Magical Magic That Feels Magical

14. Heart Of The Beast:  Cast this spell on a slain monster’s heart (or reasonably equivalent organ or portion), then consume it.  At any time, you may take the devoured creature’s shape, once, for 10 minutes.  You will retain some physical mark of this transformation afterwards.

Once again, Taichara hits it straight out of the park!

UPDATE: Ok, I posted too quickly.  Here are some thoughts:

Heart of the Beast is clearly meant to allow you to assume the shape of creatures, but "monster" can be an ambiguous term; could the truly unscrupulous use this to mimic a murdered person?

Can you use Skyclad in conjunction with The Stars to Guide You?  I'd certainly allow it.  

Creepiest Spells in 5e D&D

I’ve grinched before about the lack of magic in 5e’s magic system. The spells themselves blow hot-and-cold. Too many simply do damage with only the thinnest veneer of flavor or, a favorite trick of 5e’s, do damage and have a secondary mechanical effect; Guiding Bolt, for instance, which does damage and gives the next attack on the target advantage.

But then you’ve got gems like Hunger of Hadar or Crown of Madness which are full of creepy atmosphere. In Hunger’s case it’s largely cosmetic (at the end of the day it’s largely just plopping dangerous terrain that is impossible to see through, another favorite trick of 5e’s).

While none of these rise to the level of Raggian twistedness, there are still times when a little extra creepiness fits the tone of an encounter or an adventure. Collected here are the spells I consider the creepiest from 5e.

Do note that this is a very personal list. It’s based on my own preferences and on how I normally see D&D run. For instance, flame spells ought to be horrifying. Even the lowly Flaming Hands spell is, in effect, getting hit in the face with a flamethrower. But burns in D&D land don’t work like burns in the real world, to the point that meeting someone who’s actually badly scarred from getting 3rd degree burns just yanks you out of story; burns don’t cause permanent scarring in D&D, certainly not if they’re healed via magic. No matter how many times the red dragon breathes on you, an eight-hour nap is all it takes to shake off the worst effects.

Likewise, just doing necrotic damage isn’t enough to warrant a spot on this list. Nor is acid or poison damage, as horrifying as that ought to be. Repeatedly going to those wells has reduced all of that to mere lost hit points, easily regained.

I’m also ignoring charm spells for the most part. Sure, those are creepy if you really think about it, but most players don’t when they’re at the table. They’re difficult to adjudicate and their potential for creating drama at the table (rather than in the world) is high, so they deserve their own discussion.

Still, that does leave us with a number of spells creepy enough to fit an already disturbing atmosphere you may be trying to maintain and deepen. Let’s take a look:

CANTRIPS

You’re going to be seeing numerous mentions of Xanathar’s Guide to Everything because that book punches above its weight when it comes to atmospheric spells. Among them is the cantrip Infestation. Yeah, mechanically, it’s just some poison damage and a forced move (that doesn’t provoke opportunity attacks), but if you’ve already talked up all the creepy-crawlies in the dungeon, this one is sure to get a reaction from bug-phobic players.

1st LEVEL

Armor of Agathys and Hellish Rebuke both have a nice write-up and both fall into the school of stop-hitting-yourself spells. I’ll admit, the write-ups for these spells are ok but not terribly creepy; they’re mostly on this list for their power to make players stop and re-evaluate their tactics which, I think, magnifies their otherwise meh-level creepiness.

Crown of Madness goes beyond most charm spells. It’s not just mucking about with someone’s impressions, but full on, “You are my puppet! Now kill your friends!” The FX are just icing on the cake. If the barbarian fails his save on this one, sure, he won’t be raging, but the rest of the party will radically shift their priorities until this is no longer an issue.

2nd LEVEL

Not much here. Melf’s Acid Arrow ought to be spooky, but it’s just more damage of the acid type rather than, “ARRRRGH! It’s burning through my face!”

3rd LEVEL

Hunger of Hadar combines blindness (even for those pesky races with darkvision), difficult terrain, and nasty damage with some excellent FX. Even more effective if you add some panic by telling players they have no idea where the edge of the Hunger is, and they blindly stumble about trying to escape.

4th LEVEL

Blight is mostly here for its ability to kill plants. It’s a straight up “Look how toxic I am!” thing that makes the practical application also the cool FX.

5th LEVEL

Cloudkill is on the list because it invokes the horrors of mustard gas and the first World War. It’s the spell to use if you want your bad guys to prove just how vile they are by turning it on entire villages or mobs of protesters or the like.

Contact Other Plane is a classic, and probably the only spell in D&D that reminds players that magic is something mysterious and dangerous. Really wish the game had more like it.

