[Pathfinder] Magic items to change [s]the world[/s] a town.

[momothefiddler]

Of course, you could have a minor creation based fashion, where people literally had their clothes created anew on their bodies every day.

-Username17

That's cool, but wouldn't Disguise Self be way cheaper?

'Course, I'd need to throw in Endure Elements and some sort of defense against mild abrasions and such. Would temp HP count for that or would I need full-on DR? Maybe Minor Creation is the cheaper method after all....

[Ferret]

Fabricate a suit of clothes for everyone, each item enchanted with 1/x Mending 1x/ Prestidigitation (cleaning) and possibly an item of Endure Elements.

Everyone's clothing and person is always clean and hygenic, minor rips and tears are fixed via Mending.

[momothefiddler]

Minor Creation (8hrs): cost factor 24. Command Word: cost 43,200

Disguise Self: cost factor 1. Use Activated: cost 2000
Endure Elements: cost factor 1. Continuous: cost 1000
Mending 1/day: cost factor 0.2. Command Word? Cost 360
Prestidigitation 2/day: cost factor 0.2. Command Word: Cost 360
We'll go ahead and say this outfit takes the chest, belt, arms, and feet slots to avoid worrying about slot multipliers. Total cost: 3720

So the population could get up to all of 11 before it's more practical to have a dispenser than to enchant individual outfits, even ignoring the fact that individual outfits could get stolen and whatnot. You might want to include Endure Elements, and you might want a longer duration, and I'm not sure how best to do that without increasing the CL to absurd levels, but even then the dispenser scales better.

---

Say, you can restrict magic items to function only for a specific race/class/alignment. Can you restrict them to TiaC's tattoo? What if I built something around Arcane Mark?

[Prak]

The Major Creation Seamstress only covers basic clothing, not clothing that changes appearance, mends and cleans itself, and makes you better able to withstand normal weather. Also, keep in mind that Prestidigitation gives you the ability to perform its minor tricks for 1 hr/caster level. So if you're Bard1 who casts Prest., for the next hour you can colour, clean, soil, chill, warm, flavour and slowly lift small items.

I would say the arcane mark is fair game for item use limitation.

[momothefiddler]

Appearance, mending, and cleaning are covered by the fact that you get literally new clothes whenever you want and the old ones vanish after however many hours.

It would make sense to include an Endure Elements effect, if possible, though, yes. [EDIT]And it probably wouldn't be necessary to add it to the cost calculation but I could throw Swift Girding into the prereqs so people could have the dispenser put the clothes on them instead of spitting out clothes that they had to carry home to change into. It'd make cleaning and fashion changes easier too.[/EDIT]

Prestidigitation: Hm. So it wouldn't be unreasonable to throw it in as continuous and have the garment automatically keep itself clean and change color as desired? Though while clothes are being worn they're not in a 1-foot cube, so can they be affected? The build I'd proposed for enchanted clothes assumed they'd be taken off and folded up at night or something. It was only after I'd forgotten that that I raised it to 2/day.

I think as long as the Endure Elements can be folded in (or otherwise covered), I like the disposable clothing plan.

---

I'm definitely gonna see what I can do with Arcane Mark.

[Prak]

What's the idea, here, exactly? A giant clothes generator in the center of town?

[momothefiddler]

Not necessarily giant, I suppose, but yeah, that's what I was thinking. Want to change clothes? Wander up to the dispenser, push the button or whatever, and now you're wearing what you wanted to wear instead. Sorta like the goodberry dispenser, where you go over and pull the lever and eat the berry.

[fectin]

If you want to preserve food crops as viable, prestidgitate the goodberries to be bland instead.

Necromancy comes up because it's a perpetual motion machine. Put a zombie in a treadmill, and it walks forever with no energy input. You can run whatever you want off of that. On top of that, spellstitched undead are a fantastic renewable resource for all kinds of shenanigans.

At level three, life is still rough for the fantastic revolutionary. Don't sweat it. Your sweet spot is levels seven through nine. Before that, several dozen arbitrary items of magic missile 1/day does a lot to secure a town, and even more to make it democratic (or at least oligarchic).

The CLW trap is probably still viable in some form or other.

