Levitate

With a word and gesture, you alter the target’s relationship with the pull of the world, lifting it beyond ordinary footing and holding it there.

2nd-Level Transmutation
Casting Time: 1 Action
Range: 60 feet
Components: V, S, M (a small leather loop or a piece of golden wire bent into a cup shape)
Duration: Concentration, up to 10 minutes
Available To: Artificer, Sorcerer, Wizard

One creature or loose object of your choice that you can see within range rises vertically, up to 20 feet, and remains suspended there for the duration. The spell can levitate a target that weighs up to 500 pounds.

An unwilling creature can make a Constitution saving throw to resist the spell. On a successful save, the spell has no effect.

A levitating target can move only by pushing or pulling against a fixed object or surface within reach, such as a wall, ceiling, or beam, allowing limited horizontal movement if the environment permits it. Otherwise, it simply hangs where it was raised.

You can change the target’s altitude by up to 20 feet on your turn as part of maintaining the spell. When the spell ends, the target floats gently to the ground if it is still aloft.

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Overview

Levitate is not a spell of speed. It is a spell of denied footing.

That distinction matters. It does not let a creature roam the sky like a flier, and it does not throw enemies around like a violent force spell. Instead, it removes the ground from the equation. In play, that can be even more disruptive. A swordsman without ground under his boots is no longer fighting on his terms. A prisoner raised out of reach is suddenly secure. A wounded ally pulled above floodwater or grasping hands may survive by a margin that no weapon could create.

What makes Levitate memorable is that it changes the meaning of vertical space. A courtyard, shaft, tower chamber, bridge, ritual pit, cliff edge, or city street stops being merely a place and becomes a hierarchy. Who is on the ground? Who is beyond reach? Who is exposed? Who is helpless? The spell creates answers instantly.

It is also a spell with a cruel edge. To be levitated unwillingly is not merely to be moved. It is to be denied agency in a very visible way. The target hangs, struggles, kicks at empty air, and discovers that strength means little without purchase. For that reason, Levitate can feel judicial, humiliating, or ritualistic as easily as tactical.

Unlike flight, which grants freedom, Levitate grants position under constraint. That is why it is so useful, and why it feels stranger than it first appears.

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Best Uses

Remove a Melee Threat from the Fight

One of the spell’s clearest uses is simply lifting a dangerous close-range opponent beyond striking distance. Against creatures that depend on footing, reach, and pressure, this can neutralize them immediately.

Protect an Ally or Yourself

A levitated ally can be raised out of floodwater, grasping enemies, collapsing ground, or a press of bodies. Cast on yourself, the spell can buy safety from melee attackers, hazards underfoot, or a sudden environmental threat.

Extract Someone or Something

A wounded companion in a pit, a relic at the bottom of a shaft, a trapped body under unstable rubble, or an object suspended over danger can all be reached by changing vertical position rather than brute-forcing access.

Break Formation

Lift a key enemy from a shield wall, ritual circle, gang line, or defensive position and the whole arrangement changes. Levitate is often strongest when used on the one figure holding order together.

Turn the Environment into the Real Weapon

Cliffs, wells, shafts, balconies, stairwells, ruined towers, and urban heights all make the spell more dangerous. In the right space, a 20-foot vertical change is enough to transform the entire encounter.

Create a Public Display of Power

Outside combat, Levitate has dramatic force. A condemned criminal raised before judgment, a sorcerer hanging motionless above a crowd, a prophet suspended in stillness during a rite—this spell carries symbolic weight as well as tactical value.

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Tactics

Choose targets that need the ground. Levitate is strongest against creatures whose danger depends on closing distance, holding a line, or physically controlling others.

Read the space before casting. Open air favors the spell. Tight interiors with convenient walls and beams may let the target drag itself around more effectively than you expected.

Use altitude deliberately. Sometimes the right move is not “as high as possible.” A low suspension can still deny footing while keeping the target in missile range, conversation range, or ritual range.

