Is Circle Magic Any Good In D&D 2024?

D&D 2024’s brand new magical mechanic for teaming up on spells.

Heroes of Faerun is D&D 2024’s first rules expansion, with lots of brand new character options and, uniquely, the introduction of a new (for 5e) mechanic known as circle magic. Originally developed by the Elves of Faerun, circle magic spread to the nations of Thay and Rashemen and has now become a practice of many spellcasters throughout the Forgotten Realms and beyond.

It involves having multiple spellcasters support in the casting of a spell, enhancing it somehow. The more spellcasters involved in the circle magic, the more potent the enhancement.

You may be thinking the same thing I was when I first heard the announcement about circle magic. Surely this could cause the game to be broken. Well this is part of what I want to investigate in this article. I’m going to dig into how circle magic works, when to use it, wok out whether we can do anything game breaking with it and get an understanding of how good a mechanic it is.

How does circle magic work?

In short, circle magic allows you to enhance a spell by having other spellcasters join in the casting. Those spellcasters must use their magic action for the duration of the casting of the spell (which might delay it’s casting if cast as an action).

There are a few restrictions to be aware of:

Only spellcasters can participate in circle magic. This includes warlocks with their pact magic.
The spell must use a spell slot. No circle casting from scrolls, wands or even species or class spells.
It must require an action or longer to cast, no bonus action or reaction spells allowed with circle magic.

There are a bunch of ways you can enhance spells with circle magic. These include:

Augment: Increase the range of a spell by 1,000ft per secondary spellcaster. There is a limit of a mile. In case you’re not clued up on the conversions here, there’s 5,280ft in a mile.
Distribute: Allow every secondary caster to also concentrate on this spell. As long as at least one of the caster’s remains concentrating on the spell, its effects continue.
Expand: Make the spell’s area of effect larger by 10ft in one dimension per secondary caster.
Prolong: For spells that last a minute or longer, increase the duration according to the number of secondary spellcasters involved in the casting of the spell (from 1-24hrs)
Safeguard: Protect others from the effects of an AoE spell by making 5 cubes of safety within the spell’s area. You create a number of these areas of safety equal to the number of secondary spellcasters involved in the spell’s casting.
Supplant: Reduce the cost of material components for a spell by 50gp per secondary spellcaster.

When to use circle magic

With circle magic, it’s worth being aware that there is a kind of cost associated with using it. Secondary spellcasters must also use their actions to enable circle magic. There may also be a cost in the form of extra spells slots and even by being within range of the original spellcaster (30ft).

This means that it’s not always wise to use circle magic, but below I’ve pulled together some good use cases.

When you need a spell to last longer

Some spells last for 1 or 10 minutes. These are the main spells we want/can make last longer (though you could choose to make a 1 or 8hr spell last 24hrs for instance). For this, we can use prolong. It will cost a spell slot from each secondary caster so unless you’re pushing for 8+hrs, you might as well just have the 1 secondary caster.

Handily, this will allow you to precast the kinds of defensive spells that you might otherwise ignore as you need to cast them mid-combat and they require an action. This includes the likes of:

Blur
Mirror image
Bless
Death armor
Globe of invulnerability
Greater invisibility
Haste
Otiluke’s resilient sphere

There’s rarely a need to extend the duration of a spell beyond a minute that you cast on an enemy in combat as combats should rarely last longer than a minute (that’s 10 rounds). This means that more aggressive spells you cast against enemies (like hold person) rarely need to be prolonged. You’ll undoubtedly find unique and niche instances where this is useful, but often, this won’t be as useful as pre-casting spells ahead of combat or ensuring they last for multiple, close together encounters.

The exception here might be out of combat spells like charm or dominate person/monster where you might want the effects to last much longer for whatever social encounters you want to manipulate.

Making area of effects larger

For those times when the standard AoE won’t be large enough, expand can be a great option. There’s a bit of a caveat here. The secondary casters will expend their actions and a spell slot (preferably a 1st level spell slot to keep the costs lower).

This means that casting something like shatter as a circle spell probably isn’t worthwhile as the second caster might as well cast a similar kind of spell and have double the effects and damage occurring.

Where this becomes more worthwhile is on very powerful spells, especially those with smaller areas, those where the areas can be magnified more significantly with a 10ft extension or AoE spells with a duration that’s more than instantaneous.

As a few examples, if you cast lightning bolt, it has a 5ft width, but a 100ft length. Extending the length is near pointless, but extending the width magnifies the potential damage of the spell significantly (potentially more than just casting 2 lightning bolts). A great option for wider corridors of enemies.

Another example might come in the form of spirit guardians. It has a 15ft emanation but should last an entire encounter. That’s several turns of a larger area resulting in greatly increased damage potential. That can easily be worth the action and 1st level spell slot of an ally, especially if you’re upcasting.

Moonbeam is another good candidate for this kind of effect.

There’s a potentially interesting combination here for spells with multiple areas of effect. This is the case for something like fire storm which has 10 cubes of 10ft dimensions. One reading of this would be to extend 1 dimension of each of these cubes by 10ft, but I don’t think that’s the case. You get to increase 1 dimension of the spells area of effect, for me, that would be extending one dimension of one cube, not of every cube. Admittedly, it’s ambiguous if that’s RAW, but I certainly think it’s RAI.

