Part of being a great player is knowing how to effectively use the tools of your trade. Here, we will take a look at the fireball. A spell of much fame, but mostly of conventional use (i.e. blowing up bad guys). A creative player can certainly find many uses for such an open-ended spell, and some of them are listed below for your perusal.
1. Barbeque: Fireballs make great barbeques. You can roast all kinds of monsters and animals and then feast on them to your heart’s content. If you collect enough rocks and water, you can also make an improvised steam bath.
2. Smoke Signal: Instead of relying on smoke signals to be found, you can shoot a fireball into the sky. Not only is it much brighter and larger, it also sends the clear message that a high level wizard is ‘here’. If you modify the color of your fireball, you could send color-coded messages such as: help (red), I’ve found treasure (yellow), or back off before I hurt you (giant green skull with a snake for a tongue).
3. Mining: Always remember that fireballs are 50% fire, 50% explosive, and 100% awesome. You can easily use fireballs as improvised dynamite sticks for removing rubble or mining a passage for the dwarves.
4. Cigarette Lighter: If there are any huge giants around, you can impress them by using your fireballs to light their smokes. If you have an enlarging spell, you could even pick up a date with a giantess.
5. Home Security System: Fireballs, rigged to fire upon intruders, are a great way to protect your house. Be sure to make your building out of stone so that when the robbers go up in flame your house doesn’t fall to the same effect. While the GM might not allow you to cast permanency on fireball traps, he shouldn’t be able to stop you from making wands of fireballs and then attaching them to strings pointed at your door handle.
6. Internal Heating: Living in the middle ages means you usually can’t get hot tubs. If you rig up some fireballs properly, you can power trains, automobiles, stoves, and Jacuzzis.
7. Flashlight: If you run out of light spells—because you cast them on enemy’s eyes to blind them—you can always toss a fireball in a random direction underground to get the ‘lay of the land’ provided you don’t accidentally blow it up. If you can con your GM into letting you have some kind of low-level, infinite attack fire spell; this can also be used like an unlimited supply of flares and matches.
8. Starting Camp Fires: Gather a large pile of wood and stand back 21 ft.
9. Fireworks: Shooting arrays of timed fireballs into the sky is great entertainment and very cheap provided you have enough wizards and fireball wands lying around. It’s likely you could use the pay for the civic service to the kingdom to make some extra fireball wands anyway.
10. Waste Removal: Not only can you obliterate household waste, but fireballs are great for removing unsightly garbage dumps and practically anything else you don’t want lying around anymore such as this week’s spell research trash.
11. Fire Giant Aphrodisiac: Shooting fireballs at fire-based creatures such as red dragons, fire giants, and magma titans are all bound to attract them to each other (or you) provided you used a polymorph spell appropriately or there are more of the creatures nearby.
12 Smelting: Normally, you have to find a big forge to make cool things such as gold ingots or magical swords. A few well-placed fireballs should be able to melt just about any metal you want and then all you have to do is use telekinesis to craft anything.
13. Removing Obstacles: If anything is obstructing your party’s movement, you should probably fireball it. This can include: doors, rubble, pig men, tax collectors, curtains, and walls.
14. Social Encounters: Often, simply pointing at someone and saying ‘care to be turned into a barbequed chicken?” will cause them to reconsider their stance on social issues concerning your party. You can have a Charisma of 3, but if the threat of fiery death won’t cause the captive to talk, nothing will.
15. Stealth: If you’re faced with a band of enemies, try tossing a fireball in one direction and heading in the other. The large roar of fiery explosion will most likely cause them to be distracted and/or investigate the disturbance giving you the opportunity to walk right in without a roll.
16. Lock Picking: Locks melt and doors burn.
17. Calling Card: If you modify the appearance of your fireball, you can simply detonate one every time you enter a new building or region, and the locals will soon learn to recognize when you’re within a few miles of them and act appropriately. Depending on your mood, this could be used to get the villagers to gather their valuables into one place before you arrive, or to let your enemies know they’re about to be exploded and cause dissension in the ranks.
18. Roasting Marshmallows: They’ll probably tend to be burned, but if you space them just right you can make a load without the bother of starting a fire.
