I am DMing game with a transmutation wiz. He had the great idea to make magical bombs by using alchemy to make elements that combust on contact (I thought this was a great character idea). In his research, he found that the element francium combusts on contact with water. So he cast the spells, "create/destroy water" and "create". Creating 5 cubic feet of water and the same amount of francium. I looked up how large of an explosion this would be, and it's about the size of a nuke. Does anyone have any advice?
That's actually a really fun sounding idea, but the problem stands that he needs to know about francium. I suppose in his backstory it could be included, but otherwise, he probably can't pull it off
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“Basically, if you tell anyone, we’ll kill you. We’re pretty good at that sort of stuff”-Salros Viper, Whispers Bard, paid assassin
Well, D&D takes place in a magical universe. As DM, you could rule that not everything in this cosmos works that same way it would IRL. So instead of spontaenous combustion and fatal radiation happen, have something much less powerful happen instead. You're the DM, it's your world.
It might be worth taking a look at Faerzress from 3.5e (and I think I saw a mention in Out of the Abyss for 5e) and have it function that way. Faerzress is an underdark "radiation" effect, messes with teleportation and does some other weird stuff if I recall correctly.
Francium is unstable stuff. It is radioactive and oxidizes very quickly and energetically. They probably don't even need to use create water. A 7800 lb cube of it really doesn't want to exist (that is literally 100000 times what is actually predicted to naturally exist on earth at any given moment). The heat of it's own decay would cause it to self combust in a few seconds.
It wouldn't be a nuke per se because the main explosion would not be nuclear but thermal, but it would scatter burning radioactive metal debris everywhere. So it makes for a self detonating dirty bomb.
But it is also super rare in nature. There would only be a few atoms of it per whole uranium mines.
I'd give the player a more reasonable alternative as a reward for their creativity. They could find clues that lead to a cave with a rare mineral, which they could use in the future to make alchemical explosives with, after traveling the dangers of the cave and maybe unleashing the ancient sleeping evil...
As to the radioactive stuff, the spell requires you to have seen what you are creating before. Seeing this stuff is the end of a major quest, not a backstory detail, imo. It is not something you just find in nature. Plus its got to be highly toxic being so insanely radioactive. And it's got a super fast half life so not stable enough for keeping around for more than minutes (which would probably kill you anyway).
I am DMing game with a transmutation wiz. He had the great idea to make magical bombs by using alchemy to make elements that combust on contact (I thought this was a great character idea). In his research, he found that the element francium combusts on contact with water. So he cast the spells, "create/destroy water" and "create". Creating 5 cubic feet of water and the same amount of francium. I looked up how large of an explosion this would be, and it's about the size of a nuke. Does anyone have any advice?
let him detonate it. Be like. EVERYONE roll new chars.
give the same world lore as original session. Only now include the nuclear fallout and wasteland that is where the nuke was set off.
make some fun lore like some NPC investigators are finding the cause. Have NPCs find out it was former PC. Have him be shunned throughout history for his dastardly nuke. Etc.
he’ll learn.
sometimes you have to learn to limit how creative you can be. With great creativity comes great power. With great power comes great responsibility.
* if they were semi-end game... this could be a nice way to prolong it. Give out a lot of “misinformation/information” about the former party, but painted in the light as if THEY might have been the BBEGs, and highlight all the “questionable” things they did, as well as the nuke obviously.
** maybe the radioactive fallout, creates a thriving ecosystem for liches, undead, etc as well...
Francium is extremely radioactive, which means that it won't even exist for too long. It doesn't need water to explode, it can just use the oxygen in the air. In order to transport it you'd need a container that is a perfect vacuum, has a magical element stabilizer to keep it from radioactively decaying, and must be opened by brute force, then it will immediately explode. I've previously ruled in my own games that nuke like objects deal 100d10 radiant damage and give radiation poisoning to anyone within 3 miles of the center of the explosion.
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an tarrasque could take that, but how much time and how many dice do you have? And how many ties has your players thrown "nuke like objects" at you?
I don't have that many dice, but just go to any online dice rolling website and you will be able to roll this in seconds. I do have at least 10 1d10's, so if I roll all of them as a group 10 times, and add that all together, that is a relatively easy way to calculate that.
It is an average of 550 force damage, and the average tarrasque could take that, I fully intended this to be the average damage. It would make sense that nothing except the most powerful monster in the Monster Manual and creatures with immunity to force damage (yes I accidentally said radiant above, I mean force) could survive this. I expect nukes to be extremely powerful and difficult to survive.
