Fear: Treasure in a Trail of Pee

Usable By: Bard, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard

Spell Level: 3

School: Illusion

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: Self

Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute

Components: V, S, M (A white feather or the heart of a hen)

You project a phantasmal image of a creature’s worst fears. Each creature in a 30-foot cone must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or drop whatever it is holding and become frightened for the duration.

While frightened by this spell, a creature must take the Dash action and move away from you by the safest available route on each of its turns, unless there is nowhere to move. If the creature ends its turn in a location where it doesn’t have line of sight to you, the creature can make a Wisdom saving throw. On a successful save, the spell ends for that creature.

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

3rd level spells are very competitive. We’re now getting out of the early game, the world of 1st and 2nd level spells capping out at 4d6 damage, and into a world doubling that damage and summoning monsters to kill your foes. This means Fear needs to have a huge impact to justify its cast, and while it can be a bit tricky to set up, can absolutely deliver.

When cast, everything in a30 ft. cone makes a Wis save or it drops whatever its holding and becomes frightened of you for the duration. But wait, there’s more! Creatures frightened this way have to take the Dash action to move away from you up until it has nowhere else to go! It keeps doing this until it can’t see you, when then, and only then, it gets to start making Wis saves at the end of each of its turns to end this effect.

This allows for some really fun and engaging play patterns built around maintaining the giant Fear cone. You can chase down baddies to keep them running, turning corners and breaking cover to ensure they’re going to waste as many turns as possible. It has to dash away from you, and by the nature of the frightened condition, can’t use its movement to get closer to you, meaning at best it’ll spend its movement attempting to break line of sight, which gives you the opportunity to hide, steal their stuff, set up other magic, or any number of other options to leverage your obfuscated position.

Beyond it being an excellent way to eat a ton of actions, Fear also has a fairly unique bit of text in that it also disarms everything you successfully frighten. There just aren’t a lot of ways to take a giant’s massive hammer away from them. Fear is one such way, and can permanently defang some horrifying foes by gutting their main method of attack for the remainder of an encounter. After dashing away from their things, the party can advance to take a position guarding it, making it a lose-lose situation for the disarmed creatures; they either take a beating trying to get their stuff back, or they attack without the weapons that their stat block utilizes. This is all on top of the rounds wasted running and being peppered with arrows and cantrips for free, on top of being removed from a fight while their non-feared allies get majorly outnumbered. Most entities with an Int of 5 or higher aren’t sticking around after that.

Fear is a baller 3rd level spell that’s often outshone by Fireball and the other all-star 3rd level spells. Bards probably get the most out of it, as their 3rd level options aren’t quite as robust as Sorcerers and Wizards, and without scaling its very difficult for warlocks to justify even considering this. Still, all four classes can utilize this spell to great effect in a variety of fights. It's a really powerful mass save or die that does everything you’d want a save or die to do, and comes with its own unique condition that no other spell really can replicate. Fear is great. Try it out.

5e Spells

Fear: Treasure in a Trail of Pee