How to adjudicate an army of unseen crafters

[Jowgen]

Unseen Crafter is a 2nd level Bard spell that is relatively easy to get via knowstones or advanced learning or whatever. It works like Unseen Servant and also can not only craft things, but lasts days per level.

(EDIT: It's actually also a 2nd Wizard, Sorcerer, Cleric and Artificer spell. Virtually everyone and their familiar can have it. My bad, the reference list I was using didn't have that listed. It's from Races of Eberron p. 191 if anyone wants to check.)

Now thing is, anyone capable of casting this spell can just by casting 1/day maintain a constant cadre of these servants equal to their caster level. If they can cast more than 1/day the number will keep on increasing gradually over time as long as they keep up the regiment.

The most high-powered scenario of the top of my head is a spellthief with the appropriate knowstone making a point of draining allied casters' 2+ spell spell slots at night before they refresh, and/or disabling enemy casters and also draining them or maybe even keeping them around that way to use as spell slot batteries. This spellthief always immediately burns the stolen spells to amass more Unseen Crafters.

The result either case is a caster with an arbitrarily high number of Unseen Crafters at their constant disposal. As it takes a move action to direct a spell effect, the practical effects in combat are limited to the same degree that having just one or two unseen servants are, but outside of combat this gives the caster access to a staggering amount of "manpower".

Give it a few minutes and the caster can have hundreds of highly mobile, tireless strength score 2 servants start to take apart a building piece by piece, tunnel through a mountain, excavate a massive pit, clear a section of forest, or if going with the original purpose of the spell, expend them to Craft a metric ton of stuff in a short time... that's just of the top of my head. It can be thought of as a reserve of virtually unlimited (tele)kinetic energy that the caster can, given the wind-up time, direct to accomplish a staggering number of complex and otherwise time consuming tasks.

The purpose of this thread is two fold.

1) To collect idea people have in what ways this sorta Unseen Army can be used/abused
2) Think of ways to prevent such uses and abuses from unbalancing the game

So, thoughts anyone?

[Kayblis]

Well, a Strenght score of 2 nets you a max 20lb heavy load. Lots and lots of them might be able to carry some stuff, but that's nothing rare with spells. Tenser's Floating Disk is a 1st-level spell on a much more accessible list that carries 100lb per caster level. Also, a score of 2 brings its own problems, because most usual deconstruction work includes breaking stuff. Not everything is like in Mechanus, where you can just detach and unbolt stuff until the structure collapses.

The crafting side is a low-level version of Fabricate - it still takes the days to craft stuff, but with multiple castings you can query stuff and have a lot of workers. Don't think it's all that easy though, they roll with your Craft ranks(so you need to invest points anyways) and disappear once they finish a job or the duration ends. This means each casting will net you at best one item. Sure, if casting the same spell 10 times is efficient or not depends on the setting, and surely stealing spell slots can help improve your crafting, but you won't get much mileage out of the skill anyways because Crafting progress is measured by the week, and if you do it by the day you're losing a lot of progress. If you managed to beat a weekly DC 20 with a roll of 20, you progressed 40gp in one week. Scaling it can net quite a lot of gold, but it brings its own RP problems and the gold won't matter at the level it comes online. A 7th level character usually has 19,000gp. A couple hundred more won't break balance, specially if he's investing something into it.

[Climowitz]

With magic ítems rules you can hace años atrás Will unen Carter ítem. Instant army of workers

[Jowgen]

Well, a Strenght score of 2 nets you a max 20lb heavy load. Lots and lots of them might be able to carry some stuff, but that's nothing rare with spells. Tenser's Floating Disk is a 1st-level spell on a much more accessible list that carries 100lb per caster level. Also, a score of 2 brings its own problems, because most usual deconstruction work includes breaking stuff. Not everything is like in Mechanus, where you can just detach and unbolt stuff until the structure collapses.

Tenser is a brilliant spell. Someone should write a handbook on its uses.

I don't think the relative weakness of the individual servant is a particular limitation. Since they don't take up space, there is no appreciable limit to how many at most you can have exert force on a single thing either, although they do need to be given the order individually. Another point is that their ability to use tools and "mend" should allow for the use of crowbars and stuff to generate mechanical leverage that would help. Very well within the realms of what an untrained human can do with a DC 10 check of some kind.

What I think limits them for this sorta labour, particular transporting things like you mentioned, is their measly 15 ft speed and lack of brains. Going by the FAQ, they lack sense or judgement, basically being limited to differentiating things by size and weight (i.e. what you could perceive by touch), so giving orders that amount to effective deconstruction is tricky. So you can probably give an order that would amount to them prying all the nails and screws out of the room on their own without active directing, but without direct guidance they couldn't pull apart interlocking beams. An order to just indiscriminately pull things apart into whatever direction they can move might be more efficient. Or use saws, if there were any...

Other indiscriminate building destruction options would be to have them move the earth out from under the building until it collapses, or have them in groups of 10 lift 200 lb object and drop those from like 40 ft up over and over until everything is broken. Doesn't even need to be for a purpose. Stroll through town and have them wreck things all around you for giggles.