19. Lighting a Candle: While the candle will probably be exploded, you can make it a personal endeavor to fireball anything whenever someone says, “Could you please light my torch?” and then plead your innocence on grounds of ‘they asked for it’.
20. Destroying Ships: Most ships are made of wood. Casting fireballs on them from your raft at a long distance, particularly if you’ve expanded the range can make your rowboat the deadliest ship on the high seas.
21. Burning Villages: Most village huts probably have straw roofs which will burn very well. Casting a single, well-placed fireball can probably destroy the average city or village in no time.
22. Anti-Frost Spell: If any other party member is frozen by some means, casting a fireball on them is a great remedy.
23. Improvised Explosives Device: Firstly, you grab a load of barrels of oil and other explosive materials such as flour. Secondly, you place them all around the object or castle to be destroyed. Thirdly, you cast a fireball on it.
24. Glass-Crafting: Go to a beach and cast a fireball on the sand. After that, use telekinesis to make marbles or whatever you happen to feel like.
25. Disarming: Instead of attacking a powerful enemy with a fireball, consider shooting his favorite weapon, spell, or bag of holding. While your opponent probably has enough hp to handle a dozen fireballs, whatever he’s wearing or using as a weapon probably isn’t so lucky. Used correctly, you could potentially end up fighting a naked enemy wizard with no more spell components to speak of.
26. Healing: If anyone is cut or bleeding, you can quickly cauterize the wound with a fireball. It also probably cures sore throats if applied to the wind pipe of someone immune to fire.
27. Killing People Immune to Fire: If your enemy is immune to fire, simply use the concussive force of the fireball to knock him off a high wall or into a pit filled with spikes. If you explode it right next to his ear, you can probably make him deaf as well.
28. Pest Control: Shoot a fireball down a mouse hole.
29. Crop Control: Fireball targeted on the weeds.
30. Trap Detect/Disable: Shoot a fireball at pressure plates to trigger them. Once you find a trap, shoot a fireball at it
to disable it by melting/exploding all the parts.
31. Hunting: Shoot a fireball at an animal to not only kill it, but cook it as well. Laugh at the party’s ranger.
32. Sword Fighting: Cast fire immunity on someone and then cast a fireball on their sword so it becomes super-heated metal and highly dangerous.
33. Boxing: Cast fire immunity on someone and then give them ‘fists of fire’.
34. Water Purifier: Cast a fireball on a pool of water and then collect the steam into your coffee mug.
35. Stopping Fires: Burn everything around the course of a fire so it has nowhere to go and then dies out.
36. Covert Ops: Go to one side of town and have an ally laser mark a structure to be destroyed. Arc the fireball over the buildings and blow it up. When the authorities come to investigate, there will be no one around. All wizards past 5th level will be under suspicion.
37. Impressing Women: Go into a bar and say, “I bet I can blow up that chair/table/guy/anything.” Then do it.
38. Getting Free Drinks: Offer to blow up the bar unless you get a free drink on the house.
39. Escaping Jail: When you’re wrongly imprisoned in a jail, blow up the jail with a fireball and walk out. If the walls are stone, you’re in trouble. Under these circumstances, if you have enough hit points you should stick your finger in the lock and blow it up.
40. Escaping Confinement: If you’re bound and gagged you usually can’t cast fireballs. Be sure to always carry at least one concealed wand of fireballs which is activated by your mental will. If worst comes to worst you can always fireball yourself and escape naked into the trees.
41. Betray the Party: If your fellow party members have been annoying you, cast flame immunity on yourself and then toss a fireball in a confined space. You can always argue later on that you didn’t realize the chamber was only 15’ by 15’.
42. Destroy the Evidence: Whenever someone says “Aha!” and brandishes a piece of paper proving your guilt, shoot it with a fireball. Not only will the evidence be destroyed, but the witness will probably explode.
43. Invade a Kingdom: Pretend to be a highly skilled juggler and get invited into the castle of the kingdom to be invaded. Ask for all the soldiers’ weapons for your final act. Say you have to go to the bathroom. Find the only armory with weapons and fireball it. When the rest of your group attacks the castle, they’ll have no weapons.
