D&D: Five High-Level Spells Worth Giving Your Players Early
Whether from scrolls or magic items, some high-level spells can enrich your campaign if players get them early on.
There are plenty of ways to get access to spells more powerful than a character can cast with their own power. They might gain the ability to cast the spell from a magic item like the Staff of the Magi, or an Enspelled item. Or maybe a spell scroll or even just hiring an NPC caster to do the spell for you.
And while the machinery of D&D typically engages itself around the idea that you gain access to potent spells whenever you are of an appropriate level, I think it can often be worth it to give players access to “the good stuff” before they would have it on their own. Especially when most games will maybe let you get to level 10/12 if you’re lucky. So, with that in mind, here are five higher-level spells that won’t throw off your game if the party gets ’em earlier in their adventuring career.
Find the Path
Find the Path is one of those spells that feels very helpful, but never enough to necessarily be worth using a spell slot/prepared spell entry on. Because Find the Path does exactly what it tells you – it lets the caster magically sense the most direct physical route to a direction the caster names. The caster has to be “familiar” with the location, and for a day, this spell tells you how far away and in what direction it lies.
I love giving players an item with this spell built in because it’s literally a tool for me to keep them on track. Sometimes, sure, if you want the adventure to be about finding a place, you need to work around this spell. But, by and large ,this spell can help players to find where they’re supposed to go. Even if it’s a place they’ve never been, the adventure can be researching the location so they can be familiar with the lost elven city or whatever. Perfect fodder for something like a magical compass that doesn’t point North.
Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion
Every party of PCs needs a cool base every now and then. And a spell like Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion is the perfect way to do exactly that. Sure, it’s a 7th level spell, which ordinarily the players wouldn’t have access to until at least 13th level – very late in the game indeed. But as far as those things go, it’s pretty harmless.
It gives players a safe base in an extradimensional space that they can get to and inside is a magnificent foyer with numerous chambers. It’s a chance for a player to decide what their mansion looks like – or for you the DM to make a cool little extradimensional base that the players can get to because of a magic item they have. Either way, it is perfectly safe (for the most part), and it gives your party’s NPC friends a place to hang out too while they’re on the adventure.
Control Weather
Control Weather is a potent spell. But it’s one that fills a narrative niche in terms of magic, rather than a combat one – with maybe some extreme corner cases. It’s an 8th-level spell, and you can tell it’s not meant to be used in a fight because it takes 10 minutes to cast it, unless you have a way of speeding that up.
But when you do cast it, you gain the ability to just decide what the weather should be like. Whenever you cast the spell, you can change the weather conditions to fit your whims (to some extent) you can make rain stop or turn it torrential. You can change something from cool to cold; you can change weather by one degree, so to speak. And giving a low-level party a way to do this is like giving Link the Song of Storms or the Sun’s Song. Suddenly they can set the stage for whatever comes, and it might get them a little more interested in the world.
Demiplane
For much the same reason as Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion, the Demiplane spell is pretty amazing. It gives players a place to explore – but there’s a little more danger involved. Unlike Magnificent Mansion, the demiplane isn’t necessarily isolated. Demiplanes can be linked – if you know the nature and contents of a Demiplane cast by another creature, you can link there. Meaning a DM can set up a demiplane incursion or have players encounter a Demiplane that is unused, but only because its master is “away”.
Wish
Finally, the Wish spell. This is the kind of thing you could base a campaign around. Heck, campaigns have turned around players getting 9th level spells because at last the Wizard can cast Wish. A Wish is a powerful boon. It’s the stuff that legends are made of. You could go on an epic quest just to gain a single casting of the spell.
You could rewrite a tragedy in the campaign, or you could instantly defeat a villain or any number of other creative things. This is a great one to give people and tell them, “the gem/ring/sword/lamp has one casting of Wish.” And then you watch. And wait.
Happy Adventuring!