The crafting side is a low-level version of Fabricate - it still takes the days to craft stuff, but with multiple castings you can query stuff and have a lot of workers. Don't think it's all that easy though, they roll with your Craft ranks(so you need to invest points anyways) and disappear once they finish a job or the duration ends. This means each casting will net you at best one item. Sure, if casting the same spell 10 times is efficient or not depends on the setting, and surely stealing spell slots can help improve your crafting, but you won't get much mileage out of the skill anyways because Crafting progress is measured by the week, and if you do it by the day you're losing a lot of progress. If you managed to beat a weekly DC 20 with a roll of 20, you progressed 40gp in one week. Scaling it can net quite a lot of gold, but it brings its own RP problems and the gold won't matter at the level it comes online. A 7th level character usually has 19,000gp. A couple hundred more won't break balance, specially if he's investing something into it.

Fabricate is better in a lot of ways, but is also a 5th level slot and has a volume per casting limitation (especially for mineral stuff). The math will depend on what you're working with, but for most purposes the number of Unseen Crafters you'd need to out-pace it should still be in the double digits.

Also, I don't think they are necessarily limited to making a single item, they just have to keep crafting the same thing for the duration, e.g. churning out arrows, as that is still "one task that can be accomplished by the use of the Craft skill". Regarding ranks, considering they add your casting stat and can take 10, hitting the 15 for martial weapons or "high quality" items should be doable without rank investment. If profit is the goal, the obvious pick would be poison, where the number of doses you make per week gets calculated in gold rather than silver.

Rather than making cash though, I think the more interesting use is making cheap stuff and leveraging the sheer volume you have for in-game purposes. Like, turn a helpless village into a militia decked out in simple but effective leather/hide armor, bucklers and Longspears. Of course fortifying the whole place with walls and watchtowers can be done at the same time. All you need is a Goblin Army Ex Machina and you'll be a regular General Enri of Carne Village.

[icefractal]

Now thing is, anyone capable of casting this spell can just by casting 1/day maintain a constant cadre of these servants equal to their caster level. If they can cast more than 1/day the number will keep on increasing gradually over time as long as they keep up the regiment.

It won't though. If you can cast it X/day, you can have CL*X crafters present at a given time; it just scales linearly, as with Shrink Item.

Still useful, that said. They use your spellcasting stat and Craft is an untrained skill, so with a 30+ in the stat you can make masterwork anything. Prior to that, with a 22+ in the stat you just need a single rank in each Craft skill that you want to use. Since it uses the casting stat rather than Int, it's especially good for non-Int casters who would be limited in their use of Fabricate.

They may be mindless, but the fact that they can Craft at a high degree of skill implies that "build a frigate following this blueprint" is a viable command, so it'd be useful for ships, buildings, and other things too large for Fabricate's size limit.

Also, as formless beings that don't occupy space, it seems fairly legit to have a huge number aiding you to generate a truly immense Craft check, more than would be practical with human assistants. In case you need to audition for a job as God of Craftsmanship or something.

[Jowgen]

It won't though. If you can cast it X/day, you can have CL*X crafters present at a given time; it just scales linearly, as with Shrink Item.

Ah, got it mixed up with the spellthief scenario, which was my original introductory example before I figured to best tone it down. I also didn't include the use of 2nd level pearls of power, which after CL*day up add up to another =CL number of servants. Either case, getting like 50 odd Servants running at the same time seems achievable for most.

They may be mindless, but the fact that they can Craft at a high degree of skill implies that "build a frigate following this blueprint" is a viable command, so it'd be useful for ships, buildings, and other things too large for Fabricate's size limit.

Kinda makes it weird that there is nothing to suggest that, outside of their ability to apparently craft just about anything at a surprising amount of skill, they are anymore capable of following complex orders. I can order it to craft a pocketwatch, but I can't then ask it to Disable Device sabotage a pocketwatch to run slow.

Although side note, ships have their own construction rules by means of Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering), though there is synergy still.

Also, as formless beings that don't occupy space, it seems fairly legit to have a huge number aiding you to generate a truly immense Craft check, more than would be practical with human assistants. In case you need to audition for a job as God of Craftsmanship or something.

Normally I'd consider abusing aid another en masse uncouth cheese, but the spell does specify "any one task that can be accomplished by the use of the Craft skill", so seems legit. And arguably the spell's note about taking 10 over-rides the general no taking 10 on aid another, but even without that each servant adding +2 at least seems basically guaranteed.

For every 5 crafters we are netted a +10, which easily works for the quick creation option to boost the craft DC for quicker progress. A caster with 50 of them, if allowed to use them all, gets a straight up +100 to their check boosts the DC accordingly. So they can not only be good for crafting one very big thing or lots and lots of cheap things, but help you craft one very pricey thing a lot faster if need be.

[Jack_Simth]

Meh.

