Theory crafting 'Contact Spirit' spell

For some time now, I've wanted a generic 'Contact Spirit' spell. Unfortunately, as with any sort of divination, all the mechanics I can think of are both complex and require quite a bit of DM input. However, I really want this as a spell, so here is where my thinking is at present:

Contact Spirit

Using this ritual, the spell caster attempts to lure a spirit into briefly manifesting themselves to them and answering a simply phrased question. One such question may be asked per 5 caster levels (round up), but the entire interview must not take more than 1 minute per caster level. Unless they are hostile, spirits will answer most questions honestly, but will often owing to personality quirks and alien disposition be brief, cryptic and speak in riddles. Hostile creatures will lie, prevaricate, mislead, or speak nonsense in an attempt to thwart the caster’s intent. More powerful ones may even attack the caster in fury at his intrusion, so casters are best advised to prepare defenses such as protection from spirits. Even a spirit which is not hostile, will refuse to answer questions that are opposed to its own interests.

The spell caster begins by making a small fire and burning a small quantity of incense (usually about 1 ounce) while chanting the spell. Such incense is generally worth about 1 s.p. A random nearby spirit normally answers out of curiosity, but with appropriate knowledge regarding the ritual the shaman can influence which spirit answers. With a DC 15 Alchemy check and access to appropriate materials, the spell caster can craft incense of an appropriate formulae to make it appeal to spirits with a specific alignment or specific subtype. Alternately, with an appropriate DC 15 Knowledge check, the caster can select a small sacrifice or offering, in order to lure vary specific sorts of beings. A Knowledge (Nature) check is required with respect to nature spirits and fey. A Knowledge (Planes) check is required with respect to denizens of the inner planes and transitive planes. A Knowledge (Arcane) check is required with respect to undead and native outsiders, and a Knowledge (Religion) check is required with respect to denizens of the outer planes. This offering is worth at least 1 c.p. times the HD of the creature to be contacted, and generally takes the form of a food or libation which the creature may find desirable. When a sacrifice is offered, Contact Spirit takes on the same subtype descriptors as the creature being contacted. However, if a sacrifice is offered, if no spirit of that sort is known to be associated with the area, then there is only a 4% chance per caster level that the attempt to contact the spirit is successful.

Skill checks to adjust the ritual are made secretly. If they fail, the caster has made an inappropriate change to the ritual, and the spell automatically fails.

If the shaman knows spirit’s true name or else has an appropriate totem for the spirit, a specific spirit can be contacted. Spirits specific to a location, including almost all minor spirits and many of the greater ones, can only respond if the spell is cast in the vicinity of that location – usually within 1/2 mile per HD of the spirit - and the spell will fail if that spirit is unable to respond. The names and totems of spirits with more global scope to their activities are thus highly prized, and closely guarded by those that know them. Spirits which are bothered too often or whose names are taken too lightly tend to become hostile. Exact details are up to the DM, but a spirit will generally become annoyed if contacted more than once a month unless sizable bribes and offerings are made.

This spell can be used to contact the spirit of a dead and departed person, but only if used in a place closely associated with that person such as their home in life, their grave, or in the presence of their mortal remains. The shaman must either know the person’s true name or else have been acquainted with them in life. The dead are generally uninterested in the concerns of those still living who they did not know in life, but may make an exception for mortal descendants or other close relatives. Favored personal possessions of the dead person may be used as effective totems.

A totem can be crafted to represent a spirit that a shaman is acquainted with. Such totems generally cost at least 1 s.p. per HD of the spirit that they represent, and require a DC 20 Knowledge (Religion) check to correctly design the totem and an appropriate DC 20 crafting check. Both checks are made in secret, and if either check fails the work is wasted. A totem may be of virtually any size, but generally may not be smaller than about ¼ lb. per HD of the spirit that they represent, and smaller totems are desired then they must be more finely wrought or of proportionately more valuable materials. In inhabited portions of the world, it is not uncommon to find many small shrines along roads and paths built to house totems of this sort. Stealing from such shrines is considered very bad luck, for somewhat obvious reasons.

The spell cannot be used to contact any spirit with any amount of Divine Rank, including creatures of Divine Rank 0. For that purpose, Contact Other Plane or similar powerful magic beyond the bounds of this spell must be sued.

If the spirit is of different alignment to the caster or otherwise has cause to be hostile to the caster, the caster must make an opposed charisma check to gain the spirit’s cooperation. If this fails, there is a 50% chance the spirit attacks the caster if it has greater than or equal HD than the caster, and the spirit lies and attempts to deceive the spell caster otherwise. If it has less HD than the caster, the creature lies to the caster regarding its knowledge, or seeks to mislead the caster or give evasive answers to any questions. If the spirit does attack, it generally will not waste more than 1 round attacking per level of the caster, unless the caster is already a mortal enemy or adds insult to injury by attempting by attempts to hold or bind the spirit in some fashion.

