“This is not blood magic. This is blood science!”
–Dr. Peter Blood, physician/pirate

Here’s an alternative to clerical magic and 5e hit dice that might be a good fit for your gritty horror campaign.

The Red Doctors are a college of physicians who heal their patients through a course of bleeding (the blood does not always come from the patients). In towns where the temple healers might not take you, the Red Doctors will.

The Red Doctors offer the following services:

Phlebotomy (Cure wounds cast as level 1): 100 gp and the patient’s max HP is reduced by 1. Like all maximum hit point damage, this damage goes away with a long rest.

Operation (Lesser Restoration): 300 gp and 3d6 damage to patient’s max HP.

Transfusion (Raise Dead): 500 gp and an extra corpse, unwounded, extremely fresh (no questions asked about either corpse provenance. No guarantees, no returns, no exorcisms in the event of accident)

So much for the Red Doctors as a replacement for NPC healers. But in a dark setting, with a PC Red Doctor, you could roll on happily without either clerical healing or Hit Dice healing.

The Red Doctor abilities hit the highlights of the clerical healing list: they don’t mimic every clerical spell, obviously, but arguably they’ve got everything that’s absolutely required on a day-to-day basis: healing, curing, and resurrection. The nice-to-have’s, like Turn Undead, are, in this case, don’t-have’s. That might be a feature in a Ravenloft game.

I like Phlebotomy as a straight-up replacement for Hit Dice. There’s no spell-slot cost to this Cure Light Wounds effect, so it can be done infinite times per day, but there is a cost: 1 max HP damage per 1d8 HP healed. Instead of ticking off daily HD and then hitting a wall, you’re watching your max HP diminish every time you heal, which is a nice way to model decreasing stamina in terms of resource management, instead of imposing, say, penalties to d20 rolls.

In a world without clerics or HD, I’d make the Red Doctor abilities widely available. I might make them a feat, or even consider giving them to anyone who is trained in medicine. Here they are as a feat.

Bachelor of Sanguinity

If a PC studies at the Red Doctor school (a study which requires downtime and a fairly steady supply of fresh corpses), he or she gains the following abilities. (In the sinister jargon of the red doctors, a patient is any humanoid creature, Small or larger, that bleeds when cut. An intact corpse is one that has no external injuries and hasn’t shed blood in the past day. I use these terms in the following description.)

A Bachelor of Sanguinity can use the power of a patient’s blood to cast magic spells, using Intelligence as spellcasting stat, without the use of spell slots.

Phlebotomy. As an action, the doctor may draw blood from a willing or helpless patient. The creature’s hp and maximum hp are reduced by 1. If the patient’s HP hits 0, it dies. Otherwise, as part of the same action, the red doctor may cast Cure Wounds as a first level spell on the patient. Higher levels: at each odd level after the first, the doctor can perform the Cure Wounds at one spell level higher, up to a maximum of 5 maximum HP reduction and 5d8 + Int bonus healing at level 9.

Available at 3rd level. Operation. The doctor may spend 10 minutes bleeding a helpless patient, reducing its hp and max hp by 3d6. If it falls to 0 hp, it dies. If it survives, the doctor may cast Lesser Restoration on the patient.

Available at 5th level. Lobotomy. After a 10-minute procedure, the doctor may turn one intact humanoid corpse into a zombie. The zombie is loyal to the doctor indefinitely. The doctor may only control one lobotomized zombie at a time.

Available at 9th level. Transfusion. In a 10-minute procedure, the doctor drains all the blood from an intact humanoid corpse. The doctor may then cast Raise Dead with no material component on a different corpse within reach. There is a slight chance of failure (see below:)
Roll d20:
1: The resurrected body is possessed by the soul of the transfusion donor as if Magic Jar had been cast. This may not be immediately obvious.
2-19: Success!
20: The resurrected body is undead. If you’re feeling nice, consider giving it the Revenant template from Unearthed Arcana.

I designed the Red Doctor abilities so that the low-level ones are fairly benign, and they get creepier at higher level. Being able to raise a zombie, and being incentivized to “find” fresh corpses, make sense as capstone abilities in a world where knowledge corrupts.

In the right setting, though, this feat doesn’t have to represent only sinister, evil doctors. It can also represent the skills of a standard non-magical physician. After all, Renaissance doctors tried approximately this same stuff, except without the benefit of healing people, and with the additional tendency to poison people with mercury. And Renaissance folks (mostly) didn’t think doctors were evil.

Since D&D is, let’s face it, a kids’ game, kids are really good at it. My two year old seems to be constructing a campaign world. Here are two locations that she recently detailed.