Floating Disk could make streetcars or a train.

animate rope could probably become a telegraph system with a little creativity.

Enlarge person significant;y aids manual labor, including housebuilding and such.

Feather fall might be helpful for transportation.

Resist Energy helps with forging and smelting.

Finally, heat metal, create water and some fast talk get you a steamball (or an aeolipile), which kickstarts a steampunk revolution.

[Prak]

Not necessarily giant, I suppose, but yeah, that's what I was thinking. Want to change clothes? Wander up to the dispenser, push the button or whatever, and now you're wearing what you wanted to wear instead. Sorta like the goodberry dispenser, where you go over and pull the lever and eat the berry.

What about a dispenser of little amulets that affect simple clothes the person is already wearing? You could use a single casting of Polymorph Any Object to turn 1500 cu ft of cotton into a bunch of sets of clothing permanently (Same Kingdom/Class/Int, related, 11). You would need to figure out the cost of creating an item that creates minor magical items, but I would think that should be doable (without making a wish machine set to "create fashion amulet")

[TiaC]

The advantage of using Genies is that their Major Creation SLA gets around the limited duration. (Just realized that you'll need to bind them, as it has a 10 minute casting time) They have a +12 craft mod. With spells you can easily get this over +20. The highest craft DC you will regularly see is 20. They can also create masses of Black Lotus Extract.

Summoning a Shaitan is still cheaper than the value of its SLAs.

Borrow Skill is 1st party. It's a level 1 Bard spell.

[RadiantPhoenix]

You would need to figure out the cost of creating an item that creates minor magical items, but I would think that should be doable (without making a wish machine set to "create fashion amulet")

First approximation: 100x the cost of the item dispensed.

[momothefiddler]

If you want to preserve food crops as viable, prestidgitate the goodberries to be bland instead.

Wait, why do I want that? Artificial scarcity is shitty.

At level three, life is still rough for the fantastic revolutionary. Don't sweat it. Your sweet spot is levels seven through nine. Before that, several dozen arbitrary items of magic missile 1/day does a lot to secure a town, and even more to make it democratic (or at least oligarchic).

Oh. Oh wow. That would certainly change some dynamics, wouldn't it.

The CLW trap is probably still viable in some form or other.

I could throw it on the fountain as use-activated for like 2k. Less than a day's work and now every drink taken from the fountain heals 1d8+1.
Probably.

Floating Disk could make streetcars or a train.

Hmmm. Maybe! I was thinking of using Mount for transport because there's no issue with getting the horse back to the stable where it started (or with starting at a stable). Floating Disk doesn't require a Ride check, though. Of course it only goes "your normal speed each round", whatever that means....

animate rope could probably become a telegraph system with a little creativity.

Hmm....

Enlarge person significant;y aids manual labor, including housebuilding and such.

Actually! Anthropomorphic Animal was suggested earlier for brute labor, and it makes the animal count as a humanoid, so Mount->Anthropomorphic Animal->Enlarge Person gives you a Huge horse that "serves willingly and well" and has a Heavy Load of up to 1200lbs. That should cover most needs.

Feather fall might be helpful for transportation.

Huh. Yeah, depending on the terrain....

Resist Energy helps with forging and smelting.

Nice.

Finally, heat metal, create water and some fast talk get you a steamball (or an aeolipile), which kickstarts a steampunk revolution.

I don't know why, but I feel like if I tried to use Actual Tech (or even Actual Physics), it'd get banned.

You would need to figure out the cost of creating an item that creates minor magical items, but I would think that should be doable (without making a wish machine set to "create fashion amulet")

Considering that even Wish can't make items any more, I'm not sure that is possible. I'll see what I can find, though.

[momothefiddler]

The advantage of using Genies is that their Major Creation SLA gets around the limited duration. (Just realized that you'll need to bind them, as it has a 10 minute casting time) They have a +12 craft mod. With spells you can easily get this over +20. The highest craft DC you will regularly see is 20. They can also create masses of Black Lotus Extract.

Oof. Planar Binding is up there. But I'm still not sure why it's so important to have permanent clothes.

What's up with Black Lotus Extract, by the way, and why's it the standard crafthax substance? Is it just because it's the most expensive poison and thus the most expensive per volume substance?

