join in on my first sandboxy game ever, run by a friend of a friend

>It turns out the only feasible way to construct a space elevator is to resurrect Alexander the Great and get him mad enough to invade the moon.

>Some Americans decide to launch a tablet that reads "Darius was here, Alex is a loser" to the surface of Mars and see what happens

>Alexandria on Mars by 2021

Alexander didn't build a bridge, fuckwit. He built a mole, an artificial peninsular which when completed connected the island of Tyre to the mainland.

Getting back to the douchebaggery posed by the OP's moron of a DM, you aren't going to be building a 10-40km long bridge with classical/medieval technology. Even Xerxes "bridge of boats" at the Hellespont won't fit the bill.

The problem will have to be solved by magic.

Actually, the Romans did it, using wood, simple mechanics, and their concrete. It's actually a fairly simple method:
Get a shit ton of tree trunks, build portable walls from them. They need to be high enough to be above the high tide line, and to sink into the river bed enough to provide support.
Make primitive pumps. A series of Archimedes Screws is what the Romans used early on.
Get a barge big enough for your equipment, and choose the location for your mid-span supports. You can build them one at a time, so don't panic if you don't have the funds to build all of them at once.
Make sure you have ladders.
Start dropping your walls, in the shape of a box. Attach them at the corners to make sure they don't collapse. You'll keep adding supports against the river flow as you go further down.
Start using the screws to remove the water, building troughs attached to the walls so you can keep moving the primary screw further downwards, with more screws for each trough. If you want, you can build screws with the greatest length the materials allow, meaning you have to build less troughs. Also do what you can to waterproof the walls. Water flow is your enemy.
Get down to the bottom, and dig out the riverbed there. Pour your concrete, with a slot for the forms you need for your bridge supports. Let it cure. Build up your forms, pour concrete, let cure. Keep going until you reach the height you need. If this river will be a major shipping lane (if we go with the fucking huge Nile in OP's post, it will be), them make sure a minimum of two of your supports can handle the weight of a drawbridge, with a big enough distance between them for ships to pass through.
As you finish supports, pull the walls so you can use them again. Build forms and scaffolds to build the actual transit structure of the bridge.
Open the bridge and make bank off the tolls.

Admittedly, the Romans never built a bridge that long. This technique was most often used for making their docks, but it did see use for bridge building. In some occasions, the supports were pre-poured and cured in sections, with holes to allow structural connectors between them.

Let me reiterate the most important point and the point you're deliberately ignoring:

TEN TO FORTY KILOMETERS.

It's not a mole. It's not an aqueduct. It's not a dock, breakwater, dike, dam, or canal. It's a BRIDGE which has to cross a 10 to 40 km wide "river". It's akin to building the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel with classical/medieval technology.

Of course the idea of a 40km wide river is complete nonsense, not that the idiot OP's moronic DM could understand that. Portions of the Amazon come close, especially during the rainy season when the river floods the lands beside it. Most of that "river" width in that situation is actually swamp which could be "crossed" by dikes and causeways.

While the Amazon's mouth is 300+ km wide, it's also full of islands and swamps so a bridge crossing the river there would actually be a collection of bridges and causeways connecting preexisting islands and crossing swamps.

TL;DR - The OP's DM is a moron and the OP is too stupid to call him on it.

Okay folks, I'll bite the bullet and ask the question.

How would you go about building a 20-something kilometers long megabridge with late Iron Age levels of technology and, dunno, Greyhawk levels of magic? You do have access to huge pool of resources, can hire mages, necromancers and buy magical items, but, obviously, the less you spend the better.

Yeah, I know I'm posting a pier.

I think the OP is just happy about his upcoming game, and surprised at the amount of resources the characters are - supposedly - going to command, man.

Although if I ever play with you, I'll remember to get my rivers straight.

Magic.

youtu.be/MEAdskdbn3E

Building a bridge can't be that hard......

What kind of magic and how powerful would the magicians involved have to be?

Moses level wizard, split water, build bridge, close water, easy peasy

So, a mid-level druid and mid-level wizard working together then.

>mid-level wizard

Even easier would be catching/summoning/bribing a water elemental and an earth elemental.

Oh great powerful elemental of water please parts these waters for us, oh great elemental of earth.....bridge pls

Would be done in a day

In 3.5 druids get Control Water at 7th level, and Wizards get Wall of Stone at 9th level.

>Shit_that_never_happened.png

It's even poorly-written. Just ugh.

You don't get my reference, do you?
Youjo Senki is pretty much about the war between God and a Japanese salaryman turned smug loli who tipped his fedora so hard it caught God's attention

Sorry. I'm not a pedophile, so I don't watch anime.