I have never used a nuke before in my games. I am going to use a "nuke" in my Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus campaign, long story short, it is a sphere filled with the souls of about 100-1000 soul coins, that are all ignited at once with smoke powder and demon ichor, then exploding everything within 1000 ft. of it at once. It is currently being developed by Bel to be used to overthrow Zariel, and he needs the character's help. I am making a pdf for DMs Guild to detail this further, but essentially he is developing the Infernal Soul Annihilation Sphere "nuke" to blow up Zariel's Flying Fortress.
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but did you make the ruling "all nuke-like objects deal 100d10 force damage and radiation posioning" before the announcement and release of Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus and what made you think that such an rule might become nessesary? did you just have an discussion with your friend that just happened to go in that direction, did your players happen to ask or had you at some previous point planned to use some other "nuke like object" in your world?
and speaking of previous rulers of avernus, whatever happened to tiamat after she ceaed to be an archduke? she is still an evil dragon god, but whereis she a dragon god
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i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
but did you make the ruling "all nuke-like objects deal 100d10 force damage and radiation posioning" before the announcement and release of Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus and what made you think that such an rule might become nessesary? did you just have an discussion with your friend that just happened to go in that direction, did your players happen to ask or had you at some previous point planned to use some other "nuke like object" in your world?
and speaking of previous rulers of avernus, whatever happened to tiamat after she ceaed to be an archduke? she is still an evil dragon god, but whereis she a dragon god
No, I made the ruling of nuke about a couple weeks after I got the book Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, and it mentioned an infernal machine Bel was making to overthrow Zariel, but didn't mention anything specific, and I currently have a Descent into Avernus campaign where the characters can choose to help Bel become Archduke of Avernus by helping him develop the "nuke" to use on Zariel's Flying Fortress. I didn't plan any of this before the book was released, and I got the inspiration on how souls can be used to fuel infernal war machines and infernal flying fortresses by burning the souls.
I had an idea that if you could extract a soul and imprison it somewhere without destroying it, what would happen if you were to store a lot of them in the same container, and were to ignite it all at once. I decided it would be essentially a nuke, and that is what Bel was developing, though it definitely wouldn't be easy to make. First you'd need a machine to extract but not destroy the souls, next you'd need a spherical device to store them in. Next you'd need a what to simultaneously ignite them all at once, which I rule would require an explosion of some kind, so I used smokepowder. Then, you'd need abyssal ichor to drive the reaction into overdrive. You'd also need water from the river styx to purify the souls.
This is what I made the rules for making and using a nuke to be, and it isn't easy, it requires hundreds of souls, and extensive material collection. I have not discussed this with any of my characters, and they won't know it is a nuke until they build it, Bel won't tell them.
Tiamat lives in Avernus, there is a map that marks where she lives there. I don't know if that answers your question, it is a bit confusing.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Francium is maybe a bit esoteric. Pure sodium (and lithium, potassium, anything in that chemical family, really) does basically the same thing, but less powerfully. (And perhaps more plausibly.)
Also, the reaction is slowed by the limits of surface area. Only the outer layer of the material can come in direct contact with the water. That layer will generate enough heat & force to vaporize and scatter the water, leaving you a somewhat smaller lump of un-reacted material.
So, if they did it carefully (rigging a detonation device to drop the charge into a big barrel of water in a vulnerable, enclosed location) I'd say it does 20d6 fire and 20d6 bludgeoning damage similar to meteor swarm. If not (and they just yeet a hunk of the stuff into some water randomly) I'd say it does 8d6 fire damage like a fireball.
If this is in Forgotten Realms there is lore on why some forms of explosives do not work. That is why gunpowder is not in Forgotten Realms. It would not be a stretch to declare this lore to change how the above problem functions.
If this is in Forgotten Realms there is lore on why some forms of explosives do not work. That is why gunpowder is not in Forgotten Realms. It would not be a stretch to declare this lore to change how the above problem functions.
Uhh... Gunpowder isn't not in forgotten realms. There is even a suggested price table.
If this is in Forgotten Realms there is lore on why some forms of explosives do not work. That is why gunpowder is not in Forgotten Realms. It would not be a stretch to declare this lore to change how the above problem functions.
Uhh... Gunpowder isn't not in forgotten realms. There is even a suggested price table.
