Five Spells for Villainous Strongholds in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

is your dark foreboding tower underground dungeon complex or villainous Castle experiencing an adventurer problem do you find that all of your treasure and magical items are constantly being stolen are going missing are your dark rituals interrupted by bands of intrepid heroes who are slaying your minions monsters and loved ones well we have 5 spells for you these are 5 spells that can protect your villainous stronghold greetings my name is Monte Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we discuss everything Dungeons and Dragons including advice for Dungeon Master's and guides for players we upload new videos every Thursday so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we're looking at five spells in the dungeons of dragons fifth edition players handbook that dungeon masters can use when designing a villainous stronghold or dungeon environment these spells are often overlooked by players because they don't seem to have very many tactical uses in combat or exploration but for a villain to use them on their strongholds really amps up their fortifications these are spells that are long lasting and have a major impact on an environment particularly when you're the one building it or constructing it they're available to a wide range of classes and pose really interesting scenarios when the player characters encounter them that they have to figure out how to solve so let's get rolling as always we're just going through these spells alphabetically by spell level they're not ranked in any particular order the first spell we're looking at today is a second level illusion spell found on page 263 of the players handbook and it is missiles magic aura missiles magic aura is a very clever spell for Dungeon Master's that are trying to get around a very canny group of player characters this is because missiles magic aura has the ability to mask or modify the magical auras that player characters normally detect using the detect magic spell players will often use the detect magic spell which can be cast as a ritual in D&D Fivey to determine what sort of magic is at hand when they're in a dungeon this can oftentimes give them some clue or ideas on how to get around certain spells that might cause problems for them oftentimes detect magic completely spoils the surprise of a magical trap and the fact that it is a ritual does mean that the players have it readily at their disposal when gathering information over the years my groups have started to rely on detect magic very heavily when exploring dungeons as a way of bypassing traps overcoming puzzles and recognizing when something is going to explode because it has an aura of a vocation or abjuration magic on it but putting missles magic aura liberally throughout the dungeon allows me to trick the players or to even hide these magical auras completely from them the spell usually lasts for 24 hours but if you cast it every day for 30 days it becomes permanent so this means that a villain with a stronghold that has been there for a long time might just have a series of permanent magic auras placed all around their dungeon this is going to be a recurring theme with the spells that we're looking at today many of these spells have a short duration or a one-day effect but they become permanent when constantly cast in the same location after several weeks months or even years this makes them really easy to be used in strongholds where a villain has a long time to prepare and set up their defenses but not so much for players who are often moving around and going to different environments you can also use the mask ability of magic aura to change the type of creature that can be detected by certain players meaning that a paladin using their divine sense to detect undead might not be able to detect them if you have the magic aura another great strategy that you can use with magic aura is to create a fake treasure vault by placing a fake aura of magic around swords magic items pieces of clothing that the players pick up they can't figure out what's magical about it so they think it must be a mysterious puzzle and it really turns out that that's not even a magical sword at all that's just a fake treasure and the real treasure has been hidden underneath and masked by the magic aura spell as well that's so mean the next vote we're looking at is a third-level app duration spell found on page 245 of the players handbook and this is glyph of warding and it's a long spell it is and it takes a long time to set up because it takes one hour to set a glyph of warding by casting it and you also need 200 gold pieces in magical dust or gems or something to set the glyph of warding but once you've said it it lasts until it's dispelled or activated so it's a very long lasting defensive measure although an expensive one because once the glyph awarding is triggered it's gone and you have to set it back up again let's talk about how glyph of warding works you make a magical glyph on a surface of your choice and then you get to choose some really cool features about what that glyph is gonna do yeah it's effectively a magical trap and you get to explain what is gonna trigger it so you could say that any creature that touches it or picks up this object or walks near it within 10 feet of it triggers the glyph and it blows up but you could even have other restrictions like a creature has to read the words or pick the object up or it only affects elves or creatures of a certain alignment or it