# Forum > Gaming > Roleplaying Games > D&D 3e/3.5e/d20 >  The World of {Spell}

## SangoProduction

So, an idea came to mind while I was at work... or more precisely, getting paid to do nothing and be bored. But a few thousand dollars a month is worth boredom. I guess. (Government... where productivity and all purpose to life goes to die. At least you know your tax dollars and printed money are going to a good place...)

So, you know how the Tippyverse is an entire inversion of a world based on just one wide-used ability: Teleport (if I remember correctly)? 
Yeah, I was thinking about the meme of super hero inventors having the tech to solve [literally all problems], but instead choose to spend their time fighting two-bit thieves. And then eventually 16-bit thieves. Maybe even a couple petabytes by the end of it.

And, for example, Tony Stark's "Arc Reactor" alone probably changes the world. A tiny device (the size of a fist) that can, produce and store so much power that it can launch at least a good couple hundred pounds of metal at insane Gs, and sustained supersonic flight. All while also being able to be modulated and channeled on demand such that you aren't literally cooking yourself alive by being in the 10-mile radius of it. Even if it uses up palladium by the truck load, that **** is sufficient to kick start the galactic era all its own.

So, I was trying to think about what spells would revolutionize the world if introduced tomorrow, and made widely available. Like as if it could be cast through a magic item that cost like... 1000 bucks. A not-insignificant figure by any means... but for magic? Probably below fair market price. Unless supply was so great that it was only 1000 bucks.

Obviously, every [fire] and [cold] spell just ****s thermodynamics. Same with all teleportation-style spells performed within a gravity well. And pretty much all conjuration spells, whether it's teleportation, or creation.
Portals would be trippyverse, but with fancy, impenetrable shields and walls... which could be bypassed by using a portal.

I want to find a spell that creates a unique world.
What about Charm Person? Suggestion? No. No. Google and Facebook have never done any such thing. Definitely just boring, and not at all realistic. Let's move on.
Well, Telepathy.... Kinda like Internet, but on Crack and Meth, at the same time. God that would be... entirely uncomfortable if tin foil doesn't work. Especially if it can be initiated and read without your explicit consent. Again, kinda like Google. But worse?

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Although some people may point to [damage dealing spell], and say it would cause a cataclysm... and maybe you'd be right. But the vast majority of people would never actually use it, unless it was cantrip-level, or maybe even ... actually, I think Magic Missiles would be one of the single most impactful (to society at large) damaging spells in this situation. 

At 100+ feet of range, that's plenty good enough for most urban combat. Its unerring accuracy also completely alters breaching procedures to focus even more on negating enemy sight.
But that's military. Not society.
Well. I mean, you've got what's basically a low-power firearm with unerring accuracy at specifically your target. Well, low power at low levels. And presumably the mentioned item can modulate its power output as desired. But even if it had to be at its maximum setting: Getting to knockout and/or seriously injure 2 aggressors without ever risking injury to anyone else is a damned fine tool of self defense. And of offense. But when...anyway, that discussion is going to go nowhere.
But also think about pest control. You see a rat, a bat, a squirrel or a roach? Boom... well, the rat and squirrel might just be knocked out, but the other two might be messes that you have to clean up... but at least they aren't... well, you didn't get rid of the roaches. OK, this was a bad idea. And if you see one rat, there are many more families around as well. Yeah, you're still going to need to implement proper pest control procedures that prevent them from even wanting to be in your house, rather than killing the few you see. Or invest in a proper cat - one that hunts for its dinner.

Eh... so it's basically like a neat little gun, with which, swatting a fly isn't overkill. Well, it is. But you're not putting holes in your wall with it. Ultimately, probably not the most extreme of changes if introduced.

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Oh! Continual Flame! An incredible little spell that produces heatless light... permanently. (At least for as long as you care.) I mean, "electric bill" has been synonymous with the "light bill," ever since Thomas Edison gave electricity a reason to be used in the home. Imagine headlights that never went out or got dull. (Obviously headlamp casings are what would be improving to amplify it, and make use of as many instances of the spell as they could.)
You never have to worry about being in the dark due to the a great freeze passing over the land.
Rescue operations could operate even easier during the night.
20 dollar drones could have Continual Flame cast on them, and... in addition to all of the benefits of a mobile light source, such as the above, it could make for grand light shows on the cheap. Not to mention, this would get rid of huge portion of the electric bill that-... wait. I think I did mention that.

