The Gaming Den

What kind of arrangements do you get when you have a powerful adventurer decide to collect a vast number of magical scholars? Is their export going to be new spells and techniques?

The game I'm running, one player is an efreet and another is a knowledge specialist, and they both have Leadership; bringing all of their followers (wanting them to be scholars/experts/adepts) into one place, using wish to make all of the buildings (4 followers to a mansion, basically), make permanent unseen servants within each mansion to handle menial chores/cleaning. Also an aqueduct system tied to a decanter of water, and several distributed everful larders (Stronghold Builder's Guide, 15k item, produces 5 servings of simple food/water every time its opened).

The party doesn't have them doing any kind of focused research. Mostly just jamming ~250 magical scholars into a pile and asking them to do "magickey type stuff", hiring a few extra hirelings for the purpose of maintenance (handing them wands of mend or a lyre of building to keep up repairs).

Are they too close to bringing the world out of the Dark Ages, as referenced in the Economicon? Or are they making the equivalent of a mage city that will produce breathtaking sights, which will collapse once the adventurers stop protecting it, its riches being spread throughout the land by goblin raiders like so many other ancient & destroyed cultures?

As an aside, what kind of stuff do you think I should have these researchers churn out in their research?

virgileso wrote:The party doesn't have them doing any kind of focused research. Mostly just jamming ~250 magical scholars into a pile and asking them to do "magickey type stuff", hiring a few extra hirelings for the purpose of maintenance (handing them wands of mend or a lyre of building to keep up repairs).

So, you're going to have over 200 scholars with no funding issues, given orders to "do magicky-type stuff"? I forsee 150+ utterly distinct projects ranging from the mundane ("Animated brooms! They sweep for you!") to the brilliant to the utterly insane.

This looks like a decanter of endless plot hooks to me. Experimental constructs run amuck. Techno-magical war machines need to be tested. Weird spells have bizarre and unlikely effects - why is half the city made of ice cream? Horrifying discoveries are made - D'lurva street is named for the Lovecraftian horror imprisoned beneath it...yeah, the street they're planning to tear up...

As an aside, what kind of stuff do you think I should have these researchers churn out in their research?

Whatever amuses you the most.

That.

Is comedy gold right there. I'd pay to be in a game like that.

Well, okay, first thing I'd do is plot out factions/goals and so on among the scholars.

Hell, you could have one group invent the steam engine and then, BAM, you have Dragonmech. Another group could invent the Ultimate Destructive Magic and then, oops, got to stop Meteor from ruining the planet.

I mean, that's just an excuse to run the party from crisis to crisis indirectly caused by them.

Of course, it's also an excuse to keep the party with the best equipment and gear, as the scholars figure out the secret to making glassteel and how to smelt orichalcum out. So they might find it worth the bother.

Talisman wrote:This looks like a decanter of endless plot hooks to me.

That line is officially win!

As an aside, what kind of stuff do you think I should have these researchers churn out in their research?

Okay, first of all you should be extremely careful about this method.

In 3rd Edition, it's not very hard for someone to research a spell if you have the time and money. 3 1st-level NPCs could research a 9th level spell without even really trying.

The problem, of course, is actually getting them to cast these spells. But scroll scribing has a loophole to it.

Classes that don't prepare spells, like the sorcerer or a bard, don't need to be able to prepare the spell to scribe it onto a scroll. They just have to know it.

So you have a bunch of sorcerers with the Scribe Scroll feat running around in their magical library making crazy scrolls of 9th level spells.

Because you have way too much gold or you're breaking the system for it, you can afford a cubic fuckload of Eagle's Splender potions so that they can use the scrolls. The only problem is that actually activating the scroll is going to be a mother bitch.

Fortunately for you, failing to activate a scroll doesn't actually get rid of the spell. The only problem is that some of the spells can cause a mishap that will probably instantly nuke the poor sadsack who activated the spell. I strongly recommend having someone on standby with an Owl's Wisdom spell and a couple more bennies to up the wisdom check.



Net result: you probably end up either discovering the secret to eternal life or you open up a gate directly into Asmodeus's bedroom. Either way there's tons of excitement in your future.

Congrats virgil, now you're playing Heroes of Might and Magic.

Any time you have a city made by spellcasters you've also dipped in to the typical situation of "Hey I can too!" and after a while it's nothing special any more, since any peasant could theoretically bag a Wish somehow and start the whole thing over again.
Keeping control of overnight-cities is another challenge, though.

At the moment, the party only has wish because one of the players is an efreet, and I'm basically using Book of Gears & the F&K rules on bindings.

In reference to the Economicon, I'm just going to assume the idea of doing all this just won't fit in their heads on a large scale for people. The party is doing it in a very small scale, and is still planning on leaving holes in needs of the city so they can give jobs that aren't just research to people to give them something else to do; paying them all standard wages.