doesn't work if someone says the password giggle shorts so you've got a lot of leeway in how exactly the glyph is triggered and it's almost invisible requiring an intelligence investigation check to detect that it's even there not only can you use this to just have an exploding trap that's triggered by something but you can also cast another spell into the glyph of warding causing that to be the spell that's triggered when the effects take place yeah so glyph of warding gives you as a dungeon master the basic template for how to turn any spell in the players handbook into a trap so very simply you could have a trap that when the players walk over a platform it polymorphs them into a chicken and the great thing is that with with a warning is that the glyph of warding spell concentrates for you so if you put a concentration spell in the glyph warding once it's triggered it lasts the full duration so someone that walks over your polymorph glyph gets turned into a chicken and that's that they don't have to get that dispelled or the duration has to end so there's a lot really cool uses for the spell there's lots of ways that you can incorporate other spells in this there's lots of really cool things I'm thinking of a bunch of Heroes showing up in a library and there's one book in the middle that looks like it's going to be this magical book of secrets but actually it's just filled with traps and when you read the words you explode one important caveat with little warning is that if it is put on an object and not a surface and that object is then moved more than 10 feet from its original location the glyph of wording is broken so it's hard to put it on a book and then have all those pages just suddenly exploding in your face but it is a good way to protect a book that you don't want to get stolen I would put a glyph of warning on that book that simply dimensioned or in a creature away so somebody breaks in and they're looking for this holy relic of a book to read these ancient words and then they start to read them and they just get teleported back out of your dungeon or they get teleported in you a room filled with acid or yeah yeah yeah I don't make a good villain you're the better villain or you can have any spell triggered by this like for example what you guys didn't realize in our dungeons a dragon hunt campaign is that you guys actually triggered a glyph of warding that had a cloud kill attached to it oh that all makes sense yeah yeah or and I've actually created a trap room where there were two glyphs of warding one that created a wall of force and one that created a cloud kill and we triggered both yeah at the same time yeah horrible yeah it's very horrible there are some really nefarious ways to use glyph of warding in a villains lair that are not really obvious because anybody that touches the glyph of warding can potentially trigger it in fact you might want to create a glyph of warding that only works when you touch it casting a buff spell into the glyph alone the villain on their desk has a glyph of warding that when they slam it it casts a fly spell on or the villain has another book on their bookshelf that does that same dimension door trick but they grab the book they pull it out and it teleports them away so they can escape yeah it's an it's an you can have an auto escape plan yeah you could even just have I don't know an orb sitting on their desk that they're just like I'm out of here yeah yeah gone Oh a big problem that I think a lot of villains have when you're making like a boss encounter is that you want to buff the villain up somehow but it's hard to do that without giving them extra magic items and they don't know enough spell slots and it's hard to have a villain that's trying to have a fly spell on them but also has stone skin on them like you can't stack buffs on your villain because of the concentration mechanic but a villain that's well prepared with lifts of warding in their in their sanctum might have a glyph that they just grab and that cast stone skin on themselves and they have a glyph that they just grab and that casts fly on them and they have those prepared for the last-ditch contingency so that they can actually balk themselves up if they need to defend their inner sanctum I'm just imagining that the evil sorcerers desk is just full of glyphs and when the enemies break in or just our heroes and the control yeah and then they just power up yeah that works yeah you could put a bunch of different spells in there and that would create some interesting things also just creating a boss encounter with a bunch of glyphs of wording that could be triggered by the players could create an interesting encounter the thing to be careful with with rewarding is that it's really easy to go overboard with it and it's impossible to calculate how this affects the challenge rating of an actual encounter the next spell we're looking at is a third level illusion spell on page 258 of the players handbook and that is major image major image allows you to create a very large illusion up to 20 feet on a side that includes all sorts of stimuli like smell touch and even thermal components to it you can control this image at last for up to an hour but the unique thing about major image that's useful for us in building a stronghold is the fact that when you cast major image using a sixth level spell slot the spell no longer requires concentration and instead it becomes permanent there are so many things that I can think of to cast major image and really mess up a group of adventures if you have a large