Oh, let's put it on curse of the worms too, why not?
Done!
Updating
Curse of the Worms working draft.
I think you're right about wormwork. Do you want to drop that one and substitute soften earth and stone somehow?
I would like to keep the spell, but we'll need to modify it somehow to make it more level-appropriate compared to
soften earth and stone.
Hmm… well it's called worm
work which refers to the soil earthworms sometimes pile up on the surface, so maybe have the spell be able to create shallow trenches, pits and banks of earth as well as just soften the ground? Kind of a poor man's
move earth plus
soften earth and stone without
soften stone?
It's got a duration too, so we could give it a respectable total volume of earth that can be softened/moved but it can only do a few "cubes" of work each round, and only creatures standing on an "active" cube need to make the Reflex save to avoid being caught in mud.
Something like:
Every round the
wormwork spell can work on one 10-foot square of earth or soil for every three caster levels, producing one of the following effects.
- break up hard ground (i.e. heavy clay, dense rocky earth) into normal earth.
- soften normal earth into loose soil (see below). If the normal earth is already loose soil the worms will soften it regardless.
- move soil to create a bank or mound of earth no more than 5 feet high, with a ditch or hole of the same depth appearing in an adjacent 10-foot square where the soil came from.
- move soil so an existing bank, mound, ditch or hole no more than 5 feet high or deep is shifted up to 10 feet. The feature can be changed in shape while being shifted (i.e. a 10 ft. by 10 ft. pit could be lengthened into a 5 ft. by 20 ft. pit).
During casting, the spellcaster can instruct the worms to work to a particular plan (i.e. "dig a ditch along this path", "soften this area") and the worms will follow this directive until the spell's duration runs out, they are ordered to stop (a free action) or ordered to follow a new plan (a standard action).
If a creature is standing on a square which is being softened by
wormwork, they risk being sucked into the churning ground as if it were thick mud. The creature must succeed on a Reflex save or be caught for 1d2 rounds and unable to move, attack, or cast spells. A creature that succeeds on its save can move through the softening ground at half speed, and it can’t run or charge.
Loose soil is not as troublesome if it is not being actively softened by
wormwork, but all creatures in the area can move at only half their normal speed and can’t run or charge over the surface.
Special Duration: The effects of a
wormwork spell (i.e. loosened soil, excavated earth) are Instantaneous and will remain after the spell duration concludes. The duration ends when the spell performs 1 round of "wormworking" per caster level or the caster's concentration ends.
The spell stat-block will also need a tweak to include:
Duration: Special (Concentration, plus see below)
I do not see a summon monster spell that let's you get purple worms. Which one is that?
Sorry, I did not make myself clear. I was proposing a custom "
summon monster IX" that summons a single fiendish purple worm instead of the usual creature options.
Come to think of it, that would be an Evil spell though, wouldn't it. I'd rather it be a neutral / unaligned creature since I don't think the Worm Domain should be evil-aligned. Maybe an Earth Element Purple Worm? Except that would require the use of material not in the SRD or our CC.
The sample creatures for
summon monster IX range from Challenge Rating 9 (Night Hag) to Challenge Rating 13 (Fiendish Colossal Monstrous Spider) so if we can come up with a substitute CR 11 or 12 wormlike monster for it to summon I'd be game to consider it.
Could just make it an Elder Earth Elemental I suppose, but that doesn't feel quite "wormy" enough.
