Spell Spotlight: Conjure Minor Elementals
Spell Spotlight is a series that focuses on excellent, problematic, underappreciated, overrated, or just plain weird spells in Dungeons & Dragons. Conjure minor elementals is one of Dungeons & Dragons’ most frustrating spells, especially for new players. It's hard to use as a player, simply because the game itself makes it difficult to summon the creatures most players expect to be able to summon. Despite being useful and balanced, the lack of options and clear guidelines available to players makes casting this spell more trouble than it’s worth. Let’s fix that.
What Does Conjure Minor Elementals Do?
This spell basically does exactly what it says it should do, it conjures a single CR 2 (“challenge rating 2”) elemental or a hoard of CR 1/4 elemental minions to fight for you. Essentially, it lets you turn the tables on your Dungeon Master, swarming the monsters with small, expendable minions instead of the other way around. Focusing on conjuration spells is a fun and unique way to play D&D. Playing a conjuration wizard makes me feel kind of like playing a hero unit in Warcraft 3, commanding my small units to defend me while I keep laying down damage with my spells.
One notable drawback is that conjure minor elementals requires you to spend 1 minute to cast it, meaning that you have to have this spell cast before combat begins, but no longer than 1 hour before combat because of its duration. Its concentration requirement is also a serious danger, since even one good hit from a powerful monster can cause your small army of elementals to disappear. It encourages you to play defensively and tactically, using your conjured minions to do the dangerous work for you.
(Fortunately, wizards who choose the School of Conjuration get to overlook this drawback starting at 10th level. They can’t have their concentration broken when concentrating on a conjuration spell, which lets them fight and explore boldly, without fear of a stray arrow of a failed Acrobatics check wasting a spell slot.)
It’s good that the spell has these severe limiting factors, because being able to summon up to eight minor elementals is incredibly powerful. Action economy—in this case, how many actions one “side” can take compared to the other in a single round of combat—has a huge impact on any combat’s outcome. It’s why single powerful boss monsters are rarely as effective against a party of four characters as they feel they should be. The simple fact that the adventurers can take four times as many actions as the boss tips the encounter overwhelmingly in their favor. The same goes for spells that summon monsters, even little ones.
Conjuring up Confusion
Conjure minor elementals is plagued by myriad tiny issues of organization. Similar to the Beast Master ranger and Circle of the Moon druids, you need to have the Monster Manual on hand in order to make full use of your conjure spells. These spells say “The DM has the creatures’ statistics,” but this doesn’t just make it difficult for players who want to be able to summon specific creatures, but it also puts an undue burden on the DM who is already juggling a dozen balls trying to keep the game running. Having to stop the game to first flip through the Dungeon Master’s Guide to find a Monsters by Challenge Rating list, find what elementals are on the list, then switch to the Monster Manual and find their statistics drags the game to a complete stop just because of one spell. That shouldn’t happen.
But far and away the greatest source of confusion plaguing conjure minor elementals is that there aren’t any “minor elementals” in the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons to summon. Prior editions of D&D had many different power levels for air, earth, fire, and water elementals; for example, third edition D&D had a CR 1 small water elemental, a CR 3 medium water elemental, and so on up to a CR 11 elder water elemental. In fifth edition, however, there’s only one type of water elemental in the Monster Manual, and it’s CR 5, too strong to be summoned by this spell.
In fact, if you use D&D Beyond's monster search tool to search for elementals by challenge rating, you'll find that there are only 10 different creatures you can summon with conjure minor elementals in the entire Monster Manual! (There's one other from The Tortle Package, but let's set that aside for now.) Worse still, not a single one of them has the word “elemental” in its name. These creatures are:
- Mud mephit (CR 1/4)
- Smoke mephit (CR 1/4)
- Steam mephit (CR 1/4)
- Dust mephit (CR 1/2)
- Ice mephit (CR 1/2)
- Magma mephit (CR 1/2)
- Magmin (CR 1/2)
- Fire snake (CR 1)
- Azer (CR 2)
- Gargoyle (CR 2)
Not counting the mixed-element mephits, only elemental fire and earth are represented on this list, meaning that conjurers simply can’t summon minor air or water elementals with this spell using official monsters. As a conjurer, I've often just wanted to summon a bunch of air elementals, or I want to summon a fire elemental that isn't an azer. Something about summoning a thinking, feeling azer to fight for me rubbed me the wrong way.
To solve this problem in my home game, I decided to create four new minor elementals for my players to summon. These monsters are NOT official and are NOT D&D Adventurer’s League legal, but they are balanced using the same metrics as creatures in the Monster Manual, Volo’s Guide to Monsters, and other official fifth edition sources, and work perfectly in your home D&D game. If you want summon basic elementals using conjure minor elementals, ask your DM if you can use these new minor elementals:
- Minor air elemental (CR 1/4)
- Minor water elemental (CR 1/2)
- Minor earth elemental (CR 1)
- Minor fire elemental (CR 2)
Most problems in D&D can be solved by using your own creativity as a Dungeon Master to tweak the game. In the case of conjure minor elementals, all it took to make this spell much more fun to play with was for me to make a few new monsters, which also serve double duty as new enemies you can use against low-level characters. This isn't always an option in games that stick close to official rules, such as in the D&D Adventurer's League, but as the DM of a home game, you are empowered to change any spell, rule, or monster that doesn't work for you or your players.