The Gracious City. I have no confidence that she knows what gracious means, but she likes how it sounds. I asked her what’s in the Gracious City and she said “horrible trees.” Again, not sure she knows what horrible means, but still, evocative.

It sounds to me like the Gracious City is an old elven city – no one else’s city name would be arrogant in that particular way – and it sounds like the city has fallen upon hard times. The elves are gone, and the City’s Rivendell-like buildings and towers are haunted by evil treants and blights. Decent adventure location, kid. Now stat up some encounters, please.

The North City. While the Gracious City is sort of a vanilla d&d hex, the North City is more of a campaign conceit.

First of all (announced my kid, after watching a bit of a Midsummer Night’s Dream production), angels are fairies’ babies. Whoa! Could it be that the feywild, rather than being a mere prime material shadow, is actually the progenitor, the life force from which everything else bloomed, including the astral plane, its gods, and its angels? That’s certainly a secret the gods would keep hush hush. Let’s call this the Garden Cosmology!

Second toddler-supplied fact: in the North City is a red door. Angels and fairies open it, go through, and close it behind them. The door leads to Mars.

What’s on Mars, I asked? My toddler answered (with some justifiable impatience) “angels and fairies.” And a blue door. And a gray door. And a beige door. What’s through these doors? One leads to “up up high in the North City,” one leads to “down down in the North City,” one to “up above the North City” etc.

There’s so much to unpack here. First of all, the mention of Mars implies that this game world may be an alternate, future, or past Earth. Second, the name “the North City” suggests to me that cities are not that common: a mere direction is enough of an identifier for the city. Finally, based on the targets of the doors, the city is tall. Made of spires? or clouds? or maybe a giant pyramid?

Oddly, this world bears a strong resemblance to William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 novel The Night Land, which I’ve written about before. On future Earth, under a dimming sun, a few cities remain. They’re giant pyramids. Titanic monsters wait outside the cities.

Only my daughter’s reference to Mars, and the angels/fairies, remains unexplained. But The Night Land does include unexplained references to elves and time travel, so it’s not necessarily noncanonical.

So far this developing campaign world seems to be city-oriented. I’ll keep an ear open for any lore she drops about wilderness and dungeon locations.

In my game world, hobgoblins and bugbears are not a separate subspecies, but goblins who have been “promoted.” A goblin tribe has the power to elevate its members to hobgoblinhood or bugbeardom. Let me talk about how that ability, plus elements drawn from game theory, might naturally produce goblin-only tribes; goblin tribes ruled by hobgoblins; bugbear gangs; and a few powerful hobgoblin empires – in other words, enemies that can challenge PCs at different levels. In fact, the same goblin tribe might rise with the PCs from level 1 to name level, remaining a stubborn threat throughout.

Ok, so the rule is, any dozen goblins can cast a ritual that turns a thirteenth goblin into a different goblinoid (hobgoblin or bugbear). Any one of the dozen goblins can sabotage the ritual without revealing its identity. Only goblins have this power, not the other goblinoids.

Now every goblin tribe is in a prisoner’s dilemma.

Let’s take a tribe of all goblins. Each would like the power of a bugbear or hobgoblin, but no one wants to give rulership to another. Even a goblin chief has trouble finding a dozen goblins loyal enough to elevate it: at least one (but probably all) of any dozen will secretly ruin the ritual.

Of course, all the goblins would benefit if they just agreed to promote each other to hobgoblins or bugbears (except the unlucky last 12 goblins who don’t have enough compatriots to cast the ritual on them). But a goblin would benefit even MORE if it was promoted and others weren’t.

Thus, a tribe of goblins are in a Nash equilibrium (part of an economic game-theory model proposed by John Nash, the Beautiful Mind guy). No goblin wants to change the status quo for the better, because whoever makes the first move (by promoting someone else) is likely to benefit the least.

This goblin mutual distrust means that players will encounter lots of goblin-only tribes, suitable for first-level characters to beat up on.

However, when things get tough for the goblins, this changes.

For short-term threats, like an owlbear wandering nearby, goblins might convert a few of their number into bugbears. Bugbears are tough and sneaky, but unlike goblins, they’re not community- and lair-minded. At first, they might accept tribute in exchange for fighting the tribes’ enemies; but they’ll soon get bored of bullying their weak cousins and wander off to form their own bugbear clique – perhaps even hunting goblins of their original tribe – or to seek their fortunes as minions of mad wizards. That’s why bugbears are fairly rare as part of goblin tribes, but are often found as wandering wilderness monsters or level 2 dungeon encounters.

For long-term threats to a goblin tribe, raising a hobgoblin to rule the tribe looks pretty good compared to being enslaved by orcs or slaughtered by humans. So when goblins are under serious attack, a hobgoblin chief arises.