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But, let's be honest. Everyone knows the real revolution comes from Illusions. Specifically the Major Image. I mean, I imagine that is lies somewhere between having to create it painstakingly from scratch, and AI generation. But I think it's much closer to the latter, based on the fact that Major Image has a casting time of a standard action (around 4 seconds) to create something that's simply visualized by you. And there is no stipulation for your character to have any skills whatsoever (outside of simply being able to cast it) in order to create believable images.

I mean... the prawn industry probably simply can't compete with the demented minds of the users who would spend 1000 dollars... wait, VR is a thing. Guess it wasn't a joke. But self-generated, rather than still needing VR content.

Any sort of movie, or story you want to tell instantly has all the accompaniment you can imagine. Your Sonic OCs... god damn it. No. But your D&D characters, which are definitely not demented....
Nope. No. I'm done. I've read the horror stories. I don't need to experience them in HD.

Anyway, I say that Major Image would be among the most impactful spells to be introduced in the world tomorrow.
What do you think?

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## Beni-Kujaku

I really don't think Major Image would be the great contender. It's great, don't get me wrong, but we have LCD screens already. It would make entertainment that much easier to do, but not much in terms of everyday life. Major Image requires somebody to use it, and items automatically succeed on the saving throw to disbelieve. I don't think you could film or take a picture of an illusion, which limits greatly the spreading potential. If you can, then it would indeed revolutionize the cinema (yes, and p*rn) industry, but nothing major, except if it was really easy to access.

Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion (and, to a lesser extent, Create Food and Water) is the spell that could have literally no impact or be world-altering, changing society to its core. It all depends on the availability. If an item of MMM 1:day is craftable quite easily by specialized companies, then the whole struggle of life could be bypassed. No more search for a home, or for food. Each MMM item can feed and host 156 people. If you can manufacture one such item for, say 10,000 dollars, you could eventually have the whole population live in luxury. Even if it is about as expensive as in the game (327,600 dollars, considering 1gp~10 dollars), it would completely upend the housing economy, and probably divide the world between the wealthy who have a magnificent mansion and the poor who have to buy their own house. It would also help tremendously after natural disaster, giving the refugees a temporary home during reconstruction. 

Remove Disease. Just Remove Disease, in as much a concentration as you can manage.

Continual Flame is a good one, but I wonder how long it takes to make it less expensive than an energy-efficient lightbulb.

Charm Person (and most charms and compulsions), if there's no countermeasure, would make most chiefs of state become recluse who can't come within 50ft of anybody else. If a countermeasure exists, then it will just add a few layers to scandals, whistleblower affairs, and investigations.

Zone of Truth would be absolutely great for investigations. Might lead to a few drifts.

Prestidigitation is so versatile it's actually ridiculous. It replaces all seasoning, washing machines, and dye. I don't think it would change society, but I can't think of any company restaurant, or rich household that wouldn't want an at-will Prestidigitation item for 9000 dollars.

Damage spells are too brief to provide any kind of reliable power source. ON THE OTHER HAND. Control Weather. Control Wind. And Control Water. The trifecta of "excuse me while I'm telling mother nature to shut up and let me do my stuff". Especially Control Weather. 2 mile radius, and the weather can be anything you like, from torrential rains to heat waves, for basically a whole day. Also, it moves with you. A single casting of Control Weather can provide water for a huge field surface, or create a sunny weather for important events, or power dozens of wind turbines with a carefully controlled wind. It can solve so many problems it's almost upsetting. I don't think it can inverse global warming, but it's the next best thing.

Fly, because "_Weeeeeeeeeeeee!!!_". Yes, that's all.

