Chronurgy Wizard 5e Guide: Time Manipulation and More

Last Updated on January 22, 2023

“A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.”

– Gandalf the Grey
– Michael Scott

Wizards have the power to manipulate the very fabric of reality itself. These learned mages dedicate their lives to understanding a particular school of magic, and have the potential to become some of the most powerful beings in the cosmos. Many wizards have even ascended to godhood through their sheer might and power.

One very exciting school of magic is known as chronurgy magic, the manipulation of time itself. Chronurgy wizards use time as their ally, bending it to their will to give their allies an upperhand in battle, or to stop their foes in their tracks. 

These wizards aren’t outright time lords, they can’t easily travel across the expanse of time. Let’s be honest, if they could, that would be really annoying. Imagine playing with someone who set the game clock back fifteen minutes every time something didn’t go their way… no fun right? 

Instead, we get a really exciting concept of a wizard who can shift time ever so slightly, making minor adjustments to change the outcome of events. Much like Doctor Strange using the Eye of Agamotto, these wizards can turn back the dial of time on a specific person or event, in hopes to create a better situation.

Class-Defining Abilities

Changing the outcome of events is the main focus of this subclass. Not in the “I’m going back in time to stop Hitler” kind of way, but more in the “oops, that wasn’t good, let’s fix that” kind of way. The way that works within the mechanics of D&D is through the roll of the dice.

As soon as you take this subclass at 2nd level you’re going to gain access to an ability called Chronal Shift. This feature allows you to, as a reaction, force a creature to reroll an ability check, attack roll, or saving throw. You do only get two uses a day, but expended uses come back on a long rest. 

There are plenty of features that allow creatures to reroll, but forcing them to is an entire new ballpark. It’s similar to imposing disadvantage, except you do run the risk of a worse scenario on the reroll. 

At first glance, this ability might seem a little underwhelming. Being locked into only two uses even as you level up seems a little harsh. However, this ability just demonstrates the importance of control.

You obviously can’t go around forcing everyone to reroll whenever you don’t like the outcome of a roll, that would completely derail the game. The way this ability is set up, you have the ability to choose wisely when deciding upon a moment in time to mess with.

You’re also rewarded with a much more powerful version of this at 14th level with your capstone ability: Convergent Future.

Instead of just making someone reroll, this ability allows you to decide whether a creature succeeds or fails on a check. 

The ability to decide someone’s roll is incredible, and the restriction this ability has is rather interesting. Instead of a set amount of uses per long rest, you gain a level of exhaustion whenever you use this ability. These exhaustion levels can only be removed by a long rest.

In theory, this gives you a maximum of five uses per day (or six if you’re willing to die). It also means that the more you use it, the more consequences you have. This sort of restriction is really fitting for such a powerful ability.

Using this with a powerful spell that requires a saving throw, like True Polymorph or Plane Shift, is a setup for an absolutely game-changing event. Imagine making it impossible for Tiamat herself to resist being turned into a frog… pretty crazy right?

So, aside from shifting the course of history as it plays out before your eyes, what else does being a Time Wizard do for you? Well, let’s start off with your 6th level ability, Momentary Stasis.

Similar to the Hold Person spell, this feature lets you incapacitate a creature and reduce their speed to 0. Essentially, you’re hitting the pause button on someone. This lasts until the end of your next turn, should they fail their saving throw and be affected.

What makes this ability stand out is that it isn’t a spell. As such, it doesn’t require your concentration. While it does require an action to pull off, you can do some pretty impressive things on your next turn before the effects wear off.

My favorite ability of this subclass is the 10th level ability to put a pause on your spells. When you cast a spell of 4th level or lower, you can condense it into a small bead, from which the spell can be released later. These little spell beads can be destroyed, or they expire after an hour, but that’s plenty of time to get a lot of use out of it.

While you could cast ANY spell into these beads, storing concentration spells is an elite move. Anyone can release the spells, and giving it to an ally, preferably a non-caster, means being able to coordinate two concentration spells at the same time. 

Using Bestow Curse to impose disadvantage on a creature’s wisdom saving throws, and then giving your fighter the ability to cast Polymorph with a bead means an almost surefire success, and that’s just one example with about 30 seconds of thought. Careful planning and a creative mind can do a whole lot more.

