The Great Leap Forward in FantasyLand

[ModelCitizen]

Do druid shit to get these to grow quickly into full grown oaks - I'm sure there's a spell somewhere for that.

Plant Growth can *almost* do it. You'd want to plant a bunch of acorns in a barren plot of dirt, wait for them to sprout, and hit the sprouts with Plant Growth. Since the spell has to take its full effect somehow and the only vegetation in the area is the sprouts, they instantly get really big.

The only problem is Plant Growth requires "trees and brush" so you have to plant at least one shrub with the acorns. The DM is within RAW to rule that the entire Plant Growth effect is concentrated in the shrub, and it's not a tree so you can't Awaken it.

Edit: You could solve this by suspending the shrubs in a hanging planter surrounded by Antiplant Shells above below and on all sides. The shrubs satisfy the requirement for brush, but they can't grow into the shells so the Plant Growth can only fill the area by growing the tree sprouts.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Celestial and Fiendish trees have the Plant (extraplanar) type, not the Outsider type.

You're not going to get a half-fiend oak tree unless you can convince a Dretch to fuck a knothole or something.

What do you get when you cross a Celestial [animal] and a normal [same animal], then, if not a Half-Celestial?

[Avoraciopoctules]

Probably either normal or Celestial, depending on plane of birth. Unless it just looked like a Celestial animal, and was actually a Hound Archon or other creature with Outsider hit dice.

[...You Lost Me]

The Celestial Creature template seems to denote a different type of celestial-ness. It would be weird if you had a +2 LA template that became a +4 LA template when 'diluted' by half, and then a +1 LA specific race after that.

Of course this is D&D so logic is just whatever, and the rules don't say anything either way, but I don't think breeding a celestial creature with a regular creature should give a half-celestial.

[Foxwarrior]

The Celestial Creature template seems to denote a different type of celestial-ness. It would be weird if you had a +2 LA template that became a +4 LA template when 'diluted' by half, and then a +1 LA specific race after that.

Of course this is D&D so logic is just whatever, and the rules don't say anything either way, but I don't think breeding a celestial creature with a regular creature should give a half-celestial.

Well, with real genetics breeding two creatures together doesn't average their stats. Why should fantasy genetics be different in that way?

[Winnah]

A 7th level druid could pull off some template stacking shenanigans with a Yellow Musk Creeper.

Assuming you're relying on the template pyramid rules from Savage Species, rather than blanket type modification from applying inherited templates, you would still be in a position to keep successive generations of YMC under control via Control Plants.

Works up to undead/contruct/ousider. You just need to feed the target creature to the plant in order to create a Yellow Musk Zombie that will hatch into a new creature. Technically that should fulfill reproduction requirements for a lot of inherited templates.

So you can have an awakened half illithid/half troll/half fey/half dragon/half whatever shrubbery, surrounded by some badass plant zombies. Assuming you can feed the requisite creatures to your plant, you can breed successively more powerful generations of creatures. It then just becomes a matter of feeding sentient creatures to the plant in order to produce zombies which will then propogate the new, more advanced species.

Can still be 'bred' with a celestial or fiend, but that will change the resulting creatures type to outsider, which a druid may not be able to control or awaken with magic, at least not easily.

[Xaos]

as the DM i would realize that the populace has no income to pay for anything and thus the idea is pointless as the kingdom wants taxes more than it does products to sell, so keeping the peasants on their backs so you can walk on them is worth more than the effort in this.

Actually, it's more along the lines of 'how do you deal with a Utopian society?'.

Presumably the undead would cost little to nothing to provide every service you'll need in society. Creating an entire populace of unemployed people who are still able to be fed and sheltered, at virtually no cost (aside from initial investment).

What does humanity tend to do when it's idle?
Yea.

.....what we're doing?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Plant Growth is a weird spell because it's a fixed-percentage increase. If we're talking about modern-day yields, Plant Growth would be a very good spell to have in your back pocket, especially for agricultures with limited space like Japan.

