There are a couple of spells that have shown up in Aurikesh for which I promised actual rules “sometime soon,” which apparently means today. Since those two spells don’t a satisfying post make, I’ve added in a few more ideas.
Protection from Moonlight
3rd-level abjuration (bard, cleric, druid, paladin, ranger, sorcerer, warlock, wizard)
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Components: V, S
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 hour
For the duration, the willing creature you touch gains resistance to radiant damage and ignores the effects of exposure to moonlight.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 4th level or higher, you can target one additional creature for each slot level above 3rd.
Summon Genie
3rd-level conjuration (bard, sorcerer, warlock, wizard)
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 90 feet
Components: V, S, M (a brass oil lamp worth at least 150 gp)
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 hour
You call forth an elemental spirit from the courts of the genies. It manifests in an unoccupied space that you can see within range. This corporeal form uses the Genie Spirit stat block. When you cast this spell, choose a genie type: dao, djinni, efreeti, or marid. The creature resembles a Medium-sized version of a genie of your choice, which determines certain traits in its stat block. The creature disappears when it drops to 0 hit points or when the spell ends.
The creature is an ally to you and your companions. In combat, the creature shares your initiative count, but it takes its turn immediately after yours. It obeys your verbal commands (no action required by you). If you don’t issue any, it takes the Dodge action and uses its move to avoid danger.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 4th level or higher, use the higher level wherever the spell’s level appears in the stat block.
GENIE SPIRIT
Medium elemental
Armor Class 12 + the level of the spell
Hit Points 35 + 10 for each spell level above 3rd
Speed 30 ft., burrow 30 ft. (dao), fly 40 ft. (dao, efreeti, and marid)
or fly 90 ft. (djinni), swim 60 ft. (marid)
STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA
17 (+3) 12 (+1) 14 (+2) 14 (+2) 12 (+1) 16 (+3)
Damage Resistances acid (marid only)
Damage Immunities poison; fire (efreeti only); lightning and
thunder (djinni only)
Condition Immunities charmed; petrified (dao only)
Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 12
Languages Primordial, understands the languages you speak
Challenge – Proficiency Bonus equals your bonus
Actions
Multiattack. The genie makes a number of scimitar attacks equal to half this spell’s level.
Scimitar. Melee Weapon Attack: your spell attack modifier to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 1d6 + 3 + 1d6 + the spell’s level force damage (dao only), lightning damage (djinni only), fire damage (efreeti only), or acid damage (marid only). If the target is a Large or smaller creature within 5 feet of you, the genie pushes that creature 5 feet away from you and can choose to enter its space.
Mighty Smash. Each creature in a 15-foot cube originating from the genie must make a Dexterity (dao, efreeti) or Strength (djinni, marid) saving throw. On a failed save, a creature takes 3d8 bludgeoning damage (dao only), thunder damage (djinni only), fire damage (efreeti only), or acid damage (marid only).
Bonus Actions
Master’s Call. The genie teleports to an unoccupied space within 5 feet of you.
Winterpetal Rite
3rd-level abjuration (ritual; bard, druid, warlock, wizard)
Casting Time: 1 minute
Range: Touch
Components: V, S, M (one winterpetal flower, typically worth 50 gp,
which the spell consumes)
Duration: 1 hour
A protective magical force surrounds you and up to six other willing creatures. Each creature other than you with an Intelligence of 4 or higher rolls a DC 15 Intelligence (Arcana) check. Creatures that succeed this check, as well as you and creatures with an Intelligence of 3 or lower, gain 5 temporary hit points for the duration. If a creature hits you with a melee attack while these temporary hit points remain, the creature takes 5 cold damage.
Additional Components. For every additional winterpetal you spend as a component in this spell, the spell grants an additional 5 temporary hit points, to a maximum of 25 temporary hit points.
