I write builds now, apparently!

-Sil

I’m going to be outlining a build that cranks conjuration wizard up to its fullest potential. This means i’m going to be using material from a lot of books, some of which might not see play at your table. Thankfully the premise of “twilight wizard 1 / conjuration wizard X” is easy to apply and doesn’t need any of the extra material it’s being given by, say, strixhaven backgrounds for example.

I highly recommend reading my minor conjuration guide as the stuff used there is going to be used here a lot.

Level 0:
Race: Mark of Handling
Background: Custom, Witherbloom Student
Making it a custom background with witherbloom as a feature allows us to swap nature and survival with perception and stealth prof, both of which will be useful to us later.

We will also gain 2 tool proficiencies, Alchemists tools, and weavers tools.

This gives us Witherbloom initiate as well as the witherbloom expanded spell picks, both of which we’ll be using.

Our racial choice gives us conjure animals as a spell pick, which gives us another damage option should we need it. Nonmagical BPS immunity is a huge problem for this spell, since we can not get magical attacks on our conjured animals like shepherd druid can, but we can use flying snakes to deal poison damage, or summon giant constrictor snakes to grab and restrain enemies.

Levels 1-4

Stats
Strength: 8
Dexterity: 14
Constitution: 13 (+1)
Wisdom: 13
Intelligence: 14 (+2)
Charisma: 11

Equipment:
Dagger
Component Pouch
Explorers pack
Sell your rations, mess kit, and firestarter, We don’t those. We are exceptionally poor right now, but we’ll have that sweet sweet adventurer gold and/or con some shop owner out of 2500gp with a diamond soon enough

I’m keeping the dagger because it has enough out of combat uses to be worth keeping. You could sell it and just prestidigitate a used noble knife when you needed one if you wanted.

We have 15gp from our background, we could buy a mule or two if we sell some valuables. Try to keep them out of direct fights, use one at a time. They’ll be useful for carrying our stuff as well as something that can use items.

Level 1, Conj1
Cantrips: Prestidigitation, Minor Illusion, Mind Sliver
[Current Cantrips: Prestidigitation, Minor illusion, Mind Sliver, Chill Touch, Druidcraft]

I’m starting wizard here, mostly to rush to conjuration wizard 2. I also think int and wisdom save proficiencies is going to be better than wis and cha saves. I also don’t think starting equipment is going to be an issue for us, if we’re starting in a game that starting equipment would be important, then we may want to start cleric. When it comes to cleric/wizard combos, I would generally suggest starting cleric, but minor conjuration is super important and we want it as early as possible. If you chose to start cleric, I wouldn’t blame you, as AC is more important at level 1 than it is at any other time.

Witherbloom Initiate: Take druidcraft and chilltouch and use int for casting. Our spell of choice is “Goodberry”. We completely invalidate almost any need for goodberry at 2nd level, but we take it anyway. I suggest everyone keeps a goodberry or two on their person so a familiar or other summon can feed them one should they be downed. This isn’t actually true RAW, but is a super common houserule. Ask before you start, and take a different spell if this isn’t the case.
Cantrips: Prestidigitation, Minor illusion, Mind Sliver
Wizard Spells: Unseen Servant, Silvery Barbs, Absorb Elements, Shield, Find Familiar, False Life

“Sil, fucking false life?!” Is what i imagine most people saying when they see this list. False life nearly guarantees we won’t die stupidly at level 1 thanks to having nearly double the health of a typical PC. We prep it at first and then ditch it at 2nd.

Why not mage armor til 3rd? false life provides a net higher effective health than mage armor does, and will also protect us from save damage.

If you don’t take false life, I don’t blame you. Take sleep, as it’s painfully missing from this list as a 1st level wizard (and would be another good reason to start twilight, but, conj2 is that good)

Our level 1 strategy is pretty simple: Use unseen servants for everything that looks dangerous, chill touch if we have to have an attack roll cantrip, and we can make use of prestidigicannon by hiring a few servants. If we’re lucky enough to start in a town, we can also convince some hobos to join by giving them free food from prestidigitation.

Level 2: Conj 2
New spells: longstrider, tensers floating disk

Unprep false life, Conj 2 gives us an option for temps as well as ice troll hearts. At this point we are a force to be reckoned with. There’s so much minor conjuration tech that I won’t go over all of it (Read “To Conjure the World” here)

A huge consideration going forward with our spell selections is that we can conjure The Incantations of Iriolarthas, meaning the spells in that book are available to us, either to prep or to scribe into our own book using downtime. For example, We would take identify here, but it is in TIOI.

