Fun Finds v7.0 - Now with +15% more reposts!

[SorO_Lost]

Hmm, is that even viable?

Taking corn for example, in the 1860s people averaged around twenty bushels per acre (opposed to say 160/acre in 2010)^*. An acre has 43,560cuft and a bushel is about 9.3 gallons^* or 148.8 cups or 297.6 servings of corn. So at CL1 Womb of the Earth affects a 25ft wide circle (about 78cuft) for about 0.00005 bushels of corn per casting and that's "1.68010752688172e-7" servings of corn according to my windows calculator. Someone should check my math I think.

[TC X0 Lt 0X]

Got an obscure and rather useful spell:

Womb of the Earth is a 1st level cleric spell from Dragon 279 p. 35. It's Transmutation, casting time of 15 minutes, Range of Close, an Area of 15 ft burst +10 ft/level, with an Instantaneous (D) duration. In turns an area of natural light vegetation into a miracle-grow field that causes "food plants" (of a type specified of at the type of casting) to grow to harvest maturity in 24 hours. After harvesting the ground returns to its prior condition.

No Druids?
The forest is going to have a riot over this.

[ketaro]

That math is probably correct, Soro, in that the world doesn't need yet more ways for clerics to cheat the poverty system with mass amounts of free food at 1st or slightly higher level.

[kitep]

That math has to be wrong, as you could easily grow several stalks in that area, and even one ear of corn has to be more than e-7 servings.

Spell Area = pi * r^2 = 3.14 * 25 * 25 = 1962.5 sqft

1962.5 / 43,560 * 297.6 = 13.4 servings

[Jowgen]

I done a different calculation with the Pomow plant (SoS p. 51), which maxes out at 1-2 ft diameter in size. Tying the WotE to a Hallow and assuming one gives each plant a 1 ft planting berth, you can fit 711 Pomow plants in the area, which is also how many you can harvest in a day. Going by watermelons (maybe pumpins would be better analogy), which are on average a bit over 1.5 ft in diameter (like the pomow), each Pomow should weigh about 8 lb. Giving a bit of leeway, that is about 8 x 700 = 5600 lb of food. The average humanoid needs 1 lb of good quality food/day, so that is the exact number of people that can be fed (not accounting for the 3 days someone can go without food without penalty). That is comfortably within the population range of a Large town or the low-end of a small city. If Plant Growth stacks on top of this, we up the production to about 7500, which is a mid-range small town.

[Childe]

For kitep's calculation, the one aspect missing is it is 20 bushels/acre, not just 1 bushel/acre. So 1 casting produces 268 servings of corn over 24 hours (assuming the plants are there to begin with).
That's not bad.

[ketaro]

Damn. And thus another broken food generator appears...

[Jowgen]

Damn. And thus another broken food generator appears...

Actually more than that, it is an incredibly broken means of wealth creation. Going by the "edible items table" in A&E, you can get 75 gp per OUNCE of vanilla. Runner up is Saffron at 65 gp. Furthermore, going by the dictionary defintion of food plant "a plant some part of which provides food for human consumption", you can include fruit trees. Including Fey Cherries, which are a damn gold mine. Certain ingested drug plants, like Mertoran Leaf, might also qualify.

[SorO_Lost]

and even one ear of corn has to be more than e-7 servings.

fyi


But I did screw something up. The more accurate area of 1,962.5cuft is about 4% of an acre. That comes out to about 0.8 bushels or 7.44 gallons or 238 servings which is much better. You could probably plant a garden of several different plants to meet nutritional requirements. It might just come out ahead of several other Spells too, but troll meat is still probably the way to go.

[Keldar]

Sounds like a job for The Three Sisters.

[Thurbane]

Ghostwalk states that Undead can use Charisma to determine the duration of their Rage:

Barbarian: There are not many barbarians among the undead, but gangs of barbarian ghouls and ghasts are used as shock troops by the more powerful lords of Xaphan. A raging undead barbarian does not gain an increase in Constitution (or anything dependent upon Constitution such as hit points or Fortitude saves) but uses its normal Charisma modifier instead of its Constitution modifier to determine how long a rage lasts. Because undead are immune to fatigue, an undead barbarian is not penalized when a rage ends.

...also, less obscure:

Charisma: A creature’s Charisma modifier affects the save DC for any spell-like abilities it has. Use Charisma for anything pitting the creature’s will against an opponent, such as gaze attacks, charms, compulsions, and energy drain effects. Also use Charisma for any DC that normally would be based on an ability score the creature does not have. For example, undead have no Constitution score, so any poison attack an undead creature has would use Charisma to determine the save DC.

