Can a caster Deliberately Fail Wrest Resources to produce adamantium?

Question

This is a request for a viability check on a spell combo to mass produce adamantium.

My questions are:

• Is this viable?
• Am I missing any negative consequences not accounted for?
• Is there a way to make the Adamantium Stable? I.E. No longer susceptible to Dispel Magic or Stone to Flesh, etc.

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Sequence of Events:

1. Cast Clone or Kidnap a Beggar to use as "Body Fodder" for Magic Jar.
2. Use Magic Jar on Clone Body or Beggar.
3. Cast the ritual Wrest Resources. Make sure you don't have the required skills to successfully complete the spell.
4. Let your current body be turned into Adamantium via the Flesh To Stone aspect of Wrest Resources.
5. Let magic Jar Expire, return to your original body.
6. Cast Restoration on yourself to remove the negative level.

Relevant Quotes:

Magic Jar

the host body is slain, you return to the magic jar, if within range, and the life force of the host departs (it is dead). If the host body is slain beyond the range of the spell, both you and the host die. Any life force with nowhere to go is treated as slain.

If the spell ends while you are in the magic jar, you return to your body. If the Spell ends while you are in a host, you return to your body.

Flesh To Stone

The subject, along with all its carried gear, turns into a mindless, inert statue. If the statue resulting from this spell is broken or damaged, the subject (if ever returned to its original state) has similar damage or deformities. The creature is not dead,

Wrest Resources

Failure: All casters take 6d6 points of damage and are exhausted. The primary caster is the target of a flesh to stone spell (DC = 16 + the primary caster’s Charisma bonus) but instead of stone the spell turns the caster into the resource used in the material component.

Backlash The primary caster takes 1 permanent negative level.

Reference Links:

• Clone - Used for the "Extra" Body necessary to pull this off with moral ambiguity. Spell target for Magic Jar.
• Beggar - Alternative spell target for Magic Jar - Evil Alignment Requirement.
• Magic Jar - Used to get out of our Adamantium body.
• Flesh to Stone - This is what we want to happen to us.
• Wrest Resources - The spell we want to fail.
• Restoration - Needed to undue the negative caster level post ritual.
• Stone to Flesh - A possible problem spell.
• What is a reliable source of Adamantium? - The whole reason were doing this.

Answer 1

This works, basically in its entirety, in any game that uses the occult ritual rules (which I would, as a general matter, recommend against, for this and sundry other, similar reasons).

• Using magic jar to take over a disposable body certainly works.

• Which of your own abilities you retain while using magic jar is irrelevant, as rituals are specifically designed so that anyone can perform them.

• Guaranteeing failure in the ritual casting is quite simple, as the wrest resources requires several DC 42 skill checks; unless you have a +22 bonus or better, you simply cannot succeed on those checks (remember, natural-20s do not auto-succeed on skill checks). Arguably you can choose to fail anyway, but you avoid the argument by just being incapable of success.

• Unlike skill checks, the rules explicitly allow you to voluntarily fail saving throws, so the flesh to stone effect is guaranteed to succeed.

  Voluntarily Giving up a Saving Throw

  A creature can voluntarily forgo a saving throw and willingly accept a spell’s result. Even a character with a special resistance to magic can suppress this quality.

• The flesh to stone spell used for turning the body into adamantine is Instantaneous, which is defined as “The spell energy comes and goes the instant the spell is cast, though the consequences might be long-lasting.” So there is nothing magically keeping the body an adamantine statue—that just is what the statue is. No amount of dispelling—not even a disjunction–is going to turn it back, because there is no magic to dispel.

  • This, however, assumes an extremely strict reading of the rules. The spell stone to flesh does not say it undoes flesh to stone; instead it says it returns a petrified creature to normal. A petrified creature is defined, per the game rules, as a creature that has been turned to stone—and adamantine isn’t. Which means that stone to flesh cannot do anything for this character.

