Help me build a Glyph of Warding Cannon!

[RickAllison]

Exactly what the title says. For background, my wizard is a UA Artificer, which means he possesses the capability of casting Glyph of Warding at a limited rate for free via Infuse Scrolls. My question is how could I best weaponize this to extend the spell's reach beyond the 10' it is limited to?

In case I'm not being clear, this thread is about weaponizing Glyph of Warding so it has more range and usefulness than 10'.

[ClintACK]

Glyph of Warding can already attack well beyond 10'.

1st: Explosive Runes is a 20' radius explosion.

2nd: But a Spell Glyph targets whoever *triggers* the Glyph -- at whatever range that might be.

3rd: It can be triggered by being seen -- at any distance. Stick it on a wall facing a long corridor through which your enemies must approach. (Heck, put it on a flag that you only unfurl (moving it less than 10') when the enemy army approaches your castle.)

Picture an army moving to attack your castle. Your men-at-arms on the battlements untie a few strings and let rolled-up banners roll open on the castle walls, facing outwards. The banners are covered in holy glyphs. When the attackers approach within 60', these Glyphs trigger stored Flame Strike spells.

This is pretty close to lining the battlements with cannons...

It's not clear what happens if you use Call Lightning instead. The range ups to 120', but Call Lightning has a duration of "Concentration, up to 10 minutes" -- so arguably you've got ten full minutes of lightning strikes in the same spot (or targeting the same person if that person is still in range).

4th: Usefulness -- you can basically store *any* spell there (depending on how your DM reads the fluff line about harming other creatures). This can get cheesy fast. It's like a non-portable Contingency -- and can be abused in all sorts of similar ways.

The main limits are the cost (200 gp and an hour of your time per casting) and the lack of portability (you can't move it more than 10' from where you cast it).

So... if you want cheesy damage at a distance that will make your DM's eyes cross, but seems to work RAW... Try Spirit Guardian and trigger off an enemy who sees the Glyph. Now you've got a 15' radius of ongoing damage with a 10 minute duration (the glyph handles concentration for you) -- centered on the triggering enemy at range (as SG was never meant to do) and doing tons of damage over time. And you lose the main limit on Spirit Guardians -- the caster doesn't have to hang out in melee making Concentration checks.

But you still can't take the Glyph with you -- it's a stationary, single-use defense.

Most of the cheese I can see with Glyph of Warding comes when you stack multiple Glyphs on the same target at the same time. Example: in a room that's a 20' cube, you can fill the floor, wall, and ceiling with 24 glyphs that all trigger off the same enemy entering the room. That's 24x5d8 or 120d8 (540 average) damage of your choice of element, effectively in a surprise round. Save for half still leaves a massive amount of damage -- and that's before coming up with cleverly synergistic spell effects to store.

It gets worse when you realize that RAW you can scribe each Glyph in a much smaller area -- the only RAW limit on how many Explosive Runes Glyphs you could stack in that 20' room is 200 gp and 1 hour per Glyph (and your spell slots). You could one-shot the Tarrasque with enough Glyphs.