Contact Higher Plane: This spell allows the magical-type to seek advice and gain knowledge from creatures inhabiting higher planes of existence (the referee). Of course, the higher the plane contacted, the greater the number of questions that can be asked, the greater the chance that the information will be known, and the higher the probability that the question will be answered truthfully. Use the table below to determine these factors, as well as the probability of the Magic-User going insane. Only questions which can be answered "yes" or "no" are permitted.
If a Magic-User goes insane, he will remain so for a number of weeks equal to the number of the plane he was attempting to contact, the strain making him totally incapacitated until the time has elapsed. For each level above the 11th, Magic Users should have a 5% better chance of retaining their sanity. The spell is usable only once every game week (referee’s option).
I want to imagine a party that is so desperate to learn some crucial piece of information about a situation that they're in, that they're prepared to allow the caster to suffer insanity for as many as 12 weeks, or three months, to get it; and that this information, once obtained, doesn't need to be acted upon at once, because the caster won't be available to engage in that adventure should that mage go insane. Then I try to think of any official adventure that I've ever heard of where this sort of adventure was proposed or even outlined... for, certainly, there's nothing in the White Box set that I've encountered so far that carries both (a) the level of demand this suggests; or (b) the lack of immediacy that would concommitantly be assumed. And I just can't. Which would mean, for me, this spell as written has no use whatsoever in game, and therefore exists merely as an author's indulgence.
This spell reads like one of those little private fantasies designers sometimes wedge into an early draft: big cosmic flavour, no functional scaffolding. The numbers are there not to produce play but to conjure a mood. High planes, madness, the brush with transcendence that topples the mortal mind. It’s mythic… and totally unmoored from any form of adventure pacing. What party, running any scenario published between 1974 and, frankly, the present day, pauses the action for twelve weeks so someone can drool in a blanket after asking "Is the lich in the west tower?"
The game as written simply doesn't have problems that require a sacrifice of some excessively high magnitude to solve. Everything is built for immediacy. The dungeon is pressboard: small rooms, nearby monsters, low-resolution danger. The politics of the world aren’t fleshed out; the cosmology is a sketch. There's no machinery for long-term scenarios that hinge on procuring one world-shattering yes/no answer. And if we did build such a scenario, we'd need to rewrite the entire framework of pacing just to let the party survive the caster's convalescence.
But let's accept the premise as written. Why should this spell be limited to once per week? Is it not just another spell, like any other spell? It does say, "referee's option" — but the very proposal suggests that this spell is SO powerful, that not only must we impose the insanity consequence, but we must FURTHER limit it in availability. Exactly why, I ask. Is the DM's "secret knowledge" so earth shattering that such lengths must be gone to so that it's kept out of the player's hands? I have been studying D&D for 46 years and I know of no game detail I have ever had about my setting that must be so carefully protected from a party. I'm honestly baffled. What unutterable revelations about hit dice and gelatinous cubes require quasi-Lovecraftian safeguards?
Knowledge is a strategic resource. In a well-run campaign, more knowledge ought to deepen the stakes, it ought to increase the party's tension, it ought to enliven their imagination. There's no game if it must always exist in the dark. The approach to the game this spell reveals counters every rational philosophy about DMing and game play that there is... and tells, plainly, that the writers here did not have the capacity to truly understand the game they'd designed. Or even, for that matter, how a plain old story arc in a book works. As designers, they are the worst kind of amateurs.
Passwall: A spell which opens a hole in a solid rock wall, man-sized and up to 10' in length. Duration: 3 turns. Range: 3".
It's fine. It could use a comment on what happens to the subject if they're inside when the wall collapses. It also reveals the problem with recent discussions I've been having elsewhere regarding how long a "turn" lasts; in Chainmail, it's a minute, whereas in the White Box, it's 10 minutes. A spell like this, if it only lasts for three minutes, that's a problem. But we've already discussed the problems that are created by several spells with a turn lasting 10 minutes. Overall, time issues abound, and there's just nothing that we can do to fix it, except to redesignate the unit then correct every spell, including those for which time is not included... which is what AD&D would later try to do.
We have to ask, however... if wall of stone, also a 5th level spell, can make an instant wall a hundred feet long, why isn't passwall just permanent?
Cloudkill: This spell creates a moving, poisonous cloud of vapor which is deadly to all creatures with less than five hit dice. Movement: 6"/turn according to wind direction, or directly away from the spell caster if there is no wind. Dimensions: 3" diameter. Duration: 6 turns, but the cloud is dispelled by unusually strong winds or trees. Note that the cloud is heavier than air, so it will sink to the lowest possible level.