  • Both miracle and wish serve as wild cards here, but neither has any written ability to help here: flesh to stone doesn’t specify either as a cure (as spells like insanity do), and neither addresses petrification directly (instead relying on their ability to copy stone to flesh, but as noted, that doesn’t actually help here). So using miracle or wish here would require using the “very powerful request” or “greater effect” clauses, which is of course entirely up to the GM.

• Healing negative levels is one of the things restoration is explicitly useful for. Nothing in the occult ritual rules says that the backlash cannot be healed, and the backlash is explicitly noted as a “minor debilitation,” and a save DC is given for removing any negative levels that might come from a backlash, so there is no reason to think these negative levels are special in any way.

All in all, this works out perfectly for you—as long as the rules are read in an extremely nit-picky manner with respect to stone to flesh. I suspect most GMs, however, are going to allow stone to flesh to work, and there is ultimately nothing you can do about that. Even breaking up the statues doesn’t prevent them from being targeted with stone to flesh—the body may be in a million pieces and quite, quite dead, but it won’t be adamantine anymore, either.

Answer 2

You don't need to deliberately fail. All you need to do is fail to meet the sky-high skill roll requirements. Keeping yourself in a state where you can't possibly make DC 42 checks in Knowledge (Nature), Knowledge (Geography), and Survival isn't hard, especially given the stringent limitations on skill assistance.

Mind, it's not entirely free. You're going to have to come up with 500gp worth of Adamantium per casting. It's going to cost you 1000gp in diamond dust for the Restoration. It's going to cost you 100 GP for the magic jar, and, for the non-evil path, 1000 gp for the clone. You also have to fail your save, but that's voluntary.

Dispel magic doesn't work, because Flesh to Stone is instant, rather than duration. Flesh to Stone is also 6th level, which means that Break Enchantment won't work unless it can be broken by either Dispel Magic or Stone to Flesh. Mythic Break Enchantment would do the job, but if someone is throwing mythic spells at you, you're probably already in trouble.

Stone to Flesh is... questionable. It targets either a petrified creature or a quantity of stone. If you're adamant, you're not a quantity of stone, and pieces that have been broken or sliced off (so that they can be forged into a golem) are no more a creature than a severed hand is (we will ignore certain necromantic constructs). Further, Flesh to Stone does not at any point reference the petrified state, and the petrified state itself specifically says that it refers to one that has been turned to stone (which, again, adamant is not). A DM may well assert that countering Flesh to Stone is what Stone to Flesh is for, and therefore that it works, but they'd also have to have ruled that parts taken off of the statue (like limbs) would still count as parts of the creature in question, in a way that is simply not so for parts removed from a standard non-petrified creature.

On the bright side, even if the DM does rule against you on Stone to Flesh, all is not lost. Very few people would imagine that casting Stone to Flesh on a hostile adamant golem would be a good use of their time, to the point that if someone is trying it, and there aren't hostile divinities involved, it's almost certainly because the DM is abusing OOC knowledge. Break Enchantment is more plausible as a tactic, but it has a casting time of 1 minute, during which the golem has an opportunity to lodge its objections to the process.

Also, if you're evil, there's a way of doing this that requires a lot less spellcasting. Find some wretch who won't be missed and apply appropriate levels of mind control or diplomacy to convince him that you're a friend. Teach him the ritual. Have him cast it, solo. Make sure that you hit him with something to drop his save bonus while you're at it, and perhaps something to feed him temp HP to the point that the 6d6 damage won't kill him outright. (If he's dead, he's no longer a valid target for Flesh to Stone.)

Of course, this is the sort of resource-gaining scheme that leaves traces, and can produce interesting complications. You have to find the ritual, you have to learn it, and given that the ritual is literally trying (however badly) to steal all of the adamant within an area whose radius is measured in tens of miles, it seems like the sort of thing that might attract attention.

Final caveat: for the ritual, the mineral/metal/gemstone must be "natural". As skymetal, adamant may or may not qualify, depending on the exact definition of "natural". It's probably okay, but your DM may disagree.