44. Get Cheap Haircuts: Cast fire immunity on everything except your hair. Cast a fireball on yourself. Become bald. Use this to shave the queen’s legs without the pain of waxing and become rich.
1. Barbeque: Fireballs make great barbeques. You can roast all kinds of monsters and animals and then feast on them to your heart’s content. If you collect enough rocks and water, you can also make an improvised steam bath.
2. Smoke Signal: Instead of relying on smoke signals to be found, you can shoot a fireball into the sky. Not only is it much brighter and larger, it also sends the clear message that a high level wizard is ‘here’. If you modify the color of your fireball, you could send color-coded messages such as: help (red), I’ve found treasure (yellow), or back off before I hurt you (giant green skull with a snake for a tongue).
3. Mining: Always remember that fireballs are 50% fire, 50% explosive, and 100% awesome. You can easily use fireballs as improvised dynamite sticks for removing rubble or mining a passage for the dwarves.
4. Cigarette Lighter: If there are any huge giants around, you can impress them by using your fireballs to light their smokes. If you have an enlarging spell, you could even pick up a date with a giantess.
5. Home Security System: Fireballs, rigged to fire upon intruders, are a great way to protect your house. Be sure to make your building out of stone so that when the robbers go up in flame your house doesn’t fall to the same effect. While the GM might not allow you to cast permanency on fireball traps, he shouldn’t be able to stop you from making wands of fireballs and then attaching them to strings pointed at your door handle.
6. Internal Heating: Living in the middle ages means you usually can’t get hot tubs. If you rig up some fireballs properly, you can power trains, automobiles, stoves, and Jacuzzis.
7. Flashlight: If you run out of light spells—because you cast them on enemy’s eyes to blind them—you can always toss a fireball in a random direction underground to get the ‘lay of the land’ provided you don’t accidentally blow it up. If you can con your GM into letting you have some kind of low-level, infinite attack fire spell; this can also be used like an unlimited supply of flares and matches.
8. Starting Camp Fires: Gather a large pile of wood and stand back 21 ft.
9. Fireworks: Shooting arrays of timed fireballs into the sky is great entertainment and very cheap provided you have enough wizards and fireball wands lying around. It’s likely you could use the pay for the civic service to the kingdom to make some extra fireball wands anyway.
10. Waste Removal: Not only can you obliterate household waste, but fireballs are great for removing unsightly garbage dumps and practically anything else you don’t want lying around anymore such as this week’s spell research trash.
11. Fire Giant Aphrodisiac: Shooting fireballs at fire-based creatures such as red dragons, fire giants, and magma titans are all bound to attract them to each other (or you) provided you used a polymorph spell appropriately or there are more of the creatures nearby.
12 Smelting: Normally, you have to find a big forge to make cool things such as gold ingots or magical swords. A few well-placed fireballs should be able to melt just about any metal you want and then all you have to do is use telekinesis to craft anything.
13. Removing Obstacles: If anything is obstructing your party’s movement, you should probably fireball it. This can include: doors, rubble, pig men, tax collectors, curtains, and walls.
14. Social Encounters: Often, simply pointing at someone and saying ‘care to be turned into a barbequed chicken?” will cause them to reconsider their stance on social issues concerning your party. You can have a Charisma of 3, but if the threat of fiery death won’t cause the captive to talk, nothing will.
15. Stealth: If you’re faced with a band of enemies, try tossing a fireball in one direction and heading in the other. The large roar of fiery explosion will most likely cause them to be distracted and/or investigate the disturbance giving you the opportunity to walk right in without a roll.
16. Lock Picking: Locks melt and doors burn.
17. Calling Card: If you modify the appearance of your fireball, you can simply detonate one every time you enter a new building or region, and the locals will soon learn to recognize when you’re within a few miles of them and act appropriately. Depending on your mood, this could be used to get the villagers to gather their valuables into one place before you arrive, or to let your enemies know they’re about to be exploded and cause dissension in the ranks.
18. Roasting Marshmallows: They’ll probably tend to be burned, but if you space them just right you can make a load without the bother of starting a fire.
19. Lighting a Candle: While the candle will probably be exploded, you can make it a personal endeavor to fireball anything whenever someone says, “Could you please light my torch?” and then plead your innocence on grounds of ‘they asked for it’.
