Since Glen Terry asked for them in a recent comment, I’m doing more spells themed around Vecna, the Whispered One. I love spell design, and designing weird things you can do with high-level spells is an especially interesting space.
Vecna’s Spellbook | More Spells
Anoint Death Knight
8th-level necromancy (cleric, warlock, wizard)
Casting Time: 1 minute
Range: Touch
Components: V, S, M (a suit of plate armor, which the target can be
wearing)
Duration: 24 hours
When you cast this spell, you touch one willing creature, suffusing them with profane magic. For the duration of the spell, the target gains the following benefits:
- Its Type becomes Undead.
- It gains resistance to necrotic and poison damage, and gains immunity to the exhaustion, frightened, and poisoned conditions.
- It has advantage on saving throws against spells and magical effects not cast by you.
- The target and Undead creatures within 60 feet of it have advantage on saving throws against effects that turn undead.
- When it hits with a melee weapon attack, it deals an additional 3d8 necrotic damage.
- It gains 35 (10d6) temporary hit points, and regains these temporary hit points when it finishes a short rest.
Eradicate Lore
8th-level enchantment (bard, sorcerer, warlock, wizard)
Casting Time: 1 minute
Range: Self
Components: V, S, M (a scroll of hammered gold worth 1,000 gp, which the
spell consumes)
Duration: Instantaneous
When you cast this spell, choose one fact about a person, place, or thing. This fact might be widely known or a closely held secret. That fact can’t be learned through magic, including commune and contact other plane. Creatures currently aware of the fact must roll a Wisdom saving throw to retain the knowledge. Ability checks using the Arcana, History, Nature, or Religion skills automatically fail, and the DC to learn the information with an Intelligence (Investigation) check is 30 if it isn’t already higher than that. Creatures can still learn the fact from texts, or from conversing with other creatures that retain knowledge of the fact.
A creature’s name – the fact that this specific name refers to that creature – can’t be eradicated against the creature’s will.
At Higher Levels. If you cast this spell using a 9th-level spell slot, a creature that learns the fact rolls an Intelligence saving throw. On a failure, they slowly transform into a nothic over the next 1d4 months, unless they receive a remove curse.
Ethereal Vortex
6th-level abjuration (sorcerer, wizard)
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Self
Components: V, S
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
Arcane energies swirl around you, draining power into the Ethereal Plane. For the duration of the spell, you have resistance to force damage and psychic damage. When a creature other than you casts a spell within 30 feet of you, you can use your Reaction to make the caster roll a Constitution saving throw. On a failure, their spell is countered unless they choose one of the following:
- Spend an additional spell slot of the same level or higher, and everyone within 30 feet of you takes psychic damage equal to the level of the spell slot.
- They take psychic damage equal to three times the level of the spell, and you regain an equal number of hit points.
Rend Divinity
9th-level necromancy (sorcerer, warlock, wizard)
Casting Time: 24 hours
Range: Self
Components: V, S, M (golden reliquary worth 10,000 gp, which the spell
consumes)
Duration: 1 month
When you cast this spell, choose one god, or an Aberration, Celestial, Dragon, Elemental, Fey, or Fiend with a CR of 18 or higher. You must speak its name clearly, and it immediately becomes aware that you are casting this spell. The target rolls a Constitution saving throw, an Intelligence saving throw, a Wisdom saving throw, and a Charisma saving throw.
- If it fails its Constitution saving throw, the target gains vulnerability to one damage type of your choice. You can’t choose a damage type that it has damage immunity against.
- If it fails its Intelligence saving throw, the target loses any Blindsight, Truesight, or similar extraordinary forms of perception, and can’t cast spells of the Divination school.
- If it fails its Wisdom saving throw, the target can’t grant spells above 6th level to its followers, including clerics, paladins, and warlocks.
- If it fails its Charisma saving throw, the target can’t reply to commune, contact other plane, or gate spells for the duration of the effect. Attempts to contact or summon it with these spells fail.
Any Legendary Resistance spent to pass these saving throws can’t be regained for the duration of this spell.
If you can see the target of the spell and you are within 60 feet of it at the time of casting, the casting time is reduced to 1 minute. The target must remain within that range throughout the casting time.
Design Notes
I feel like I’m taking some substantial design risks here, so I hope you find that kind of thing compelling even if you decide that I haven’t nailed the power level.
Anoint Death Knight is just a way to tell a little bit of Kas’s story with a spell. It definitely doesn’t go well for Kas or Vecna here. I’m kinda thinking of this as Tenser’s Transformation and Holy Weapon rolled into one.
