Toys, Gadgets and things that go "BOOM"

[FoxWander]

OK, I tried this in the general discussion forum but it didn't get much attention. Maybe you guys will be more interested and actually share some ideas.

This was originally posted as "Ideas to stock the "Sharper Image" of Adventuring Gear stores." Things like gimmicked mundane items, alchemical items and accessories, enspelled items and psuedo high-tech semi-magical gadgets. Think of James Bond's Q but with magic. Here are some examples that I've come up with throughout my gaming career to get you going. Warning: these range from the simple to high weirdness...

- A collapsible 10' pole
- Attachments for said pole like mechanical fingers, mirror holders, continual flame plugs, saw/knife blades, mouse cages (for safe "testing" )
- Tanglefoot bag launchers
- Continual flame lanterns
- 'Continual light' stones in clay jars (As light bombs vs. drow and other easily blinded foes?! At least back when it was called 'continual light' and was VERY bright as opposed to just a flame now.)
- Glass jars of green slime or rot grubs
- Alchemists Fire projectors (Its the squirt gun from HELL! )
- The Auto-Ram - Put a permanent Shrink Item on a portable battering ram, spike it shrunken before the door, then unshrink it. WHAM! No more door. We've house ruled that it adds a +20 to open door checks)
- The Cure Light potion CamelBack - A 1/2 gallon wineskin with a long flexible hose. Sure it costs 3200 gp for 64 potions and a wand would be a heck of alot cheaper, but fighters can't use wands.


And now the weirdness, which are basically ways to use Shrink Item (SI) and the Attune Gem feat:

- "Can I get some back up", SI (cloth) skeletons tied to a Spell Gem with 'Animate dead'. Attach it to a arrow/bolt/bullet for some long distance chaos

- "Spell Resist this!", SI some chains and large size tanglefoot bags to Spell Gem with 'Bind', attach to your missile of choice. Its a web spell for high SR foes.

- "I love the smell of napalm in the morning", this is a little more complicated. Create a 'grenade' with a weighted bottom so it always lands right side up. Give it a hollow center with six holes to the top at about a 45 degree angle. In the center put several gallons of SI'd oil and then plug the holes with SI'd alchemist's fire. A magic mouth that goes off 1 round after the thrower says "Bombs away" (or whatever) says the command to unshrink the oil. The high pressure of the expanding oil shoots the plugs out and covers the surrounding area with oil, then the SI'd plugs land and unshrink also, burning anyone nearby and igniting the oil. Its a pocket firestorm!


Bonus question- what kind of defense can you think of against DM's who want to hit you with Dispel Magic and make all your Shrink Item gadgets explode like the 4th of July? I've thought of three.
1) Spell Gems with Dispel Magic triggered by Dispel Magic for automatic counterspelling.
2)Enchant the container you carry them all in with the MoF's Spellblade enchantment vs. Dispel Magic.
3)Carry them all in a Bag of Holding, since the Rope Trick description makes it clear that spell FX cannot cross extra-dimensional barriers, your gadgets would be safe from Dispel Magic, though it would deactivate the bag for a time. This would also save you from Anti-Magic Fields.

BTW, my DM doesn't let me play the character who came up with those last three anymore. Especially after I thought up those defenses against Dispel Magic making me the ammo dump with a match tossed in.

Also, I'm not actually going to make a store that sells all this madness in my campaign world. What am I - INSANE!!?!! No, my players are quite devious enough with out my help. I'm just looking for ideas. Mainly for my Gnome rogue/wizard gadgeteer. I love the look of worry/terror on my DM's face when my character says- "Wait, I've got an idea!"

Anyway, now let me hear YOUR ideas!

 

[Fade]

Magic Mouth can't speak command words. You'd have to have it activated by tossing it down (easier, but less stable). Also, if you keep it for too long (more than about a week) it's in danger of the spell wearing out and it going off.

Couldn't sell the Autoram - permanent Shrink Item spells can only be shrunk again by the original caster.

Idea we had a few years ago: Use magic to create a perfectly mirrored sphere. Cast dozens of Continual Light spells inside. Leave it for a while, then open a tiny hole in the sphere. Depending on how long you leave it, this beam of light might be able to punch through a mountain. Then you close the sphere and let it recharge again. Replace Continual Light with Continual Flame in 3E.