If we're talking about anything before the Green Revolution, let alone the second Industrial Revolution, it's tiny and bullshit compared to just plain equipping peasants with steel plows or using crop rotation. Given how uncommon druids are in 3E D&D demographics, it's just not going to reliably bootstrap your economy unless you already have an advanced infrastructure in place.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Of course, there's still the underlying problem of how there would be a fantasy Great Leap Forward as envisioned by 3E (and probably 1E to 2E) D&D. Or rather, even if people could identify reasons, methods, and people responsible... why exactly would it happen?

What exactly is the incentive for an 11th level wizard or cleric to stop what they're doing and use their spells to bootstrap the economy? First of all, what exactly would they gain from this other than the happiness of sophonts? I mean, dictators from our world do (and did) get something out of empowering the masses. Their lives benefit from more food diversity, more sources of entertainment, more conveniences, etc. (EDIT) J.P Morgan definitely had a better life than Thomas Jefferson. And Gordon Gekko had a better life than Morgan.

But Mordekainen? Raistlin? Varsuuvius? By the time a full spellcaster gets to level 11, let alone level 15 or so, they can with careful planning get almost everything they want regardless of whether the mundanes are healthy and educated urbanites or pre-literate neanderthals chewing squirrel bones. They don't get anything personally out of empowering sophonts that they can't get with magic unless we're talking about the information age.

And of course the flip-side to this is that empowered sophonts are actually a threat to some of their self interests. Even if we're proposing a Star Trek-like utopia, some of the spellcasters are going to want things that the masses at large are never going to allow like child sex slaves, fresh brains, and demonic sacrifices. They're not only not incentivized to spend decades, if not centuries of their time doing boring shit like using Major Creation to make pesticides and using Command Undead to harness the labor of Colossal Skeletons, but an empowered population is actually a threat to them. The status quo is that most of the time Szass Tam or Xykon or whoever can pretty much just kill and torture whomever they feel like as long as they don't run afoul of the minority of people who can stop them. But when we start talking about things like police officers armed with wands of fireball patrolling the streets life gets a lot more dangerous to them. Therefore, bad guys and even 'neutral' guys have a huge incentive to go around torching public libraries and freeing slaves.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to come up with a plausible reason why spellcasters would choose to empower other people to get and do things that they don't need or want and why other spellcasters would allow this to happen without resorting to DM fiat, rules-based cheese loops, or getting on your knees and begging the 0.1% not to be dicks.

[duo31]

Stability.

Happy (at least not alienated) and Educated populaces are more productive and more stable.

At the very least having sufficient surpluses from bootstrapping allow you to support a well trained and full time military so that you can throw the monsters out and keep them out of your kingdom, so that people stop coming to you to save them and you can concentrate on study of the unknown.

[fectin]

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to come up with a plausible reason why spellcasters would choose to empower other people to get and do things that they don't need or want and why other spellcasters would allow this to happen without resorting to DM fiat, rules-based cheese loops, or getting on your knees and begging the 0.1% not to be dicks.

Becasue people like living in Paris instead of Cambodia, even when they can get away with murder in Cambodia.

[Lago PARANOIA]

At the very least having sufficient surpluses from bootstrapping allow you to support a well trained and full time military so that you can throw the monsters out and keep them out of your kingdom, so that people stop coming to you to save them and you can concentrate on study of the unknown.

So what does our self-interested 13th level spellcaster gain from all this? Do the peasants grow more exotic drugs than they could get with Minor Creation? Do they write more plays than the wizard could get out of commissioning their druid buddies to use rods of maximize on treant underlings, whereupon they put on +15 gloves of Profession/Playwright? Do they build castles faster than a cleric with a lyre of building and a team of undead?