Spirits of any sort will be wary, and seek to keep sufficient distance from the caster of a Contact spell to allow for flight should the encounter go sour. They will prefer to not manifest and maintain incorporeal form, or use spells of their own such as illusions to act as proxies for their presence.

A spirit that is willing to answer the spellcaster’s questions does not always know the answer. A spirit either knows something or it doesn’t. Asking the same question rephrased in a different way always obtains the same results. The DM is the final judge of whether or not a spirit can answer a specific question, but in general the chance that a spirit can answer a given question is as follows.

Common Knowledge : 65%
Unusual Knowledge : 15%
Rare, Inaccessible, or Specific Knowledge : -5%
Rare and Specific Knowledge: : -30%

Add the HD of spirit to chance that it knows.
Add +25% bonus if the spirit is questioned regarding something pertaining to its specific domain or its immediate environs.
Subtract 5% for each point of intelligence below 11.

Hostile spirits that don’t know the answer always lie or mislead. If the spirit does not know the answer, then there is a 5% chance that it believes that it does and gives a plausible but entirely wrong answer.




Still with me?

If you are still with me, would you as a player learn/prepare a spell like that?
Approximately how much value do you think you could squeeze out of a spell like that?
Is it broken? Too weak?
If it isn't broken, about what level of spell would you consider it?

This sounds much like the Commune with Nature spell, except with some flavor differences, letting you ask a broader array of questions.

I don't think you should be able to just commune with a spirit, even if you know their truename. I believe there's an Eberron magic item that does something like that though (it's basically a head on a stick, with a Speak with Dead-like effect, that you generally use on a friend's head or ancestor's head).

(Psi)SeveredHead said:

I don't think you should be able to just commune with a spirit, even if you know their truename.

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What is your concern here?

I am sorry, your spell description was far too long to read. You are probably overthinking it. The spell text for contact other plane for comparison: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/contactOtherPlane.htm

Celebrim said:

What is your concern here?

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You could get any known information from someone's spirit. If you can't control exactly which spirit you contact, then it's possible to limit the info.

(Psi)SeveredHead said:

You could get any known information from someone's spirit. If you can't control exactly which spirit you contact, then it's possible to limit the info.

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This is the commonly espoused theory that divination shouldn't work. That may well work for some GMs, but I have no particular concern about my plots being ruined or my players being able to out think me. My preferred approach is more like Gumshoe - it's always better if players learn things and the fun part is making choices based on what they learn. I want the players to find clues. Nothing is worse than having players who are lost and don't have a plan. Besides, it's always possible to limit the info. Compared to something like Commune, this breaks nothing.

Even a very powerful world spanning spirit - in my game, a totemic spirit with 20HD or more, that is the sort a shaman could have as a patron - has only a fairly small chance of being able to give correct answers to specific questions ("tell me about this dragon..."), as opposed to answers about general lore ("tell me about dragons..."). And you have to be fairly high level to get more than 1-2 questions in. So that's what 15% chance of knowing specific things for 1-2 questions, and no chance of knowing specific secrets ("where is the crown of infinite sorrows buried..." or "who killed the young prince..."). If the PC abuses this relationship with such a powerful, then the ability is limited by the fact that if you bother it frequently, it will get angry. And if you bother an angry spirit, it possibly won't cooperate and it may even try to punish you for your offense. Some stupid 3rd level shaman has a totem to the Hungering Beast, and isn't Evil aligned, and decide he'd like to talk to contact Urglick he's probably going to die. And likewise, even if you don't die, if you were bothering a totemic spirit - the Prince of Cats, the Grandmother of Oaks, The Hungering Beast - you just made a whole portion of the world hostile to you. You effectively just cursed yourself with a curse that remove curse isn't sufficient to remove. It's mostly going to be flavor, but every once and awhile you're going to want to do something like climb an oak tree and now it matters that oaks everywhere hate you.

To a certain extent I want this spell to carry some of the weight that the Call of Cthulhu 'Contact' spells carry, while providing some divination ability from very low level. But mostly what this spell serves is world building. This is a spell that tells you a lot about how my world works, and conversely this is a spell that should exist because of how my world works.

Random Bystander said:

I am sorry, your spell description was far too long to read. You are probably overthinking it. The spell text for contact other plane for comparison: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/contactOtherPlane.htm

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Yeah, and for me that mostly just goes to show how bad of a spell 'Contact Other Plane' actually is.

There is a lot missing from that spell. For example, there is a line beneath 'Elemental Plane' for 'appropriate', which doesn't explain itself and leaves the reader to guess that the caster is asking questions appropriate to that element. But if that is the case, why aren't their 'appropriate' line items below the other entries.

