Detect Poison and Disease: The Fever Perceiver
Usable By: Cleric, Druid, Paladin, Ranger
Spell Level: 1
School: Divination
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Self
Duration: Concentration, up to 10 minutes
Components: V, S, M (a yew leaf)
For the duration, you can sense the presence and location of poisons, poisonous creatures, and diseases within 30 feet of you. You also identify the kind of poison, poisonous creature, or disease in each case.
The spell can penetrate most barriers, but it is blocked by 1 foot of stone, 1 inch of common metal, a thin sheet of lead, or 3 feet of wood or dirt.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
I rate Detect Magic pretty highly. It is a fairly useful tool that highlights important magical objects at all tiers, and doesn’t typically cost you a lot of spell slots to use efficiently thanks to the ritual tag. Detect Poison and Disease is the cleric and druid version of the effect, and while similar in text, its applications are so niche I can’t imagine it being something you’re regularly preparing and getting uses out of.
The diseases in 5e are laughably underdeveloped. Zombies don’t come with any diseases, nor do most undead. The Contagion spell is responsible for nearly a 4th of all diseases. Ten monsters (in total) come with their own kind of diseases (out of all the monsters ever printed for 5e), and eight natural diseases exist and lack tools for DMs to easily incorporate them in games. In reality, you’ll go three or four entire campaigns before something with a disease pops up. Poisons are slightly more common, most on monsters that just deal bonus poison damage with no condition, and the vast majority of these poison conditions have a 1 minute or shorter duration. You won’t ever really need Detect Poison and Disease outside of specific protection missions where your job is to identify the assassin and apprehend them. The rest of the time, it's going to alert you that the giant spider is in fact poisonous. Who would have guessed!
When you’re going to hunt an assassin, or sneaking into a den full of known sneaky poisonous monsters, Detect Poison and Disease can act as a monster radar for these specific kinds of creatures. That’s the vast majority of its application. As a prepared ritual spell, knowing it exists is all you’ll really need. You shouldn’t ever be preparing this without knowing poisons or diseases are coming shortly. If you do know it’s coming, you probably don’t need to ever waste spell slots on this. Even as a ritual, I have a hard time justifying using Detect Poison and Disease.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.
