What is the cheapest way to get permanent flying for a party lower than level 11?

Question

Since I do not want to spend all my spell slots for flying to make my party able to fly in fights I am looking for a way to grant them flying permanent or for a long time.

Actually I wanted to make a staff Overland Flight and cast this every day two times on them but I just saw that with the wand creation feet I can only load spells up to level 4, whereas Overland Flight is level 5. Unfortunately I cannot create a staff since I am level 9 and not 11 yet.

I am a Wizard 9 (Archmage 3) and have Crafting Mastery. We do not have so much money so I am looking for a cheap way to accomplish what I have written above.

Answer 1

You have two options, depending on which body slot you want to use:

Lesser Wings of Flying, shoulders slot, 11,000 gp for permanent flight speed.

Winged Boots, shoes slot, 8,000 gp for 3 times per day fly for 5 minutes each use. Which should be more suited if you desire to fly in combat and not travel while flying.

Both are cheaper alternatives to a wand of fly (if you can), as it would cost at least 10,500 gp to craft, and would be spent after maybe 10 or so battles, not to mention the actions used to cast it on everybody. But they will hog the group's resources if you need to craft four of them.

To be honest, the spell you want is Mass Fly, but it should be available only at 13th.

Bring the flier down

Another, and much cheaper solution, is to bring the enemy flier down (unless for some reason you do require everybody to fly), and there are both mundane and magical ways to obtain this (but some are subject to gm fiat), such as nets, bolas, tanglefoot bags, Dragoncatch Guisames. And even spells, like Burdened Thoughts.

With an Harpoon, you could grapple and bring down a flier if any of you happen to land a critical hit while attacking with it. As per rules of grapple grapple, they are forced to immediatelly move towards your position.

Answer 2

Consider getting everyone a Pegasus mount. There are rules for buying and training them (3000-4000gp each), but doing so counts as slavery, so:

The proper method to convince a pegasus to serve as a mount is to befriend it with diplomacy, favors, and good deeds.

so basically you're petitioning your DM for a side quest.

You could also go for Hippogriff mounts which do not count as slavery; you can straight-up buy them for 5000gp.

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In terms of magic items, I want to note that a staff of Overland Flight is not a great solution: you need to expend your own spell slots to recharge the spells cast from the staff, so if you're planning to use it every day, it's equivalent to just preparing Overland Flight in all your spell slots. You could try making a bunch of Pearls of Power V but that's pretty expensive (crafting cost 12500gp).

Answer 3

If you have a Cleric/Oracle/Druid/Alchemist in the party or a reasonable Use Magic Device check, you can use a wand of Air Walk. 70 minutes is better than 5 minutes of fly, and wands are reasonably cheap as far as magic items go (10,500 to craft). It's not as good as an active item or something to cast Overland Flight, but it may be a good compromise.

Answer 4

There is no cheap way to do this.

As you stated, you cannot use a Wand for this purpose and even Staves are really quite impractical due to their limited charged and recharging rules.

Permanency cannot be applied to Flight and most magic items that grant flight in some way start at around 30,000gp. Far our of your price range!

As such, I'd like to just recommend investing in a Wand of Fly. You should be able to craft one using only 5625gp of raw materials. The casting will last for five minutes, plenty to get through a combat, and if you have multiples then you can even hand them out to other characters with Use Magic Device to speed up the pre-combat buffing.