And the spell lets you contact a specific elemental, but it doesn't tell you if you can contact an appropriate outer plane or who you contacted or whether if you contact an outer plane you are randomly likely to be answered by Heaven or Hell. Who did answer the call, and did it matter? If I'm asking about Hell, why doesn't that matter?

Moreover, it doesn't tell you whether or not, if you are being lied to whether you can use Sense Motive to know, and if a player tried what would be the opposing bluff check?

Plus, compared to Commune it's just a lousy spell. I can't think of any time I've seen this spell used, and I know I've never seen it relied on by anyone.

It also in my opinion needs some caveats. For example, asking questions about how to destroy the City of Brass might well be appropriate questions to ask a power of the elemental plane of fire, but it would seem to me that even a random power of that plane might take particular umbrage to that line of questioning if they could figure out your intent. Likewise, there is no provision for the PC having direct and personal knowledge or relationship with the powers in question, which in game is not something entirely outside the realm of possibility and certainly by the time a PC could and would use these spells. So there is a ton of fiat situations that a DM will have to handle that aren't called out by the spell.

So, yes, I am concerned with how complicated the spell is. If I wasn't, I wouldn't even put this out here.

But I also want the final version of the spell to not only be at least somewhat useful, but to serve a world building purpose. Think of all the things you learn about my world from this spell:

1) Spirits are common, found almost everywhere, and have a great variety of scope and power.
2) There are these things called totems, and people set up shrines and leave totems scattered around the world, for the purpose of contacting these spirits.
3) There are almost certainly commercial enterprises specialized in providing the sort of incenses suitable for contacting spirits of particular sorts, so that you could go into any fair sized town and buy prepared incense of various sorts suitable for various purposes.
4) All of this together implies something akin to a religious structure - ritual, incense, and shrines and friendly or unfriendly spirits means that there is an animistic religion operating in place of or alongside a more formal polytheistic religion. Or in other words, it world filled with 'small gods'.
4) There are these secrets called truenames that let you call out a specific spirit, and possession of such a secret has value and probably economic worth. So finding a totem or a truename could be considered a sort of treasure.

Now, if you could suggest some reasonable simplifications that still captures the flavor, I'd be all for it.

I've constructed similar spells in the past for talking with the spirits of the dead. I based them around Scrying with the items granting penalties to the save being things tied tightly to the person or their death and inflicting the +5 bonus for being on another plane. Higher bonuses are possible if the target is protected or enslaved by a powerful entity in the afterlife.

The 3rd level version allows a small set of questions a la Speak with the Dead and the same spirit can't be summoned again for a week.
The 5th level version allows a longer more deliberate and free-flowing discussion.

I also added a chance the spirit simply no longer remembers the answer to any question depending on length of time dead (Wis check DC 5-10 depending how important the knowledge was to the living creature, with -1 for a full day deceased increasing another -1 per extra time period (week, month, season, year, 5 years, 25, years, etc.)

*edit
For more general use with more general spirits I have less experience. It strongly depends on the setting.

Nagol said:

I've constructed similar spells in the past. I based them around Scrying with the items granting penalties to the save being things tied tightly to the person or their death and inflicting the +5 bonus for being on another plane.

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One thing I'm inclined to change from the first draft is to make the spell involve remote contact explicitly, rather than the assumption that the spirit is actually present. That simplifies some things, but I did like the mechanic of hostile spirits potentially avenging themselves if contacted. Being present simplifies potential interaction, and I'm not sure if there is a simple level of interaction between 'none' and 'full'.

One area that you may not have picked up on is that by spirits, I don't just mean 'spirits of the dead'. Thank more something along the lines of 'Spirited Away', and you'll have a better idea what my campaign world is like.

Celebrim said:

One thing I'm inclined to change from the first draft is to make the spell involve remote contact explicitly, rather than the assumption that the spirit is actually present. That simplifies some things, but I did like the mechanic of hostile spirits potentially avenging themselves if contacted. Being present simplifies potential interaction, and I'm not sure if there is a simple level of interaction between 'none' and 'full'.

One area that you may not have picked up on is that by spirits, I don't just mean 'spirits of the dead'. Thank more something along the lines of 'Spirited Away', and you'll have a better idea what my campaign world is like.

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I caught the inference and adjusted my post as you were posting.

In 1e, my PC used Contact Other Plane extensively (if gingerly). For more general spirit types, it is almost certainly a better skeleton than the Scrying/Speak with Dead framework I used for Séance-type spells.

Whether you want the threat of "physical" interaction would depend on whether it is a spell that allows contact or a spells that summons some portion of the spirit. Perhaps that threat would only apply if the caster is using the location the spirit normally resides (thus gaining a bonus on success at the cost of increased danger level).