Baleful Starfire
4th-level evocation (warlock)
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 120 feet
Components: V, S
Duration: Instantaneous
When you cast this spell, the baleful stars flare brightly enough to be seen in daylight. One creature of your choice within range makes a Charisma saving throw. On a failure, the target takes 5d10 radiant damage and is blinded until the start of your next turn; they take an additional 1d10 damage if you use a bonus action to speak their name immediately before you cast this spell, and an additional 1d10 damage if they can see the night sky.
On a successful saving throw, the target takes half damage and has disadvantage on the next ability check, attack roll, or saving throw it makes.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 5th level or higher, the damage increases by 1d10 for each slot level above 4th.
Mythbreaker
7th-level enchantment (bard, warlock)
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 60 feet
Components: V, M (a scroll describing the target’s legendary deeds)
Duration: 1 year
This dire curse severs part of a creature’s connection to its own legend. Choose a creature you can see within range that has the Legendary Resistance or Legendary Action traits, or has 15 or more class levels. If you choose a creature that isn’t a valid target, you lose your action, but the spell slot is not expended. The creature rolls a Constitution saving throw, a Wisdom saving throw, and a Charisma saving throw, and for these saving throws, Legendary Resistance grants a reroll rather than an automatic success.
If the target fails three saving throws, it loses three Legendary Resistances and two Legendary Actions for the duration of the curse, and spells you cast ignore its Magic Resistance trait, if any. For the duration of the spell, it takes an additional 3d6 psychic damage each time you deal damage to it. Legend lore spells to learn about the creature receive almost no information.
If the target fails two saving throws, it loses two Legendary Resistances and two Legendary Actions for the duration of the curse, and spells you cast ignore its Magic Resistance trait, if any. Legend lore spells to learn about the creature receive reduced or garbled information.
If the target fails one saving throw, it loses one Legendary Resistance and one Legendary Action for the duration of the curse.
If the target kills you while the curse is active, the curse’s duration becomes 100 years. A remove curse spell cast to break this curse must be cast with a spell slot of a higher level than the one you used to cast this spell.
Thirsting Lash
3rd-level necromancy (sorcerer, warlock, wizard)
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 30 feet
Components: V, S, M (a squid’s tentacle)
Duration: Instantaneous
You lash out with a tendril of dark energy toward one, two, or three creatures in range. You can make three melee spell attacks, divided any way you choose among those targets. On a hit, you deal 2d8 necrotic damage. Half of the damage you deal becomes a pool of hit points that you can spend as a bonus action to restore hit points to yourself or a creature you touch. If any points remain in this pool 1 minute after you cast the spell, they are lost.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 5th level or higher, you deal an additional 1d8 damage on a successful hit for every 2 slot levels above 3rd.
Design Notes
Protection from moonlight came about because moonstone dragons deal radiant damage. The PCs weren’t fighting the moonstone dragon, but helping it hatch, which was just as dangerous. The warlock’s patron gave her this as a bonus Spell Known to help.
On a related note, why on earth doesn’t protection from energy allow extra targets when upcast?
In general, of course, you just don’t need that much resistance to radiant damage, but I think we’re seeing a little more radiant damage from new monster/NPC stat blocks. This would be a middling spell choice at best for a warlock if it hadn’t been given for free.
The Aurikesh PCs got a scroll of summon genie sometime back, and I needed to get it written. Here it is, very similar to both summon elemental and summon fey, but (hopefully) just different enough from both to have its own interesting usage. Probably needs some additional work, tbh.
Winterpetal rite is an experiment in ritual group buffs with expensive components. The Aurikesh PCs have this, and a limited supply of winterpetal. They haven’t used it yet, as far as I recall. It’s a group version of armor of Agathys, with a different mechanic for temporary hit point scaling and no damage scaling.
Baleful starfire is a remake of Thirteen Baleful Stars in the 4e PH warlock. I had to tweak it a bit further because my first draft was excessively close to Raulothim’s psychic lance. It’s still pretty close, frankly, but I hope its oddities distance it enough to be its own thing. I like that it has some peripheral effect beyond damage on a successful save.