Eradicate Lore is about Vecna as a keeper of secrets. This should make it a lot more possible to, you know, do that. How do you hide things in a setting with legend lore?
Ethereal Vortex is about Vecna presenting you with situations where every choice is painful. It’s borrowing from the new version of Counterspell that came out in today’s Unearthed Arcana 2023 – Player’s Handbook 7 packet. Which I will, someday, write about in Tribality!
Rend Divinity is touching on the story of Vecna taking Iuz’s essence to attack Sigil in the late-2e Vecna adventures – and also about what kinds of cosmically awful things 9th-level spells might let you do. I doubt there are many cases where a PC would go through the work of doing this, but I don’t know your life.
I am, as always, indebted to Patreon backers and friends who reviewed the spells and gave me pointers for improving format and function. You know who you are.
You can now buy Under the Seas of Vodari in PDF!
Under the Seas of Vodari is a 300-page book that provides 5E/Fifth Edition material for both gamemasters and players to dive into a world full of action and adventure set beneath the waves of Vodari or your own campaign world. This book is a follow-up to The Seas of Vodari, a setting book filled with swashbuckling action and magical adventure. Dive into your first adventure today!
As with the previous offering from Vecna’s Big Book of Magic Tricks, these spells are flavorful and evocative.
Eradicate Lore is something you could hang an entire campaign arc on as a villain casts it and then starts eliminating all remaining references to whatever they eradicated, old tomes and people alike. Really top-notch for building in mystery for your world’s history.
Ethereal Vortex is a really nice play-up on Counterspell. It makes me want more spells in this vein, things that provide interesting choice points around a negative consequence. Counterspell itself has always been a boring option in my opinion. It is action denial with nothing added in its place. I would love to see something like this at a lower level to replace Counterspell entirely.
Rend Divinity is an interesting way to bring a terrible threat down to a manageable level. The only real serious problem I see with it is the lack of a clear mechanical definition of a “god” in 5e. The gods we have gotten stats for are all other creature types (as written this spell also can’t affect Auril from Rime of the Frostmaiden at all). I dunno, the spell works for what it is, and if you are playing at a level where 9th-level magic is being tossed about then there are sure to be irregularities that require adjudication at the table. I do kind of want a companion spell to go with this, “Steal Divinity” or something similar. A second spell that lets the caster of Rend Divinity gain some power based on the saves that the target failed.
Anoint Death Knight is a cool idea, a way to empower a lieutenant or companion. I don’t like the specific implementation here, but I think that is down to my weird idiosyncratic views on death knights and undead in general. I don’t like that the spell isn’t permanent, in my mind becoming a death knight is similar to becoming a lich, a terrible ritual that results in a powerful new form. It changes a creature’s existence totally, and only very specific circumstances even allow for such a change to be attempted. Mechanically I think the spell is fine, it offers appropriate power for an 8th-level spell, it’s just the association with the death knight that bothers me. Kas or Soth are similar to Vecna or Acererak in their almost mythic origins in the D&D shared mythology and reducing that status down to a single spell just bugs me. It should also be pointed out (because I am a pedant) that Kas is a vampire, not a death knight.
Would love to see more Vecna-related spells going forward.
Rend Divinity: This spell explicitly works on Auril: “choose one god, or” indicates that any god is a valid target. The CR requirement only applies to things with conventional creature types. =)
Anoint Death Knight: I could see adding an “if you cast this spell on the same target each day for seven days, it becomes permanent” to the spell. To say the very least, there was no coherent way for me to contain “do such deeds as the day would quake to look upon” as a mechanical prereq. I just want top-end necromancers to be able to do really unusual things, you know?
Kas: Hmm, I guess a lot of that lore has been wrong in my head for a long time. But it turns out that there is a death knight calling himself Kas the Bloody-Handed, who serves Vecna and tries to “redeem” himself for his betrayal. Not the same being, but he believes himself to be the “real” Kas apparently?
I agree that high-level necromancers should be able to do strange and terrible things. As I said, my complaints are pretty specific to my personal view of what a death knight is in the fiction of the D&D world. I do like when spells get the “multiple castings make this permanent” clause.
Regarding Kas, I read this entire article and then wrote my response thinking that he was in fact a death knight. I actually looked it up right before submitting the original response because I suddenly couldn’t remember. He certainly fits the death knight theme and story well enough that he might as well be one. Especially if you take the 4th edition approach to death knights and tie them to cursed weapons. The Sword of Kas would be a perfect fit for that. Kas is also unique enough to blur the lines on what precisely he is anymore. He has been a mortal general, a vampire, a Dark Lord, a vestige, and probably other things.