James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of the Critical Role Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, and writes as a freelancer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and Kobold Press. He ran Princes of the Apocalypse for two years from level 3 to 15, and now thinks angry elementals are pretty cute. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his furball elementals, Mei and Marzipan. You can usually find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.
Do one about shatter!!
Ran into this problem when running the Zephyros tower in SKT against the dragon. As this is one of Zephyros' spells, quickly bogged down the action as I could not find "minor elemental" literally anywhere. Chose a random fire elemental picture to show my players, and made some pretend rolls and dmg behind the screen. Thanks for the rundown, really helpful.
I feel that the minor air elemental is a bit OP for having a CR of 1/4. Especially if it has resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical attacks. I'd say their more like CR 1/2.
Thats the MAIN Reason I dont use summon spells at all for my Dragonborn druid. NONE !!! not even to fay spirits as animals or elemental and such.
backstory of an enslaved clan using mine altering magic .... Na Ah !!!
I feel it would slow the game and be a nuance to the DM.
Thanks, the homebrew minor elementals will make a good addition to my D&D Beyond homebrew "collection", and the conjurers among my players will surely enjoy them in my non-AL campaign.
For anyone still figuring out this site: I added James' homebrew monsters to my homebrew collection by navigating to Monsters, Homebrew, and then filtering by the keyword 'Minor'. Easily added his four homebrew creatures to my library, just so I can find them quickly and double-check to make sure they'll work for my games.
I wish there was a spell to make a contract with a being from other planes so you can summon them whenever
I am excited about this series. I would like a special section for "DM's Tips" too for these spells. As a DM I regularly have an enemy with a spell I've never used before. Despite my best efforts at preparation and trying to strategize before a fight, running an NPC or monster with a spell for the first time I find that how the spell works in practice, or I miss/forget a key piece of text and am at a disadvantage to my players (who have been learning to use their same set of spells over time for the last several combats). How DM's can best use spells would be a huge help.
In ToEEvil my druid had fun with smoke mephits. It was nice to have minor death abilities or minor aoe because CR 1/4 summons are usually or worth a damn in battle. Their mischief was very useful and thematic
Great article, but I'd like to point out some things that are wrong with your elementals:
I would love to never see anymore Homebrew like this as official articles on DnDBeyond. I've nothing against homebrew as a fun part of the game but this is an official site selling official product, I'm not interested in what whomever the author is homemade monsters.
Highlighting individuals from the community Homebrew could be cool, showing off your own stuff maybe isn't so much. My other suggestion would be doing a "from scratch" version of this article showing how you get to the stats and abilities present at the end, at least that way I don't feel like I'm watching someone who ostensibly writes in an official capacity showing off his latest OC, ya feel?
I'd feel the same way if I had to read an article on the MTG Mothership about a developer giving me unofficial cards I could use with my friends that they made up. It's just not what I want from this site, it's not a level of professionalism I expect I guess.
The overall idea of "Spell Spotlight" is one I have many hopes for. Hearing about ways to optimize usage, relatively unknown combos, hell even relatively known combos for new players, this is a great thing.
Hearing about OC from an official author is not.
Basically, this sort of thing should never be used to present anything less than official content or highlighted community content, because as someone who is literally working for the company that writes the rules on these kinds of things, by proxy, anything said will be confused or used by someone in the wrong way. It doesn't matter if there is a disclaimer, there's gonna be someone who takes this to an AL or similar and end up causing issues. The way this is presented does not convince me that it's done enough to remove itself from that kind of situation occuring and as someone who deals with a lot of AL, I don't want to have to do with those kinds of cases. They've popped up before and they'll pop up again and this kind of thing doesn't help with that
Personally, I think the benefit to those of us who find this content interesting probably outweigh the very few who can't see an extremely clear bolded sentence saying it is not AL legal. I'm sure with so many players out there, there might be someone who gets confused about it, but people generally are smarter than others give them credit for. And the majority of those who do skim and miss that statement would probably just say "Oops" and accept it when it's pointed out. If anyone fails at both of those, well... I don't think we should be tailoring all of this content down to that level as a base assumption and not having something useful to the thousands of the rest of us. Lowest common denominator writing is pretty pointless.
(Also, how is highlighting community content NOT going to have the same exact problem???)
Besides, the conclusion of the article itself is "This spell is useful but has some issues - which are very easily fixed by making some new stuff!" It is not "Hey I made some new stuff, how can I make an article around it?" He is discussing how he identified a minor problem with an interesting spell, and how to address that problem. Seems useful to me!
Plus, the discussion of the spell in the article is interesting enough that it has inspired me to consider using it more!
Another problematic spell you could highlight is Find Familiar. It's not super clear, but based on the text and @JeremyECrawford this is how I think it works.
It creates a spirit (not defined anywhere) that has the statistics of a beast (unless PoC Warlock) but is actually a celestial, fey, or fiend (presumably needing food and air). When killed it disappears (who knows where) leaving no physical form behind (presumably items it's carrying fall to the ground?), but the same creature comes back if you cast the spell again. You can dismiss it to a pocket dimension (not specified what happens to items it's carrying) where it somehow can live indefinitely (does the pocket dimension provide food and air, is it in stasis?). If you cast the spell again, rather than getting a new familiar, your existing one transforms into a new creature.
Any thoughts you have on this would be welcome.
Thanks! I hope the team at WotC reads this!
I have created a whole suite of elementals of each type, from CR 1 to CR 9, available on DM Guild pay-what-you-want: Elemental Progression.