_____________________________________________________________

And it states it must happen within 1 minute of the corpse having died, so you have almost a full minute to haphazardly tear a heart out of a chest; a fairly easy thing when you think of it as almost 10 entire rounds worth of actions.

Heartripper or Clutch of Orcus should seriously reduce the removal time. 

[Jowgen]

Something that I thought would already have been mentioned but doesn't show in the compilation:

Splinter Bolts, from Dragon 349 page 23. 60 gp a pop, these crossbow bolts actually fragment into a 30ft cone upon being fired, doing 1d6 regardless of the crossbow with a DC 15 for half damage. As these are still ammunition fired from a ranged weapon, stuff that adds (flat) damage to weapon damage rolls should apply accross the board. Get your damage per shot high enough (e.g. DFI anyone?) and this can mow down mooks in literal droves.

Less interesting but still fun are Tanglefoot Bolts from the same page, which are just a tanglefoot-bag tipped bolt that does exactly what you think.

[Vladeshi]

I don't know how I missed this for the 15 years I have been playing 3.0/3.5, but if you look in Deities & Demigods and the Dragon magazine article on Olidammara you can notice that he has an affinity for creatures with shell and carapace.

Well....

(click to show/hide)

Olidammara backwards is arammadilo. A few letters off from armadillo. God of jokes and tricks indeed.

[phaedrusxy]

 

[Samwise]

I don't know how I missed this for the 15 years I have been playing 3.0/3.5, but if you look in Deities & Demigods and the Dragon magazine article on Olidammara you can notice that he has an affinity for creatures with shell and carapace.

Well....

(click to show/hide)

Olidammara backwards is arammadilo. A few letters off from armadillo. God of jokes and tricks indeed.

There are several dozen of those sprinkled throughout Gygax's material. Mostly anagrams, often with homophonic letter swaps, some clipped names, and other random bits of humor.

My favorite that took me a good 20 years to get is this:
In D3 Vault of the Drow you require special vision to see, either infravision, a gem of seeing, or the "cinnabar cusps".
"Cusps" are lenses, or more directly, glasses.
"Cinnabar" is a mercury compound often used as a dye, and causing the usual problems of mercury poisoning as a result, which is to say, insanity. Cinnabar is a deep red color.
"Cinnabar cusps" are thus . . . "rose-colored glasses", of a material that causes madness.
Thus when you look through them, the Vault "is indeed a dark fairyland."

As for deities, Wee Jas (pronounced "ouija", like the board), deity of magic and death, who is exceptionally lawful, is rumored to be having an affair with Norebo, the deity of thieves, who is of course thoroughly Chaotic. Norebo spelled backwards is Oberon, King of the Fairies from a Midsummer Night's Dream.

[SorO_Lost]

Retributive Enervation apparently has no limit on handing out Temp HP allowing every Zombie nearby to gain a +5hp buff for an hour. It's not a lot, specially at level 13/14, but still interesting.

[Samwise]

Plotting some NPCs for an adventure featuring as assault on a mountain fortress and the thought occurred to me:

Airstep Sandals + Pegasus Cloak = advanced parachute

Airstep sandals are 10' flight as a move action but must end the round supported or fall.
Pegasus cloak is constant feather fall.

Combined, you fall 60'/round, with 10'/round controlled/modified movement.
Leap from a high enough place and you can cross a street or chasm or whatever to a lower landing point without having full flight.

[ketaro]

These new spells can be common spells chosen from the sorcerer/wizard spell list, or they can be unusual spells that the sorcerer has gained some understanding of by study.

From Sorcerer's Spells class feature....Does this technically mean Sorcerers can learn spells outside the Sorcerer/Wizard spell lists?

[Nifft]

These new spells can be common spells chosen from the sorcerer/wizard spell list, or they can be unusual spells that the sorcerer has gained some understanding of by study.

From Sorcerer's Spells class feature....Does this technically mean Sorcerers can learn spells outside the Sorcerer/Wizard spell lists?

That's a tantalizing tidbit that's constantly brought up, but never officially supported either way... EXCEPT in Oriental Adventures, where they give Sorcerers the option of using the (relatively worse) Wu Jen list instead:

Game Rule Information: As described in the Player ’s Handbook. Sorcerers can use either the wizard/sorcerer spell list from the Player’s Handbook or the wu jen spell list in Chapter 7.

But yeah, some DMs would allow a Sorcerer to take off-list spells. That's a house-rule, though, merely inspired by the tantalizing tidbit you quoted.

[ketaro]

Whoa you can learn Wu Jen spells? Cause, much like Paladin spells, theres some real nice gems in all that rough.