Crown of Madness: Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown
Usable By: Bard, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard
Spell Level: 2
School: Enchantment
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 120 feet
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
Components: V, S
One humanoid of your choice that you can see within range must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or become charmed by you for the duration. While the target is charmed in this way, a twisted crown of jagged iron appears on its head, and a madness glows in its eyes.
The charmed target must use its action before moving on each of its turns to make a melee attack against a creature other than itself that you mentally choose. The target can act normally on its turn if you choose no creature or if none are within its reach.
On your subsequent turns, you must use your action to maintain control over the target, or the spell ends. Also, the target can make a Wisdom saving throw at the end of each of its turns. On a success, the spell ends.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Mind control effects: some of the most hated and beloved tools in D&D Dominate Person lands in my “spells I’ll never cast again as a DM” roster simply by the nature of how miserable it can feel to have the character you’ve worked so hard on fail one save and become an agent of evil. Crown of Madness often feels like Dominate Person at under half the spell level. It's pretty brutal.
If you’re an enchanter looking to play the mind controller archetype, this is going to be your bread and butter for a large chunk of the game. It functions at its best against groups of moderately threatening enemies in medium numbers. Against one big threat, it can feel close to useless, as it can against swarms of smaller creatures. This makes it a great tool to DM against as if the mind controller has gotten a few too many encounters won single handedly, it's easy to throw different kinds of threats that challenge the group in ways Crown doesn’t excel at handling. It can end encounters on its own in its best case scenario, so it's something you’ll always want to consider when DMing for players with access to it, but isn’t so game warping it can feel impossible to create encounters that can’t handle it.
Having to manually control the creature is where I wish more summoning and mind control magic was at. Denying the enemy team actions actually has a cost here, whereas with spells like Dominate Person both deny enemy actions while simultaneously granting your own team more. Summoning magic functions similarly; you gain control of groups of monsters that increase your team's actions at no cost past the initial cast. Needing to spend an action designating targets for the mad creature to strike balances the spell nicely; you don’t get to keep firing off spells if you want to use the ogre to beat his friends to death. You actually have to take your turn as if you were the ogre. I personally love it as it kind of gives you the feeling that you’re playing as the creature you’ve crowned, giving you a glimpse into the mind of the monster and allowing you to mess around just a little bit as something different.
The iron crown theme attached to mad flailing is reminiscent of metal culture: love that. The mind control effect is one of the most balanced versions we’ve got in the game: love that. It's a save or die that can do nothing: don’t love that. But all things combined, Crown of Madness can help facilitate some archetypes and play styles in a fun and cool way. It can even be a neat problem to throw at your players every once in a while.
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