You and your party (7-8 level) have just finished clearing out a big dungeon that used to be the domain of a really powerful badass wizard a long time ago. During this dungeon crawl, you come upon several very large doors made of a rare and expensive metal alloy. After getting back to town, you learn that the material these doors are made from make them worth upwards of 50,000gp each.
So, you have 9 10’x20’x2" metal doors, 16000lbs each, scattered around a big multilevel dungeon complex complete with teleporters, spiral staircases, and an underground lake. How do you get them out and back to town?
edit: a few more details. The nearest city is about 4 days away, overland partly through a swamp. At least one of the normal openings of the dungeon is very close to the sea. The nearest city is pretty big, but 15th level is the highest level caster available for hire. You’ve got about 50,000 gp available if the party pools all of it’s money together.
Is that 15th level caster for hire able to summon a fire elemental? If so, summon elemental (fire), melt doors into a more convenient shape/containers, hire labor to grunt them out to the chartered boat…
That’s just over 3 gp per pound, and under 1 gp per pound per day of travel. That’s assuming you could sell it all for full price. Because, really, who’s in the market for such things?
Not worth the (considerable) effort, IMO. Move on to the next adventure and make some money and XP there.
And let’s not forget that you might have a wicked DM who’d take into account the effects of your flooding the market. Sure, Door #1 might sell for 50K gp; by the time you’re trying to unload Door #8, it’s more like 250 gp. (And for that, I am doing you a favor!! :D)
I’ve done that before. Transmuters are very good at stealing things even if they are nailed down, like adamantine portcullises.
Lets see… you’ve got a total of 300 cubic feet of material, weighing 480 pounds per cubic foot.
Looking at the Pathfinder SRD, a Portable Hole costs 20,000 gp and holds up to 280 cubic feet of material. The best Bag of Holding costs 10,000 gp and holds 1,500 pounds or 250 cubic feet, whichever is lower. In this case, the Portable Hole is vastly more cost effective.
You’d need to be level 9 to cast Fabricate yourself, so you’ll need to use scrolls or hire a wizard to come out with you - I’d suggest the former. For minerals, you need one caster level per cubic foot per casting, so it costs 125 gp per cubic foot to transmute the doors into a convenient form - i.e. ingots. You could transmute them straight into useful items but they’d take up more volume in your Portable Hole.
If you’ve got 50,000 gp and you’re spending 20,000 gp on the Portable Hole, that leaves 30,000 for the scrolls. This is enough for 240 caster levels worth of Fabricate, or 240 cubic feet of material. Since this is smaller than your 280 cubic feet of Portable Hole space, you could feel free to spend the last few scrolls producing bulkier items like weapons and armour.
All up, this technique means that you can spend 50,000 gp to retrieve 360,000 gp worth of ingots, and you get to keep the Portable Hole afterwards.
I realize that it’s prolly not the best idea, but we’ve been talking about it just to see how feasible it might be. We know that we’re prolly going to be seeing more of these alloys in the future, and it would nice to have a whole door’s worth of something normally used to make small items with.
I like the Fabrication spell though, might have to pick up a few scrolls of that. I think Treasure Stitching might be more cost effective for transportation than Portable Holes.
I’d be fine with that. Just selling that first door gets you your money back, so there’s no disadvantage to just holding onto the portable hole and the remaining ingots until there’s another opportunity to sell.
I didn’t suggest Treasure Stitching because I wasn’t aware of the spell, having come from 3.5 where it does not exist. It is cheaper and can carry more, allowing you to transmute and transport the full 300 cubic feet for 38,725 gp, but it’s a single use spell, meaning you can’t just sell a few ingots here and there as you saturate demand - it’s all or nothing, unless you buy another scroll.
True, but you only need to get it all out once, assuming you have a place where you could reasonably melt down the doors. Or, find someone willing to buy them in bulk to melt or to use for their own purposes. You might lose a little on the transaction, but less than it would cost to melt them down before transport.
Hell, you could build an incredibly sturdy house out of them to live in, if you wanted.
You have to convert them before transit: a 10 foot by 20 foot door is too large to fit on Treasure Stitching’s 10 foot by 10 foot cloth, and the 16,000 pound weight per door means you couldn’t get them all on the one cloth anyway.
Treasure Stitching is superior if you can sell over a hundred thousand pounds of metal in one place on short notice, but it is not reasonable to assume that this is the case.
If the doors are impressive enough, could you perhaps shop them around to a king or emperor or major merchant’s house or something? There may be someone who would pay top GP to get some impressively intimidating architecture delivered, and having a set of them might be excellent for them. If you hinted that you’d offer them first dibs on other wonders you find in the future, they might even deal honestly with you.
Yes, it does have Shrink, but it would require a 17th level caster to do one door.
One of the things about the doors is that the alloy is particularly difficult to make. It’s part steel & part Djezet, a metal that is liquid at all temperatures. It takes serious skill to make it do anything but sit there. The alloy behaves as steel in all other aspects. It’s being treated as an art object because it’s basically a prestige item, and doesn’t have much practical use.
It would take 36 trips with the heaviest wagon to transport the metal, and that’s after you’ve moved 65 tons of metal to the wagon-accessible parts of the dungeon.
Stand them up.
10’x20’x2’ means that nine of them will fit on two carpets that are 10’x10’ with room to spare along one of the dimensions. Of course, you have to be able to move them, but you don’t necessarily have to break them down.
Well, first thing that comes to mind is Floating Disk. (Floating Disk – d20PFSRD) If you have a 7th level wizard in the party using six of her spell slots on it, you could haul 2100 lbs for 14 hours a day. Pretty solid, especially if you don’t have access to beasts of burden.
Looking through the Pathfinder SRD, though, I see Ant Haul as a potentially very useful spell for this situation (Ant Haul – d20PFSRD). If you decide to go the wagon route (which, really, is by far the most cost effective) it could greatly cut down on the number of animals and wagons you need. With properly designed wagons it could triple your efficiency.
If you decide to go with wagons, don’t forget to buy food for the animals. That’s exactly the kind of thing a cruel DM would punish you for forgetting.