Phantom Trap

No matter how long you've been playing this game, no matter how many times you've reread the Player's Handbook, I find there's always some obtuse spell you've never seen before. Case in point: I recently stumbled across a core spell called phantom trap that I swear I've never laid eyes on. Unlike a lot of these obscure and worthless spells that crop up now and then, however... this one I kind of wish I had. It's strange, so strange that I'm having trouble thinking of any real, practical applications for such a spell. That said, it is worth investigating by virtue of how unique it is - and likely more for the DM than any of the players. The text for phantom trap is as follows:

Mirror Move

In D&D, it can be tempting to try and do everything. You want to have all these spells, and these prestige classes, and these feats, and even these various skill ranks... yes, it can be tricky to fit everything that catches your eyes into a single build. But what if you were able to sub in what you want when you want it now and then? You might not be able to trade out class levels on the fly, but whenever you see someone using a cool feat, do you not think to yourself "I wish I could try that"?

Well if you're willing to look way back to a dubious little corner of an unofficial web article, you just might be able to try that.

Mirror move is a 2nd level bard/wizard spell that allows you to make like Taskmaster and copy any physically demonstrable feat that you see. If you're wondering why you haven't seen nor heard of this admittedly funky spell, it's because it's from a somewhat dubious source - a web article published in 2001 that was never subsequently included in a book, updated for 3.5, or otherwise mentioned again. Yes, the same source as guidance of the avatar and other suspect tidbits. Still, it was published by Wizards, so if your DM doesn't mind you can have some fun with this one.

If it wasn't obvious already, I have a deep love for open-ended feats and spells. Having a single option that can be tooled to the current situation rewards creativity and inventiveness without demanding perfect foresight or having an overabundance of niche options prepared "just in case." After all, you can rarely be certain of what you'll come across in any given day of your adventuring career, let alone while adventuring in general, so having a multi-tool can keep you from being caught with your pants down. Unlike a lot of the usual "cast this and pick what you want" sorts of spells, though, mirror move functions a little differently.

Firepower

Not all things are created equal, a tacit fact that is again and again reinforced by the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons. The fighter can never hope to keep up with the wizard as levels ramp up, and everything a monk can do a swordsage can do better. Even in less fundamental aspects of the game, this can creep in: just ask any melee character who has tried to use a sword and shield versus a two-handed weapon. Indeed, even something as seemingly flavourful as energy types suffer from this. Don't believe me? Compare how many monsters resist sonic damage versus those that resist fire.

At the top of this pyramid of supremacy, force damage is the way and the path. Essentially nothing resists or is immune to force damage, asides from the (very epic-level) force dragon. A few spells and items make a particular call-out for magic missile spells. Next there is the second-tier of energy types: unusual call-outs like holy damage (a la flame strike,) and desiccation damage (a la desiccate.) Very rarely are these going to be resisted or affected in any way: they're virtually "typeless" the way force damage often is. That said, they're also very uncommon. Third tier belongs to sonic damage, which is the most effective of the "core" energy types. Fourth tier holds acid and electricity, in that order, and the bottom tier holds cold damage and lastly fire.

This hierarchy is in no way official or rigid: it's just a vague guideline I've determined from observation. It simply means that putting aside the setting, environment or pre-established foes, if you prepare an acid spell instead of an otherwise-identical fire spell, you're less likely to run across a foe who will be resistant or immune to it. 3d6 acid damage isn't "better" than 3d6 fire damage, there have just been more creatures with fire resistance that have been printed. Demons, devils, dragons, celestials: all the major players shrug off the effects of fire.

