Water Treatment Spells

[Meikle641]

Idly, I was wondering what spells could clean water of contaminants, aside from 'Purify Food and Water' or Presti. Specifically, this came to mind as I tried to figure out how to clean a lake in less than 100 years.

On a related note, looking at how much water Lake Ontario holds in litres is mindboggling.

[K]

What's the contaminant?

Some can be boiled or frozen out, and that is doable with several spells, but there really aren't easier ways to get the rest outside of epic level spells or wish-likes.

Fire and ice might also kill all life in the lake as well, which may or may not be a problem.

[Endovior]

Best bet is probably to create a cheap 'use activated' magic item... like a pump or something... and enchant it with Purify Food and Water. Bamf, instant water treatment plant... costing in the neighbourhood of 1000 GP, IIRC. Hire some peasant to run it for you, and you've got a device which produces 4800 gallons of clean water every hour it is manned. This scales fairly easily; you could either make a higher-level version of this device, or just make more of them... the cost is the same either way; you're paying 1000 GP per 4800 gallons per hour; more devices take more people to work, and high-level ones take XP from higher level casters. Which is cheaper is a matter for debate.

This method should be more then sufficient for the needs of your average D&D city... though it's still nowhere near 'purify a lake' levels. In practical terms, K is right; you need either Wish or Miracle to purify any large body of water in any reasonable time.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Endovior has the right approach. This is going to require expensive infrastructural magical items or rituals, or at the minimum it's going to require a lot of extradimensional slave labor conjured by your local wizard or druid.

[tzor]

On a related note, looking at how much water Lake Ontario holds in litres is mindboggling.

You know, there is a reason why it's called a "Great" lake. If you go to just the really really big lakes you might get something really big but not mind boggling. (Seneca Lake is the largest of the glacial Finger Lakes of the U.S. state of New York, and the deepest lake entirely within the state. It is the second longest of the Finger Lakes and has the largest volume, estimated at 4.2 trillion US gallons (16 km³), roughly half of the water in all the Finger Lakes.)

(Unfortunately Wikipedia's inconsistent formatting means most lakes simply lack a volume entry.)

P.S. I think (I could be wrong) the spell you are looking for is "Wish."

[Meikle641]

K: Well, thinking around early 1900s industry and various pollutants. Plus a bunch of corruption and gross shit due to an Illithid invasion.

-----
Well the plan I'd had so far was to use at least 1000 of these Water Purifier gadgets I had someone design for me. Effectively, each one would filter 100 litres a round. Totals to 1,440,000,000L, IIRC.

Then I had around 100 Purify Food and Water Traps, say at CL 8 as auto-reset traps (2k each, seems like), which would do about 64 gallons a round (226.5L).

Combined, the two methods would filter the lake in... Something like 1300 years. Thankfully the Water Purifiers are technically nonmagical, so I could churn them out of need be.

Yeah, the lake was supposed to basically be Lake Ontario, but obviously the size involved is massive. I guess one could assume you'd only need to purify a portion of the water, rather than the whole lake, which could speed things up as well.

[Stahlseele]

Question:
Why do you want to purify the whole lake?
Would it not be enough to only purify the water needed by the people around?

[CatharzGodfoot]

Is there a problem with draining the lake, sterilizing the ground, and then filling it back up with a gate to elemental water?

[TheFlatline]

Is there a problem with draining the lake, sterilizing the ground, and then filling it back up with a gate to elemental water?

For that matter, could a water elemental just purify that shit?

And yeah, that's some significant magic going on to do it in anything like short order. Flat out cleaning up a lake of contaminates is still something to this day that we can't feasibly do without it taking years and a lot of money and effort.

Either that or a ritual would probably work if you had the DM working with you.

Edit: I guess you could use metamagic to heighten purify food & water up to a level 9 spell and get it done quicker. Or can you metamagic 0-level spells?

[Vebyast]

Better idea: instead of using your XP to build items, use it to bind extraplanar beasties that can Purify Water as an SLA. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't get something reasonably low-CR that had it as an SLA, and binding five or ten of those would be a lot more effective purification-for-XP than magic items.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If you want a fast, low-maintenance, high-magic solution...

You can put Prismatic spheres at certain inlet chokepoints and have all of the colors except for the one that blocks poisons and gases dispelled out. If you're worried about wildlife or workers you can also create damn dams with Permanency'd Phase Door on it set to block everything excepts critters that you don't want in the lake. It'll let the water through by a strict reading of the spell. You only need like one Permanency'd Phase Door per dam though, the rest along the dam wall can be regular Phase Doors that don't allow anything through but non-creatures and the casters so you'll never have to worry about the door 'depleting'. This is so you can save on experience costs.

