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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 1348322" data-attributes="member: 8158">Having watched my share of CSI, I think there are a couple of ingredients that you should bear in mind doing a campaign that emulates its style:First of all, it's OK if the characters can use magic to come up with some easy answers. The CSI team get easy answers through basic forensics all the time, but they just lead to more questions. They either provide a seemingly impossible, paradoxical murder scenario, or conversely the answers are so misleading that the obvious, occam's-razor conclusion that they draw from those answers send the team off on a wild goose chase. For instance, if a Commune spell reveals that Kyrellan was murdered by Kyrellan, does that mean that it was suicide, or perhaps a mirror of opposition was involved, or perhaps someone else named Kyrellan? In the case of a suicide, your challenge as a DM is to make it look like the method of death is a seemingly impossible method of killing oneself. In the latter case where the murderer is another guy named Kyrellan, you as a DM have to establish what exactly is the weight of a name per se. If I have my name legally changed to Kyrellan, then murder somebody else named Kyrellan, and then have it legally changed to something else, how will that affect a Commune? Will it offer verification based on my first name, the name it was when I commited the murder, or the name I currently have? Or all of the above? Will my alias "Felon" serve as my name if that's the only way you know me, even though that's not my real name? That could really confuse a party.Secondly, rather than having the killer use a Ring of Nondetection or Mind Blank to ensure that the simplest, most direct methods won't work (which the party are likely to find boring if those are used constantly), the killer should ensure that the simple, direct methods will still seem to work as far as the investigators are concerned, thus throwing them off the trail. Let's take Speak With Dead for example. The simplest countermeasure I have against that spell is to get rid of the victims head; reduce it to a state that Make Whole won't repair or just take it with me. But that'll just make the players use more sophisticated methods. Instead, I think I'd rather make that squealing noggin work for me by making its former owner believe it was murdered by somebody else. Heck, I could replace that head with the head of someone murdered in a very similar manner. Likely, the skull will provide some answers that will range from confusing to outright misleading. What are the odds that it will even occur to the players to use up one of their 2 questions per level to verify the skull's name? Oh, and to be really tricky, go ahead and smash the skull, but not to a degree that would render a Make Whole spell ineffective. The players might just think you screwed-up and didn't cover all the bases. Once they're convinced they caught you making a mistake, watch how quickly they become overconfident and don't cover all of their bases.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification