Summon Greater Demon: Could it be… SATAN?!
Spell Level: 4
School: Conjuration
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 60 feet
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 hour
Components: V, S, M (a vial of blood from a humanoid killed within the past 24 hours)
You utter foul words, summoning one demon from the chaos of the Abyss. You choose the demon’s type, which must be one of challenge rating 5 or lower, such as a shadow demon or a barlgura. The demon appears in an unoccupied space you can see within range, and the demon disappears when it drops to 0 hit points or when the spell ends.
Roll initiative for the demon, which has its own turns. When you summon it and on each of your turns thereafter, you can issue a verbal command to it (requiring no action on your part), telling it what it must do on its next turn. If you issue no command, it spends its turn attacking any creature within reach that has attacked it.
At the end of each of the demon’s turns, it makes a Charisma saving throw. The demon has disadvantage on this saving throw if you say its true name. On a failed save, the demon continues to obey you. On a successful save, your control of the demon ends for the rest of the duration, and the demon spends its turns pursuing and attacking the nearest non-demons to the best of its ability. If you stop concentrating on the spell before it reaches its full duration, an uncontrolled demon doesn’t disappear for 1d6 rounds if it still has hit points.
As part of casting the spell, you can form a circle on the ground with the blood used as a material component. The circle is large enough to encompass your space. While the spell lasts, the summoned demon can’t cross the circle or harm it, and it can’t target anyone within it. Using the material component in this manner consumes it when the spell ends.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 5th level or higher, the challenge rating increases by 1 for each slot level above 4th.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
A blood sacrifice ritual to a demon lord of the abyss really is the perfect callback to an era where D&D was believed to be indoctrinating kids into evil cults worshiping the damned. Every game out there on the internet has you raising undead monstrosities, murdering zombies with chainsaws, and ripping open portals to hell. Summon Greater Demon nails the feeling of the old-school summoning spell. It's a precarious, tenuous relationship formed between an overconfident caster and a bloodthirsty monster. In the hands of a competent caster, this can be an amazing weapon. In the hands of a foolish one, a death sentence.
This is a rare summoning spell where you pick exactly what you want, and you get it. If your DM is just working out of the Monster Manual, this spell summons either a barlgura or shadow demon. With additional books, rutterkin, bulezau, babau, dybbuk, and tanarukk are also options. You could summon a lower CR demon than these, but you could conceivably get those with Summon Lesser Demons or the warlock’s Pact of the Chain feature, so you’ll likely be looking towards these CR 2-5 options.
Shadow Demons are horror movie monsters brought to the table. They predominantly just claw things, but can use their bonus action hiding to get advantage on attack rolls should they get to an unseen location. Paired with its corporeal movement, these can be incredibly tricky to pin down, and quickly become a problem for you should it break free. Balgura are giant apes with spells, which is exactly as horrifying as it sounds. They have a massive jump distance, access to Invisibility, and make THREE attacks each round, all at advantage while attacking recklessly. Gross!
Using Summon Greater Demon to its fullest will likely involve putting a demon somewhere it kind of wants to be: inside a lot of things it can kill. Unknowing enemies who punch back free up your action to do other things while the default mode the demon gets involves brutal beating back whatever was dumb enough to fight the conjured monstrosity built to kill. You may even consider deliberately dropping concentration after a round or two just to get a rampaging demon for 1d6 rounds; that’s a pretty potent effect for a 4th level slot. Manually controlling it can be fine if you’re tight on resources, but more often than not you’ll likely want to attempt to set up getting the demon in a position where you can just let it be a demon.
Summon Greater Demon to be is exceptional design. It rarely will last the hour long duration, but it doesn’t need to to have a major impact on your game. It definitely asks the players to have the tools at the ready as opposed to the DM, which is where I like summoning magic to be. The summoned monster performs best when you put it in a spot where it does what its good at doing (murder, in this case). If you are playing an evil character or an anti-hero diabolist, Summon Greater Demon delivers on the fantasy you’re looking for in a powerful way you’ll have a blast using. Like the lesser version, this isn’t something you’ll probably want to be juggling every encounter, but every now and then you can bust it out for a great time playing tug of war over a demon’s free will.
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