For the critters that you actually want to kill off that you could put another filter on it consisting of a Permanency'd Wall of Fire on the other side. Remember that Phase Door that only lets 'bad' critters through? This is where it leads. You may want to use gravity for this step if you can't get a pump to kill the critters you don't want but avoid evaporating the water. Or you could drop another Permanency'd Prismatic Sphere and filter all of the colors out except for the poison one (bizarrely it'll kill the critters but it won't affect water purity) if you have the experience points to burn. This depends on the configuration of the water source, obviously.

This will take care of chemical and microscopic contaminants. It'll take several months before you can make the water potable but it's probably the most environmentally friendly option. Of course the actual construction of the dams will take a fuckton longer, so the timeline for this project should be several years.

Alternatively if you don't give a fuck about the ecosystem and you have the experience points to burn you could just (magically) construct and drain around the middle of the lake through copious uses of Permanency'd Prismatic Sphere... actually, let me just explain this process.

(1) At the minimum point(s) of the lake dig in a cone-shaped area.
(2) Put in Permanencied Prismatic Sphere's. This will wipe out nearly everything in the lake. There's your drain. This of course scales rather nicely with how many casters you have so if you're on an experience budget you can lengthen the draining time from days to weeks to even months.
(3) Get rid of the spheres.
(4) Clean out the lake of anything the Prismatic Sphere didn't take care of. Depending on how you do this it can take anywhere from months to years. Obviously getting rid of everything 'bad' is impractical, probably even impossible.
(5) Start casting Control Weather. You obviously want to do this during the Spring months so you can have torrential rainfall. The water creation rate on this spell is actually pretty goddamn rad and will fill up your lake in a reasonable amount of time. Lake Erie would be filled up within months with a decent-sized spellcasting team and they wouldn't have to strain themselves too hard either.
(6) If you start this process in the Late Winter and start casting Control Weather in the Spring you'll get a clean lake in about half of a year. To minimize ecosystem damage you'll want to have druids casting Control Weather on the surrounding area to provide necessary water. Make no mistake though this process is the lobotomy of water purification and you only do it if there's like a really bad drought and the lake was pissed in by demons for several thousands of years.

Gate is extremely impractical for water creation. The hole just isn't big enough nor lasts long enough. Even with gravity and pump assistance on the side of the elemental plane of water you'd only be able to get tens of thousands of gallons before the spell expires. The same goes for Decantaurs of Endless Water. You'll seriously need tens of thousands of them and let them run for about a year before you fill the lake. Which isn't bad as far as time goes, but where are you getting the experience points from and money from?

If however your DM rules that Control Weather can't create water from nothing (because he's a fucking retard) then you're pretty much fucked and have to use the first methods. If he's a double retard and rules that there aren't any inlets for you to take advantage of then you'll have to create some dams and feeder lakes yourself. This process will seriously take years of constant spellcasting however which may not be fast enough for the OP.

[Kaelik]

Better idea: instead of using your XP to build items, use it to bind extraplanar beasties that can Purify Water as an SLA. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't get something reasonably low-CR that had it as an SLA, and binding five or ten of those would be a lot more effective purification-for-XP than magic items.

Especially since Planar Binding has no XP cost.

[Vebyast]

Especially since Planar Binding has no XP cost.

Shows roughly how long it's been since I actually looked up anything I've said. But, yes, you're far better off creating creatures to purify water for you.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I think we seriously need a thread that's nothing but how to make public works projects or at least expand the scope of this thread to allow it.

It's extremely fascinating to learn what magic in 3rd Edition D&D can do in lieu of technology and what it can't replace. For example, wizards can seriously make more iron than iron age societies can actually use, a glassmaking industry that will be the envy of everyone until well into the industrial revolution, fill up libraries so quickly that there's no excuse for any town with more than 5000 people not to have one, and clever spellcasters can create vast underground dungeons for practically nothing.

On the other hand, spellcasting is absolute shit for wood, textiles, and for food. Depending on how the DM rules Control Weather you're going to be pretty hard up for water as well unless you live in a metropolis. It'll create some really, really weird cultural aesthetics like borderland militias being outfitted in full plate and with longswords of the finest quality steel but even nobles being unable to regularly eat anything more luxurious than turnip soup with salt pork.

[Vebyast]

I think we seriously need a thread that's nothing but how to make public works projects or at least expand the scope of this thread to allow it.

Agreed. Would that go here or in IMOI?

even nobles being unable to regularly eat anything more luxurious than turnip soup with salt pork.

