I can’t do a murder mystery because the PCs will just cast speak with dead.
I’ve seen this sentiment a lot, but it’s never really made any sense to me: The act of investigating a mystery is one by which you reveal that which is unknown. When we talk about PCs casting a speak with dead spell, we’re describing a situation in which the players reveal that which is unknown (i.e., they investigate the mystery), but then, oddly, we’re supposed to conclude that they can’t investigate the mystery because they investigate the mystery.
I think part of the problem here lies in an erroneous instinct that I talked about as part of the Three Clue Rule:
There is a natural impulse when designing a mystery, I think, to hold back information. This is logical inclination: After all, a mystery is essentially defined by a lack of information. And there’s a difference between having lots of clues and having the murderer write his home address in blood on the wall.
But, in reality, while a mystery is seemingly defined by a lack of knowledge, the actual action of a mystery is not the withholding of knowledge but rather the discovery of knowledge.
Let me put it another way: Strip the magic out of this scenario. Imagine that you’ve designed a mystery scenario in which there was a witness to the crime. The PCs turn to this witness and say, “Who killed him?” and the witness says, “It was Bob.” And it turns out Bob is just standing there, so they arrest him. End of mystery.
You wouldn’t conclude that you can’t do mystery scenarios because people can talk to each other right?
Speak with dead should be no more alarming than an FBI team taking fingerprints or a CSI team enhancing video and running facial analysis.
DESIGN TO THE SPELL
You may also see people suggesting that you “nerf” the spell to one degree or another. (Corpses that refuse to answer questions, for example.) Nothing is more frustrating to a player than having their smart choices blocked because the GM has some preconceived notion of how they’re supposed to be investigating the crime.
But what you can do is design your mysteries to the reality of the spell. Generally speaking, after all, people in the game world know that the spell exists, right? So they aren’t going to plan their murders in ways that will expose them. (Any more than people in a magic-free setting will commit their murders while standing directly in front of surveillance of cameras.) They will find ways to conceal their identity; they may even find ways to try to use the spell to frame other people. (For example, imagine a murder scenario where the victim thinks one of the PCs did it because the perpetrator used a polymorph spell.)
OTHER DIVINATIONS
The same advice generally applies to other divination spells, too. The only divination effects which are truly problematic are those which allow you to contact omniscient beings and receive crystal clear information from them. Fortunately, these spells basically don’t exist in D&D (and most other games). The closest you can get are commune and contact other plane, but both are explicitly limited to the knowledge of the entity you’re contacting. (1st Edition AD&D actually had a lovely table for determining “Likelihood of Knowledge” and “Veracity”.)
FURTHER READING
Zone of Truth Mysteries
Three Clue Rule
I’m not sure about older editions, but both Pathfinder and 5E require the corpse to still have a mouth in order to answer questions. OK, now you have to find the victim’s head. 😃
He’s back! *Cheers*
This makes me want to comb the spell list from the POV of an assassin trying to outsmart an investigator.
That’s 2 character ideas right there, and it implies a professional economy.
This are good tips, but I think what people are complaining about is that it makes designing mysteries harder than they already are. Consider the neophyte DM. He is feeling adventurous and sets up a murder mystery scenario. If a player snaps his fingers and solves it in a few minutes by use of magic, what is more likely? The DM starts designing his murder mysteries around the thousands of D&D spells or throws in his hat and just rolls up another Monster Zoo dungeon?
Welcome back, Justin!
There is a lot of good information about which spells might be used in investigations, and likely in-game counters to them, in the Ultimate Intrigue supplement for Pathfinder, which is available to read for free at d20pfsrd
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/intrigue/#Spells_of_Intrigue
Admittedly, that’s specifically for Pathfinder, but like Justin’s advice here about murderers hiding their faces from their victims in a work with Speak with Dead, a lot of the observations in Ultimate Intrigue work without reference to specific rules.
Just because you know the general description or if the corpse knew them the name of the killer doesn’t mean the adventure is over. You still have to figure out where they are and also maybe have some more evidence then a talking corpse to arrest them.
I mean there are many episodes of crime dramas where they pretty much know the killer but need to prove it.
Right, the corpse is just another witness, and might be unreliable, or even want to frame someone other than the real killer. What happens when all the evidence contradicts the dead guy?
Rashomon, the greatest film ever made about the fundamental unknowability of the truth about a murder, has a medium speaking with the spirit of the victim as part of its central narrative.
As Arnaud points out, some editions (like 5e) require the corpse to have a mouth to reply, and that’s an important factor. It also highlights the fact that D&D doesn’t really have a seance-like spell where you can speak with dead spirits.
In my world, though, there are some other mitigating factors. First, while magic is relatively common, the average person doesn’t know that “speak with the dead” is what could be considered a common spell. So most murderers aren’t concerned about it (especially since so many are crimes of the moment). So when the PCs started coming across bodies that have the jaw removed, that concerned them more.