OK, so, they function as Unseen Servant... which means they dissipate if they're out of range. And the spell changes how they function: If your DM does not agree that the Crafting function of Unseen Crafter is additive, you won't be able to order them to follow you around until you assign them a crafting task (additive = anything an unseen servant can do, so can an unseen crafter; if it's NOT additive, then it doesn't have the functions of Unseen servant to do things like "follow you"). While the crafters themselves may not take up space... tools and materials do, and those have to actually be there. And you can't easily tell the crafters to pick things up and move them to a more convenient spot. The net effect is that you need to cast them near where they're going to work, and you're stuck in place until they're done. Well, unless you plan on parking your mega-factory on a rather lot of carts or something.

So how much does this actually net you? Assuming for the moment you've got a +10 mod between your primary casting stat and your ranks in the craft skill, and have a caster level of 7, each 2nd level spell slot expended gets you 7 days of work making DC 20 by taking ten. Each week, you make 20x20 = 400 silvers (40 gp) in progress. But in general you sell for half, and must buy materials. so 20 gp, minus the 13.33... gp in materials, means at 7th you're usually making 6.66... gp per casting. Crafting Trade Goods makes it better (26.66... gp per casting), but that's about as good as it gets at 7th. And markets DO get saturated (and quickly, when you're stuck in one spot).

A 2nd level spell slot on a 3rd level caster markets at 60 gp. You're behind the Cleric/Wizard of half your level who's having a half-off sale.

So... DM gives you a little spare cash, then tells you you've saturated the market and need to go elsewhere. Alternately, makes you start making profession checks to actually sell things... and because the market is saturated, you're not so much selling things as rolling profession checks during down-time.

[Jowgen]

OK, so, they function as Unseen Servant... which means they dissipate if they're out of range. And the spell changes how they function: If your DM does not agree that the Crafting function of Unseen Crafter is additive, you won't be able to order them to follow you around until you assign them a crafting task. While the crafters themselves may not take up space... tools and materials do, and those have to actually be there. And you can't easily tell the crafters to pick things up and move them to a more convenient spot. The net effect is that you need to cast them near where they're going to work, and you're stuck in place until they're done. Well, unless you plan on parking your mega-factory on a rather lot of carts or something.

Transporting them shouldn't be an issue. Even if they can't use their 20 lb of force to hold on to you and be dragged along, or be contained in a regular bag, any sort of extra-dimensional storage container should ferry them fine (especially since they technically take up 0 space and explicitly weigh nothing).

Not sure what you mean by the crafting function being additive. You suggesting it can be read that crafting is the only thing they can do? If so, I don't see it. It explicitly functions as Unseen Servant, except you can order it to craft. Nothing to take away the other unseen servant functions any more than it would take away the rules about Str, HP or speed.

True though that with their speed of 15 they're no good for transporting materials over long distances when you have a construction project that needs specific stuff. But, there's a Floating Disk Talisman for that.

So how much does this actually net you? Assuming for the moment you've got a +10 mod between your primary casting stat and your ranks in the craft skill, and have a caster level of 7, each 2nd level spell slot expended gets you 7 days of work making DC 20 by taking ten. Each week, you make 20x20 = 400 silvers (40 gp) in progress. But in general you sell for half, and must buy materials. so 20 gp, minus the 13.33... gp in materials, means at 7th you're usually making 6.66... gp per casting. Crafting Trade Goods makes it better (26.66... gp per casting), but that's about as good as it gets at 7th.

A 2nd level spell slot on a 3rd level caster markets at 60 gp. You're behind the journeyman Cleric/Wizard who's having a half-off sale.

I'm not a fan of using them to craft just to make money. Although if you'd want to do that, you'd craft Poisons/Drugs/Ravages, since they get made in GP/week. Plus, Dragon mag has rules for using Knowledge (local) to get poison raw materials at discount prices, at 1/6th rather than 1/3rd. Then assuming the mod of +10 and taking 10 for a DC 20 product, it's 400 gp of progress per Unseen Crafter/week, with the raw material cost taking it down to 333.33 gp (assuming dragon mag is in play).

So 3 Crafters making you exactly 1000 gp worth of poisons/drugs/ravages week sold for 500 gp. Even a standard 7th level bard with 16 Cha can produce 5 Unseen Servants in a day that'll last him the week, and each following day a new set of 5 can be added for 35 max if his level 2-3 spells are spent on nothing else. As long as sales keep up (dependent on demand for Poisons/Drugs), that adds up to a weekly profit of 5833.33 gp starting week 2. Nothing to sneeze at.

But again, not an idea of exploiting innocent unseen servants for blind profit. That's what Planar Binding is for.

[Jack_Simth]

Transporting them shouldn't be an issue. Even if they can't use their 20 lb of force to hold on to you and be dragged along, or be contained in a regular bag, any sort of extra-dimensional storage container should ferry them fine (especially since they technically take up 0 space and explicitly weigh nothing).

Not sure what you mean by the crafting function being additive. You suggesting it can be read that crafting is the only thing they can do? If so, I don't see it. It explicitly functions as Unseen Servant, except you can order it to craft. Nothing to take away the other unseen servant functions any more than it would take away the rules about Str, HP or speed.

The relevant bit of that spell is:
"This spell functions as unseen servant, except that the unseen crafter can be assigned any one task that can be accomplished by the use of the Craft skill."

