Brain storming a spell mechanic

[Celebrim]

For all the spells that have been created for D&D over the years, most of which I feel are useless variation (how many flavors of direct damage do you really need), I keep stumbling over gaping holes in the spell lists where there ought to be things but I've never really thought about it.

I've got two questions. The first is very general. What holes in the available spells have you noticed before, and how have you tried to fill them?

The second is specific ideas regarding the hole I've noticed most recently, which is the idea of contacting a spirit, which is a very basic magical trope. Now, there are plenty of rules in D&D for summoning a spirit to get it to do something for you - notably fight your enemies - but there aren't really any rules for if you just wanted to contact a spirit and ask it a question. This seems like it ought to be a lot easier than a summoning conjuration, and interestingly might be in the divination school, letting you have a bigger range of 'consorts with spirits'.

The spell that has the closest flavor to what I'm thinking of is Contact Other Plane, which is a big hefty-weight version of what I'm thinking of in that it lets you phone a greater deity or the like. What if you would like to just like to reach out to someone or something at the bottom of the hierarchy of spirits. Obviously, you are more likely to not get an answer, but you don't need phenomenal cosmic power here or be anyone special to speak to an ordinary spirit being, nor are you necessarily risking going insane. What I want is something between the flavor of Summon Monster and Contact Other Plane, available as a 1st level spell, reasonably restricted so as to be balanced but also reasonably reliably so as to be worthwhile. Alternately, you can think of it as being more like Planar Binding, only the spirit isn't forced into any sort of bargain - it just answers a question and leaves.

Mechanically, some of the balancing factors could be:

Possible Restrictions:
1) There is a chance no one is home, or they glance at your caller ID and just ignore you.
2) A random spirit picks up the phone.
3) The spirit is annoyed and potentially hostile.
4) The spirit doesn't know the answer.

Your ideas for mechanically handling any of the above are welcome.

I'm interested in interesting ideas for how we pick the spirit that answers. Randomly select something? Let the player pick something appropriate from a monster summoning list?

I'm even more interested in how we determine what questions are appropriate. The obvious thing is to limit the DC in some fashion, but one of my most frustrating tasks is setting a DC for knowledge rolls or figuring out how much knowledge is implied by a given degree of success. I just can't think of anything better than a chance based on arbitrarily classifying how difficult the question is. The Contact Other Plane spell assumes deities and that all questions are basically equal. You can ask about minute trivia and general knowledge with equal chances of success. That might make some sense for a deity, but we'd want more reasonable limits on what you can ask an earth elemental, a dretch, or whatever.

 

[Nagol]

Generally, there have always been holes all over the place when compared to mimicking the effect magic items are capable of generating.

Speak with Dead fits the space you are looking at, basically. I've also allowed scry-type spells to locate a recent-deceased spirit on its way to its afterlife. To my mind the difficulty of talking to a specific spirit is not in coercion or manifestation, but finding the particular spirit.

If the caster just wants to get any low-power spirit on a particular plane or of a base type, I'd reckon it would be around a 2nd-level spell to initiate a short "chat" and a 3rd-level spell to include enough compulsion to get a basically truthful set of responses. The response chart would look something like Contact Other Plane in terms of truthfulness / knowledge for simple questions with no chance of mental damage on part of the caster.

As for what questions would be appropriate, the answer comes back to that awful line: "It depends". I'd provide information that is general knowledge on the plane - in a 3.X style game I'd probably fudge that in play by rolling an d20 without bonus to determine the maximal DC the entity can answer truthfully with regard to basic environs ( Knowledge:Local, Knowledgelanar specific plane, etc.) and apply a penalty to the roll for related and/or close regions.

 

[the Jester]

I think speak with dead is exactly what you're looking for, albeit not 1st level... but notice that D&D typically restricts even the simplest question-answering spells to 2nd level or higher (e.g. augury). I'm not counting things that answer a very specific question like "Is this magical?".

 

[Celebrim]

Speak with the Dead is certainly a divination spell, but its not really what I had in mind. For one thing, Speak with the Dead is already a highly problematic spell to adjudicate unless you've absolutely prepared for it (as in a murder mystery). This would be worse. It's generally a problem having to invent an NPC on the fly and figure out exactly what the NPC might know, if anything, and then to follow the directions given by the spell. For another, it's not really 'speak with spirit' and says as much, as much as it 'animate corpse', since the corpse has to be intact enough to actually speak to you.

