Create Homunculus: Find Another Familiar

Usable By: Wizard

Spell Level: 6

School: Transmutation

Casting Time: 1 Hour

Range: Touch

Duration: Instantaneous

Components: V, S, M (clay, ash, and mandrake root, all of which the spell consumes, and a jewel-encrusted dagger worth at least 1,000 gp)

While speaking an intricate incantation, you cut yourself with a jewel-encrusted dagger, taking 2d4 piercing damage that can’t be reduced in any way. You then drip your blood on the spell’s other components and touch them, transforming them into a special construct called a homunculus. The statistics of the homunculus are in the Monster Manual. It is your faithful companion, and it dies if you die. Whenever you finish a long rest, you can spend up to half your Hit Dice if the homunculus is on the same plane of existence as you. When you do so, roll each die and add your Constitution modifier to it. Your hit point maximum is reduced by the total, and the homunculus’s hit point maximum and current hit points are both increased by it. This process can reduce you to no lower than 1 hit point. and the change to your and the homunculus’s hit points ends when you finish your next long rest. The reduction to your hit point maximum can’t be removed by any means before then, except by the homunculus‘s death. You can have only one homunculus at a time. If you cast this spell while your homunculus lives, the spell fails.

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

Create Homunculus is a surprisingly short spell that has quite a bit to it. Unsurprisingly, most of its actual effects are hidden within the homunculus stat block. For 1,000 gold, an hour long cast time, and 2d4 damage, you can basically create a homunculus familiar. You can’t quite use its senses, but it can telepathically communicate all of what it senses to you from any distance. It has a 40 foot fly speed, 60 foot darkvision, and a pretty terrible poison attack that will rarely knock something unconscious for a few minutes.

Out the gate, Find Familiar is cheaper (by nearly 1,000 gold), has a more diverse range of options for abilities, is a 1st level ritual spell, and lets you use your familiar’s senses as you wish. Sure, you can only telepathically communicate with your familiar when it's within 100 feet of you, but for what Create Homunculus and Find Familiar do, the range of it isn’t that much of an issue.

What’s left then is the ability to give your homunculus some hit points. Not only is this one of the worst possible things you could invest your hitpoints in, it reduces your MAXIMUM hit points. You can’t heal the expended hit points from resting, healing potions, or magic. In exchange you’re giving a CR 0 companion with a 1 piercing damage bite attack a bunch more hit points. If for some reason people trying to kill you pivot to instead attempt to kill the CR 0 forty hit point ball of uselessness, consider it a miracle. Long story short: don’t do this.

The main perk to Create Homunculus is its permanence. Once you have it, it's there forever which makes this more of a wizard feature than a spell you spend spell slots on. The cost of the spell ends up being an unused spell slot and having to buy a pretty dagger, and in exchange, you get your second familiar. Familiars are great with just one; two is kind of overkill, but the real costs are just so cheap there aren’t a lot of good reasons not to have one. Having one helper that can offer you a myriad of advantages in exploration is excellent. Having two gives you a tiny bit more flexibility in how you use them, and gives you a potential fallback pet in case one sets off an explosive trap that turns it to dust.

Create Homunculus ends up being a nice to have option for higher level wizards. They definitely didn’t need more features like this, and by that tier of play you and your DM probably have figured out a good balance for what you’re familiar is capable of so having a second one isn’t a huge deal. If you do want more pets, and the 1,000 gold isn’t a barrier, you probably want to add this to your spellbook when you can.

5e Spells

Create Homunculus: Find Another Familiar