Apart from the same movement problems already discussed in relation to other spells, this is more or less the same spell as would appear in later versions of the game. A 60-minute duration is, in role-playing terms, not D&D-as-wargame structure, a simply phenomenal length of time. But we've pounded this drum already. There are so many cases where we can easily point out which rules were plainly designed for a miniature-based battlefield (where six turns happen as six "moves" for each side), and the role-playing game as character narrative arc, where the players have to sit around for an hour for the spell to dissipate... for, even if they are high enough level to just move on, a "cloud of vapour" would logically disrupt vision. And suppose I were to open a potion while inside such a cloud, or a vial of holy water? Would the magical vapour of the cloud affect these substances? A vaporous toxin that fills thirty feet of space and persists for an hour should render the environment uninhabitable, disrupt vision, taint consumables, corrode reagents, probably drop the pH of holy water — unless we invent a metaphysics where "poison" doesn’t interact with anything except hit dice. And that's the handwave the game settles into: Cloudkill isn't poison as poison. It’s "poison" as a game token, a little yellow marker sliding across a battlefield.
With each handwave the environment has less substance, less gravitas, and therefore less value to organic, not wargame-based, engagement-based play. It came up in a comment-string with the last White Box post whether a caster can dispel their own spell, without the need of the dispel magic spell. I have to argue that yes, they must, otherwise there's no real way to control the most dangerous sorts of magic. While true enough, not being able to wink out one's own elemental might seem a reasonable way to balance the power of the creature against the mage's use of it... but that same logic creates problems where I have to ask: if I have six questions because I'm contacting the 6th Plane (whatever that actually means), am I allowed to dispel the spell after I've asked four? There's no duration listed. Does it just continue to exist until I've asked 6 questions? I should think that would matter.
There's a logic here that the rules as written simply ignores, that I've noticed the entire industry of D&D ignores where spells are concerned. According to the game's own canon, spells are "researched" and thus logically manufactured by some wizard, somewhere, in the game setting's past history. Thus, we must assume the design of every spell was intentional; but why would someone EVER make a spell where the caster could not simply dispel their own conjured effect? That would be like designing a car where the engine has to run for 20 minutes, whereupon it turns off on its own, requiring that we drive around the block and time our arrival perfectly, so that the car rolls up our driveway with its last bit of momentum. Adding an off-switch to everything we design is an absolute must. The invention of spells that would not do this, simply because some DM imagines a clever way to fuck over the mage and limit the spell, is just idiocy on a grand scale where the setting's logic is concerned. And I for one, no matter what the rules say, just won't buy it.
If it turned out that I could only make a spell, say cloudkill, in a manner that it couldn't be dispelled at will, then I wouldn't accept the spell as is and I'd go back to the drawing board. And yet this is the common argument: "Well, they had to make the spell that way because that's the only way the magic would work." Then the magic isn't working, that's my point. It's stupidly dangerous as is. It would never be counted a success by the original maker, it would never become a canon spell that any mage in the setting could pick... until that design flaw was repaired.
It goes to show that the spells designed in the White Box, and in pretty much every other version, were for the DM, NOT the player. And that's unacceptable to me. If it's acceptable to you, that's fine. You have a higher tolerance for looking like a fucking moron than I do. I prefer to look and sound like someone whose words make sense.
If Contact Other Plane is so dangerous to the campaign that insanity has to be risked to use the spell, why not just limit the number of questions, or the quality of the information received, or the kind of information received, until the caster can use the spell reasonably? If teleportation is so dangerous that death must be a risk, why not just limit how useful the spell is by distance or the places that can be teleported to? If conjure elemental is so dangerous, why not just lower the number of hit dice or the damage the creature can cause, until it's "safe" within the bounds of the caster's deserved and earned level of power? Why this stupid "gotcha" mechanic? How vulnerable were Gygax's balls that he needed to keep both hands so tightly on top of them?
The gotcha mechanics are a confession: the original designers didn’t trust the players and didn't trust themselves to design around player agency. So they did everything they could with the upper level spells to protect the DM's authority, with the tacit belief that the DM's authority is what mattered most.
I beg to differ.
Feeblemind: A spell usable only against Magic-Users, it causes the recipient to become feeble-minded until the spell is countered with a Dispel Magic. Because of its specialized nature the Feeblemind spell has a 20% better chance of success, i.e. lowers the Magic-User's saving throw against magic by 4, so that if normally a 12 or better were required to save against magic, a 16 would be required against a Feeblemind. Range: 24".