You're assuming additive: That the "...except that the unseen crafter can be assigned..." means "...except that the unseen crafter can also be assigned...": That the new ability of "Make craft checks" is added on to the existing abilities of "functions as an unseen servant". The "also" isn't there, so it's open to interpretation. When you're the DM, and the specific goal is to prevent abuse, making them effectively immobile by NOT permitting the "also" that some folks seem to think is implied goes a long way towards that. It may or may not be what's intended, and you may not see it, but it can be read that way. The "Functions as unseen servant", in the "non additive" reading, describes how it handles area damage, interaction with senses, targeting, and so on.

True though that with their speed of 15 they're no good for transporting materials over long distances when you have a construction project that needs specific stuff. But, there's a Floating Disk Talisman for that.



I'm not a fan of using them to craft just to make money. Although if you'd want to do that, you'd craft Poisons/Drugs/Ravages, since they get made in GP/week. Plus, Dragon mag has rules for using Knowledge (local) to get poison raw materials at discount prices, at 1/6th rather than 1/3rd. Then assuming the mod of +10 and taking 10 for a DC 20 product, it's 400 gp of progress per Unseen Crafter/week, with the raw material cost taking it down to 333.33 gp (assuming dragon mag is in play).

So 3 Crafters making you exactly 1000 gp worth of poisons/drugs/ravages week sold for 500 gp. Even a standard 7th level bard with 16 Cha can produce 5 Unseen Servants in a day that'll last him the week, and each following day a new set of 5 can be added for 35 max if his level 2-3 spells are spent on nothing else. As long as sales keep up (dependent on demand for Poisons/Drugs), that adds up to a weekly profit of 5833.33 gp starting week 2. Nothing to sneeze at.

Up until law enforcement tracks down the new guy dealing in illegal goods. Or the local mob decides they need to deal with the bloke that's cutting in on one of their money makers. Or the market crashes. Any or all of which are reasonable consequences for a "new player in the business" suddenly selling a big blob of illicit goods.

But again, not an idea of exploiting innocent unseen servants for blind profit. That's what Planar Binding is for.

Then "effectively immobile" is really the way you want to go.

[Jowgen]

Critical error detected, Unseen Servant is not bard exclusive, but Wizard/Sorcerer, Cleric, Artificer and Magewright 2 as well. That is my B. Note added to OP.

You're assuming additive: That the "...except that the unseen crafter can be assigned..." means "...except that the unseen crafter can also be assigned...": That the new ability of "Make craft checks" is added on to the existing abilities of "functions as an unseen servant". The "also" isn't there, so it's open to interpretation. When you're the DM, and the specific goal is to prevent abuse, making them effectively immobile by NOT permitting the "also" that some folks seem to think is implied goes a long way towards that. It may or may not be what's intended, and you may not see it, but it can be read that way. The "Functions as unseen servant", in the "non additive" reading, describes how it handles area damage, interaction with senses, targeting, and so on.

Ah, I see what you mean now. As it does not specify that the Crafting ability is a new addition of ability, it can be read as replacement, which certainly would lend itself to limiting player abuse.

Thinking it odd I didn't see that, I went back to the book to check reasons why, and I'm pretty sure I found why this suggested reading seemed to inconceivable to me: the 1-line description of the spell for the spell lists reads: "Invisible force obeys your command and can use the Craft skill", i.e. the regular Unseen Servant's "Invisible force obeys your commands" plus the crafting bit.

So while the spell description itself does leave room for interpretation, the RAI does seems to be for it to be additive, but now I'm not sure where does the RAW land? Does this qualify as a conflict between text and table, and which do the 1-line summaries count as anyways?

I suppose push comes to shove I can just hard line GM call, but still...

Up until law enforcement tracks down the new guy dealing in illegal goods. Or the local mob decides they need to deal with the bloke that's cutting in on one of their money makers. Or the market crashes. Any or all of which are reasonable consequences for a "new player in the business" suddenly selling a big blob of illicit goods.
Then "effectively immobile" is really the way you want to go.

Oh yeah, RP ramifications galore would ensure to be sure, but that is part of the concern I have, i.e. a campaign inadvertently turning into Breaking Bad. Then again, just being upfront about this particular avenue of side-business carrying a risk of becoming a long term, quest-derailing pain might be enough to avoid it, and if the players really wanna go that route it certainly is something that can be worked with.

Regardless of the eventual application of the servants, I think you have the right idea about limiting the mobility of the unseen army to keep thins reasonable. At the very least it seems sensible to place some sort of limit upon how densely the servants can be packed together, since that would a) limit crazy Aid Another stacking, b) limit how many can move/act upon one thing, and c) limit how many a player can transport in their extradimensional space (which would be required).

After all, servant might not take up space in terms of creatures, but perhaps they could be said to at least take up space relative to each other. Question is how much. The picture on SBG p. 79 seems to suggest they're about the volume of... 1 cubic ft at most? Not sure how much that would limit them in practice.