So why the imbalance? Is this just another matter of "X is better than Y, get over it"? Well... sort of. The thing is, the greater reliability of the higher-tier energy types often comes with an arbitrary balancing factor. This is perhaps best demonstrated in the orb of X line of spells. Orb of fire deals 1d6 fire damage per level (maximum 15d6) and makes the target save against dazing. Each orb has a different riding effect, though, so the orbs with a slightly better damage have slightly worse effects. For instance, orb of cold forces a save against blinding (not as impressive) and orb of acid a save against being sickened (a comparatively minor hindrance indeed.) Then you get to orb of sound, which can deafen the target (ho-hum) and deals only 1d4 damage per level. The fact it's dealing sonic damage is reason enough to lower the damage dice. Then lastly, there's orb of force, which has no secondary effect and tops out at a maximum of 10d6 damage, rather than 15.

So there isn't really an inherent pros-and-cons debate introduced by using force damage over fire damage, say, it's just that in many cases spells and effects will likely be balanced to somewhat favour the "worse" energy types in case-by-case bases. In addition, there are far more feats, class features and items to improve your cold and fire spells (take even a casual glance at Frostburn) than for, say, sonic or desiccation damage. This is an imperfect science, of course, but at least the effort is there.

If we know what energy types are "best" and which are "worst" (yet have the best spells,) what do we do with this knowledge? Well, fire damage may be much-maligned in general for its generally underperforming against a variety of enemies, but its humble status as the lowliest energy type has earned it the most published support. If all of this support material exists mostly to balance it out against the other types, though, why bother? Well, it would suddenly get a lot more impressive (and hey, interesting for roleplaying) if those shortcomings could be easily undone, wouldn't it?

Enter Searing Spell.

This little gem from Sandstorm does something very unusual - it makes your fire spells so supernaturally hot that they ignore all fire resistance and even still do half damage to creatures with fire immunity. What do you want to bet that a fire elemental has never felt what it's like to be burned before? As a nice bonus, a searing spell also does double damage to creatures with the cold subtype - which is on top of the double damage they were already taking from a fire spell. This peace of mind comes at the acceptable cost of a spell slot one level higher.

So now you can fling fire spells around with little worry for targeting restrictions. Sure, Energy Substitution already existed and doesn't even raise the spell's level, but what if you want to stick to fire spells thematically? A pyromaniac shouldn't have to shoot "coldballs" just because he's facing an efreet. More importantly, it's generally the case that if a monster has resistance to one energy type, it does to most of them, especially with Outsiders and at higher levels. It's also the case that changing the energy types of your spells won't let you reliably capitalize on its original energy type - something that can be very handy, as we're about to see.

So removing the biggest downside of fire damage is a real coup, but pumping the cost of all of your spells by one level is a pretty hefty cost. Is there enough support for fire damage that can make it worthwhile? Unshockingly, the answer is... perhaps!

Animate with the Spirit

Undeath is a pretty fun well to dip into, so long as you aren't actually drinking from it.

The thing is, it's a tricky and contentious brand of magic. The last couple of articles might have gotten you interested, but of course, it's not like just anyone can cast animate dead. (Sorry sword-swingers, before you get too excited, I'm not about to reveal a way for you to reanimate undead minions.) Animate dead is only for wizards and clerics, and worse still, the moral implications of even using such a spell are... suspect, at best. Being a heroic fantasy game, D&D characters are generally going to be good, and it can be hard to justify reanimating corpses with negative energy as a result. The problem is, naughty necromancers don't get any love from Santa come Christmastime. So how do capital-G-Good characters get in on the fun? And in the spirit of the season, can't rangers, druids and paladins also get a present while we're at it?

On the Proper Care and Maintenance of Undead

We can all take solace in the common struggle that we as human all face: we just want someone to boss around. That's probably a big draw for the fantasy escapism of D&D, but astonishingly even therein it's easier said than done. Pelor knows your party's an ornery bunch, and they'd rather shake down commoners for copper pieces than do anything you suggest. The Leadership feat is banned in some campaigns, and you have to be careful with your followers lest they become disenfranchised. Most campaigns don't run psionics (for you wannabe thrallherds out there) and planar binding can be a real hassle with all of the costs, exacting rules and opposed charisma checks. What's a power-hungry lunatic to do?

