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Your party has it all figured out. Your rogue will pick the locks while your ranger distracts the guards. Your fighter will provide backup muscle if needed, and you, as the caster, have one simple job: have a contingency in case anything goes wrong.
While it can be daunting to search through the multitude of spells available for your class to ensure you’re adequately prepared for your heist, fear not! In this article, we’ll explore the best spells to take on a heist based on their use case, ensuring you have the magical advantage to pull off your party’s perfect plan regardless of your class.
A Campaign of Capers for Your Crew
Do you want to embark upon a heist full of magic, double-crosses, and danger like you saw in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves? If so, Keys from the Golden Vault is the treasure you’re looking for! This adventure anthology contains 13 heist-centric adventures for a variety of levels and features tons of unique environments for your party to explore!
Each mission requires inscrutable preparation to complete successfully, so you’ll have to channel your inner Edgin Darvis to make sure your plans are in place!
Best Spells for Heists
Heists are usually complex missions that require multiple phases to pull off. In order to determine what your spellcaster should stock, we’ve broken down the best heist spells into different categories based on their use case.
In the below table, you can click on the category name to jump to the section of the article for a more in-depth breakdown of how to use these spells to succeed in your mission!
Spells to Take on a Heist
Avoiding Detection
Avoiding detection during a heist will likely be crucial for at least some of your mission. Luckily, there are several spells that can help keep prying eyes away from your operation. Spells like invisibility and greater invisibility are excellent for singular party members that need to avoid detection. However, they can be quite resource intensive if you need to cloak an entire party.
For missions where you need to stealth in with the whole party in tow, pass without trace offers a +10 to Stealth checks for an entire hour for creatures within 30 feet of you, allowing you to (hopefully) keep your entire party hidden from detection.
If you’re looking for more of a “hide in plain sight” vibe, disguise self is perfect for when you need to blend in with the environment or take on the appearance of someone else. Warlocks can even pick up the Mask of Many Faces invocation, which allows them to cast this spell at will for extended infiltration missions. For situations where your use case is beyond a simple illusion for yourself, you could also look at alter self for a disguise that holds up to physical inspection or seeming if you need to disguise others.
In case of emergency scenarios where you’re on the brink of being detected, darkness, fog cloud, or even stinking cloud can obscure large areas, allowing for a quick escape.
Finally, this list of non-detection spells wouldn’t be complete without silence, which, while it may seem niche, is extremely versatile in a heist. You can disable sound-based alarms, deafen the sound of your knock spell, and even cloak the sounds of combat if it breaks out.
Causing Distractions
Causing a distraction can be a solid strategy when navigating a well-guarded area. Minor illusion and silent image are reasonable low-level options that can create minor visual or auditory illusions, distracting guards and leading them away from your intended path.
If you need movement, sound, and other sensory stimuli for your illusion to be effective, major image is a more potent option that will cost you a 3rd-level spell slot. While creating an illusion that can affect multiple senses may draw attention better than a silent or non-moving one, it can still only occupy a 20-foot cube, and you’ll need to stay within 120 feet and use your action to keep it animated.
Speaking of animated illusions, mislead is a 5th-level spell that allows you to create a perfect copy of yourself that can move independently, gesture, speak, and even relay what it currently hears and sees. This can be a perfect way to get guards to chase your duplicate, and seeing as the spell also turns you invisible when you cast it, it allows you to slip past any remaining guards unnoticed.
For not-so-subtle distractions, there are few options that will cause as big of a bang for your buck as conjure animals. This spell is the perfect perpetrator of chaos and confusion, allowing you to create anything from eight eagles, for when you need feathers and noise, to two brown bears, for when you need to clear a room real quick.
Detecting Threats
When infiltrating a high-security environment, it’s a good idea to keep an eye—or in this case, your magical senses—out for danger.
Detect magic, on the other hand, is a similarly helpful 1st-level spell that can reveal magical auras and give you an idea of any enchanted objects or spells in the area, helping you to avoid traps. It’s also excellent for looting the vault after you’ve broken in, as you’ll be able to pinpoint which objects are magical and, therefore, the most valuable. Even better, this spell can be cast as a ritual and has a 10-minute duration, so if you have 10 minutes to kill while your rogue buddy is off picking locks, you won’t have to burn a spell slot.
Another 1st-level ritual spell that will undoubtedly come in handy is find familiar, which can be used to summon an animal buddy to scout ahead while you sit back and relax. This works exceptionally well while you’re within 100 feet of your familiar as you can see and hear what it encounters and communicate telepathically with it. Even when you’re outside the range, it can still follow a task you set and report on what it finds.