[Fizban]

(EDIT: It's actually also a 2nd Wizard, Sorcerer, Cleric and Artificer spell. Virtually everyone and their familiar can have it.

Which if anything is the part that really irks me. Unseen Servant is a cool spell which gets wrecked from one side by Tome and Blood's Prestidigitation page letting you magically clean 600 cubic feet of matter. And then Races of Eberron makes a spell that's obviously about repairing Warforged. . . by taking a 1st level hour/level spell on the arcane list and making it a 2nd level day/level spell on all the non-Druid lists. Great idea guys, well done. So I'd use the craft checks only ruling. Actually I'd just exclude the spell and nerf Prestidigitation while I'm at it, but yeah.

The most impressive use I've considered is from the industrialization threads, where I pointed out and computed that massed Unseen Servants beat any other type of power source for machines that aren't hauling cargo. Thanks to the "shapeless force" description (and if necessary the fact that magical force has no given mass or volume anywhere), you can concentrate all those 20lb forces onto any tool you want, making the jump to precision machine tooling as quick as standardizing your measurements and supplying the US's. And figuring out the metallurgy. If Unseen Crafter is allowed and doubles as Unseen Servant, that's that much easier.

[Jack_Simth]

Thinking it odd I didn't see that, I went back to the book to check reasons why, and I'm pretty sure I found why this suggested reading seemed to inconceivable to me: the 1-line description of the spell for the spell lists reads: "Invisible force obeys your command and can use the Craft skill", i.e. the regular Unseen Servant's "Invisible force obeys your commands" plus the crafting bit.

So while the spell description itself does leave room for interpretation, the RAI does seems to be for it to be additive, but now I'm not sure where does the RAW land? Does this qualify as a conflict between text and table, and which do the 1-line summaries count as anyways?

They're table. Explicitly, even. Hold a bit...

From the 3.5 PHB errata (see Here, specifically This file:

Errata Rule: Primary Sources
When you find a disagreement between two D&D ® rules
sources, unless an official errata file says otherwise, the
primary source is correct. One example of a
primary/secondary source is text taking precedence over
a table entry. An individual spell description takes
precedence when the short description in the beginning
of the spells chapter disagrees.

(Emphasis added)

[Jay R]

So 3 Crafters making you exactly 1000 gp worth of poisons/drugs/ravages week sold for 500 gp. Even a standard 7th level bard with 16 Cha can produce 5 Unseen Servants in a day that'll last him the week, and each following day a new set of 5 can be added for 35 max if his level 2-3 spells are spent on nothing else. As long as sales keep up (dependent on demand for Poisons/Drugs), that adds up to a weekly profit of 5833.33 gp starting week 2. Nothing to sneeze at.

Only if you know where enough potential buyers are. And bear in mind that that price is based on the number of buyers (demand) and the number of sellers (supply). Add that much more supply on the market, and the price will go down.

Also, where exactly are the customers for poisons? You don't just set up shop in the marketplace and start shouting, "Poisons! Get your murderous poisons here!"

Marketing is a full-time job. You'd need fairly high levels of Knowledge(poisons market), and Profession (Merchant) just to find customers.

And if you succeed? You are taking customers away from current merchants who, by hypothesis, suddenly have a lot of poison they can't sell. What do you suppose they'll do with it?

[Jowgen]

Which if anything is the part that really irks me. Unseen Servant is a cool spell which gets wrecked from one side by Tome and Blood's Prestidigitation page letting you magically clean 600 cubic feet of matter. And then Races of Eberron makes a spell that's obviously about repairing Warforged. . . by taking a 1st level hour/level spell on the arcane list and making it a 2nd level day/level spell on all the non-Druid lists. Great idea guys, well done. So I'd use the craft checks only ruling. Actually I'd just exclude the spell and nerf Prestidigitation while I'm at it, but yeah.

I feel you regarding Prestidigitation taking a lot of the fun out of US, although I personally see Unseen Crafter at leasting bringing it somewhat back in spirit. I.e. people can at least feel like they're using US and think its worth it again. Although I do agree its on way too many lists. It should at the very least remained Arcane only, a cleric getting it just doesn't agree with me. Except maybe as artifice domain or something akin.

The most impressive use I've considered is from the industrialization threads, where I pointed out and computed that massed Unseen Servants beat any other type of power source for machines that aren't hauling cargo. Thanks to the "shapeless force" description (and if necessary the fact that magical force has no given mass or volume anywhere), you can concentrate all those 20lb forces onto any tool you want, making the jump to precision machine tooling as quick as standardizing your measurements and supplying the US's. And figuring out the metallurgy. If Unseen Crafter is allowed and doubles as Unseen Servant, that's that much easier.

Asmodeus almighty... I had not considered that cat girl murdering angle whatsoever. Going by STR score alone, it should take... 7 US/UC to equal the power output of one Decant of Endless water on a turbine, right?

They're table. Explicitly, even. Hold a bit...

So spell description is certainly primary, but I do not see how they can be read to disagree as required for text to trump. Text is ambiguous as to whether "except you can" is to be read as "except you only can" or "except you also can", while the table specifies the "also" option.

