Adventurer Haircuts? Welcome to the Snip of the Gods

An adventurer's life is usually thrilling. The game master has them wandering across their setting, fighting the most fearsome creatures, earning treasures, and the prestige of their world. When all is said and done for those eternally busy adventurers, the things we mortals see as incredibly mundane are forgotten in games, but that doesn't mean they aren't interesting.

In past location articles, we've looked at the exceptional magical wares stores and the shadiest underground fight clubs. I'm always interested on a magical twist on a fairly uninteresting shop like a tailors, but there was always one establishment, one place I used to hate going to when I was little. I wish I could have gone to a barber shop like this.

Snip of the Gods

Barber Shop Interior by NextLuxury

A shop with tall windows show huge leather seats facing a mirror. By the doorway is an immense jar, with red and white magical energy twirling around each other. The doorway into this place is both taller and wider than the average human.

By the front door, is a list of reasonably priced options you'd get in a barber shop or salon in our world. Beard trims, men's, and children's haircuts. The immense list of colouring and styling options, done with traditional dyes and enchantments to make the hair move like it was underwater or crackling with fire.

Lastly it has many options for horn maintenance and styling. In worlds with people descended from devils and dragons, living alongside satyrs and minotaurs, keeping horns is just as important as styling hair. Filing down horns and resizing them are among the easiest procedures, and at the top of the price list. To get horns engraved, or stamped with jewels or other trinkets are much tougher.

Cutting Room Floor

Inside the barber shop are anything from three to six tall chairs. The seats range for people as short as three feet tall, or up to hulking forms at seven foot, able to cater for all customers. The creaking supports inside the chairs buckle under anyone's weight but never break. “Old things are usually reliable” the small shoeless owner would say.

Under each mirror was the wide display of gleaming scissors and heavy combs with varying sized teeth. The opposite wall, over the patchy waiting seats, are the multiple bottles of tonics, waxes, gels, and horn paints that anyone can buy. “We offer all you need to put true flair in your hair” one of the barbers, with deep purple skin and gold-adorned horns would say.

Sometimes the hair cuts back - Hair Monster by Akino Fukawa

The far wall, by the staff door has the tools one would usually see in a carpenter's shop or on a torture rack. Saws of various sizes and blade thickness alongside rasps and files, all there to manicure horns. A customer who wants a reduction will be seated on the last seat, with the large head supports to help them hold still while they saw or file down the immense, heavy horns. “It's a rough job, but do you want to look unfashionable, or accidentally impale people? I don't think so,” says the gruff minotaur woman who does most of the horn work.

Cut Above the Rest

Adventurers can treat a place like this as welcome R-and-R between missions, bringing hair wild with grease and full of dirt, spiderwebs, or worse here for the needed clean and reshape they need.

If adventurers become all the more regular, some quests that a barber shop could offer could be as simple as trying to get ingredients for a rare magical hair mousse. The barber shop could be a secret front for illegal or cult activity. Perhaps one of the barbers is a wizard, who instead of sweeping the hair away, animates it into a little man that walks into the trash, but one of these hair golems has grown too big and is on a rampage across town.

Hair Golem Stats generated by Homebrewery.Naturalcrit

In any case, the suggestions for a magical barber shop add realism to a world of magic and monsters, but there are ways to make it remarkable again. Now we want to hear from you. How would you use a barber shop with magical clients and strange products? What element of the mundane would you like to see made magical? Let us know on Discord, or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com, he writes about card gaming and PC gaming to a corner of the internet he carved out himself. On Youtube, he can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Follow his Twitter @IzzetTinkerer.