If you really want to break thermodynamics, the best spell is probably Shrink Item. Especially if Permanency is on the table. Supposing a CL 11 Shrink Item, you can shrink an item 22 cubic feet in volume. A lead item this big weighs about 300kg. Attach it to a long pole (say, 50m, like a wind turbine). Attach the pole on the other end to a turbine. Shrink the item. Get the shrunk item to the highest possible point. Unshrink it. Let it go. When it is about the bottom, shrink it again. Repeat ad nauseam. Going up gives the item 300*2*50*9.81~300,000 Joules of potential energy, and going down requires almost nothing, so all this energy goes into the turbine. If the item reaches half its terminal velocity, the turn will be completed in less than 10 seconds, or 30kW of energy. That's not a lot (a 20th of the power of a regular wind turbine), but that is for only one ball of lead. Permanency never runs out, and if you have a way to mitigate the XP cost, its fairly spammable. In a day, you could have 100 such items attached to a turbine. In a year, you could solve the energy crisis while requiring no wind or other natural phenomenon except the raw power of gravity. The only problem is the XP cost. You might want to abuse ambrosia obtained in dark alleys of drug-addled cities. 

Disintegrate would be a bit more niche, but absolutely destroying non-recyclable waste (including nuclear waste, maybe), digging tunnels with no effort, it cannot be overstated.

Clone/Raise Dead would be the super expensive medical method that all world leaders have prepared in case of assassination.

And finally, we have Animate Dead. It should really have been the first mentioned, but I like to keep the best for last. Infinite amount of servants, infinite workforce. Every repetitive task can be replaced. Every menial task that could be replaced by a robot, a skeleton can do it. They can pretty effectively copy anything another person does, and never get tired. The society would never be the same.

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## Quertus

Im gonna go with spells, rather than spell. Also, curious where 1gp=$10 came from; my estimate iirc was more like $200.

I picture the Utopia / dystopia starting with M3. Food and housing, with space for lots. But who do we want to fill that space?

Enter Simulacrum. Choose who you will be living with. Add Mindrape to choose exactly what they know and believe about this situation.

But how do you earn the money to give such tech to the next generation? Enter Animate Dead for a subservient workforce with no upkeep cost; 100% profit margin is hard to beat.

And if you dont get enough entertainment out of your 100+ guests, yes, illusions are certainly a way to go. Maybe make sure at least one of those Simulacra is well-versed in the types of stories you care about, or a storyteller good at inventing their own media.

But probably the most impactful single change would be Immortality through Steal Youth or True Reincarnation.

So, theres my dystopia: silos of immortal shut-ins, playing with their imaginary friends in luxurious extradimensional spaces, while the real world becomes an undead labor camp wasteland.

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## Beni-Kujaku

> Im gonna go with spells, rather than spell. Also, curious where 1gp=$10 came from; my estimate iirc was more like $200.


Honestly? I oscillate between 10 and $100 depending on the point I'm trying to make. 

Arguments for 10: a tent costs 10gp, and $50 to $200, rations per day cost 5sp, 50ft of rope cost 1 gp, a simple lock costs 20gp, a crowbar costs 2gp, a sewing needle is 5sp, a common musical instrument is 5gp... Basically all nonconsumable items use this kind of ratio, except items like paper and spyglasses, who are notoriously hard to create in a medieval-fantasy world. Most of the food also follows this trend (though maybe slightly cheap), with a standard meal costing 3sp, a fine wine bottle is 10gp, 

Arguments for 100: Whetstones cost 2cp and at the very least $2, a sack costs 1 sp, an artisan's or traveler's outfit costs 1gp, a mug of ale is 4cp, a hunk of cheese is 1sp, a night at the inn is 5sp, most of the big ships, like a warship for 25,000gp
Most of the salaries also follow this trend: 3sp per day for a trained hireling, 1cp for a gate toll...

In general, I think the 1gp~$10 is most accurate, and I think the salaries are just inordinately low in D&Dworld. Your 1gp~$200 probably comes from the current (or more accurately, that of 30 years ago, in the years of 1e) cost of gold (1lb of gold~$10k, and 1 gp is a 1/50th of a lb), which isn't really applicable to D&Dworld

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## Inevitability

Stone to Flesh makes for a disgusting but very interesting world.