Anyone else notice that the above does not explain the effects of the spell? Presumably, from the spell's name, that the mage can no longer cast spells. Arguably, however, the precise definition of the word goes further than that, particularly if we're speaking with 1974 lexicography. Then, "feebleminded" still carried the full ugly freight of a medicalised diagnosis. It meant someone whose intellectual capacity had collapsed to the level of a young child or below, someone who was no longer capable of coherent reasoning, independent decision-making, or even meaningful self-care. It was a term used by state institutions to categorise the "unfit." The meaning was not metaphorical.
Since the word is NOT defined in game terms, we must assume this is the meaning assigned to the spell. Which, then, asks why it's limited to mages? Fighters and clerics also have minds, do they not? And if the spell causes profound cognitive impairment, then restricting it to magic-users is nonsensical. Anyone, monsters too (it is a 5th level spell, so why not monsters, since we can charm them at 4th), should be capable of being cognitively impaired by the spell. Arguably, that should include anything with a nervous system, even a basilisk.
It's a completely ad hoc limitation and, again, an obvious in-world magical design flaw. Would you not, as a designer, having invented this spell, automatically go back to the drawing board and make sure it applied to everyone? Why would you spend months, perhaps years, crafting a spell that only ruins the minds of the one category of beings least likely to be marching at you with a spear?
It exists here as a rule written solely for gameplay convenience, not to simulate a world. It exists because wizards were perceived as the "dangerous" class and needed a direct countermeasure. Speaking just for myself, I prefer my magic to be more egalitarian.
Also, last month we went round and round about how a modifier of +4 does not equal "20%." Thus I feel duty bound to post the link. We can move on.
Growth of Animals: A spell which will cause from 1-6 normal-sized animals (not merely mammals) to grow to giant-size with proportionate attack capabilities. Duration: 12 turns. Range 12".
Funny how this 5th level spell becomes a 1st level spell in AD&D, enlarge.
Is it a roll? If I have two dogs that I want to transform, do I roll a d6 to see if I just get one or if I roll a 2 and up? And since this set of books doesn't include stats for the giant versions of quite a lot of potential animals (how dangerous is a "giant" gazelle?), how do I as a DM run the spell when the time comes? An elephant is already a pretty big creature. Assuming there are elephants in the campaign, does this translate the "elephant" into an 18-foot high "oliphant"?
And what about an animal that is already a "giant." Does the spell have any effect on them? The spell name is "growth of animals," not "create giant animals," so I assume a giant crocodile that just happens to find the party can be altered into a super-giant crocodile. What are the stats for that? Yes, true, it does say the spell affects "normal-sized" animals... but isn't an "oliphant" the normal size that it is for that species of fictional animal?
Too, if I can't control the animal, presumably, why would I want to do this? To make a fight more... um... challenging? Do I get extra experience for killing a creature that I could have killed more easily if I hadn't used the spell?
The spell is sort of fine as written... but it's like being handed a special wrench for a machine that doesn't exist yet. Later D&D would add a sufficient number of giant-sized creatures to give a DM at least a ball-park idea of how to use this; but as we'll see when we get to the monster pages in the second book. Such does not exist in the White Box.
6th Level:
Stone to Flesh: This spell turns stone to flesh, and it is reversible, so as to turn flesh to stone. It is particularly useful in reviving characters who have been "stoned" by some monster. It is permanent unless a reversed spell is used. Range: 12".
Not only is it "particularly" useful for this purpose, the direct use of this is only useful for reversing "stoned" creatures.
While it seems powerful to transmogrify a monster into stone, and needing a 6th level spell to do it, charm monster is a 4th level spell and is, in fact, more useful. The least good way to use an enemy monster that could be very useful is in making it stone, which is useless. Although, point in fact, you'll notice there's no saving throw here. Nor is there a limit on how much flesh can be so transformed. Can I transform all flesh in a 12" radius? If so, wow.
Consider: you're accompanying an army in the field and you have this spell. Do you, (a) cast the spell, knowing that the enemy might also have a mage that has this spell, who can then simply reverse your spell (presumably, "dispel magic" isn't sufficient, or else there's no need for this spell to even exist)... or do you (b) save your spell for when the enemy mage uses theirs? It's sort of a stand-off, isn't it? Even if you don't know the enemy has the spell, can you cast the spell, knowing the enemy might themselves cast it, in which case you won't have the spell to reverse their effect?
Obviously, it's only sixth level to make the basilisk and medusa more quantifiably powerful. The harder it is to get this spell, the longer in game terms those monsters remain relevant. That's not necessarily a flaw, but it's worth noting, so that we understand why the spell exists at all.
Sigh. Let's just stop there. These spells feel like they'll never end.
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