Meld Into Stone: I am a Rock

Usable By: Cleric, Druid

Spell Level: 3

School: Transmutation

Casting Time: 1 action (ritual)

Range: Touch

Duration: 8 hours

Components: V, S

You step into a stone object or surface large enough to fully contain your body, melding yourself and all the equipment you carry with the stone for the duration. Using your movement, you step into the stone at a point you can touch. Nothing of your presence remains visible or otherwise detectable by nonmagical senses.

While merged with the stone, you can’t see what occurs outside it, and any Wisdom (Perception) checks you make to hear sounds outside it are made with disadvantage. You remain aware of the passage of time and can cast spells on yourself while merged in the stone. You can use your movement to leave the stone where you entered it, which ends the spell. You otherwise can’t move.

Minor physical damage to the stone doesn’t harm you, but its partial destruction or a change in its shape (to the extent that you no longer fit within it) expels you and deals 6d6 bludgeoning damage to you. The stone’s complete destruction (or transmutation into a different substance) expels you and deals 50 bludgeoning damage to you. If expelled, you fall prone in an unoccupied space closest to where you first entered.

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

Pursued by the half-blinded ogre, the cloaked halfling darts around the corner down the dark corridor. An angry roar shouts to her “GET OVER HERE YOU POKEY LITTLE EYE STABBER, I’LL EAT YOUR HEAD!” She keeps running until she hits the room at the end of the tunnel, an empty goblin barracks. Dead end. She looks right, left, scrambling for anything to hide in, hearing the echoing ogre steps behind her growing closer and closer. “Whelp, I guess we’re going under,” she mutters to herself before holding her nose, taking a big breath in, and sinking into the stone brick floor, melding with the rock seamlessly. The ogre breaks down the wooden door, tears apart the room, roaring in frustration. “WHERE YOU GO?”

Meld Into Stone is a delightful spell effect, but my god is it overcosted. Being able to instantly hide in any stone environment for up to eight hours is a neat trick, but not particularly applicable in the vast majority of environments. It can be used to juke pursuing enemies or duck into hiding in a pinch, but it only applies to you, and deprives you sight of the surrounding areas to boot. Invisibility, comparatively, has a myriad of uses, most of which eclipse what this spell offers in a near identical form.

It being a ritual spell doesn’t even help the spell all that much. Ritual casting Meld into Stone takes its already limited use cases and sinks them further. Ten minutes is a long time to prepare a hiding position, and there aren’t a tremendous amount of other uses for this outside of smuggling the cleric or druid in somewhere as a rock.

Clerics and druids both aren’t going to readily expect to need Meld into Stone, making it something they aren’t often preparing. It's cute, it's fun, it's magical, but it isn’t good enough to cost you a 3rd level slot. It needs a lot more to justify that cost. If you like the thematics and flavor with Meld into Stone you’ll probably find a handful of uses per campaign for it; there will nearly always be other spells that solve the problems it does for cheaper, or in a far superior way. Nobody really needs this. If you like it, you can still have fun with it.

5e Spells

Meld Into Stone: I am a Rock