New Spells: Molten Upheaval, Wall of Lava
This content can now be found at its most updated version in The Elements and Beyond, a free 246-page compendium that you can download right here, filled with 23 subclasses, 8 spellcasting feats, 134 spells, 213 spell variants, 85 monsters, 30 magic items, 4 races plus 12 new subraces each with racial feats, and even more goodies for both players and DMs!
PDF Link | D&D Beyond Links: Molten Upheaval, Wall of Lava
Art Credit: https://mtgpics.com/card?ref=vvk064
Lava is a very popular fantasy trope but somehow there are no officially published lava spells in 5th edition! That's part of why there are a handful of new lava spells and a half-dozen lava spell variants appearing in the compendiums for D&D Unleashed. These lava spells are a great example of why the new Pyromancer feat from the same compendium as these spells, The Elements and Beyond, is conceptually different from simply specializing in fire damage: lava spells like these are too much of a mix of fire and earth to appear on either the Pyromancer or Geomancer spell list. If you take the Pyromancer feat, these lava spells will be a bit out of your specialization, but if you only focus on fire damage, these spells will fit right into your collection. Of course, this is more like fantasy pulpy lava and less like real-life physics-based lava, or it would burn people just for being in the same room!
Sometimes the best strategy in a fight is to just blow up the ground under your foes. Molten Upheaval is a potent spell all by itself: why use two spells to trap enemies in an area and then burn them alive, when molten upheaval can do both? This spell loses a great deal of effectiveness against flying enemies, it doesn't play well with melee allies, and it takes at least two turns of concentration before the spell beats out cone of cold in damage (with a smaller area than cone of cold), but molten upheaval can still be a crushing new spell to add to a war mage's arsenal.
Wall of Lava is a new wall spell that looks like a deadly chimeric combination of wall of fire, wall of water, and wall of stone. You can move through the wall, but you risk getting stuck and burning alive very quickly. Freezing the wall into obsidian will let you smash through it if you can't go around it or fly over it. This spell is a wonderful choice for fire-based villains, especially those that are immune to fire damage, such as devils or fire giants. Imagine a party in the elemental plane of fire, facing an efreeti sorcerer guarded by an elite team of salamanders: the efreeti casts wall of lava, and then both he and the salamanders fight the player characters by moving back and forth through the wall, ignoring the fire damage they are immune to, attacking through the wall and then retreating to safety each turn behind the lava. A memorable, thematic, and challenging encounter!
Note that wall of lava has an extra non-combat use because of the ability to make a permanent wall of obsidian. If you have the spell slots and extra days to spare, you can build the exterior of a castle or palace out of black obsidian glass! You'll have trouble making the more intricate internals of a structure using this spell, but that won't stop a BBEG from having an imposing-yet-believable palace of shiny black obsidian on the outside!
PDF Link | D&D Beyond Links: Molten Upheaval, Wall of Lava