Fortunately, for any problem, we have undead. Order them around, use them for combat, hard labour, hat racks, you name it. They don't complain or disobey, and best of all, you don't even have to feed them. Ah, the wonders of magic. One casting of animate dead and you've got a contingent of skeletons ready to either kick ass or kiss ass, at your option.

...not that it's without its deficiencies, however. Having no intelligence or self-sufficiency feel like par for the course; I'm referring more to the fact that animate dead can get damned expensive, at 25 gp per hit die. One Turn Undead from an enemy cleric and that's all of your money and hard work wasted. Plus, there is a limit to how many you can command - 4 HD per level may sound like a lot, but the low hit points, saves and BAB of undead mean that most of the worthwhile options need HD as high as possible to make a dent.

So how can you ensure a reanimated legion is worthwhile? A gang of bloodthirsty corpses can pull apart most commoners with ease, but you're going to have to put in a little more effort than that if you hope to pit them against level-appropriate threats. Here, then, I have a short treatise on what corpses to aim for when reanimating, and how to best make use of them once they're active.

Haunt Shift

Halloween draws near, dear readers, and with it comes all manner of ghosts n' goblins. And ghouls and ghasts and goristros and gorillons and... uh, well, you get the picture. So with all of the restless spirits coming to roost, why not embrace the season and get in on a bit of the haunting yourself?

Necromancers have always been able to order around undead armies and generally bend entities of negative energy to their whims. But why settle for undeath by proxy? D12 hit dice and a list of immunities longer than your arm sounds like a good time for any spellcaster, but of course, trading in your meat bag for another, more gangrenous meatbag with an abysmal Fortitude save has its own disadvantages. Really, there's no reason to trifle with bodies at all - once you've crossed that hurdle into undeath, a mid-level spellcaster can make themselves a haunting presence, and go around possessing one item, Poltergeist-style. Of course, you're not just going to pick any Tom, Dick or grand piano off the street: if you get to possess an object and pilot it around, you might as well custom-make the best you can get.

Traps

They prowl dungeons the world over, lurking around corners, behind locked doors and in treasure chests. They have no conscience to appeal to, no mind to reason with. Negative levels or ability drain won't so much as slow them down, and even no-save, no-SR spells like forcecage or maze won't do a thing. They can threaten any character, from level 1 all the way up to level 20, and take many forms. What deadly creature could this possibly be...?

Traps!

Yes, the staple of dungeon hazards, traps have been dutifully stabbing, poisoning, dropping, slicing, dicing and polymorphing-into-spaghetti-ing hapless adventurers since time immemorial. Generally they are something to suspect and avoid, to shove the rogue at in hopes of tasty XP before moving on. But in truth, traps are misunderstood creatures. Their name might inspire fear and caution in seasoned adventurers, but with a bit of kindness and a lot of gold, one can bend these gentle, beautiful, inanimate creatures to their own whims. With some careful set-up and some rather gross subversion of the game designers' expectations (as usual,) traps can be a source of immense power.

Prestidigitation

Think of that spell that lets you do anything you want.

Most magic has an effect that you have to make do with and apply to the situation at hand. You know the one, though: that spell that lets you perform any feat of your choice, without that choice being made when you prepared spells at the start of the day. All you need do is word what you want exactly and you can make it real.

Which spell were you thinking of? Wish? Miracle, perhaps? Forget those; too costly. I'm talking about the Level Zero Wish here - prestidigitation, baby!

Eternal Wands

Disposable magic items were always a moral dilemma for me. Investing in something that's single-use leaves you really intent on getting your money's worth out of that one usage. A scroll, for instance, can cost you a pretty penny but holds a spell you can only cast once. Thus, it's not uncommon (in my experience, anyway) to hold onto the item indefinitely, always convincing yourself that it's being saved for when you really need it. Even when you do really need it, you'll save it for when you really, really need it. In such a case, it ends up being wasted money. Most players are more comfortable buying a ring or a +1 weapon or some other item with a permanent and tangible benefit.