Coming in at the higher investment of a 4th-level spell slot, arcane eye is considered the ultimate scouting tool. It’s an invisible, magical eye that has darkvision, can fit through gaps as little as 1 inch, and has no limit on how far away it can go. This allows you to see almost anywhere and gather valuable intel from a safe distance. You could even combine it with the Observant feat to read lips, which will compensate for the fact that your arcane eye doesn’t relay audio.
Removing Roadblocks
There are always twists and turns when pulling off a heist, and these spells will be crucial when you hit those inevitable roadblocks. Polymorph and banishment are probably the best single-target removal spells, though they’re quite resource intensive at a 4th-level spell slot and require concentration for the entire duration.
If you’re looking for a lower-level solution, phantasmal force is sort of like a single-target major image that can inflict damage and, hopefully, send your target running. Speaking of lower-level solutions, sleep is probably the most effective, violence-free option as long as you’re dealing with enemies with smaller pools of hit points. As a 1st-level spell, it can knock out creatures with a combined hit point total of 22 on average, which can easily deal with a couple of guards.
Charm spells like charm person and suggestion are other excellent routes that can be used to mollify suspicious guards or even turn them into allies. If you’ve really bungled the heist and need to erase the events of your missteps from an onlooker’s mind, modify memory is an effective option that comes at the steep cost of a 5th-level spell slot.
When you encounter arcane obstacles, there’s no better way to deal with them than dispel magic. This catch-all spell can deactivate arcane barriers, incapacitate animated defenses, and shut down magical traps, so it’s definitely worth stocking if you’re trying to steal anything from a location you suspect might have magical defenses.
Infiltrating and Escaping
When planning a heist, you need to think outside the box. Sure, guards are observing the floor-level entrances and exits, but are they prepared for a big-brained team of geniuses that plan to dimension door 500 feet into the air, then paradrop with feather fall through the skylight? Didn’t think so. Fly, levitate, and spider climb are other (read: safer) methods of using elevation to your advantage, allowing you to exploit unsupervised windows, balconies, and air vents.
For making a quick escape, there are few options better than misty step, which can be used as a bonus action to teleport 30 feet even after you’ve used your movement and action to Dash. Unfortunately, the biggest downside of misty step is that you can only teleport where you can see. If your escape is blocked by an unscalable wall, gaseous form, or etherealness if you have a 7th-level spell slot hanging around, are the gold standard for bypassing physical obstacles.
Knock is another must-have spell in case you find your way blocked by a lock your rogue can’t crack. It can also be used to suppress arcane locks. But be careful. The spell’s stealthiness is impeded by the fact that it produces a loud knock that can be heard 300 feet away, so use this spell with caution. If you just want to skip the whole process of locks altogether, you can simply make your own door with stone shape or passwall, which are the types of spells that make your DM put untransmutable walls in every dungeon your party enters thereafter.
Working Together
Teamwork is imperative for a successful heist (there’s a reason that every good heist movie has a sequence of getting a team together). Usually, each team member needs to succeed in their area of expertise for the plan to work. If you’re looking to help out your teammates, the guidance cantrip can give them a small but crucial bonus to their ability checks. If they need a more considerable boost with a longer duration, enhance ability can provide advantage on checks made with a specific ability, great for when your rogue has some sneaking or your bard has some convincing to do.
If your fantasy world doesn’t have walkie-talkies for your team to stay in touch, message and sending can be used to communicate with your party at a distance, allowing you to coordinate your movements and share information without alerting guards or drawing attention to yourself. If you’re going to be splitting up for longer periods of time, investing in the 5th-level spell telepathic bond may also be prudent.
Though it’s typically used as an offensive option, hex is another solid teamwork spell, especially during heists. The spell’s secondary effect provides disadvantage on checks made with certain abilities, so it can be used to hinder the target’s attempt to sleuth out a stealthing party member.
Spell Out Your Plan
When it comes to pulling off a successful heist in D&D, the right spells can make all the difference. Hopefully, this article has provided some food for thought and given you some spell choices to mull over for your next heist.
Remember, you can never be too prepared, and it never hurts to have a contingency plan in place—speaking of contingency, be sure to have that spell ready in case things go awry!
Mike Bernier (@arcane_eye) is the founder of Arcane Eye, a site focused on providing useful tips and tricks to all those involved in the world of D&D. Outside of writing for Arcane Eye, Mike spends most of his time playing games, hiking with his girlfriend, and tending the veritable jungle of houseplants that have invaded his house.
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