the "re" portion of the word "reanimate"

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    Originally Posted by Quertus
    So, again, apologies if my frustration with myself bled through to my post.
    That’s fair, and certainly accepted.

    Originally Posted by Quertus
    This is an interesting question: *does* Wall of Fire consume oxygen? …Any official ruling in either direction?l
    Good question. Continual Flame is specifically described as not consuming oxygen, but it’s a [Light] rather than a [Fire] spell. Wall of Flame is a [Fire] spell, and both radiates heat and deals fire damage, so I’d say it’s actual fire and consumes oxygen as such. But there may be other rulings out there.

    Originally Posted by Quertus
    So, the necropolis has *no* need of heat (undead); the halfling Furries have minimal heating needs (small, furry). So, all things being equal, they would be the hardest to find (among those in caves)?
    A necropolis at cold-ambient is pretty much in stealth mode, so unless they’re using a forge to craft something, there won’t be any overt heat signature. There still might be a few tiny melted points where the vertical fissures reach the surface, since the interior cave temps will probably be above the subzero temperatures topside; but those will be natural and indistinguishable from any other natural cave vents, and extremely easy to overlook.

    As for the halflings, probably only slightly more noticeable than the necropolis. Although the cheerful scent of baked goods might be wafting upwards.

    Originally Posted by Quertus
    …I have no concept how hard a *stable* city-sized dome should be to design.
    It’s a massive challenge. I could see something like this being a prestige project in a prosperous kingdom that wanted to flaunt its wealth, but that would be a colossal endeavour even in times of peace and good weather.

    Originally Posted by Quertus
    Then again, cave dwellers have even *more* rock over their heads, which, supposedly, if heated will be noticeable, so I'm not sure that there *is* a winning answer.
    It’s a whole series of tradeoffs, and it’s certainly fair to assume that for every surviving enclave that found a working strategy, there are nine more that are frozen over.

    Originally Posted by Quertus
    However…

    …let's say, for the sake of argument, that there were existing sturdy stone structures, well-placed watchtowers, etc, that could actually serve as *half* the necessary support structure, so that they only need 150% of the "dome-sized" castings….

    …Can they - if left unmolested (perhaps by dent of having a friendly Dragon see their efforts, and decide that it would like a nice warm home too) - manage to build their dome before their stockpile runs out?
    A lot of good questions here. It’s feasible that there would be towers throughout the city; medieval Florence was known for its towers. But these towers were designed to support their own weight, not anything else.

    That said, we may be putting too much emphasis on the “dome” aspect. What’s the point of doming over an entire city? You end up enclosing a lot of empty air within the dome, but is there any benefit to having that air enclosed?

    Rather than building an immensely resource-intensive dome, it might be more efficient to simply stretch buttressed sheets of rock over city streets, reinforcing the roofs of individual buildings as necessary. This would still be a years-long project, but it won’t spend years and thousands of spell slots enclosing a huge volume of unproductive air.

    As for finishing this before the stockpile runs out…I think not likely, and my instinct is that most of the population will still need to retreat to the caves. But roofing over the main streets would allow the work to progress outwards from the center, as you mentioned, and would provide living and working space immediately, rather than waiting 15-20 years for the entire dome to be completed.

  30. - Top - End - #180
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    Maat Mons's Avatar

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    May 2018

    Default Re: Surviving A Thousand-Year Winter

    Here's something I wrote up yesterday, but didn't post because I noticed Efrate posted something that I felt covered the same idea.

    I feel like a lot of plans are getting shot down on the basis that there exist bad men who would sooner take what you've worked so hard to create than create things for themselves. That's not an invalid point. But it's by no means unique to this scenario. Defending themselves against various monsters and armies is a necessary part of survival for a D&D city even under the best of circumstances.

    It could be argued that the number and scale of attacks will increase. But let's examine that. Every city will be trying to plan for its own survival. If every city succeeds, there won't be any starving masses who need to go pillaging just to survive. Every city succeeding is an overly-optimistic assumption. But if even a decent percentage do, the marauders will be spread out over enough targets that each city should be able to manage the bands that come their way.

    Moreover, I feel like anyone with the capacity to be a threat has little incentive to attack. If they can't muster enough spellcasting power to overcome the environment without needing to steel from others, well then they clearly don't have enough magic at their disposal to succeed at taking anything from the (clearly superior) communities that do have the wherewithal to sort their own situations out.
    Anyway, people keep saying the world's going to go all Mad Max in this situation. But I don't feel anyone's provided any sound reasoning why it should. Basically, there's need to be widespread shortages of basic necessities for that to happen. And people in this thread have outlined many ways of ensuring an abundance of basic necessities.

    For most of them, the only counter argument for why the plans wouldn't work is that everyone would be at everyone else's throat. But people will only be at each other's throats if the plans don't work. So it's really quite circular. Attempts to farm in greenhouses fail because hungry people show up and ruin things. But the only reason there even are hungry people how can show up and ruin things is because attempts to farm in greenhouses fail.

    If an average city can provide for itself in this "apocalypse" with only their internal resources, then all the cities will do that, and there will be no bands of desperate raiders. So if the only reason an average city couldn't provide for itself is desperate raiders, no problem, because there aren't any. First you need society to fail, then you get rooving warbands. Which means roving warbands can't be what causes society to fail, because they come later.



    On a largely-unrelate note, the OP said our city isn't using human sacrifices. But I see no reason to suppose that other, less scrupulous cities won't. And that's important, because it's other, less scrupulous cities that you keep worrying about us being attacked by. So if the Evil-ly inclined can get their magic items easily and safely by sacrificing some dumb 1st-level Commoners who show up seeking refuge, they're clearly going to prefer that option to risking an attack on an organized force. The only reason anyone might need to steel supplies for crafting magic items is if they're too moral to kill innocents to get what they want. And if they're too moral to kill innocents, they're not going to come and kill us, because we're innocents.



    And speaking of Evil solutions, there's always Planar Binding. I mean, it's not explicitly tagged as Evil, but come on! Kidnapping outsiders, forcing them to do your bidding, and then maybe not even paying them? That's some dark stuff.

    But anyway, there are outsiders with Wish as a spell-like ability. And Wish can create magic items out of nothing. … Man, the whole concept of scarcity just falls apart in this game, doesn't it?



    On a completely-unrelated note, isn't there a spell called Suspend or something that levitates a massive chunk of rock in the air? Feels like it might be relevant to the "let's have tons of rock over our heads" plan.

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