Five Spells for Villains - DM Tips for Dungeons and Dragons 5e

what are we gonna do today Monty well the same thing we do every day Kelly we're going to try to take over the world with magic [Music] greetings evil masterminds overlords and Dungeon Master's I'm Marty Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes are you thinking what I'm thinking Monty I don't know Kelly what are you thinking I'm thinking that we need to pick out some top spells to give our big bad evil guy in our D&D campaign yeah we've got a special episode for Dungeon Master's as we're gonna help you take your villains to the next level by showing you how to use the magic in the players handbook against your unsuspecting heroes so some dungeon masters will tell you that as a DM you don't need to play by the rules at all but there is a smug satisfaction to be gained about challenging your players by using magic that they can use to against them it really will highlight how vicious some of these spells that people seem to overlook can really be yeah and it may it teaches your players to think differently about how they plan and approach situations and I think using spells as a DM really effectively but being constrained by the same constraints the players have oh really is one of those things that makes your players a respect your villains much more and B fear them we're gonna take a look at a number of different spells today we're gonna go into detail about each one and Monte's going to tell us a bit about how to really use those spells in your game to create a really crazy villain what's the first spell that we want to talk about today yeah so the very first spell that I want to talk about is scrying scrying which is a spell that allows you to spy on your player characters from the wherever he is scribe is a fifth level spell so it's available to lots and lots of different character classes clerics get it bards get it Wizards get it sorcerers get it actually sorcerers might not get it warlocks get it so almost any major villain archetype is gonna have access to the scrying spell as soon as they get to ninth level yeah and from a player's perspective you know you might look at that spell and say well that doesn't really do a whole lot of damage it I don't get to cast fireball I don't get to blow things up but there is something really terrifying about having a villain that can constantly spy on the party ya know bear in mind scrying does take 10 minutes to cast and you only get to spy on somebody for 10 minutes at a time so your villain isn't necessarily gonna get the opportunity to be constantly spying on the party but scribe allows your villain to observe the party as if they were really there now until your villain knows the player characters names or collects pieces of their hair your party's gonna get a very good chance of making their saving throw and scrying is a great thing to do at the table just saying hey Kelly make a wisdom saving throat and your players are like what why am I doing this you might send your villain out eventually your they might send like a spy out to collect like fingernails from their players which gives them a which gives the player a minus 10 penalty on their wisdom saving throw against the screen you want your villain to scry on your party once a day cuz usually they're only gonna have one or two spell slots to do that with mm-hmm and so my villains by default scry on the party in the morning or at night the other thing is that the villain can also use scrying to spy on their own lieutenants so you kind of create a network then of your main bad guy being able to see what all of his commanding officers are doing keeping tabs on them and really just making sure that he's controlling his evil our second spell had a little bit or direct combat application and that is contingency contingency now I as a player character have used contingency I loved my contingency but I can think of many other ones that a villain may use now contingency is a sixth level spell it's only available to Wizards however bards can pick it up with magical secrets and many often do because there's a fantastic spell for both players and their villains this also means that the villain has a little bit of a narcissistic streak because for contingency you need a jeweled statue of yourself worth 1,500 gold pieces yeah but what villain doesn't have them exactly it's like your own action figure yeah and so contingency once you cast it it lasts 10 days so it doesn't count against the spells of the visit the your villain has used 4/4 time so I usually say that my my villain is never caught on a day that they cast contingency and you get to specify a condition and then cast another spell that happens automatically when that condition applies but it can only be a spell that targets you who's casting contingency for my player character I had it so that I also had polymorph so I had it so that if my wizard was reduced to half hit points or lower he immediately cast polymorph on himself and became a t-rex now that's an awesome strategy just bear in mind that if you do do that you have to concentrate on the new spell that the contingency creates so if you were reduced to have hit points and then turn into a t-rex you're now concentrating on that poly more spell as well yeah um and once you specify the conditions of a contingency it happens regardless of whether you want it to or not my favorite use of contingency for a villain is basically to give the villains an extra of legendary resistance I have my villain say that their contingency is cast dispel magic at fifth level on myself if a spell renders me incapacitated a question about contingency when it goes off does it use a spell slot to trigger then it doesn't but when you cast contingency originally you use a sixth level slot and then you also cast the spell that you're casting as well and I'm pretty sure you can cast that so the limit of the second spell is it can't be higher than fifth level so it means that like you can't put and it also needs to have like a casting time of one action so you can't do things like have contingency to heal yourself or contingency to raise raise yourself from the dead right but dispel magic is a pretty good one one that often also gets use is contingency for invisibility