However, a lot of the complexity here is narrowed down by Speak with the Dead. Exactly what you'll be speaking to is established, and the fact that it is not in fact present or in possession of a volition is actually established.

In my case, how we decide what we are speaking to or can speak to elegantly in something I want to pin down here. Does physical location matter? Can we speak to an individual spirit by name? What stops you from calling up Orcus at 1st level? What risk is there in bringing yourself to a spirit's attention? Can something you ask to manifest, decide to go further than that, as in Planar Binding?

Once you decide what we are talking to, how do you decide what it knows. Contact Other Plane seems to provide a fairly reasonable set of mechanics. I was thinking something similar to 'Contact Other Plane', but just one question allowed and no chance of going mad.

My first brief brainstorm on 'chance to know' was something like:

Common Knowledge : 75%
Unusual Knowledge : 25%
Rare Knowledge : 0%
Rare and Very Specific Knowledge : -25%

Add HD of spirit to chance that it knows.
Add +25% bonus if the spirit is questioned regarding something pertaining to its specific domain.

If the spirit is of a different alignment to the caster, the caster has to make an opposed charisma check or the spirit lies, misleads the caster, or deliberately evades the question, even if it knows the answer.

Getting random spirits in some ways involves less problems than requesting specific ones. In the case of really powerful spirits, it's rather believable that they could be effectively omnipresent. But my game is just filled with very minor or very localized spirits. It's a 'haunted world', rich in animism. For example, the party got a big clue in one mystery when they realized that the house they were in had become sentient after centuries of habitation and it was aware of what was going on inside it and loyal to its owner. In that case, I decided I was ok with the Shaman just using their spirit empathy ability to try to appeal to the house to manifest, and ask it a question. That spirit could conceivably speak to someone reasonably near it, but would lack the ability to manifest itself 3000 miles away. Ditto a spirit of a tree, a rock, a stream, or the spirit representing all the rabbits in a particular forest, or a particular ghost, or any of the numerous other sorts of very minor spirits.

But I'm realizing a relatively low level, "Talk to nearby spirits" spell has a lot of flavor and is entirely reasonable and occupies a niche different than planned spirit encounters.

 

[transcendantviewer]

I had a D&D character that desperately wished to talk to a deceased love, so I looked through the spells section in the PHB and all the other source books (Back in 3.5, so there were many) and found no such spell. He didn't want a Gate to go talk to her in her home plane, he didn't want to summon her to his plane to speak to her, he didn't want to animate a corpse to ask it questions about her, he just wanted to talk to her. This idea you're talking about seems like something you could just ask your DM about. Ask them about adding a personal addendum to the Speak With Dead spell that says you can talk to a single willing spirit that you designate at the casting of the spell. Contacting a specific spirit just to talk with them. Being that this is an edition with more leeway in the rules, the DM would probably happily oblige (or refuse if it's of story importance).

 

[Celebrim]

transcendantviewer: First, I am the DM. I'd never presume to inform the DM about what rules he should have in a game where I was the player. Whenever I speak of crafting rules, I'm always speaking of modifying my own homebrew campaign world.

The game I run draws inspiration from Tolkien, Lovecraft, and the Brother's Grimm. It's a haunted animistic world where peoples everyday lives are dominated by interactions with fairies, spirits, gods and stranger creatures and every stone, tree, and brook has its own spirit. In this world, it's ordinary for persons to seek to commune with spirits, not just of their ancestors, but of the tree you might want to cut down, the rock in your field you might want to dig up and move, indeed of the field itself if you want to plow it, dig a well in it, or erect a barn on it. Hitherto, I'd be rather happy to adjudicate such interactions on a case by case basis - you want to talk to the tree, try talking to the tree. But the lack of standardized way for specialists to try to contact local spirits is a gap in how the world supposedly works. I've means of finding and identifying spirits, but no means of reaching out to them short of something like Lesser Planar Binding.

Using this spell as a séance isn't something I'd particularly thought about, but is definitely thematic and appropriate. And it would probably be allowed to work under the rules I'm considering, provided you cast the spell near the place of burial.

 

[transcendantviewer]

Glad you like it.