What happened to the old spell "sink"?

[frankthedm]

Remember that one? You'd slap your enemies and they'd sink into the ground, going into temporal stasis until someone dug them up. Does that spell, or any variant there of, still exist in 3e?

Thanks!

There was a dragon magazine spell [either LATE 2nd or early 3rd edtion that was 6th level wizard. It buried the victim 10 feet downward [your feet wound up 10 feet from where they had been] and then they began to suffocate if they were in over thier head. IIR creatures over 10 feet tall could pull themselves out. a save avoided the spell.

The art had an arab look.

2E druid book had an earthmaw spell that "Bit" with a jaw of earth. a crit buried the victiom.

 

[dcollins]

In addition, unlike earlier editions of the game you don't automatically reanimate the person just by digging them up.

That wasn't allowed in 1st Ed., either. Taking Vance for inspiration, the intent seemed to be that the victim was buried dozens of miles below the surface of the earth.

What was cool was that when you used the freedom spell to reverse it, you had a 10% chance of also freeing 1-100 other random creatures who had been imprisoned in the earth in the same place through the eons.

 

[Piratecat]

Really? Man, my memory must be going as I get older -- I could swear that it was.

This was going to have been a key component in my last Iron DM entry, but I worked around it.

 

[Moorcrys]

There was definitely a spell named sink... it was introduced in Unearthed Arcana (1st Edition) -- not second edition. It was one of my favorites in my first edition days -- a lot more flavor than imprisonment and a lot easier to recover an ally from.

After casting the spell, the caster needs to chant for a certain number of (1st edition) segments , and if he's not interrupted the target creature (or object) makes a saving throw. If the subject fails it becomes "rooted to the spot" and becomes the same density as the surface it stands (or rests) upon.

You as the caster then have the option to cease chanting -- if you do the subject returns to normal in (1st edition) 40 minutes. If you continue chanting, each additional segment you do so sinks the creature or object into the ground a quarter of the way, so at the end of 4 additional segments of chanting the creature is completely sunken into the ground.

Unlike imprisonment, the 'upper extremity' of the victim is as far beneath the ground its height, so the top of a 6' human's head begins at 6-feet-under so to speak. And it specifically states that "if the ground around the subject is somehow removed, the spell is broken and the subject will return to normal -- although it will not then rise up."

More interesting to me, though not as powerful as the 9th-level imprisonment.

Moorcrys

 

[RigaMortus]

The art had an arab look.

Was it Al-Quadim perhaps?

 

[dcollins]

There was definitely a spell named sink... it was introduced in Unearthed Arcana (1st Edition) -- not second edition.

Hey, good point, I overlooked that. You're right, sink does explicitly say you can dig the victim up and recover them. Presumably it must have appeared in a Dragon magazine article prior to that (as did all the UA spells, I'm pretty certain).

 

[Moorcrys]

Yeah I think you're right, just about all (if not all) of the spells in Unearthed Arcana started in Dragon... I don't know if it changed at all from the magazine to the hardbound.

Moorcrys