Hair Growth magic item considerations

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by StevenH

The Hair Growth spell can be used to enchant an item for a relatively cheap cost (100 energy). It causes hair to grow a million times faster, resulting in hair that grows 0.2 inches/second (nails too, but let's ignore that for the moment), or, after 8 hours, 480 feet long (and weighing 70lbs). Nice little prank to pull on someone while they are sleeping!

Anyone have any other thoughts on the societal effects of such an item?

Hair Growth is one of those GURPS 3E spells that got ported over to 4E with very little revision. Critics of the GURPS 3E Magic system pointed out this exploit but it wasn't fixed.

Since the spell is essentially a "color" spell with few fully-described game mechanical effects it gets overlooked by both players and GMs. It's fast and cheap to cast, and, as you pointed out, magic items based on the spell are very cheap to enchant. The prerequisite chain isn't bad either.

Game mechanical effects, with an indulgent GM (Not RAW):

a) Blind, distract, or trip foes (mentioned in RAW, but no game mechanics).

b) Make it difficult or impossible to wear certain types of clothing or tight-fitting equipment (e.g., grow out a foe's beard to break the seal on his gas mask).

c) Make friends by curing baldness or bad haircuts.

d) Make enemies by turning people into Jo Jo the Dog-Faced Boy.

e) Good as a potential disguise. (If the bad guys are looking for a bald, clean-shaven man then they might not suspect someone who looks like a hippie.)

f) Mend torn fingernails.

g) Possibly mess with opponents' ability to wear gloves or similar items or to grasp items when their nails grow out to the length of a Chinese emperor's.

h) Torture foes by growing their hair and fingernails out and then tear them out at the roots. Repeat as desired.

i) Make heaps of money in the wig, rope, or wool trades.

Economic benefits if cast on a human:

a) Instant recovery of hair loss.

b) Hair for wigs becomes incredibly cheap. (People with naturally great hair, or hair of unusual color, might make a living being hair donors.)

c) Human hair actually makes very good rope. There are stories of women in besieged towns donating their hair to make skeins for ballistas or catapults. As you point out, a 480' single strand of hair is far longer than any plant-based material which potentially makes it even more valuable.

If the GM allows the spell to be cast on animals it becomes utterly ridiculous.

In combat, growing out an opponent's horse's hair might make it fall or panic.

Forget sheep you can shear every 8 seconds (with a combination of Hair Growth and Haircut). Instead, make real money by using the spell on angora goats or rabbits, beavers (high quality felt for hats), vicuna, eider ducks, or critters whose hair or feathers are valuable magical ingredients.

If the GM rules that the spell affects any part of a living being which is made from keratin, raise unicorns or rhinos for their horns, pangolins (or dragons!) for their scales, or silkworms for their cocoons. Grow out silkworm cocoon silk by a factor of 1 million and you've got the world's longest fiber. Grow spider silk from spider egg sacs into long fibers suitable for making very tough, light garments which are potentially bulletproof.

Depending on the campaign, the GM might embrace some or all of these ideas with the understanding that wool, silk, and other natural fibers are now dirt cheap. (Add the M&B college spells Clean and Reshape to quickly process and weave raw fiber into cloth. Add a permanent variant of Dye to quickly dye lots of fabric.)

Sure, the first Body Control mage to think of using Hair Growth on a captive phoenix in order to harvest bales of magical fireproof feathers will make serious bank, but after a while phoenix feather suits will just become the magic version of Nomex fabric - still useful but not unreasonably expensive.

GM's who don't like this idea should use the rules for Create Object to determine how long magically-grown hair lasts. Alternately, they can just rule that grown-out hair vanishes as soon as it is removed from the subject's body.

Another option is to rule that cost to cast the spell is based on the potential economic value of the material being grown. Multiply casting cost by some multiple of dollar value of the created material.