Wands are the beginnings of a compromise in that direction. With 50 uses before they're spent, they have a large enough store that players are usually comfortable spending charges when they're needed. However, 50 is indeed a finite number, and for wands that aren't holding severely specific spells, one that is liable to run out eventually. Until you've used all 50 of those charges, you haven't actually gotten your money's worth out of the item - and yet after you have used all 50, you no longer have anything to show for your spent gold!

So what's the real solution? Is there a way to comfortably spend money on an item that isn't yet another +1 to something on your character sheet? Can one make appropriate use of an activated item and still have something to show for it one or twenty levels later? Surely there's a way to take the utility of a wand and stretch it out a bit, isn't there?

Heroics

Feats are a precious resource: most characters get seven over the course of their entire career, with humans getting eight and fighters getting eleven more... but at the dire cost of having to be a fighter. That's not even taking feat taxes into account, with many of the more desirable prestige classes necessitating one or more feats that are otherwise of little to no use.

So how can you ensure your feats are working hard enough for you? In particular, more specific feats might have a strong effect, but they run the risk of being useless in most situations. Well, there is a rather simple way to not only get more feats, but to get them on-demand, picking up whatever suits the situation as you need it.

There's a little gem in the Spell Compendium called heroics - a level 2 sorcerer/wizard spell that lets you grant the subject a single feat off the list of fighter bonus feats for 10 minutes per level. Even at minimum level, that's half an hour to make use of your new feat. Having to be a fighter bonus feat is indeed a big restriction, especially from your viewpoint as a spellcaster - no crafting, no metamagic and nothing along the lines of spell focus, obviously. But if you look, you might be surprised by how extensive the list really is, often with bonus feats appended to it with every book. In particular, versatile feats that grant you choices gives you a 'feats-within-feats' situation that can be tooled to suit any character.

Unseen Servant

D&D is a fantasy game, and like in any fantasy game, it's best to take advantage of whatever niceties you might not have access to in real life. Spellcasting, a stronghold, a girlfriend (come on, you're not fooling anyone)... oh, and of course, boot-licking toadies. Problem is, hirelings aren't reliable for much more than taking up space, and golems will break the bank before they can break anyone's face. So how's a player to make do? Thankfully, there's an effective and low-level way to score yourself a helper that's so loyal and thoughtful that it doesn't even give you an ugly mug to have to wince at whilst giving orders. That's right, we're discussing the spell unseen servant, for all those of you who wanted to experience the thrill of friendly poltergeists for hours every day.

Fabricate

On the previous episode, we talked about using a spell to create most any material you wanted. Conjuring up hundreds of pounds of raw materials at a time can be plenty useful, but sometimes you want something a little more refined and purposed. Say, if you want a snazzy-looking carriage, a mid-level caster shouldn't deign to call up a bunch of darkwood and then laboriously craft the whole thing with his bare hands. As it happens, there is a spell that is the natural next step from minor creation, one that lets you create any sort of fashioned object so long as you have the raw materials on hand. The spell I'm discussing is fabricate, the haymaker in the one-two punch that is creating abstract wood carvings during your downtime... or useful items, if that's your thing.

Minor Creation

In the world of Dungeons & Dragons, spellcasting is king. Nothing can stand up to a being who increases their caster level with each HD, except for a higher-level spellcaster. While roaring infernos and rays of enervation all have their place on the battlefield, perhaps the most powerful - and most versatile - thing a spellcaster can do is to create. Sometimes you're creating an entire mansion with a single spell, other times you're creating a small puddle of bacon grease on the ground. In terms of creation for creation's sake, then, there's no spell more versatile than the aptly named minor creation.

Spell Storing

As we all know, classes that can cast spells will always be stronger than those that cannot. There's no quick fix for this disparity - every single spell printed is another option for the casters, yet sword-swingers have to pick from a variety of band-aid-type patches to make them more viable. So what if, instead, they had a way to cast spells of their own?