The 'Fusion'. Airtight box, with all the air inside teleported out. Tiny permanent Teleport Circle on the floor, leading to a point just below the top. Heavy lead weight continually falling and gaining velocity. Contingency Dispel Magic to go off when the candle on top burns down. Leave it for a long time, place near mountain you don't like, light candle, Teleport out. Teleport Circle vanishes, lead weight travelling at relativistic velocity hits floor. Temperatures hot enough to cause oxygen fusion.

 

[whatisitgoodfor]

Actually, I was thinking about the old infinite speed falling trick the other day and gave myself a headache.

Cast the two teleport circles three feet apart vertically.

Cast shrink on a 5 foot long quarterstaff.

Hold shortened staff between the two portals and release. Use mage hand if necessary to get the staff falling perfectly vertical.

Say command word to restore staff to 5 feet long, which is two feet greater than the distance between the portals.

Now, what in the Delayed Blast Barbarian Balls happens to the staff!!!!

 

[Impeesa]

Get a large barrel. Put a layer of lead in the bottom so that when you drop it it lands properly. Stick a tube down the center. At the bottom of the tube, put a flask of Alchemist's Fire. Fill the rest of the tube with black powder. Now, fill the empty space between the tube and the outer barrel with caltrops. Dribble oil on them if you're feeling nasty. Put the lid on, seal everything up tight, and launch it from catapults or drop it from a flying mount. Shrapnel bombs away!

--Impeesa--

 

[FoxWander]

Wow, feedback so quick and all but ignored int the General forum. Have to remeber to post my weird ideas here from now on.

Fade- Yeah your right about the Magic Mouth thing. Gotta think of a way around that. Think Message or Whispering Wind would work?. Message isn't illusion so it makes real sound, so does WW. Maybe a higher level Magic Mouth that COULD say command words? Sounds like a reasonable idea. Think how useful that'd be as a burglar alarm if you combined it with a wand you had made. Definitely a good idea. Any suggestions on what level it's be? Also about the not selling the AutoRam. As I said, I'm not trying to actually stock a store with these things. That was just my post title to try and get people interested. The title in this forum seems alot better. Besides, if you WERE to make such a store, I'm sure a spell could also be created to transfer 'ownership' of a spell like that. Or it could probably be done as simple an enchanted item without too much of a difference in XP cost between enchantment and just casting Permanency.

Whatisitgoodfor- Ouch, stop making posts like that! My head hurts just trying to think of the physics involved in such a thing.


But on a related note, I have a new idea- "The Shrink Item GUN".
Its along the same lines as the AutoRam but smaller. You get a small rod, say 6" by 1/2", with a Permanent Shrink Item and put it inside a tube (the barrel of the gun) that is just wider and longer than it is. Attach it somehow to the rear of the barrel, magnets should do the trick, that way it'll stay inside whether its shrunk or not. Now whenever you say the command word you have an instantaneously expanding ram inside the barrel, effectively an explosive force. Now you simply put a bullet in front of it, or if you don't like the idea of 'gun', put a crossbow bolt in front of it. Now my question is- How much damage would the thing do? According to the spell description, or at least the Glove of Storing which is based off the spell, it shrinks and unshrinks "instantly". What kind of force is that going to put on a projectile? Anyone got a real loose 'physics' guesstimate? I'd think at least equal to a modern handgun, and go with the 1d10 for pistols in the DMG. Anyone else have thoughts on this? What I especially like about this is that it could be engineered to avoid Dispel Magic 'misfires' by simply constructing it so the projectile isn't in the barrel until you're ready to fire it. You might even convince a DM that the 'smack' a trigger could give it might be equivalent to the 'tossing it on a solid surface' in the spell description, thus a making it completely mechanical to fire.

Anyway- Thoughts, Feedback???

Ooh, Impeesa slipped the Shrapnel Bomb in while I was busy typing. I like that idea, except for the gunpowder. Our DM gave us flintlock's once (That's how I can justify the concept of a gun and what I wrote above) but he strictly limited our access to 'smokepowder'. He made it pseudo-magical so we couldn't even replicate it with alchemy. But I just had to work around it. I made shrapnel bombs by getting FIVE gallon solid iron barrels, etching fragmentation lines in the sides and then putting SIX gallons worth of Shrink Item'd alchemists fire and oil into them. We hid them on a battlefield the night before the fight and used Shout to say the command word. Big BOOM!!!!