As is, I don't think this nerf can be applied by RAW as opposed to house ruling it. Which is fine, but I everytime I do that I feel a Kender comes to life. Rather avoid it.

Only if you know where enough potential buyers are. And bear in mind that that price is based on the number of buyers (demand) and the number of sellers (supply). Add that much more supply on the market, and the price will go down.

Also, where exactly are the customers for poisons? You don't just set up shop in the marketplace and start shouting, "Poisons! Get your murderous poisons here!"

Marketing is a full-time job. You'd need fairly high levels of Knowledge(poisons market), and Profession (Merchant) just to find customers.

And if you succeed? You are taking customers away from current merchants who, by hypothesis, suddenly have a lot of poison they can't sell. What do you suppose they'll do with it?

Well, could always advertise to people with ancestral relics.

Broken feats aside, the added challenge of peddling illicit goods favoured by the nasty is something that I feel helps off set the unfairly lucrative crafting math for poisons. Although if one wanted to get around that, there are Ravages, which can be crafted the same but aren't illegal and will have a steady market wherever good struggles against the forces of evil. Or one could go full villain and sell drugs instead, boosting the law enforcement and rival salesmen trouble way high in exchange for steady demand. Or just do both, selling to all sides. There be options.

Any case though, as you point out, the money making schemes all have their own checks and balances that can be implemented as the need arises and tied in with the story, so I'm not too worried about those. If players really want a breaking bad side-story to their quest, why not?

[unseenmage]

Hmm, I wonder what's the cheapest priced/earliest level an Intelligent Magic Item could be made that can use Unseen Crafter at will and give them orders.

Especially as Int Magic Items can explicitly utilize all their own superpowers and can be built with an agenda chosen by their creator.

An Int Magic Item Portable Hole or Enveloping Pit would seem useful. Could be a fairly horrifying espianage or sabotage minion actually. I cannot think of many places such a creature couldn't get in to.

At higher levels adding Greater Plane Shift and G. Teleport makes it exponentially more mobile.

[Fizban]

Asmodeus almighty... I had not considered that cat girl murdering angle whatsoever. Going by STR score alone, it should take... 7 US/UC to equal the power output of one Decant of Endless water on a turbine, right?

No idea. The guy arguing for Create Water power wasn't using Decanters (might have even been you for all I remember- look it up? eh, watching Desert Bus, I'll get my US numbers from the thread later), and the knockdown effect is basically un-convertible to any useful measure of power anyway. Even if you just figure "fire hose" you'd have to pick a fire hose, and they have a big variance. Infinite fire beats everything for raw energy output anyway, but Unseen Servant cuts out so many steps in a machine (the entire steam engine and drive system) that it's better. And existing magical vehicles/strongholds are extremely strong even in the absence of a known cost for inventing and building steam tech.

Edit: so converting ft lbf/s to watts gives a single Unseen Servant 67.8 watts of power. Which is not very much at all, but again, you don't use these to crank generators. You use them to apply 20lbs of pressure per US to a tool. For comparison, a medium fire elemental puts out around 22-65 MW depending on how you rule Burn affects things, and the interior of a 1.5' radius by 3' tall cylinder Wall of Fire at cl 7 is 55 MW (two of either is enough to power a train). An early steam engine can only turn 1% of that energy into useful work, but watts vs megawatts is a factor of 1,000,000. And if you want continuous 1st level output, you just cast Mount for literal horsepower instead.

Which, incidentally, is how they powered early machine tools where waterwheels weren't feasible. You can just put people or animals on the cranks. Neither Mount nor US is any good without duration, but if you want to turn a crank then Mount will crush US, obviously. It's the steelworking where focusing tons of US's directly on steel tools seems strong to me.

[Jack_Simth]

So spell description is certainly primary, but I do not see how they can be read to disagree as required for text to trump. Text is ambiguous as to whether "except you can" is to be read as "except you only can" or "except you also can", while the table specifies the "also" option.

You are reading "disagrees" as "directly contradicts". While that's certainly a valid reading, "disagrees" can also just mean "say different things". If one thing says "red or blue", and the other just says "blue" (but does not explicitly say "only blue"), then the two disagree.

Yes, it's a deliberately narrow reading. Yes, there's other ways to read it. But your line item two question in the OP was "how to limit abuse", and "effectively immobile" tied with the "dissipates if you're out of range" deals with most abuses handily.

[Jowgen]

Hmm, I wonder what's the cheapest priced/earliest level an Intelligent Magic Item could be made that can use Unseen Crafter at will and give them orders.

Especially as Int Magic Items can explicitly utilize all their own superpowers and can be built with an agenda chosen by their creator.

An Int Magic Item Portable Hole or Enveloping Pit would seem useful. Could be a fairly horrifying espianage or sabotage minion actually. I cannot think of many places such a creature couldn't get in to.

At higher levels adding Greater Plane Shift and G. Teleport makes it exponentially more mobile.

I can see the utility, but it is also seems prohibitively expensive to get it to a level where the item can make enough UCs to be real effective. Now if you're going the Intelligent item abuse route anyways, then finding space to add UC is probably a good idea, but doing intelligent items for the purpose of UC abuse seem inefficient, although I might be missing something.

