jumpingjacktrash:acaranalogy:jumpingjacktrash:roachpatrol:somethingdnd:badger-actual:Holy shit. A WM

jumpingjacktrash:acaranalogy:jumpingjacktrash:roachpatrol:somethingdnd:badger-actual:Holy shit. A WMD for the D&D world.never let engineering students design magic itemsi’m pretty sure this would be most effective in naval combat, to hull big ships. a regular arrow will kill someone plenty dead in small skirmishes. a regular cannon ball, discharged over a battlefield, is fired at a nearly horizontal angle, so it takes out as long a line of combatants as possible while skipping along the ground, and would probably do just as much damage along that line as this device, rather than going off on the first dude it hit and taking out just one ring, while whatever load of rock and rubble a catapault would dump onto a battlefield would take out a much wider blast radius than just 10 feet. but a 10-foot diameter scoop taken out of the hull of a ship is a pretty big deal in any universe. if you stuck with arrows to deploy this device, it also wouldn’t be anywhere near as heavy as the 12000 pound cannons required to fire a six pound cannonball, and there’d be no dangerous recoil or risk of explosion on the firing ship. but a professional archer with a longbow’s range would only be about 400 yards (though very accurate) while a six-pounder could go up to 1500 yards (though less accurate). so it’s a toss up which method would be better, unless you’re working in a world without gunpowder, in which case your ships would be closing in much more closely to exchange crossbow/arrow fire, throw flaming crap, or try to ram and board, and you’d do just fine with tension-launched rift devices.come to think of it, were these things to be invented in a time before gunpowder, the ensuing arms race would be all about range, not explosive power or accuracy: whoever could accurately hit the other guy from furthest away would automatically win. we’d be seeing some really interesting sea-trebuchets in a generation…you could, of course, just manufacture a lot of sea mines, and dump them.considering how expensive portable holes and bags of holding are to make, i would save this for targets that are essentially immune to regular damage. there are an alarming number of them in the d&d world. re ships, tbh, in a high-level game, when we did naval warfare the difficulty was keeping any of the ships afloat. for instance, our sorceror pioneered a move we called “fuck these six cannons in particular.”and then there were the enemies you’d unleash all this firepower on and they’d pretty much laugh it off because they’d layered on 9 kinds of immunities and 20 points of damage reduction. but nobody is immune to a bag of holding implosion.In a world where these things somehow catch on (disregarding prices for a moment), an interesting complication arises: by the rules as written, this is not an Arrow of Total Destruction. It’s an Arrow of Greater Banishment. See, when it says it opens up a rift to the Astral Plane and sucks everything through within 10 feet, it’s not being metaphorical. Everyone caught wholly in the blast radius of one of these arrows doesn’t die, they’re just sucked into the Astral Plane, which is hard to leave but other than that is actually a relatively hospitable place to live compared to most D&D planes of existence: a vast, silvery sphere of endless sky, with subjective gravity (”down” is where you want it to be) and total freedom from the ravages of time (age, hunger, and thirst need not apply).A battlefield where these are used extensively leaves a lot of confused immortal refugees on both sides just hanging out in the corresponding Astral location, possibly with no real reason to continue the fight. A war where these are used extensively leaves a whole multicultural population stranded there.aaaaand you just gave someone their campaign setting. :DOne significant drawback; the Gith live in the Astral, they’re experts at tracking portals, and they’re none too friendly. Using one of these arrows(unless you’re working off the rule that these rifts open, on the Astral side, where the BoH’s hidden chest is located, in which case their Astral-side opening wouldn’t be random) would have some chance of resulting in an almost immediate counter-attack by one of the two Gith factions, and if used widely on a battlefield might result in a full-scale invasion later on, as that’s what they’d immediately decide was happening if a few thousand, albeit confused, soldiers suddenly appeared in one of their monasteries(well ok, I guess the Githzerai are technically in limbo so maybe not) or, gods forbid, in one of their floating god-corpse cities :]Another thing to consider is that people living in a magical setting would respond to innovative weapons like this with equally innovative defenses. For instance, while this arrow makes use of the magic behind bags of holding and portable holes, it itself isn’t enchanted. A simple 3rd lvl Protection from Normal Missiles Abjuration spell, extended by a higher-lvl caster to cover a wider volume, or as a blocking plane before a ship or formation, could defend against this device, depending on how you decide PfNM functions(for instance, if it still causes arrows hitting it to break, then it wouldn’t work. If, instead, it just unmakes the arrow or sends it somewhere else in the planes…). Voidstone plating, being made from Negative Material Plane matter, could be designed to drain the enchanted items within the missiles on impact, “disarming” their magical payload and rendering the arrow completely mundane(and making Voidstone’s not too difficult in a world filled with Thayans and Halruaans willing to sell their services, and Shadovar mercs with a direct line to the Negative Energies of the Shadow Plane). A ritual device projecting an anti-magic or wild-magic field over a wide area could also counteract such a missile, though a wild-magic field would carry its own dangers. Dimensional Anchor could likely be modified to negate such portal-based attacks, then deployed either as an AoE protection field, a time-limited Enchantment Spell, or a long-term enchantment(probably not to the wood of the ship, maybe the water-proofing tar?). In fact, plenty of mid-to high lvl abjuration spells can be used to protect against specific schools of magic, and BoHs and PHs are both Conjurations, so any of those spells could be used to protect against this.So I’d say the true power of this weapon lies in surprise; once you’ve used it and your enemy knows you have them, countering it is pretty easy. They could be super-decisive -for instance why drag around hefty siege equipment when one Astral Rift Arrow will immediately knock a hole through 10 feet of solid, un- or misenchanted Anything?- but if your enemy is prepared for them, or happens to be employing very paranoid mages, then the cost of making them and the ease of negating their effects would counsel against their use. -- source link
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