Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Whisper_Swiftblade 07-21-06, 08:55 PM	1) get a board with footlong bamboo spikes sticking out of it place it in and now you have a portable pit fall. 2) fill with water, bull rush fies into it, close it give foe time to drown, remove foe and repeat.
savant_warlord13 07-21-06, 09:13 PM	3. fill it with hundreds of thousands of caltrops, then use them as shrapnel in an explosion
neth2 07-22-06, 03:45 AM	one interesting idea i saw was to put it on a shield and then shield bash the opponent so they fall in the hole and cant get out thrn find a way to kill them take thrm out rinse and repeat im also wondering what would happen if you left an unstoppered decanter of endless water r eversmoking bottle in the hole
Rulebook 07-22-06, 07:19 AM	i dont think shields are big enough to unfold a portable hole onto. and why would you need to fill it with water? if they breathe they'll run out of air in there anyway. but seriously... some things ive used portable holes for: Changing room (we houseruled that the space it opens to is always oriented the same way, so when you put the hole on th right side it opens on the right side) Extremely Expensive Waterskin (no clerics or druids... best we had) Campsite (same rule as the changing room one... just put a bed in) Firepit (just toss some logs and stuff in, light and voila! campifire in the swamp) Flying Cover (open on a flying carpet! hehe) An EXTREMELY long tunnel going nowhere (we found like 200 portable holes in a dungeon, but couldnt take them with us. so we linked em into a big tunnel!)
Whisper_Swiftblade 07-22-06, 09:59 AM	i dont think shields are big enough to unfold a portable hole onto. and why would you need to fill it with water? if they breathe they'll run out of air in there anyway. speed things up, you will die faster if there is no air to from the start
shruggar 07-22-06, 10:04 AM	I continue to be a supporter of the Sheild idea. Still need to tweak my "Portable Hole Item Familiar" build to make it accessible to non-high-money campaigns, but the poor-man's version is: Sovereign Glue the hole to a mithral circle, then animate objects + permanency the circle, take it as an Item Familiar. Fill the hole with acid. Then with Kobolds. If your DM has allowed the Portable Hole + Wooden Buckler idea, see how well he takes to Portable Hole + Armor. Portable Magic Shop Portable Hot Tub Prefix the word "Portable" to anything you can fathom squeezing into a 6'x10' cylinder. Don't forget to make a belt of Reduce Person. Of course: a quick escape Bypassing the limitations of a Gate spell by casting Gate from inside the hole, which is technicaly a different plane. Depending on your DM, glue it to the ceiling for an alternative to Reverse Gravity. slide one under a door or through a crack in the wall to make a difficult Escape Artist check into a simple action. Put it on a Floating Disk Spell to get rid of that pesky weight limit Need to get to the astral plane? Don't have Plane Shift? Have a Bag of Holding? well... Put stuff in it Portable Pit Fill it with gold, jewels, magical items, jewelry, other expensive trinkets, open it in combat and watch your enemies jump in. Cast Darkness, Silence, pretty much anything to eliminate all senses on the hole. Insert person. Open the hole, drop enemy within, do something that makes him think it's in his best interest to close the hole from within. Cover where the hole used to be and/or somehow lower the floor. Your DM may vary. With a little enginuity and a Wall of Force: Submarine With the same amount of enginuity: Bus for your entire party Fill with Pillows as an alternative to Featherfall A nice place to keep your Clones It looks like a folded hankercheif, why not use it as a hankercheif? Fun alternative to merely short-sheeting someone's bed. Extra manuvering room for getting something large up stairs much more.
hypervole 07-22-06, 10:09 AM	Why stop at shields? As long as its the size of a pocket handkerchief you can put the hole on it. So Portable Hole armour anyone? Just be wary of barrages of bags of holding!
Dheran 07-22-06, 03:40 PM	The small opening ideas just don't fly. The Portable Hole can be folded as small as a handkerchief, but only opens up when spread upon a surface 6' in diameter. So no use on shields, armor, or Floating Disc, and no sliding it under a door unless the door is over 6' wide and you've got a frame to keep the portable hole open as you push the cloth. There's nothing in the description to think that a PH makes its own gravity, but that's a good thing. This way you can fill your PH with water, fold it up, and dump a small flood when your spread the PH upon a wall. The water comes out the moment it's fully spread.
Alpha_Moose 07-22-06, 03:54 PM	First time I saw it I thought it would be like the portable holes in Bugs Bunny cartoons. Can you make something like that?
