[RPG] Are there any 5e spells whereby PCs can gain the benefit of a long rest without actually taking a long rest

dnd-5erestsspells

I know that in D&D 5e the 3rd-level spell Catnap allows PCs to get the benefit of a short rest in exchange for 10 minutes of being unconscious.

Are there any spells that allow PCs to get the benefit of a long rest in less time than a long rest actually takes?

Best Answer

Plane Shift, if you squint and you're lucky

This is a bit of a risky strategy. It doesn't actually allow you to complete a long rest in less than eight hours of your own subjective time, but it might let you complete a long rest in an hour or less according to the Prime Material's chronology. I certainly wouldn't use it as a trivial way to accomplish a long rest in a short time, but if you're in circumstances where you've got significant time pressure but fighting on without a long rest means certain doom, you might just be desperate enough to try it.

The plane we're interested in exploiting for this purpose is the Feywild, because of the following optional property it has (described in the DM's guide):

Time Warp

While time seems to pass normally in the Feywild, characters might spend a day there and realize, upon leaving the plane, that less or more time has elapsed everywhere else in the multiverse.

Whenever a creature or group of creatures leaves the Feywild after spending at least 1 day on that plane, you can choose a time change that works best for your campaign, if any, or roll on the Feywild Time Warp table.

So, you plane shift to the Feywild, and then you take a long rest and spend a full day on the plane. Once a day has passed, you plane shift back to wherever you were before. This invokes a Time Warp. By rolling randomly on the Time Warp table, you've got a 10% chance of your day in the Feywild having been only a minute elsewhere, and a 20% chance of it having been only an hour - and a cooperative DM might even arbitrarily choose one of those options as what "works best for your campaign".

There are, unfortunately, some downsides to this plan. The DM may decide it's narratively more interesting for the time dilation to end up working against you and for more time to have passed outside the Feywild than in it. If you do rely on random chance, you have a 35% likelihood of there being no actual time warp at all, and it's possible that your day trip to the Feywild will become a week, month, or even a year of real time (but at least you will have spent it with your friends).

You also probably won't arrive back exactly where you started, unless you were next to a known teleportation circle you can use as a target. This may not matter too much, since if you have access to plane shift you probably also have access to teleport, transport via plants or other kinds of transportation magic that can get you back on track pretty quickly.

And, of course, it's not necessarily a given that you can spend a day peacefully chilling out in the Feywild without getting into some kind of bother with the locals. It would be helpful if you're already on good terms with some powerful denizen of the plane who can provide a safe haven for the party to rest in.

Altogether, a risky strategy, but conceivably a risk worth taking in some circumstances.