Remember that this is not flight. A levitated creature is constrained, not liberated. That applies to your allies as much as your enemies.

Think in terms of isolation. Levitate often works best when it separates one important creature from the rest of the scene: the bodyguard from the gate, the prisoner from the mob, the cult leader from the circle, the wounded ally from the battlefield.

Exploit the moment of helplessness. When a target suddenly loses purchase, that shock matters. Even before the tactical consequences are fully understood, the psychological effect is real.

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Good Combinations

Fog Cloud: Raise a target above or within obscuring mist so it loses footing and visibility at the same time, making rescue, escape, or isolation more difficult.

Darkness: Suspend an enemy in magical darkness to combine physical helplessness with total visual denial.

Web: Use Web to lock down the ground and Levitate to remove a key creature from the few spaces where movement was still possible.

Silent Image: Create deceptive surfaces, false ledges, or the illusion of reachable safety around a levitating target, encouraging bad decisions from creatures already panicking.

Feather Fall: Pair the spell with controlled descent, especially in dangerous vertical environments where Levitate is being used for rescue, exploration, or extraction.

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DM Notes

Levitate works best when treated as a spell of positional denial, not as bargain flight. The central question is never just “who goes up?” It is “what changes once they no longer have the ground?”

Keep the constraints clear. A levitating creature is not freely maneuvering through the air. It is suspended unless it can push or pull against something solid. That distinction is the heart of the spell.

Reward environmental thinking. The spell becomes memorable in wells, towers, alleys, shafts, collapsing ruins, hanging bridges, execution yards, and ritual chambers. It is less interesting in a blank open field unless the target itself is what matters.

Remember the emotional tone. To levitate an unwilling creature is often humiliating as much as tactical. To levitate an ally can be lifesaving but frightening. To levitate oneself may feel powerful at first and then suddenly precarious once the limits become clear.

In worldbuilding, Levitate belongs naturally to artificers, tower mages, inquisitors, urban sorcerers, ritual authorities, and strange nonhuman traditions that understand height not as freedom, but as control.

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Why This Spell Is Dangerous in the World

Levitate is dangerous because it lets one creature decide, within a small but decisive vertical range, who is allowed the security of the ground.

Its scope is limited. Twenty feet is not a mountain, and Levitate is not flight. But that is enough.

A guard lifted above a gate cannot hold it.
A prisoner raised beyond reach cannot be seized.
A suspect hung in the air before a magistrate becomes a spectacle of power.
A victim suspended over a shaft, fire, or mob becomes helpless without ever being struck.
A wounded ally pulled clear of danger survives because the ground itself is no longer where the danger is.

That is where the spell’s real menace lies. It turns height into judgment. It can rescue, humiliate, isolate, display, restrain, or sentence. In the right setting, it makes power visible in an immediate and unsettling way.

Levitate does not reshape the world. It reshapes who is permitted to stand in it.

Levitate

Levitate allows you to move yourself, another creature, or an object up and down as you wish.

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

Transmutation

Level Sorcerer/Wizard 2
Components V, S, F
Casting Time 1 standard action
Range Personal or close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Target You or one willing creature or one object (total weight up to 100 lb./level)
Duration 1 min./level (D)
Saving Throw None
Spell Resistance No

A creature must be willing to be levitated, and an object must be unattended or possessed by a willing creature. You can mentally direct the recipient to move up or down as much as 20 feet each round; doing so is a move action. You cannot move the recipient horizontally, but the recipient could clamber along the face of a cliff, for example, or push against a ceiling to move laterally (generally at half its base land speed).

A levitating creature that attacks with a melee or ranged weapon finds itself increasingly unstable; the first attack has a -1 penalty on attack rolls, the second -2, and so on, to a maximum penalty of -5. A full round spent stabilizing allows the creature to begin again at -1.

Focus Either a small leather loop or a piece of golden wire bent into a cup shape with a long shank on one end.