Nystuls is an immensely stupid spell that allows us access to entire worlds of options that would previously be unavailable to us. The primary use of this is considering certain creatures as other creatures for the sake of spells and magic. Before we get too far into that, many would argue nystuls doesn’t allow us to, say, consider ourselves as an ooze to avoid being hit by ‘dominate person’, but here’s some proof as to why it does, beyond the spell itself.

Dan Dillon is a designer for D&D content currently, and is the only designer to comment on the spell. This counts as official WotC endorsement, and the issue has since not be touched on.

There’s two effects of Nystul’s, the one we care about most is ‘mask’.

Mask. You change the way the target appears to spells and magical effects that detect creature types, such as a paladin’s Divine Sense or the trigger of a symbol spell. You choose a creature type and other spells and magical effects treat the target as if it were a creature of that type or of that alignment.

but we also have ‘false aura’

False Aura. You change the way the target appears to spells and magical effects, such as detect magic, that detect magical auras. You can make a nonmagical object appear magical, a magical object appear nonmagical, or change the object’s magical aura so that it appears to belong to a specific school of magic that you choose. When you use this effect on an object, you can make the false magic apparent to any creature that handles the item.

False Aura lets us hide things from detection or vise-versa. This is good for getting around detection magic. Fool someone into thinking a wand of magic missile is a wand of web or something. Possibly, we can trick people into buying nonmagical objects by allowing them to see our sword has an evocation enchantment on it, but it’s just nystul’d. The potential tech on false aura is rather short, but that doesn’t mean we have to ignore it. If we have the time, we can hide the nature of our magic items. Make it impossible for enemies to tell what our items are, if they’re magical, ect.

The real ‘meat’ of this spell is from mask.

Mask allows us to consider any willing creature as any type. I use this a lot in “Dark Matter is Divine“, but this deserves its own article.

There are a series of spells that benefit greatly from nystuls, especially when combined with eachother. I will attempt to over all the relevant ones in this article.

Planar Binding: to chain the unchained

Planar binding is already gamebreakingly strong without nystuls, as it allows us to have arbitrarily large armies of elementals.

combined with nystuls, we can now planar bind anything we want to.

My favorite use of this is *nystuls wishbound delayed blast fireball* or *NWDBF*. We can actually bind a delayed blast fireball and have it sit somewhere to ramp up, 14,400d6 a day. this can be continually bound until needed. It requires a use of wish, but this is much more damage than anything in the game can survive.

We can also planar bind a shadow blade using this trick, though this is largely useless. It has a niche use for a martial character at least, if we want to.

We can also use nystuls to planar bind boss enemies if we care to. This is only the start of the bastard magic we can accomplish with Nystuls.

Magic Jar: To possess the unpossessable

This one is easier to explain. Want to possess something that magic jar won’t let you? simply nystuls it into a humanoid and now you can. My personal favorite option for this is the dybuk, which allows us to possess other things with the same trick.

This leads to us being able to become a lich or a dybuk inside a marilith. Truely some of the best tech in the game. This combos well with true polymorph, which lets us make creatures we would like to turn into.

Defense against the human arts

Dominate person? no thanks, i’m an ooze. Possession? no, i’m not a humanoid i’m actually a plant.

nystuls can be used to make us immune to variety of humanoid targeting effects that would cripple or break our characters should we fail against them. This combined with black sap makes us nearly “DM takes our PC” proof. With the exception of feeblemind as a total debilitation spell. Luckily we have good int saves as well as mindblank.

End of Lesson 1

Like any good magical lecture this has taken way too much time to make. These are the big “core” aspects of nystuls that i’ve touched upon, hopefully the explanation is clear enough that you can find the more particular uses yourself. Enjoy ooze life!