All right, yes, there is some rather lengthy fine print to that statement, but there is an efficient way for anyone to sling a spell every now and then. All it takes to qualify is the ability to swing a stick around - the harder, the better. Enter the spell-storing weapon special ability from the Dungeon Master's Guide: essentially it allows a spellcaster to store any one targeted spell of up to 3rd level in a melee weapon. Whenever the spell-storing weapon hits a creature, it can immediately cast the stored spell on the foe, regardless of who or what its wielder is. It can only store one spell at a time, but it can be refilled any number of times. Now, chances are you aren't going to take the time to store a spell in a weapon mid-combat, so it amounts to one quickened spell on the first strike in a fight. If the spell was stored the day before, it even amounts to one extra spell slot. Not bad for a +1 bonus!

So which spells are the best choices for your rider effect? The restriction to targeted spells means no Rays are permitted, so things like ray of exhaustion and enervation are off the table. The level cap of 3rd means you won't be wishing upon any stars - or anything else, for that matter. Still, there are a healthy number of effects that most assailants won't want cast on them within that criteria, some particular standouts being listed here.

Bestow Curse

Debuffing your foes is a perfectly respectable tactic in combat. Making an enemy easier to defeat, or less able to defeat you, is a very obvious step towards the ultimate goal of defeating them without being defeated. However, debuffs generally have a finite duration or can be easily dispelled. Not so a particular subset of the debuff - curses.

Bestow curse is a level 3 Cleric spell (level 4 for sorcerers and wizards, meaning probably don't bother) that places a permanent curse on any touched creature that fails a Will save. It isn't mind-affecting, it isn't a negative energy effect, and it is not subject to dispel magic. A curse can only be removed by remove curse (no joke!), break enchantment, limited wish and up. It lists three possible forms for the curse to take:

• A -6 penalty to an ability score (bringing it to a minimum of 1.)
• A -4 penalty on all attack rolls, saves, ability checks, and skill checks.
• Each turn, the target has a 50% chance to act normally; otherwise, it takes no action.

These are all quite nice effects, honestly. Reducing a casting stat by six can wreak havoc on spells available as well as save DCs, and a -4 to everything is a great across-the-board hindrance that will come up even outside of combat. Note that concentrating on a spell and trying to break a grapple are both standard actions, meaning the affected won't be able to do so if they're rendered "unable to take an action" for a turn.

Nice as these effects are, though, perhaps the most interesting feature of bestow curse is the next line: "You may also invent your own curse, but it should be no more powerful than those described above."

Yessir, bestow curse is entirely open-ended in letting you ruin someone's day in whatever way you can come up with. Call it Level 3 Wish, so long as you're wishing to wreck a kid's birthday party. What to do with such an accommodating spell, especially one set on such a decent baseline power level? Here, I've come up with a list of suggestions for curses you can inflict upon the DM's self-insert NPC when he least expects it:

Get Rich Quick

In D&D, much as in real life, how well you're doing is ultimately contingent on how much money you have.

So much for a fantasy game, huh?

No joke, though, a character's worth will generally comes from two places: magic and magic items. (The fact that one of these is not inherently available to all characters is a small reminder on this system's balance.) Monks, oft maligned as the bottom of the barrel for core classes, need a boatload of practically standardised magic items just to bring their class features up to a passably-functional level. Druids, meanwhile, do go gently into that good night as naked as a jaybird - and in the form of a jaybird, too, at their option.

So if you want to get rich quick, what are your options? If you look at the Craft, Perform, and Profession skills, even astronomical DCs still result in paltry income. Fortunately, as is the case with any sufficiently large system that has enough different minds behind it, there are exploits in place that can be capitalized on by the players. It's probably safe to assume that none of these were intended by the game designers, but as is always the case, too bad ha ha ha.
Presented here, then, is a handy list of Ten 100% rules-legal, 100% obscene methods for amassing in-game wealth. You may not be rich, but you can at least pretend to be for one night a week.