painandgreed said:
It's a mute point because whatever BBEG is having this done also has a cleric behind the person asking the question with Zome of Truth up.
Moot point. Moot.
Yeah, if I'm a BBEG, I certainly will be tying up a couple of tenth level clerics (we'll assume that ten minutes per casting is the minimum acceptable time) for every gate I have (a couple, because the spell only has a 20' radius and most gates are going to be bigger than that); each one of them - if they have a 14 wisdom - will be able to cast that spell 6 times before they go off shift. That covers one hour of time. But let's assume he's really paranoid and he's commanded them to prepare all their spell slots with that one spell; that gives each one about 90 more minutes in a 24-hour-period he can cover. We'll assume the BBEG only keeps his city gates open for ten hours a day.
That's eight tenth level clerics per gate per day that
do nothing at all but cast that spell. Creating wands and scrolls at tenth caster level gets prohibitavely expensive damn quick; you're using up roughly one wand a day, and you're taking three days to
make a single wand of Zone of Truth. (That's just at the minimum caster level, too; you'd need to make it at 1oth caster level, but I can't remember how that works). So that means you have even more clerics, all of have the Craft Wand feat, doing nothing but making this one magic item.
For simplicity's sake, they are telling people to 'relax' as they are questioned (ie, willingly give up the saving throw they'd normally get).
Can you see how utterly unworkable this is? The sheer cost of it alone is staggering, even just assuming they're paying for materials (this is government work, after all) - they can only enslave so many people (we'll assume he's not paying the clerics or the wand makers for their time), and the materials still have a cost associated with them.