Speak with Dead: Dead Men Tell Mo Tales
Spell Level: 3
School: Necromancy
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 10 feet
Duration: 10 minutes
Components: V, S, M (burning incense)
You grant the semblance of life and intelligence to a corpse of your choice within range, allowing it to answer the questions you pose. The corpse must still have a mouth and can’t be undead. The spell fails if the corpse was the target of this spell within the last 10 days.
Until the spell ends, you can ask the corpse up to five questions. The corpse knows only what it knew in life, including the languages it knew. Answers are usually brief, cryptic, or repetitive, and the corpse is under no compulsion to offer a truthful answer if you are hostile to it or it recognizes you as an enemy. This spell doesn’t return the creature’s soul to its body, only its animating spirit. Thus, the corpse can’t learn new information, doesn’t comprehend anything that has happened since it died, and can’t speculate about future events.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
I’m not here to tell you Speak with Dead is that good, because it's not. Speak with Dead is probably over cost for its effect, and fairly niche when it comes to obtaining information about the world around you. However: I’m here to advocate that Speak with Dead is an incredibly fun spell to play with. If you’re a cleric specifically, I think you can have a ton of fun with this.
A 3rd level slot is a pricey ask. You get five questions from a corpse, which can range in usefulness from direct answers to a mystery to cryptic nonsense, but the roleplay experience of interrogating a corpse can be a blast. The DM gets an opportunity to build out the world by connecting its history to the present; when you commune with a corpse of a soldier, you can learn all about the battle it died in from a firsthand source. The remains of a murder victim can tell the horrific story of the night they died, painting a dreadful picture of gloom and despair. I can see a whole suite of death-related clerics and bards just spending their afternoons in the local morgue chatting with the recently deceased about their lives. Definitely morbid, but absolutely enriches a specific macabre fantasy.
Speak with Dead could probably be a ritual spell and nobody would bat an eye; it costing a spell slot every time is rough, and 3rd level is a lot to ask out of characters even in the middle to upper tiers for five cryptic answers. Even with its suspect practicality, Speak with Dead opens up a world of roleplay possibilities I adore. If you want to play a character that speaks to the departed, this spell can play a major role in satisfying that fantasy.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.
