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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zappo" data-source="post: 2715483" data-attributes="member: 633">According to old Planescape cosmology, the souls of dead sentients travel through the Astral, losing their memories in the process, and end up somewhere on an Outer Plane according to deity or alignment. If they are raised, they pick up "most of" their lost memories on the way back, provided that not too much time has passed.Here's the idea - you can travel to the Astral; what if you could search for the memories of a dead person? There are plenty of reasons to do so. You could be just trying to gather information, and that's the most obvious one. But it could also be a way to break the limitations on raise dead and similar spells.Finding the memories of a lost comrade would be quite hard. Even assuming that memories are scattered away by astral winds after some time, the plane must have millions of such locations. It'd probably take a special spell, maybe using something (or someone!) that the dead one used to love dearly as a focus and guide.Once you find them, what do they look like? On the Astral, they may become psychic projection of the deceased's mind. The best remembered places, items and persons would be present - their home, their parents, but also everything that has ever shocked them. As pure memories, with no intelligence, these elements would move like psychic automatons, perpetually reenacting the scenes that were most vivid in the character's mind.And then, what do you do? Maybe, if you can interact with these projections, if you can somehow enhance and pull together the drifting memories, and especially those that would make the character want to be raised, you could push the raise dead limits a bit. Or you might be able to reduce the XP loss.And what if you find the petitioner on the Outer Planes that is the soul of the dead character, what if you bring him to that place on the Astral? Maybe he would remember his past life. That could make him easier to raise; maybe it could even allow a simple raise dead to overcome a [Death] effect. Or maybe it would empower him somehow, turning him into a true planar being through the merging with his former self.(Elements of Magic revised, if you like this <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> )</blockquote>

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