Greater Invisibility

4th-Level Illusion
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Components: V, S
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
Available To: Bard, Sorcerer, Wizard

Effect: A creature you touch becomes invisible until the spell ends. Anything the target is wearing or carrying becomes invisible as long as it remains on the target’s person.

Unlike Invisibility, this spell does not end when the target attacks or casts a spell.

Overview

Greater Invisibility is where invisibility stops being a spell of approach and becomes a spell of active power. Ordinary invisibility already allows a creature to move unseen, scout unseen, and choose the moment of revelation. Greater Invisibility removes the need for revelation altogether.

That change is profound. A creature under Invisibility usually enters unseen, listens unseen, moves unseen, and then loses the spell the moment violence or spellcasting begins. A creature under Greater Invisibility remains unseen while continuing to act. Blades come from nowhere. Commands are interrupted by an unseen voice or spell. Locks are opened under watch. Objects move without a visible hand. Every passing moment deepens uncertainty instead of resolving it.

That is why the spell feels like a true tier shift rather than a simple upgrade. It is not merely safer invisibility. It is sustained unseen agency while events are still unfolding.

Why Greater Invisibility Matters

The spell matters because it changes not only how a creature hides, but how a whole scene functions.

With Invisibility, the unseen choose when to reveal themselves.
With Greater Invisibility, they do not need to reveal themselves at all.

That single distinction transforms the spell from infiltration and setup magic into one of the most oppressive illusion effects in the game. In combat, enemies are forced to endure an active threat that remains unseen while still capable of attacking, casting, repositioning, and controlling tempo. Outside combat, the spell is just as dangerous: theft can occur while witnesses are present, sabotage can be performed in active spaces, and manipulation can unfold in full view of people who still cannot identify the agent behind it.

Within the illusion sequence, the progression remains especially clean:

Mirror Image = which body is real?
Blur = where exactly is the body?
Invisibility = where is the body at all?
Greater Invisibility = how do you answer what continues acting without ever returning to sight?

That is what gives the spell its real force. It does not merely deny vision. It denies certainty while events continue to move.

Best Uses

Sustained Unseen Offense

This is the spell’s most famous use for good reason. A creature that can keep attacking and casting while unseen becomes profoundly difficult to answer. Even when enemies suspect the threat’s location, suspicion is not the same as a target.

Precision Violence

Greater Invisibility is exceptional for assassins, duelists, ambushers, skirmishers, and any combatant who gains major value from repeated unanswered action. It turns a single opening advantage into continuing battlefield pressure.

Spellcasting Under Threat

A visible caster is easier to surround, interrupt, and punish. An invisible one can keep shaping the encounter while denying enemies the visual certainty needed to retaliate cleanly.

Repositioning Without Losing Tempo

Many defensive tools ask you to choose between survival and contribution. Greater Invisibility often lets you do both. You can withdraw, interfere, rescue, flank, or reach stronger ground while remaining difficult to answer.

Theft Under Observation

This is one of the spell’s most dangerous non-combat uses. Unlike ordinary invisibility, Greater Invisibility allows theft while people are present and watching the room. A jewel can vanish from a table, a key can be lifted from a belt, or a coffer can be opened while everyone is still present and reacting too late.

Sabotage and Tampering

The spell is ideal for quietly altering the world while remaining unseen: cutting bindings, planting evidence, poisoning food or drink, damaging equipment, or moving key objects in active use. The power lies in continuing to act without becoming visible.

Espionage and Manipulation

In councils, courts, temples, war rooms, and noble houses, Greater Invisibility allows active interference rather than mere eavesdropping. Documents can be turned, seals broken, letters switched, and outcomes altered while the room is still occupied.

Psychological Pressure

As a secondary effect, the spell can also break discipline. Even intelligent creatures become less coherent when blows, spells, missing objects, or sudden disturbances come from empty space. Commands falter. Formations loosen. Fear begins to spread.

Practical Tactics

Keep Moving

Do not let enemies build a reliable sense of your position. Greater Invisibility is strongest when hostile minds cannot settle on where you are, where you were, or where you will act next. Motion is part of the spell’s force.

Make Uncertainty Expensive

The spell is not only defensive. It pressures bad decisions. Enemies may guard the wrong angle, waste attacks into guessed spaces, cluster too tightly, expose allies, or overprotect ground already lost. Make those mistakes hurt.