Weirdly, though, every single person in the world will be fed and have proper nutrition. Goodberry is cheap enough that you can Wish for a command-word item of it; that, combined with a modest berry farm outside town, can provide a stable food source for about 10k people. Assume that a roomful of efreeti can get a new dispenser out every six seconds and can work around the clock. My math says that they end world hunger in something like two months, but I don't believe that result at all and someone should check it.

[DeJoker]

All so complicated. One simple well crafted mid-level spell should do the trick assuming that what is contaminating the water is not magical in origin. I mean using the methods thus far is like either driving a a finishing nail with a 5 lb hammer rather than a finishing hammer or using an air compression nail gun with a specialized dail to regulate the power so that driving the finishing nail does not send it all the way through the substance your putting it in. Still I applaud the creative ideas for a more prolonged solution that creates jobs for the local populace always good to give your populace something to keep them busy.

[Meikle641]

I'm down with the thread expanding into public works projects.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Goodberry is cheap enough that you can Wish for a command-word item of it; that, combined with a modest berry farm outside town, can provide a stable food source for about 10k people.

I'm not a fan of any effect that requires you to schtup a magical item that's not printed, because all of those are created by DM fiat. You may as well ponder what industry would be like if the rules supplement necessary for Pun Pun to exist was thrown into the mix. For the purposes of this or a future thread I'd rather lean on effects that don't require you to suck a DM cock to work.

Planar binding effects leave me cold for a similar reason, but since there's actually source material (along with a couple of well-known games like Exalted that make this theme much more explicit) on enslaving powerful beings for minor comforts I'm not willing to just flat-out ignore those. Anything that filters through the DM or relies on rules exploits or obscure supplements is right out.

Still I applaud the creative ideas for a more prolonged solution that creates jobs for the local populace always good to give your populace something to keep them busy.

The industries that D&D magic can't replicate better than mundanely enabled labor are the low-skilled industries such as agriculture and materials-hauling. The industries that lead to the eventual creation of a middle class just flat-out cannot exist in D&D as envisioned. There's little reason for scribes, artisans, merchants, blacksmiths, masons, military leaders pulled from the hoi polloi, jewellers, etc. to exist. Woodworkers and leathermakers would still have their jobs. And that's about it.

Basically you can envision D&D society as having something like 49 out of 50 people belonging to the bullshit peasant class who do things like farm and haul coal. 2% of the population would not explicitly belong to this class, which includes people like playwrights and bookkeepers as well as high-level wizards and warriors.

If you want a fantasy setting to not be a level of grimdark poverty that would make a hobo living in pre-Revolutionary France blanche you pretty much have to invert the current paradigm. Magicking up water and crops and wood and livestock and common building supplies like stone is easy while doing the same for skilled labor/heterogenous products is hard. So societies become stronger and more competitive through initiatives like universal education and freedom of religion and intellectual stimulation rather than weaker. Of course to make that society stable--stable as in perpetually adhering to the status quo--you'd need to introduce some other kind of grimdark threat that continually tears down progress so you still have a fantasy stalemate.

[DSMatticus]

Agreed. Would that go here or in IMOI?

Seems very here, it's not new rules, it's just ideas for things to do with the rules.

Assume that a roomful of efreeti can get a new dispenser out every six seconds

Considering efreeti cheese (even with modified wish) seems rather pointless.

Set-up: seed of gold and prepared planar binding.
Round 1) You cast.
Round 2) Negotiate three wishes for gold, as per spell text.
Round 3) Wish for gold.
Round 4) Wish for planar bind efreeti.
Round 5) Wish for planar bind efreeti.
Round 6) You and efreeti each negotiate with one efreeti each for the same thing (using gold).
Round 7) Wish for gold.
Round 8) Wish for planar bind efreeti.
Round 9) Wish for planar bind efreeti.
Round 10) You and the 3 efreetis you have bound each negotiate with one of the four efreetis each you just summoned (using gold).
Note: you are keeping the efreetis around for the full time of their paid service, even after the wishes, to do the laborious task of "talking to other efreetis." This is essential, because the sum of all the efreetis from the previous steps + 1 (you) is equal to the number of efreetis you just summoned. Which means negotiating takes exactly one round, no matter how long you continue this process, if you keep the previous efreetis. If you let them go, the time you spend just talking to efreetis also grows exponentially.

Every 4 rounds, the number of efreeti you have bound doubles. Given ten minutes, you end up with... ((10 minutes * 60 seconds) - 6 seconds startup)/24 seconds per doubling... 24 full doublings on 1 efreeti. Or 16,777,216 efreetis, each of whom have three wishes to offer you. Each wish can duplicate a wizard/sorcerer spell of 8th level or lower, or any spell of 6th level or lower. What could you do with 50 million 8th level spells every 10 minutes?