Just because there is a price table and it is included in the books does not make it lore in forgotten realms as DnD is not just forgotten realms and the books include things for other settings like homebrew worlds.
Lore Wise , Gond, god of Craftsmen and Scientists, made the original formula for gunpowder chemically inert. He did, however, gift his priests with Smokepowder, which allows them to produce firearms and other weapons. It is not a stretch to say other forms of chemical reactions were also made inert.
DMs can do anything they want though but if they go by lore and actual settings then no gunpowder is not in Forgotten realms.
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I am DMing game with a transmutation wiz. He had the great idea to make magical bombs by using alchemy to make elements that combust on contact (I thought this was a great character idea). In his research, he found that the element francium combusts on contact with water. So he cast the spells, "create/destroy water" and "create". Creating 5 cubic feet of water and the same amount of francium. I looked up how large of an explosion this would be, and it's about the size of a nuke. Does anyone have any advice?
Where has the wizard seen 5 cubic feet of pure francium?
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That's actually a really fun sounding idea, but the problem stands that he needs to know about francium. I suppose in his backstory it could be included, but otherwise, he probably can't pull it off
“Basically, if you tell anyone, we’ll kill you. We’re pretty good at that sort of stuff”-Salros Viper, Whispers Bard, paid assassin
Well, D&D takes place in a magical universe. As DM, you could rule that not everything in this cosmos works that same way it would IRL. So instead of spontaenous combustion and fatal radiation happen, have something much less powerful happen instead. You're the DM, it's your world.
It might be worth taking a look at Faerzress from 3.5e (and I think I saw a mention in Out of the Abyss for 5e) and have it function that way. Faerzress is an underdark "radiation" effect, messes with teleportation and does some other weird stuff if I recall correctly.
Edit: found Out of The Abyss here: https://media.wizards.com/2015/downloads/dnd/DDEOutoftheAbyss.pdf
Faerzress is on page 25.
Francium is unstable stuff. It is radioactive and oxidizes very quickly and energetically. They probably don't even need to use create water. A 7800 lb cube of it really doesn't want to exist (that is literally 100000 times what is actually predicted to naturally exist on earth at any given moment). The heat of it's own decay would cause it to self combust in a few seconds.
It wouldn't be a nuke per se because the main explosion would not be nuclear but thermal, but it would scatter burning radioactive metal debris everywhere. So it makes for a self detonating dirty bomb.
But it is also super rare in nature. There would only be a few atoms of it per whole uranium mines.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francium
I'd give the player a more reasonable alternative as a reward for their creativity. They could find clues that lead to a cave with a rare mineral, which they could use in the future to make alchemical explosives with, after traveling the dangers of the cave and maybe unleashing the ancient sleeping evil...
As to the radioactive stuff, the spell requires you to have seen what you are creating before. Seeing this stuff is the end of a major quest, not a backstory detail, imo. It is not something you just find in nature. Plus its got to be highly toxic being so insanely radioactive. And it's got a super fast half life so not stable enough for keeping around for more than minutes (which would probably kill you anyway).
let him detonate it. Be like. EVERYONE roll new chars.
give the same world lore as original session. Only now include the nuclear fallout and wasteland that is where the nuke was set off.
make some fun lore like some NPC investigators are finding the cause. Have NPCs find out it was former PC. Have him be shunned throughout history for his dastardly nuke. Etc.
he’ll learn.
sometimes you have to learn to limit how creative you can be. With great creativity comes great power. With great power comes great responsibility.
*
if they were semi-end game... this could be a nice way to prolong it. Give out a lot of “misinformation/information” about the former party, but painted in the light as if THEY might have been the BBEGs, and highlight all the “questionable” things they did, as well as the nuke obviously.
** maybe the radioactive fallout, creates a thriving ecosystem for liches, undead, etc as well...
Ohh I like the Litch idea
Francium is extremely radioactive, which means that it won't even exist for too long. It doesn't need water to explode, it can just use the oxygen in the air. In order to transport it you'd need a container that is a perfect vacuum, has a magical element stabilizer to keep it from radioactively decaying, and must be opened by brute force, then it will immediately explode. I've previously ruled in my own games that nuke like objects deal 100d10 radiant damage and give radiation poisoning to anyone within 3 miles of the center of the explosion.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
just make shure he does not find an triton with the feat from the XGE bonus that lets them cast create/destroy water at will
i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
Or a water elemental
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
is that not like an average of 550 damage?
an tarrasque could take that, but how much time and how many dice do you have? And how many ties has your players thrown "nuke like objects" at you?
i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
I don't have that many dice, but just go to any online dice rolling website and you will be able to roll this in seconds. I do have at least 10 1d10's, so if I roll all of them as a group 10 times, and add that all together, that is a relatively easy way to calculate that.
