A 1st level spell that trips everyone around you, wrecks the floor, and still gets called the worst Thunderwave in the book. I think the haters are half right. Come fight me about which half.
Today we’re looking at a 1st level evocation spell called Earth Tremor. Available to Bards, Druids, Sorcerers, and Wizards, plus the Eldritch Knight, who can grab it off the wizard list because it’s evocation, and anyone who Magic Initiates their way in, this is the spell where you stomp, the ground ripples out ten feet in every direction, and everybody standing on it has to make a Dexterity save or eat a d6 and fall on their face. If the floor was loose dirt or rubble, it stays wrecked as difficult terrain until somebody spends a minute per patch cleaning it up by hand.
Sitting at a listed range of 10 feet, a casting time of one action, and an instantaneous duration with no concentration, Earth Tremor is the rare 1st level area spell that’s centered on you, costs you nothing to hold, and leaves a mess behind. The catch is the two things it doesn’t do. It doesn’t hurt anyone who makes the save, and it doesn’t reach anything that isn’t touching the ground. So the flying thing, the spider on the ceiling, the guy who made his save, all untouched.
The community angle is a fight on two fronts. Front one: is this just Thunderwave with worse damage and a better rider? Front two: what on earth does “range 10 feet” mean on a spell that clearly explodes out of your body, and can a sorcerer double it? That second one has an official answer and a loophole, and we’ll get to both. For now, let’s look at the rules as written, and remember, you can always fight me in the comments if you read it different.
RAW
- Casting Time: 1 action
- Range: 10 feet
- Components: V, S
- Duration: Instantaneous
Here’s the text, straight from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, page 155, and it’s the same text in the updated Elemental Evil Player’s Companion, page 17:
“You cause a tremor in the ground within range. Each creature other than you in that area must make a Dexterity saving throw. On a failed save, a creature takes 1d6 bludgeoning damage and is knocked prone. If the ground in that area is loose earth or stone, it becomes difficult terrain until cleared, with each 5-foot-diameter portion requiring at least 1 minute to clear by hand.”
Four sentences, and every one of them has started an argument somewhere, so let’s slow down.
“You cause a tremor in the ground within range.” This is the sentence that confuses people, because the range line says 10 feet and the spell never names an area of effect. People read that and go, wait, do I pick a point ten feet away and shake one square? No. The spell shakes all the ground within range of you. Jeremy Crawford said it flat out in 2017: “You cause a tremor in the ground within range. Range is 10 feet.” When someone pushed back that the word “area” has no antecedent, he pointed at that first sentence, “the ground within range,” and said the book uses “area” in its plain English sense. So picture it as a 10 foot radius circle centered on you, roughly every square within two squares of your space. You are the epicenter.
“Each creature other than you in that area must make a Dexterity saving throw.” Other than you. The caster is safe, always. Your friends are not. If the fighter is standing next to you, the fighter is rolling. And there’s a hidden word doing a lot of work here, which is “in the ground.” Crawford clarified this in 2018 too: each creature, other than you, on that ground must make the save, even if it’s behind a barrier, because being on the ground is the key. Flip side, things that are not on the ground, the flying imp, the spider on the wall, the guy levitating, are not touching the thing you shook, so they don’t roll. Someone asked him whether that meant a dungeon floor doesn’t count because it isn’t soil, and the answer was that “ground” means what it means in English and your DM decides. Most tables rule a floor is ground. Your table should decide before the fight, not during.
“On a failed save, a creature takes 1d6 bludgeoning damage and is knocked prone.” This part is all or nothing. There is no half damage on a success. They make it, nothing happens. They fail, they take an average of 3.5 and they’re on the floor. Prone is the payload here, because a prone creature attacks at disadvantage, gets attacked at advantage by anyone within 5 feet, and has to burn half its movement just to stand back up. Watch it play out. Your bard is surrounded by three goblins, save DC 13. Goblin one rolls a 15, makes it, nothing. Goblin two rolls an 8, eats 4 points and goes down. Goblin three rolls a 2, same, on its back. Now your fighter walks up and swings at either one with advantage, and when those goblins get their turn they need 15 of their 30 feet of movement just to stand up. That’s the spell doing its job.
“If the ground in that area is loose earth or stone, it becomes difficult terrain until cleared, with each 5-foot-diameter portion requiring at least 1 minute to clear by hand.” This one is conditional. It only fires if the ground was loose to begin with, so a dirt road, a gravel slope, a rubble strewn ruin, yes, and a smooth flagstone floor, probably not, DM’s call. When it fires, you’ve just paid a 1st level slot for a permanent, no concentration patch of difficult terrain twenty feet across, and it costs a minute of shoveling per five foot chunk to undo. Stack that on the prone goblins from a second ago. Each one stands up, 15 feet spent, and the 15 they have left only moves them one square in difficult terrain. They are, functionally, stuck next to your fighter. That’s where this spell starts to look sneaky good, and also where you notice the catch. The difficult terrain is under you too. You’re walking out of your own mess at half speed.
At Higher Levels. “When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, the damage increases by 1d6 for each slot level above 1st.” So a 2nd level slot is 2d6, a 3rd is 3d6, averaging 10.5 to everyone who fails. The radius never grows. The prone and the difficult terrain never grow. Upcasting buys damage only, and the damage was never the point, so I’d upcast this one rarely. The optimizer math on upcasting it is in the uses post, and the short version is fun on paper, but don’t.
