Scrying Question

[Shadow145]

Okay, this happened in an adventure I was running and I was wondering if anyone knew of an official rule I missed somewhere.

The party is investigating the disapprearance of a cleric. The cleric had been killed and animated as an undead. When the party scrys for the cleric, does it succeed and show the undead creature or does it fail as the cleric is dead.

I ruled it worked mostly because the party needed the extra clue at the time, and I didn't want to stifle them after finally using divinations. Also scrying specifies "creature", and undead are "creatures" in that sense of the word. I guess the question is if the undead creature is considered the same creature as the living being.

 

[Liquidsabre]

Good question. I checked the MM and the Undead type doesn't say anything about not beign a creature. I suppose it would depend on the Int of the undead cleric. If the Cleric retaiend it's own mind and Int while undead I think you could still say the celric is still the same creature they are scrying for (just undead). If the cleric was animated as a mindless undead then I would say the scry attempt fails.

 

[Pinotage]

This situation came up in our game recently as well (this week, in fact). The wizard wanted to scry for the location of a kidnapped woman, only she only had the opportunity to do so a day after the kidnapping and by that time the woman was dead. I allowed the scry to locate the dead body, since I don't believe the spell description specifically disallows it. You could argue that scrying locates a person's essense and that being dead or undead means the person's essense is altered, but then you could also argue that scrying is detecting the physical presence of a known entity, and it doesn't matter what form the entity is in at the time.

Pinotage

 

[TheYeti1775]

Stealing from a Novel for this one.
Dawn of Night (Book II The Erevis Cale Trilogy) Forgtten Realms

Scrying for an opponent, opponent was shaped changed but still able to locate him even though he was looking for a different description of the "body".

Hope that helps...

IMO - It would depend on how/what they said they were searching for, and how their mind saw them.