Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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Silly question, but does a cantrip (or spell) exist that could be reasonably used to quickly get a clean shave (not illusionary)?
There are a couple you could flavor that way....
Chill Touch - Make the hair die and fall out on its own
Prestidigitation - Specifically the Clean or Soil option to clean your face of debris (hair)
Primal Savagery - Use those long nails as a razor
Shocking Grasp - Use the lightning a method of electrolysis (which is a permanent hair-removal procedure)
That's all I can think of off-hand
It’s really funny that half the spells hat you could come up with are also dangerous as heck to normal people.
Just stand in a Cloud of Daggers for a few seconds a get a totally fresh haircut. Then you can easily blow out all excess hair with a Gust of Wind.
In a more "serious" tone, Prestidigitation is what I thought immediately, even though the spell description doesn't fully match. But something like this would be quite easily homebrewed. I would say the spell would deal slashing damage, but there doesn't seem to be any cantrips that deal slashing damage (at least I couldn't find from dndbeyond spell search).
It's a minor enough effect that it's not worth a "Known Cantrip" slot. I would just use Prestidigitation and call it a minor effect.
I think the Prestidigitation "Cleaning" idea is the closest thing, but that effect only works on objects so I guess it would need DM approval :)
I work from the assumption that there are quite a few cantrips and low-level spells that exist for simple, everyday, tasks like that, and they're just not listed in the book because they're not useful enough. We get prestidigitation, thaumaturgy, and druidcraft as general illustrations of the type, with enough marginal use for adventurers, but they're not the only ones.
Although if you wanted to visually establish somebody as someone who uses magic for everyday tasks they could easily do themselves, using an unseen servant to do the full lather-and-razor routine seems suitably ostentatious.
Back in a long-ago time, D&D had cantrips like Dry, Shine, Untie, Warm, and Clean. At the time, there was no such thing as a combat cantrip, though. As others have mentioned, the current rules have distilled the cantrips down to things that are actually useful for adventuring. And that makes sense when characters can only learn a limited number of them.... but it also leaves a gap for various "common magic" like this.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable to include things like this under Prestidigitation. Otherwise you'd probably have to write up a whole set of "lesser cantrips" or something like that, and let magic-users pick options from it.
Personally, I think the shaving effect would work really well as a Common magic item, maybe a rough cloth and small hand mirror, which lets you quickly and easily "polish" your face into a smooth shave.
The barbers guild probably hired assassins to eliminate the wizard who was looking into it. Cool idea for a low level adventure :D
I LOVE this idea. Especially if the wizard survives, but just has no idea why anyone would want to kill them.