Sure, eventually a populace boostrapped by Fantasy Great Leap forward will start to be able to do things for the full casters that they can't do or get by themselves. Animate Objects + Permanency for a motor generator is eventually going to be less efficient than just commissioning mundane laborers to build the Hoover Dam. But until that point the spellcasters aren't going to be getting anything from it. And of course they're also going to have to face the fact that they'll have to cut way back on virgin sacrifices and zombie fodder once the muggles actually get enough power to, you know, defend themselves.

Becasue people like living in Paris instead of Cambodia, even when they can get away with murder in Cambodia.

But the spellcasters don't live in the bad parts of the populaces that they are ignoring/oppressing. The overclass in the real world certainly didn't.

[Foxwarrior]

In an age long since past, there were two races of people: elves and humans. For a while, the much shorter generations and proportionally faster learning rates of the humans seemed to make them the clear winners. However, the elves had an even greater advantage than that: where the human mind held rational self-interest, the elven mind held only racial pride. Despite orders of magnitude more high level casters, the humans were left in poverty as all of those casters quickly acquired obsessions with semi-illusionary demonic harems and other frivolous pursuits (perhaps the elves got them addicted). The elven casters, however, worked tirelessly to make elvenkind surpass humanity.

After doing a bunch of the things listed earlier in this thread to vastly improve their quality of life, and secretly manufacturing a small army of templated monstrosities to let loose upon humanity, the elves finally conclusively established that selfishness in high-level casters is like the most useless thing ever.

And that's why the only humans left are liches living in hugbox demiplanes. The End.

[duo31]

Perhaps you made a bet that you could travel the planes in 80 days and build a civilization in that time.

You want to take over all teh kingdoms.

You believe in Good and Justice and bettering the lives of others.

They next civ over is expansionist and more advanced, so you want to halt them.

There are many motivators behind building up a civilization.

Why are Gates and Buffet donating their fortunes to make the world better instead of pissing off to a private paradise ala John Galt?

[Lago PARANOIA]

The elven casters, however, worked tirelessly to make elvenkind surpass humanity.

Wait wait wait. So you're proposing a race that in pretty much every racial book about them are shown to be:

[*] Infamously culturally conservative -- unlike humans.
[*] Infamously anti-industrial -- unlike certain imaginings of gnomes.
[*] Long-lived, from a couple to several to even dozens of centuries old -- unlike kobolds.
[*] Are insular and even xenophobic -- unlike halflings.
[*] Are territorial and have strong sense of property rights -- unlike goblins.
[*] Live in societies that are bucolic but not subjecting people to deprivation -- unlike orcs.

Are going to be the ones who use their high-level spellcasters to bootstrap in a new era of industrialization?? Really?

And this isn't even getting into works written by actual elf fans/fanboys like the Complete Elf Handbook in which the brahmins of elf society are very pointedly not uplifting the people of their same race in their caste.

--

That is yet another problem with doing a Fantasy Great Leap Forward. When you start looking at other races like elves and sahugin and kobolds they're packed with all sorts of disproportionate disadvantages. Humans, what with an extra skill point per level, no ECL, omnivorous, short-lived, no intelligence penalty, relatively short and non-convoluted reproductive cycle, and a free feat are actually probably the best race to pin your hopes on -- though if halflings and gnomes didn't live as long as they did (or take as long to get to adulthood) they would be a pretty good backup bet.

Why are Gates and Buffet donating their fortunes to make the world better instead of pissing off to a private paradise ala John Galt?

You're kidding me, right?

[Foxwarrior]

Okay, maybe Elves weren't the most ideal choice; I just picked them because they're exceptionally racist. Maybe substituting in kobolds, goblins, orcs, illithids, or something else would be more convincing. The ultimate point stands, even if Elves are too weak to embrace it.

[Ice9]

Sure, eventually a populace boostrapped by Fantasy Great Leap forward will start to be able to do things for the full casters that they can't do or get by themselves. Animate Objects + Permanency for a motor generator is eventually going to be less efficient than just commissioning mundane laborers to build the Hoover Dam. But until that point the spellcasters aren't going to be getting anything from it. And of course they're also going to have to face the fact that they'll have to cut way back on virgin sacrifices and zombie fodder once the muggles actually get enough power to, you know, defend themselves.

