Tired of throwing magic missiles?
Sick of Sacred Flame?
Welcome to our brand new series on Overlooked Spells in 5e. We here at Owlie feel like too often magic users fall back on the same tired spells again and again, so we present a look at some unique ways of using your spellcrafting abilities to realize your dreams (or whatever your magic user dreams of). First up, Rary’s Telepathic Bond.
So you’re a fifth level divine magic user and you’re starting to really feel that whole connection with your God thing. It’s time to step up your game and really start to create a necromantic-style army that your God wants you to create. What better way to appease your divine power than by cementing your thrall over lesser beings?
This is what Rary’s Telepathic Bond allows you to do, in a way. The text of the spell requires creatures to be willing to be telepathically linked to you, but with a bit of creativity, you can transform this spell into a way to telepathically link enemies to you and get them to do your bidding.
Getting Around the Willing
So the creature needs to be willing to be telepathically controlled by you — that’s an issue that you can solve depending on your core stats.
Good at Persuasion? Talk to the creatures and use your excessive charm to get them to be willing to be telepathically controlled. At Level 5 this might be a big ask depending on the status/level of the enemy you’re up against, but it’s worth a shot with your high charisma.
Good at Spellcasting? Something like “Dominate” or “Command” would be natural fits to go along with the telepathic bond. The bond itself won’t allow you to command the creature, but the supplemental spell will get you there.
Do you know “Charm”? This is a real ringer. Have someone in the party cast “charm” on the creature and it’s a good chance that your DM will consider the creature suggestible to your telepathic bonds.
Why Use This Spell?
A high-charisma divine magic can use Rary’s Telepathic Bond to use the power of suggestion to control creatures (and here’s the important part) from any distance so long as they’re not transported to a different plane. This means that you can send telepathic messages over incredibly long distances without requiring something like a stone of far speech.
Couple the long-range telepathy with the power of suggestion and you could potentially control a small army of willing NPCs to do your bidding. This is also invaluable if you could, say, charm an NPC from across a door using your persuasion and then use Rary’s Telepathic Bond to seal the deal and get them to open the door for you.
Fun Use Case Scenario
Here’s one use case scenario for why you should use Rary’s Telepathic Bond:
Suppose you and your party are trying to split up in the room ahead to allow users to sneak and kill off some of the kobolds hanging out in the cave you’re trying to infiltrate. Using Rary’s Telepathic Bond, you can coordinate like a Seal Team between your party members without worrying about triggering the enemies into an aware state. The bond works with up to 8 willing creatures, so it should work with all your party members assuming the group isn’t gigantic.
Another interesting use for Rary’s is to use it to forge a telepathic bond between you and a high ranking official in town before getting a different town official to incriminate themselves, allowing the high ranking official to hear in real-time the confession.
Give it a shot! A new spell always adds some fun to your next session.