We start our day by eating an ice troll heart freshly plucked from the ice troll that we conjure ourselves, followed by theki root for temp HP, black sap for charm/fear immunity, which we will smoke a dose of every time it comes up, and once we’re done with all our buffs (and applying them to our teammates), conjure a catapult munition.

In the event we want control in a fight instead of damage, we can conjure a tangler grenade instead.

If we’re feeling truely degenerate (which, this is boot brew, of course we are), we have the option to become a half-dragon at this level. The half-dragon template is a somewhat forgotten part of 5e, but any humanoid can become a half-dragon. I recommend we become half green dragon, resistance to poison is the best of the options for us in particular. We also get 10ft blindsight and a green dragon wyrmling breath.

If we have an extra hour to spare not doing any of the many important things we wizards do every day, make a potion of cold resistance with your alchemist tools and ice troll heart. Just one a day for 2 weeks gives us 14 of them, which we can keep prepped encase of an upcoming ice enemy, or sell to local merchants / adventurers / whoever.

We should have a familiar already, but if we don’t, We can somewhat mitigate this by charming an animal. We would usually be able to conjure the components to spells, but we can’t, because find familiar itself takes an hour to cast. We should also attempt to always have an unseen servant with us, or if not them, some other creature. Charm an animal with your innate cast of charm animal, buy a mule with some of the gold you’ve likely gotten, or hire another servant for 1sp a day.

As a last resort we can force another party member to throw the other catapult munition. This takes up their turn of damage output for yours, but yours is so much better it’ll be more than worth it.

Need cash fast? sell a huge diamond to some shop owner you’ll never see again. Do it while under disguise so you can’t be caught up to by guards later. There’s about a 75% chance this doesn’t work. If the shopkeep is sus just walk away.

Assuming decent initiatives, we can even get 2 catapult munitions off in a round. this is easiest to do with an unseen servant, servant throws as a BA, action conjure a new munition, familiar can then take it and throw it off your turn, but it’s questionable if an unseen servant can throw a catapult munition. one instance of 10d6 in an AOE, save for half, should be enough to win any fight at level 2, but if it weren’t, having two of them in a round should do the job.

Even if we do take a substantial blow, we regain health at a rate of 5 per turn unless we’ve been hit by fire or acid, fire we should have a constant resistance to thanks to murrossa balm, and acid we can use absorb elements on. This still turns off our regen, but it means enemies are forced to use a damage type we resist in order to make us stop regenerating. Our AC is still atrocious, but we shouldn’t be targeted all too often, since everything should be dead in 1-2 rounds. We should even be able to avoid the scenario of being crit to the floor thanks to our temp hp supply and the use of silvery barbs.

Even if we’re downed and our regen isn’t up, we can have a goodberry cast from the day before, and our familiar or other party member can feed it to us. Assuming no one else in the party has healing word, which, might be good, considering the overwhelming amount of healing we’re providing at level 2.

Level 3: Conj 2 / Twi 1

Twilight Spell picks:
Cantrips: Guidance, Mending, Thaumaturgy
Current Cantrips: [Guidance, Mending, Thaumaturgy, Prestidigitation, Minor illusion, Mind Sliver, Chill Touch, Druidcraft]
Healing Word, Sanctuary

Twilight brings us the armor we’ve wanted for a while, advantage on initiative, and 300ft darkvision.

We’re taking twilight here because minor conjuration is doing a majority of the heavy lifting for T1.

We should take someone’s medium armor that we’ve fought, something like hide or scale should not be difficult to procure.

Twilight doesn’t have anything terribly complicated to go along with it, it’s mainly to buff our init and give us armor, the spells are nice too. The hardest part is keeping guidance up on ourselves to add to our initiative bonus, which acts as our diet GoA.

With healing word prepped we’re not healing everyone passively, everyone has a goodberry they can be forcefed, and we can pick someone up with our bonus action, which is great, as we can use our action to conjure a catapult munition and hand it to them.