It is an average of 550 force damage, and the average tarrasque could take that, I fully intended this to be the average damage. It would make sense that nothing except the most powerful monster in the Monster Manual and creatures with immunity to force damage (yes I accidentally said radiant above, I mean force) could survive this. I expect nukes to be extremely powerful and difficult to survive.
I have never used a nuke before in my games. I am going to use a "nuke" in my Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus campaign, long story short, it is a sphere filled with the souls of about 100-1000 soul coins, that are all ignited at once with smoke powder and demon ichor, then exploding everything within 1000 ft. of it at once. It is currently being developed by Bel to be used to overthrow Zariel, and he needs the character's help. I am making a pdf for DMs Guild to detail this further, but essentially he is developing the Infernal Soul Annihilation Sphere "nuke" to blow up Zariel's Flying Fortress.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
but did you make the ruling "all nuke-like objects deal 100d10 force damage and radiation posioning" before the announcement and release of Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus and what made you think that such an rule might become nessesary? did you just have an discussion with your friend that just happened to go in that direction, did your players happen to ask or had you at some previous point planned to use some other "nuke like object" in your world?
and speaking of previous rulers of avernus, whatever happened to tiamat after she ceaed to be an archduke? she is still an evil dragon god, but where is she a dragon god
i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
No, I made the ruling of nuke about a couple weeks after I got the book Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, and it mentioned an infernal machine Bel was making to overthrow Zariel, but didn't mention anything specific, and I currently have a Descent into Avernus campaign where the characters can choose to help Bel become Archduke of Avernus by helping him develop the "nuke" to use on Zariel's Flying Fortress. I didn't plan any of this before the book was released, and I got the inspiration on how souls can be used to fuel infernal war machines and infernal flying fortresses by burning the souls.
I had an idea that if you could extract a soul and imprison it somewhere without destroying it, what would happen if you were to store a lot of them in the same container, and were to ignite it all at once. I decided it would be essentially a nuke, and that is what Bel was developing, though it definitely wouldn't be easy to make. First you'd need a machine to extract but not destroy the souls, next you'd need a spherical device to store them in. Next you'd need a what to simultaneously ignite them all at once, which I rule would require an explosion of some kind, so I used smokepowder. Then, you'd need abyssal ichor to drive the reaction into overdrive. You'd also need water from the river styx to purify the souls.
This is what I made the rules for making and using a nuke to be, and it isn't easy, it requires hundreds of souls, and extensive material collection. I have not discussed this with any of my characters, and they won't know it is a nuke until they build it, Bel won't tell them.
Tiamat lives in Avernus, there is a map that marks where she lives there. I don't know if that answers your question, it is a bit confusing.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Francium is maybe a bit esoteric. Pure sodium (and lithium, potassium, anything in that chemical family, really) does basically the same thing, but less powerfully. (And perhaps more plausibly.)
Also, the reaction is slowed by the limits of surface area. Only the outer layer of the material can come in direct contact with the water. That layer will generate enough heat & force to vaporize and scatter the water, leaving you a somewhat smaller lump of un-reacted material.
So, if they did it carefully (rigging a detonation device to drop the charge into a big barrel of water in a vulnerable, enclosed location) I'd say it does 20d6 fire and 20d6 bludgeoning damage similar to meteor swarm. If not (and they just yeet a hunk of the stuff into some water randomly) I'd say it does 8d6 fire damage like a fireball.
If this is in Forgotten Realms there is lore on why some forms of explosives do not work. That is why gunpowder is not in Forgotten Realms. It would not be a stretch to declare this lore to change how the above problem functions.
Uhh... Gunpowder isn't not in forgotten realms. There is even a suggested price table.
Just because there is a price table and it is included in the books does not make it lore in forgotten realms as DnD is not just forgotten realms and the books include things for other settings like homebrew worlds.
Lore Wise , Gond, god of Craftsmen and Scientists, made the original formula for gunpowder chemically inert. He did, however, gift his priests with Smokepowder, which allows them to produce firearms and other weapons. It is not a stretch to say other forms of chemical reactions were also made inert.
DMs can do anything they want though but if they go by lore and actual settings then no gunpowder is not in Forgotten realms.