A tribe with a single hobgoblin is not stable. Hobgoblins are teamwork-oriented, so the first hobgoblin will probably demand a second hobgoblin, and so on. However, hobgoblins like to have someone to bully, so they’re likely to stop once they’ve gotten a nice little hobgoblin war band surrounded by goblin slaves: a feudal system, essentially.

The equilibrium of this configuration means that there are lots of goblin tribes with elite hobgoblin nobles, especially in areas where the PCs have been slaughtering goblins. So on day 2 of the Caves of Chaos, when the PCs return to finish clearing the goblin lair, they’ll find that their opposition just got stronger and more disciplined.

This dynamic is stable until the tribe begins to meet with success. Once the hobgoblins have lots of non-goblin slaves, they look at their goblin minions, not as servants, but as potential comrades in arms. They’ll expand their army by converting all their goblins to hobgoblins, except for the smattering of goblins needed to cast the ritual and a few bugbears to act as scouts.

That’s where you get your classic Roman-style hobgoblin armies with dreams of conquest – a good match for mid-level characters. PCs returning to the Caves of Chaos on day 3 may find that all the surviving goblins are now hobgoblins, and the kobolds and orcs are now their footsoldiers.

Of course, this “leveling up” of the goblin tribe relies on the PCs never doing the logical thing and slaughtering the whole tribe. But game theory suggests a plausible solution there too. The Nash equilibrium inspired the military doctrine of mutually assured destruction.

Let’s say that there’s a fourth type of goblinoid, whispered about in human villages, feared even by goblins, but rarely encountered: a mindless Tasmanian devil of wanton destruction which kills everyone it encounters, including the goblin tribe to which it once belonged. It can be created through the same ritual that promotes goblins to any other goblinoid.

In tribute to the Nash equilibrium which inspired it, let’s say the goblins call this monster “the Gnasher.” For stats, I suggest using a flesh golem. There are three reasons for this: 1) with its high HP and immunity to nonmagic weapons, a flesh golem is capable of slaughtering goblins and low-level PCs indiscriminately; 2) it’s got a rampage mechanic which describes how I want the creature to act all the time; and 3) it’s alphabetically close to goblin, so you only have to flip a few pages to keep track of monster stats for your apocalyptic goblin battle.

Goblins are not suicidal. They know that if they cast a ritual to create a Gnasher, they’re likely to be its first victims. But goblins are also vindictive. If they’re cornered in their lair by PCs bent on slaughter, the last 13 goblins will join hands and chant, and then, next round, one of those goblins will turn into something the PCs might not be able to handle.

As a side effect of this, here’s another encounter the PCs might stumble into. While exploring a forest or in a cave system, the PCs find some moldering goblin corpses, and then, further on, among goblin huts and fortifications, a reeking slaughter, like a goblin battle with no survivors. Right here, the PCs should probably decide to go back the way they came. If they continue, they’ll see a lone creature, like a big, blood-stained, grotesquely muscular, misshapen goblin, walking in circles and yammering and growling to itself. And then the monster will see the PCs, and charge.

With the Curse of Strahd D&D adventure released this week, there’s a chance that you might be fighting vampires in your next 5e game. Here’s some literary trivia that suggests a change to the vampire stat block.

I’m reading this vampire novel, Carmilla, by J Sheridan LeFanu. It was written two decades before Dracula, and it features a female vampire who turns not into a bat, like Dracula and the D&D vampire, but a cat.

That got me thinking: maybe we have vampire shape-changing abilities wrong. Maybe we’re taking Dracula’s bat form and assuming it’s universal to vampires — sort of like if Order of the Stick were our only fantasy reference and we assumed all wizards had raven familiars.

Let’s assume that vampires have varied animal forms. (Are there already rules like this in Vampire: the Masquerade?) From now on, for each vampire or vampire family, roll on the following table to determine the form of the vampire’s Shape Change ability and swarm-summoning ability. (To make this list, I looted the animal section of the monster manual, paying particular attention to wizard familiars and nocturnal creatures.)

Roll d20:
1 Bat
2 Blood hawk (naturally, how is this ever NOT a vampire form)
3 Cat
4 Flying snake
5 Frog (how Arnesonian!)
6 Giant centipede
7 Jackal
8 Mastiff
9 Owl
10 Poisonous snake
11 Rat
12 Raven
13 Scorpion
14 Spider
15 Wolf
16-20 roll twice more on this table (this is how the literary Dracula ended up with both a mastiff form and a bat form)

While you’re at it, surprise your players! Roll up a new animal form for Strahd himself. Or just look at the name of the setting and give him a raven.