Let me tell you about christmas cakes

Me again now that I have elementals stuck in my head,

Would it not be possible to bound small or tiny air elementals to act kind of like suspensors for the bridge super structure, that would then remove the need to remove the water first or even add supports at all, plus you'll be left with a pimp looking floating bridge of magic

These are all good starts. The OP's group will have to build this bridge with magic. Pilings, screw pumps, caissons, concrete, and all the rest aren't going to get the job done.

I wasn't even aware you were trying to make a reference. I just thought you were poking fun.

>all of this happened in a single session
>a single session where 3 people were late to it and it still had enough time for him to do fuckloads of shit
oh well at least it's a funny story

>Not playing from 14 to 23.

At a 10~40km river, magic will be the only way to do it, but why stop at just a bridge, why not go all the way and have a magical 'monorail' for what of a better word, using carriages pulled by the undead, who will never tire, running back and forth 24/7, you could even expand that to run a non-stop transport network for the whole kingdom

Carriages pulled by corpses would never be fast enough, even if you used dead horses. To span that distance quickly you'd need an alchemist to transmute a shitload of giant lodestones to make a crude maglev system across the entire river.

Ahh yes, but undead are a whole lot simpler to create/replace, slow and steady wins the race user, plus the hire fees plus the cost of the loadstone will massively eat in to your profit, 10,000 gold on wizards and loadstone or free stolen corpses who will never join a union

Question, why not save Time and Money buy just having some docks build at either end and have an assortment of boats to haul shit across?

This river is wider than the shorter area of the English Channel. It's harder to cross a fucking river than to get from Britain to Continental Europe.

Just get a boat man, this user is right.

Boats = pretty nice

Magic floating bridge = fucking awesome + tourism revenue

>stuck somewhere for over a year
>story is good, but pacing is wack
>plagued with timing problems, person issues, hiatuses
>combat takes 3.pf years
>we've been on the "last part" for a few months now

as impractical as it is, how if you bight two parallel bridges with both having slight angles pointing to opposite shores. then rig up some rails (or if you want to have fun with it water pumps) and you can then ride gravity down and across the river

Can we turn this in to a general fantasy engineering thread, I don't want to start a whole new thread just for it to charge straight to page 10, so general magical engineering thread?

that sounds like a great Idea, I've enjoyed this thread a lot so far

Are you assuming that this nonsensical 40km river wouldn't have islands too?

>the DM is known for doing shit like hotswapping DnD for Rogue Trader

Epic tweest shit like this is just sad.

I've all ways had a thing for undead 'automation' but it's incredibly hard to pull off with out seeming like 'le ebil necromancer', I just like the idea of swapping menial monotasks to undead slaves, farming, mining, even in the use of machines like looms or grind stones

For a moment, let's ignore conjuration, portals, and growing/shrinking objects, since those tend to break logic the hardest.

Even without those, magic would make construction of an insane bridge easier. Artificial islands could be made by briefly stopping the river and moving earth from elsewhere/taking stone from another part of the riverbed and raising it as pillars.

That depends on the circumstances. The Romans were known to build incredibly long bridges by just building one arch after the next until they were across. In theory, there's no limit to the length of such a bridge.

The problem is that it severely limits navigation of the river, since no ship taller than the arches can pass through.

You could go one step further with geomancy, you could just raise land on one side (where you are) and span the whole river in one large stone arch, dropping down supports when ever you need too, the main issue I for see is travel time, at 40km wide and the average walking human pace of 4km/h your looking at a 10 hour river crossing at best

Farming in particular requires a lot of small tasks that mindless undead are unsuited to.
You require intelligent handlers to:
>Identify when to plant or harvest
>Tell the difference between a bee and a locust, and to eradicate the latter
>Identify and remove dying or diseased plants, to reduce needless labor
etc

Mining, too, requires intelligent handlers to direct the menial mindless workers.

With mining though I could see it as 3 separate groups, the first group of undead to basically stop mine non-stop all ground in front of them, then a second to 'human' chain the spoil up to the surface, and then the last group with an intelligent handler sorting the material in to useable/valuable/refineable

And with farming I agree with you, especially when it comes to the backbreaking labour like ploughing, cultivating and other related tasks

I do also enjoy the idea of an undead mass transit system, undead horses who never tire moving goods and freight up and down the kingdom with a sentient/human/golem driver to handle the delivery paper work

I always like the idea of a magically inclined civilization that summoned Earth Elementals to go into the ground and pull the ore itself out of the ground instead of having to do all that messy "mining" stuff that puts peoples lives at risk.

Of course, in the case of mass transit, you need to make more skeletons to replace the ones that wear out. But horses are easy to make.

