I’ve talked before about why 10th level spells exist in the game world’s past but not its present. Here are some appropriately overpowered 10th-level wizard spells.
Because every such spell is lost to history (most 10th-level spell users having destroyed their own civilizations), each spell must be researched based on tantalizing clues from forbidden books. An easy Wisdom check reveals that this is a bad idea.
10th-level spells are more the purview of villainous NPCs than PCs. I bet that they can be cast with lower-level spell slots, if cast in a suitably long and interruptable ritual.
10th-level spells:
Animate all dead. Area: the world.
Detect Great Old One’s Thoughts. Your brain explodes. Everyone within 1000 miles is subject to a Feeblemind spell.
Disaster. Range: 5 miles. Everything is destroyed and everyone is killed within a 1 mile radius. Caster’s choice of meteor strike, inferno, volcano, chasm, plague, tarrasque, etc. There may be unintended lingering side effects (deadly ash, tarrasque, plague, etc)
Erase person. Range: 400 feet. Kill one person and destroy their body and gear, no save. Everyone except for the caster instantly forgets the person ever existed. Their deeds are re-ascribed to others. People with close relationships to the erased person get a saving throw after 1 week of being confused by inconsistent memories.
Immortality. The spell all the liches are searching for. Warning: may attract liches.
Mordenkainen’s dimensional domain. Warps space so that an area of up to a 20-mile radius is moved into a pocket dimension, accessible only by rules set by the caster (only through a specific wardrobe, appears one day every 100 years, etc). Don’t bring a bag of holding into this domain.
Planar blink. Duration: one hour. Every turn, you may teleport anywhere you’ve scried or visited on any plane, or you can teleport to a random location on a plane you’ve heard of but never visited, or you can teleport to a random location on a random plane. Besides the classic planes, you can visit alternate timelines, other D&D campaigns and game systems, and the theoretical dimension where game-players control your actions, so you can kill the guy controlling you.
Power word: damn. The target dies and goes to hell. They get a saving throw after a year. Even if they return, they’ll be pretty traumatized.
Soul swap. Touch someone. You permanently swap bodies, no save. You each keep your game stats but trade appearance and age.
Trans-galactic jaunt. The caster and 10 friends can survive comfortably in space and fly at 1 light-year per hour. They can finally explore the vast seas between stars and discover that, however a big deal they might be on their planet, they’re level 1 in cosmic terms.
And finally, the real reason level-10 spell research is a bad idea:
Detect 10th level spell research. The one wizard in the multiverse who knows this spell also knows Planar blink and Erase person.
Good.
Very nice!
The Epic Level Handbook from 3.0 had some neat ideas, too – Demise Unseen and Lord of Nightmares are ideas worth stealing.
Awesome!
I’m not sure the caster should keep all his/her stats after a Soul Swap. Strength and Constitution certainly seem to be properties of the body, not the soul.
Personally, I would expect only Intelligence and Wisdom to go entirely with the caster’s soul (although there are those who would say that these, too, should be subject to the limitations of the new body’s cerebral physiology). And I think I might take the average of the caster and host’s Dexterity and Charisma stats, since each of these appears to measure something both physical and intangible.
@John D. Payne I agree. I was thinking Intelligence and Wisdom go with the soul, both souls get the average of Charisma and Dexterity (because it is both behavioral—i.e. of the mind—and phsyical), and Strength and Constitution remain in the original bodies.
Yeah. Also probably any racial traits should stick with the body. For dex and cha – how ’bout make it caster’s choice? “I shall keep my finely honed reflexes and commanding personality” or “I want to leave my aged body behind and take over this agile and handsome lad.”
“Animate All Dead” reminds me of one of the major spells from the PC game Master of Magic, which IIRC caused all casualties from your successful battles to rise as zombies under your control. I think Chaos had an equivalent of the “Disaster” spell as well, with volcanoes and meteor strikes on everyone else’s territories. Fun times!
Damn. Power Word that sends you to hell. Kind of like how I feel after reading this incredibly difficult, rambling blog!