This subclass of wizard also gets access to dunamancy magic, a rather new school of magic, introduced through the Critical Role-based sourcebook Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount. It involves manipulating the magical fabric of the universe and is broken up into spells that affect gravity (graviturgy) and spells that affect time (chronurgy). 

There aren’t many dunamancy spells published yet, but the ones that are available tend to be extremely powerful. One such spell is Reality Break, which can deal up to 10d12 each turn for up to a minute! That’s what happens when you expose a creature to the entirety of reality and all of many timelines and possibilities.

Limitations

Usually, when we discuss the limitations of the class, we’re talking about how it could be better, or areas that it’s lacking in. This subclass does have its limits but in a different sense. The chronurgy wizard is limited by what’s available at the moment.

Each wizard tradition tends to focus on spells in the school they choose. A divinity wizard uses mainly divinity spells. There aren’t many chronurgy spells. In fact, of the fifteen dunamancy spells currently published, there are only four spells which are specifically chronurgy dunamancy spells. 

While this subclass can certainly use any dunamancy spells, or any spells at all for that matter, the specified spell list can be pretty lackluster. It puts a lot of the decision making on your shoulder as a player, finding spells you enjoy, rather than picking spells tailor-made for your subclass.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, options are nice to have. What might lead me away from playing this character is that aside from the subclass features and the four chronurgy spells in existence, there’s not much time manipulation I actually get to do. I mean, necromancy wizards get 42 spells to work with before they even have to move to consider another school of magic!

I don’t want to scare you away from becoming the next Michael Newman though. There is a workaround. Flavor. One of the best ways to make a character your own is to change the flavor of existing 5e mechanics to better suit your needs.

Using the concept of flavor to alter the descriptions of existing spells can make your chronurgy wizard feel much more cohesive, and really give them their time to shine.

We talked about how the Momentary Stasis is similar to Hold Person, maybe when you cast Hold Person you can describe it in a similar manner, having trapped the humanoid in a localized temporal loop. Maybe Misty Step is you pausing time and quickly moving to another space. The spells which you choose to describe as chronurgy spells are really only limited by your own imagination.

Black Citadel’s Ranking and Tier System

Color and Tier ranking is very helpful when you’re trying to digest a lot of information. In our ongoing series of 5e class guides, we use the following color-rating scheme:

• Red – C Tier. Red options can sometimes be situationally useful and might make for an interesting narrative choice but are largely less effective than other tiers.
• Green – B Tier. Solid but nothing that is absolutely critical for a build, or Green can be very good but only in very specific situations.  
• Blue – A Tier. An excellent choice. Widely regarded as powerful in some way, useful, highly effective. 
• Purple – S Tier. The top of our rankings. Objectively powerful or transformative in some way. No choice in D&D is essential, but these options are worth strongly considering when you create your character.

Our goal here is to provide scannable but comprehensive guides for you as you develop your character.

While we might sometimes make reference to unofficial or homebrew content to illustrate a point (or just because it’s too cool not to talk about), every option we suggest is legal in the official rules for D&D 5e as published by Wizards of the Coast.

Race Choices

Wizards are one of the hardest classes to choose a race for. There are very few options to pick up a bonus in intelligence, which means we can’t get picky. I say, choose whatever race calls to you if you’re going to play a wizard. 

If that happens to be a race that would gear you towards an optimized build, great. Otherwise, focus on building the character you want to play. That being said, here are the few options I think are the best.

Rock Gnome – INT +2, CON +1. Gnomes make excellent wizards. Not only are they one of the few races to offer up a bonus to intelligence, but their abilities fit nicely as well. Advantage on all of the mental abilities’ saving throws is insanely powerful for a spellcaster, because it means having excellent protection from other spellcasters. The rock gnome also gets to make little clockwork toys, which while almost useless, is really cute for a time wizard to have. 

Vedalken – INT +2, WIS +1. Vedalken abilities are almost the same as the rock gnome, without the inclusion of tinkering or darkvision. You do miss out on the much needed bonus to constitution, but, if you don’t want to be a gnome, this becomes a great option.

Owlin – The owlin race is not yet released, but judging off of the recent Owlfolk UA race that WotC was playtesting, it’s pretty safe to assume we’re going to be looking at an exciting race option.

