Advice in Practice: On the Simulacrum Spell

I've talked before about what I think makes for effective games that keep players wanting more (namely listening to the players and establishing real stakes as described in this blog post), but I recently encountered a Reddit thread wherein the original poster was asking about advice for trying to limit the 5e version of the simulacrum spell. The rule for 5e simulacrum is that a given caster can only cast one instance of simulacrum at any given time, but those simulacra could use their one cast of simulacrum on the caster, creating an infinite army of wizards given enough time and powdered rubies. The redditor in question was worried about this "exploit," and was asking for advice.

While a lot of advice in the comments suggests, "go ahead and limit it, you're the GM," I don't find that satisfying, because I tend to think the inflection points of a thing are usually the most interesting part. So in keeping with establishing real stakes, here was my response. A specific example that is potentially broadly applicable; when your players can do something wild and creative that seems like it will upend your carefully crafted world, let them do it! But also, brainstorm the ripple effects this action will have. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and the world keeps moving while the players wait.

(Also, part of the joy of being a powerful wizard in any role-playing game system is doing wild, impossible things. Don't take that from your players!)

I replicate my response below:

As the DM, you are perfectly within your rights to limit aspects of the rules or setting. That's technically the end of the discussion, although I might canvass the entire player group and see what they think.

But personally? I wouldn't limit simulacrum. I'm usually in favor of whatever nonsense my players want to do.

However, there is always a cost.

Each casting of simulacrum costs 1,500gp and takes twelve hours, which means you can functionally only cast it once per day despite your spell slots. (If your characters have folded time or don't need to sleep, then maybe you get two castings if you have the spell slots. Wish obviously changes the calculus of these assumptions, but it does that anyway.)

That means your magic-user's clone army takes weeks to amass. If anything else is happening at the moment, it continues to happen while they're doing this. If the other players don't want to wait, then they get to go have adventures while the wizard sits in their laboratory and makes simulacra all day.

And what about ruby dust? Your player might have plenty of rubies (a single "typical" 5,000gp ruby as described in the treasure portion of the Dungeon Master's Guide yields enough powder for 3 1/3 castings of simulacrum), but will probably have to get more to amass an army over the course of months. That means they have to go delving, or mining, or trading. How many rubies are in a typical settlement, anyway? A typical mine? Is the queen willing to pry every ruby out of her crown to power your simulacra?

All of this to say: the spell is not instantaneous, and it's not without cost. Casting simulacrum takes time and resources, the sort of large-scale project that someone notices and tends to engender strong opinions. What do the NPCs do when they realize a wizard is casting simulacrum over and over again? What do they do when they realize a wizard has 50 rubies on hand? (Worth at least 250,000gp; the GDP of whole city-states.) What do the other player characters do when they realize the wizard is going to spend the next two months blasting through their wealth to build clones?

Are things so quiet in the world that the characters can afford to wait while the wizard performs their Great Work in their ivory tower? Is there no political or religious organization in your setting that would be very interested in these activities? Is the villain merely sitting idly while the players gather a magical army vulnerable to antimagic?

I don't know the parameters of your campaign. But I do know that player decisions don't happen in a vacuum, and in high-level games, they have consequences. Big consequences. What are the consequences of this choice?

Play to find out.

A Lone Dungeon Room

Back in the spring of 2020, I was involved in an abortive project to present an Exquisite Corpse dungeon. As often happens in the world of table-top role-playing games, the organizer disappeared from the internet, a bunch of people left Facebook, and that appears to be the end of that.

Since I assume that project will never see the light of day, here's the room I contributed. (I present it as originally written, resisting the urge to edit the thing for length and clarity.) Stats are vaguely B/X-ish — if you're converting to another system, the most important thing to know is that a turn is ten minutes long. You can probably figure out the rest.

You could theoretically drop this room into any dungeon in a dead-end room containing a pool.