gorge with like spikes or something at the bottom and a bridge across that rope bridge could just be a major image you could just hide the entrance to your stronghold completely with major image and I I think security through obscurity is a valid tactic and I've designed dungeons in the past where the entrances have been pretty obvious it's just that they were masked over by illusions and there were even doors and corridors in the entire dungeon complex that were just covered over with an illusion so that the players didn't know that it was there every time that I've walked up invisible staircases or through walls that you were like yet you just walked through the wall that was major image yeah yeah major image was powering that wall because that's the simplest way to explain it and it gives you a baseline of how to adjust how player characters would need to fine or penetrate illusions so I find that illusions are a big part of my own dungeon design I almost always have a campaign where there is an illusionist villain that masks major areas of their dungeon with illusions and I use major image as my reference tool for deciding how players find it what it can do and then how long it lasts and kind of the rules for it I like this idea of using major image to place objects that the players would want to interact with or use in the heat of combat that end up just being a full-on illusion mm-hmm like maybe they they see that there's a rope hanging that they could swing across and they could like jump and grab the rope but the ropes just an image so you have them jump to try to grab it and then they just plummet to their death there's so many fun uses of tricking your players with illusions that's just so much fun and I think as a DM watching your players fall for those is a little bit of an evil part of me that I get joy out of because having your players fall for your traps is just so much fun one of my favorite illusions is the players come down the stairs of the dungeon and right away there's an open pit trap filled with spikes it's a 20 foot deep pit filled with spikes at the bottom or if you want to do higher levels you can even have acid or lava at the bottom of the pit there's a rope going down into the pit that's cut off just before the trap and then a skeleton or down there at the bottom and the player characters are immediately going to jump over this pit but what they don't realize is that the trap like the lava or the spikes is an illusion and the floor of the trap itself is false and that's the true entrance to the dungeon I'm using that I'm stealing that that's great that you're so evil he's so evil right because though and then when they jump over the pit everything past it is a complete distraction so that's where you have all the dungeon that's filled with the treasure that's fool's gold that's been masked with magic aura so they go in there and you have like undead creatures to defend them and then it doesn't matter though the real thing is hidden underneath what looked like an obvious trap I also want to just give a quick honorable mention dispels like hallucinatory terrain mirages arcane and seeming that also can help sell these kind of illusions and of course my favorite which is project image which allows your villain to then be safely in their villainous stronghold project their image up into the false stronghold so when the adventurers come to confront them in the throne room it's an it's an illusory image that talks to them that then disappears and lots of them so the adventurers jump over the pit burst through the doors and there's a wizard standing there turns around and is like oh no you found me and then they go to attack him and he's an illusion the pit was an illusion the treasure was an illusion everything everything was an illusion and they didn't even get into the right dog yeah the next whoa we're looking at is a fourth level AB duration spell found on page 262 of The Player's Handbook that is more than canons private sanctum now you have encountered border Titans private sanctum a lot in my campaigns Oh probably you have and and I think that you know just how dastardly it can be at forcing players to think outside the box more than kinds private sanctum like several of the other spells that we discussed normally only lasts for 24 hours but when you cast it in the same location every day for a year it becomes permanent so well Morden kind of private sanctum is limited to a small area of about a hundred feet on a side over time of hood ward a much larger complex with successive castings on different areas to fully protect their entire private sanctum so once an area has been warded with Morten Qaeda its private sanctum there's a few different traits that come into play one of the big ones for me is that it actually creates this wall of fog that you cannot see through and that is something that the players will have to pass in order to enter that sanctum yeah so both sound and vision are blocked on the edges of the area so if you as a spellcaster are casting this on your tower people can't even look through the windows of your castle to see what's going on inside if the player characters open up a door they will see a wall of misty fog that they can't see beyond and these are really intimidating for your player characters to come across even if there's not anything major on the other side the assumption is that there always is you people generally have a fear of the unknown and I can't tell you a time that I have opened a door in one of Monty's campaigns to see a wall of fog