Since this race is being released in November 2021 with Strixhaven, the magical university, there are going to be some connections to magic laid out for us… but more on that when this race becomes a reality.

Update: You can now check out the Owlin race, released in 2021.

Custom Lineage – +2 INT. The custom lineage option introduced in TCoE allows you to make a character the way you want it. You choose what you look like, so pick a race or go for something homebrewed like Pandafolk. Then you get +2 to an ability score of your choice, wizard is going with intelligence, a feat of your choice, and a skill proficiency or darkvision. If you’re not excited by the few existing options that give you a bonus to intelligence, use this option to make the character you want.

Skill Choices

We tend to choose these based on our highest stats, but choosing a different route based on how you want to roleplay isn’t a bad idea, especially since adding your proficiency bonus might compensate for a not-so-good ability modifier.

The wizard class is given the ability to choose two skills from Arcana, History, Insight, Investigation, Medicine, and Religion.

• Arcana (INT) – You are a wizard who went to school to be here today, you should be able to make arcana checks!
• History (INT) – History checks fit really well with chronurgy. I’d say you even have a right to glimpse backwards through time to see the history of an object or place.
• Insight (WIS) – Insight is always a nice skill to have, but not very necessary for you.
• Investigation (INT) – This skill is open to preference. If you want to join the time cops, pick this up. Otherwise, it’s not important.
• Medicine (WIS) – You don’t need this skill.
• Religion (INT) – I would avoid religion unless it’s important to your character’s backstory.

Background Choices

When we look for a background we want to find some skills that synergize well with our ability scores, but that’s not all. We’re also looking for a background that makes sense with a wizard who studied the inner workings of dunamis, the fabric of space-time itself.

Cloistered Scholar – Proficiency in History and one ability of your choice from Arcana, Nature, and Religion. It’s all in the name here, you’ve completely withdrawn into your studies from the time you were a young lad. You also get pretty liberal access to even well-restricted libraries, meaning you might get to peep some exciting spellbooks from time to time.

Investigator – Proficiency in Insight and Investigation. You know what, I liked my time cops joke enough to put this in here. And honestly, there’s a lot of fictional precedence for a group of chronurgy-esque cops. Time Lords (Doctor Who), TVA (DC), Time Bureau (Marvel), Temps Commision (Umbrella Academy, the US Government (Timecop, but I really want to say real life), the list could go on forever, but then I’d have some time trooper stopping me.

Sage – Proficiency in Arcana and History. This is just the background made for wizards. Read books, focus on a particular area of study, develop expertise. 

Chronurgy Wizard Progression

Features that you automatically obtain through the Wizard class will appear in Orange and features that you gain through the Chronurgy subclass will appear in Pink. 

Filling out the Character Sheet (Level 0)

Hit Dice: 1d6 per Wizard level

Hit Points at 1st Level: 6 + your Constitution modifier

Hit Points at Higher Levels: 1d6 (or 4) + your Constitution modifier per wizard level after 1st

Proficiencies

Armor: None

Weapons: Daggers, darts, slings, quarterstaffs, light crossbows

Tools: None

Saving Throws: Intelligence, Wisdom

Skills: Choose two from Arcana, History, Insight, Investigation, Medicine, and Religion

Equipment:

You start with the following equipment, in addition to the equipment granted by your background:

• (a) a quarterstaff or (b) a dagger
• (a) a component pouch or (b) an arcane focus
• (a) a scholar’s pack or (b) an explorer’s pack
• A spellbook

1st Level

Spellcasting: 

Spellcasting is the main source of a wizard’s power. Wizards use intelligence as their spellcasting ability, so your spell save DC is 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Intelligence modifier and your spell attack modifier is your proficiency bonus + your Intelligence modifier.

Wizards use a spellbook, which starts off with 6 1st level spells. As you find or learn other spells you can copy them into your book.

Each day you can prepare a number of spells, chosen from your spellbook,equal to your Intelligence modifier + your wizard level. 

You know a number of wizard cantrips, which you can cast at will, as shown on the table above.

Arcane Recovery: 

On a short rest, you can recover spell slots. The levels of the slots you recover can combine to a total of half your wizard level. For example, if you are a 4th level wizard, you can recover one 2nd level spell slot, or two 1st level spell slots on your short rest.