Danse Macabre and Negative Energy Flood are both from Xanathar’s and both here because they create undead. Negative Energy Flood is slightly creepier in my book because it animates PCs killed by the spell, pre-empting attempts to bring them back from the dead.

6th LEVEL

Create Undead does exactly what it says on the tin. That’s always great if you play it up right.

I love how Flesh to Stone in 5e is a slow, creeping process. Sure, it means you’re more likely to save out of the effect, but it’s also got this great, gradual body-horror thing going on that it didn’t have before.

Soul Cage is from Xanathar’s and is another lovely baddie spell, allowing you to not just steal a soul (and possibly pre-empt resurrection) but then torture that soul in multiple useful ways. All your darkest baddies should have a soul in their pocket for use with this spell. Preferably the soul is connected in some way to the PCs.

7th LEVEL

Finger of Death is here because it turns those it slays into undead. That’s always a fun, creepy trick to pull on your PCs. Power Word Pain is all about the FX; be sure to cast it on the character of the hammiest player in your group, who will delight in acting out just how their character reacts to its tortures.

8th LEVEL

Like Hunger of Hadar, Maddening Darkness blinds even those elves and half-orcs and the like who have darkvision. Alas, it doesn’t actually cause madness, and for that it nearly got dropped from this list.

Abi-Dalzim’s Horrid Wilting, from Xanathar’s, is Blight turned up to 11. The FX on this one is to kill every non-creature plant in a 30’ cube, and that’s on top of whatever other damage you do to creatures. Again, the message is that whoever casts it is toxic as hell and doesn’t give a damn about collateral damage.

9th LEVEL

Xanathar’s Psychic Scream literally makes people’s heads explode. What’s not to love?

Weird probably works best for smaller, more intimate games, where you spend a lot of time in the heads of the PCs. You can have a lot of fun forcing the PCs to confront their deepest fears with this one.

So that’s my list of creepiest spells in D&D. It’s pulled almost exclusively from the warlock and wizard list, so I may have missed some gems from the druid and cleric lists. Let me know which I missed, please.

Painting by Pieter Claesz. Not sure who took the gas mask photo.

From the 5orcerer's 5croll: Concentration and Spells

WotC was, shock and surprise, really rolling out the red carpet for 5e at GenCon. One of the best parts was getting to listen to Mike Mearls and others on the team speak about their intentions for the game and why they built the rules the way they did. I hope a lot of what they talked about is in the DMG because there’s some stuff that seems (inadvertently) designed to trip up us old-timers. If you basically treat all RPGs as additional rules, gear, and monsters to bolt onto some version of Basic D&D from when Reagan was president, then you’ll want to keep your eye out for these things.

Magic is one of the big ones. I’ve already discussed the changes to how preparing spells and spell slots work. Mearls, however, pointed out a few things I’d missed that are probably more important to how 5e is supposed to play at the table. So, in the spirit of “5e is always right,” I’ll be combing through my notes and sharing what I heard with y’all here.

One change that’s huge is how 5e handles concentration. Nearly every spell that lasts longer than 5e’s six-second round requires concentration. Concentration isn’t that limiting; you can still fight, run, drink a potion or whatever while you concentrate on maintaining a spell.

One thing you absolutely can not do while concentrating is cast another spell that also requires concentration. This is huge because most (though not all) buff spells require concentration. This means stacking buffs (like bless and enhance ability) can only be done if you’ve got multiple casters. Gone are the days when the party’s lone cleric would start every fight casting bless and prayer and whatever else buffs, stacking a pile of +1 and +2 bonuses on the rest of the party.

This is part of streamlining the game. One of the things advantage/disadvantage (and I’ll be talking more about that later) does is remove the chained arithmetic that plagues older versions of D&D: +1 for you STR bonus, +2 for being specced, +1 for bless, +2 for holding the high ground, -4 because your foe is invisible…

So, with a limited number of buffs, and most situational modifiers handled by advantage/disadvantage, it should be a lot easier to judge whether any given roll is a success. This shaves seconds off every player’s turn in combat and minutes off every combat.

There’s more to concentration however. If you’re killed or KOed, you lose concentration. Also, if you take damage while concentrating you have to make a Constitution save and the target number is 10 or half the damage you took, whichever is higher. Fail and the spell goes poof.

This isn’t just a big deal for buffs because a lot of spells that used to be fire-and-forget now require concentration. This includes the various “wall of…” spells and those like it, like web. That’s right, stop concentrating and your wall of sticky webs vanish and whatever was trapped in it is free. I don’t know about you, but that radically changes how I assumed those spells worked.