that I cannot see through cannot do anything through it and we all have to just trust that we're gonna walk through this and come out on the other side okay the other critical features of Morden kindness' private sanctum is that it blocks teleportation into or out of the warded area preventing things like players from using dimensioned or to bypass obstacles or even from escaping using such spells because even planar travel can be blocked with more than titans private sanctum finally one kind of private sanctum also blocks most forms of divination such as the player characters trying to scout an area using arcane AI or scrying on a villain that is sleeping in that area so if you do have a party member that takes scrying and you want to keep your major villain safe you should give them a private sanctum that they can hang out in because that way they can't be screwed on yeah I basically operate under the assumption that my big bad villains always have somewhere where this spell is in effect they have some sort of private sanctum that's where they go to sleep every night it's well-guarded it's weld it's probably secured with some allusions and some of the other tricks and traps that we've had and that's their private ultimate fortress and that might not be the entirety of their fortress or the entirety of their dungeon but like the personal apartment of the villain is warded in this way if your players are a seventh level and they have dimension door you put this big adamantium door that is covered with glyphs of warding one of their first reactions is almost always going to be well we just dimension door to the other side and this this asks them to come up with a little bit more of that of a solution there yeah it forces your players to have to think outside the box because now you've presented them with something that nullifies the easy ways out yeah and I think the thing with using a spell like more than kind as private sanctum there's also a similar spell called forbidden that has a similar effect but also affects different creature types - the thing with it blocking teleportation and divination is that you want to use that in a way that forces the players to solve the problem in other interesting ways it removes the obvious solution but it doesn't shut down all the creativity it can be used as a railroading tool to mean that like the only way to pass the adamantium door of sera Von Teese is to bring forth the eight great sigils and put them into the door and yes sure the last spell that we are looking at today is a six-letter agent spell found on page 248 of the players handbook and it is guards and warrants guards and wards is an incredibly useful spell because it is more or less your one purchase option to protect your entire fortress or villainous stronghold or underground lair you basically just need this one spell and it's going to give you all the things you need to protect it against those pesky adventures with one casting of the spell you can ward an area up to 2500 square feet approximately 25 10-foot by 10-foot cubes and so you can stack them and arrange them however you need to to fill multiple corridors or spaces and of course successively you could apply guards in the wards to a larger structure with well castings and the effects of guards and wards do last 24 hours but they become permanent once they've been cast in one space every day for a year and for me guarding wards is really inspiration more than anything else because you could replicate darts and wards with multiple castings of glyph of warding and using things like major image creatively but guarding words gives you the full package in one spell yeah it gives you so many different options that affect so many different parts of your stronghold so I say that we go over them one at a time and just mention what it is that they do and how you might use them first it does a really basic thing it fills all the staircases in the stronghold with web spells so that anybody that's trying to go up or down those stairs that you don't want going up or down those stairs get stuck and furthermore if someone burns away your webs they grow back ten minutes later so there you go you have sticky stairs all over your dungeon already another one that it does is it actually fills the area with fog all the corridors are heavily obscured and at all the intersections whenever a creature of Avenue tries to go through those intersections there's a 50% chance that they just automatically go the opposite way that they wanted to go I'm gonna turn left and then they end up going right 50% chance you could even if you had an obvious path through your dungeon using guards and wards means that it's far less obvious which direction they're gonna end up going in next all the doors in your guarded and warded area become locked by the arcane lock spell another spell that could make it onto this list but because it's contained within the spell doesn't quite get its own mention in addition ten of the doors in your sanctum become covered by illusions to appear as normal sections of wall which is another completely dastardly trick so you now have magically locked doors and ten doors that you won't even notice are there yeah and how are you gonna find the other doors when all the corridors are covered in fog as well and then you got a deal with those web stairs yeah that would be enough on its own but now you also get to put a gust of wind down one of the hallways stinking clouds in two locations you also got magic mouth and yeah so you can send a warning message on the