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G/1

Gaseous Form Imagine going to Wizard Grad School for 12 years and the farthest you get in your chosen career path is being able to change yourself into a fart. This is pretty advantageous in a lot of ways -- you can get into locked rooms, you're immune to falling, and you get some good boosts to saves and the like -- but not only can you not (obviously) hold on to any of your gear, but you can't attack, cast spells, or use magic. Even that would be tolerable, or at least understandable, but you can still *take* damage, and if you get reduced to zero hit points, you not only are dying, but you become corporeal again! A good idea ruined by ridiculous execution. Real-World Rating:  3 (Pretty Ineffectual) Gate It takes you until 9th level to get this one, and you have to burn 5,000 in gold every time you use it -- the equivalent of flying first class, I guess -- but it is a pretty great spell: It opens an immediate and infallible portal to anywhere you want to go on any other plane
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F/4

Fog Cloud The very definition of a useful, simple, low-level spell that can easily be replicated with technology. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out why carrying London around in your pocket might be useful, but a smoke grenade would get the job done just as easily and let you save this slot for Magic Missile. Real-World Rating:  5 (Effective But Limited) Forbiddance I love the awkward, over-elaborate name of this spell, which practically begs you to use highfalutin pseudo-Shakespearean English while casting. "Methinks I shall engage in a bout of... forbiddance ." Anyway, what this does is create a huge magical no-fly zone, which basically prevents anyone from teleporting, astrally traveling, gating, plane-shifting, or otherwise mystically trespassing on the area for an entire day. Sound pretty good, right?  In Dungeons & Dragons , it is! It's a high-powered 6th-level abjuration with lots of practical applications. But, as a reminder, the premise of th
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F/3

Fire Shield  Let's continue our exciting tour through the wonderful world of what TSR Wizards of the Coast Hasbro Industrial Fantasy Simulations Inc. thinks you can do with fire. This one basically shrouds you in a bonfire, which provides you with resistance to fire damage, after the 'sympathetic magic' approach that so much of Dungeons & Dragons  relies on. (In fact, being consumed by flames makes you more  vulnerabe to fire damage, not less .) It also gives you a counter-attack against anyone who tries to smite you, inflicting a small but not insignificant amount of damage. What's particularly odd about this spell is that you can also make it a 'chill shield', whatever that is, that makes you equally resistant to cold . This makes no sense, and furthermore, doesn't it make more sense to have Chill Shield  as a separate spell?  If nothing else, it would break up the tedium between Charm Person and Chill Touch. Real-World Rating:  5 (Effective But Lim
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F/2

Find Familiar Let's start this week's installment off with a joke: If it's that familiar, why do you have to find it? Hilarious. Now we move on to the assessment portion of the program: Maybe this says more about me and the people I play D&D with than it does the spell itself, but I have never, in forty years of playing this dumb game, been in a situation where a wizard having a familiar has contributed in a positive way to the game. I've had plenty of players who tried to use their familiar as a sort of shortcut to omniscience* ("I'll send my hawk into the dungeon to find all the traps!"), and I've had plenty who had jolly fun with their familiar as a pet , but I've never seen, as a player or as a dungeon master, a game session where it contributed in a practical way that justified wasting a 1st-level spell that could otherwise have been spent on Magic Missile. If you want a cat, get a cat, but don't pretend it's high magic. Incidental
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F/1

Fabricate Finally, we're free of the tyranny of the Es, and into what I call "The F ZONE"! Why am I so excited about the F ZONE? Because, buddies and pals, it has fire  in it.  But before that, we have to get through some dross like this, which basically lets you do with magic what people have been doing for thousands of years with good old manual labor. Friends, I'd be lying to you if I said I didn't sit down and calculate the actual cost-to-benefit ratio of using a 4th-level spell to turn a cluster of trees into a bench, but why bore you with those numbers when this entry is so boring already? You could make the argument that this could liberate a couple of people from some wage drudgery, but the overarching point is that you don't have to use a relatively potent bit of wizardry to save you the work of a lathe, an overseas below-minimum-wage worker, and a trip to Bed, Bath, & Beyond. Real-World Rating:  2 (Mostly Pointless) Faerie Fire What if Dancing Li
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E/2

Enthrall This is basically "Bullshit: The Spell". On casting you let out a string of gibberish that your target, if they fail a save, and you get to have advantage for one minute or "Concentration". I dunno, maybe I'm getting jaded already, but this seems like something you could replicate just by telling a story about a dream you once had. Real-World Rating:  3 (Pretty Ineffectual) Etherealness The rare example of a spell that's vastly  more effective in the 'real world' than in D&D, Etherealness lets you basically turn into a living ghost -- invisible, intangible, and able to go anywhere and see anything -- for eight hours . In the game, this is fraught with peril, as you are still subject to spells, ethereal beings, and other risks, but in our reality, it's basically a ticket to omniscience. You don't get it until seventh level, but it's worth it!  Basically beats almost any kind of divination spell there is. Real-World Rating :  1
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E/1

Earthquake It seems a little grumpy to criticize this spell. It does just what it says it's going to do! It makes an earthquake! It knocks people over, it drops people into a hole in the ground, and it destroys buildings! What's not to love? Well, I mean...it's an 8th-level spell , and it's a pretty big investment for something that only effects an area the size of a football field for one minute. Not that that's bad! It's fine. It's fine ! Maybe you got a couple hundred people chasing you because you ass-grabbed the king's daughter, and you don't happen to have a ton of time or C-4. So you throw an extremely localized earthquake at them.  It's...it's fine.  I don't know. Maybe I'm just hard to please.  Real-World Rating:  7 (Effective) Eldritch Blast One of the things that D&D's 5th edition improved -- or ruined, depending on your perspective -- was the relative offensive weakness of low-level spellcasters. Well, you don'
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