You don't have to stop the exponential train ride at 10 minutes, either. Each efreeti gold wish only needs to be able to pay for two other efreeti, and keeping an efreeti's attention for 1/day CL is only 10,000 gold. Wish can create 25,000 gold worth of mundane wealth instantly. At the minimum level required to do this cheese (for the most part), you've got 11 days of exponential growth. That's like 2^40,000 efreeti's, and every 2^10X is pretty close to 10^3X.

Gallons of water on earth: ~10^20.
Atoms in the universe: ~10^80.
Number of efreeti after 11 days: ~10^12,000.

(I hope the scheme and math are right, but I won't swear by it.)

[Endovior]

Goodberry is cheap enough that you can Wish for a command-word item of it; that, combined with a modest berry farm outside town, can provide a stable food source for about 10k people.

I'm not a fan of any effect that requires you to schtup a magical item that's not printed, because all of those are created by DM fiat. You may as well ponder what industry would be like if the rules supplement necessary for Pun Pun to exist was thrown into the mix. For the purposes of this or a future thread I'd rather lean on effects that don't require you to suck a DM cock to work.

Technically, items that exactly replicate core spells are totally okay by core; indeed, that was exactly what my original suggestion was. The whole thing about 'whoops, some of these spells might possibly be unbalanced as magic items, better restrict that' came out later, and it came out BADLY since there wasn't much in the way of rules or reasoning given other then 'the DM can feel free to shit on you if he feels like it'. A magic item of endless Goodberries is just as feasible as one of endless water purification.

[fectin]

Decanter of endless water is not that expensive, and doubles as a mechanical power source. It's a little weird to think of a combined water wheel/water tower, but it should work fine.

Average person uses 80-100 gallons per day (I read it on the interwub; it must be true). Decanter of endless water provides 30 gallons per round, which is 5 gallons per second. That's 1 person's supply every five seconds, or a constant first world supply 17280 people (permanent solution at a cost equivalent to five day's labor? Yes please!).

On top of that, it's providing power. some internet rumors tell me a firehose "can shoot 75 feet in the air". Lets go with that. After some mathing and rounding, that gives us 11 meters/second. 1/2m(v^2), with 5 gallons/second moving at 11m/s says that's pumping out roughly 2.3 kilowatts of power. If you can afford to build a 5 meter drop into that machine (giving you an extra 9.8 m/s), you turn it into a much more respectable 7.6 kW. even if you lose half of that in transmission, it's probably enough to run a sawmill or a gristmill, especially if you stick a giant flywheel on it.

Transmuting mud to rock and vice-versa would work great for paving. Or really, anything you could do with cement. You could probably even build a custom magic item that was a decanter of endless mud (there's an elemental plane of mud, right?) and have a whole masonry shop.

If you can also scrape up the cash for a command word mud-to-stone item (~80k), you've got it made. Obvious use is building roads, which is like adrenaline straight to the heart of your economy. It's also easy to create roman-style roads, as long as you have infinite labor (undead) and free stone (made on site with decanter of mud + rock to mud). Animate a mummy as your gang boss, and away they go. The decanter is your real limiting factor (fills 57 blocks of 10x10x10 per day), and that comes to only 1/10 mile. You don't just want to make mud willy-nilly, you want the roman-style trenches: dig down five feet, pile the earth along the sides to give you a ten foot depth, raised 5 feet up, then turn that to solid stone. That shit will be permanent, and it will go up fast. You can make it almost infinitely faster too; the limit is how fast you can supply mud.

[fectin]

Oh, and the obvious thing: Continual Flame increases your useful daylight, without letting in disease, which is a huge deal.

[Ice9]

I'm with Lago on this - sure, you can do all kinds of stuff with custom magic items. So much stuff that it gets fairly meaningless. And if you throw Efreet into the mix, it's completely meaningless. All that goes double for "extrapolating" spells that could exist, based on the power level of other spells.

I'd rather see what we can accomplish with the rather quirky and asymmetrical D&D magic, warts and all.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Technically, items that exactly replicate core spells are totally okay by core;

Okay, then let's have an infinite use miracle item that doesn't suck the cock of a deity unless it's Gond or Prometheus to put in whatever bullshit game effect we want. Totally allowed by core!

It's a fruitless road to go down.

[Vebyast]

We're also looking for the most interesting things, which might be counter to rules as intended.

Modification to the Goodberry Dispenser that doesn't require Efreeti: have every Good-aligned Druid that takes Craft Wondrous Item make three of them. It's only a few goblins' worth of XP (a bit over 200), and I'd be pretty surprised if there isn't at least one Good 3rd-level Druid with CWI per forty thousand people.