outside have a mouth appear and say get out of my house yeah off my lawn and then you can also have a suggestion spell cast on someone which I also love the idea just to go back to you cliff of warding putting a suggestion in a glyph of warding to have someone do something awful like drink that vial of green liquid over there or why don't you jump into that pool of liquid that is looks like water but is not I just imagine this party that works its way through these twisting corridors of fog up these webbed stairs finding these secret doors they finally get to the last room and they just get suggested to please leave and they're like oh okay and they go back the way that yeah emily's yeah and the icing on the cake is that when you cache cartoon words you can specify other creatures in addition to you that aren't affected by any of the effects so your minions and monsters yes yes so guards and wards is a hundred percent the number one most essential spell I'd say to take for your villainous stronghold it basically gives you a list of things to to just set up your stronghold better and make characters get really messed up trying to navigate through it yeah I think what's what's cool about these things is that a lot of these spells on paper aren't really unfair but when you think about how these spells encourage us as Dungeon Master's to think creatively about our environments and to think about the tools that our villains would have at their disposal to defend their strongholds we can create some really unique dungeon environments that feel like they're existing within the world of Dungeons and Dragons at the same time I think that it is a really important note for those of you who are just getting into DMing or home brewing your own dungeons or anything like that that when we make a when we make a series like this I often see a lot of people comment being like I'm gonna kill all my players next game with this and maybe you will and maybe that's really fun but you also don't want to make every stronghold have such intensity fed defenses that your players are just lost and confused every time they enter a dungeon have a few goblin caves in that don't have this sort of thing have some environments where they're not gonna get messed up but when they come to your major villain stronghold and you want it to be this set-piece dungeon that they're going to remember forever these are the sort of things that really set it apart from just trudging through room after room of enemies this makes them think and this makes them come up with some interesting and creative solutions which is in my opinion what makes D&D so much fun on the flip side I think a lot of players go through the players handbook and see these spells and think they're completely useless and they don't realize that these spells are actually here for Dungeon Master inspiration players can get really overconfident once they start discovering spells that let them detect traps teleport past them and easily overcome obstacles in their path and so by throwing a curveball like this in front of your players it really can shake them out of their confidence and complacency and remind them that your villains are smart too and that they plan ahead using these spells in conjunction with the spells that we talked about in our v spells for villains yields are really intelligent and crafty lich that is feels like they're acting as an antagonist against the party even before they come in direct contact with the party and I think that that's the cool thing for making a villain in D&D so memorable is that so rarely do we have the opportunity to let our players confront the villain or to experience the villain being competent you know the villain just ends up getting slain in the final confrontation when the party shows up to disrupt the ritual the best way they know that it exists then you know that person is taunting them almost and constantly causing problems for them even before they've come in contact with them yeah and I think as well if I was going to implement these I often don't use all of them together at the same time the first time my players encounter them I'm a big fan of using things like just major image at first or a single glyph of warding with a spell effect attached to it so the event players get used to the idea that these things exist in the world and they should be thinking about them after all all of these effects can be pretty easily dismantled by a well-placed dispel magic spell so it's not like the players don't have the tools to bypass them it's just that they have to think smart so that they don't catch them by surprise so this has been our list of the top five spells for villainous strongholds in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition if you've used any of these spells or others for your strongholds let us know about them in the comments below please consider supporting our show on patreon if you're enjoying the channel you can find out how by following the links in the description below and if you want to see Monti mess us up with some of these amazing spells you can check out our live play dungeons of dragon hime which airs Tuesday nights at 6 p.m. Eastern on Twitch you can find all the previous episodes in a playlist right up over here and our classic 5 spells for villains will show you more nefarious tactics for your evil villain right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 115,545

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: oQBmtgU4d2g

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2019