Move Earth: Erections Can Last up to 2 Hours

Usable By: Druid, Sorcerer, Wizard

Spell Level: 6

School: Transmutation

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: 120 feet

Duration: Concentration, up to 2 hours

Components: V, S, M (an iron blade and a small bag containing a mixture of soils-clay, loam, and sand)

Choose an area of terrain no larger than 40 feet on a side within range. You can reshape dirt, sand, or clay in the area in any manner you choose for the duration. You can raise or lower the area’s elevation, create or fill in a trench, erect or flatten a wall, or form a pillar. The extent of any such changes can’t exceed half the area’s largest dimension. So, if you affect a 40-foot square, you can create a pillar up to 20 feet high, raise or lower the square’s elevation by up to 20 feet, dig a trench up to 20 feet deep, and so on. It takes 10 minutes for these changes to complete.

At the end of every 10 minutes you spend concentrating on the spell, you can choose a new area of terrain to affect.

Because the terrain’s transformation occurs slowly, creatures in the area can’t usually be trapped or injured by the ground’s movement.

This spell can’t manipulate natural stone or stone construction. Rocks and structures shift to accommodate the new terrain. If the way you shape the terrain would make a structure unstable, it might collapse.

Similarly, this spell doesn’t directly affect plant growth. The moved earth carries any plants along with it.

Review by Samuel West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

Picture this: you and your party valiantly battle an adult red dragon in its lair overlooking the towns its claimed and terrorized for centuries. You gather the loot, earn your levels, and as you begin to leave, realize you need some way to signify this is your lair now. What better way is there really than making an enormous twenty foot tall stone dick overlooking your new lands?

Honestly, that’s kind of the extent of Move Earth. It's at its best as a silly giant sculpting spell, and serves otherwise niche purposes that rarely come up.

Practical applications of the spell are genuinely hard to come up with in most environments. If you’ve got time in an underground dungeon, this can seal off an area relatively quickly which can be used to play the long game in attempting to starve out some baddies. You could conceivably make a wall with it to block an entrance to an underground settlement or enclosed camp. You could excavate a space and fill it with spikes or water and alligators, I guess. You could start a demolition company and bring some buildings down, which is neat. Outside of that, I don’t really see it working out.

You can’t use it in combat as the time it requires to move stuff around takes too long. You need to be in an area where altering a large chunk of terrain has an advantage, which means you need to know you’ll be fighting there in the future. You then need to leverage the moved area more so than the spell currently describes, as it's difficult to make a wall of stone all that useful, especially when you actually just cast Wall of Stone with a lower level spell slot, and spontaneously as an action at that.

The alterations you make are permanent, and do affect a large area. If you want to build your own base or fortify a town, this spell will give you some amount of tools to do that. In the grand scope of a campaign, this rarely will lead to meaningful advantages, and could be completed with a bunch of gold, some hired masons and builders, and a quarry.

I want to like Move Earth, as it rewards creative thinking and future planning. The core issue with it is the location you alter needs to be a central focus. The other use cases can be fine, but again require you have ample set up time to be meaningful which often you just don’t have. Move Earth can move along as far as I’m concerned. If you’re playing an Earthbender type character it's a must have. Otherwise, don’t bother.

5e Spells

Move Earth: Erections Can Last up to 2 Hours