#None of this matters too much tho either your GM lets you or they don't

[maeamian]

A fun thing you can do with the cantrip spell, shape water, is animate a continuously turning small water wheel for an hour, since the water needs to fit in a five foot cube, it can't be a big one, but given that it costs the casting of one cantrip and you can have two of the continuous effects happening at once, you can therefore animate a ten foot tall five foot wide column of water, and like, I'm not going to do the fluid dynamics because they fundamentally do not matter to the level of D&D's rules, but it's definitely an extremely simple technological achievement to extract *some* of that energy to do mechanical work, and what I am really getting at here is that with a pretty small population of wizards, sorcerers and druids capable of casting a literal cantrip, you could absolutely power a large city, either in terms of translating that into things like drop hammers and conveyors, or just demanding that your DM let you invent electromagnetism (less likely).

#Read an article that examined the adventuring uses #and that's cool and all #But no one ever considers the industrial scale uses of magic and that's an absolute shame #I was gonna do some math about it but honestly that's not really important unless you actually use it in game #And at that point the specifics of implementation will require a lot more scrutiny #as well as buy in from your other players #Also there's just flat out no mechanical text about the rate of rotation you can get out of that water #But given that you can make it turn independent of gravity that opens up a lot of interesting design choices #Like building a 5 foot wheel around the water and putting the spokes inward to get more rotational inertia from your wheel #None of this matters too much tho either your GM lets you or they don't #And like you can't get into anything without that buy in