Dispel Magic and Secret Page.

[gomipile]

Here's a question from a friend of mine:


Got a D&D question for you and the forums. The spellbook my wizard found that was covered entirely by Secret Page and probably a few traps, what would a Dispel Magic cast on the book do? Take out some of the secret pages and traps, all of them, erase the spells scribed inside?

[Curmudgeon]

If a spell is written on the "secret" page, Dispel Magic will remove that. But spell writings themselves aren't magical, so writing on the "real" pages will remain. I'm assuming a Dispel Magic targeted on the book, so you'll know if any of the spells cast there made their saves to avoid being dispelled; that way you can repeat the process until all the traps are gone.

[Moriato]

Secret Page just makes the page appear to have else written on it than it actually does. Dispelling it would reveal what's actually written on the page, it wont erase the spell written there, they're not inherently magical by themselves.

I think that technically, since the target of Secret Page is a single page, and not the whole book, a targeted dispel on his spellbook would not dispel any of the secret pages. They'd have to specifically target the page.

An area dispel, however, would hit them all, but that would only target the spell with the highest caster level on each page. I'm actually not sure what you do if they all have the same caster level. Roll randomly I guess? Anyway, if a page had both Secret Page and Explosive Runes on it, for example, an area dispel would dispel one or the other, but not both. That's assuming they succeed on their dispel check, as normal, which they would have to do for each page with a spell effect on it.

Wow, this is more complicated than I thought it would be.