Summoning a Shaitan is still cheaper than the value of its SLAs.

Not sure what of those are useful. Wall of Stone, I guess. The Transmutes? It'd be a lot cooler if not for:

A summoned monster cannot summon or otherwise conjure another creature, nor can it use any teleportation or planar travel abilities. Creatures cannot be summoned into an environment that cannot support them. Creatures summoned using this spell cannot use spells or spell-like abilities that duplicate spells with expensive material components (such as wish).

Borrow Skill is 1st party. It's a level 1 Bard spell.

...So it is. It's also a 3rd party Bard 1 that is in all ways worse. Wow.

You would need to figure out the cost of creating an item that creates minor magical items, but I would think that should be doable (without making a wish machine set to "create fashion amulet")

First approximation: 100x the cost of the item dispensed.

Do you have a basis for this? It fits with the material component cost of an unlimited use item, so there's that.

[RadiantPhoenix]

You would need to figure out the cost of creating an item that creates minor magical items, but I would think that should be doable (without making a wish machine set to "create fashion amulet")

First approximation: 100x the cost of the item dispensed.

Do you have a basis for this? It fits with the material component cost of an unlimited use item, so there's that.

It's basically that.

Imagine you have a spell with caster level 0, whose effect is "produce one X", and whose material component is "one X"

[brized]

Side note...Anyone else thought of The Wheel of Time's Age of Wonders in reading threads like these? He can't be the first author to have actually taken a fantasy setting with all its magic and thought it through to its logical conclusion.

[Mask_De_H]

The advantage of using Genies is that their Major Creation SLA gets around the limited duration. (Just realized that you'll need to bind them, as it has a 10 minute casting time) They have a +12 craft mod. With spells you can easily get this over +20. The highest craft DC you will regularly see is 20. They can also create masses of Black Lotus Extract.

Oof. Planar Binding is up there. But I'm still not sure why it's so important to have permanent clothes.

What's up with Black Lotus Extract, by the way, and why's it the standard crafthax substance? Is it just because it's the most expensive poison and thus the most expensive per volume substance?

People like having durable clothing that doesn't disappear on them while they wear it. Although you could make a killing Major Creating haute coture for balls and other functions.

And Black Lotus poison is plant matter, so it lasts the longest and is the most useful to make batches of and then condense with Shrink Item.

[TiaC]

The advantage of using Genies is that their Major Creation SLA gets around the limited duration. (Just realized that you'll need to bind them, as it has a 10 minute casting time) They have a +12 craft mod. With spells you can easily get this over +20. The highest craft DC you will regularly see is 20. They can also create masses of Black Lotus Extract.

Oof. Planar Binding is up there. But I'm still not sure why it's so important to have permanent clothes.

What's up with Black Lotus Extract, by the way, and why's it the standard crafthax substance? Is it just because it's the most expensive poison and thus the most expensive per volume substance?

Mainly because it's absurdly expensive and yet clearly plant matter in a way most things aren't. However, it also allows the creation of Ironwood and Darkleaf items. I also came across Blightburn Paste which makes for a nice bomb even if a temporary one if you ever go to war. Can also make drugs to keep people happy/destroy your rivals. Might also be able to create the seeds of a plant creature.

Summoning a Shaitan is still cheaper than the value of its SLAs.

Not sure what of those are useful. Wall of Stone, I guess. The Transmutes?

Their Metalmorph ability is pretty nice too. Adamantine weapons for everyone.

[momothefiddler]

First approximation: 100x the cost of the item dispensed.

Do you have a basis for this? It fits with the material component cost of an unlimited use item, so there's that.

It's basically that.

Imagine you have a spell with caster level 0, whose effect is "produce one X", and whose material component is "one X"

Makes sense. I'll see if that flies. It'd be pretty expensive, but probably better than enchanting all the clothing individually....

People like having durable clothing that doesn't disappear on them while they wear it.

Maybe I'm weird then because as long as it had a reasonable duration, I'd definitely take "must push clothes button once a day to stay clothed" as a cost to "may change into any outfit at will by pressing clothes button, and outfits are always fresh and clean and new."

And Black Lotus poison is plant matter, so it lasts the longest and is the most useful to make batches of and then condense with Shrink Item.

Huh. Does condensing it allow you to apply multiple doses at once?

However, it also allows the creation of Ironwood and Darkleaf items. I also came across Blightburn Paste which makes for a nice bomb even if a temporary one if you ever go to war. Can also make drugs to keep people happy/destroy your rivals. Might also be able to create the seeds of a plant creature.

Hm. Cool.

Their Metalmorph ability is pretty nice too. Adamantine weapons for everyone.

Oh hey, that it is.

[fectin]

Side note...Anyone else thought of The Wheel of Time's Age of Wonders in reading threads like these? He can't be the first author to have actually taken a fantasy setting with all its magic and thought it through to its logical conclusion.

Brandon Sanderson is pretty similar. Most of his settings are basically postapocalyptic, so it's a little hard to tell.

On topic, is it any physics that's likely banned, or is steam just a bridge too far? Can you e.g. build signal relays with skeletons covering/uncovering continual flames? Boolean Skeletal Diminutives? Haunt shift shennanigans (is haunt shift still part of pathfinder?)? Create Water sledways? Ray of frost refrigerators?

[momothefiddler]

On topic, is it any physics that's likely banned, or is steam just a bridge too far? Can you e.g. build signal relays with skeletons covering/uncovering continual flames? Boolean Skeletal Diminutives? Haunt shift shennanigans (is haunt shift still part of pathfinder?)? Create Water sledways? Ray of frost refrigerators?

There's a chance steam is ok. There's a chance an infinite water fountain is not. I'm not perfectly sure, because at the moment the line is somewhere around "What the MC feels is inappropriate for the genre". Signal relays seem okay. Boolean Skeleton Diminutives don't. Haunt Shift is apparently gone, damn. Sledways maybe, depending on how much I have to talk about momentum to explain the concept. Fridges probably not (though I could probably work up an appropriately thematic way to have a walk-in freezer).

Point is, I probably shouldn't have objected to the steam thing, 'cause it might be fine.

[Mord]

For what it's worth, I feel as though invoking real physics/technology is a waste of the opportunity you have here to explore magitech to its fullest. Why build a locomotive when you can use an embiggened skeleton to haul loads of trade goods using some kind of humongous platform built through its ribcage?

Also, an objection to the temporary clothes: you can't leave the village if your clothes vanish daily. You're going to need some kind of permanent clothing option if you want to export any goods, which you surely will.

Once you have the basic needs of life taken care of for your villagers, you will need to consider what will replace farming as the principal economic activity. If you let the people get fat and lazy, your little magic utopians will either turn into lotus eaters or start killing each other over petty squabbles.

You can definitely export enchanted knick-knacks if you institute public education and guild-style workhouses (I don't think enchanting is a task to which you can apply assembly line principles). You could also export exotic foodstuffs if you want to keep an agricultural society intact so as to give the magic-untalented something to do. For instance, magic greenhouses to grow tea, opium, indigo, tobacco, cotton, and/or spices in a pseudo-European climate? Cha-ching!

Improving the quality of life and life expectancies for your people with the improvements already suggested in this thread will cause a population boom. You need to have some way to employ and govern the excess population. Magical means of government enforcement will be useful, especially if you can train up a subordinate mage corps with combat magic (or nonmages with antimagic weaponry).

[momothefiddler]

Also, an objection to the temporary clothes: you can't leave the village if your clothes vanish daily.

Ooh, good point.

Your further points on gotta still have a working economy are... interesting. You might be right, psychologically. I don't have any urge to make sure we keep making money, though. If I wanna make money, I can do it with magic, or by killing a dragon. I'd rather have them doing things I can't automate, like art or research. Not sure how, though, since training NPCs is... not a thing that has rules? If so, then the enchanting guildhouse certainly makes sense, but I still don't see the need for money. Maybe a some of them could go set up similar arrangements in other towns. People with low Int can still be Wizards and enchant; they'll just have lower Spellcraft modifiers. But with Int 8 and a point in Spellcraft at Wiz 1, you're still looking at +3, which lets you ignore a spell prereq (since you can't cast the spell) and still make a CL 3 item by taking 10.

