You lance your hand to extract a portion of your life essence on the tip of a needle laced with the fruit of a belladonna. Choose a number of hit die to spend, up to a maximum of one, and one creature other than yourself that you can touch. You force the extracted essence into the target. For the number of hit dice chosen, the target regains a number of hit points equal to your spellcasting ability modifier.
You can cast this spell even if you do not have hit dice to spend. If you do so, you gain levels of exhaustion equal to the difference between the number you chose to spend and the amount of hit dice you have left to spend.
The spell increases the maximum number of hit die you may choose to spend when you reach higher levels: two dice at 5th level, three dice at 11th level, and four dice at 17th level.
* - (an ivory needle and the fruit of belladonna)
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Posted Apr 25, 2019Keeping with my theme of making stuff that uses the hit dice pool used for short rests as a resource, I decided that this mechanic may be the one and only way to make a healing cantrip that isn't broken or a must take cantrip. Due to the fact it is extracting your own life essence, it definitely belongs in the school of necromancy, and as such it makes sense to include it as a school of necromancy spell selection. Beyond that, since it isn't traditional healing, it seems that the amount of healing given should be more consistent by being static while also providing a small pool of healing. The decision to impose exhaustion is more flavor via rules text than anything, since it represents overexerting oneself by lending others their healing essence.
Originally I forced the character to chose the maximum amount every cast, but this proved to create a wonky scenario where as you leveled the number of times you could use it in an adventuring day decreased as you hit higher levels...and overall a 20th level character being able to at most use this cantrip 20 times before imposing exhaustion on themselves in an adventuring day seems fine.
Finally, depending on playtesting the healing values may be improved since the spell essentially provides less healing, but lets you access that healing pool sooner. Since the caster can't target themselves, changing the healing calculation to rolling the spent hit dice and adding the spellcasting ability modifier may prove to make it better but not too strong for a cantrip.