Conjure Fey: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Fey
Spell Level: 6
School: Conjuration
Casting Time: 1 minute
Range: 90 feet
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 hour
Components: V, S
You summon a fey creature of challenge rating 6 or lower, or a fey spirit that takes the form of a beast of challenge rating 6 or lower. It appears in an unoccupied space that you can see within range. The fey creature disappears when it drops to 0 hit points or when the spell ends.
The fey creature is friendly to you and your companions for the duration. Roll initiative for the creature, which has its own turns. It obeys any verbal commands that you issue to it (no action required by you), as long as they don’t violate its alignment. If you don’t issue any commands to the fey creature, it defends itself from hostile creatures but otherwise takes no actions.
If your concentration is broken, the fey creature doesn’t disappear. Instead, you lose control of the fey creature, it becomes hostile toward you and your companions, and it might attack. An uncontrolled fey creature can’t be dismissed by you, and it disappears 1 hour after you summoned it. The GM has the fey creature’s statistics.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 7th level or higher, the challenge rating increases by 1 for each slot level above 6th.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
You probably don’t want to cast Conjure Fey if you can instead cast Conjure Woodland Beings. This spell’s power is directly tied to the physical books and information at your disposal. In just the SRD and MM, there are a grand total of seven summonable fey creatures, all of which but green hags can be summoned in equal or greater quantities with Conjure Woodland Beings.
There are a lot more beasts this spell can functionally summon, but if you’re taking the spell I imagine you’re itching to get some hags or pixies on your side for once. This means the spell basically requires Volo’s Guide to Monsters to get you any other new options, and even then it's only adding redcaps, annis hags and yeth hounds as new summonable allies.
If you up-cast it, you can also get a korred or a bheur hag with Volo’s (and no new options without). I guess the korred’s command hair is neat, and the bheur hag’s spell list is rather robust and fairly powerful, but if you’re dabbling into summoning magic why risk potentially dying to your summon?
The downside of facing off against the fey you summon when you lose concentration is vitally important, and isn’t the case in its comparable lower level versions like Conjure Woodland Beings and Conjure Animals. The creatures you’d summon with Conjure Elemental at least tend to be melee combatants you can use to defend yourself from harm, mitigating the downside of losing control. Knowing that summoning a bheur hag could result in it nearly immediately turning on you and flash freezing everyone up to three times with cone of cold just makes this option feel terrible. Memorable, for sure, but terrible.
The beastial options are fine, but nothing to write home about as far as summoning magic goes. Conjure Animals gives you a wider array options as you can summon groups of animals as well, and while you can’t get single powerful options like a giant ape, large groups of giant owls or other over statted for their CR beasts will end up feeling more powerful and providing way more utility. If you are just a dinosaur nut and need to summon a triceratops that might turn around and gore you though, conjure fey can do it.
Overall I think this is one of the weakest summoning spells without extra books and content. The busted stuff you can do with it requires sinking money specifically into Volo’s, and probably will require pestering the DM to figure out what options will and won’t work at the table.
Even with it, I think you’ll be better off leveraging tried and true busted summons in the lower levels while holding on to your upper level spells for more consistent effects. Conjure Fey is just a pretty bad summoning spell that is wildly outshone by a bunch of spells lower level than it.
This means it's still pretty good, because summoning magic can be wildly game breaking.
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