Spider Climb: Dancing on the Ceiling
Usable By: Artificer, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard
Spell Level: 2
School: Transmutation
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 hour
Components: V, S, M (a drop of bitumen and a spider)
Until the spell ends, one willing creature you touch gains the ability to move up, down, and across vertical surfaces and upside down along ceilings, while leaving its hands free. The target also gains a climbing speed equal to its walking speed.
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Flight is a controversial topic in D&D games, specifically in the early levels. Aracockra were the first race to bring the issue of 1st level flight to the table, followed by some Unearthed Arcana options and Owlkin. I find one of the main arguments against them is how they can invalidate some neat spells. Spider Climb is one of them.
Spider Climb is a 3rd level way to start engaging with the three dimensional fantasy world in ways you couldn’t prior. It fulfills part of the Spiderman fantasy where you’re sticking to ceilings and sneaking over arrow traps laid out on the floor. It gives you a tool for scaling shear surfaces in a new way, for a long time. Spider Climb is rocking an hour long duration. It being attached to concentration is a huge bummer, as it gates this spell's potential to last a while by the quantity of encounters and traps you come across during that hour, but it can help in both those cases as well.
There can be some early tier fights where you, as a wizard, scale up the side of a cliff to outrange some goblin short bows with your Fire Bolts. Have a way to quickly and effectively navigate around a complex vertical environment can be incredibly fun. Unfortunately, because only one person will be getting the Spider Climb and most low tier monsters don’t exactly thrive in these kinds of environments, they’re pretty sparse in the low tiers, which is the only real time Spider Climb justifies its spot on your sheet.
The moment you get access to Fly, this spell starts to feel very bad. Spider Climb lets you engage in new ways when traversing niche vertical environments. There is nearly always some benefit to unmitigated flight. This takes the problem mentioned before of 1st level fly speeds and exacerbates it a bit; it can be a tall ask to try to get cool uses out of your Spider Climb when your other party members can do what it does better out the gate.
I’m not advocating for banning flying races or anything; what I’d like to see instead is Spider Climb get a bit more love. I think this spell with no concentration would be a great place to start, or even drop its level to be a 1st level spell so it has more time to be cool and useful. Where it is now, Spider Climb just doesn’t have enough moments to show off how cool it can be because other elements of the game around it do what it does so much better at nearly the same cost. You probably don’t ever need this on your character sheets, but in the right environment, I think you can have a blast messing around with it for a few levels.
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