Let Terrain Multiply the Spell

Noise, smoke, darkness, narrow approaches, broken ground, curtains, furniture, stairs, vertical spaces, and clutter all make Greater Invisibility nastier. The less readable the environment, the more terrible unseen activity becomes.

Act with Purpose

Because the spell allows continuous unseen action, it is tempting to treat it as freedom to do everything. It is better treated as freedom to do the most important thing repeatedly without exposure. Focus on the targets, objects, or decisions whose disruption will unravel the rest of the scene.

Exploit Active Spaces

This spell is at its most distinctive when used where ordinary invisibility would fail: guarded rooms, active corridors, courts in session, negotiations in progress, defended treasures, battlefield command points, or occupied ritual spaces.

Protect Concentration

This spell is strong enough that intelligent enemies may stop trying to see you and instead start trying to break you through area effects, wild attacks, ash, powder, sound cues, or saturation of likely spaces. Treat concentration as the spell’s vital organ.

Limits of the Spell

Greater Invisibility is powerful, but it is not absolute. It does not make the target silent, intangible, scentless, or impossible to detect by all means.

Enemies may still:

• hear movement
• track disturbed water, dust, smoke, blood, or fabric
• use blindsight, tremorsense, or truesight
• sweep spaces with attacks or hazards
• fill an area with flame, sand, powder, water, or debris to expose movement

Its greatest balancing factor is concentration. The spell’s power is extraordinary, but it can still be broken by injury, panic, or hostile conditions. It is also short in duration, which suits its role as a spell of acute domination rather than long stealth travel.

DM Notes

Greater Invisibility works best when described through consequences, not magical display. Do not cheapen it by half-showing the invisible creature. Its power lies in the fact that the eye never receives the answer it wants.

Describe instead:

• wounds opening with no visible attacker
• spells cast from empty space
• locks opening under watch
• cups tipping or letters vanishing with no visible hand
• dust, fabric, curtains, and debris reacting to movement with no visible source
• weapons turning too late toward sounds that no longer match the true position
• fear growing because the threat keeps acting without ever becoming seen

At the same time, let capable opposition adapt. Smart enemies may spread out, ready attacks, mark likely spaces, throw liquid or ash, guard exits, protect vulnerable allies, or retreat into tighter formations. This does not weaken the spell. It lets the spell create a richer and more frightening encounter.

Greater Invisibility is most satisfying when it does not erase resistance, but turns resistance into a desperate attempt to answer a force that remains active while absent from sight.

Good Combinations

Misty Step: Excellent for repositioning while remaining unseen and difficult to track.

Silence: If sight is denied and sound is suppressed, finding the target becomes dramatically harder.

Fly: An invisible aerial combatant can become nightmarishly difficult to answer.

Sneak Attack or precision-damage builds: Particularly strong for characters who gain major value from repeated unseen attacks.

Darkness or obscuring terrain: The harder the battlefield or chamber is to read, the more punishing the spell becomes.

Pass without Trace: Excellent when Greater Invisibility is being used for infiltration, sabotage, or movement through active guarded areas.

Allied battlefield control: Enemies already slowed, split, or disoriented by terrain and magic become vastly less capable of responding to an unseen active threat.

Adventure and Story Uses

Greater Invisibility is not merely a stronger stealth spell. It is a spell that transforms combat, assassination, rescue, sabotage, theft, espionage, and magical warfare into scenes of sustained unseen pressure.

A court killer crosses a hall of guards and keeps striking without ever appearing.
A battle mage turns a breach into terror as defenders fall to an enemy they cannot answer.
A rescuer moves through riot and prison smoke unseen, opening cells and cutting bonds while chaos deepens.
A thief lifts jewels, letters, and seals from a crowded chamber while witnesses watch the room in growing panic.
A saboteur poisons the cup, cuts the harness, or removes the key while everyone is still present.
A sorcerer haunts a battlefield like a curse with intent, visible only through wounds, collapsing formation, and fear.

That is why the spell feels so formidable. It does not merely remove the body from sight. It allows unseen agency to remain fully active while the world around it keeps moving.

Greater Invisibility

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

Illusion (Glamer)

Level Bard 4, Sorcerer/Wizard 4
Components V, S
Target You or creature touched
Duration 1 round/level (D)
Saving Throw Will negates (harmless)

This spell functions like invisibility, except that it doesn’t end if the subject attacks.