Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Viatos 05-30-07, 11:03 PM	Let's say that one finds oneself and one's party leading a good-sized horde of undead, of the sort an 8th-level Cleric with Deathbound and Undead Leadership, and another 8th-level party member with Undead Leadership as well, could create. This horde includes enough intelligent undead to keep things running smoothly in the following circumstances. We've halfway taken over a near-ideal location; a valley suitable for housing at least two cities eventually, with coastal access, plentiful amounts of onyx in the mountains, and only two passes requiring defense. The half not taken over poses little to no threat, being composed mostly of 1st-3rd level intelligent beings we'll get around to slaughtering later. Right now, though, we have more pressing concerns. A booming merchant city-state finds itself lacking, among other things, well over 25,000 GP in mundane arms and equipment, and a lot of soldiers and civilians both living and awaiting burial. It appears as though some unthinkably twisted group of necromancers pulled some sort of internal coup and animated a considerable amount of the resulting casualties. Anyway, for whatever reason, instead of tracking down and exterminating those monsters, they've allied with some local tribes and hired a bunch of mercenaries and decided to send all they've got at us. Now, we made good time, and it'll take a couple months for them to get everything together and reach us - but between our rogue and a few shades, internal conflict and sabotage is expected to extend that up to at least a year (this is resolved as some abstract rolling in between specific acts or assassinations, basically a string of missions and "Rogue checks" whose success controls the damage). To fill the time, the rest of the party has their own mission-strings, and I the cleric am in charge of getting our horde to work. That is, construction of first and foremost fortifications on the passes, including walls, guard towers, and hopefully fortresses that will be serviceable by the time we're reached. The walls and towers go up first, and then we either rush construction of the fortresses or just fortify what's already built, depending. On the off-chance the fortresses find themselves completely finished, the undead will start on an actual city (we decided not to expand a town, but to start from the top), but that's not an issue right now. What is an issue is, assuming our personal funds currently come to about 120,000 GP, and we have around 100 HD of workforce undead (Rod of Undead Mastery, Deathbound, and the Leaderships), most of which is concentrated in high-strength low-HD animated stuff (nothing in the work force has over four HD, and most of it is 2), how is this supposed to play out? The rules really don't cover what happens if most of your labor and material costs for construction can be paid by a tireless, mindless workforce. That is, we can mine, quarry, and harvest pretty much everything we need, namely stone and lumber. So how do we figure out costs and rates? What's the GP earnings of a 16 Strength Skeleton quarrying stone 24 hours a day? We need some kind of system to figure out how much the undead are making in terms of material and labor costs to determine the rate of production; that is, they work towards completion of everything collectively, the idea being we spend very little aside from buying the equipment they need to mine, harvest, and build. So I've come to you. Help!
Rerecros 05-30-07, 11:57 PM	Well in a typical day, a human laborer is good for about 8 hours a day. An undead laborer can work 24 hours a day, so just multiply a the work done by 3.
Maekrix_Waere 05-31-07, 12:03 AM	Well in a typical day, a human laborer is good for about 8 hours a day. An undead laborer can work 24 hours a day, so just multiply a the work done by 3. Only if they are skeletons. Zombies...it would be about the same. To the OP: As for cost, just have your Undead get the material for you. Get some handaxes and have your skeletons start chopping down forests. Give 'em some picks and let them start mining stone. Alternately, use Stone Shape/Minor Creation/Major Creation/"I wish for the town which I have inscribed upon this piece of paper, with the exact dimensions AS WRITTEN, every building being 10 ft. tall, with a flat, horizontal stone roof completely covering the top, but not jutting beyond the outer walls, and that every building be completely devoid of furniture, creatures (living or dead), interior walls or columns (except where noted on the paper, and of the same size as noted on the paper), and that the buildings within this town have walls made out of stone, with the width and length being exactly upon noted on the paper, and that the walls and roofs be of a condition that they will be able to stand until the ending of the world, no matter what duress they be placed under, and that all the doors will be open and unlocked until I see fit to lock and close them, and that the town appear on the __ acres of land which I have purchased from ________ for ______gp for the express purpose of creating this town." (Yes, that is necessary to remove the prospect of the wish being flawed somehow. Never take a breath during this speech, and make sure it is all one, long sentance. If anyone can find a way that an entity can twist that wish to be a detriment, please post such, and I will amend this as appropriate.)