But wait, there’s more! Check out this bit from the spell flesh to stone (page 243 for those of you playing along at home):

A creature restrained by this spell must make another Constitution saving throw at the end of each of its turns. If it successfully saves against this spell three times, the spell ends. If it fails its save three times, it is turned to stone…

Yep, turning someone to stone is no longer a quick, save-or-die roll. I think all the old save-or-die spells have been changed this way. Mearls said he wanted to end the anticlimax of facing down the ancient dragon in its lair, only to have it fail a save in the first moment of combat and end the fight right there.

I’m not sure how much I agree with that goal, but it certainly makes those spells a lot more exciting and dramatic in combat.

Spell-slinging in 5e

During the playtesting for 5e, I never DMed and I never played a spell-slinging class. Most of my play was with a low-level monk, a class I don’t think I’d ever played before. It was neat, and did a good job of introducing me to the basics of 5e as they evolved through the playtest. However, I completely missed what they’d been doing with spellcasting in the game.

The writing of the rules is subtle but the changes are dramatic, and if you’re as guilty as I am about treating all later editions of D&D as just extra options and monsters to bolt on to the BX/BECMI rules, then these changes may come across as jarring at first. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

The 5e rulebook describes spell slots as “a grove of a certain size--small for a 1st-level slot, larger for a spell of higher level.” This sounds just like the spell slots we’ve always known and (sometimes) loved, but that’s absolutely not how they actually work.

A better metaphor for spell slots would be capacitors. A 1st-level spell slot holds enough magical juice to power a single 1st-level spell. A 3rd-level spell slot holds enough juice to power a single 3rd-level spell.

Yes, magic-users and clerics still prepare spells, but the number of spells and their levels are NOT based on your spell slots. Wizards prep a number of spells (that they have in their book) of any levels they know equal to their Intelligence modifier + their Wizard level. Clerics can pick from their whole list, but it’s about the same: Wisdom modifier + cleric level = number of spells you can prepare.

Now, why would you prepare spells in a ratio of levels that doesn’t match your spells slots? Because, while a 1st level slot doesn’t have the juice to power a 3rd level spell, you can use any higher level slot to power a single lower level spell. So if you really need to fire off another Jump spell (1st level transmutation), you can burn a 3rd level slot for it. (And yes, it uses the entire slot; you can’t cast three Jump spells from a single 3rd level slot.)

But wait, it get’s even weirder, because casting a spell doesn’t end its preparation. By that I mean, if your wizard has prepared Jump and they cast it, it’s still prepared! From a single preparation, your wizard could go on to burn every single spell slot of every level to keep casting the Jump spell over and over and over again.

So, the number of spells you can prepare (appropriate stat modifier + class level) is the breadth of your spellcasting ability. It defines your character’s magical flexibility. Your character’s spell slots define the depth of their magical ability; how many spells they can sling before needing to rest and recharge their magical capacitors.

This gives those classes unprecedented flexibility in spell-casting. You’re going to be seeing a lot more unusual spells prepared and actually used. (I expect we’ll also see a lot less angst and time spent in picking just the right spell list, too.)

But wait, there’s more! Because that’s just the cleric and magic-us- er, I mean, wizard.

Sorcerers work from a much more limited selection of spells known, based on their level. But there’s nothing in their description that mentions preparing spells. If you played any 3.x D&D this won’t be surprise to you. Bards handle spell-casting in an identical way (but do not get “sorcery points” that allow a sorcerer to use 3.x-style metamagic abilities to modify their spells).

The warlock, on the other hand, gets a set number of spell slots and each of those slots is at the same level. Combined with their Eldritch Invocations (largely power-boosts to particular spells), most warlocks are going to have a very limited number of magical tricks they’re very good at which they’re going to use repeatedly. Sorcerers are going to have a wider variety of spells, but still not as wide as most wizards and never as wide as clerics. However, the sorcerer is going to be able to do more with the spells they have in ways that will surprise people who think they know how those spells are “supposed” to work.

The changes are subtle in how they’re explained in the rules, but have dramatic effects on play, so you’ll want to take a closer look at those classes before you either play them or DM for them. The end result is greatly expanded flexibility across the board for every spell-slinging class while simultaneously removing the need for agonizing over every spell slot in advance for fear of not having just the right spell when it’s needed. While the changes were jarring at first (literally causing me to sit up and say, “What, what the fuck did I just read?!?”) I’m cautiously optimistic about how these will play at the table.

And now you know, and knowing is half the battle!

Whence Magic?

If you’re building a fantasy world, crafting the system by which magic will work is one of the earliest tasks to tackle. Anthony, over at of Pedantry, believes that magic and science don’t mix. He’s usually right, but it’s not always so. Magic, being utterly fictitious, can work in all sorts of ways, some of which are very compatible with science and others which are extremely not compatible science. Here follow a few broad categorizations of magic that I was able to think of off the top of my head.

