You take a shot of liquor, you get a handful of fake hit points, and in 2024 they finally last all day. Come argue with me about whether that’s worth a slot.
Today we’re looking at a 1st level necromancy spell called False Life. In the 2014 Player’s Handbook it’s on the Sorcerer and Wizard lists, the Artificer has had it since Eberron: Rising from the Last War, and a pile of subclasses hand it out for free, the Death Domain cleric from the Dungeon Master’s Guide, the Grave Domain cleric from Xanathar’s, and the Undying and Undead warlock patrons. Then there’s the warlock invocation Fiendish Vigor, which lets any warlock cast this thing at will, and that one invocation is the reason half the internet has an opinion about a spell that otherwise nobody would talk about.
You cast it on yourself and you get 1d4 plus 4 temporary hit points for an hour. Range of self, one action, verbal, somatic, and a material component that is, I promise you, a small amount of alcohol or distilled spirits. You are taking a shot to feel tougher.
The community angle is a three-way fight. One camp says it’s a trap that Shield beats every time, one camp says it’s the best thing a squishy level 1 caster can do with a slot, and the third camp argues all day about how it interacts with Armor of Agathys, because the 2024 rules changed that answer. Let’s look at the rules as written first, and remember, you can always fight me in the comments if you read it different.
RAW
- Casting Time: 1 action
- Range: Self
- Components: V, S, M (a small amount of alcohol or distilled spirits)
- Duration: 1 hour
Here’s the 2014 text, straight from the Player’s Handbook, page 239:
“Bolstering yourself with a necromantic facsimile of life, you gain 1d4 + 4 temporary hit points for the duration.”
One sentence, and the whole spell lives in the phrase “temporary hit points,” which has its own rulebook, so let’s slow down.
“Bolstering yourself.” Self only. This is the biggest limit on the spell and the one people wish was different. You cannot put it on the barbarian or the paladin who is about to eat a dragon breath. It only ever protects the caster, and the caster is usually the wizard in the back who was supposed to avoid getting hit in the first place.
“A necromantic facsimile of life.” Flavor, but it tells you the school. False Life is necromancy, which is why the Death and Grave clerics have it on their domain lists, and why the Shadow Touched feat from Tasha’s, which lets you pick any 1st level necromancy or illusion spell, can hand it to anyone.
“You gain 1d4 + 4 temporary hit points.” So 5 to 8, average 6.5. Temporary hit points sit on top of your real hit points and get chewed through first. They cannot be healed back up. They do not stack with any other source of temp HP, if you have some and get more, you pick the bigger pile and the other one vanishes. And they do not wake you up if you’re at 0, they’ll absorb the next hit while you’re down, but only real healing brings you back.
Let me show you why five to eight points is a bigger deal at level 1 than it sounds. Your level 1 wizard with 14 Constitution has 8 hit points. A goblin’s scimitar does 1d6 plus 2, call it 5 a hit. Two hits and you’re on the floor. Now you cast False Life before you open the door and roll a 3, so 7 temporary hit points. Same goblin, same two hits. First one eats the 7 down to 2. Second one takes the last 2 temp and 3 real, and you’re standing at 5. The goblin needs a third hit. You went from a two-hit wizard to a three-hit wizard for one slot, and the goblin’s buddies are dead because your fighter had an extra round.
“For the duration.” And the duration is one hour. This is the 2014 catch. The general rule is that temp HP lasts until it’s used up or until you finish a long rest, unless the thing that granted it has a duration, and False Life does. Cast it at breakfast and by the time you kick in the dungeon door it’s gone. You have to cast it when you think the fight is close. Keep that hour in your head, because it’s the number the 2024 version deleted.
One more thing that trips tables up. Temp HP does not protect your concentration. If you’re holding a spell and a hit eats 10 of your temporary hit points, you still took 10 damage and you still roll the Constitution save. Sage Advice is clear on that. False Life makes you harder to drop, and does nothing to make you harder to disrupt.
At Higher Levels
“When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, you gain 5 additional temporary hit points for each slot level above 1st.” So a 2nd level slot is 1d4 plus 9, a 3rd is 1d4 plus 14, a 5th is 1d4 plus 24. The d4 never grows, you bolt another flat 5 on per level, and people on Reddit find that weird because the die becomes almost decorative. Roll a 1 or a 4 on a 5th level casting and the difference is 25 versus 28.
Upcasting is worth it sometimes. A level 5 wizard dropping a 3rd level slot on this gets 15 to 18 temp HP on a character with maybe 30 real hit points, a fifty percent bigger health bar, off the same slot that could have been a Fireball. For a backliner, Fireball. For a Bladesinger standing in the front, or anyone who got told there’s a dragon in the next room, the big False Life has a real fan club, and their stories are in the uses post.
Limits and Cheeses
The short version, because the depth lives in the companion post.
It’s self only and it’s an action, so mid-fight it’s usually the worst use of your turn. It doesn’t stack, so if your Twilight cleric or your Artillerist buddy is already handing out temp HP, False Life is redundant, you keep the bigger number. And there’s no casting it twice for a double buffer, no matter how cleverly someone words the argument.
Now the cheese that made this spell famous. Fiendish Vigor, the warlock invocation, lets you cast False Life on yourself at will, no slot, no material component. At will. So in 2014 a level 2 warlock recasts it until the d4 comes up 4, starts every fight with 8 temp HP, and tops it back up after every fight, forever, for the cost of one invocation. DMs have been asking Reddit whether to allow that for a decade, and the answer has always been yes, that’s what it’s for.
And then Armor of Agathys. Same level, same flat five per slot scaling, but it’s warlock only, it deals cold damage back to anyone who hits you in melee, and in 2024 it no longer cares where your temp HP came from. False Life topping up an Armor of Agathys is the combo that lit up r/onednd, and it’s the crown jewel of the uses list.