Population boom is a good point. If we end up going the route of permanent enchanted clothes, the guildhouses could make those...

...out of materials worth gp, dammit, we do have to have an economy.

[Laertes]

I'm not a D&D player, much as I adore magitech settings. You may find the following useful however.

The following is a rough breakdown of the expenses incurred by a medieval castle settlement. You can generalise it to be that of any prosperous settlement with a command economy.
30 - 40% food
10 - 20% alcohol (keeps people happy and water isn't fit to drink)
10% firewood and candles
10 - 15% clothes and shoes
5 - 15% tools, weaponry and horses
10% building maintenance and repair
5 - 10% misc expenses

So for example, if you manage to roll out magical lighting, heating and cookery, you end up saving 10% of people's money *and* you free up the land and labour that goes into forestry and chandlery. (Read: a whole bunch of dudes get fired and are pissed at you.)

In a medieval setting, labour is very cheap. The cost of hiring a peasant - or even a skilled craftsman - to do a thing is only a small proportion of the total cost. This means that labour saving devices like steam engines make no sense economically, because labour is cheap but coal is expensive so burning coal to replace labour is a sucker's game.

The main thing that drives cost is scarce resources. For example, books are expensive because they're written on vellum (calf leather) and there is only so much vellum around, because there are only so many cattle, because there is only so much grazing land. You cannot increase the amount of vellum in circulation even if the literate population increases and so the demand for books rises; and when that happened historically people ended up making books using lower and lower grades of leather to write on. Unless you have a hack to make materials from nothing, a wealthier community can't have more books than a poor one and thus wealth simply causes inflation.

The other big thing that drives cost is transportation. Even for non perishables, moving them across long distances is phenomenally expensive if you're doing it by ox cart. The main reason it's expensive is that transportation involves vast numbers of animals which need vast amounts of feed. That feed needs to be grown, and once again there's only so much land to grow things on.

However, if you look at what people in the medieval era were actually interested in spending money to improve, it was neither resource extraction or transport. What they cared about was disaster planning. The prospect of a bad harvest - and those happened a lot - would drive a region into a frenzy of preparation and speculation. People would store food using methods that are extremely inefficient by modern standards because it was the best they could do. They would import stuff from elsewhere, accepting the massive costs of that. In short, there was a very high cost to planning for emergencies. If you can smooth that out, either by making the world more predictable or by making storage easier, you take away the factor that kept the smart people up at night.

Aggravating this, of course, was transport, because it meant that everything was local. I write this as a resident of the UK, where we have had failed harvests three times in the last four years and I don't really care because the bread I eat is made from grain imported from Canada and Australia and wherever. Transport is cheap and so the whole world is connected, which means local misfortunes are less important. In the medieval era this wasn't true and so local difficulties became the literal end of the world for the people who lived in that location.

The final point I shall drop here is that you may find the biggest hurdle in the magitech revolution to be that of changing people's mindsets. It is difficult for us, in the post-Smith and post-Marx world, to grasp how zero sum everyone back then thought that wealth was. Aristocrats would keep the peasants down, the King would keep aristocrats down, and everybody disliked the rising burgher class. The concept that someone else's fortune was anything but bad for you was an alien one, because they teally were all competing over scarce resources. As such, if you rolled into town and put in a bunch of improvements in place, the people who are least benefitted by these improvements would riot.

The only ways I can see around that are a) doing it very slowly and incrementally, or b) going full-on USSR and accepting that the price of crash modernisation is that you are going to be constantly embroiled in a low-intensity war against your own people.

[Ferret]

Training NPCs seems like the kind of thing that could be handled by hiring -other- NPC Experts from a nearby metropolis or temple.

Hire them to train your villiagers to become your R&D enclave. Your Enchanters Guild can start churning out local-use items, and overages can be sold outside the villiage, or the crafters can turn to churning out low-level consumables (potions, perhaps?)

Selling consumables provides your income for purchasing ongoing material components until you can access True Creation and Fabricate for full-on Star Trek Replicators

[momothefiddler]

I'm not a D&D player, much as I adore magitech settings. You may find the following useful however.

Well those are super depressing points.

Valid, and important, and useful, definitely.

But awful.