In the AD&D rules, a fireball is a 40′ diameter sphere, which is 33,000 cubic feet. My longest played character, Griswald, got quite good at throwing them underground in what we called dungeon wars.

Under the castle evil was detected and the king order the lower dungeons sealed. When a few scullery maids disappeared, Griswald was tasked with finding out what happened.

Orcs, and many others were found. Griswald could not mount enough force on his own to dislodge them. It turns out there was an old tunnel in the hills that lead to the depths of the caverns under the castle.

Griswald mapped out the one level of the dungeon and knew where he could throw a fireball and have it not affect his troops. In all his casting, he only miscalculated once and only one friendly troop was injured a 5th level captain hireling, who ended up with a scar from his helmet failing it’s save and melting. Thankfully, that hireling is still a loyal member of the team.

The problem with using a fireball when it got so bad that the large number of incoming orcs and other baddies were defeating the available troops, is that all the wooden doors would be destroyed and Griswald’s forces would have to rush to put in new doors. Finally, Griswald was able to get some help from all the other high level characters in the campaign and we pushed on to the caverns below. Caverns so huge that a fireball could easily only affect the enemy. In my brother’s game, he has a Battlemagic Fireball which does the same 1d6 damage per level, but it is triple the volume. These caverns were so big, the player wizard that had that could throw those.

We then found a temple to Orcus and desecrated it. Orcus doesn’t like us. Not good when he is at least aware of your activities, let alone your name and address.

Dungeon wars came to an end when there was a great earthquake that hit the kingdom and effected such a large area that not only did the castle fall into the caverns below, but the orcs on the borders were weakened enough that Griswald was able to push a few smaller orc tribes out of his ducal patrimony that was overrun and abandoned in a civil war decades before his birth. Lots of fireballs were involved with winning and keeping that.

Fireballs, destroying enemies and causing friendly fire incidents for centuries.