Venenum 07-22-06, 04:21 PM	[list] Fill with Pillows as an alternative to Featherfall Pillows why ? In a true hack and slash game you would would use kobold corpse soft and squishie. Now i mgoing to serious, nowhere does it actualyy say that force is transfered, so there would just be a mild bump as it setled
Whisper_Swiftblade 07-22-06, 06:19 PM	hide one near a dragon and shoot an arrow with a ba of holding attached to it into the PH oh look guys, free hord. (well not free it caust the use of the howl, the bag and the arow but you get it.)
shruggar 07-24-06, 08:00 AM	...but only opens up when spread upon a surface 6' in diameter. I disagree! "When opened fully" to me implies that it can also be opened not-fully. Meanwhile, closing the hole from within already has enough problems of logic without worrying about "it instantly closes the moment any part of it is not touching the surface". It's really not defined (as with many things in there), but to avoid a hole+buckler it's probably a better idea to limit the definition of "Surface", not "Open". As for "Not on a floating disk", that's just silly. Even if you require it to be fully opened, you can still make a 6' round surface to put on the disk, and put the hole on that. Custom-craft it to have a rounded part on the bottom so it always stays in place, etc. Balance-wise, the real issue is: "If you have a Portable Hole, why the (censorship sucks) are you using a Floating Disk spell?". There's no getting around that one ;) I agree that Portable Holes inheirit gravity from their surroundings, some avoid this due to the ambiguities of a closed hole, combined with the idea of a "Portable Lab" some use to craft more portable holes on the go. Trying to open a hole on a ceiling is always a hard trick anyway: "Okay, you spread it across the ceiling, and it opens. You are no longer pushing along the surface of the hole, instead you are reaching into the hole. The hole falls from the ceiling, closing as it leaves the surface. Your hands are severed." I prefer my holes to be "slightly sticky", but RAW there's nothing that says they are. Spreading across anything other than a flat smooth floor will vary from DM to DM.
runestar 07-24-06, 08:49 AM	Sew a small one into the butt area of your pants and you never have to go for a dump in the middle of a dungeon expedition ever again. :D
Sorcen_Anenooata 07-24-06, 10:22 AM	I'm curious as to whether you it is accessible even when folded up, and on a similar note as to whether it is possible to make a small one or clothing out of it to use as armor perhaps. Many possibilities with this way of thinking. This is just another thing that the players werent expected to think this much into. Anyway some ideas: for a lich to hide the phylactery in. depending on how the DM rules about objects inside the hole being destroyed when the hole is put in a bag of holding, then u could use it to destroy the lichs phylactery. If possible: armor, i think was stated before, made of portable hole material. maybe a weapon, u'd have to empty it every once in awhile but i can picture a big hammer with a portable hole on one end and then jus smash the enemies and turn it as u bring it back up to capture the people and keep them from jus sliding back out of it, could work for the 6ft one but would be alot more efficient with a smaller one, maybe 1-2 foot, (I like my sphere of annihilation adaptations to weapons better though). This concludes my ideas for now, sorry for my lack of numbering but I'm too lazy to count the others up especially since nobody here has bothered to number either. Good thread with good ideas and makes me wonder about some possibilities of portable holes though.
tarkin 07-24-06, 10:44 AM	I think the clothing idea has merit (or the shield idea as well), but it should be written up as a seperate magic item based on the idea, not just "do this with an existing magic item". That, is a Shield of Portable Hole and Armor of Portable hole Here is what I would write up for a Tower Shield of Portable Hole. Tower Shield of Portable Hole. This Tower Shield is made of thin wood with an adamantine rim (one inch thick = Hardness 20, 40 hitpoints) that is then enchanted with a Portable Hole. It does not have the standard encumbarance penalty, because it is slightly smaller and much lighter than a regular Tower Shield. It can be used as a shield, if so you get a +4 cover bonus to AC (not a shield bonus). Or you can take Total Cover behind it. Unlike a regular Tower Shield, this is real cover, so it does provide real cover against a targetted spell. If the Tower Shield is held horizontally, it can hold 1/4 the amount of stuff a regular Portable Hole can hold (while it is 5ft tall, it is only about 3ft wide, and 6ft deep.) Moderate conjuration; CL 12th; Craft Wondrous Item, plane shift; Cost 22,180 gp
Rulebook 07-24-06, 12:34 PM	and armor of portable hole! your armor is completely covered by portable hole, making you invulnerable to damaging attacks that dont effect your whole body, or your mind/spirit!
