Banishment

One creature you can see within range must succeed on a Charisma saving throw or be transported to a harmless demiplane for the duration. While there, the target has the Incapacitated condition.

When the spell ends, the target reappears in the space it left or in the nearest unoccupied space if that space is occupied.

If the target is an Aberration, Celestial, Elemental, Fey, or Fiend, it doesn’t return if the spell lasts for the full duration. Instead, it is transported to a random location on a plane associated with its nature, as determined by the DM.

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4th-Level Abjuration

Casting Time: 1 Action
Range: 30 feet
Components: V, S, M (a pentacle)
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute

Available To: Cleric, Paladin, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard

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At Higher Levels

When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 5th level or higher, you can target one additional creature for each slot level above 4th.

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Overview

Banishment is one of the coldest spells in the game because it does not confront a threat on the threat’s own terms. It does not burn, crush, or weaken. It simply declares that the creature is no longer permitted to remain.

That gives the spell a peculiar authority. A dangerous presence is removed without spectacle, and the shape of the encounter changes immediately. The line opens. Pressure collapses. Plans that depended on that creature begin to fail at once.

Mechanically, it creates time and space. In play, it feels like a verdict.

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Why This Spell Is Dangerous in the World

Banishment is dangerous because it allows mortal spellcasters to contest presence itself.

Steel kills. Fire destroys. But this spell acts at a higher level. It denies a creature the right to exist in the current place at all.

In a living world, this reshapes institutions. Temples become authorities of spiritual exclusion. Courts develop rites of removal. Sanctuaries, summoning halls, and royal courts become places where presence can be judged and revoked.

Its danger lies in its restraint. There is no explosion, no spectacle—only absence. A bodyguard vanishes. A witness disappears. A summoned envoy is removed mid-negotiation. The world quickly learns that such magic does not need drama to become power.

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Best Uses

Remove the Defining Threat:
Target the creature currently shaping the encounter, not necessarily the strongest on paper.

Split One Fight into Two:
Remove the worst problem, stabilize, then deal with what remains.

Exploit Extraplanar Weakness:
Creatures that do not belong are especially vulnerable. If held for the full duration, they are removed permanently.

Buy Time and Spend It Well:
A full minute allows repositioning, healing, escape, or preparation.

Force Enemy Response:
Once active, the spell pressures enemies to break your concentration or accept defeat.

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Tactics

Banishment rewards timing and positioning.

Cast when removing one creature will change the encounter’s structure. Protect your concentration at all costs—use cover, allies, and movement.

The Charisma save reflects metaphysical stability. Some creatures are difficult to dislodge. Others, especially those defined by intrusion or instability, are far more vulnerable.

Upcasting increases impact but also risk. Multiple targets can collapse an encounter—or restore it if concentration breaks.

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DM Notes

Run Banishment as a spell of tension, not disappearance.

Track duration clearly. Emphasize concentration. Let the table feel each round as borrowed time.

Narratively, keep the effect restrained. A soft collapse of space. A sudden absence. A trace of frost, ash, or stillness. The quieter the effect, the more absolute it feels.

For encounter design, avoid relying entirely on a single creature. If one failed save ends the encounter’s pressure, the encounter needs more layers—terrain, allies, objectives, or consequences that persist.

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Good Combinations

• Wall of Force: Remove the primary threat, then reshape the battlefield safely.
• Dimension Door: Turn removal into an escape window.
• Magic Circle: One confines or wards; the other expels.
• Hold Person: Combine removal and paralysis to break enemy coordination.
• Sanctuary: Helps preserve concentration when it matters most.
• Silence: Shuts down enemy spellcasters attempting to disrupt you.

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Using Banishment in Your Game

Clerics wield this as judgment and exorcism. Wizards use it as correction—removing what should not be. Warlocks invoke deeper authority. Sorcerers make it feel instinctive, as though reality itself bends around them.

In the world, this spell is feared not for destruction, but for what it implies: that presence is conditional.

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Spellcasting Culture and Worldbuilding Hooks

Banishment marks the difference between those who wield power and those who govern boundaries.

Orders that regulate summoning, courts that judge possession, and sanctuaries that control access all rely on this kind of magic. It becomes a credential—proof that a caster can do more than act. They can deny.

The pentacle component anchors the spell in symbolism: a sign of order, boundary, and exclusion. Different cultures may interpret it differently, but the underlying idea remains the same—this is magic that defines who belongs, and who does not.