Leo 05-31-07, 06:28 AM	Zombies are not particurlarly smart and can only follow simple orders. I doubt they could build anything more sophisticated than moats and pilled stones walls. It depends on your Dm discretion however. I would say they that even working 24 hours a day they'll still take the same number of days as regular humans, plus the quality of the work will be pretty low.
was_fired 05-31-07, 06:39 AM	Eh, it would be hard to say all of that in the required six seconds, but I do believe it is possible. That said the wish would most likely fail straight out because of the requirement that, "that they will be able to stand until the ending of the world, no matter what duress they be placed under, and that all the doors will be open and unlocked until I see fit to lock and close them." The thing is you asked for it to be made from stone and stone can only withstand a finite amount of force. Wish isn't powerful enough to end the world so it can't be made to happen that way likewise wish isn't powerful enough to ensure that erosion or an adventurer with a adamantine axe won't show up in a thousand years so the only conclusion is for the wish to fail. Remember wish still has limits, it can't do the impossible (or indeed quite a number of possible things).
Leo 05-31-07, 06:53 AM	You may risk finding yourself teleported into a giant fortress in the plane of negative energy.
Maekrix_Waere 05-31-07, 10:52 AM	Eh, it would be hard to say all of that in the required six seconds, but I do believe it is possible. That said the wish would most likely fail straight out because of the requirement that, "that they will be able to stand until the ending of the world, no matter what duress they be placed under, and that all the doors will be open and unlocked until I see fit to lock and close them." The thing is you asked for it to be made from stone and stone can only withstand a finite amount of force. Wish isn't powerful enough to end the world so it can't be made to happen that way likewise wish isn't powerful enough to ensure that erosion or an adventurer with a adamantine axe won't show up in a thousand years so the only conclusion is for the wish to fail. Remember wish still has limits, it can't do the impossible (or indeed quite a number of possible things). Speaking is a free action. Also, if you phrase it correctly, Wish can cause a chain of events that would end the world. But why would anyone want to? Your job is to CONQUER the world, not destroy it. Also, if the Wish fails, you shouldn't lose the EXP, just the spell slot. Just keep reigning in the wish until it works. If flaws are detected, apply Stone Shape as necessary. P.S.-Editted phrasing of Wish.
Drausktanchache 05-31-07, 10:57 AM	skooma....that solves all your harvesting problems... flaws: Abbysal Rift diefic message: 404'd Page not found
was_fired 05-31-07, 02:08 PM	Speaking is a free action. Also, if you phrase it correctly, Wish can cause a chain of events that would end the world. But why would anyone want to? Your job is to CONQUER the world, not destroy it. Also, if the Wish fails, you shouldn't lose the EXP, just the spell slot. Just keep reigning in the wish until it works. If flaws are detected, apply Stone Shape as necessary. P.S.-Editted phrasing of Wish. The DM determines at what point speaking stops being a free action. http://www.d20srd.org/srd/combat/actionsInCombat.htm#speak A DM is well within his rights to consider a paragraph sentence to be longer than what they define as a few sentences.
was_fired 05-31-07, 02:12 PM	Before you say that it still isn't "more than a few sentences" and thus is allowed by the letter of the law consider that it never mentions which sentences it refers to. The DM could therefore using the same twisted logic that you do declare that anything longer than, "Stop. Don't go. Never mind." Can't be counted as a free action as indeed that is a few sentences in length.
Rerecros 05-31-07, 02:59 PM	Undead are stupid, they pretty much need constant supervision or you'll have a sorcerer's apprentice situation on your hands. You can get undead to preform complicated tasks, but you need a lot of them, and specifically program them like those assembly line robot arms. Instead of a fortress, a dungeon sounds easier, how hard is it to dig a hole in the ground.