Edit: so converting ft lbf/s to watts gives a single Unseen Servant 67.8 watts of power. Which is not very much at all, but again, you don't use these to crank generators. You use them to apply 20lbs of pressure per US to a tool. For comparison, a medium fire elemental puts out around 22-65 MW depending on how you rule Burn affects things, and the interior of a 1.5' radius by 3' tall cylinder Wall of Fire at cl 7 is 55 MW (two of either is enough to power a train). An early steam engine can only turn 1% of that energy into useful work, but watts vs megawatts is a factor of 1,000,000. And if you want continuous 1st level output, you just cast Mount for literal horsepower instead.

Which, incidentally, is how they powered early machine tools where waterwheels weren't feasible. You can just put people or animals on the cranks. Neither Mount nor US is any good without duration, but if you want to turn a crank then Mount will crush US, obviously. It's the steelworking where focusing tons of US's directly on steel tools seems strong to me.

Okay, so they're not the ideal energiser bunny (unless duration is way more important than power), but best used for precision work or stuff that just needs pressure. Like your own personal fantasy hydraulic press show.

You are reading "disagrees" as "directly contradicts". While that's certainly a valid reading, "disagrees" can also just mean "say different things". If one thing says "red or blue", and the other just says "blue" (but does not explicitly say "only blue"), then the two disagree.

Yes, it's a deliberately narrow reading. Yes, there's other ways to read it. But your line item two question in the OP was "how to limit abuse", and "effectively immobile" tied with the "dissipates if you're out of range" deals with most abuses handily.

I see your point and appreciate the contribution. While I personally do not jive with the idea of limiting the capabilities themselves by means of such a narrow reading, I acknowledge that it's an option, and I do like the general idea of limiting the mobility as a way to reign in absurdity.

As is, my approach would be to require that being able to transport them at speeds faster than the 15 ft/round requires having extra-dimensional storage to occupy. That can place a non-arbitrary limit on their numbers depending on space sharing ability. Then getting each one out onto the field requires an action, so 20 per minute, and then giving each one that's out an order takes again as long. Of course those orders need to be careful to avoid them trying to move out of range. While the project is going on, moving more than a couple 10s of ft in any direction would again require orders to all to avoid getting out of range, and then the movement is limited to 15 ft per round. Lastly at the end they need to be packed up again.

So with that there are still things that can be done with them, but it becomes a lot more time-consuming/cumbersome to get anything done. Rather than walking in a room and going "I order my Unseen Servant army to dismantle the place", it becomes a "I stand there for a while getting my servants out. Then I stand there for a while given each one these specific orders to avoid loosing them. [...] Okay, we done just wait while I get them all back in their bottle.", which is an ideal case scenario where the circumstance don't suddenly change in a way to makes the point moot or suddenly requires moving away and therefore loosing the servants.

Do you personally feel that's sufficiently limiting, or think there's some other constraints that can/should be added?

[Jack_Simth]

You'd also need to keep the extra dimensional space open, as when it is closed they're not in "close" range anymore.

[Ruethgar]

You should of course learn to cast the War version of this spell to get 25*CL crafters per casting at a +1 spell level and some other limitations.

You'd also need to keep the extra dimensional space open, as when it is closed they're not in "close" range anymore.

Nurturing Seeds on an oak sapling from which you drew an Acorn of Far Travel now you are always close.

[Fizban]

A a conjured effect, the Unseen Servant is a shapeless bit of magical force that moves around. It's not capable of stopping anything outside of the 20lb of force it can exert (it's not a mini Wall of Force), but it's also not merely a convenient way to describe a tractor beam. It is a thing, albeit a thing whose lack of defined mass or volume can potentially be exploited. One can also exploit the fact that it is a thing, and order it to grab onto something- or someone.

Getting your Unseen Servant to keep pace with you is trivial, just order it to ride you around before you get moving.

[Jowgen]

A a conjured effect, the Unseen Servant is a shapeless bit of magical force that moves around. It's not capable of stopping anything outside of the 20lb of force it can exert (it's not a mini Wall of Force), but it's also not merely a convenient way to describe a tractor beam. It is a thing, albeit a thing whose lack of defined mass or volume can potentially be exploited. One can also exploit the fact that it is a thing, and order it to grab onto something- or someone.

Getting your Unseen Servant to keep pace with you is trivial, just order it to ride you around before you get moving.

It's might be an option, but not nessecarily a trivial one. So long as the Ride check (or other) DC is 10 then it'll work for casual overland travel, but it would most likely preclude the use of most kinds of teleportation. And it leaves them exposed to surprise AoE attacks, so really the extradimensional route is probably the best advised option regardless.

Although on the fun side, if someone were capable to seeing the servants, you'd look hella interesting to them with a dozen or so trailing of you as you walk.

You'd also need to keep the extra dimensional space open, as when it is closed they're not in "close" range anymore.

Indeed, which leaves your stuff vulnerable to being Pickpocketed more easily.