Banishment

This material is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.

Abjuration

Level Cleric 6, Sorcerer/Wizard 7
Components V, S, F
Casting Time 1 standard action
Range Close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Targets One or more extraplanar creatures, no two of which can be more than 30 ft. apart
Duration Instantaneous
Saving Throw Will negates
Spell Resistance Yes

A banishment spell is a more powerful version of the dismissal spell. It enables you to force extraplanar creatures out of your home plane. As many as 2 Hit Dice of creatures per caster level can be banished.

You can improve the spell’s chance of success by presenting at least one object or substance that the target hates, fears, or otherwise opposes. For each such object or substance, you gain a +1 bonus on your caster level check to overcome the target’s Spell Resistance (if any), the saving throw DC increases by 2.

Certain rare items might work twice as well as a normal item for the purpose of the bonuses (each providing a +2 bonus on the caster level check against Spell Resistance and increasing the save DC by 4).

Arcane Focus Any item that is distasteful to the subject (optional, see above).

Banishment

A word of repudiation, a sacred dismissal, or an act of hard arcane refusal tears the unwanted from the world and casts them out beyond its proper borders.

This spell does not merely remove a threat—it can send the unworldly back where they came from.

4th-Level Abjuration
Casting Time: 1 Action
Range: 60 feet
Components: V, S, M (an item distasteful to the target)
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute.

Available To: Cleric, Paladin, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard.

Effect:
You attempt to send one creature you can see within range to another plane of existence. The target must succeed on a Charisma saving throw or be banished. If the target is native to the plane you are on, it is sent to a harmless demiplane for the duration and is incapacitated while there. When the spell ends, it reappears in the space it left or in the nearest unoccupied space. If the target is native to a different plane, it returns to its home plane; if your concentration ends before 1 minute, it comes back, but if you hold the spell for the full duration, it does not return.

At Higher Levels:
When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 5th level or higher, you can target one additional creature for each slot level above 4th.

Overview

Banishment is one of the coldest spells in the game because it judges not only strength, but belonging.

Against native creatures, it is a minute of removal: a hard-won gap in the battle, bought and held by concentration. Against outsiders, it becomes something sterner. It is not merely control. It is expulsion. A thing that crossed into the world is told, with magical finality, that it must leave it again.

That double identity is what gives the spell its weight. A mortal champion vanishes, and the field changes shape. A fiend vanishes, and everyone present understands that a breach in the order of things has just been forced shut. The same spell can feel like battlefield tempo, exorcism, planar law, or divine rejection, depending on what stands before it.

Why This Spell Is Dangerous in the World

Banishment is dangerous because it makes presence conditional.

In a world where the spell is known, strength is no longer enough to guarantee that a being may remain where it stands. Summoned creatures, infernal envoys, elemental servants, fey guests, and things dragged through ritual breach all become vulnerable to one disciplined act of refusal. That changes religion, law, diplomacy, and fear.

A king protected by bound outsiders is no longer merely powerful; he is exposed to anyone who can cast his protectors out. A cult that tears open the world for a patron spirit risks seeing its godling sent back in front of the faithful. A court that hosts extraplanar ambassadors must reckon with the fact that one priest, one magus, or one inquisitor may be able to turn hospitality into exile.

Even when used against native creatures, the spell alters institutions. It changes arrests, rescues, trials, duels, and sieges. A dangerous person can be removed from the room for one minute, and one minute is often long enough to decide who rules, who flees, who dies, and who survives.

Best Uses

Remove the Creature Defining the Encounter

The best target is often the creature creating the most pressure, not necessarily the one with the biggest numbers. A demon bruiser, a battlefield commander, a tyrant’s bodyguard, or the hostile caster holding the enemy plan together are all prime choices.

Split One Battle into Two Smaller Ones

Against native creatures, Banishment is often best used as a minute-long partition of danger. Remove the worst problem, stabilize the field, kill the lesser threats, then decide how the party will meet the target if it returns.

End Outsider Intrusions Properly

If the target is not native to the plane and you maintain concentration for the full minute, the spell does not merely delay the problem. It sends it home.

Punish Summoners and Planar Meddlers

This spell is one of the cleanest answers to creatures whose power depends on breach, bargain, calling, or unlawful manifestation. It tells the table that not every summoned horror deserves a glorious duel. Some should simply be dismissed.