The guild is an important part of medieval life that doesn’t translate well to d&d’s faux-medieval XPocracy (apart from the thieves and adventurers guilds). After all, what is gameable about, say, the glaziers’ guild?

One thing to remember is that there was no such thing as the ignorant country bumpkins’ guild. Medieval guilds were mostly composed of educated professionals. Scientists. Seekers after knowledge. In D&D terms: magic users.

Furthermore, medieval guilds were shrouded by layers of ritual mystery. Think of the esoteric ceremonies of the Masons. Now let’s D&D it up. Imagine that each guild’s closely guarded secret is actually of world-shattering importance. Everything about a campaign’s cosmology could be informed or subverted by some guild secret.

I’m running a guild-heavy city game right now, so I prepared this handy chart. For each guild, roll d6 to learn the unspeakable secret it guards. Every time you roll up a new set of guilds, your campaign will have new alliances, villains, threats, and planar secrets.

Alchemists guild. The alchemists make anything you can stir, from potions and poisons to beer and wine. They’re the comic relief of the guilds, since they’re always blowing up their own laboratories, but honestly, don’t wizards do that too? And the elders of the guild know secrets that are anything but comic.

What is their closely guarded mystery? Roll d6:
1 nitrogen fertilizer. Their secret agricultural compound could triple the civilized population, but they know that a higher population leads to more psionic energy which leads to visits from hungry Others.
2 Potion of inevitable success. A secret brew concocted from waters from the Lake of Illumination gives Fortune’s wheel just the push to spin its drinker to the top. Even a buffoon may lead conquering armies or rule kingdoms. Its effects wear off quite suddenly when the drinker’s ambition is achieved.
3 Gunpowder. The secrets of p 268 of the Fifth Edition DMG could transform warfare. The blacksmiths guild desperately wants to bury this secret.
4 Elixir of immortality. The guild has learned that old age can be bested, but at terrible sacrifice of innocent lives. A series of disappearances can be traced to surprisingly young guild elders.
5 By combining research with the jewelers guild, the alchemists are close to an economy-destroying breakthrough allowing them to turn lead into gold, silver into mithril, or gold into an even more marvelous metal, sungold.
6 Roll d6 twice more on this table.

Beggars guild. Besides beggars, the guild includes actors, musicians, prostitutes, and performers.

What is their closely guarded mystery? Roll d6:
1 Gateway glyphs. Beggars mark every public doorway with secret glyphs. The reader of this code knows secrets about each building’s inhabitant.
2 Ads. The beggars are close to a breakthrough in the sinister science of advertising, which makes the worse appear better, enriches the knave, and lets the few control the many.
3 Mechanical foes. There are those hidden among us, initiates of the jewelers guild, who have replaced their hearts with clockwork and have given up every emotion except greed. They are locked in an eternal war with the beggars guild.
4. Actors in high places. Many of the world’s rulers have been replaced with beggars guild duplicates. They will give patronage to their own.
5. Tribute game. The thieves guild demands yearly tribute of the beggars guild. The beggars guild thinks it is great fun to cheat them of the tribute in a different way each year.
6. Roll twice more on this table.

Blacksmith guild. This guild includes many adventurers and soldiers in its ranks. Besides smithing, they study personal combat and war tactics.

What is their closely guarded mystery? Roll d6:
1. Metallurgy. If they chose, the guild could use its metallurgical magic to arm legions with +1 armor and melee weapons, giant mecha, and animated swords.
2. Fallen devils. According to the devil that the smiths secretly worship, devils are not fallen angels. Rather, angels are devils who fell when they became toadies of the gods. The smiths are forging black metal rings which will “free” the angels.
3. Manual of Conquest. The last few conquerors of the world were guild members who understood the secret blacksmith book, the Manual of Conquest. There are chapters by many founders of bygone empires, including Dar the Shining, Timord the Conqueror and Vorik the Lion. The book has been stolen by the scriveners guild.
4. Glassteel. Members of the glazers guild and blacksmiths guild working together can produce glassteel, strong as steel, clear as glass, and light as mithril.
5. Fire walking. To Guild initiates, every fire is a doorway to every other fire.
6. Roll twice more on this table.

The guild of Carpenters and weavers. The practitioners of these two arts work under one guild to combine their efforts on ship-making, archery, and weaving.