[Fizban]

It's might be an option, but not nessecarily a trivial one. So long as the Ride check (or other) DC is 10 then it'll work for casual overland travel, but it would most likely preclude the use of most kinds of teleportation. And it leaves them exposed to surprise AoE attacks, so really the extradimensional route is probably the best advised option regardless.

The keeping of pace is trivial, I never said anything about the rest. There are no ride checks for normal movement so there's no reason to be calling for one, and AoEs are always going to hose them. Even leaving an extradimensional space open for the servants to move in and out of requires the DM to agree, since those pocket dimensions count as different planes and I don't know of any direct statements that leaving the bag open allows spells to ignore that boundary.

Although on the fun side, if someone were capable to seeing the servants, you'd look hella interesting to them with a dozen or so trailing of you as you walk.

The servants are invisible, See Invisible will see them. Blindsight would presumably do so as well, and you might even get to wreak havoc on someone's blindsense if the DM says it picks them up too.

[Jack_Simth]

You should of course learn to cast the War version of this spell to get 25*CL crafters per casting at a +1 spell level and some other limitations.



Nurturing Seeds on an oak sapling from which you drew an Acorn of Far Travel now you are always close.

Are you sure you want it to include that in your interpretation of what the Acorn of Far Travel does? It leads to a problem wherein you can't cast spells on anyone outside your storage zone, as they're out of range.

[Zaq]

The servants are invisible, See Invisible will see them. Blindsight would presumably do so as well, and you might even get to wreak havoc on someone's blindsense if the DM says it picks them up too.

Hmm. That's actually kind of weird. They aren't creatures and they aren't objects, though you might get away with calling them "beings." But they don't really have a shape. They're just a "shapeless force." They are, in black and white, "invisible," so I guess it's possible to argue that See Invis makes them visible to you, but what does a shapeless force look like? What exactly did you make visible?

For that matter, how would they interact with Invisibility Purge? And how do other force effects that are described as "invisible" (such as Wall of Force) interact with the same?

[Jowgen]

Hmm. That's actually kind of weird. They aren't creatures and they aren't objects, though you might get away with calling them "beings." But they don't really have a shape. They're just a "shapeless force." They are, in black and white, "invisible," so I guess it's possible to argue that See Invis makes them visible to you, but what does a shapeless force look like? What exactly did you make visible?

For that matter, how would they interact with Invisibility Purge? And how do other force effects that are described as "invisible" (such as Wall of Force) interact with the same?

Well, as to what they "look" like, I know of two pictures. One in SBG p. 79, which depicts Unseen Servants serving a bunch of adventurers at a table while looking like cloudy, ghostly wisps of particulate matter (note: one is holding a burning log without issue). The other is on Races of Eberron p. 191, showing an Unseen Crafter fixing a warforged, while only appearing as a slight magical glow around 6 individual crafting tools that are being levitated and used by it.

So the idea seems to be that it is a cohesive amorphous field of energy and magic particles, not unlike a swarm of Fine sized creatures. Going by the first picture, I guess they have a volume of about a 1 ft diameter spehere (about 15 litres). Going by the FAQ's statement that they can stretch out to around 6 ft from end to end (based on the FAQ saying it can hold 6 ft of rope/curtain rigid), which tracks with the warforged picture.

If we take the FAQ's thing about holding 6 ft curtains rigid, that gives us a number for over how far an area they can stretch, and if we add the 15 litre volume to that, then the result is that at that max 6 by 6 ft stretch, it would be just under 0.2 inches wide, or a about 4.5 centimetres. If one wanted to decide on a limit on how small of an opening a servant can squeeze itself into, that might be a reasonable rule of thumb.

So to someone with see invisibility, they'd probably see the little invisible energy particles that make it up twinkling, while someone with Arcane Sight could probably also see the field of energy that keeps those particles in a shape? The reason that AoE effects uniquley affect them would then be that they interfere with the bods between the particles.

[ericgrau]

Level 10-11:
Around 10-20ish spell slots while still leaving a couple or so high level slots in reserve
+20ish mod, take 10 for 30
30*20=600 sp per week, 400 sp profit. 100 sp if sold for half (300-200).
x10-20 slots = 4,000-8,000 sp profit per week = 400-800 gp per week. 100-200 gp per week if sold for half.

Doing the same with perform checks gives 70 gp per week and makes you popular with far away figures, or even extraplanar creatures. There are also several other ways to make gold during downtime. Crafting magic items saves the party roughly 500 gp a day, 437.5 gp if you value xp at 5gp each. That's about 3k gp a week. Yeah you can unseen crafter at the same time, but it's a small additional boon. You're also leaving yourself more vulnerable against surprise when you are missing all those spell slots on your downtime days, and the spell slots might be useful in other ways too. Even mundane players can hire themselves out or make money in various ways, though it's less obvious without roleplaying it a bit.

All in all I'd say let it be. Barring some super cheesy trick I haven't thought of, at least allowing the typical use of an army of unseen crafters is fine. If someone pulls some trick you might ban/nerf if necessary, but it seems like it's hard to get very far without a NI loop.