This spell creates 70 cubic feet of meat per casting: that's nearly two tons, making it about thirty times as efficient at creating food as a CL5 Create Food and Water spell. It's also really good at removing rock and can easily clear out large spaces if cast at-will.

What does Fleshworld look like?

Large cities, much bigger than ours, clustered around mountains, often extending into them. Sanitation is surprisingly good: the cilinders produced by StF make for great utility pipes. Standards of living are a mixed bag: the poor are guaranteed food and shelter, where 'food' means 'the same artificial meat every day, maybe with a few supplements' and 'shelter' means 'dimly lit tunnels a mile underground'.

The architecture of the undercities could be called eldritch: much of it underground, surrounded by unworked yet utterly smooth stone, the cilindrical radius of the spell subtly rounding many pathways. Light is provided by sputtering fat-burning lamps, and despite the frequent ventilation shafts the smell of meat never really goes away. Most towns are built near mineral resources, which are dug up, purified, and processed before ever seeing the sun (3d construction really helps pack your production chains into a tight space!). In the undercity, you might pass by factories, homes, storerooms, cricket farms, and active mineshafts in the span of a five-minute walk. Nearby, new tunnels and chambers are rapidly dug, with teams working in tandem to transmute the rock and remove the resulting meat.

Outside the cities, the land is mostly used for material production: carefully managed forests for lumber, large plantations for cloth and thread. Some agriculture and horticulture is practiced, but most people have fully carnivorous diets (consuming either the mass-produced meat, or smaller animals that can be easily raised on it). A decent portion of food production is oriented around stuff that makes the rockmeat taste good. Trade thrives in Fleshworld: high-value goods like spices and gold combined with dense population centers make it easy to turn a profit.

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## Glimbur

Speak With Dead at will worldwide would still be our world, but secrets would be harder to keep.

Contact Other Plane goes straight into topics we don't argue about here (IRL religion) but would be world changing.

Purify Food and Drink at will worldwide seems like a general improvement of living standards for struggling people. Also enables pranks.

There's a spell that is a contingent Heal spell, would cut down on accidental death or injury. Murder still doable, just have to do it twice.

Summon Elysian Thrush I think is the spell that lets you get more sleep in less time (via magic bird with aura). Again, still our world but changed if everyone just needed less sleep (or actually got enough sleep instead of being forever short).

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## SangoProduction

More seriously, Major Image turns everyone into a "skilled" artist, with the distinction not being whether or not it's a believable / useful image, but rather just how believable it is under scrutiny, and how much detail is present. Again, there are incredible parallels with AI art here.

Communication is much, much higher bandwidth when you can also convey an entire scene, complete with touch and smell, in the span of a few seconds. Those NPCs and grimy alleyways that you tend to spend just a few seconds speaking about generally can be displayed in their full glory. "The world happening around them," is no longer just limited to what you specifically describe at a given moment, based on the players' attention span, and how long you think is appropriate for describing something that they may care nothing about. The stories you share about a game to your family can be conveyed with full motion capture... and then they play the game and it's nothing like you describe. But it was your internal interpretation of the events of what you played, made external. 
Speaking of which, getting witness statements about a suspected perp would probably be more about capturing the scene, and corroborating the independently generated scenes together, rather than getting someone to describe the face, then someone else to listen, and draw it.

Housing designers can literally walk through and on a fly adjust the tiniest thing according to their (or their customers') taste, seeing and feeling the effect in real time. (Basically the fantasy that AR is being sold to us as, but like 200 years from now, when AI has gotten really good.) With such tools at basically the common man's finger tips, more time can be spent by designers on the security, safety, and durability of the design, rather than the aesthetics. Speaking of which... it could be taken in a dystopian direction where you actually have your cardboard boxes and gruel, living in a teeny pod, but you can Image it away into fancy furniture and steak... still in a pod, but it's not like your image was that large anyway. You'll be happy.

