Invisibility in D&D | Rules, Rulings, & Edge Cases | Wandering DMs S8E23

So invisibility, uh, this is one of these, um, questions that came up, Paul, from our, uh, holiday game with the, in the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, actually, where, where you in particular were doing a lot of, uh, clever, uh, troublesome to me, the DM, scouting invisibly.

Uh, and your team was using the invisibility sphere, or what used to be called invisibility 10 foot radius, and I was, uh, kinda doing a postmortem myself, making sure that I, um, was doing that right.

Had kind of a conversation show up on our Discord server with a lot of really interesting takes, as a matter of fact, which is I kinda wanted to, uh, share some of those takes, as a matter of fact.

Now, invisibility, right, obviously the, the, the one canonical place where this is being inspired from is the primary ability of the One Ring in Lord of the Rings.

The whole, the, the whole major f- one-

Yep

... magic item that we think about that clearly inspired D&D at the root of it.

Such an important ability.

It's, maybe it's the magic ability to s- start them all in some ca- some sense.

Uh, invis- you know, b- long before Lord of the Rings, there's long, long tradition in legends of myths of, uh, powers like invisibility.

There's a lot of allusions to a cloak of invisibility.

There's the Helm of Hades.

There's the Ring of Gyges in, in Greek myth that all do that kind of stuff.

And it's used a whole lot in Homer.

All through the...

The Iliad has, I don't know, like a dozen different examples of the gods hiding their favorite heroes in a dark mist-

Mm

... and letting them escape what's, what would clearly be a mortal injury on the battlefield.

And then, um, uh, you know, we, we...

As, as we tape this, there is, um, the Christopher Nolan, uh, version of The Odyssey currently in theaters right now.

And so I thought that I might read, uh, a little bit from Alexander Pope's translation of The Odyssey by Homer.

And this little bit is in book seven where the, uh, Odysseus is washed up alone, uh, at the city of Phaeacia, and he's greeted...

He doesn't realize it, but he's greeted by his patron deity, Pallas Athena.

And so here's, um, Alexander Pope's take, which he, he translated in verse, for what it's worth.

"Thus having spoke, the unknown celestial leads, the footsteps of the deity he treads, and secret moves along the crowded space, unseen of all the rude Phaeacian race.