Re: (TFT) Re: Melting points of caldrons

[srydzews@ix.netcom.com]

> Lava as it comes out of a volcano is about 
> 1150 degrees Celsius (+/- 25 C or so). 
>
> Cool! So how much damage does Lava do? 

Well...a lot.  It radiates so much heat that your clothes 
would probably burst into flame before it even touched you.
The superheated air around it would probably burn out your
lungs before it reached you.  Anyone touching it is pretty
much a goner.  To rate all this in dice of damage...I don't
know, how does 4d6 damage if actually in the same hex with 
the lava, -1 die per hex of distance, sound?

The Fireproofing spell is so broadly worded that I imagine 
it would protect you from lava.  You could walk right over
it, humming a happy little tune.  

> How hot is a fireball? Normal campfire? 1-hex Fire? 

Well everyone feel free to 'flame' me if I'm wrong, but
I'm not so sure that the deadliness of this stuff is
so much it's temperature as it's mass--I mean, if you
had a pile of wood or pumice or whatever that was this
hot it wouldn't be terribly danerous outside of it's own
hex.  It's the fact that it's thousands of pounds of 
high-density rock, all of which is radiating this 
heat, that makes it nasty.  

Isn't this the 'secret' of these firewalking guys?  It's
the fact that they're walking on light, pumice-y rocks
that saves them.  No way they'd be able to walk across a
slab of red-hot iron, or lava, even if it's nominal
temperature was the same as their pumice.

> How fast does lava move generally? 

It varies tremendously.  The fastest moving lava flow 
recorded in Hawaii moved at about 6 miles per hour.  
>From what I gather, this is extremely fast for lava 
outside of a volcano.  Inside a volcano, where it's 
still piping hot, it has been clocked at up to 35 
miles per hour (!)  Since the one end of the gate 
would be inside the volcano, you *might* be able to
get some darn speedy lava.

> In other words, if some mad evil wizard did try to create 
> this (and no group of adventurers were able to stop him 
> in time!) then how dangerous would this Lava-pot be? 

It would be insanely dangerous.  Since iron is denser 
than lava it would just sit there, buried in lava after
a few rounds, and be very difficult to get to in order
to shut it down.  The lava would harden after travelling
a certain distance, but I have little idea what the total 
radius is that would be destroyed.  I'd guess at least 
hundreds of meters around, although this would take days.

Say, if you had a lava flow feeding an eternal gravity-gate 
accelerator, you could launch lava at escape velocity, or 
even faster.  Space Volcanoes...

Yeah, it's these sort of shennanigans that caused me to put 
limits on gates in my campaigns.

Stan

"Fire the lava beams!"

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