Viatos 05-31-07, 03:04 PM	I really like the suggestion of just human labor x 3. We have enough day-operating intelligent undead that complex tasks can be broken down into simple steps, and in response to this thread I'm hiring a number of human Experts to advise on construction and masonry, so craftsmanship won't be an issue. There are four skeletons to every zombie, about, and the roles zombies are placed into are such that require only a single action a turn to be effective; assembly lines and pass-the-bucket type setups being the standard. I showed my DM this thread, and he ruled that undead work three times as fast as human laborers, and added that after about 5,000 in startup equipment and human labor to get the resource collection started, the only costs we incur are for magic, rare materials, et cetera. So we're well on our way, and thank you, very much, for your time and effort. =)
Rerecros 05-31-07, 03:23 PM	I really like the suggestion of just human labor x 3...I showed my DM this thread, and he ruled that undead work three times as fast as human laborers, and added that after about 5,000 in startup equipment and human labor to get the resource collection started, the only costs we incur are for magic, rare materials, et cetera. So we're well on our way, and thank you, very much, for your time and effort. =) Another satisfied customer :w00t:
Duncfoo 05-31-07, 03:34 PM	I think one problem you will have with the construction is that the DMG assumes that construction is done by skilled laborers. The undead masses, while strong, resilient, and untiring, won't be able to properly mortar together stones and connect beams. If your DM lets you have your zombies and skeletons do this, well, awesome. I would advise having a few of your undead followers be intelligent undead who once understood stone masonry and carpentry. They should be able to direct your horde in correct construction of the fortifications. The mindless undead will require some sort of supervision during the construction process. Use your undead for basic work, such as digging out a whole section of the pass, then hauling that rock and stone back up to use for the fortress. Make sure to fill your walls with dirt and stone. But really...I would recommend a... Lyre of Building If the proper chords are struck, a single use of this lyre negates any attacks made against all inanimate construction (walls, roof, floor, and so on) within 300 feet. This includes the effects of a horn of blasting, a disintegrate spell, or an attack from a ram or similar siege weapon. The lyre can be used in this way once per day, with the protection lasting for 30 minutes. The lyre is also useful with respect to building. Once a week its strings can be strummed so as to produce chords that magically construct buildings, mines, tunnels, ditches, or whatever. The effect produced in but 30 minutes of playing is equal to the work of 100 humans laboring for three days. Each hour after the first, a character playing the lyre must make a DC 18 Perform (string instruments) check. If it fails, she must stop and cannot play the lyre again for this purpose until a week has passed. Faint transmutation; CL 6th; Craft Wondrous Item, fabricate; Price 13,000 gp;Weight 5 lb. (From D20 SRD) If you got a year and the materials, this could make yourself a country. 13K Gold for one of them, allows for construction and protection of your buildings. Buy two! Use it to build walls, forts, catapults, statues, traps, the worlds largest latrine etc... The "Whatever" part of the description leaves this sucker pretty well open. No matter how well you play it you get 100 humans laboring for 6 days worth of work. If you have a skilled bard (or use smart spell casting) you can keep this up for as many hours a day as you need! Really, with 2 of these you could easily get your passes well defended, after having your mindless gather the supplies. I love this item. Hire a tactical genius to help design the fort. Pay him well, offer him eternal life and a seat of power.
Phrennzy 05-31-07, 04:20 PM	I'm in the camp of "3 x the work, but 1/3 the quality". I can't believe you were able to hire experts who would want to work with you, but then I guess threat of undeath could be convincing. I just can't see ghouls, ghasts, or wights performing as bricklayers and carpenters very well. At least not without eating the human experts from time to time.
maharai23 05-31-07, 07:15 PM	Ok, I agree with previous assessments as to labor speed. Now, onto a bit of tactics. According to you, there's a defensible valley accessible by several passes, and an approaching army. Building fortresses takes longer than a month, so if you plan to engage them, go for forts, and defensible fallback positions. Focus on bottlenecks and traps. Now, that's not my ideal defense. My ideal defense is to collapse the passes. Make them impassable. You don't need outside supplies, you have naval access for what you do need, and this eliminates the possibility of a land assault by corporeal forces. Step one, complete. If the landslides were big enough, they could take months for a dedicated army to remove. Best yet, as there's a limited number of creatures that can assist removal, tireless labor wouldn't speed things up any faster than the living rotating workforce would. This gives you the time to make a truly defensible location. Even moreso if you have that Lyre of Building described above.
Rerecros 05-31-07, 11:29 PM	incorporeal undead are awsome, make sure you have a regiment of them. They can scout and incapacitate the enemy, and make sure you desecrate the grounds.
