Out of Combat Wizard Shenanigans

[Bobthewizard]

What are your favorite out of combat high level wizard shenanigans? Making armies with Infernal Calling/Magic Circle/Planar Binding. Multiple high level Mass Suggestions to gain allies. Simulacrum loops. Illusory Realty.

Here’s mine.

1. Clone each party member
2. Place clones in Demiplane with a rock hammer and sapphires
3. Sapphires are from Drawmij’s Instant Summons for their best magic items
4. Glyphs of Warding for each clone, so that on one command of “Power Up” the Glyphs cast all of the following spells: Jump, Mage Armor, Protection from Evil, Darkvision, Enlarge, Invisibility, See Invisibility, Spider Climb, Fly, Haste, Protection from Energy, Tongues, Water Breathing, Fire Shield, Greater Invisibility, True Seeing, and Mind Blank. (crossed out if they are redundant)
5. Glyph of Warding for each clone so that on command of “Return” the Glyph casts plane shift to return the player to the place of choice, near their spot of death

So if the wizard dies, then at 6 second intervals
1. Staff disappears
2. Robe disappears, etc.
3. Multiple buffs simultaneously from Glyph of Warding on single command word
4. Plane shift from Glyph of Warding on command to 100’ away from your old body
5. Force cage around enemies
6. Sickening Radiance (creatures in Forcecage then have to make Constitution saves every 6 seconds for 10 minutes)
7. Dimension door away

What else have you seen?

[viaFAMILIAR]

Prestidigitation: soil your highschool bully's pants

[Mercurias]

I had a Wizard in a one-shot who had a habit of using Prestidigitation to make someone's drink at a bar taste the way farts smell if they made him angry.

The same Wizard used Shape Water to cause Holy Water to soak into the shafts of crossbow bolts when hunting undead.

The same Wizard used Shape Water and his waterskin to freeze a door shut in order to give himself time to cast Invisibility on himself, then use his familiar as a decoy (He'd made a habit of using it to turn into a crow, so he had his familiar look like a crow) while he went back into the castle to find out what he'd been sent to learn.

[Wizard_Lizard]

low level shenanigans is just the spell suggestion.
"hand over the dwarf please mr bugbear"
fails wis save
"ok"

[JackPhoenix]

What are your favorite out of combat high level wizard shenanigans? Making armies with Infernal Calling/Magic Circle/Planar Binding. Multiple high level Mass Suggestions to gain allies. Simulacrum loops. Illusory Realty.

Here’s mine.

1. Clone each party member
2. Place clones in Demiplane with a rock hammer and sapphires
3. Sapphires are from Drawmij’s Instant Summons for their best magic items
4. Glyphs of Warding for each clone, so that on one command of “Power Up” the Glyphs cast all of the following spells: Jump, Mage Armor, Protection from Evil, Darkvision, Enlarge, Invisibility, See Invisibility, Spider Climb, Fly, Haste, Protection from Energy, Tongues, Water Breathing, Fire Shield, Greater Invisibility, True Seeing, and Mind Blank. (crossed out if they are redundant)
5. Glyph of Warding for each clone so that on command of “Return” the Glyph casts plane shift to return the player to the place of choice, near their spot of death

So if the wizard dies, then at 6 second intervals
1. Staff disappears
2. Robe disappears, etc.
3. Multiple buffs simultaneously from Glyph of Warding on single command word
4. Plane shift from Glyph of Warding on command to 100’ away from your old body
5. Force cage around enemies
6. Sickening Radiance (creatures in Forcecage then have to make Constitution saves every 6 seconds for 10 minutes)
7. Dimension door away

What else have you seen?

See Invisibility and Fire Shield are invalid for Glyph of Warding, as they both target only the caster. Water Breathing and Plane Shift are invalid, as they targets more than one person. And even if PS wasn't, you would have to pre-select the destination when you cast the spell, not when you activate the glyph, and you wouldn't have precise control of the arrival location anyway. "A mountain from which you can see the place of your death, 10 miles away from it" is a valid possibility, going by the example from the spell's description. Drawmij's Instant Summons only work for the caster, so you would have to do all the breaking, and the longer you take, the higher the chance someone will grab the items from your corpse.

And Clone won't restore your expended resources, so you better hope you have some left after a fight tough enough to kill your whole party.

[Bobthewizard]

See Invisibility and Fire Shield are invalid for Glyph of Warding, as they both target only the caster. Water Breathing and Plane Shift are invalid, as they targets more than one person. And even if PS wasn't, you would have to pre-select the destination when you cast the spell, not when you activate the glyph, and you wouldn't have precise control of the arrival location anyway. "A mountain from which you can see the place of your death, 10 miles away from it" is a valid possibility, going by the example from the spell's description. Drawmij's Instant Summons only work for the caster, so you would have to do all the breaking, and the longer you take, the higher the chance someone will grab the items from your corpse.

And Clone won't restore your expended resources, so you better hope you have some left after a fight tough enough to kill your whole party.

All good points. You are right on See Invisibility and Fire Shield. I tried to remove the self spells but missed those two. I think Water Breathing is still ok since it can target one creature. Glyph of Warding isn't worded like Twin meta magic. It just says the spell can only target one creature, not that it can only be able to target one creature. Drawmij's would still work for me at least. Bummer for everyone else. Plane shift would have to be a scroll then. At least for me and anyone else who could use one. Of course all of this depends on the DM allowing buffs in GOW which isn't completely a given.

[Segev]

As an Illusionist, I'm fond of having a mirage arcane that is my personal flying castle. Put it up on a cloud, and you can bring it down to modify entire cities when you like, and put it away to stay in when you're done. Of course, you have to provide your own transport there, but you're a wizard; I'm sure you'll figure that part out.

Heck, if your cloud castle is less than ten miles up, you can give it a stairway. Though I hope you're in good shape if you're hiking up that many stairs.

Trickier to do, but if you can get a real stone slab or something up there, you could put a teleportation circle up there to teleport to when you bring your castle. The spell is particular about actually casting the spell in the same place for a year to affix it, though, so you're unlikely to get away with just willing the glyphs into being to create a target with mirage arcane alone.


Same spell, but using it to extort a noble, king, city, or what-have-you into paying up, or just to punish them, by causing the whole thing to be a dilapidated wreck would work. Going unsubtle, you can do it all at once, even making the structures vanish entirely to wipe the city off the map for weeks. Going subtle, you can cause it to change slowly over time, getting more and more ruined, worn, and destroyed as time passes no matter the repair efforts. Going "poetic justice," you could make the slums into palacial apartments and the best parts of town into molding ruins.

For the unsubtle options, you don't even have to be an Illusionist; the range is line of sight, so you can cast the spell from a couple miles outside of town, just eyeballing it for the 10 minutes.