It might not be a huge personal benefit, but it's not a personal cost either. Virgin sacrifices? Who even uses those? Zombie fodder? Zombie humanoids are crap anyway, hydras are the way to go. Not to mention that even in awesome-land there are still graveyards.

When you can make crap-ville into awesome-town by spending some spells that would just go to waste anyway, I think a lot of people are going to do that.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Maybe substituting in kobolds, goblins, orcs, illithids, or something else would be more convincing.

First of all, any creature that has a level adjustment is a non-starter for 'becomes the master race by mass-empowering people at the bottom of the social ladder'.

Dwarf: Charisma penalty. Non-spellcaster favored class. Long lifespan.
Elf: See above. Chaotic Good by nature.
Half-Elf: Completely inferior to humans from a 'how does this race contribute to an Industrial Revolution bootstrap', since their one positive trait can be emulated with a feat.
Aquatic Elf: Intelligence penalty.
Kobolds: Evil disposition. Incredibly xenophobic towards other sophont races. Charisma penalty. Poor reproductive rate ("one noncombatant child and one egg per ten adults"). Daylight sensitivity. Favored class is one that they have a primary stat penalty towards.
Gnome: Long life. However, the Monster Manual also says that they're naturally inquisitive and that they're usually neutral good, so this may not count against them.
Goblins: Evil disposition. "Poor grasp of strategy" by nature, but the MM admits that they can be bullied or cajoled into more complex projects. Charisma penalty. Filthy by nature but doesn't have a racial disease resistance. Non-spellcaster favored class.
Orcs: Evil disposition. Daylight sensitivity. Penalties to all mental stats. Non-spellcaster favored class.

There might be some real competition in other books, but as far as 'race suited for a Fantasy Great Leap Forward' in the basic Monster Manual goes it's pretty much impossible to beat humans. The feat, reasonably short life, extra skill point, and selectable favored class is just downright brutal.

When you can make crap-ville into awesome-town by spending some spells that would just go to waste anyway, I think a lot of people are going to do that.

It's not 'spending some spells'. Have you read the previous threads on fantastical infrastructure spellcasters could conjure? Without fail, they devolve into one of three suggestions:

[*] The spellcaster has to constantly babysit whatever project that they're working on, because they're doing something like filling aqueducts with Control Weather or making pesticides with Minor Creation or supervising work teams with Command Undead. Some suggestions, like Fabricate or item creation, require that the spellcaster sink in some additional investment like Craft/Metalwork or Perform.
[*] The spellcaster has to be of very high level, like level 15 or so.
[*] The spellcaster has to rely on some rules exploit or lean heavily on abusing a broken subsystem like custom magical item creation.

I don't doubt that there are going to be some SimCity wizards who are able and willing to put in the effort. However, just extrapolating from what we know of human nature in the real world and basic game theory relying on them to create a Fantasy Great Leap Forward is just not plausible. People remember bullshit like Carnegie's donated libraries and Gates' computer science hall precisely because they're such a pittance compared to the actual wealth of the overclass that they stick out more.

[Foxwarrior]

You really should connect your two arguments more, because what you just said was:

No other race is as good as humans at bootstrapping, therefore we'll use humans for this Great Leap Forward.
...
Human nature is incompatible with this Great Leap Forward.


Maybe, just maybe, this means that humans are not actually the best race to choose here.

