How fast could you build a cathedral at 18th level?

[Noumenon]

I'm hoping the answer is "more than one day" and I hope it's not something like "in six seconds using Time Stop" or some other 9th level spell I'm not aware of.

(In the specific example of the cathedral-building competition, it's worth noting that of course the rival team also includes high level Clerics, who are themselves also casting spells to speed their efforts.)

This specific question is just one instance of me trying to get a feel for what poses a good challenge for high level adventure design. Another idea I had was a deep deep pit entirely full of 1000 low-level zombies so you basically have to burn spells or turning attempts to move (the goal being to get Pelor's sun thingy down to the bottom of it where the darkness comes from and burn them all with its light).

 

[delericho]

As a rule of thumb, figure an 18th level Cleric can cast 2 miracle spells per day, and that each is worth about 125,000gp towards the total cost (5,000 XP times 25, as for magic item creation).

So, if the Cathedral costs 1,000,000gp total, then it would take 4 Cleric/days of effort. Of course, that would also cost the Cleric 40,000 XP.

Assuming the Cleric doesn't have 40,000 XP to spend, then the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook says it takes 1 week per 10,000 gp of the cost - and that assuming an appropriately-sized workforce and that any spellcasters are casting spells were appropriate.

Which would suggest the answer would be "about 2 years" for that 1,000,000gp cathedral.

 

[Piratecat]

In the real world, cathedrals generally took 15-100+ years to build, with long stoppages when their patrons ran out of money. Those suckers aren't inexpensive.

Make sure you look at the lyre of building, your best friend for any construction project.

Lyre of Building

If the proper chords are struck, a single use of this lyre negates any attacks made against all inanimate construction (walls, roof, floor, and so on) within 300 feet. This includes the effects of a horn of blasting, a disintegrate spell, or an attack from a ram or similar siege weapon. The lyre can be used in this way once per day, with the protection lasting for 30 minutes.

The lyre is also useful with respect to building. Once a week its strings can be strummed so as to produce chords that magically construct buildings, mines, tunnels, ditches, or whatever. The effect produced in but 30 minutes of playing is equal to the work of 100 humans laboring for three days. Each hour after the first, a character playing the lyre must make a DC 18 Perform (string instruments) check. If it fails, she must stop and cannot play the lyre again for this purpose until a week has passed.

Faint transmutation; CL 6th; Craft Wondrous Item, fabricate; Price 13,000 gp; Weight 5 lb.

The real adventure hook here, of course, isn't that you're building a cathedral. It's that someone or something already claims the site that the cathedral is to be built on, and how you deal with them affects the outcome of the race. That's the real challenge.

 

[El Mahdi]

deleted

 

[Dausuul]

Hmm. There's probably some trick you could pull with Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion to do it with a couple of spells.

If you're not being quite so munchkin about it... let's see. One or two castings of move earth will suffice to prepare the ground. After that, it's time for the actual building.

Wall of stone is 5th level and creates one 5-foot square per level, to a thickness of 1 inch per level. At 18th level, this comes out to 675 cubic feet of stone. If you apply the Widen Spell feet, that doubles all numerical measurements, so you get one 10-foot square per level, 2 inches thick per level. (I'm not going to try to argue that you should get two 10-foot squares per level.) So your 8th and 9th level slots can produce 5400 cubic feet each.

But you're going to be making buttresses and arches and such-like, so halve the output of your spells: 337.5 cubic feet and 2700 cubic feet.

You're a 3E caster, so let's assume you're being reasonably smart about your stat allocation and started with 18 in your primary casting stat. You then dumped all your level bonuses into it, bringing it to 22, and got a +6 stat item, bringing it to 28. (You may have some inherent bonuses as well, but I'm disregarding those for now.)

If you're a sorceror or favored soul, you have 22 spell slots in the 5th-7th level range, and 10 slots in the 8th-9th level range. If you're a wizard or cleric, you have 15 spell slots in the 5th-7th level range, and 6 slots in the 8th-9th level range. Specializing in conjuration or taking the Earth domain will give you 18 and 8 slots respectively.

So, putting all this together:

A sorceror/favored soul can produce 34,425 cubic feet of stonework per day.
A generalist wizard/cleric can produce 21,265.5 cubic feet.
A specialized conjuror or a cleric of earth can produce 27,675 cubic feet.

Now, how much do you need to build a cathedral? Well, according to this document, Washington National Cathedral is built of limestone and weighs 150,000 tons. Based on this link, 150 pounds per cubic foot seems a reasonable estimate of limestone's density. So we're looking at 2 million cubic feet. But Washington National Cathedral is pretty damn big, so let's assume you're a bit more conservative and scale it down to a mere 1 million, and we get:

A sorceror/favored soul can build a cathedral in 29 days.
A generalist wizard/cleric can build a cathedral in 47 days.
A specialized conjuror or a cleric of earth can build a cathedral in 36 days.

Of course, that's just for the stonework. You also have to furnish the thing. While you've been spending 2-3 minutes a day conjuring up stonemasonry and the rest of the time kicking back with your coterie of scantily clad grey elf wizard-groupies, your fighter buddy has been hard at work chopping down trees and hauling bags of sand to the site. Once the building itself is constructed, you'll cast fabricate a few times (one day's worth of castings will be more than enough for this); the sand will turn into stained glass windows, the trees will turn into pews, and voila! Cathedral complete.

