Practical magic
Mar. 10th, 2026 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseThere is a baby in this story. Quite an important baby, as it turns out.
Let's see if I can summarise briefly. Lord A took a mistress, B, who eventually became Lady B because Lord A managed to wangle her a title (mostly on false pretences). They had three children including a daughter, X, who, despite being illegitimate, was Lady X because both her parents had titles. Lord A then died, and his son immediately threw Lady B out of the house as she was a serious offence to his mother; this left Lord A's son as effective guardian to Lady X, along with his mother.
Meanwhile, a long way away, High Lord C and High Lady D, the regents of an important province, had twins, Lord Y and Lady Z. Lord Y was very slightly older than his sister, so he became heir to this province.
Lady X and Lord Y were both wild and badly behaved, so both sets of guardians had the same idea: send them to a monastery (this is a D&D monastery, of course, so it's what you'd probably call spiritual rather than religious - the important thing is it's very disciplined). The two aristocratic brats managed to escape from the monastery together, and they made for the capital city. At some point, Lady X got pregnant, and Lord Y promised to marry her.
Unbeknown to either of them, Lady B reached the capital before they did. She had tried to find her actual legal husband after being thrown out, but he was no longer on the Material Plane (and, besides, although he was a very kind man, he would not have taken her back after she was complicit in very nearly getting him killed); so instead she decided to go to the royal court and demand a dower house, given that she wasn't being allowed to live in the one on the late Lord A's estate. The King and Queen were a little puzzled by this, especially since they had recently heard information about Lord A's estate which conflicted with what she told them; so they did some investigations which ended with them decreeing that Lady B should not have been given the title. So she was not only stripped of the title, but, due to her behaviour while in the capital, ended up being put to work in the royal kitchens. That, in turn, meant that Lady X also lost her title, though she didn't yet know that.
Our party, for plot reasons, was looking for Lady X. They found her by means of spells, and simply waited at the east gate of the city until she and Lord Y walked through it, at which point they had to break the news to her that she was now just plain X and tell her what had happened to her mother. Lord Y promptly dropped her like a hot brick ("do you expect me to marry the daughter of a kitchenmaid?"). While X had caused the party a good deal of trouble, that still did not go down well, shall we say.
Needless to say, High Lord C and High Lady D were informed. They weren't worried about the simple fact that their son had got someone pregnant - had he taken full responsibility, it would have been fine; but they were very upset that he'd abandoned mother and baby like that. So they decided that Lady Z should now be the heir. Lady Z, however, could not have children, following a very difficult stillbirth which had almost killed her; so the obvious solution, which X was entirely happy with, was to have Lady Z and her husband adopt the child, keeping X as its nurse (her nurse, as we find out a little later). The succession therefore continues just as before, but bypassing the dastardly Lord Y.
So this is why the baby is so important; and, obviously, she now has to be transported from the capital city to the distant province, which could be up to six weeks' journey by carriage. And babies need nappies; and, while you can certainly wash nappies en route, what you cannot do is get them dry.
Enter the Prestidigitation cantrip.
Prestidigitation is one of the simplest and (ostensibly) least powerful spells in D&D. You can do minor illusions with it. You can clean things with it, so magic users never need to get their robes cleaned. You can colour or flavour small amounts of stuff with it. You can dry wet clothes if you've been out in the pouring rain. And so, of course, I thought... that's what they'll need to use; let's work out just how many terry nappies one cast of the cantrip is able to clean.
So I looked it up. One round in D&D is six seconds, and Prestidigitation, once cast, lasts for one hour. According to the manual, the spell will clean 1 cubic foot of stuff per round. All right, I am incapable of thinking in feet, so let's say 30 cm; that is pretty close. A 30 cm cube I can imagine.
Now, a terry nappy is not going to be more than 60 cm on a side, so if you fold one of those in four it will fit in a 30 cm square. Let's say that is 3 cm thick, at a reasonable guess. That means you can get ten of them into your 30 cm cube. You can clean 10 nappies every 6 seconds, so you can do 100 of them per minute. That means you can clean 6000 nappies during the time the spell lasts. That's... well, they're travelling in two carriages, but even so they're not even going to have room for 6000 nappies. (They decided in the end to bring three dozen.)
If you cast Prestidigitation yourself, it costs you nothing; however, if you cast it from a scroll, it costs you 12 gold pieces and 5 silver pieces (which is to say 125 silver pieces). So, for interest's sake, I worked out how much it would cost you in the D&D universe to have that many nappies washed in the normal way. You can hire an unskilled labourer, including a laundrymaid, for 1 silver piece per day (D&D, thankfully, does not have a gender pay gap). Assume your laundrymaids work 8 hours a day (again, they'd have worked much longer hours in a historical setting, but D&D generally assumes 8 hours), and it takes one laundrymaid, on average, 10 minutes to get a nappy properly clean, including the time taken to hang it up to dry. (Some nappies will inevitably take longer than others.) Do all the maths, and it turns out that that'll cost you... exactly 125 silver pieces. It's the same. You just have to wait longer for the turnaround.
I'm pretty sure nobody's ever worked that out before. But don't anyone tell me in future that Prestidigitation isn't extremely powerful for what it is!