[Grek]

Dwarf: Charisma penalty. Non-spellcaster favored class. Long lifespan.
Elf: See above. Chaotic Good by nature.
Half-Elf: Completely inferior to humans from a 'how does this race contribute to an Industrial Revolution bootstrap', since their one positive trait can be emulated with a feat.
Aquatic Elf: Intelligence penalty.
Kobolds: Evil disposition. Incredibly xenophobic towards other sophont races. Charisma penalty. Poor reproductive rate ("one noncombatant child and one egg per ten adults"). Daylight sensitivity. Favored class is one that they have a primary stat penalty towards.
Gnome: Long life. However, the Monster Manual also says that they're naturally inquisitive and that they're usually neutral good, so this may not count against them.
Goblins: Evil disposition. "Poor grasp of strategy" by nature, but the MM admits that they can be bullied or cajoled into more complex projects. Charisma penalty. Filthy by nature but doesn't have a racial disease resistance. Non-spellcaster favored class.
Orcs: Evil disposition. Daylight sensitivity. Penalties to all mental stats. Non-spellcaster favored class.

This is intensely disingenuous. Penalties to a single mental stat, alignments (especially when you cite every single alignment as being counter productive.) and favoured classes are entirely irrelevant. Also, you misspelled sapient, you twat.

All Dwarves: Charisma penalty means that they will have Wizards and Clerics instead of Sorcerers.
Forest Elf or Half Elf: Equally good at all casting.
Grey Elf: Makes for good wizards.
Drow: Killed by the LA, but see Grey Elf if you have a LA 0 version.
All Other Elves: Not very good wizards, but Sorcerers and Clerics are still available.
Kobold: Do not actually have a penalty to any mental stats, stupid. Mostly sorcerers.
Gnome: No argument there.
Goblins: Not actually filthy by nature (where the fuck are you getting that from?) and the MM says they can implement complicated plans with a powerful central leader.
Orcs: Admittedly, a terrible choice for a nation of spellcasters. Who'd have guessed?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Maybe, just maybe, this means that humans are not actually the best race to choose here.

The point, Foxwarrior, is that humans are actually the best race to pick from to A.) recruit and train ubermensch to advance civilization and B.) the best race to actually uphold the gains of society so that they don't have to be continually babysat by ubermensch once they reach a certain development level.

RE: Grek

Let me explain why I chose those criteria as making worse racial footsoldiers in the Fantasy Great Leap Forward.

[*] ECL should be obvious.
[*] Being evil-aligned is really bad. We can talk nature versus nurture (and 3E D&D leans heavily tortures nature, despite what revisionists like Burlew claim) but the fact remains that an evil-aligned race will fuck over this project before it gets off the ground. The project calls for patience, altruism, and tribal openness -- qualities which are decidedly in short supply in evil races.
[*] A race that lives a long time is bad for the project. This means that the elders in society are going to stunt and depress the development of new ideas. The societal retardation caused by this effect is hard to understate. I gave gnomes a pass on this because they're naturally good and the game says that they're restless and inquisitive, but something like elves?
[*] Let's talk more about mental stat penalties. Intelligence is the most obviously debilitating, but because WIS and CHA also provide a proportion of the spellcasting classes this reduces the number of classes that a race can credibly advance as. It's a total folly to claim that just because dwarves are disincentivized from becoming sorcerers that they'll make it up by churning out more clerics and wizards. I'm sure that there will be more mid-leveled clerics and wizards proportionately but the absolute number of full casters is only going to go down. If God cursed 20% of humans to be randomly born with paraplegia it wouldn't mean that we made up for the sudden drop in athletes with more scientists. Undoubtedly there would be more scientists but the number of 'athletes AND scientists' would go down.
[*] Multiclass penalties. 3E D&D's class system is wonky and stupid so I won't blame you for just retconning the whole 'You meet the Child of Prophecy when he's 13 years old and he's saddled with a level of commoner' problem but D&D demographics posits most people as NPC classes. Unless you want to introduce difference engine shenanigans, a lot (and I'd say the majority) of people would be shit like expert 1 / rogue X or aristocrat 2 / sorcerer 4.

