She Blinded Me with Science! (Magitek That Doesn't Make Me Cry Myself To Sleep)

[Kellus]

Thanks for your response! I'm sorry, but I ended up casting another Wall of Text. If you want to get the rest of your content out before worrying about my concerns, I totally understand.

Wow, you have some really insightful questions. I'm being lazy and putting off finishing Biomachinery, so let me answer your questions first.

That reminds me. What would be the caster level on said magic missles? 3?

The same as the caster level of the caster who placed it there in the first place. You need to cast a spell into an arcanodynamic transformer in order to get it to output the spell in the first place.

If you're changing the fuel source to bone, might you also want to change the material of the ballistics engine from copper to something that makes a more thematic fit? I love the way flesh engine to blood fuel/gold engine to sunlight fuel fit, and it'd be a shame to break that. For that matter, does the thematic of bone fit the mechanic of the ballistic engine?

Bone I think thematically works fairly well (violence), and is at least something that isn't going to cause arguments finding in-game like coal. I'll admit copper doesn't thematically have much of a link to it, but it does have the sort of spirit of early ballistics, cannons, and firearms that I think the principle evokes, so I think it'll do. I want to make sure it's a planetary metal to make sure it's in good supply, and most of the others are already taken.

(interesting stuff about pricing and orichalcum)

This is a really interesting topic. I agree that the idea of storing puissance allows you to do a lot more than ever before. At 14th level+ that's totally okay, since everything is lolwtfbbq but before that it can certainly have some nasty side-effects with clever parties.

I'll think about various scenarios, but I think the most reasonable solution is to be careful as a DM introducing any higher tech level material into lower tech settings.

I've tried to stay away from the economic side of things, mostly because:

1. I don't really care
2. I don't know much about economics
3. Any economic decision is predicated on the specifics of the setting

Especially number 3. I can't make generalisations like "orichalcum is especially valuable in low-tech settings", because maybe someone wants to run a low-tech game set in a post-apocalyptic setting where the fallout of the angel wars has left a lot of orichalcum and phlogiston deposits lying around. Essentially, I trust DMs to understand the material, and control how it enters into their game. Orichalcum is a Doctorate-level effect for a reason.

But let me think a little more about it, I might at the very least put some guidelines in about handling orichalcum in the setting. At least advise DMs not to hand out massive chunks of it.

Also, can any of the ascended metals be found in nature?

No, unless you want them to be in your setting.

Thinking about weight vs. cubic feet got me thinking that if ALCH 364 is overpowered, ALCH 101 might be underpowered. Stone is going to be somewhere between 145-160 pounds per cubic foot, which means about 3.3 cubic feet of stone per preparation. So, you see that stretch of the town wall you'd like to harden? The one that's 100 feet wide, 10 feet thick, and 20 feet tall? Better get crackin', cuz that's gonna take you 6,060 hours to do! And that's probably not even the whole wall! Might wanna take another look at other principles with similar targets, because I'm noticing a trend that weight per cubic foot is usually a lot higher than anticipated.

The 101 principles don't have especially large impacts on the setting, and in this case at least it's pretty much exactly what I was aiming for. 6,060 hours is quite a while for one party member, but if he hires, say, a construction crew of 50 1st level gramarists, he can be done in about a week. Faster if they're elans or warforged or something else that doesn't need to sleep. The point is that in order to do big-scale stuff like that you need teams and crews working together to get big engineering projects done. On your own, you can harden the party's equipment and stuff, sure. But fortifications? Good thing that most kingdoms have engineering corps with their armies.

If that's the case, then I'm gonna need some rules for damage/knock-back when you get crushed/pushed by one of these babies, because to me, the #1 coolest thing to do with this is shoot them at people. I'd want to rig up a 20 ft. chain, fix a barrier to it, and then swing at in a circle to shunt people around. Hell, you could literally make a giant flyswatter and swing it through buildings to splat the people inside! It'd probably be some sort of modified bullrush, using a function of the weight of the spatial reference to which the barrier is linked, but leverage might also be a factor. You probably know more about physics than I do. Or perhaps there's already something in the established rules you could use to calculate it?

Well, that's an interesting point. Luckily walls of force already exist in the game, and have rules for how they interact with people. For trying to push and squish people, bull rushes seem perfectly reasonable, and lets them try to resist it with their Strength. I would start by figuring out the size of the filter for the bludgeoning damage it deals, and treat it as an improvised weapon that initiates a bull rush based on the attack roll + the size modifier of the filter. At some point, the actual rules inevitably break down, and you need to make a judgment call based on the specific circumstances; no ruleset can predict every scenario. That's exactly why every part of this ruleset tries to reference existing material as much as possible so you know exactly how an effect slots into the game.

That being said, see my response to General Patton below.

One last thing: Would darkness created by an input gold transformer be magical or natural darkness for the purposes of darkvision?

Natural darkness. Magical darkness that darkvision doesn't work in always specifically mentions it, like an actual darkness effect.

@Morcleon–

Haha, I'm not sure I'd rely too much on blue ice. I get that it's pretty cool, but the intent was that when an effect specifies "ice" it means actual frozen water.

The main problem with a phlogiston/ice transformer is that phlogiston has a temperature of 1,000 degrees Centigrade around it, and even with alchemetric modification, there's only so much heat you can channel away with arcanodynamics. If you can set something up to get around that, it's a fantastic source of energy!

I second this notion. A surface being held at a fixed distance from something else that can be moved will break physics as soon as someone starts interacting with both the Filter and the object it's affixed to. You can't even meaningfully calculate the motion since there's no forces involved with some of the components of this system. Without constructing physics for it, you could carry infinite weight on a Filter glued to an object and create bootstrap drives that we can only assume move at infinite speed.

This is a really good point. I'll write up some rules for kaleidomantics for what happens when something is pushing back against a moving filter that should hopefully clear up some of the confusion.