2nd Level

Chronal Shift:

You can manipulate time around a creature. After a creature makes an attack roll, an ability check, or a saving throw, you can force them to reroll. The target must use the second roll. You get two uses of this ability and regain expended uses on a long rest.

Temporal awareness:

You can add your Intelligence modifier to your initiative rolls.

3rd Level

4th Level

ASI: 

You can either increase one ability by 2 points or two abilities by 1. Alternatively, you can choose a feature, if you already have great stats this is a great choice.

5th Level

6th Level

Momentary Stasis:

As an action, you can magically force a Large or smaller creature you can see within 60 feet of you to make a Constitution saving throw against your spell save DC. On a failed save the creature is incapacitated and has a speed of 0 until the end of your next turn or until the creature takes any damage. 

You can use this feature a number of times equal to your Intelligence modifier. You regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.

7th Level

8th Level

ASI

9th Level

10th Level

Arcane Abeyance:

At 10th level, when you cast a spell using a spell slot of 4th level or lower, you can condense the spell’s magic into a mote. The spell is frozen in time at the moment of casting and held within a gray bead for 1 hour. This bead is a Tiny object with AC 15 and 1 hit point, and it is immune to poison and psychic damage. When the duration ends, or if the bead is destroyed, it vanishes in a flash of light, and the spell is lost.

A creature holding the bead can use its action to release the spell within, whereupon the bead disappears. The spell uses your spell attack bonus and spell save DC, and the spell treats the creature who released it as the cast for all other purposes.

Once you create a bead with this feature, you can’t do so again until you finish a short or long rest.

11th Level

12th Level

ASI

13th Level

14th Level

Convergent Future:

Starting at 14th level, you can peer through possible futures and magically pull one of them into events around you, ensuring a particular outcome. When you or a creature you can see within 60 feet of you makes an attack roll, an ability check, or a saving throw, you can use your reaction to ignore the die roll and decide whether the number rolled is the minimum needed to succeed or one less than that number (your choice).

When you use this feature, you gain one level of exhaustion. Only by finishing a long rest can you remove a level of exhaustion gained in this way.

15th Level

16th Level

ASI

17th Level

18th Level

Spell Mastery: 

Choose a 1st-level wizard spell and a 2nd-level wizard spell that are in your spellbook. You can cast those spells at their lowest level without expending a spell slot when you have them prepared. If you want to cast either spell at a higher level, you must expend a spell slot as normal.

By spending 8 hours in study, you can exchange one or both of the spells you chose for different spells of the same levels.

19th Level

ASI:

20th Level

Signature Spell: 

When you reach 20th level, you gain mastery over two powerful spells and can cast them with little effort. Choose two 3rd-level wizard spells in your spellbook as your signature spells. You always have these spells prepared, they don’t count against the number of spells you have prepared, and you can cast each of them once at 3rd level without expending a spell slot. When you do so, you can’t do so again until you finish a short or long rest.

If you want to cast either spell at a higher level, you must expend a spell slot as normal.

Feat Options

Using feats to spice up your character is an excellent option. I should note that if you didn’t go with a race that boosted your Intelligence you should move right along and avoid these in favor of as many ASI’s as you can carry.

Still here, cool. Let’s talk about how to make your time wizard even more awe inspiring.

Alert – You already get to add your Intelligence modifier to your initiative rolls, why not add 5 to it as well, along with the inability to be surprised. You are so aware of the possibilities of the multiverse that no one can get the best of you. Alert Feat is a solid choice.

Durable – Wizards are very squishy. Picking this up ability up means +1 to your constitution, which you’ll be looking for anyways, and a much better result whenever you roll your hit die.

Keen Mind – This is a rather unpopular feat, but it does give you a +1 to intelligence, which means it’s half of an ASI you would otherwise take. The abilities are really spot on for a chronurgy wizard. Always knowing how many hours till sunrise/sunset and being able to remember everything? Yeah, that’s a time wizard’s thing for sure.

Tough – If you didn’t go for Durable, go for tough, which increases your hit point maximum by a healthy amount.

War Caster – Advantage on saving throws to hold concentration, and the ability to cast spells as reactions instead of an opportunity attack. What more can a caster ask for?