(This does assume that you're willing to dump your entire spell allocation at 5th level and higher into conjure-work. In practice, you'll want to keep at least a couple of spells in reserve in case of trouble. It also assumes you're willing to burn a feat on Widen Spell; without that, your output will be drastically reduced.)

This specific question is just one instance of me trying to get a feel for what poses a good challenge for high level adventure design. Another idea I had was a deep deep pit entirely full of 1000 low-level zombies so you basically have to burn spells or turning attempts to move (the goal being to get Pelor's sun thingy down to the bottom of it where the darkness comes from and burn them all with its light).

Why would the PCs not simply teleport to the destination?

 

[MarkChevallier]

Of course, a real wizard will cast time stop, then fire out two castings of major arcana to produce a cathedral approximately the same size as the Little Metropole Cathedral in Athens (approx size 170,000 cubic feet, total casting volume provided by the spells 288,000 cubic feet). He would then just hope no-one inspects it too closely.

Total creation time: 6 seconds.

 

[Dausuul]

In the real world, cathedrals generally took 15-100+ years to build, with long stoppages when their patrons ran out of money. Those suckers aren't inexpensive.

Make sure you look at the lyre of building, your best friend for any construction project.

D'oh... completely forgot about that.

Assuming you've got at least +17 in Perform (Stringed Instruments), so you never fail the check, and you play for 16 hours a day, you'll be putting out as much construction work as 9600 people.

This actually seems to yield results comparable to the above wall of stone method. I'm having some trouble finding estimates of the man-years involved in cathedral building, but if we say it takes a crew of 100, working for 20 years, and not working during the winter months (50% of the time), then you're looking at about 365,000 man-days, which means 38 days on the lyre.

Of course, you could always combine them--have the full spellcasters pump out wall of stone while the bard plinks away on the lyre. With a wizard, a cleric, and a bard all working together, you could have the whole thing finished in a week or two.

(The really munchkin trick, of course, is to point out that the lyre's description doesn't give any details about the "100 humans laboring for 3 days," and argue that you should be able to get the benefit of 100 eighteenth-level sorcerors laboring for 3 days each. In that case, I calculate you can build a cathedral in roughly 4 minutes. )

 

[roguerouge]

The problem with all of these assumptions is that they're based on the idea that the spell produces the kind of quality you look for in a cathedral. When you say "cathedral" you mean a work of art meant to last for ages. Masterwork is just the minimum baseline here; your skill checks would have to be much, much higher to avoid the embarrassment of creating a monument to your lack of taste and patience.

In addition, you're assuming that anyone can create a cathedral. Don't. It takes years of training and work on smaller buildings for an architect to be ready to build a major building.

I'm thinking that you'd need DC 30 checks on AT LEAST the following:

Knowledge (architecture and engineering)
Knowledge (history)
Knowledge (religion)
Craft (stone-working)
Craft (glass-working)
Craft (wood-working)
Craft (sculpture)
Craft (weaving) tapestries and carpets and such
Craft (painting)
Appraise

Edit: obviously, social skills, information gathering, GP and the leadership feat can compensate for PCs lacking in these skills.

 

[Dausuul]

The problem with all of these assumptions is that they're based on the idea that the spell produces the kind of quality you look for in a cathedral. When you say "cathedral" you mean a work of art meant to last for ages. Masterwork is just the minimum baseline here; your skill checks would have to be much, much higher to avoid the embarrassment of creating a monument to your lack of taste and patience.

In addition, you're assuming that anyone can create a cathedral. Don't. It takes years of training and work on smaller buildings for an architect to be ready to build a major building.

I'm thinking that you'd need DC 30 checks on AT LEAST the following:

Knowledge (architecture and engineering)
Knowledge (history)
Knowledge (religion)
Craft (stone-working)
Craft (glass-working)
Craft (wood-working)
Craft (sculpture)
Craft (weaving) tapestries and carpets and such
Craft (painting)
Appraise

Edit: obviously, social skills, information gathering, GP and the leadership feat can compensate for PCs lacking in these skills.

Alternatively, for a divine caster, cast greater planar ally a couple of times and request advisors to assist you; a dao, maybe, to advise you on architecture and engineering, and an archon to advise you on religious art and symbolism.

For an arcane caster, assuming that you aren't going to be working on more than one thing at a time, cast moment of prescience daily to give yourself a stunning mystical vision of how the completed cathedral should be (+18 to the relevant skill check), then take 10. If you've got at least a 14 Intelligence, which is not hard to achieve at that level, that will carry you through. Sacrificing an 8th-level slot each day will slow you down some, but not tremendously.

There are very few problems in 3E that cannot be solved by throwing enough magic at them.

 

[HandofMystra]

In the real world, cathedrals generally took 15-100+ years to build, with long stoppages when their patrons ran out of money. Those suckers aren't inexpensive.

Make sure you look at the lyre of building, your best friend for any construction project.



The real adventure hook here, of course, isn't that you're building a cathedral. It's that someone or something already claims the site that the cathedral is to be built on, and how you deal with them affects the outcome of the race. That's the real challenge.

I had been wondering if there were a magic item that would do mining rather than laborers. The Lyre of Building costs 433 times as much a the labor cost saved from one use. This makes me think that a mine owner would rather higher the labor than obtain an expensive item to do the work (I was trying to think about how the mines in Idylls of the Rat King should really looks. The maps do not look like any silver mine made in the European Middle Ages).