shruggar 07-24-06, 01:15 PM	even I think "Portable Hole Armor" is a bit of a stretch (even if I am the one who suggested it). I dont consider a folded portable hole to be accessable- some part of it must be directly touching (and somehow held or pressed against, usually by gravity) a surface in order for it to "open", and I dont consider the portable hole itself to be a surface, otherwise it'd just fall inside itself and vanish. I have always assumed a "Folded" portable hole to be inescapable (without a Plane Shift or similar), so the kobold you stuffed inside isnt going to reach out of your pocket and stab you. What constitutes a "surface" is debateable, think of throwing a portable hole onto a thick cargo net. Does it open? Does it open only where the hole is touching the net and not between the net's holes? As for armor: can a hole even be open when bent? How much space would be inside? What if it's already completely full? One solution might be: it can be open when bent, but only if it is not so full that doing so would cause the opening to intersect with the contents. (always keep your hole 3' from being completely full to avoid every running into this problem, which you should always do anyway so you can jump in if you need to). This becomes even worse when you try to think about the hole being wrapped around something (like armor). You could just use two, for armor, but the thought problem still exists: If the hole can bend you can esstenially turn its edges inside-out (depending on your interpretation of the opening). To avoid this, you can stick with the "unattached portal" interpretation- that is, the edges of the hole(the object) do not correspond to the edges of the hole(the space), and the Portable Hole has the same form on both "sides", can be lifted up and folded into a hankercheif and carried around, but this interpretation has all sorts of problems like Upside-Down holes, Variable-size holes, Unopenable holes, and Multiple holes with two entrances (aka Wormholes). You could consider the top of the hole to always be where the hole opens/closes, attached "somehow" though independent of the edges, in which case this isnt much of a problem, but is still a bit odd. I'm sure none of that made sense to anybody but me :) And meanwhile, as for enchanting a sheild directly into a portable hole: "lol good luck weaving beams of starlight into wood, n00b!" Finally, another use: A slightly more mundane (depending on how you look at it) form of the "Bag of Tricks"
spyderfreek 07-24-06, 01:38 PM	First time I saw it I thought it would be like the portable holes in Bugs Bunny cartoons. Can you make something like that? I remember in older editions the PH doing something like this... is it still possible?? If so it would solve a major problem my character is facing at the moment.
shruggar 07-24-06, 02:10 PM	I remember in older editions the PH doing something like this... is it still possible? No. Well, what "bugs bunny cartoon" are you thinking of, specifically? I recently searched for examples of Portable Holes in non-D&D media to cite in a rant about portable holes, but could find none (!) [other than Who Framed Roger Rabbit]. I know it exists in various places, I just can't seem to find any clips/pictures.
TeediousPrime 07-24-06, 06:44 PM	No. Well, what "bugs bunny cartoon" are you thinking of, specifically? I recently searched for examples of Portable Holes in non-D&D media to cite in a rant about portable holes, but could find none (!) [other than Who Framed Roger Rabbit]. I know it exists in various places, I just can't seem to find any clips/pictures. In the episode in question, a little old mad scientist guy creates them. They get squirted out of an oversized syring thingie. I don't remember specifics, but I do remember at the end he threw his wife down into one, and the devil popped out and made him take her back. The Roger Rabbit use is great... for those who don;t know, at the beginning a police detective (or something) finds one while they're messing around with a bunch of cartoon props. At the end of the movie Eddie Valiant uses one to escape the giant magnet that is pinning him to a metal drum.
Whisper_Swiftblade 07-24-06, 07:19 PM	the cartoon ones where different because they just made an opening in something allowing the useer to walk throw walls and such, while in D&D you use them as an extra place to store things, or go as you need. however it might be fun to make such a tool. Yuo would probally want to call it portible tunnel or something and it would probally have abilities like this: "the portible tunnel when folded looks much like a hankerchif with exeption to the oil like luster on it, however when unfolded to it's full diamiter (3.5 feet) and is placed on a solid non-living surface it is only seen as a thin black outline (requires a difficult spot check) around a hole in that surface. A portible tunnel can only make a tunnel of five feet or less and if within five feet there is no opaning on the other end the tunnel does not function (so no useing two to travel past ten foot walls). The tunnel can be placed on any non-living, non-magical, solid flat, surface due to it's sticky nature and removed by pulling on it's outline, when it is removed the surface is restored and anything inside the tunnel is jaunted outside of the surface to the nearest exit (yah I did'nt know how to put that) ." Maybe someone can improve on the abilities and the wording of that and, come up with price and stuff for it. I'm not verry good at this kind of stuff.
Alpha_Moose 07-24-06, 10:25 PM	I think you could use phase door or something to describe it.
Undying_Councillor 07-26-06, 07:15 PM	There was actually an old Dragon magazine article which dealt with this very same question. I'll see if I can locate the issue for you all - provided your collections go back that far (it was mid-nineties if memory serves). My personal favourite from that article was to fill the hole with leeches and slowly lower opponents into it as a form of "Information Gathering" (there was no such skill in 2nd Ed, we had to make do with what we had). Second to that was the jacuzzi idea which involved fire elementals, lots of water and a few friends. :D
Undying_Councillor 07-27-06, 05:59 AM	The Article in question is "101 Uses for a portable hole - Would you believe that six canoes can fit into one of these babies?" published in Dragon Magazine #221 (September, 1995)
thaylok 07-27-06, 01:30 PM	My buddy unfolded his around his body, put his armor over it, and used it to protect his torso/abdomen as much as possible from attacks. He also kept it stocked full of alchemist fire (greek fire in 2nd ed)... and to read the information there... go find the thread on hilarity.... this was involved in more than one of his deaths....