Limits and Cheeses
The quick version, because the real depth lives in the companion uses post.
The limits are built in. It’s a ten foot bubble around you, so you have to be in the middle of the enemies, which is exactly where a bard, druid, sorcerer, or wizard does not want to be. It’s a Dex save with no effect on a success, so against anything nimble it whiffs. It doesn’t touch fliers or climbers. It hits your friends. And the terrain rider depends on the floor.
The cheeses mostly come from that weird range line. Because Xanathar’s printed the range as “10 feet” instead of “Self (10-foot radius),” a sorcerer’s Distant Spell metamagic, which doubles the range of any spell with a range of 5 feet or more, turns this into a 20 foot radius quake for one sorcery point. That’s the one spell in the game where Distant Spell grows your area of effect. The Evocation wizard’s Sculpt Spells and the sorcerer’s Careful Spell protect your allies in the blast. And because the prone is the payload, the smart play is timing, cast it right before your melee friends act. All of that, plus the table arguments about what counts as ground, the tremor inside a monster’s stomach, and a playtest spell that briefly turned this into a city block earthquake, are in the Earth Tremor uses post. Go read that one.
The 2014 version versus the 2024 version
I get asked this every time, and for this spell the answer is short. There is no 2024 version. Earth Tremor was not reprinted in the 2024 Player’s Handbook. It’s on the list of Xanathar’s and Elemental Evil spells that didn’t make the cut, alongside Catapult, Cause Fear, Chaos Bolt, Ceremony, and friends. So if you’re playing 2024 rules, Earth Tremor is still the Xanathar’s version, and it’s still legal at most tables the same way every other older spell is, with your DM’s blessing. The classes that could cast it in 2014, Bard, Druid, Sorcerer, and Wizard, are the same classes that can reach back and grab it under 2024 rules.
The one thing to watch if you’re running it under 2024 is the terminology. The new rules define a “target” to include anyone forced to make a save by an effect, which is why people argue that ally-targeting features like the Order cleric’s Voice of Authority now trigger off your own area spells. And 2024 Distant Spell still says “a range of at least 5 feet,” so the Xanathar’s range loophole survives. Otherwise, same spell, same d6, same prone, same mess.
History
Now the part I love, except this one is short, because Earth Tremor is a fifth edition original. There’s no first edition Earth Tremor, no 2nd edition priest spell, no 3.5 version, no 4th edition power. Earthquake has been around forever, sure, but that’s an 8th level world ender in 5e and a completely different spell. The little 1st level stomp was born in 2015 and the story of it is really the story of one sentence getting rewritten.
It first appeared in March 2015 in the free Elemental Evil Player’s Companion, page 17, and in the back of the Princes of the Apocalypse adventure the next month. That original printing read differently from what you just heard. The range was “Self (10-foot radius)” and the first sentence was “You cause a tremor in the ground in a 10-foot radius.” Clean, obvious, a bubble around you. The difficult terrain line was also shorter. It just said the ground becomes difficult terrain “until cleared,” with no mention of how long clearing takes.
Then Wizards started fiddling. The Princes of the Apocalypse errata changed the range to 10 feet and added the sentence about each 5-foot-diameter portion taking at least a minute to clear by hand. The Elemental Evil PDF was updated to match. And in November 2017, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, page 155, reprinted the spell with the new wording as the official version going forward. Same damage, same save, same prone, same classes, Bard, Druid, Sorcerer, and Wizard the whole way through. Only the range line and the cleanup clause changed.
I find that funny. The rewrite was meant to tidy things up and tell you how long the rubble sticks around. What it accidentally did was hand sorcerers the Distant Spell trick, because “Self (10-foot radius)” is not a range Distant Spell can touch, and “10 feet” is. People noticed within weeks, asked Crawford, and he confirmed the plain reading. So a spell that went through two printings and a pile of errata to get its wording straight came out the other side with a brand new loophole. Catapult got its range cut in the same book. Earth Tremor got its range, in a roundabout way, doubled.
Opinion
Earth Tremor is a bad damage spell and a decent control spell, and people judge it as the first thing when they should judge it as the second. A d6 is nothing. But an action that can put three or four enemies on the floor at once with no concentration, and then leave them standing in rubble at half speed, is a real turn for a 1st level slot, and it’s a turn a sorcerer or bard can take at level 1 when they have exactly two slots to their name. The problem is the delivery. It wants you in the middle of the room, and the classes that get it are the classes that die in the middle of the room.
So if you’re a backline caster, leave it in the book and take Thunderwave, which does more damage, has half damage on a save, and pushes people away from you instead of keeping them next to you. If you’re a Swords bard, a Bladesinger, an Eldritch Knight, or anyone else who is going to be surrounded on purpose, Earth Tremor is quietly one of the best 1st level spells you can prepare, because everyone around you falling down is exactly what you want, and the difficult terrain keeps them in your reach. Pick the right character and it’s great. Pick the wrong one and it’s a d6 that also trips your cleric.
I’m curious where you land though. Have you ever seen Earth Tremor actually swing a fight, or is it the spell everyone reads once and never prepares? Does your table count a dungeon floor as ground? And the eternal one: Earth Tremor or Thunderwave, if you only get one? Let me know in the comments below, go check out the companion post for the Distant Spell trick and every other way to squeeze this spell, and until next time, roll high and stay ridiculous.
