Hear ye, hear ye!
Tales From the Tables is back with episode 52: Lady Mage of Waterdeep, part 2.
Apologies, not very meme-y this time, still submitting for the sake of completion and popular demand :)
Our intrepid adventurers befriend Laeral Silverhand, and get to know the fames Lady Mage of Waterdeep from a different, personal side.
It's very much a Laeral special, lovingly consulted with the man, the legend, Ed Greenwood. It saddens me that so many D&D players only know Laeral superficially, if at all.
"Ruler of Waterdeep"
"Oh, she's a powerful wizard and very old, isn't she?"
And that's about the extend of most players' knowledge...
She's a truly fascinating character who's walked Faerun for over 7 centuries, with beautiful, oft heart-wrenching stories to tell. I do hope my little hints at but a handful of events from her past will encourage a few people to at least read up about her on the Forgotten Realms Wiki, or better yet, reach for the many amazing books by Ed Greenwood or Steven E. Schend.
It's 3000 GP just for the material components, plus another 400 to pay the caster. At one gold piece a day (the amount a skilled artisan earns) it'd take 11.5 years to earn a clone with a poor lifestyle (2 SP per day).
So you're living a poor lifestyle for basically half your professional life, just to earn the ability to repeat your professional life and spend another 11.5 years of it earning the ability to repeat your professional life just to spend 11.5 years of it earning the ability to... you get the idea. You'd also need to find a caster capable of casting an 8th level spell, which is rare.
Possible? Yes. Popular? I doubt it.
23 years. I'm assuming you're going for Squalid living conditions rather than Wretched, so you can only save half your money. But you'd still be able to afford Poor conditions for most of your life. If that's not worth it, why even bother the first time? Just do the minimum it takes to get to a good afterlife, like go grab a sword and go on a suicide mission for a good god.
Of course, really what you'd do is spend 3.5 years saving up 250 gold, then learn a tool proficiency, and now you're a skilled worker and can live a Modest lifestyle and save 1 gp per day, and save up the rest of the money in 2 years.
How do you know how much to pay the caster? I thought 5e didn't have an equation for that. Adventures League has a few spells you can buy, which mostly follow the equation level^2 + 2*consumed component cost + unconsumed component cost/10. Using that, Clone should cost 2840 gp (including components).
I remember offhand it being 50 GP per level of the spell you want to cast, though I can't say where in the PHB I read that.