Mirage Arcane: Does This Desert Seem Moist to You?

Usable By: Bard, Druid, Wizard

Spell Level: 7

School: Illusion

Casting Time: 10 minutes

Range: Sight

Duration: 10 days

Components: V, S

You make terrain in an area up to 1 mile square look, sound, smell, and even feel like some other sort of terrain. The terrain’s general shape remains the same, however. Open fields or a road could be made to resemble a swamp, hill, crevasse, or some other difficult or impassable terrain. A pond can be made to seem like a grassy meadow, a precipice like a gentle slope, or a rock-strewn gully like a wide and smooth road.

Similarly, you can alter the appearance of structures, or add them where none are present. The spell doesn’t disguise, conceal, or add creatures.

The illusion includes audible, visual, tactile, and olfactory elements, so it can turn clear ground into difficult terrain (or vice versa) or otherwise impede movement through the area. Any piece of the illusory terrain (such as a rock or stick) that is removed from the spell’s area disappears immediately.

Creatures with truesight can see through the illusion to the terrain’s true form; however, all other elements of the illusion remain, so while the creature is aware of the illusion’s presence, the creature can still physically interact with the illusion.

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

Mirage Arcane is an illusion spell in description only; in reality, it’s the most magical, powerful tool to get a world to look and feel exactly as you want. Is that at all practical on nearly every character? Nope, not even a little! But as a DM tool, or just as a way to enrich a specific character's fantasy, Mirage Arcane is a blast to have.

You functionally get a 1 mile square of whatever environment you want. Want to torment a village? Transform a mile of it into a desolate lava hellscape, where every fishing pond is a burning tar pit, every river a flowing magma stream. Finding the arctic mountain pass to be a bit too treacherous for your liking? Transform it into an overgrown tropical jungle with lush fruits growing alongside route and ample solid ground to navigate instead of the five foot high snow drifts.

What sells this spell the most to me is the duration. Any with this 7th level spell can cast it once a week to maintain a mile wide illusion. Chained together and adding on up-casts, you can have high CR magical villains or heroes transform tens of miles of terrain around them into their perfect and preferred domain. An ancient green dragon slowly expanding its domain one mile at a time via Mirage Arcane will look and feel magical, the once safe woodlands around the town transformed into toxic mires for the green dragon’s venomous minions to dwell in. It's a perfect tool to literally show a monster's reach expanding, yet in an impermanent way that will go away should the monster be forced from the area or slain.

A ten minute cast time and lack of clear rules as to what exactly Mirage Arcane can do leave it as a world building tool more so than an actual practical tool for players. Some might be able to bend it to create exact conditions to swindle or debilitate specific kinds of enemies, but for the most part Mirage Arcane isn’t going to be particularly effective at empowering a group's potential to kill something. It can be useful in transforming elements of hazardous environments, but your mileage may vary when it comes to exactly what elements are covered over and what hazards pop through the illusion. I love Mirage Arcane as a DM. As a player, I’m probably only ever preparing this for some fun downtime activities.

5e Spells

Mirage Arcane: Does This Desert Seem Moist to You?