Sanctuary gives us a good use of our bonus action on conjuration turns, and if we only conjure items to be used by other creatures, we can spend entire fights under the effects of sanctuary, making us difficult to target. Which is good, because we’re likely the designated ‘healer’ of our party at this point, even if most of our healing output isn’t tied to use casting in combat. This is especially good news later

Level 4: Conj 3 / Twi 1:
Level 2 spells: Nystuls Magic Aura and lesser restoration

TIOI spells to keep in mind: Continual flame, invisibility
[don’t take knock, we don’t knock, we blow down the door]

Thankfully some of the complicated stuff is done here and we can start streamlining through a lot of our picks. Having lesser resto in the book helps us in case something curses us or applies certain conditions we can’t make the party fully immune to. We don’t have to keep it prepped all the time

Nystuls Magic Aura will help us much later on, but is also useful as a defensive measure now. Using the ‘mask’ part of the spell on ourselves, we can falsely present as another creature. I suggest an ooze. Magical effects that target us now treat us as if we were an ooze. Anything that requires we be a humanoid to work that works through a magical means simply is not allowed to effect us. After rest casting this for 30 days, it becomes permanent until dispelled. We can eventually effect a whole party with this, or use up all our slots, which would be stupid. This may be a mostly selfish cast until later levels, but keeps us away from being possessed. We can also stack nystuls, masquerading as an ooze masquerading as a dragon masquerading as a celestial. [Don’t actually use celestials, they can be planar bound. Use ooze, dragons, or constructs if you don’t care about healing spells not applying to you] Upcasting the spell higher than 3rd might prevent it from being easily dispelled.

Levels 5-10

Level 5: Conj4/Twi1:
2 more spells: misty step and rope trick
New cantrip: Mold Earth
Current Cantrips: [Guidance, Mending, Thaumaturgy, Prestidigitation, Minor illusion, Mind Sliver, Chill Touch, Druidcraft, Mold Earth]
ASI: Alert

it was a hard consideration here between misty step and web. I think tangler grenades give us enough control to last without needing the web spell, but taking it is still a good option. Misty step exists to get us out of bad situations we may find ourselves in, and, ultimately, i found that more important.

Enemies that can’t see you have a harder time targeting you with specific effects when they can’t see you, so pyrotechniques is a valuable spell. We could also just conjure a smoke grenade, but there is some possibility the smoke grenade disappearing also causes the smoke to disappear.

A slightly uncomfortable level for us, but we should be blowing through encounters anyway. Alert also makes us immune to being surprised, which is going to help us in case enemies try to sneak up on us. It also means enemies don’t gain advantage from being unseen by you, so if you’re in smoke, enemies have disadvantage. This would go well with the pyrotechniques spell. The one downside is that downed people in the smoke can’t be targeted by our healing word spell, but, who needs them. So, if pyrotechniques would be so great, why aren’t we taking it? Well, we can replicate the same effect with prestidigitation. Prestidigitate the harmless visual effect of smoke filling a room or mist, or whatver flavor fits best for your character as a means of heavy obscurement. Heavy obscurement is a very tricky thing to do right in this game. It’s a huge defensive buff for us, especially with alert, but also can make fighting enemies tedious. I recommend making the effect one that can be moved around or out of instead of just ‘the whole room’, but as always, it will depend on your situation.

The other option for an ASI would be fey touched for GoA. This depends on your party, with our stat array, GoA isn’t as good for us as it would be with someone with an odd ability score in their casting stat. Alert is the more ‘selfish’ pick of the two, and we hopefully have someone else in the party willing to pick up GoA, or, if we are in a game that opens up the dunamancy spells for all wizards, grab it normally.

Level 6: Conj5/Twi1
Spells: Phantom steed, Revivify

TIOI spells to keep in mind: Counterspell, Dispel Magic, Fireball, glyph of warding, animate dead.

Assuming Revivify RANFS ruling (as revivify doesn’t work unless we cast animate objects or otherwise animate the corpse RAW) we should take revivify. Someone, and ideally two someone’s, should have revivify prepped, so that if one PC happens to die in a fight we can bring them back good as new as long as we’re quick to get to the body. Our existence thus far should be making it really, really hard for us and our allies to drop, but now we make it even harder.

Phantom Steed is an amazing ritual that we’ll be using extensively. Super fast horse that can also use a catapult munition of a tangler grenade, and since it shares our turn while mounted, makes setting up double catapult munition round 1’s that much easier.

