High Level Magic (a bit of a mouthful)

[paradox42]

Hey! They had Clydesdales, baby. And the coolest weapon ever.

No no, Firemares. They were called Firemares. And they could run across open air leaving trails of flame behind them- much cooler (or hotter?) than mere Clydesdales!

 

[Tsillanabor]

Higher-level adventurers need nemeses (nemesii?). By the time characters reach the upper levels I try to have at least a rival group of adventurers, recurring BBEG, powerful monster they want to gain the power to defeat, etc., etc. for them to deal with.

 

[Vanye]

On a somewhat related note...how do you guys handle COMMUNE WITH NATURE?

From the SRD:
Commune with Nature
Divination
Level: Animal 5, Drd 5, Rgr 4
Components: V, S
Casting Time: 10 minutes
Range: Personal
Target: You
Duration: Instantaneous
You become one with nature, attaining knowledge of the surrounding territory. You instantly gain knowledge of as many as three facts from among the following subjects: the ground or terrain, plants, minerals, bodies of water, people, general animal population, presence of woodland creatures, presence of powerful unnatural creatures, or even the general state of the natural setting.
In outdoor settings, the spell operates in a radius of 1 mile per caster level. In natural underground settings—caves, caverns, and the like—the radius is limited to 100 feet per caster level. The spell does not function where nature has been replaced by construction or settlement, such as in dungeons and towns.



I haven't had anyone in my games ever cast the spell, and I've shied away from casting it in games I've run, but it looks like it'd be a damn useful spell...but a major, major pain in the ass for the DM. Has anyone in this thread actually used the spell?

 

[The_Gneech]

Well, yes, it's useful, but hardly game-breaking as far as I can see. "Up to three facts" could include something like, "there is a band of orcs on the far side of the ridge" or "the forest wastes under an ancient curse" or so forth, but it's not gonna tell you anything that you couldn't find out by sending the magician's familiar out on a scouting mission, I would think.

-The Gneech

 

[kigmatzomat]

It was used in my game quite extensively by the druid. It is a good high level snapshot of the area. The 3 usual facts were: presence of humanoids, presence of unnatural creatures, and animal population (particularly predators). The 9+ mile radius will usually tell people what they might encounter through about lunchtime, assuming they're on horseback, less with magical transportation.

I find it fun for terrorizing the party every so often since creatures at high altitude or several hundred feet below ground can be sensed.

 

[Psion]

Warding areas against teleportation is edging the line of "negating the PCs' wifty abilities outright," but maybe there are ward-keys (thank you, Silver Marches supplement) that specifically allow that character to pierce the wards...

This sounds interesting. Care to shed some light on how this works?

 

[ruleslawyer]

This has been around a good long while in FR, actually. Ward tokens are, well, tokens that one can carry that allow passage through the ward for the token-bearer. Silverymoon's wards have four different types, each of which negates a specific subset of ward prohibitions for the bearer of the token.

Personally, I like the way the Realms handles this; there have been lots of defenses against teleportation and scrying in FR material for a long time, and they've got a lot of flavor. (My favorite is perhaps Waethra's warm welcome, from Volo's Guide to All Things Magical; it simply must be seen to be believed.)

Still, we're back to the arms race. Personally, I favor house rules. A few of mine:

1) Teleport is 7th level, greater teleport 9th. This makes using greater teleport a difficult choice even for high-level spellcasters, and reduces the number of folk able to pop around the game world at whim. They also raise the likelihood that casters will use other travel spells, like wind walk and shadow walk.

2) Divinations all require a caster power check (1d20 + caster level + spellcasting stat) against a DC of some sort, depending on the spell and what knowledge is desired. Defenses against divinations raise the DC of the check rather than creating a blanket prohibition.

 

[WizarDru]

I haven't had anyone in my games ever cast the spell, and I've shied away from casting it in games I've run, but it looks like it'd be a damn useful spell...but a major, major pain in the ass for the DM. Has anyone in this thread actually used the spell?

Our druid used it frequently. It's a nice 'what's going on in the area' spell, but it doesn't actually give much specific or practical information, by itself.

Example: at one point, the druid in my game used it to sense a forest. Within he discovered that there were two extremely powerful unnatural creatures, some 200 soldiers and that there was a sizable body of water nearby. The spell doesn't reveal things like an exact location by my reading of the spell, just the presence of them. It also doesn't specify information about the creatures, though I always offer a 'relative power' description similar to any of the Detect series of spells. In this case, the two powerful unnatural creatures were White Slaad, shapechanged into the forms of elves, walking amongst an advance Elven scouting force allied with the players, camped near a lake. This told them that there was definitely trouble afoot....but they had no way of tracking them with just this spell; it took other spells in conjunction with this one to gain the full picture.

The thing to remember about high-level divinations is that they are individually useful, but the real power comes from overlap from the use of several at once.