 

[Jack Haggerty]

The 'Fusion'. Airtight box, with all the air inside teleported out. Tiny permanent Teleport Circle on the floor, leading to a point just below the top. Heavy lead weight continually falling and gaining velocity. Contingency Dispel Magic to go off when the candle on top burns down. Leave it for a long time, place near mountain you don't like, light candle, Teleport out. Teleport Circle vanishes, lead weight travelling at relativistic velocity hits floor. Temperatures hot enough to cause oxygen fusion.

This only works if, when teleporting, you keep your previous velocity after you've teleported. The spell itself doesn't really specify.

You could argue that teleporting effectively stops all motion. In which case, the lead ball would have to start over from zero every time it teleports. Even so, you'd still have a perpetual motion machine, which would be pretty damn cool.

If you make the box out of glass, you'd have a very expensive, but incredibly fascinating paperweight.

 

[Kweezil]

Not quite as cool as the fusion box or the continual flame laser sphere, but here's my two cents.

Void bomb
Damn expensive, but excellent for sieges, unstoppable war machines etc.

Make an overly-long ballista bolt with a collapsible housing with a reinforced 'spearhead' on the end.

/`````-------------
\_____-------------

On impact, the head stops when it strikes the target but the shaft of the ballista keeps going.

Now mount a portable hole on the inside of the spearhead and a bag of holding on the end of the ballista shaft. On impact, the inertia rams the bag into the hole, creating a planar rift. Any structure or object that isn't sucked in bodily will probably be torn apart by the shear stress.

If you really have gps to burn, use a staff of power instead of the hole and bag.

Incendiary bolt
A far cheaper version of the void bomb, using a simlar bolt design. Fill the cavity with alchemist's fire and cast fire trap on the casing to detonate when 'opened'.

 

[The Furious Puffin]

One For DMs

My favourite "device" was from the good old days of second edition. Simply it was a bunch of skeletons holding skulls with skull trap cast upon them, while there actual heads were also skull trapped. Requiring 50 gp and two corpses the resulting explosion from about 4 of them was - effective.

I would happly use them again - but this time insipired by the beheaded kamakize bombers from Serious Sam. Their only problem is touching them is suffiecent to blow them up - setting off a chain reaction, preventing thier use when the enermy can fire at you

 

[orbitalfreak]

I've always been partial to the "Hole There/Not There" pit trap.

See Fig1.

_______________________
              |        
              |        
              |        
_____.....    |________
     :   :|   |        
     :   :|   |        
     :...:|^^^|

The wall (vertical bars) has Invisibility cast on it, and the hole is covered by an illusion spell to show a floor. The unlucky PC sees just a plain corridor. But the real fun is creating the illusion of a pit before the actual pit (represented by : and ...).

PC goes to jump over the "pit", hits the wall, and falls into the real pit, filled with your favorite flavor of traps.

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As far as the 5' Staff in a 3' tall area, I say that the extra portions of the staff actually exist in the same space as the "normal" portions of the staff. This, of course, will cause the molecules of the various portions of the staff to fuse together due to their close proximity, creating a very big BOOM!!.

********************

I also had the idea for the Laser-Sphere (a real-life version), a few years back. I saw the potential for it to be used as a weapon, but my initial purpose in thinking it up was to make a cool night-light that could be powered by just a few seconds out in the sun. Instead of being opaque though, the sides were two-way mirrors, letting some of the light seep out to provide illumination.

 

[HalfElfSorcerer]

Magical Radio

A small wooden box with a smiling Magic Mouth on it. Music, news, and other sounds can be sent to the mouth via Whispering Wind, and the mouth will relate the sound in the exact manner it was orignially heard at whatever volume the user so chooses. The user can also change which broadcast is heard with a word. Many organizations operate brodcasts, which are usually operated by hired wizards, who use a modified version of Whispering Wind to deliver the sound to all Magical Radios currently tuned to their broadcast. For some reason, Magical Radios are very inexpensive to make and anyone earning more than 3sp a day has a 75% chance to own one.

Screwy, ain't it?