Now, halflings, kobolds, gnomes, and goblins do have some genuine advantages over humans. They're small and thus the population density can go way the hell over what we can hope with humans. However, halflings live too long, gnomes live WAY too long, kobolds are evil and have a bullshit reproduction rate, and goblins are filthy and have a charisma penalty. Humans avoid all of these pitfalls and have an open favored class, a free feat, an extra skill point. This isn't enough to make the project hopeless but if I was a betting man I would give humans better odds of supporting the project.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Level adjustment only applies if you are a PC, if I recall correctly. There is nothing keeping an NPC Marilith or Storm Giant from picking up a few wizard levels in the same time it would take a dwarf or whatever.

So I see little reason an obscure bullshit monster race couldn't leverage their advantages into some kind of utopia project. Hell, if you're a cabal of Pathfinder Rakshasa, you actually want your gilded-yet-oppressive state to eventually spawn heroes who stab you in the face and lead a bunch of reforms. It practically guarantees that when you reincarnate, you get to digivolve into Rakshasa+.

[Foxwarrior]

I take it, then, that you're holding out hope for some argument that would convince human ubermensch to go through with this project, Lago?

How about "Those kobolds over there are getting mighty powerful, and I don't actually want all my relatives to die. Maybe I can do what the Kobold Archmage is doing, but better."

It might be easier to just whisk them away to his demiplane though.


Until the humans can overcome their human nature, none of their infinite advantages matter as much as the assertion that they won't make use of them.

[Grek]

The project calls for patience, altruism, and tribal openness -- qualities which are decidedly in short supply in evil races.

The "project" is rapid industrialization. I shouldn't have to point out the obvious reasons why an Evil society would want to rapidly industrialize in order to do more evil, and why the leaders would back these efforts.

This means that the elders in society are going to stunt and depress the development of new ideas. The societal retardation caused by this effect is hard to understate.

I think this effect would be cancelled out by the increased incentive for long lived races to try to improve the world and a greater willingness to plan for the long term.

It's a total folly to claim that just because dwarves are disincentivized from becoming sorcerers that they'll make it up by churning out more clerics and wizards.

And yet, this is exactly what you see in real life economies. Whenever you have two competing industries (Horse Breeders and Car Makers) in a society where both produce similar goods (Personal Transportation), and one industry does so better (the Car Makers) due to that society giving one of the two an advantage, you see the weaker industry shrink and the stronger industry grow, but the total amount of product produced stay proportional to the demand for that product. As long as the dwarves value spells as much as humans do, they will have as many spells being cast, even if those spells are cast by a cleric instead of by a sorcerer.

Unless you want to introduce difference engine shenanigans, a lot (and I'd say the majority) of people would be shit like expert 1 / rogue X or aristocrat 2 / sorcerer 4.

That is completely bullshit. In my entire experience playing D&D, not once have I seen anyone stat up a character as a multiclass character between PC and NPC classes. You either have NPC levels, or you have PC levels, but not both.

[hyzmarca]

In classic fantasy, Industrialization is basically what the evil overlord does. Guys like Sauron and Saruman of Many Colors build huge industrial civilizations with massive war machines where everyone is a cog in the wheel.

Notably, random tribes of goblins don't do this on their own.

The advantage of using a traditionally evil race, especially tribal ones, is might-makes-right politics.

When Evil people ask why they should follow you, you merely have to explain that you'll murder the fuck out of them if they don't, and will probably make it slow and painful. They'll understand.

With so-called Good races, when you're paying wages are too low to live on and they start complaining about it you have to negotiate with the labor union that inevitably forms. With the Evil races you can get by with the much faster, simpler, and less costly mass impaling of union leaders and agitators and random people because, fuck, you brought too many stakes and didn't want them to go to waste.


Evil understands and respects naked power, so keeping them under control is much easier. Good, on the other hand, is selfish and egotistical and will whine and complain when faced with the fact that the universe doesn't revolve around them and will then whine more when you try to torture them for their insolence like they deserve.