What is their closely guarded mystery? Roll d6:
1 The clothes make the man. The weavers can imbue a suit of clothes with magic so that its wearer can take on the appearance and voice of anyone who previously wore those clothes. They are infiltrating the alchemists guild, looking for the secret of gunpowder so that their ships may rule the seas.
2 Men of war. There are plans on the High Carpenter’s desk for a new class of (flying?) ship called the Man of War. It can hold a thousand men and is virtually unsinkable (or the flying equivalent).
3. The seven winds. The corpses of the Wind Dukes of Aaqa are the sources of the 7 winds. If you survive a journey to one of the corpses, you can forever summon that wind. You can speed your own ships and hinder your rivals.
4 The Princess Ark. The guild has pooled its knowledge with the scriveners guild to produce a great ship, the Princess Ark, that can fly to the stars. The ship was lost on its maiden voyage. The guilds are building scout ships to explore the stars and find the Ark.
5 The Loom of Life. There is a huge loom in the Guildhall of the Winds. Cut a thread and someone, somewhere, will die. Initiates know what thread goes to what life.
6 Roll twice more on this table.

Glaziers guild. The glaziers don’t just make window panes: they grind telescope lenses, and peer through them, and learn much that is forbidden.

What is their closely guarded mystery? Roll d6:
1. Hostile takeover. One or more of the gods are dead and prayers are being answered by an alien entity with big plans. Step 1: going public.
2. Through the looking glass. A mirror can be made which traps people in a dimension unknown to cosmologists.
3. Secret whispers. Point your telescope at a certain empty point in the night and you will hear whispered nonsense rhymes. Whisper them in someone’s ear and they will die. Whisper them again in the corpses ear and it will live again but follow your commands…
4. Paranoia. The beggars guild inner circle are shapechangers from a distant star. They are replacing rulers and generals with their own.
5. The walls have eyes. To Guild initiates, every piece of glass is a window to every other piece of glass.
6. Roll twice more on this table.

In Gary Gygax D&D, coins weigh 1/10 of a pound. In WOTC D&D, coins weigh the more historically plausible 1/50 of a pound. Gary’s giant coins have been widely mocked as absurd dinner-plate coins. Imagine a pound of gold only being worth 10 GP! Imagine how big that coin must be!

But hold on. Let’s put aside copper and silver and concentrate on gold. Gold is heavy. Exactly how big would a 1/10-pound gold coin be?

Let’s take the largest widely-used American coin: the silver dollar. The Eisenhower dollar (which is copper/nickel) and its silver predecessors (like the Morgan dollar, which is 90% silver) are one and a half inches in diameter. The Morgan dollar weighed .058 of a pound. Gold is 1.84x as dense as silver. Multiply gold’s density by the silver coin’s weight and you get: 106/1000. In other words, a gold coin the size of an Eisenhower dollar would weigh a tenth of a pound – a little more even.

The silver dollar is a big coin, but it’s not dinner-plate-sized by any means. It fits in your pocket. It was legal tender and it was reasonably common. Even if it weighed twice as much as it did, it would still not have yanked your pants down by their pockets.

If you want to get a sense of how big a silver dollar, and thus a 1/10# D&D gold coin is, look at a poker chip. That’s about one and a half inches in diameter.

OK, all very well and good, but historical gold coins do weigh much less than a tenth of a pound. They tend to be thin little slivers, more like a US penny. Shouldn’t we match historical reality, in which gold coins tended to be about 1/50 of a pound?

I say we should not. D&D economy really doesn’t line up with Earth history to begin with. For one thing, prices are about 10x too high. For another thing, every dragon is sleeping on a bed of gold, even though on Earth, the total gold mined before 1950 would fit in one Olympic swimming pool. Gold is clearly much more common in D&D than on it was in medieval Earth.

Accept that premise and a lot of problems go away. You don’t need to go to a silver standard to match Earth historical prices. Just accept that a pound of gold buys you a longsword; laborers earn a gold piece a day instead of a silver groat; even in a back country tavern, you don’t cause a riot by flashing gold; and for larger transactions, higher currency must be used, like platinum and gems. None of this is absurd. It’s only fantastical. It assumes that, for whatever reason, D&D worlds ended up with heavier elements than did Earth. In such a world, gold coins would be large and heavy, just as silver coins were large and heavy at the time of the Morgan silver dollar.

Of course, my weight calculations only hold true for gold and platinum. Silver coins of 1/10 pound would be bigger than an inch and a half, and copper coins would be bigger still. But that doesn’t really matter. Silver as a currency disappears from D&D at character level 2, and even first level parties disdain hoards of copper coins. It’s not worth the rules weight to assign them specific lighter weights. Just say that coins are 1/10 pounds and all your calculations will be easy.

The main property of everything in Fairyland, haunting beauty, is hard to get across at the game table. I’d prefer to double down on a more visceral property. Everything is too big (or maybe you are too small).

