Hello spellcasters of all shapes and sizes! Welcome to my spellbook. Today we have a real treat in store for all of you and a real pain in the neck in store for me. There are a couple spells and i’ve been running into them progressively more as the spell level gets higher. That do a lot of different things. And although that’s great and it provides a ton of utility to the spells. It’s a pain in the neck for the guy, trying to simplify them.
So i hope you all appreciate this article in particular, it was interesting to try and frame it in a way that would make sense and still fit on the screen in a semi reasonable manner. So yeah long story short i hope you guys enjoy and yeah let’s dive right in here. WDo you know hat is the circle spell in d&d? So we’re gonna start out today’s episode with magic circle spell 5e.
Which sounds simple but let me tell you it is certainly not and it is usable by the cleric, paladin, warlock and the wizard as so far as to say it’s found on their spell lists. It is found in the player’s handbook so everyone should have access to it. And in certain circumstances you know this will be more than beneficial you could say to have in your back pocket.
However that requires a little bit of foresight on your behalf but in any case let’s dive right into its effects here. In any case you may also interested in checking out schools of magic 5e explained.
Mechanics
The effect at a glance is as followed: Choose one of the following creature types: Celestial, Elementals, Fey, Fiends, or Undead. The creatures are affected by the cylinder in the following ways:
They cannot willingly enter the cylinder and they must first succeed on a charisma save to enter magically. Disadvantage on attack rolls against targets within the cylinder and can’t charm frighten or possess targets within he cylinder. You can also have the spell function in reverse. So you can kind of prevent creatures from leaving the cylinder and protect targets outside of it.
Really cool stuff! Like genuinely very interesting and in certain campaign settings or certain combat encounters. This might actually be able to derail a campaign. Just through its own virtue but in order to do that you would certainly need once again a pretty sizable amount of foresight on your behalf. But you know if one of your party members getting possessed by a certain demon is the lich pin of an ark. This spell might prevent that from happening virually entirely. So just of course bear that in mind.
- Level: 3rd
- Casting Time: 1 Minute
- Range/Area: 10 ft (10 ft cylinder)
- Components: V, S, M *
- Duration: 1 Hour
- School: Abjuration
- Attack/Save: CHA Save
- Damage/Effect: Control
The cast time is one minute so it’s not once again plays into that whole foresight thing. The range is 10 feet and the cylinder itself is 10 ft and then 20 foot tall. So it’s quite sizable in that regard. The duration is one hour and at higher levels the duration increases by one hour for each slot level above 3rd.
The components are the holy trinity of verbal, material and somatic and you’re gonna wanna take note of the material component here it is a holy water or powdered silver and iron worth at least 100 gp, which the spell consumes.
Now reading this and going online and kind of digging around it provides an interesting point about the approximate value of holy water and whether or not you could just use the ceremony spell to circumvent this. I don’t know, i probably wouldn’t allow it to be honest because if you can just make the holy water that the spell consumes,
it’s kind of for naught i would probably phrase it in a way where it needed to be blessed by a priest of a certain ranking or something to that effect to prevent characters from just making their own. But i don’t know that’s a DM call to make so it’s certainly worth bringing up but i don’t know that’s my two cents on it. And the school is abjuration which is completely unsuprising. Now let’s move on here to the full description and i’ll kind of talk about it a little bit more so.
Description
You create a 10-foot-radius, 20-foot-tall cylinder of magical energy centered on a point on the ground that you can see within range. Glowing runes appear wherever the cylinder intersects with the floor or other surface. Choose one or more of the following types of creatures: celestials, elementals, fey, fiends, or undead.
The circle affects a creature of the chosen type in the following ways:
The creature can’t willingly enter the cylinder by nonmagical means. If the creature tries to use teleportation or interplanar travel to do so, it must first succeed on a Charisma saving throw. The creature has disadvantage on attack rolls against targets within the cylinder. Targets within the cylinder can’t be charmed, frightened, or possessed by the creature.
When you cast this spell, you can elect to cause its magic to operate in the reverse direction, preventing a creature of the specified type from leaving the cylinder and protecting targets outside it.
At Higher Levels: When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 4th level or higher, the duration increases by 1 hour for each slot level above 3rd. * – (holy water or powdered silver and iron worth at least 100 gp, which the spell consumes)
Very interesting stuff! As you might imagine. Honestly i really like it, i think it plays well thematically and i think it’s a good spell as it relates to rewarding characters for due diligence. It has a lot of very impressive effects that thwart what these enemies will typically do to you and since there’s not really a level restriction outside of the saving throw i guess affects scalability, this is essentially viable at almost every level.
Certainly early on odds are you’re gonna be running into primarily undead at least in most campaigns it’s a general trend and undead aren’t known for having very high chrisma at all so it’s a pretty safe bet that they’re gonna fail that saving throw. And as long as you’re a half decent caster and as long as your dm isn’t throwing things at you that are almost geared towards charisma this should be good at virtually every level of play. Without needing to up cast it which is super valuable. Now let’s move on to some alternative uses here.
Alternative Uses
So the first one i was really thinking of was using this as kind of a way to create a doorway of sorts. This would be good in certain halls of the dead if there’s a undead outbreak to kind of seal them in there and give you a roughly a short rest to kind of replenish any damage you might have taken or any spell slots you might have lost based on your class, but that’s one way to use it.
Another way to use it along the same vein of thought is to really just escape outright. Odds are a lot of these creature types aren’t going to have access to teleportation at least towards the beginning of the game it’s not super likely i mean faye might and elementals in some cases might but for the most part you’re pretty in the clear.
And another good way to use is just use it to execute planning its kind of a cop-out for me to say that because i’ve been mentioning it throughout but it is worth putting a finer point on. This is 100 percent a spell that is geared towards really rewarding due diligence.
A great thing about it is it’s not concentration as well so you can still use this and another damage dealing concentration spell to really kind of drive the point home. Another idea that i was thinking of for one of my campaigns is using the concept of this spell as a dungeon master to create a prison of sorts for extra planar entities, this spell would be activated by some version of a glyph of warding at a high enough level or modified in a way so that it’s kind of always active as long as the main caster wishes it to be.
Just a kind of cool idea for a world building element to it and it might be good for questioning these entities especially if you can trap them within the circle itself and once again provided that they constantly fail those charisma saves. It’s very good, another thing i want to point out as well is if they try and use a teleportation ability and fail that save that ability is used. Right! they don’t get to use that same ability again and again until they do succeed at least that’s a assuming that they don’t have like a ridiculous amount of spell slots or usages of such abilities.
In any case it is a good way to drain that resource just on its own. So it is really interesting. I like it, i think it’s a great spell. I think taking it is kind of arbitrary it depends on play style right! If you are like a guns blazing cast fireball all the time kind of caster, this might not suit your character although it’s kind of tempting to take and to be honest if that’s your play style you’re you might not find any use for it. However if you are a more meticulous or a more cowardly caster then this is certainly a viable approach for you.
Conclusion
In any case let me know what you think of dnd magic circle 5e down beneath in the comment section be sure mention any thoughts, questions, comments, or concerns you have regarding it or even any cool stories as well. That being said, i hope you all have a wonderful day and as always happy casting everyone.
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