In one of our campaigns I was playing a Wizard School of Necromancy Hobgoblin named Celestino. It was a character that I created in literally five minutes because my first one died in the middle of a session, and I needed to continue playing.
Celestino turned out to be a really good character. He was lawful evil and schizophrenic. His goal was to search for the Necronomicon and eventually become a lich. He eventually died later in the campaign when he was 5th level, during a boss encounter with a Young Black Dragon.
Enough about Celestino, let’s talk about necromancy!
The spells available for School of Necromancy are not really that many, and that beats the feature that you get at 2nd level as a wizard when you choose your school:
Grim Harvest
At 2nd level, you gain the ability to reap life energy from creatures you kill with your spells. Once per turn when you kill one or more creatures with a spell of 1st level or higher, you regain hit points equal to twice the spell’s level, or three times its level if the spell belongs to the School of Necromancy. You don’t gain this benefit for killing constructs or undead.
I needed to find more ways to trigger this feature, so I started creating some homebrew spells. Today, we will look at one of them, what was its concept, where it came from, and how it was balanced.
Where does the spell come from?
As a wizard in D&D 5e, you get no access to healing spells. My character was quite flimsy and with low AC, I needed a way to stay alive. So I came up with some spells that would allow me to heal when I needed to, but still, be matching the theme of Celestino.
The idea for Blood Sucker comes from the video game Divinity Orginal Sin 2. In the game, it is a spell that allows you to absorb blood surfaces around your character to restore vitality. It sounded perfect for my crazy necromancer.
How did I adapt it to D&D?
I had the idea but I still needed to adapt it to D&D to be used by a wizard. The first thing to do was to create a basic spell concept.
Blood Sucker – 1st Level Necromancy
When standing in blood, you can use dark blood necromancy to suck from the blood source you’re standing on and regain hit points equal to 1d6 + your spellcasting ability modifier. The blood source must be a puddle of blood, a container full of blood (not a body), or any other type of source that is capable of containing a liquid.
This was already a good starting point. But there was still more to do.
For a 1st level spell, Cure Wounds is much better as it heals for 1d8 instead of 1d6, but wizards don’t have access to that, so I had to make some changes to heal more or less, based on how much blood I had available.
The second version of the spell changed the dice used based on the size of the blood surface I was going to suck:
| Blood Surface Size (Diameter) | Dice |
| Small, less than 5 ft. | 1d4 – 2 |
| Medium, 5 ft. | 1d4 |
| Large, 10 ft. | 1d6 |
| Huge, 15 ft. | 1d8 |
| Gargantuan, 20 ft. | 1d10 |
| Colossal, more than 20 ft. | 1d12 |
It might seem as this weakens the spell, but we need to consider that if two or more creatures die next to each other, their blood surfaces would most likely merge, creating a single bigger surface, allowing me to use a larger dice to heal. The size of the blood surface would match the size of the creature, so a medium-size creature creates a medium-size blood surface.
The only thing left to change was the scaling when casting the spells at higher levels.
Most spells simply increase the number of dice used by one for each spell level above the original spell level. I did exactly that.
The spell block looked like this after these changes:
Blood Sucker – 1st Level Necromancy
When standing in blood, you can use dark blood necromancy to suck from the blood source you’re standing on and regain hit points equal to the size dice + your spellcasting ability modifier. The blood source must be a puddle of blood, a container full of blood (not a body), or any other type of source that is capable of containing a liquid.
The dice rolled changes based on the size of the blood source as follow:
Small: 1d4-2 (Less than 5ft)
Medium: 1d4 (5ft)
Large: 1d6 (10ft)
Huge: 1d8 (15ft)
Gargantuan: 1d10 (20ft)
Colossal: 1d12 (more than 20ft)
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, the healing increases by 1 size dice for each slot level above 1st.
What about Range, Casting Time, Duration, and Components?
These were the last things to decide before the spell could be used. Given that most of the time the blood surface would be of Medium size, I was not going to heal much, so using the spell as an Action was probably too much, so I chose that the casting time would be one Bonus Action, like for Healing Word.
For the range, 60 ft. around my position seemed reasonable, considering that as a wizard I am not supposed to be in the middle of the action. This would allow me to suck the blood from creatures that did not necessarily die around me.
For components instead, I chose only Verbal and Somatic. A 1st level spell is not expensive to cast, and from the video game, the character simply calls the blood to them and absorbs it without using any material component, but just by moving their arms.
The duration was going to be Instantaneous as most spells of this type.
Blood Sucker – The Definitive Version
The spell was now ready to be used, so I published it on D&DBeyond.com for everyone else in the community to use it as well.
What do you think?
Let me know in the comments what you think of this spell. Would you change anything from it? Is it too powerful? Too weak?
If you like it as it is, you can add it to your games by clicking on the Add to Collection button on the spell’s page on D&DBeyond.com.
I hope you enjoyed reading about Blood Sucker! More articles like this will come in the future with other homebrew spells! If you have an idea for your own spell, let us know in the comments or contact us and we would be more than happy to help you create it for your games and balance it.