But less dystopic, the housing aesthetic can change immediately based on whim, rather than needing a whole project to turn your house or place of business Victorian or Steampunk, only to find out a week later that it's actually really inconvenient. Honestly speaking: that "on a whim" part might be detrimental as permanency is shown, both by study and anecdote, to be a huge part of life fulfilment. It's why a wife is more fulfilling than a one night fling. (Up until a wedding becomes as impermanent as a fling, and the institution abandoned...) It's why owning a home (even if you still make payments) gives more life satisfaction than renting, regardless of it restricting your mobility by having your home be in a fixed location - because it being fixed is what creates satisfaction. But novelty is very immediately gratifying, and rather than picking one of the illusory samples to be turned into a project, one might just keep switching and switching and switching, especially if the cost is negligible. Always addicted to the next new thing...

On a less dour note: Just imagine school, with fully interactable lessons, rather than just a teacher droning on and on. Simply adding a "real life" context to a math lesson (again, with higher bandwidth of communication than purely vocal) can make a huge difference. Speaking of which, it includes sound, so you can create that modulated voice which maintains attention. (Back to playing D&D: Also means infinite voices, so long as you can "visualize" said voices.)
How much more fun would you have had in chemistry class if you got to "mix chemicals" and actually found what they could do, and had a teacher there to explain and answer questions, rather than (again) drone on and on about it in basically a language divorced from your reality as a kid?
Even just for amplifying a lesson, there is no "back row," because everyone could have their personal "black board" being shown right in front of them, with associated sound.
I mean... this sort of stuff is basically like 50 years away, with major actions being taken to implement them in schools today.

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## Promethean

Not just spells, think about mechanics!

Just the ability to level up by itself changes things. Just getting to level 2 effectively Doubles your ability to withstand pain, survive damage, and do strainious excercize(stamina loss is measured in non-lethal).

That's not even counting things like surpassing human limitations via the stat-bonuses every 4 levels or just getting class features themselves.

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## Arael666

> Im gonna go with spells, rather than spell. Also, curious where 1gp=$10 came from; my estimate iirc was more like $200.
> 
> I picture the Utopia / dystopia starting with M3. Food and housing, with space for lots. But who do we want to fill that space?
> 
> Enter Simulacrum. Choose who you will be living with. Add Mindrape to choose exactly what they know and believe about this situation.
> 
> But how do you earn the money to give such tech to the next generation? Enter Animate Dead for a subservient workforce with no upkeep cost; 100% profit margin is hard to beat.
> 
> And if you dont get enough entertainment out of your 100+ guests, yes, illusions are certainly a way to go. Maybe make sure at least one of those Simulacra is well-versed in the types of stories you care about, or a storyteller good at inventing their own media.
> ...


That is really.... sad. I would definetly watch a whole season of this

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## Kalkra

FWIW, I think officially 1 gp = $50. The only source for that I've seen is a web article which has a table that converts d20 Modern/Future purchase DC to gp, and comparing that table to the purchase DC to dollars table in the d20 Modern rulebook. That being said, it's probably mentioned in other places also. I don't remember the name of the article, but I think it had stats for the Mighty Servant of Leuk-o.

I might be misremembering the conversion, as it was a while ago I saw this.

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## Vizzerdrix

Mending. That one spell is all it would take to break the economy as so much of what we buy has a built in life expectancy. Most repair tech jobs would vanish over night and people wouldn't need to replace appliances and vehicles nearly as often.  That would in turn reduce shipping and transport as well.

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## Eurus

How about a general skill boosting spell like _divine insight_? Letting a total amateur do a task as well as an expert, or an expert become downright superhuman, would have some wild effects.

Oh, how about _divination_? If you can get enough casts of them -- say, with the resources of a government -- you can get some pretty impressive modeling of the next week, and also answer all sorts of questions about free will and predestination!  :Small Amused:

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## Particle_Man

Would the item be:  cast 1x/day or cast at will?  If the latter I would think a create astral construct (a power not a spell but Ill allow it) society would be interesting and not involve any discussion of things we are not allowed to talk about on these boards.  

You get customizable short term (a minute, say?) servants of various types for free.

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