Force the Enemy to Fight for Presence

Once Banishment lands, intelligent foes often reveal their priorities immediately. They must break your concentration, recover their missing ally, or accept that the shape of the encounter has changed. That makes the spell tactically revealing as well as tactically strong.

Tactics

Banishment rewards judgment more than haste.

Against native targets, think in terms of tempo. What can the party accomplish in one uninterrupted minute? Free prisoners. Shut the gate. Heal the dying. Slaughter the lesser threats. Reform the line. Prepare the killing ground where the returned enemy will arrive to a different battle than the one it left.

Against outsiders, think in terms of commitment. The whole encounter may turn into a struggle over your concentration, because everyone understands what the full minute means. A fiend’s servants will try to break you. A conjurer will panic. The missing creature itself becomes a clock hanging over every round.

Position accordingly. Cast from cover. Cast from behind harder allies. Move after casting when possible. Make the party understand that protecting concentration is not a side concern. For the next minute, it is the fight.

DM Notes

Run Banishment as a spell of suspended consequence.

Mark the vanished creature clearly. Count rounds. Keep the table aware of concentration. Let every turn feel borrowed. Against native targets, the tension comes from the return. Against outsiders, the tension comes from whether the return will happen at all.

This spell is at its best when outsider expulsion feels different from temporary battlefield removal. A devil should not merely disappear; it should seem wrenched back into damnation. A fey lord should go in a shedding of moonlit glamour and cold perfume. An elemental should collapse into its own principle. The less flashy the effect, the more absolute it feels.

For encounter design, this spell punishes shallow planar antagonists. If the whole scene depends on one outsider standing in the middle of the room while nothing threatens concentration, Banishment may rightly end the core problem. That is not a flaw in the spell. It is a reminder that important extraplanar threats should have context: cultists, terrain pressure, magical support, objectives already in motion, or consequences that continue even if the creature is expelled.

Good Combinations

Magic Circle: One spell confines, wards, or prepares the ground for dangerous outsiders; the other drives them out. Planar Binding notes that the creature is typically first summoned into the center of an inverted Magic Circle to keep it trapped while the binding is cast.

Protection from Evil and Good: A natural partner in outsider-heavy campaigns, reinforcing the same logic of warding, exclusion, and hostile-contact denial.

Dispel Evil and Good: Another spell in the same family of magical thought: severance, rejection, and the restoration of proper boundaries.

Planar Binding: The darker mirror to Banishment. One spell dismisses the outsider; the other keeps it here and forces service.

Plane Shift: At higher level, this becomes the harsher cousin to Banishment, able to send an unwilling creature to another plane if the attack lands and the target fails its Charisma save.

Wall of Force: If Banishment buys time, Wall of Force decides how that time will be spent.

Using Banishment in Your Game

Clerics cast it as censure, exorcism, and lawful rejection. Paladins make it feel judicial: a sentence pronounced against the unlawfully present. Wizards cast it as a correction of planar error. Warlocks can make it colder still, the servant of one vast power dismissing the lesser servant of another. Sorcerers make it most unnerving of all, because with them the spell feels less like ritual and more like reality itself agreeing.

In play, this is one of the best spells for campaigns about summoning, infernal contracts, fey intrusion, holy war, possession, and the politics of planar contact. It does not ask, “Can I beat this thing?” It asks, “Does this thing have any right to remain?”

Spellcasting Culture and Worldbuilding Hooks

Banishment teaches societies that outsiders are not merely dangerous. They are removable.

Temple exorcists, wardens of sealed gates, royal magi overseeing extraplanar diplomacy, and inquisitors investigating possession would all treat Banishment as a credential spell. To cast it reliably is to prove that you can do more than survive contact with the beyond. You can reject it.

Its material component invites rich local practice. “An item distasteful to the target” is not just a mechanic; it is lore. Cold iron for fey. Sacred ash for fiends. Salt and cedar for sea-spirits. A saint’s relic, a treaty seal, a funerary wax tablet, a thorn branch, or a broken idol fragment for beings tied to particular cosmologies. What a culture uses to cast Banishment tells you what it fears, what it reveres, and how it understands the things beyond the veil.

In stricter realms, the spell would be regulated in courts, embassies, sanctuaries, and ritual halls. To banish an extraplanar ambassador might be an act of war. To banish a being during legal proceedings might be a declaration that it was never recognized as a lawful person there at all.