The 2014 version versus the 2024 version
Yes, False Life changed in the 2024 Player’s Handbook, page 271, and it changed in the two ways people had been asking for.
First, the numbers. 2014 is 1d4 plus 4, five to eight, average 6.5. 2024 is 2d4 plus 4, six to twelve, average 9. The upcast is the same plus 5 per slot level, so a 3rd level casting is now 2d4 plus 14 and a 5th is 2d4 plus 24. Modest on paper, real at level 1, because a 9 point buffer on an 8 hit point wizard is more than doubling your health bar.
Second, the headline. The duration went from 1 hour to Instantaneous. There’s no timer on the spell anymore, so the temporary hit points follow the general 2024 rule, which is that temp HP lasts until it’s depleted or until you finish a long rest. You cast it when you wake up, at whatever slot you feel like spending, and those hit points are still on you when the ambush happens six hours later. The spell went from “cast it right before the fight and hope” to “cast it with breakfast and forget about it,” which is how people already used Mage Armor, and it’s why a spell nobody prepared is now a spell r/onednd argues about.
Two smaller notes. The material component shrank from “a small amount of alcohol or distilled spirits” to “a drop of alcohol,” a flavor trim, your focus covers it either way. And the text lost the flavor sentence. The 2024 description is one line, “You gain 2d4 + 4 Temporary Hit Points.” Necromantic facsimile of life is gone from the page. Pour one out.
Two things changed around the spell as well. Fiendish Vigor was rewritten, it now needs warlock level 2, and when you cast False Life through it you don’t roll the dice, you take the max. That’s a flat 12 temporary hit points, at will, refillable after every fight. And Armor of Agathys was reworded to end early only if you have no temporary hit points at all, from any source, instead of needing its own. Those two changes together are why a spell that was background noise in 2014 is a live combo piece in 2024.
What did not change: it’s still self only, still an action, still doesn’t stack, and the invocation still casts it at base level, so twelve is the ceiling there no matter what your pact slots look like. There’s a Reddit argument about that last point, and I flag it in the uses post, but the overwhelming read is twelve.
History
Now the part I love, and this one is short, because False Life is a young spell. I went looking for it in original D&D, in first edition, in second edition, and it isn’t there. It shows up in third edition, and even then not in the core book at first.
Its first printing, as best I can trace it, is Tome and Blood, the 2001 third edition splatbook for wizards and sorcerers. That version was a 2nd level sorcerer and wizard necromancy spell and a beefier animal than what we’ve got now. A full round to cast, a range of touch, and it gave you 1d10 temporary hit points plus 1 per caster level, up to a max of plus 10, for an hour per caster level. The alcohol was already there, too. The material component was a small amount of alcohol or distilled spirits you used to trace sigils on your body, and the sigils faded when the booze evaporated.
In 2003 the 3.5 Player’s Handbook promoted it to core, page 229. Same 1d10 plus 1 per level, max plus 10, same hour per level, but now a standard action with a range of personal, so the brief window where you could touch it onto a friend closed, and False Life has been selfish ever since. The stacking argument is older than 5e, too. There’s a 2004 EN World thread where a 12th level necromancer with seven 2nd level slots asks whether he can chain-cast it every morning for about 140 temporary hit points, and the thread spends a page fighting over the 3.5 FAQ’s stacking rule before telling him that castings of the same spell overlap instead of adding.
Fourth edition didn’t carry it over. 4e rebuilt magic into the powers system and temporary hit points got sprinkled across class features instead, and I couldn’t find a standalone False Life in that edition’s books or wikis. If you know of one, tell me in the comments and I’ll eat my words.
Fifth edition brought it back in 2014 in the shape we’ve been talking about. It dropped from 2nd level to 1st, the 1d10 plus caster level became a flat 1d4 plus 4 with a plus 5 per slot upcast, and the hour per level became one flat hour. Then the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide gave it to the Undying warlock, Xanathar’s to the Grave cleric, Eberron to the Artificer, Van Richten’s to the Undead warlock, and in 2024 it got the 2d4 and the all-day duration, plus a new home as the level 3 spell for the Chthonic tiefling.
Opinion
In the 2014 game, False Life on a wizard or sorcerer is a level 1 and 2 spell. At those levels, doubling your hit points for a slot is a genuine lifesaver, and the r/3d6 posters who ran it at level 1 talk about going from 8 hit points to 17 like a religious experience. Past level 3, the hour timer and the self-only range make it hard to justify over Shield or Mage Armor, and I won’t pretend otherwise. The exception is upcasting it before a known bad fight.
Fiendish Vigor is a different conversation, and it’s where I’ll plant a flag. At will, no slot, refilled after every fight, 8 temp HP in 2014 and a flat 12 in 2024, for a level 2 warlock? That is one of the best survivability picks in the early game, and falling off later costs you nothing, because warlocks swap invocations when they level. Take it at 2, enjoy it until the monsters start hitting for 15, swap it out.
And the 2024 spell on its own is, for the first time, a Mage Armor style morning cast. Nine temp hit points that last all day, on a d6 hit die class, for a slot you weren’t going to miss? I think it’s good now, a notch below great, and Shield is still the better first pick. But if you told me you cast False Life every morning on your 2024 wizard, I wouldn’t laugh anymore.
So where do you land? Is False Life a trap that Shield beats every time, or the best thing a level 1 caster can do with a slot? Is Fiendish Vigor overrated or the invocation nobody talks about enough? And has anyone at your table pulled off the Armor of Agathys top-up? Let me know in the comments below, go read the companion post for the combos, the arguments, and a few deeply stupid uses of a spell that is, at its heart, drinking to feel brave, and until next time, roll high and stay ridiculous.
