Level 9: #18
Chapter: Comic, Level 9 — Hotel Califormian
Rusty & Co.
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Oh, good. I thought her ear had actually come off.
That would be twisted.
But naw, Maddie just wanted to Bendz her ear a bit.
She was molting.
He wouldn’t have been able to bring it to her anyway. They haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.
Which, depending on the calendar, may mean it won’t arrive for centuries.
Hey, we got two pages in one day! Click “PREVIOUS” if you missed the last one.
Anyway, I wonder if Rusty can smell that Madeline’s armor suddenly isn’t made of metal anymore…
(Actually, how does that work? The spell is called Flesh to Stone, but the spell description explictly states that its effect extends to all carried gear.)
Thank you! I totally would have missed that.
And Rusty is a rust monster, but can eat all sorts of metals. . . precision is never a great desideratum with D&D names.
Yeah, but then there’s the Stone to Flesh spell, which can return petrified statues to whatever they were before (including the parts that were never flesh), but explicitly can also turn normal, was-never-a-petrified-creature stone into inert/dead (but edible) flesh, and specifically flesh, not any of the other materials that can be Flesh-to-Stone-to-Fleshed.
…Interesting. I definitely haven’t exploited this enough.
No way to exploit. Only normal, never-been-anything-else stone can be turned in meat. So turning equipped creatures in stone will never allow to turn materials like metal into meat.
And if my old master is a reputable source, you can’t turn simple meat into undead. But you can feed it to fungi and slimes to grow them.
Is there a limit to the scope of Stone To Flesh? Can… Can you turn a >mountain< into meat…?
When used on non-petrified stone, the spell has a limit of “a cylinder of stone from 1 ft. to 3 ft. in diameter and up to 10 ft. long” per cast, which translates to 148 cubic feet (4.2 cubic meters), corresponding to 9250-ish pounds of meat (4200 kilograms). According to the rules, a Medium-sized creature like a human needs about 1 pound of food per day, so this would let you feed… a lot of people. Certainly far more than other spells like Create Food and Water, Heroes’ Feast, or Goodberry, which are a little unclear about how much food they count for (Goodberry says it provides as much nourishment as a “normal meal”, but fails to mention how many normal meals per day people are supposed to eat, while Heroes’ Feast, while listing the numerous benefits of eating the food it produces, completely fails to mention that it’s any good for providing actual nourishment), but probably cap out at only a few pounds per cast, so Stone to Flesh is the clear winner in terms of efficiency (provided you have 6th-level spell slots and don’t care about anything other than making food), though the monotonous meat might get tiresome after a while.
Clearly you could convert a mountain with enough repeated casts of the spell, but it would take an impractically long time. Considerably fewer sources list mountains’ sizes by volume rather than height, but if we suppose a relatively modest perfect-mathematical-cone-shaped mountain 1 kilometer high with a slope of 30 degrees, it would have a volume of pi cubic kilometers, which would take about 750 million casts of Stone to Flesh to erode – not counting that cylinders aren’t a perfect shape for packing into a larger volume. A 20th-level sorcerer with 28 Charisma (18 base, +5 from levelups, +5 permanent bonus from a Tome of Leadership and Influence) can cast Stone to Flesh up to 28 times per day. 10000 20th-level sorcerers (where are you going to find those?) would take about seven-and-a-half years to dismantle the mountain at that rate. So yeah, it could be done, but it’s not practical. For one thing, the meat would start rotting by the time you’re done.
On the other hand, that’s normal mountains. When used on creatures, the spell just has an effect of “one creature”, rather than a particular volume. So if you can find a mountain-sized creature made of flesh (try looking in the epic-level monster list), you can turn it to stone and back to flesh again as often as you want. (By a careful reading of the rules, I don’t think this trick works if the creature started out as a mountain golem – even though it’s one creature, since it’s natural non-petrified stone, the “148 cubic feet at a time” rule applies. A generous GM might let you get away with it, though. Then again, a generous GM probably wouldn’t make you fight a mountain golem.)
You can’t remove the mountain, but you *can* dig a tunnel through it easily. Meat is a lot softer than rock after all. Also you can use it to breed swarms of flesh-eating monsters quietly, without being noticed until you have enough of them to unleash on an unsuspecting world, and then the adventurers who come to punish you will have to crawl through a dungeon made out of rotting meat walls, which is always cool.
Transmuting stone to flesh on industrial scales is by far the simplest way to justify the existence of the vast, densely-populated cave systems which underly so many fantasy settings. It neatly explains both how an ecosystem with no sunlight supports so many large carnivores, and how such a volume of rock was removed faster than geological processes could fill it back in.
Wait until checkout time and she finds out that wine basket was the ‘mini fridge’…
But then, they can checkout anytime they want but they can never leave, so it doesn’t matter
What happens when you check out, then? You get the bill, tehn have to stay in the lobby until you decide that you want to check in again?
I had always assumed the song’s reference to “check out, but never leave” involved one’s spirit cannot leave after they die…
Can you imagine an eternity of being stuck listening only to Eagles songs?
How dare he find something better to do!
(And with that their plans start to unravel. . . remember, she was in the last page.)
She must have a ‘detect fun’ sense. Or a ‘detect adventure’. Or ‘detect hijinks’. Or similar.
“Mulled wine?
They haven’t had that spirit here since… 1969 FR.”
– The Captain
But they do have pink champagne…on ice