Mythbreaker is just taking a cool item name from Shattered Isles and thinking about what that might be as a spell. I think of it as interacting with the current direction of legendary and mythic creature design.
Thirsting lash takes the lifeleech thorns concept I wrote in a post last year and bringing it down in level. A key part of my goal was getting rid of concentration; one of the major problems Kainenchen is having in picking spells for her warlock is that so very many warlock spells require concentration. (Also part of my thinking for baleful starfire.)
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Summon Genie is a great addition to the recent line up of Summons, and I’m not just saying that as a player that will be taking it out for a spin soon.
Winterpetal Rite falls in the same territory, but between the rare component and few occasions when we know we are going up against a tough fight in advance, haven’t been able to bring it to bear yet.
More spells are always fun.
I really like the story implications of Protection from Moonlight. I don’t remember how lycanthropy interacts with moonlight in 5e (if it does at all), but the idea of casting this spell on a lycanthrope to either revert them to their humanoid form while under a full moon or prevent them from changing is really cool.
Summon Genie is more or less fine I guess? I think it might be a little boring honestly. Though I like the material component. This would be a fun spell to give to a genie patron warlock.
Winterpetal Rite is a cool buff but seems weak given the material component cost and the level of the spell. I dunno, I’m not a great judge of spell power honestly. This just seems like either the damage or the temp HP could be increased in the base spell and still be on point.
I really like the story and conditional modifiers of Balefire Starlight. The spell makes me want to know more about the balefire stars and makes me think that this is a spell that would be limited to a specific warlock patron (patron-specific spells are something that I wish all patrons had).
The visual image and effect of Thirsting Lash are really good. Arcane spells that allow a caster to fill the healer role are always going to grab my attention. This would be a great spell for a “white” necromancer.
I have to say that I really do not like Mythbreaker. Especially the idea that you can only break the curse if you use a spell slot higher than the one used to cast it, so if a caster uses a 9th level slot it is unbreakable? It is already really hard to design monsters to challenge high-level PCs without giving them the ability to remove the abilities that are designed to increase their challenge. I don’t think the current evolution of Mythic or Legendary monsters is particularly good either, but this spell seems like a bad way to handle it. Giving PCs more ways to deplete LR or LActions is probably a fruitful direction for design though.
I also kind of think that if the target of the curse STILL manages to kill the caster while under the curse it should either break the curse (because the target has proved their legend) or do something like preventing the caster from being returned from death (because the caster died ignobly to a creature with no legend). Punishing the target even more for being able to succeed despite the curse just seems counter to the actual intent of the spell.
Fun read as always.
Differentiating the genies while also stripping them down to an acceptable power level is… not the easiest. The things that distinguish the core genie stat blocks are mostly spellcasting and can’t “fit within” a third-level spell slot. =/
The core of Winterpetal Rite’s strength is in its Ritual tag. It’s otherwise underpowered for sure.
The concept behind Baleful Starfire is the evil stars and planets of 4e – Hadar, Acamar, Delban, and so on. It’s present in 5e lore, particularly in the lore sections of the Star Spawn in Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes. You probably already know this – I just don’t have a lot else to offer you right now.
My goal for Mythbreaker is to create something you CAN do to alter your dynamic, especially your narrative dynamic, with a legendary monster. There’s an arms-race effect in play there to some extent, because there are so many one-save lockdowns at high levels (Stunning Strike with a giant pool of ki, Forcecage, whatever). I think in general you don’t want a squishy spellcaster establishing a situation that further rewards the opponent for focusing fire on them. I’m not trying to tell you to like it, of course, just trying to talk out my reasoning.