Templetroll 06-01-07, 12:07 AM	Let's say that one finds oneself and one's party leading a good-sized horde of undead, of the sort an 8th-level Cleric with Deathbound and Undead Leadership, and another 8th-level party member with Undead Leadership as well, could create. This horde includes enough intelligent undead to keep things running smoothly in the following circumstances. We've halfway taken over a near-ideal location; a valley suitable for housing at least two cities eventually, with coastal access, plentiful amounts of onyx in the mountains, and only two passes requiring defense. The half not taken over poses little to no threat, being composed mostly of 1st-3rd level intelligent beings we'll get around to slaughtering later. Right now, though, we have more pressing concerns. A booming merchant city-state finds itself lacking, among other things, well over 25,000 GP in mundane arms and equipment, and a lot of soldiers and civilians both living and awaiting burial. It appears as though some unthinkably twisted group of necromancers pulled some sort of internal coup and animated a considerable amount of the resulting casualties. Anyway, for whatever reason, instead of tracking down and exterminating those monsters, they've allied with some local tribes and hired a bunch of mercenaries and decided to send all they've got at us. Now, we made good time, and it'll take a couple months for them to get everything together and reach us - but between our rogue and a few shades, internal conflict and sabotage is expected to extend that up to at least a year (this is resolved as some abstract rolling in between specific acts or assassinations, basically a string of missions and "Rogue checks" whose success controls the damage). To fill the time, the rest of the party has their own mission-strings, and I the cleric am in charge of getting our horde to work. That is, construction of first and foremost fortifications on the passes, including walls, guard towers, and hopefully fortresses that will be serviceable by the time we're reached. The walls and towers go up first, and then we either rush construction of the fortresses or just fortify what's already built, depending. On the off-chance the fortresses find themselves completely finished, the undead will start on an actual city (we decided not to expand a town, but to start from the top), but that's not an issue right now. What is an issue is, assuming our personal funds currently come to about 120,000 GP, and we have around 100 HD of workforce undead (Rod of Undead Mastery, Deathbound, and the Leaderships), most of which is concentrated in high-strength low-HD animated stuff (nothing in the work force has over four HD, and most of it is 2), how is this supposed to play out? The rules really don't cover what happens if most of your labor and material costs for construction can be paid by a tireless, mindless workforce. That is, we can mine, quarry, and harvest pretty much everything we need, namely stone and lumber. So how do we figure out costs and rates? What's the GP earnings of a 16 Strength Skeleton quarrying stone 24 hours a day? We need some kind of system to figure out how much the undead are making in terms of material and labor costs to determine the rate of production; that is, they work towards completion of everything collectively, the idea being we spend very little aside from buying the equipment they need to mine, harvest, and build. So I've come to you. Help! The unintelligent undead don't work. They can attack, follow or guard an area nd have specific restrictions on what they will attack or refrain from attacking. The intelligent undead could probably work for you but most of them will cop an attitude after a while. Do vampires really build good fortress walls?
Templetroll 06-01-07, 12:11 AM	Undead are stupid, they pretty much need constant supervision or you'll have a sorcerer's apprentice situation on your hands. You can get undead to preform complicated tasks, but you need a lot of them, and specifically program them like those assembly line robot arms. Instead of a fortress, a dungeon sounds easier, how hard is it to dig a hole in the ground. It is only as difficult as you dont want it to collapse on you.
Templetroll 06-01-07, 12:51 AM	Eh, it would be hard to say all of that in the required six seconds, but I do believe it is possible. That said the wish would most likely fail straight out because of the requirement that, "that they will be able to stand until the ending of the world, no matter what duress they be placed under, and that all the doors will be open and unlocked until I see fit to lock and close them." The thing is you asked for it to be made from stone and stone can only withstand a finite amount of force. Wish isn't powerful enough to end the world so it can't be made to happen that way likewise wish isn't powerful enough to ensure that erosion or an adventurer with a adamantine axe won't show up in a thousand years so the only conclusion is for the wish to fail. Remember wish still has limits, it can't do the impossible (or indeed quite a number of possible things). I agree. The part about and that all the doors will be open and unlocked until I see fit to lock and close them would require the caster to close or lock or unlock or open all the doors in the town! That may have been what you intended but it seems odd. And no windows, either. That would be one stuffy place....:(
maharai23 06-01-07, 02:08 PM	Basic undead can be commanded to pick things up and carry them... They can be commanded to put things down. At the very least, they'd be competenct quarry animals. Further, packin' those suckers in like sardines and springing for an Awaken undead spell would help. Also, Incorporeal dead are too high an ecl generally, and against other undead, have limited effectiveness. Vampires are probably the strongest elite you can ask for, with the gaseous form, spider climb, bonuses to detection abilities, darkvision, and stealth, combined with good stat boosts and competitive attack ability. Ghouls, Ghasts, Wights, and even mummies aren't as efficient as skellies, but they certainly get the job done with intellect and strength. That said, many of these are unavailable to characters of lower or even mid level. Go with what you have, and round out the army with perhaps a few shadows (taking out living necromancers since 322 AD), if possible, and a small group of wights/ghouls, if possible... If you can create a vampire, so much the better, but don't count on it.
