The Gaming Den

damn, that works perfectly. In other news, can the book bomb be combined with something like secret page? I never understood Frank's schpeal about wizard's having their whole spellbook on one page or whatever that was... but if I remember it correctly, you could put all your explosive runes on one page, right? That'd be easy.

Yes, but there is no specific reason why you couldn't cast all of your explosive runes on a single page regardless. It never specifies that you can't in the spell description.

For Valor wrote:damn, that works perfectly. In other news, can the book bomb be combined with something like secret page? I never understood Frank's schpeal about wizard's having their whole spellbook on one page or whatever that was... but if I remember it correctly, you could put all your explosive runes on one page, right? That'd be easy.

Secret page lets you create a new layer of text over an existing page of text. You can even duplicate other spells, with all that comes with. You can switch between the original text and the secret page text at will. And you can cast secret page multiple times on a page, creating yet more layers of text.

You can now stack your entire spell book onto one page, for free, and you'll never run out of room.

And yeah, you could pile all of your explosive runes onto one page, and then cast secret page to "lock" the bomb. Speak the word to reveal the runes, and then toss it.

Secret page command word:

"I prepared nothing but Explosive Runes all this month."

You use the pipes of the sewers to get 1000s of rat corpses by having them run into an extra dimensional space and suffocating. You animate them into 1/4th HD skeletons. With the feat destruction retribution every time one dies it deals 1d6 points of negative energy damage in a 10 foot splash. have 300 piled in a square and fireball it that's 300d6 of negative energy that will heal the necromancer and his minions while hurting everything alive.

Someone linked me to that on /tg/ and demanded an explanation.

Maxus wrote:

You use the pipes of the sewers to get 1000s of rat corpses by having them run into an extra dimensional space and suffocating. You animate them into 1/4th HD skeletons. With the feat destruction retribution every time one dies it deals 1d6 points of negative energy damage in a 10 foot splash. have 300 piled in a square and fireball it that's 300d6 of negative energy that will heal the necromancer and his minions while hurting everything alive.

Someone linked me to that on /tg/ and demanded an explanation.

There are several things wrong with that, but it's probably supposed to be hyperbole, so whatever. The core is that the destructive retribution feat makes a negative energy burst every time "one" of your skeletons dies. But Animate Dead control limits and costs are based on the number of hit dice. Bullshit tiny animals are listed with fractional hit dice, so it's not a completely unreasonable interpretation that they are proportionately cheaper to reanimate and control than single hit die human skeletons. And the number of critters you can get into a square goes up when the critters are smaller (obviously).

Nonetheless, your control pool is still four hit dice per caster level, so you'd still need a caster level of 18 to push 300 rat skeletons around under the most favorable interpretation I can imagine. And despite the fact that getting 300 rats into 25 square feet is quite easy in reality, I don't think the rules actually support that. I think you're only allowed like 64 rats in a square by RAW. But that's a pretty obscure point and I don't care enough to look it up.

So the basic concept seems sound, but I think the specific example is hyperbolic.

-Username17

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/movement.htm#movingAroundInSquares wrote:Moving Around In SquaresIn general, when the characters aren’t engaged in round-by-round combat, they should be able to move anywhere and in any manner that you can imagine real people could. A 5-foot square, for instance, can hold several characters; they just can’t all fight effectively in that small space. The rules for movement are important for combat, but outside combat they can impose unnecessary hindrances on character activities.

So you can't have rats fighting at more than 64 / square, but you can have them hanging out there just fine. If your DM is a dick about it, have them all grapple eachother.

But Frank is right, it's not worthwhile. By the time you could turn that into useful amounts of damage, you have much better things to be doing.