I would recommend waiting a level if someone has revivify, but if you did that, there’s that chance they die that level and this guide would be partially responsible, so take revivify asap.

Level 7:
Conj6/twi1
Conjure Animals, Leomunds Tiny hut

We get benign transposition, and it really is benign. it’s a few extra uses of teleports a day. Use it if you need to teleport as an action to a place you can see, like the other side of a door. also can be used to swap places with an ally. Maybe to give teleport them onto a phantom steed so they can move out safely? Not a ton of potential tech for this that isn’t covered by misty step, sadly, but it is at least free.

Leomunds tiny hut fits our “party protector” theme and is just a generally useful ritual for setting up camp. Between goodberry, prestidigitated food, the Alert feat, Leomunds hut, and minor conjured ice troll hearts and drugs, camp should be a great time.

Conjure Animals because we’re a mark of handling human, this gives us a viable single-target damage dealing option ontop of a few other uses.

enemy immune to fire? Use a 3rd level slot and send the Wolves, lots of wolves. Enemy immune to nonmagical BPS? flying snakes, plus pyrotechniques to give them all advantage. Enemy immune to fire, poison, and nonmagical BPS? Tangler grenades and giant constrictor snakes, then cast chill touch on it.

The former wasn’t even using half-dragon templates on our conjured animals, which allows us to give them a breath weapon of an elemental type or poison.

Level 8:
Conj7/Twi1
Spell picks: Conjure Minor Elementals, Fabricate
TIOI spells: Arcane Eye, Banishment, Dimension Door, Evards Black Tentacles

Remember when we took weavers tools ever so long ago? It’s time we use them. With fabricate we can make a 10×10 cube of fine linen. This, according to the section on trade goods, is roughly 3700gp [using the thickest linen i saw on average] [assuming my math isn’t absolute garbage, which it likely is]. Anyway, money printing is now achieved as long as we have shops to sell to.

Conjure minor elementals is here for mostly one reason: Chwingas. These things have boons they can give us, but we don’t care about those! one of them gives us vulnerability to bludgeoning, can’t risk it! The benefits likely outweight the risk, but it explicitly states “the DM chooses the charm” on the chwinga statblock. Ask about it, learn how you’d receive the charms, try not to get one that’s bad for you if you do want them, some of them are really powerful, particularly one that gives you mindblank, one that gives you a strength of 25, one that gives us effectively 9 stacked death wards, tiny hut as an action, treasure sense, and one gives us conjure animals 3 times.

These buggers can cast pass without trace and then disappear into a rock that you have in your pocket, or a necklace or however else you want to flavor it. Are we using a 4th level slot to cast what a ranger could with a 2nd? Yes, but it’s that good.

Chwingas can also cast druidcraft, guidance, and resistance. This allows us to have guidance up while we concentrate on something else.


Level 9:
Conj8/Twi1
ASI: Either fey touched or lucky
If no one in the party has gift of alacrity at this point, it is now our job, take it and restcast it. Otherwise, take lucky, being able to reroll any bad d20 roll is a huge boon in general. We’ll assume we take lucky here.

New Spells: Death Ward, Ottilukes Resilient Sphere

These spells actually combo together really nicely. Restcast death ward onto yourself and any other party members who you think need or deserve it, depending on your style. If someone’s death ward procs, or they go even further and get downed but not dead, but another round of fights will kill them in all likelyhood, we can put them in the magic hamster ball to regen with ice troll heart.

Conj9/Twi1

Spell Picks: Greater Restoration, Conjure Elemental

TIOI Spells: Planar Binding, Bigbys Hand, Telekinesis, scrying
If we truly have no spellcasting help, We can still planar bind a chwinga by using the full ‘conjure elemental’ spell, trapping the chwinga in some space without rocks, and focusing on it for an hour while we cast the spell. From that point on, we just have to cast planar binding once a day. This would be overly expensive for most wizards, but we can just conjure the diamonds to cast the spell with, and we have indefinite money anyway from fabricate.

With a planar bound Chwinga, none of the party members need to use up their concentration to have PWT up, and we can have it at any time we want, because the Chwinga casts it at-will. We don’t quite have the slots to rest-cast forever, so this is our only perma-bound elemental for now.

In part 2 we’ll be going even further beyond. This will include: becoming a body-hopping entity worthy of an SCP entry, planar bound infinity summons, and more.