Flowers and mushrooms are six feet across. Bugs are the size of horses. (Giant bees and ants, with their neat orchards and farms and mighty queens, can be major fey political players.) Trees are redwood sized or larger. Cliffs and mountains brush the moon, which hangs huge and bright in the perennial dusk.

Narnian talking animals are one size bigger than usual: little animals like foxes and hedgehogs are halfling sized, deer are rideable, and predators are dire (size Large or larger).

Elves are taller in Fairyland, and taller again in their demesne. Your elf PC might stand a foot taller as soon as she steps through a fairy gate. An elf lord on his throne might be ten feet tall. Nevertheless, the whole fey court might fit on the branch of an massive, ancient tree.

Fomorians, the fey giants, should be a big deal in Fairyland politics. I’d also pepper the clouds liberally with cloud giants.

The only small things are the childlike common folk, from gnomes to sprites.

In a lot of ways, Fairyland is like a memory of what it’s like to be a kid: magic and wonder is heightened, you’re not sure what the rules are, time has no particular meaning, and everything is much bigger than you, especially those in power. And bad things lurk in the darkness.

Recently I detailed the crime-investigation spells available in 5e D&D, and the takeaway is basically “do whatever you want, the authorities cannot track you down.”

Here are some new ritual wizard spells that might make things harder for PCs – or for the PCs’ elusive enemies.

Level 1: Identify Weapon. Duration: Instantaneous. While casting this spell, you touch a wound or a damaged area on a creature or object. You can visualize the weapon or object which inflicted the damage. Besides knowing its appearance, you are now familiar with the object for the purposes of the Locate Object spell. Countermeasures: This spell fails if the damage was inflicted by a creature’s natural weapons, including fists, or by spells.

Since this is a level one spell, any militia with any spellcasting at all can now trace murder weapons (or breaking-and-entering tools). The prevalence of this spell has the fun side effect of encouraging criminals (including PCs) to beat each other up instead of stabbing each other.

Level 2: Aura Print. Duration: 1 hour. You sense the unique, identifying aura of every mortal creature that you can see. (Undead, fiends, angels, and other immortals have no aura.) You can spend a minute making a written note of an aura’s properties. You or anyone with your notes will be able to recognize this aura if they see it again. Anyone consulting these notes is considered familiar with a creature for the purposes of Locate Creature and Scrying. If cast in a level 3 spell slot, you can see the aura of the last mortal creature who directly touched any physical object within 24 hours. Countermeasures: Nystul’s Aura can be used to create a false aura or mask an aura for 24 hours, or permanently wipe the aura from an object.

I made this spell low-level because fingerprinting is the bread and butter of police procedural investigations, and it should be available even to, say, the authorities in a medium town. It also pleases me to make Nystul’s Aura, a level 2 spell I’ve never seen cast, into an important counterspell.

Level 3: King’s Highway. Duration: 1 hour. While you are under the effect of this spell, all your Locate spells (for instance, Locate Object and Locate Creature) have their range extended, adding “anywhere on a well-patrolled, civilized road or path” (whatever civilized means in your setting). You know the distance and direction of the target. Countermeasures: none, except those that block divination spells. This spell is why fugitives skulk in houses, camp in the wild, jump over paths, and cross roads only late at night and after great hesitation.

I made this spell level 3 so that it would be available to medium-level casters. Even a town guard might have a relationship with a level 5 wizard to track stolen valuables with Locate Object. If the wizard is level 7, even better, now King’s Highway can be used on Locate Creature. (Note that King’s Highway synergizes with Aura Print.)

Level 4: Analyze Species. Duration: instantaneous. You learn the species of animals and plants that make up one non-living target object. For instance, you could determine that a wooden door was oak, the blood at a crime scene was a mix of human and elven, a corpse was a doppelgänger, or that a cake contained grain, chicken eggs, sugar cane, and vanilla beans. To identify exotic species, you make a Nature check against a DC chosen by the DM. On a failure, you can only determine an ingredient’s general type (aberration, or leafy plant, for instance). Countermeasures: Prestidigitation will clean up blood stains. Exotic and red-herring ingredients will complicate poison analysis.

At level 4, this is a reasonably high-level spell: if you don’t have a 7th-level wizard on hand, you might have to send evidence to a wizard’s lab in a big city.

Level 5: Teleportation Path. Duration: 1 hour. While concentrating on this spell, you can see the astral rifts left by teleportation magic. Any space that was the source or destination of a teleportation effect glows. If you cast Teleport while standing on such a path, you can follow the teleportation route without knowing its destination. Countermeasures: You can instead use this spell to obscure your teleportation route. While under this spell, you may make an Intelligence/Arcana check when you teleport. The result is the DC for people who try to use this spell to follow your path. On a failure, their teleportation spell fails and its casting is wasted.