Metamagic – Picking up the metamagic options of quickened spell and extended spell, both of which allow you to modify the time constraints of a spell, is S tier roleplaying and an excellent way to pull off some insane stunts.

Lucky – The Lucky Feat is always a great way to be able to reroll dice, and as the features of this subclass show us, you can easily flavor that as messing with time.

Chronurgy Wizard Builds

For the following example build we’ve used the standard set of scores provided in the PHB (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8) when deciding ability scores. The only levels mentioned for the purpose of these builds are those when you will have the opportunity to make a decision on how your adventurer grows.

We will also only make suggestions for 1st through 5th-level spells, after that it becomes highly subjective. Spells marked with ^D or ^DC denote spells which are in either the dunamancy school, or spells that are specifically chronurgy spells. We hope to give you the groundwork for an exciting character build, while still allowing you space to make your own adventurer. 

---

Beginner’s Guide to Chronurgy Wizard

Wizard’s have access to many amazing abilities. The different subclasses, or traditions, available to a wizard each have a deepened understanding of the school of magic they’ve chosen to focus on. In the case of the chronurgy wizard, that school of magic is control over time itself.

While I’m always the first to acknowledge that time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so, even I can’t deny how powerful that makes these mages. Having honed the ability to bend time to their needs, these wizards are limited only by what they can imagine. Okay, and they might be a bit limited by the spells available to them too. 

Chronurgy Magic

The school of chronurgy magic is a relatively new school. It’s actually only a piece of a larger school known as dunamancy magic, which manipulates a force called dunamis. Dunamis is believed to be the fabric that holds space and time together. Having harnessed a deep understanding of dunamis, and choosing to focus on the temporal aspect of it, is what gives chronurgy wizards their abilities.

While there aren’t many chronurgy spells, there are plenty of spells out there that can be thought of as chronurgy spells. One could cast Feather Fall and describe it as slowing the passage of time as the spell’s targets fall, instead of the existing description of slowing the fall. Small tricks like this give you the opportunity to manipulate time, even when the RAW might not say that you are.

Of course, wizards are more than just the spells they can cast. They also have features they gain as they grow more powerful, and accumulate a deeper understanding of the magic involved. The abilities a chronurgy wizard gains are powerful, well-themed features that will give you a really unique play experience.

Time to Fight

Combat is a common reality of just about any D&D session. The chronurgy wizard is not SO powerful that it can stop or skip fighting altogether. When it comes time to roll initiative, rest assured, these wizards are ready.

You can see this as soon as they do roll initiative, since they’ll be adding their intelligence modifier on top of that roll for an edge on the competition. And that ability comes in as soon as you take this subclass at 2nd level.

Being high in the initiative is important, since most of the abilities this subclass offers will put you in a position to control what happens on the battlefield. Two of your abilities allow you to manipulate the rolls of others, deciding what happens on the field. Where most battlefield control classes focus on manipulation spells, which you can too, you just have abilities that actually change the outcomes of events.

Your capstone feature is one of those, and it actually allows you to decide whether a creature’s ability check, attack roll, or saving throw succeeds or fails. You can set your allies up for the swing of a sword to end it all, or force your arch-nemesis to be turned into a frog without even giving them a chance to react.

Of course, that’s not the end of your abilities. You also get to store spells away for later, hitting the pause button on them as it were. Doing this means you can give spells to your allies to use at their discretion, or set up an elaborate plan using multiple spells that require concentration.

And speaking of the pause button, you also get to put other creatures on pause. Much like the Hold Person spell, your Momentary Stasis ability allows you to freeze a creature in time, incapacitating them and reducing their speed to 0. 

Timey-Wimey Stuff

Wizards devoted to the study of time are still rare throughout the cosmos. Just as there are infinite possible timelines for your character to explore, there are infinite character options for you to explore.

You can take your motivations from existing time authorities like Doctor Who, Doctor Strange, or maybe someone without 8 years of a college education, like Rick Sanchez, the Terminator, or Agent Max Walker, time cop.

Whether you build a character that is enforcing the strict adherence of the one true timeline, or you’re simply an inquiring mind learning how far you can bend something before it breaks, this character is a world full of potential. Take your time building this character to your liking, pun intended. 

And as always, happy adventuring!