I know that the current crop of summoning spells don’t give this option, but what if the summoned genie got more abilities when a higher-level spell slot was used to cast? The spell description and/or stat block might get kind of long (it might be worth writing up 4 different blocks to avoid confusion) but I think that would give the incentive to use the spell and a cool bonus for investing your summoned genie with more power. A genie summoned with an 8th or 9th level slot could be a powerhouse.
Honestly glossed over the ritual tag on Winterpetal Rite. More general question, when designing spells how much “power” do you think the ritual tag is worth? I have usually looked at it as an almost necessary evil for non-combat spells given player mindsets, but I had not really given it much thought when it comes to the assigning spell level step.
I love the 4e evil stars, they feature in my Spelljammer-esque home campaign. One of the current PCs is playing a Startouched, a homebrew ancestry that starts as a different species that has been exposed to the radiance of one of those stars, which alters their body and mind. So, always happy to see things that interact with those stars.
I understand some of what you are trying to do with Mythbreaker. High-level combat is full of lockdown effects, but most of them are PC abilities. The monster design of the game has moved away from save-or-die and save-or-suck effects for monsters because the current play culture finds them unfun. So giving PCs even more ways to shut down powerful opponents with a single spell slot just seems like a bad idea to me.
I also like to look at spells from a narrative standpoint. Mythbreaker seems like something that might exist in the world, especially given that you call out bard as one of the potential casters. A magical curse that destroys the legend of a powerful entity seems really cool, it has hints of No Way Home, which is great. One problem with the execution is that you call out that a character with 15 class levels can be a valid target, but then almost all of the effects rely on the target having access to LA and LR, which level 15 characters do not have. All level 15 characters are PCs, because monsters and NPCs don’t get class levels. So the spell just becomes an extra damage debuff when cast on PCs, hardly worth the 7th level slot, and certainly not in keeping with the narrative intent of removing a creature’s personal legend. Actually, looking at the effects, a powerful NPC caster who doesn’t have LR or LA might cast this spell on themselves to avoid having PCs be able to find out information about them through Legend Lore, which is a super interesting use case I had not considered.
As I said before, I think there is something worthwhile in this line of spell design, but I don’t think this is there yet. I would be curious to hear stories of the spell in action though. I do really like the Remove Curse requirement. I am really hoping that curses and Remove Curse get some better mechanics in the 2024 revamp. Bare minimum each curse spell should have some extra requirement to remove it other than just RC.
Summon Genie: The issue is presentational complexity, since you’d be giving four new spells – one per genie type – at each level that granted new spells. The summoned creature stat block is complicated already, and I don’t want to see that stretch out to a nearly a full page.
It’s hard to judge the ritual tag, but this is a ritual tag on a highly combat-relevant buff, so it’s already not the same kind of thing as most rituals. My goal is to get PCs interested in winterpetals as a treasure item that basically any of their spellcasters can turn into a useful effect.
I mentioned character levels in Mythbreaker with every intention of creating mechanics by which Mythbreaker could target high-level PCs, then forgot about that as I was writing. That’s pure error on my part and will be addressed once I’m out from under some significant deadlines. I hear what you’re saying about the spell’s other deficiencies and I’ll take those into account.
Hard agree on Remove Curse. Same for diseases and Lesser Restoration.
I totally understand the desire to avoid presentation complexity, but I don’t think you would need to make it that much more complex. Add an “At Higher Levels” rider at the end of the main spell explaining that the summoned genie gets extra abilities when the spell is cast using a 5th, 7th, or 9th level spell slot. I would divide the stat block into 4 different blocks at this point. Then add three new bullet points to each stat block, one for each of the called out levels, listing the new powers they get. This would still be a long spell on the page, but I think the uniqueness of the effect would warrant the length. A caster would only really be interacting with about 1/4 of the spell at a time.
Very much looking forward to seeing what you come up with for PC targets of Mythbreaker. I think making it a valid PC targeting spell adds a lot to the potential. If the villain successfully curses a PC do the PCs risk trying to kill them before lifting the curse? There is a lot of fun story to be had there.