Unseen Servant: Good Help is Hard to Find
Usable By: Bard, Warlock, Wizard
Spell Level: 1
School: Conjuration
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 60 feet
Duration: 1 hour
Components: V, S, M (a piece of string and a bit of wood)
This spell creates an invisible, mindless, shapeless force that performs simple tasks at your command until the spell ends. The servant springs into existence in an unoccupied space on the ground within range. It has AC 10, 1 hit point, and a Strength of 2, and it can’t attack. If it drops to 0 hit points, the spell ends.
Once on each of your turns as a bonus action, you can mentally command the servant to move up to 15 feet and interact with an object. The servant can perform simple tasks that a human servant could do, such as fetching things, cleaning, mending, folding clothes, lighting fires, serving food, and pouring wine. Once you give the command, the servant performs the task to the best of its ability until it completes the task, then waits for your next command.
If you command the servant to perform a task that would move it more than 60 feet away from you, the spell ends.
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
There are some spells in this game that I adore despite their clear lack of practicality: Unseen Servant is exactly one of these spells. At its best, Unseen Servant is a worse Mage Hand. It's a little invisible force that does things you can just do mundanely. This cleans your pot after cooking a stew. It can be used rarely to have a major impact on fights, exploration, or even roleplay, yet still, I want this spell on all my characters.
Being a ritual spell is a major saving grace to justify its existence at all. If you’ve got ritual casting, this is “free” to use and if you just spend ten minutes to cast it once an hour. If you’re traveling, ten minutes every hour can make you your own little guy to clean up after you and pick up strewn peanut shells. Maybe you’ll stumble into a bridge encounter with a loosely tied rope bridge, and this can be a remote means of untying part of it as part of a larger amount of actions to help it fall! Probably not, in fact almost certainly not, but there might be an occasional moment where it’ll open up some minor option that you weren’t expecting remotely.
This barely meets the mark for me to justify having it; the flavor is very much a wizard’s apprentice kind of servant. It's not doing anything you can’t just announce your character does during downtime or while other people are talking. It doesn’t meaningfully contribute at all to gameplay, and yet, I love this stupid little spell. If you like this kind of magical feel, try it out. Who knows, maybe you’ll run into one of the three times in human history where it has a practical use, too!
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