The small man had tightened the slipknot around the pommel of his rapier and let the wire trail behind him, flexible as a whip. “I’ve grounded my sword,” he said. “Now any death-spell launched against me, striking my drawn sword first, will be discharged into the ground.“

- Fritz Leiber

Magic as science by other means: this is what most of us assume D&D magic is like. Wizards exert their exceptional intellects to understanding, binding, and commanding mysterious forces. This is magic as a sort of engineering of the mystical. It is easily compatible with science, and, in fact, will obviously overlap with that in many ways. Magic is just another force in the universe to be studied, like gravity, heat, or magnetism. It may retard science in some areas, since necessity is the mother of invention, but what science is done will almost certainly be practiced by wizards.

I learned—even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang—that the entities around me were of the world’s greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring minds into every age. I knew, too, that I had been snatched from my age while another used my body in that age, and that a few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds.

- H.P. Lovecraft

Magic as super-science: it would seem that super-science would be most compatible with science as a magical system. That is true only if the culture at large grasps the principles behind your super-science. If instead you have a fallen culture, or a culture that has stumbled across the artifacts of super-science but doesn't really understand how they work, science and super-science can clash horribly. History is full of sound scientific principles that were just plain wrong. In the age of steam, it was assumed that the human body could not withstand speeds greater than 40 mph. Concepts that we today take for granted (the existence of germs, the principles of magnetism and the flow of electrons, the mechanics of combustion) were all at one point anathema to the cutting-edge science of previous days. The greatest wizards in such a setting would be those with the most rigid of minds, slaves to dogma and ritual which would yield predictable and consistent results.

“And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien

Magic as language: in Tolkien's middle earth the key to wizardly power is knowing how to speak the languages of the elements. Gandalf and Sauroman cajole mountains and rivers, beasts and insects to do their bidding. In this world, power is based on relationships and the natural world is not a thing to manipulate but an entity. As such, science must be practiced with delicate care and respect. Too close an inspection of any natural phenomenon risks invasive rudeness, and the last thing you want to do is cause offense to something as potent as the West Wind or Mount Doom.

”Sir Gareth, do not sound your challenge yet. Until noon the Red Knight’s strength increases, after then it wanes, so if you will wait for a little the advantage will be yours.”

- Mallory

Magic as fairy-tale logic: simple, declarative statements that are true. I love this sort of thing, because it gives players all sorts of hand-holds to fiddle with, as well as interesting challenges to overcome. The troll cannot be killed unless you stab him in the heart, and he keeps his heart locked in a chest hidden inside his tower. The prince will remain a frog until kissed by a beautiful maiden. The ring can only be destroyed by the fires of the volcano in which it was forged. While such magic is internally consistent, as Zak points out, it’s inherently unscientific. There is no why; the rules simply are. The best wizards have a bard’s ability to recall detail and a lawyer’s instinct for finding the loopholes. There’s some overlap with engineers in these skills, but it lacks the universal underpinnings of science entirely.

And Ouphaloc, seeing the great craft and evil in the starveling boy, gave succor to Narthos and sheltered him. He dwelt for years with Ouphaloc, becoming the wizard's pupil and the heir of his demon-wrested lore. Strange things he learned in that hermitage, being fed on fruits and grain that had sprung not from the watered earth, and wine that was not the juice of terrene grapes. And like Ouphaloc, he became a master in devildom and drove his own bond with the archfiend Thasaidon. When Ouphaloc died, he took the name of Namirrha, and went forth as a mighty sorcerer among the wandering peoples and the deep-buried mummies of Tasuun.

-Clark Ashton Smith

Magic as alien knowledge: sometimes, knowing too much is dangerous. If we assume that the human mind developed as a specialized tool for understanding the three-dimensional world which our hands and bodies can most readily manipulate, it stands to reason that truly alien realms might utterly confound it. Indeed, thinking in terms such worlds require might even damage our minds in the same way that using a socket wrench as a hammer could break the tool. This is the magic Lovecraft writes about. Intellect, science, and knowledge are all counterproductive; the greatest wizard is the one who is already mad. The study of magic is aided by the use of hallucinogenic drugs, mind-numbing rituals, and physical deformations. Sometimes, this magic comes from outside our world. The sorcery of those who make pacts with demons is an example of this. However, in a Lovecraftian universe, the natural world explained by human science is but a thin and friendly veneer over deeper and hideously alien truths. The relationship between science and magic is complex; eventually, the two will overlap and at that point science and the civilization it supports will be obliterated.

Art by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Anthony Frederick Sandys, and Francisco de Goya.