A hypothetical I was thinking about

[der_kluge]

Suppose you wanted to drain the world of its ocean. How would you do it?

Could you make a Gate spell permanent, and thus stick one at the bottom of the world's ocean and redirect it to some outer plane somewhere?

What if you stuck a sphere of annihilation at the bottom of the ocean? Would that do it?

What other ways might work?

 

[Nightfall]

Simple:

Get a LOT of fire types together and set the water to boil.

 

[alsih2o]

research a new spell, water to flesh.

same level as stone to flesh, but creates a giant semipermable lob of flesh where all the oceans were.

creeeeeepy.

 

[Aeolius]

find the plug...

 

[d4]

research the transmute ocean to dust spell.

or simply have your BBEG wield a +12 Plot Device of Ocean Slaying and activate it just before the PCs can stop him.

 

[BigFreekinGoblinoid]

The gate idea might work, but it would take a long time. Both sides of the gate would have to be monitored and guarded.

After a long Campaign, my players in an old Dark Sun Campaign managed to travel to the Elemental Plane of Water, and tried to refill Athas' oceans this way.

Talk about a disaster. The Elemental creatures came through in droves, and a few towns and a city were flooded. 1000's were killed by a combination of natural disasters and elemental beasties not too happy about the situation.

End of Campaign.

Choose the other end of the gate carefully.

 

[SpuneDagr]

Get 100 virgins. Tie them up, light some bonfires and dance around chanting. Don't know why, but it always seems to work.

 

[Zappo]

In the Guide to the Astral Plane 2e Planescape manual there is an astral location which was formed in exactly that way. Someone opened a permanent one-way gate to the astral on the bottom of an ocean on some prime world, and the water started draining on the astral. So there's a large spherical mass of water on the astral, complete with sea creatures that were sucked in, and the ocean on the other side is slowly draining. It's a long process, though! I have no idea of how much water per second an average gate can drain, but I guess it would take years, probably decades, to drain an ocean.

 

[The Goblin King]

Trick a god into drinking the oceans. You would also have to make sure the diety chose some other plane to relive themselves or you could have a whole other problem.

Or, you could research a spell that caused the average planetary temperature to drop. After the onset of the ice age a lot of water would be locked up.

Aliens. They love to steal our resources. A fleet of saucer ships decend on the earth and begin sucking down our oceans.

Remove the worlds atmosphere. The water will boil into space leaving nothing behind but good clean earth.