20. Destroying Ships: Most ships are made of wood. Casting fireballs on them from your raft at a long distance, particularly if you’ve expanded the range can make your rowboat the deadliest ship on the high seas.
21. Burning Villages: Most village huts probably have straw roofs which will burn very well. Casting a single, well-placed fireball can probably destroy the average city or village in no time.
22. Anti-Frost Spell: If any other party member is frozen by some means, casting a fireball on them is a great remedy.
23. Improvised Explosives Device: Firstly, you grab a load of barrels of oil and other explosive materials such as flour. Secondly, you place them all around the object or castle to be destroyed. Thirdly, you cast a fireball on it.
24. Glass-Crafting: Go to a beach and cast a fireball on the sand. After that, use telekinesis to make marbles or whatever you happen to feel like.
25. Disarming: Instead of attacking a powerful enemy with a fireball, consider shooting his favorite weapon, spell, or bag of holding. While your opponent probably has enough hp to handle a dozen fireballs, whatever he’s wearing or using as a weapon probably isn’t so lucky. Used correctly, you could potentially end up fighting a naked enemy wizard with no more spell components to speak of.
26. Healing: If anyone is cut or bleeding, you can quickly cauterize the wound with a fireball. It also probably cures sore throats if applied to the wind pipe of someone immune to fire.
27. Killing People Immune to Fire: If your enemy is immune to fire, simply use the concussive force of the fireball to knock him off a high wall or into a pit filled with spikes. If you explode it right next to his ear, you can probably make him deaf as well.
28. Pest Control: Shoot a fireball down a mouse hole.
29. Crop Control: Fireball targeted on the weeds.
30. Trap Detect/Disable: Shoot a fireball at pressure plates to trigger them. Once you find a trap, shoot a fireball at it
to disable it by melting/exploding all the parts.
31. Hunting: Shoot a fireball at an animal to not only kill it, but cook it as well. Laugh at the party’s ranger.
32. Sword Fighting: Cast fire immunity on someone and then cast a fireball on their sword so it becomes super-heated metal and highly dangerous.
33. Boxing: Cast fire immunity on someone and then give them ‘fists of fire’.
34. Water Purifier: Cast a fireball on a pool of water and then collect the steam into your coffee mug.
35. Stopping Fires: Burn everything around the course of a fire so it has nowhere to go and then dies out.
36. Covert Ops: Go to one side of town and have an ally laser mark a structure to be destroyed. Arc the fireball over the buildings and blow it up. When the authorities come to investigate, there will be no one around. All wizards past 5th level will be under suspicion.
37. Impressing Women: Go into a bar and say, “I bet I can blow up that chair/table/guy/anything.” Then do it.
38. Getting Free Drinks: Offer to blow up the bar unless you get a free drink on the house.
39. Escaping Jail: When you’re wrongly imprisoned in a jail, blow up the jail with a fireball and walk out. If the walls are stone, you’re in trouble. Under these circumstances, if you have enough hit points you should stick your finger in the lock and blow it up.
40. Escaping Confinement: If you’re bound and gagged you usually can’t cast fireballs. Be sure to always carry at least one concealed wand of fireballs which is activated by your mental will. If worst comes to worst you can always fireball yourself and escape naked into the trees.
41. Betray the Party: If your fellow party members have been annoying you, cast flame immunity on yourself and then toss a fireball in a confined space. You can always argue later on that you didn’t realize the chamber was only 15’ by 15’.
42. Destroy the Evidence: Whenever someone says “Aha!” and brandishes a piece of paper proving your guilt, shoot it with a fireball. Not only will the evidence be destroyed, but the witness will probably explode.
43. Invade a Kingdom: Pretend to be a highly skilled juggler and get invited into the castle of the kingdom to be invaded. Ask for all the soldiers’ weapons for your final act. Say you have to go to the bathroom. Find the only armory with weapons and fireball it. When the rest of your group attacks the castle, they’ll have no weapons.
44. Get Cheap Haircuts: Cast fire immunity on everything except your hair. Cast a fireball on yourself. Become bald. Use this to shave the queen’s legs without the pain of waxing and become rich.
