New Spells: Storm Spear & Variants
This content can now be found at its most updated version in The Elements and Beyond, a free 246-page compendium that you can download right here, filled with 23 subclasses, 8 spellcasting feats, 134 spells, 213 spell variants, 85 monsters, 30 magic items, 4 races plus 12 new subraces each with racial feats, and even more goodies for both players and DMs!
"This spear is made with lightning! Real lightning!"
Art Credit: https://www.deviantart.com/sstarkm/art/Lord-of-Sunlight-455714621
While there's not quite a dearth of lightning spells in 5th edition, there certainly aren't enough to satisfy your average lightning-loving sorcerer or wizard. And sometimes you just want to feel like zeus (or like a dark souls cleric)! The ability to paralyze a foe with electricity is a classic mainstay of lightning-based powersets, whether that falls to a storm mage or to Pikachu. Despite that, there aren’t really any D&D spells in 5th edition that deal lightning damage and paralyze the target at the same time. We thought all these things could be remedied somewhat by the following spell.
Storm Spear was designed to hit the mark between finger of death (which deals 5d8+30 damage) and hold monster, providing a spell that both damages and debuffs an enemy at the cost of not quite being as good at either for its level as it would if it did only one or the other. This spell is perfectly suited for peeling the Legendary Resistances off of a big monster while still dealing it some damage. It even has some effect against higher-level creatures that are immune to paralysis, since it also restrains the target and knocks them prone. Just don’t try to use it against a creature immune to lightning, such as a shambling mound or a blue dragon. Not only will it not deal damage, but it won’t do anything. This spell went through a lot of changes since its inception as a higher-level single-target spell. For quite a while it actually transformed into electrical chains that grappled the target, but eventually we decided it made more sense to turn that into part of a different spell instead and simplify the spell to focus on its paralysis effect. It’s been refined a lot more since then, and finally has reached the state you see it in today: ready for prime-time.
We've also got two spell variants for storm spear today, along with a new formatting style for those spell variants. We've been trying out a lot of different styles for displaying spell variants in the upcoming compendiums (such as The Elements and Beyond, which storm spear is from). I've been leaning heavily toward this style for some time now, which enables us to separate spell variants from the regular spells into their own section. You can see a previous iteration of the styling here, although even the current design most similar to that one has been through enough changes that the design in that post is now quite obsolete. Whatever design we finalize with, it will show the book of origin (PHB, Xanathar’s, etc.) for the spell, and if the spell variants are kept in the same section as new spells, they’ll be marked in such a way as to make the new spells easy to pick out from the spell variants even at a glance.
As a note, you can see by comparing storm spear and freezing icicle to withering bone claw that with most spell variants, being changed to a damage type that is less commonly resisted (as necrotic is compared to lightning or cold damage) comes with some downsides so that the spell variant doesn’t eclipse the original in power. In the case of withering bone claw, that means that while fewer targets will be resistant to the damage dealt by the spell, more targets will be immune to the paralysis.
Links:
PDF | D&D Beyond: Storm Spear, Freezing Icicle, Withering Bone Claw
