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Message: <blockquote data-quote="uzagi_akimbo" data-source="post: 1706267" data-attributes="member: 15945">Okies now _that_ throws an offcial looking  spanner into the works - and oddly enough, WotC depicted a very different situation (and take on the rules) in one of their adventures ( well it was  published in Dungeon Magazine #96 or 97, back then it was not yet an independent Paizo publication. Yes, Dungeon is not official 'canon', but it is an in-house publication, sticking very close to published and established WotC D20 rules - so a major oversight looks unlikely, IMHO ), "Flood Season" where a key NPC gets killed and the players (or their NPC backers) are assumed to use "Speak with Dead" to get rather essential hints from said corpse - which lacks its tongue and is decapitated, IIRC. This is vital for the adventure's progress and the NPC backers even suggest  (!) this course of action/initiate it if the PCs don't think of it (or are incapable to do so ).Now I don't assume having your tongue ripped out and eaten by an NPC counts as natural decomposition or being in a fairly complete state .... Same goes for a decapitation. So clearly, "Speak with Dead", as handled by that WotC customer support e-mail should not work at all.Wouldn't it be nice, if they stayed consistent with their ideas of what actually works and what does not ? I never understood the reasoning behind the "knowledge imprinted in the body" guideline - if you miss a leg/arm/parts you can possibly give only partial answers - anyway. I mean, what knowledge is stored in my leg ? Algebra ? History ? A*se-kicking ? What does my liver know ? Or my spleen ? What knowledge does a peglegged,  hook-handed pirate have, even if he lost his leg and hand 40 years prior to his death ?Yeah, right ......I also wonder - if the time since death does not matter, how the spells is supposed to work on corpses more than a few months old (which it does )- not even talking decades or millenia. I mean, not everyone gets mummified (and a mummy , in eqyptian tradition at least, has its vital organs removed.... now does that constitute complete ? And what knowledge would be lost if a brain is removed from the body - all ?), or frozen in a glacier to stay in reasonable shape. So what use would the spell be ?Oh well, seems like time for yet another reality update at WotC's "Sage department" again.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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