what about our third spell monty our third spell is a seventh level spell and this is forced Cage I don't like playing against force cage because Monty has used it way too many times on my player characters and it always puts me into a panic mode while I run around trying to figure out what the heck to do it's essentially a force prison you can actually choose whether it's bars or a solid yeah it's either a solid box that is on all sides and it's ten by ten or a cage which is twenty by twenty and you basically can trap the player characters inside of this and use this as a tool for escape or a tool to really annoy a group of characters during combats yeah well and it could be used as combat as well for a whole wide range of situations there's a few reasons for this first of all forced cage doesn't require the villain to concentrate on it and it lasts for an hour and it can't be dispelled so man ah so once it goes off it's staying there right it can be disintegrated however it follows the same rules as a wall of force which also means that in the solid box option spells can't go through it either what it means though for your players is that if your villain has other things to do isn't gonna waste his time with your player characters kyla things are beneath him but he's got other places to be just force cage the jerks and then you and then you just walk away and then you just walk away yeah and usually player characters are conveniently in that 20 foot by 20 foot range because they like to stick together foolishly there's why player characters get fireball by the way and and it's very difficult to get out of a forced cage because you have to teleport out but in a teleporting out has some some issues it does because you have to make it charisma saving throw so my secret tech is a player if I get forced caged polymorph or yourself into a fly but that's only if it's the case there's the cage version it's a box version if it's the box version you're pretty stuck there now the cage version can also be comboed if your villain wants to fight so if your villain wants to fight he drops the force cage cage and then follows that up with one of those really nasty area of effect damage spells like cloud kill or incendiary cloud or wall of fire and this has the double effect if you drop like a cloud kill on the force cage area it means that now the teleportation spells that require line-of-sight to the destination won't help the player characters get out because they can't see through the clouds and they're also choking to get to death on poison gas Monty's guide to total party kills it is a really brutal strategy I usually combo it with time stop so I have a villain time stop force cage cloud kill and usually at that point your players have hit the panic button and are trying to figure out what to do to survive so is it so if you want like the ultimate offensive combination to drop on player characters that's the combo it's also a good way to make your player characters crack yeah well that said um I don't usually drop this as a thing Intel like player characters are over 10 through 11 level because any players under that level will just die to it and to be fair every time that I'm stuck in a forest cage although frustrating it actually added an exciting level of injury to the battle where we had to think outside the box quite literally outside I guess yeah our next spell is a little bit more Trin but I love it it's an eighth level spell called mind blank mind blank as far as I know this one is one that the villain can use on itself and actually do it every morning when it wakes up yes because mind blank is an eighth level spell that lasts for 24 hours and requires no concentration my bike is one of those spells that I like to use because it I kind of find that the eighth level spells are either really really big hosers likes power words stun that just are not fun in combat like it's it's not fun as a player to get hit by power words stun just takes all of your actions there's nothing you can do like it you can't whereas with mind blank it gives them a little really big advantage both strategically and tactically you can defense the party from being able to do anything involving mind control or charm or anything involving their brain basically right yes it makes the villa immune to psychic damage and immune to all that mind control suggestion kind of shenanigans that player characters love to use to bring bring the villains low it means that your villain is never going to get dominated your villains never gonna be succumb to suggestion but it also means that the villains can't be have his mind read his or her mind read and he or she can also like or they or what however your villain wants to be they can be anything your villain also can't describe on themselves right there you go and they seem you deserve a nation magic so that counter tactic of if your players are like the villains crying on us we're gonna scroll men well no not gonna work if they have mind link which once again cast every morning so a lot of these spells are noticing you can you can kind of just say that like yeah my villain cast all of these in the morning and now doesn't need to worry about them again for the rest of the day precisely so last stuff we get to our ninth level spells and Kelly I think you're really excited about this one sis and vulnerability it is invulnerable it's all durability so invulnerability is a spell that's new in Santa thar's guide to everything and I really love this spell especially for a villain when I first read it my first thought was player characters but then I realized the potential for giving this to a villain and vulnerability makes the villain immune to all damage while they concentrate on it for up to 10 minutes but they don't need to worry about concentration stays if they're immune to all damage yeah what I think a great use of this spell could be is less in combat although you could use it in combat and it would be really really devastating but also if you want to introduce your villain early on in the campaign and just have them show up in front of the party and be like hey I'm your main villain and here's all the things that I'm going to do to kill you if they try to attack if they try anything he could cast and