I’m making this level 5 because it matches well with Teleport, level 5. Since it’s so high level, only royal advisors and arcane colleges are likely to have it available. (The Mage in the Monster Manual, who offers “counsel to nobles,” has one 5th-level spell slot and can’t cast this and Teleport on the same day.)

With these spells available, PCs have the tools to attack a D&D mystery like a police procedural, with evidence leading to evidence. “Wounds on the victim led us to a dagger at the bottom of the bay.” “Aura Prints on the dagger match those of a known tiefling felon.” “I’ll use King’s Highway to watch the roads. You go to the Mage’s Guild and find out if any tieflings used their teleportation circle. If so, trace the jump.” Each step along the way can be an adventure hook.

If you’re curious why I’m writing divination spells that are of most interest to NPCs: it’s because I’m currently running a heist-based city campaign. My players take note! From next session on, the target of your heist might have access to these spells.

If you take the common rules of 1e, 3e, and 5e, you get a sort of D&D bouillon cube that is more “pure D&D” than any particular edition (while they’re both charming, 2e is too similar to contribute much and 4e is too different to fit). Let’s take the list of wizard spells that appear in 1e, the free 3e System Resource Document, and the new 5e SRD that was just released yesterday. These are the spells that basically every D&D player is familiar with. With these in your spellbook, you can jump into anyone’s pickup game. This is also a good list of spells to populate NPC wizards’ spellbooks in the edition-neutral adventure you’re writing. I’m declaring these spells timeless classics. After this list, I’ll mention the 15 5e wizard spells that didn’t make it to the 5e SRD (#4 will shock you!!)

I’m not tackling cleric or druid spell lists because, since they only had 7 spell levels in 1e, they changed too much from edition to edition. Wizard spell lists, on the other hand, have stayed remarkably constant. It’s amazing how many common spells there are on this list.

Spell Level 1 (and Cantrips)
Burning Hands
Charm Person
Comprehend Languages
Dancing Lights (cantrip in 3/5e, since no one ever wanted to burn a spell slot on this in 1e)
Detect Magic (cantrip in 3e)
Enlarge/Reduce (level 1 in 1e, 2 in 3e/5e)
Feather Fall
Identify
Jump
Magic Missile
Nystul’s/Arcanist’s Magic Aura (1 in 1/3e, 2 in 5e – only NPCs will ever cast this anyway)
Protection from Evil/Good
Shield
Shocking Grasp (cantrip in 5e)
Sleep
(Tenser’s) Floating Disk
Unseen Servant
Spider Climb (1 in 1e, 2 in 3/5e)

Spell Level 2
Wizard/Arcane Lock
Continual Light/Flame
Darkness
Detect/See Invisible
ESP/Detect Thoughts (name changed as part of 3e’s war on sci-fi elements)
Invisibility
Knock
Levitate
Locate/Obscure Object
Magic Mouth
Mirror Image
Ray of Enfeeblement (2 in 1e/5e, 1 in 3e)
Rope Trick
Shatter (can you believe this made it to timeless classic status?)
Stinking Cloud (2 in 2e, 3 in 3/5e)
Web

Spell Level 3
Blink
Clairaudience/Clairvoyance
Dispel Magic
Explosive Runes (in 5e it’s folded in Glyph of Warding)
Fireball
Fly
Haste
Hold Person (2 in 1/3e, 3 in 5e)
(Leomund’s) Tiny Hut
Lightning Bolt
Protection from Evil/Magic Circle
Slow
Suggestion (3 in 1e/3e, 2 in 5e)
Tongues
Water Breathing

Spell Level 4
Wizard/Arcane Eye
Fear (level 4 in 1e/3e, 3 in 5e)
Fire Trap (folded into Glyph of Warding in 5e)
Fire Shield
Confusion
Dimension Door,
Hallucinatory Terrain
Ice Storm
Polymorph
Remove/Bestow Curse (4 in 1e, 3 in 3/5e)
Wall of Fire
Wall of Ice (level jacked way up to 6 in 5e for some reason)

Spell Level 5
Animate Dead (5 in 1e, 4 in 3e, 3 in 5e)
Bigby’s Interposing Hand/Arcane Hand (in 5e, this encompasses all other Bigby’s Hand spells)
Cloudkill
Cone of Cold,
Contact Other Plane
Hold Monster
(Leomund’s) Secret Chest (5 in 1/3e, 4 in 5e)
Magic Jar (5 in 1.3e, 5 in 6e)
(Mordenkainen’s) Faithful Hound (5 in 1/3e, 4 in 5e)
Passwall
Stone Shape (5 in 1e, 4 in 3/5e)
Telekinesis
Teleport (level moved way up to 7 in 5e – no more free rides)
Wall of Force
Wall of Stone

