Excavate (4E)

Excavate

You make a great excavation in the earth.

Level: 16	Component Cost: 2,900 gp
Category: Exploration	Market Price: 8,600 gp
Time: 4 hours and more, see text	Key Skill: Arcana
Duration: Instant

You can excavate earth and stone, creating tunnels and chambers. The ritual has a variable casting time; it takes four hours to start up, then one minute for each square you want to excavate. Remember to think in three dimensions; a 10 ft. cube takes 4 minutes to excavate. If you are interrupted while excavating, any work you’ve already done remains. This ritual is accompanied by a great shaking of the earth so it is very noticeable, and it is very easy to disturb; simply hitting the earth hard within 100 ft. of where you are excavating ends it. This makes it less than useful as a siege weapon, you generally need to have complete control of the area you want to excavate. The walls of the excavation are plain undressed earth or stone. They are buttressed, but if the ground is not solid or you crate too large chambers, it might still collapse after a time. The type of ground you can excavate depends on the result of the Arcana check:

Arcana Check Result	Type of earth you can excavate
9 or lower	Soft soil
10-19	Clay
20-29	Soft stone
30-39	Hard sedimentary stone like marble
40 or higher	Bedrock