folder Billy on himself and now he's just there to tuck them and leave without taking any damage and really this is the through line of all the spells in our top 5 combining invulnerability with mind blank and contingency as well as for stage means that you've got a villain that now can walk right up to your player characters taunt them berate them give his great monologue about why he's here here they're so evil and walk away and that's something that is very hard to pull off in Dungeons and Dragons a lot of times villains just get ganked because the gloom stalker Ranger can make six attacks on the first time but with invulnerability and all these other abilities the villains not going to get wasted by the archer they're not going to get mind controlled by the wizard and they're gonna be able to stop the fighter from carving them up with the magic great sword right so it really gives your villain that ability to walk right up to the party even a high-level party say this is what the deal is and have that role-playing opportunity and I find so often in D&D campaigns we don't get the opportunities as DMS to really roleplay our villains in convincing and intelligent ways you sometimes the only opportunity you have as villain is the combat encounter where you get killed yeah I think the villains matter so much more if they're introduced earlier on if you know about them you get to meet them they get to give you this horrible speech about how evil they are and you as a player are like man I want to kill this guy but I can't right now because oh darn I'm in a forest cage and I can't read his mind and he's involved yeah it really makes the players feel humbled when they see you as the dungeon master not using any sort of DM Fiat to rule over the situation but kind of playing it straight I think that that makes the players understand the gravity of their situation in a way that completely homebrewing your villain to be invulnerable doesn't because you can as a DM just decide that your villain is invincible but when you present the spells that they're using in their strategies that actually means that your players now have the opportunity to learn what the villain strategies are and come up with a plan to address them getting around invulnerability in mind Blanc can be accomplished if your players are willing to cast dispel magic as a ninth level spell one of the things that I've seen done is like players that know the villain is going to scry on them so they intentionally set up the situation where they're going to lie about their plans well the villain is scrying I'm going to trick them so give your players all these opportunities to use the rules of the game in a really creative way that I think makes a much more richer story yeah so not only do you have a more devastating villain whose reach expands far beyond just the final battle but you also going to cause your players to have to think outside the force cage now I want to give a few honorable mentions before we wrap up the episode to some other divination spells and communication spells that villains can use these are spells like contact other plane which the villain can use to get in contact with their demonic patron I like to think of contact other plane is like a magic 8-ball that actually works it only gives one-word answers but the villain can ask things like what's the name of the Paladins parents and what's the name of that guy that killed my lieutenant and use that to figure out who the player characters are and seek out other resources villains can also use spells like sending to communicate with their lieutenants basically text messaging in the magical world yeah I usually like to have my villains have lieutenants that know sending so they can text the villain back and the other one if you really want to give your villain a super tool and take sending and scrying into overdrive give your villain a crystal ball of telepathy this allows the villain to cast scrying at will and telepathically communicate with anyone that they are scrying on which means that not only can your gonna spy on your players and taught them at the same time but the villain can then also scry on their lieutenants to give orders do anything to watch out for is that your villain doesn't end up with a very very full address book because every time you cast scrying takes 10 minutes to cast and ten minutes to watch so you end up with a morning that's filled up with like oh I gotta go spy on the general to talk about tactics I got to talk to the artificer who's over in Waterdeep picking up supplies and I gotta go scry on my assassins to tell them what to do caryn cancel my two o'clock I have I have too many things to scry on this evening I actually think that probably a villain would have like an assistant like that well there you just have a brand-new beautiful synapse crying on my Scrolls without my Danish copy so now your evil villain has a large array of spells that they can use to really mess with your party I hope you got inspired by some of these ideas and this will give you some things that you can take home into your campaign to strike fear into the hearts of your player characters now of course no villain is complete no matter how many spells they know without a wide range of monstrous minions to terrorize the player characters some of our favorite monsters can be found in Volos guide to monsters and a whole review of what we think of that book rate up over here or if you're looking for easy reference for the spells that we mentioned in this episode you can find our review on the spell cards over here you can pick up either these by following the links right down below please subscribe to our channel so 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: 288,110

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, adventure, tabletop, gaming, advice, dungeon, dudes, roleplaying, games, rpg, d20, master, player, character, D&D, bbeg, big bad evil guy, villain, evil, magic, sorcery, tips, tricks, spells, handbook, scrying, spying, contingency, force cage, antagonist, panic button, party kills, cloud kill, time stop, mind blank, invulnerability, strategy, dispel magic, combat, boss fight, monster, encounter

Id: dF3qHfjWa_0

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2017