Private Sanctum: What Happens in my Sanctum Stays in my Sanctum

Usable By: Wizard

Spell Level: 4

School: Abjuration

Casting Time: 10 minutes

Range: 120 feet

Duration: 24 hours

Components: V, S, M (a thin sheet of lead, a piece of opaque glass, a wad of cotton or cloth, and powdered chrysolite)

You make an area within range magically secure. The area is a cube that can be as small as 5 feet to as large as 100 feet on each side. The spell lasts for the duration or until you use an action to dismiss it.

When you cast the spell, you decide what sort of security the spell provides, choosing any or all of the following properties:

Sound can’t pass through the barrier at the edge of the warded area.
The barrier of the warded area appears dark and foggy, preventing vision (including darkvision) through it.
Sensors created by divination spells can’t appear inside the protected area or pass through the barrier at its perimeter.
Creatures in the area can’t be targeted by divination spells.
Nothing can teleport into or out of the warded area.
Planar travel is blocked within the warded area. Casting this spell on the same spot every day for a year makes this effect permanent.

At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 5th level or higher, you can increase the size of the cube by 100 feet for each slot level beyond 4th. Thus you could protect a cube that can be up to 200 feet on one side by using a spell slot of 5th level.

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

Spells like Nondetection exist more for a meta answer to divination magic than as something you’d ever really want to find and cast. There isn’t anything super exciting about “not being able to be magically viewed”. In the same context, Private Sanctum just makes it harder to be observed while resting. Woohoo. Riveting stuff.

I guess, as the title highlights, this could be kind of useful for private events. If you want absolutely certainty no peeping toms are trying to listen in or watch from afar, Private Sanctum does that. You know what you could do instead? Talk somewhere privately! Rest in an underground dungeon! Whisper!

The cast time makes it so you can’t even use it to lock down a teleporting enemy you find. You have to somehow goad a teleporting enemy into the area to then prevent it from teleporting away. Seems far fetched, to say the least.

Bad boring spells are hard to write about just because there is so little here worth mentioning. There aren’t really any secret redeeming qualities to mention, nor any super cool or unique ways to flip the spell on its head and use it in wacky ways. I guess you could awkwardly silence half of a castle from the other? You could conceivably cut off vision in the middle of a hallway? The problem is, outside of the planar travel and scrying nonsense, all of the text here is doable with mundane methods, and if you’re worried about deviation and extraplanar infiltration, I promise you a warded room isn’t stopping you from being observed.

I can’t recommend playing in games where Private Sanctum is practical, just like I can’t recommend playing in games where Nondetection is a must. These spells exist to help obfuscate villains, and clearly to me aren’t meant for practical player usage. The back and forth between spells like Scrying and Nondetection just make both feel worthless, like you took one to invalidate the other. Neither brings anything to the table, as if Scrying is ever on the table, the only real way to manage it is the Nondetection effects. It's an annoying back and forth, and just wastes people’s resources and time to learn nothing new or interesting. Steer clear of this crap.

5e Spells

Private Sanctum: What Happens in my Sanctum Stays in my Sanctum