Viatos 06-01-07, 07:56 PM	I think I've stated twice in here that we already do have the intelligent undead supervision; thanks to the wonderfully silly mechanics of rebuking, I've got some shades, ghouls, wights, and a pair of vampires under my control. The way our DM runs undead is that they are capable of performing any simple task without restriction; they can be commanded to chop down a tree, rotate a turbine, et cetera, they're not limited to just picking things up and attacking. Perhaps I should have clarified this, but the way they're written in the MM simply states they're limited to simple commands, and you can break down things like mortaring and stonemasonry into a list of simple commands, which is what the supervising intelligent undead are for. The undead are also an awful lot more obedient then you guys seem to be giving them credit for; the vampires are haughty but content in their roles as grand overseers, and the wights and ghouls are smart enough to realize the sooner we get this done, the sooner they'll be turned lose on the other settlements. Collapsing the passes was a great idea. Too bad it's really too late now. I actually asked about that lyre earlier, our DM had a heart attack at the implications of using spells to boost checks and delay sleep and having a Bard make 144 days of 100 human laboring per day. He's a history and military buff, and he loves building nations and cities and armies and such, and things like that basically slap him in the face. In the world of DnD, there's always people who don't care what they're working with. Experts are in plentiful supply, there were some incidents along the way that demonstrated our total control of our undead and spread word about us enough that we're not having any trouble outsourcing. Actually, we're not having any trouble whatsoever now, it's been hammered out to everyone's satisfaction. Two experts and an intelligent undead per work group (a work group is about 20HD of mindless undead), with the experts on rotation, assure us 3x speed without a reduction in quality, and we're working on acquiring more - we just found the Leadership feats in Heroes of Battle, and our DM has graciously allowed us to use Undead Leadership as a prerequisite instead of normal Leadership. Undead FTW.
Maekrix_Waere 06-01-07, 08:02 PM	I listed Wish last as it should be a last resort. Stone Shape and it's ilk would be more suitable, but if you NEED a city done fast, Wish/Miracle is the way to go. The phrasing is in there in case you have an %&&*()$ for a DM who would find it humorous to make buildings that fall down as soon as citizens enter them just because you got them instantly for a chunk of EXP and a Level-9 Spell Slot.
Kradlo 06-02-07, 01:50 AM	I'm thinking of Cheapass Games "Give Me The Brain," a wonderfully silly card game about zombies working at Friedays, the fast food restaurant of the damned. The zombies have a number of tasks they must accomplish, and only one brain to pass around. One of the cards depicts a zombie with his hand thrust up to his elbow in the deep fryer, and his face contorted in a cry of pain. The caption reads, "Give me the brain... I have to use tongs!" Your zombies will make abysmally poor stonemasons. The skeletons will be far more dexterous, but being mindless is a serious handicap to a builder, even with intelligent supervision. But, if your GM lets you get away with it, go for it.
TarlSS 06-02-07, 04:05 AM	You can go into construction! Build castles for the local villains! Build stone houses at cheap prices to attract villagers! Use your undead hordes to batter down competition!
Templetroll 06-03-07, 10:28 PM	The way our DM runs undead is that they are capable of performing any simple task without restriction; they can be commanded to chop down a tree, rotate a turbine, et cetera, they're not limited to just picking things up and attacking. Perhaps I should have clarified this, but the way they're written in the MM simply states they're limited to simple commands, and you can break down things like mortaring and stonemasonry into a list of simple commands, which is what the supervising intelligent undead are for. . I bolded the part I thought was relevant. Under skeleton and zombie it also says, "... its instructions must always be simple, such as 'kill anyone who enters this chamber.' " They have no intelligence, they have no skills. Further, under the former it says, "A skeleton attacks until destroyed, for that is what it was created to do." Your DM has a great game for your group based on a variant of what those undead can do. I just don't see the support you read in the MM. I see the things that only point to skeletons and zombies being able to engage in combat, not work.