Art of Magic July Preview: Return to Sender, Address Unknown

[Michael Morris]

July's preview is an improved version of a PHB spell.

[bq]Death Ward, Greater
Abjuration (Ward) [Good, White]
Level: (7), Clr 8

"Those who would spread death shall be destroyed by my hand, for I alone have the right to bring death as rest to the pure in my due time." - Matacha, in the Tedisa, Book IV, Canto 126.

This spell works like death ward except that death spells and effects are turned back to their creator and can affect them even if they are normally immune to death spells and effects.
[/bq]

 

[Cheiromancer]

I remember reading a criticism of a spell designed to put elves to sleep. The poster said that would be ridiculous- like a spell giving inflammation of the gizzard to a human- sleep is not a physiological state that an elf can enter.

I wonder if making (say) the undead subject to death spells is not dissimilar. Their immunity to death effects is not due to some kind of protection that can be circumvented, but from not having physiological states at all.

 

[rkanodia]

Perhaps the spell could create a positive energy backlash.

"This spell works like death ward except that anyone using a death spell or effect on the recipient suffers a positive energy backlash. Undead creatures take 1d6/caster level damage from this backlash (Will half, max 20d6), while living creatures failing a Will save are stunned for one round."

 

[Michael Morris]

Does it really matter? I could write a paragraph or to describing how this spell can destroy constructs and undead despite their normal immunity, but it wouldn't functionally change the spell and would accomplish little other than to waste text space.

 

[Cheiromancer]

It's not the implementation I have trouble with; it's the concept.

My reaction to this spell is the same as I would have to a spell which induces sleep in an elf, or an inflammed gizzard in a human. A human's immunity to an inflamed gizzard is not the kind of immunity that a spell should be able to overcome. We don't have gizzards, and that's why they can't get inflamed. As I understand it, an elf's immunity to sleep is not something that can or should be nullifiable by magic; elves are immune to sleep because they just don't have the capacity to enter that physiological state. And that's why it seem incoherent to me that an undead or construct could, under any circumstances, be susceptible to death magic. Their immunity doesn't seem to be the kind of thing that magic can or should be able to overcome.

But that is not a really compelling objection: there are other things in DnD which, to me, don't hold water. No doubt the same holds for you; perhaps our lists overlap.

I do think, however, that this looks like a nice, balanced variation on deathward, and I want to thank you for sharing it.

 

[Fieari]

Well, if the implementation works well, the only thing needed is an appropriate explanation. Say that it deanimates... destroys all intellegence AND psuedo intellegence, artifical or natural. So it would wipe out a computer, stop a pocket calculator from working, slaughter insects, make automatons to fall motionless. It's the human touch that is washed away. De-anthropomorphizing anything. It doesn't just kill life, it kills what we THINK of as life.

 

[Michael Morris]

Explanation 1)
The spell basically uses a positive blast of energy to overcome and reflect the negative energies lashed out by the death spell. Both the death spell and the positive and the negative energy comes crashing back at the offender. While an undead can ignore the negative energy the positive backlash is lethal to them. While neither of the two can affect a construct, together they can literally cause a construct to explode.

Explanation 2)
The spell is breaking a rule, so what? Magic does that on occasion. But breaking a rule isn't the same as breaking the game. Magic lets you do things you normally can't - fly, call fire from the heavens, make a foe drop dead with a single word. Wizards in my world have little understanding on how magic actually works, and spells like greater death ward, which defy what they *think* they know about magic, make the game interesting from both a game and even a roleplaying experience.

We know of many phenomena in the real world we can't quite fully explain. Gravity for one - we can observe it's effects but after centuries of study we still don't fully understand its modus operendi.

And having a magic system were every spell is completely and fully understood is a bunch of poppycock in my opinion as well.

Is this spell broken? No. Does it do something unexplainable or hard to understand, at least from the "in character" standpoint? Yes. But mysteries such as this are what make magic what it is - an art and not a science.

On many of my spells I simply state what the spell does and leave the players to ponder the how's, why and such in character. Sometimes they guess right, sometimes they guess wrong - most often they're somewhere in between. But such vageries help maintain some aura of mystery to the game I don't want to explain away.

 

[Cheiromancer]

That helps a lot. Now I can see what it looks like when the spell is in action. And now my players will be able to see it too. For an undead I might say "The ray of gray light dissipates harmlessly against the cleric's aura, which blazes with brilliant white light. The light overflows and surges back towards the lich along the path the gray ray travelled, and the lich is consumed from within with white fire."

There's some kind of inevitable that uses negative energy. Enervations, I think. Does death ward protect against that, I wonder?....

Anyways, thanks for expanding on the description/explanation.

 

[Michael Morris]

That helps a lot. Now I can see what it looks like when the spell is in action. And now my players will be able to see it too. For an undead I might say "The ray of gray light dissipates harmlessly against the cleric's aura, which blazes with brilliant white light. The light overflows and surges back towards the lich along the path the gray ray travelled, and the lich is consumed from within with white fire."

There's some kind of inevitable that uses negative energy. Enervations, I think. Does death ward protect against that, I wonder?....

Anyways, thanks for expanding on the description/explanation.

Yes, death ward stops all forms of negative energy attacks. Greater Death Ward does this as well with the additional spell-turning-like effect on death spells and effects.