Chamber #8

Hallway: From Chamber 3, this is a stone archway wrapped with vines that leads into a relatively low-ceilinged arched hall with a bone motif cut into the stonework. The stones closer to Chamber 3 are mossy, with the occasional vine entwined among the carved bones. The stone door leading into Chamber 8 appears to be more recent than the surrounding stone. The door bears a flaking fresco of an androgynous blue-skinned being, clad in river grasses and pulling a dark-skinned man from a river. The man's right side is submerged while the being's left hand grips his left arm. The door (which opens into Chamber 8 so the hinges are not accessible from the hallway) bears two doorknobs. The doorknob on the right is false and trapped with magic; manipulating it requires a save vs. Spells, or else the victim begins drowning as brackish water generates in the lungs. The victim makes a save vs. Paralysis each round or dies from drowning. The doorknob on the left is locked, the key long since missing.

Room: This chamber bears frescoes depicting scenes of daily life in a village by a life-giving river. The two alcoves to the left and right of the stairs are stuffed with offerings of cordgrass and mangrove fruits, long since desiccated and rotted. The stairs lead down into a pool in which reclines an ethereal, androgynous humanoid with greenish-blue skin, clad in river grasses and muddy silt. This being is Streenadi, once a minor deity worshiped by the now-extinct River-People. Clerics conveyed the deity here for safe-keeping after the river was dammed and the riverbed dried, but the loyal priests died before their god could be safely retrieved. Streenadi will implore travelers to find a way to transport them from their prison. They must be at least half-submerged in brackish water (roughly 10 - 20 ppt salinity) at all times. If separated from brackish water for more than a turn, Streenadi will sicken and die. If the travelers can safely transport the deity to a suitable habitat (preferably an estuary, although any appropriately saline body of water will do), Streenadi will grant them a wish.
If the characters deliberately kill Streenadi for some reason, the murderers find water and fish salty and inconsumable thereafter, even if treated with purify food and water. (Alcohol is safer than water anyway.) A suitably sketchy magic-user might pay 3d6 × 100 gp for the river-god's corpse.

Streenadi: AC 5, HD 2 (7 hp), Move 120' (40'), Swimming 240' (80'), 1 claw attack: 1d8 damage (2d8 if the victim is in water), Save As: Fighter 4, Morale: 10, Alignment: Neutral.
Streenadi cannot be damaged so long as they are standing in water. They take double damage from fire. They can perform many minor magical workings related to their sphere of influence, such as rendering water potable or brackish and summoning nearby fish from connected waterways to themself. Once per year, Streenadi can grant a single wish.

The Chicken of Duplication

Although typically found in fantasy space, there is no reason why one couldn't find terrestrial Chickens of Duplication.

There are those who revere the divine entity called the Chicken of Creation, a deific chicken who birthed the world and all within it. (Some believe there are many such chickens, although whether or not there are many Chickens of Creation or merely one is probably not useful for most people.) Among its many progeny is the Chicken of Duplication, a semi-divine chicken of monstrous size. (As with the Chicken of Creation, it is unclear whether there is one Chicken of Duplication or several.)

The Chicken of Duplication is often found flying through other dimensions or even the void of space. If by some strange circumstance you need stats for one, your system probably has an equivalent of a Tyrannosaurus rex; just add a flight speed and you're basically all the way there. They typically don't bother astral ships or other large objects or creatures; they might approach a vessel and give it a curious peck before moving on. Of course, if the occupants decide the peck is an attack and fight back, they will face the full fury of this semi-divine chicken.

Lone travelers are in more peril, as the Chicken of Duplication is roughly as vicious as a regular chicken.

(For Chicken of Duplication stats in 5th edition-style games, I'd start with a regisaur, change the type to celestial, add a fly speed of 120 ft., and change the tail to some manner of stomp or talon attack, dealing slashing damage instead of bludgeoning.)

If the legends are true and there is only one Chicken of Duplication, killing it doesn't stop it: it is reborn in a few days from one of its own eggs. (And like a terrestrial chicken, it lays eggs periodically without fertilization. These eggs are often in remote places in other dimensions. As such, there might be many, many eggs that have not yet been found, and one cannot truly kill the Chicken of Duplication without finding and smashing every such egg.)