Spell Level 6
Antimagic Shell/Field (level moved way up to 8 in 5e – no more gimmick dungeons)
Disintegrate
Geas (6 in 1/3e, 5 in 5e)
Globe of invulnerability
Legend Lore (6 in 1e/3e, 5 in 5e)
Lower/Part/Control Water (6 in 1e, 4 in 3e/5e)
Move Earth
(Otiluke’s) Freezing Sphere
Stone to Flesh/Flesh to Stone
Control Weather (6 in 1e, 7 in 3e, 8 in 5e – planning your wedding gets harder and harder)
Project Image (6 in 1e, 7 in 3e/5e)

Spell Level 7
Delayed Blast Fireball
(Drawmij’s) Instant Summons (7 in 1/3e, 6 in 5e)
Mordenkainen’s/Arcane Sword
Reverse Gravity
Simulacrum
Symbol
Power Word Stun (7 in 1e, 8 in 3/5e)

Spell Level 8
Antipathy/Sympathy
Clone
Incendiary Cloud
Maze
Mind Blank
(Otto’s) Irresistible Dance (8 in 1/3e, 6 in 5e)
Polymorph Any Object/True Polymorph (8 in 1/3e, 9 in 5e)

Spell Level 9
Astral Spell/Projection
Imprisonment
Gate
Meteor Swarm
Power Word Kill
Prismatic Sphere/Wall
Shapechange
Time stop
Wish

Now let’s talk about the spells that didn’t make it into the SRD. The following wizard spells are in the 5e PHB but not the 5e SRD.

Cantrips
Blade Ward
Fire Bolt
Friends
Poison Spray

Spell Level 1
Chromatic Orb
Find Familiar
Ray of Sickness
Witch Bolt

Spell Level 2
Cloud of Daggers
Crown of Madness
Phantasmal Force

Spell Level 3
Feign Death

Spell Levels 4 and 5 – no spells missing

Spell Level 6
Arcane Gate

Spell Level 8
Telepathy
Trap the Soul

Why are these spells out? For the most part, they’re either 4e or 5e originals (like Crown of Madness and Witch Bolt) or resurrected 1e spells not in the 3e SRD (like Feign Death and Phantasmal Force). In general, the 5e SRD sticks as closely as possible to the 3e SRD, not giving us a lot of new toys to play with. However, a few new spells have sneaked in: Misty Step is in the SRD for the first time.

There’s only one wizard spell missing from the 5e SRD that’s in the 3e SRD: Trap the Soul. I suspect that’s a mistake, since there’s no reason to revoke a spell that’s already open game content.

(Note: I lied: #4 won’t shock you. There are no electricity spells missing from the 5e SRD.)

From the characters’ perspective, whence comes this natural law that dungeon level 2 is harder than dungeon level 1, and so on?

Here and there, bloggers toy with the idea of the dungeon as a mythic underworld, an actively hostile place with its own rules. This makes sense of the Gygaxian dungeon’s changing layout and the favoritism it shows towards monsters (they can see in the dark and don’t need to force doors). It doesn’t really explain why deeper levels are harder. If the dungeon wants to kill people, why not have level-10 death traps on level 1? If it wants to lure people deeper, why not just have a trail of coins leading to level 10?

How about this: the forward edge of a dungeon wriggles though the earth like a snake, leaving skins behind. The living stone of its chaotic creation is on the deepest levels, those that Gygax refers to in Underworld and Wilderness Adventures as “under construction.” Imagine corridors writhing through the earth, doors budding from walls. The shallower levels are the snake skins, each shed by a younger and weaker version of the dungeon, and each with a relatively fixed map. As you descend into the dungeon, you find archaeological evidence of its increasing wealth, cunning, and strength, in the form of more treasure, more dangerous traps, and stronger autochthonous monsters. (The dragon that’s too big to leave its dungeon room is born of and sustained by the living stone.)

Every once in a while, the snake revisits upper levels, leaving a changed floor plan and new challenges in its wake. For the most part, though, it delves ever downward. Perhaps its increasing power is fueled by the XP it earns killing adventurers.

I don’t envision the living dungeon as manifesting as a literal snake. Instead it’s a nightmarish ever-changing zone of self-digging tunnels, doors that turn into stone walls behind you, and monsters oozing from walls. It can be killed, perhaps, by sunlight, which is a hard commodity to ship to level 10 of a dungeon.