For mining, it might be wise to have a handler in the mine proper, to push the miners towards useful ore, instead of just scripted tunnels or random movement. A group to build supports might also be wise.

But what lives are at risk if your work force is all ready dead?

But wouldn't an elemental get a bit pissed in having to give up part of 'it's self' to assist in your magical mining operations?

Ahhhh I forgot about supports for the mine, even with a handler with each group you would still only need say one or two handlers for say 20 undead miners if not more

Also on the subject of horses that would open up a whole new industry as your subjects strive to selectively breed a horse with larger/denser bones to increase the longevity of the undead horse highway

Oh sit I didnt know that guy was showing up in this thread....

How do you do sandbox right? I never got to play a long term one because the GM would end it because lazy or just being a faggot.

okay so what if you just bound an ice elemental to freeze the top layer of the river and have it esquort people across?

Water would go over the ice from the sides that aren't reachable by the elemental wouldn't t?

Plus you have the more blatant fact that it's pretty difficult to move on ice at any pace, unless you some how manage to equip your party with skates first

ice elementals in the form of huskies on a bobsled?

Or even better, have two ice elementals form two separate bridges, both with slight downward angles and create ice slides across the river, fast and effective

...

>How dare a tabletop game be unrealistic!

>how dare you not read the whole thread

We've moved well past Captain Anal and his hatred of fun

Why go over the river at all?

Pretty much like this but using wooden cranes + pile drivers made out of baskets of rocks, and several hundred people.

>trade
>traveling time
>invasion

Why cross a river irl

Fuck.
youtube.com/watch?v=MEAdskdbn3E&t=4s&ab_channel=TopGear

It would be much more expensive to dig holes. Now if you mean flying, not impossible.

Instead of flying, how about we turn true ocean going ships in to air-ships with the power of magic and friendship. Then we could become pirates of the air, raiding across the seven skies wherever adventure may take us

I don't think it's a Final Fantasy Campaign user, though that would be cool.

>tfw ffxv campaign never

The op stated it was a sand box game, so we can become what ever we want to be, now won't you join me for high adventure on the good air-ship Titanicus

If I didn't work nights, or have to post from my phone, I'd be quite happy to run a FF-inspired sandbox game, possibly using the 3.5 eberon books as they include some nice tech stuff, we could play by post, if any one was interested that is

Just wait till it's finished and the trolls start moving in.

Snack, who do you think BUILT this fucking bridge?

I've never played by post before, how does that work?

It's more collaborative creative writing with the dm leading the narrative, with very few dice rolls, that's the way I've all ways played any way, plus it allows the story to continue even when people are not all ways able to get online all together, so one session could be spaced out over a few days to a week with players posting if and when they can, like I previously mentioned, I work nights (UK based) so for me to actively play a game is near on impossible as I'm either asleep when every one else is available or I'm having to post from my phone at work

That's like building a bridge across the Strait of Dover (33km)

Apparently a tunnel is easier

>Plays a game with dragons and magic
>user draws the line at a 10km wide river

Imagine what's across the river. Or what else lies in the dangerous unseen world.

Damn it user, now I'm get sucked into Caesar's hype machine over his tactics in Germany again. Asshole wrote his propaganda two thousand years ago in a different language and I STILL have a hard time not buying into it.

With sand.

Lots of sand

Why not rocks? I'm sure if you threw enough rocks into the water, it'll eventually create a floor that rises up to surface.

You can do either, or really. Topple a mountain and use it's corpse to construct a sturdy base across the water body and then put dirt and sand across the top of the rocks to produce a land bridge. The bonus is if the land bridge is wide enough, it can have things built ontop of it, roads, stores, inns, homes, farms, ect.

Good idea. Large amounts of moving water will never be able to overcome a wall of sand spanning the entirety of a river.

Umm, can I join?

Is it possible to just siphon it dry? What kind of technology is capable of that though.

Keep an eye on the game finder general thread over the next day or so, I need to fix my Skype so we can actually organise something, or post your contact details now and I'll keep you informed

>>Plays a game with dragons and magic
>>user draws the line at a 10km wide river

No, it's more like this:
>>Plays a game with dragons and magic
>>user draws the line at bridging a 10km wide river WITHOUT USING MAGIC

Understand?

>With sand.

Already suggested and refuted. Alexander built a CAUSEWAY not a bridge. A bridge lets the river keep flowing. Causeway, if it isn't washed away, becomes a weir.

The water has to go somewhere.

They could create a kingdom that runs on all the water they took out.

Have you ever tried Discord?
I can do skype, but Discord has been a lot less fucky for me since I started using it.

I can do discord, I'm not too fussed either way

How do you figure? That's an insane amount of water to be diverting.

Can I join even if I know nearly nothing about FF?