The divine beast is rarely seen, but the eggs are the primary reason why anyone knows or cares about it. (It's possible the "Chicken of Duplication" isn't even a chicken; if someone saw a giant chicken and someone else saw a giant hen's egg, a third scholar could have connected the two.) An Egg of Duplication appears to be a hen's egg that is a little larger than human size, somewhere in the seven-by-five-foot range. It feels like a hen's egg, too, although it is significantly stronger — cracking the shell requires a concerted effort, as the shell is harder than steel. It is vulnerable to acid, however. Destroying or cracking the egg renders it inert and kills whatever is inside. (Although if it has not yet been activated, it might produce a truly prodigious amount of yolk. Scholars and sages no doubt would have plenty of uses for the yolk and shell of such a potent celestial egg...)

However, touching the egg with bare flesh causes a reaction. The creature who first touches the egg is enervated, taking a handful of damage, ability score drain, a level of exhaustion, or some similar mechanic that would easily heal in a day or two. No further touches have any effect on either the egg or the person touching it.

If the creature is too large to be contained by the egg, the egg remains inactivated until a creature of the appropriate size touches it.

After being touched, the egg hatches in 1d6+4 days, producing a nude duplicate of the creature who touched it. The duplicate has the same statistics as the original at the time they touched the egg, and the duplicate likewise has access to all of the target's memories until the moment it touched the egg.

As far as anyone can tell, such duplicates have no sinister agenda. However, apart from being birthed from an egg, they believe they are the original, and so will no doubt be very confused and possibly upset by whatever happens next.

State of the Union

"Sir, a second state-run space research organization has released a tabletop RPG."

It was inevitable.

We have seen idiosyncratic weirdos and megacorporations releasing RPGs for decades now, so it was only a matter of time before nation-states became involved in the role-playing game hobby.

A couple of bits of role-playing game-related effluvia have come to my attention over the past few days, both of which were released by national organizations focused on space research:

1. Releasing earlier this week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration released The Lost Universe, an adventure clearly designed for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons but simple enough to transfer to your analogue adventure game of choice. The adventure is designed to be educational, covering information about the Hubble Space Telescope and various cosmological phenomena.
2. Releasing sometime in the past six months (I found a tweet from September about this game despite only hearing about it yesterday), the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan released Sandcastle, a full fantasy role-playing game system that they plan to use for outreach purposes while encouraging other organizations to do the same and likewise encouraging individuals to use the system for their own enjoyment.
   

What a difference fifty years makes, huh?

The Leap Yeap

Evansville Press, Indiana, February 5, 1912

The leap yeap is considered native to the plains of the lush world of Varasla, although scholars have documented the creatures on other worlds. A leap yeap appears as a cross between a rabbit and a kangaroo, albeit the end result is as large as a Clydesdale. Although the creatures roam wild across the plains, they have also been domesticated as mounts and pack animals and so may be found in settlements outside their native range. (For example, although they are not native to the mountains, travelers have found them to make good, sure-footed mounts in uneven terrain. Some long-haired varieties have even been bred for colder climates and higher altitudes.)

Although they tend to be skittish rather than aggressive, the occasional leap yeap-related death is not unknown; their hind legs can deliver a powerful kick, and their claws are sharp enough to disembowel victims.

BECMI-style stats:

No. Enc.: 1d6 (5d6)
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 180' (60')
Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 3
Attacks: 2 (1 bite, 1 kick)
Damage: 1d4/1d4
Save: F2
Morale: 6
Hoard Class: None
XP: 50
Leap yeaps are skittish animals, found both roaming in herds or alone as mounts. They can leap up to 30', and often do if frightened—a riot of stamping feet and screeching.

5e-style stats:

Leap Yeap
Large beast, unaligned
Armor Class 13
Hit Points 22 (3d10+6)
Speed 50 ft.
Str 13 (+1), Dex 17 (+3), Con 15 (+2), Int 2 (-4), Wis 11 (+0), Cha 7 (-2)
Skills Perception +2
Senses passive Perception 12
Languages —
Challenge 1/2 (100 XP)
Standing Leap. The leap yeap’s long jump is up to 30 feet and its high jump is up to 15 feet, with or without a running start.
Actions
Kick. Melee Weapon Attack: +3 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (2d4+1) slashing damage.
Bonus Actions
Skittish. The leap yeap takes the Disengage, Dodge, or Hide action.

FIGHTS WILL BE BATTLED

Mike Mearls started a Patreon, which of course reminded me of the majesty that is Fight Battle. My friends and I have been laughing about Fight Battle for over fifteen years, and now so can you!