Let's see if I can summarise briefly. Lord A took a mistress, B, who eventually became Lady B because Lord A managed to wangle her a title (mostly on false pretences). They had three children including a daughter, X, who, despite being illegitimate, was Lady X because both her parents had titles. Lord A then died, and his son immediately threw Lady B out of the house as she was a serious offence to his mother; this left Lord A's son as effective guardian to Lady X, along with his mother.
Meanwhile, a long way away, High Lord C and High Lady D, the regents of an important province, had twins, Lord Y and Lady Z. Lord Y was very slightly older than his sister, so he became heir to this province.
Lady X and Lord Y were both wild and badly behaved, so both sets of guardians had the same idea: send them to a monastery (this is a D&D monastery, of course, so it's what you'd probably call spiritual rather than religious - the important thing is it's very disciplined). The two aristocratic brats managed to escape from the monastery together, and they made for the capital city. At some point, Lady X got pregnant, and Lord Y promised to marry her.
Unbeknown to either of them, Lady B reached the capital before they did. She had tried to find her actual legal husband after being thrown out, but he was no longer on the Material Plane (and, besides, although he was a very kind man, he would not have taken her back after she was complicit in very nearly getting him killed); so instead she decided to go to the royal court and demand a dower house, given that she wasn't being allowed to live in the one on the late Lord A's estate. The King and Queen were a little puzzled by this, especially since they had recently heard information about Lord A's estate which conflicted with what she told them; so they did some investigations which ended with them decreeing that Lady B should not have been given the title. So she was not only stripped of the title, but, due to her behaviour while in the capital, ended up being put to work in the royal kitchens. That, in turn, meant that Lady X also lost her title, though she didn't yet know that.
Our party, for plot reasons, was looking for Lady X. They found her by means of spells, and simply waited at the east gate of the city until she and Lord Y walked through it, at which point they had to break the news to her that she was now just plain X and tell her what had happened to her mother. Lord Y promptly dropped her like a hot brick ("do you expect me to marry the daughter of a kitchenmaid?"). While X had caused the party a good deal of trouble, that still did not go down well, shall we say.
Needless to say, High Lord C and High Lady D were informed. They weren't worried about the simple fact that their son had got someone pregnant - had he taken full responsibility, it would have been fine; but they were very upset that he'd abandoned mother and baby like that. So they decided that Lady Z should now be the heir. Lady Z, however, could not have children, following a very difficult stillbirth which had almost killed her; so the obvious solution, which X was entirely happy with, was to have Lady Z and her husband adopt the child, keeping X as its nurse (her nurse, as we find out a little later). The succession therefore continues just as before, but bypassing the dastardly Lord Y.
So this is why the baby is so important; and, obviously, she now has to be transported from the capital city to the distant province, which could be up to six weeks' journey by carriage. And babies need nappies; and, while you can certainly wash nappies en route, what you cannot do is get them dry.
Enter the Prestidigitation cantrip.
Prestidigitation is one of the simplest and (ostensibly) least powerful spells in D&D. You can do minor illusions with it. You can clean things with it, so magic users never need to get their robes cleaned. You can colour or flavour small amounts of stuff with it. You can dry wet clothes if you've been out in the pouring rain. And so, of course, I thought... that's what they'll need to use; let's work out just how many terry nappies one cast of the cantrip is able to clean.
So I looked it up. One round in D&D is six seconds, and Prestidigitation, once cast, lasts for one hour. According to the manual, the spell will clean 1 cubic foot of stuff per round. All right, I am incapable of thinking in feet, so let's say 30 cm; that is pretty close. A 30 cm cube I can imagine.
Now, a terry nappy is not going to be more than 60 cm on a side, so if you fold one of those in four it will fit in a 30 cm square. Let's say that is 3 cm thick, at a reasonable guess. That means you can get ten of them into your 30 cm cube. You can clean 10 nappies every 6 seconds, so you can do 100 of them per minute. That means you can clean 6000 nappies during the time the spell lasts. That's... well, they're travelling in two carriages, but even so they're not even going to have room for 6000 nappies. (They decided in the end to bring three dozen.)
If you cast Prestidigitation yourself, it costs you nothing; however, if you cast it from a scroll, it costs you 12 gold pieces and 5 silver pieces (which is to say 125 silver pieces). So, for interest's sake, I worked out how much it would cost you in the D&D universe to have that many nappies washed in the normal way. You can hire an unskilled labourer, including a laundrymaid, for 1 silver piece per day (D&D, thankfully, does not have a gender pay gap). Assume your laundrymaids work 8 hours a day (again, they'd have worked much longer hours in a historical setting, but D&D generally assumes 8 hours), and it takes one laundrymaid, on average, 10 minutes to get a nappy properly clean, including the time taken to hang it up to dry. (Some nappies will inevitably take longer than others.) Do all the maths, and it turns out that that'll cost you... exactly 125 silver pieces. It's the same. You just have to wait longer for the turnaround.
I'm pretty sure nobody's ever worked that out before. But don't anyone tell me in future that Prestidigitation isn't extremely powerful for what it is!
