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Would this work?

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Edena_of_Neith

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It is not every day that a player figures out how to use 9th level magic to destroy an entire Crystal Sphere.

You are aware of the Gate spell, are you not?
You are aware that Gate allows you to travel from Here to There, right?

Some mages created a reasonable (and apparently useless) variant of the Gate spell that causes you to go from Here to ... Here.

A Gate can be made permanent
A large Gate that allows regular traffic requires 10th level magic to do this.
However, a tiny Gate that could take only a small - say, one inch in diameter - ball of steel could be made permanent with the Permanency spell.

Now, imagine throwing this Gate upon a flat disc of steel.
Making the little Gate permanently.
Since the flat disc of steel can be moved, so can the Gate.

Now, imagine two such flat discs of steel, each with a Gate cast on them, and permanency.

Take the two plates, and suspend them in midair.
Make sure the Gates are facing each other.
Create a glass jar around the whole thing, and thus you have created a magical item, and the jar - and the two plates inside - can be moved about at will.
The plates will stay perfectly aligned, the two Gates facing each other.

Now imagine you used technology or magic to suck all the air out of this glass jar, thus creating a vacuum.

If you had thrown a steel ball into one of the Gates (in this case teleporting one into the jar, then moving it with telekinesis into one of the Gates), you would find that:

The steel ball would enter the Gate, then exit the Gate.
The steel ball would move across the vacuum to the other Gate, then exit the other Gate.
The steel ball would move back to the first Gate, then exit the first Gate.
The steel ball would move to the second Gate again, enter, and exit.

Now, Gates do have height and width, so here's the real trick of it all.

You cast Reverse Gravity on the glass, twice.
You then cast Permanency on the glass, twice.

You make it so that a perfect plane exists, bisecting the two Gates exactly in the middle, with gravity polarized on either side of this plane.

Now see what happens.

You teleport a one inch in diameter steel ball into the glass.
It falls, at normal acceleration, into the first Gate.
It exits that Gate on the OTHER side of the polarized gravity field, and falls upward, at 1x acceleration, into the other Gate.
It exits that Gate back on the original side of the polarized gravity field, and falls downward, at 1x acceleration, into the original Gate.

A nice trick. The ball falls faster, faster, and faster.

Now, Reverse Gravity is only a 7th level spell.
If a 7th level spell can negate gravity, there is no question that 7th level magic could alter gravity over a specific area, to a specific extent.
This effect, could be made permanent.

8th level magic could alter gravity much more, over an even greater area.

9th level magic could alter gravity much more yet, over an even greater area yet.
Or, alter gravity very greatly, over a tiny area.
And this, too, can be made permanent.

In this case, 9th level magic can produce a gravity field 1000 times greater than normal.

Now, you make both gravity fields in the glass jar 1000 times normal (obviously, the glass must be glassteeled to hope to survive the pressures on it.)

Now, go back and see what happens.
The little one inch steel ball, accelerates, not at one gravity, but at one thousand gravities.

In a matter of only 3 days, it reaches the speed of light.
Or, rather, it approaches the speed of light, for that speed cannot be attained by any object with mass.

As the steel ball approaches the speed of light, it's mass grows greater.
And greater.
And greater.
To the mass of a boulder.
To the mass of a hill.
To the mass of a mountain.
To the mass of a world.
To the mass, of a star.

Then, carefully prepared Contingency spells go off, and one of the Gates is dispelled.
The ball, no longer travels from Gate to Gate.
The ball, travels through the glass.

With whatever mass it has achieved, it slams into whatever is unfortunate enough, be it a person or a planet, to be in it's way.

- - -

Would the above, work?
 
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in basic form, this has been gone over a few times before, and the basic problem is:

Magic is not science, and science doesn't necessarily work like magic.

To break down magic into predictable components and results like this assumes MANY times over in this example is one of the main problems that people have with 3E's magic system.

edit: shouldn't this be in Rules?

And on second thought, isn't there a law of conservation or somesuch that dicates that energy cannot be created or destroyed, so that if the speed of the object gets greater, due to the equation E=mC^2, wouldn't the mass be getting smaller and smaller as the object neareed the speed of light?
 
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I would never, ever, allow physics and magic to be combined in such a manner. In a "Larry Niven"-esque universe, where magic can be treated as just another set of universal laws, then it would work fine. I would never let it happen in any of my campaigns, however. YMMV.
 


Crystal spheres are part of the spelljammer ruleset. In those rules, they rather explicitly state that the laws of Newton and Einstein do not apply. So the speed of light is instantaneous, and the ball would not gain mass as it accelerated.

But it is a rather amusing example :)
 

Alhandra said:
... And on second thought, isn't there a law of conservation or somesuch that dicates that energy cannot be created or destroyed, so that if the speed of the object gets greater, due to the equation E=mC^2, wouldn't the mass be getting smaller and smaller as the object neareed the speed of light?

wow Alhandra, i'm impressed. all of that on an INT of 10??? my own ranger with an INT score of 16 will forevermore feel inadequate! :p ... oh and Edena_of_Neith, you got waaaaaay too much free time on you hands! LOL
 

I've been reading recently that it seems that matter can be destroyed, and created from nothingness, at least at the quantum level. Anybody else read this? The most recent place I read about this is in Popular Science or Discover magazine. I forget which (if either).

Anyway, the basic premise seems pretty well-thought-out, but as a DM I would simply not allow it to destroy a crystal sphere. The fact that crystal spheres exist at all means that normal physics doesn't work the way we know it to work, at least as far as the crystal sphere is concerned. Maybe it's arbitrary, but magic itself seems pretty arbitrary in many respects. If you try it in real space, I'd say the dent it would make in space-time would tear apart the whole contraption before it could get to the point of being a star-killer.
 

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