â˝Â A night market has appeared on WrA, nestled in Revendreth. Have some unconventional wares you canât sell without being side-eyed? Are you a rather unconventional vendor looking to sell your merchandise and not get questioned by the guards for âsuspicious activityâ? Look no further, you are most welcome here.
â˝ A partnership between <The Sanguine Order> and the@fence-macabre âbrings another spooky market and hopes youâll join us in the Shadowlands!
â˝ We’re looking for vendors! Brand new faces have priority in our vending applications! Cross-faction and Cross-server are welcome! Anchors are always available!
So could you slap him with someoneâs dismembered dead hand?
Sure, if the arm in question somehow became severed without human intervention â if you deliberately cut it off, it would qualify as a weapon made by living hands!
What if the party necromancer made zombie blacksmiths?
Technically the weapons would still be made by living hands as living hands made the zombies that made the weapons
If weâre allowing arbitrary nesting of âmade by living handsâ, it all comes back to the particular metaphysics of the universe. If something counts as made by living hands if it was made by something made by living hands, then it might actually be invincible if the setting has theistic origins and its creator deity counts as âlivingâ.
Thereâs also the question of âmade byâ – everything within (speed of light)*(time since nearest origin of life) has been influenced by the existence of life, and thus everything could be said to be âmade by living handsâ in the sense that it did not exist in present form without the involvement of life (even if âpresent formâ just means a passing photon or two ruffled some electron spins).
Personally, I tend to go with Nobilis rules on that count: from a metaphysical standpoint, actions taken by a magically animated or compelled subject are considered to have been performed by the party doing the animating or compelling. So if I were running this scenario in a tabletop RPG, Iâd allow the âzombie blacksmithâ loophole, but only if it was an intelligent and free-willed zombie blacksmith acting without magical compulsion of any sort.
(I would also make the zombie blacksmith a cantankerous prick, because if they just help you out of the goodness of their rotten heart, whereâs the fun in that?)
Push them into a volcano?
This is probably overthinking it, but if I had to justify the wandering phrasing in the original post from an in-character perspective, what Iâd likely go with is that the Evil Overlord is trying to be poetic about a prophecy that doesnât translate well, and the only thing theyâre really sure of is that âliving handsâ are somehow involved.
Which is to say that pushing them into a volcano wouldnât work, because that involves âbringing them lowâ (i.e., causing them to fall) using your hands (or an implement held in the hands, at any rate), but kicking them into a volcano is a plausible workaround.
(You could probably also get away with using your hands if you managed to contrive a means of death that involves ascending rather than falling, if youâre really determined to do things the hard way!)
What about a Warforged, of its own free will, created the weapon?
Does the weapon have to be created with the intent of being a weapon? (For instance, killing them with a rubber duck bath toy or pool noodle.)
If the weapon is prestidigitated whole cloth, does that count?
Does weaving count as âforgedâ? (Carbon fiber bat.)
You could probably also get away with using your hands if you managed to
contrive a means of death that involves ascending rather than falling,
if youâre really determined to do things the hard way!
Teleporting them ABOVE the volcano would then work, as any somatic component of the teleport doesnât bring them low, it raises them up. However, since thereâs nothing under them– gravity does the dirty work.
