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Aquillion
2020-11-10, 11:13 PM
Forbiddence says, among other things:


You create a ward against magical travel that protects up to 40,000 square feet of floor space to a height of 30 feet above the floor.


Choose one or more of the following: celestials, elementals, fey, fiends, and undead. When a chosen creature enters the spell’s area for the first time on a turn or starts its turn there, the creature takes 5d10 radiant or necrotic damage (your choice when you cast this spell).

While the damage may seem a bit low for a 6th level spell, this is a ritual (and the component is specifically only consumed if you make it permanent), so it seems like there's some useful applications here. Specifically.

Can I make the 40,000 square feet of floor space a straight "spear" extending directly from me to the BBEG's room, over seven and half miles away from me? If used in such a way, could I extend my line of warding through walls?

For that matter, since it's seven and a half miles long, could I use it as a one-foot-wide loop to encircle a small town or the like?

You're unable to overlap the Forbiddence areas, but if you have a lot of time to prepare a battlefield, could you make layers of one-foot-wide barriers, each seven miles long? Like, say, if you're defending a town from an impending undead invasion, could you spend an hour putting six rings around the town, each of which does 5d10 damage to any undead that crosses it? Or if you're planning on entering a fortress full of undead, could you spend two hours putting twelve bands of Forbiddence through the fortress from safely outside it?

Rusvul
2020-11-10, 11:29 PM
I would personally read the range of "touch" to mean you have to physically touch the ground in the locations where you want it to apply. (The image of a caster sprinkling holy water and ruby dust across the ground comes to mind.) That said, creating a narrow band of Forbiddance around an area to protect it from large quantities of weak monsters seems like a plausible, reasonable, and creative use. 5d10 would be enough to (for instance) wipe out most of a zombie horde--and the image of a rushing mass of zombies disintegrating in golden light as they cross the narrow warded boundary is a very cool one.