The other thing to note is that not all areas are made equally in this regard. I’ve already shown that lines can be magnified more substantially through width than length. It’s also worth noting that extending the radius of a circle (so a sphere or cylinder) is going to have a great impact than it will on a cube.

Distance casting

I see this being needed less, but imagine lining up behind battlements against a gnoll war party. They may need to charge some distance to reach you. Your fireball will only reach them once they get fairly close, but use circle casting and you can blast them from 1,000+ feet away for multiple turns of long range attacks.

Another option might be for assassinations. Taking out the guard on the battlements may be hard from such distance, or killing the duke with a shot through an open window. But circle casting will give you the distance, and spells don’t suffer from disadvantage at long range like ranged weapon attacks so you’re more likely to fire true.

When you badly need concentration to last

Distribute can be a big sacrifice as it means multiple spellcasters concentrating on the same spell which means limiting how many concentration spells are active in the party. I’d probably only use this in rare circumstances when you really need a powerful spell to last the encounter. This might be the case for 9th level spells like blade of disaster or true polymorph for example.

Your best options for secondary casters will be those with less important concentration spells to cast. This includes the likes of arcane tricksters, eldritch knights, artificers, rangers and paladins who have less high spells to cast.

Blasting with AoE spells while allies are in the way

Its not unusual for enemies to bunch up into melee after the first round. Unfortunately, those pesky martials are the ones they’re gathering around. It would be great to drop synaptic static on them, but you don’t want to damage your favourite barbarian. Safeguard can cover you here, allowing you to protect some allies.

As with other things, this does limit what the secondary casters can accomplish on their turn so you’ll really want this to be an impactful opportunity before using it.

Reducing costs

I think supplant is a rare option to be useful. The 50gp savings aren’t much at a cost of a spell slot of the same level. You may not want to do this mid-adventuring day, but you could do it near the end of the day when further spell slots won’t be needed for a few savings, but these opportunities may be rare. For example, I wouldn’t bother reducing the cost of a heroes’ feast at the cost of a 6th level spell slot to just save 50gp, especially as it will need to be cast early in the adventuring day for its full benefits.

Are the mechanics behind circle casting broken?

Adventurers fighting devils — Spellcasters: Wizards of the Coast

Circle casting has some reasonably loose benefits to the extent that they feel like they could be easy to break the mechanics of the game with some exploits.

But the rules mostly manages this with some restrictions. I reckon about 9 times out of 10, you’ll be better off having your secondary caster use their actions on their own thing. This is because of the action, spell slot and concentration costs required depending on the benefits.

In most cases, I think this balances out fairly well. Tripling the width of a lightning bolt is quite potent, but casting 2 lightning bolts might be equally potent (or more so). Casting defensive spells ahead of combat is one of your biggest buffs here, but that hardly feels broken (in fact I think these spells often go wasted because they require an action to cast in combat, circle casting actually resolves this issue).

Increasing the size of emanations like spirit guardians and other AoE spells with a lengthy duration feels like possibly the biggest buff here. But that is still an action expended by each secondary spellcaster, and a spell slot, and the spell has just as much damage as before and is still one lucky hit away from broken concentration. With all that in mind, I think it’s got powerful potential, but it isn’t broken.

I did try to dig around for any broken mechanics and while there are exploits like flying with greater invisibility and blasting fireballs from 1,000ft away with a friend or extra long banishments, I feel like none of the issues I’ve seen raised are any more broken than existing mechanics. Without circle magic, you can still fly 120ft in the sky with greater invisibility and blast down fireballs. Banishment still lasts for an entire encounter, adding time beyond the encounter I don’t think is really broken.

And while there can be issues here where players can “cheese” a combat encounter, I’m not sure that circle magic is the issue. It maybe magnifies these niche cases a little further, but actually, as I looked at the spells I thought could be a problem, I found that I hadn’t found anything game-breakingly bad. Some things are powerful, but the drawbacks also tend to be appropriate too.

So is circle magic any good?

I’m almost surprised by my own answer here, but yes, I actually think it is! I fully expected there to be several exploits and game-breaking situations when I started digging into this, but I really couldn’t work out where these issues are. They may still pop up as people have time to try out the mechanics.

Instead, what I think we’ve got is an interesting new mechanic that allows you to alter magic in fun and unique ways and even makes me rethink some of my spell choices, knowing I can now apply mirror image ahead of combat makes that spell much more appealing to me, for example. The rules are also relatively simple. It wasn’t hard to understand the mechanics, restrictions and opportunities for circle magic.

I understand some people’s initial concerns, and realistically, if you think it might be a problem at your table, it’s easy enough to simply not use it (we’ve all been doing that for a long time already). But I actually think it makes an interesting, creative moment for players in a game that’s fairly light on team up mechanics. For these reasons, I’ll definitely be giving circle magic a go with my group.

What do you think of circle magic? Let me know in the comments below.