Planar Ally: The Worst Friends Money Can Buy
Usable By: Cleric
Spell Level: 6
School: Conjuration
Casting Time: 10 minutes
Range: 60 feet
Duration: Instantaneous
Components: V, S
You beseech an otherworldly entity for aid. The being must be known to you: a god, a primordial, a demon prince, or some other being of cosmic power. That entity sends a celestial, an elemental, or a fiend loyal to it to aid you, making the creature appear in an unoccupied space within range. If you know a specific creature’s name, you can speak that name when you cast this spell to request that creature, though you might get a different creature anyway (GM’s choice).
When the creature appears, it is under no compulsion to behave in any particular way. You can ask the creature to perform a service in exchange for payment, but it isn’t obliged to do so. The requested task could range from simple (fly us across the chasm, or help us fight a battle) to complex (spy on our enemies, or protect us during our foray into the dungeon). You must be able to communicate with the creature to bargain for its services.
Payment can take a variety of forms. A celestial might require a sizable donation of gold or magic items to an allied temple, while a fiend might demand a living sacrifice or a gift of treasure. Some creatures might exchange their service for a quest undertaken by you.
As a rule of thumb, a task that can be measured in minutes requires a payment worth 100 gp per minute. A task measured in hours requires 1,000 gp per hour. And a task measured in days (up to 10 days) requires 10,000 gp per day. The GM can adjust these payments based on the circumstances under which you cast the spell. If the task is aligned with the creature’s ethos, the payment might be halved or even waived. Nonhazardous tasks typically require only half the suggested payment, while especially dangerous tasks might require a greater gift. Creatures rarely accept tasks that seem suicidal.
After the creature completes the task, or when the agreed-‐‑upon duration of service expires, the creature returns to its home plane after reporting back to you, if appropriate to the task and if possible. If you are unable to agree on a price for the creature’s service, the creature immediately returns to its home plane.
A creature enlisted to join your group counts as a member of it, receiving a full share of experience points awarded.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Are you an extravagant hero looking to subcontract out your adventures? Have you grown tired of the mundanity of slaying hordes of monsters? May I then show you Planar Ally! Take your mountain of gold and turn it into bloodthirsty, violent monsters ready to take your coin for slaughter like you’ve never seen before!
Planar Ally is neat, but doesn’t really need to exist. If you’re rolling in cash, this spell offers you potentially powerful guns for hire or a rent a Resurrection. Compared to other summoning magic, though, I just don’t see it working out. If you’re in a gold strapped table don’t even think about it.
This is a spell that doesn’t feel like a spell. This feels like an adventure; the player’s go to seek out an extraplanar ally, and have to negotiate and bargain with them to get their aid. Attaching this otherwise mundane negotiation to 6th level spell just feels lazy. The DM still ultimately gets to decide what you summon and can veto powerful entities anyway, making the potential of the spell dependent on your DMs perspective on how the spell should work.
The spell gets a lot worse if you’re asking for demons, as they, you know, act like demons. This can be a way to just spawn in a monster to go kill a bunch of people, but most groups aren’t in the market for mindless mass murder, and that isn’t even garunteed. It's volatile, to say the least, in the case of demons. Elementals and celestials are more likely going to bargain, but what exactly does an Earth Elemental want? It has an Int of 5, it might not even understand bargaining. This makes the spell pigeon holed mainly to summon celestials, and lord knows they won’t get their hands dirty with things they find “morally questionable”.
In the case you do get an angel by your side for an hour to kill some monsters, you’ll have a pretty good time. Turns out high CR angels like Divas or Ki-Rin can be incredible to have on your team, and in some rare cases you’ll beseech a Solar and go crazy with power.
For some reason there is a caveat here about EXP being shared with a summoned monster; what a dumb inclusion. The vast majority of tables ditched EXP the moment milestone was showcased. Tacking on extra weird rules to tax players for using their gold and spells to get help is stupid. If you’re looking to try out Planar Ally, talk to your DM about this line. Most of the time, they’ll opt to ignore it, which I highly recommend.
If you’re rich and want to chat up some extraplanar friends, you can try out Planar Ally. Otherwise, just go find the creature you want to chat with. For just one more spell level you can even go to their home plane with Plane Shift and work it out in a way cooler method. If you can manipulate the spell to get some somewhat obedient monsters under your sway, you can go for it, but it can be an enormous hurdle to DM for, and adds a whole level of complexity and balance problems going forward.
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