The bigger aspect, though, is how easy it is to get the spell. Or not. The local clerics don’t just cast it for the watch every time there is a murder. It’s not really appropriate. Sure, there might be a church or temple (or Deity) that MIGHT consider that as a viable source of income. But in general, divine magic is reserved for the faithful.
The bigger issue is the nature of necromantic magic and spells that contact other planes in my campaign. To start with, acts which can be considered evil acts are depicted as leading down a dark and dangerous path. This is a combination of the sort of “Dark Side” approach, and the way our world, particularly in the Victorian era, perceives black magic and occultism.
Fiends cannot just enter the material plane at will, they have to be summoned, or find another loophole. Any connection to another plane can provide a potential loophole. Creatures that perform necromancy also draw unwanted attention to themselves as fiends and similar creatures have an affinity to the dark arts.
Speak with the Dead is a spell that actually doesn’t have a significant connection to the dark arts itself. But the world is set up in a way that the PCs (and NPCs) generally avoid anything that could be. The Speak with Spirits variation is more risky. This is in the Forgotten Realms, so if the spirit is among the false, it may remain as a ghost after the spell summons them. If the spirit is in the lower planes, the spell can act as a summoning spell, allowing them to cross into the material plane. Possession by fiends is another significant risk when a conduit like this is opened.
So what happens is that whether it’s the local watch fetching a cleric to cast the spell, or the PCs choosing to use the spell, they don’t do it lightly, and look for other opportunities first.
The spells themselves provide cryptic (although not usually intentionally misdirected) information. I don’t limit them to a certain number of words or questions, just time. If we’re going to go to the trouble of a divination spell like this, I prefer to play it out as a big deal that is used rarely. So in general, it provides more clues, rather than actual answers. But sometimes it’s as simple as “Bob killed me.”
As Justin points out, it’s just like interrogating any other witness. The most important factor for me when designing a mystery is not to find ways to make it interesting for the players per se. I consider what happens in my scenarios based on what would happen. Would the killer consider that “speak with the dead” might be used? Do they even know about the spell? If not, why would they take measures to prevent it?
There are some things that are relatively known and common. There are spell casters. So any potential spell caster will be bound and gagged when thrown in jail to prevent spell casting. Shackling folks to the wall in a standing position with arms outstretched comes to mind as a particularly likely and suitable medieval approach in the light of the common use of magic. Likewise, druidic magic is inhibited by metal (which is why they don’t wear metal armor in my campaign), so this prevents shapechanging too. Not everything is 100% preventable, but if the townsfolk learn that the suspect is also likely a lycanthrope because they turned into a rat and escaped, then that suspect has more than just the law to worry about going forward.
In the majority of cases, considering the in-world effect of a given ability or spell existing helps frame appropriate adjudication of the spell. In some cases I’ll make changes. For example, the shift from druids being able to shapechange at 1st level instead of the original 7th-level alters the world fairly significantly. But the bigger change is that druids themselves are not only more common, but they aren’t the wilderness living loners that they used to be. Of course, including them as a PC class in AD&D started that trend right from the start. But it drastically changes world itself if there are now potentially thousands, even tens-or-hundreds of thousands of druids wandering the countryside, and happily joining bands of adventurers. It’s a bit different than the one near-mythical and fear-inducing wild sorcerer of the woods.
So just accepting the spell (or special ability) as written is fine, and works just as Justin is describing. But I find that if you look a bit deeper at the implications, then you can get a better understanding of the impact on society, and make any changes that might be appropriate to make it fit your campaign better. In our case, rather than eliminate it altogether, or go the cop-out route and just be antagonistic about it, we have an in-world reason why it’s not used on a daily basis that also has the potential of adding additional short-term and long-term story elements.
Not to disagree with anything you said, but there’s one point you didn’t address: pacing. To build on your analogy:
“The PCs turn to this witness and say, “Who killed him?” and the witness says, “It was Bob.” And it turns out Bob is just standing there, so they arrest him. End of mystery.”
When you read a murder mystery, you don’t expect the murderer to be revealed in the first chapter. (If they are, it usually means that a) the witness is either mistaken or lying, and the rest of the story will be devoted to uncovering the true culprit, or b) the murderer escapes, in which case the story is a fugitive thriller, not a murder mystery.) Likewise, if the GM has prepared a murder mystery scenario, and the PCs solve it in the first ten minutes, then either the scenario comes to an abrupt end or it turns into some other sort of scenario.
Of course, a good GM prepares in advance for that possibility, so they’re not left scrambling to adapt on the fly. And this problem isn’t unique to mystery scenarios: a GM *can’t* exercise full control over the pacing of an adventure without heavy railroading. Using speak with dead isn’t really inherently different than teleporting to the end of the dungeon, or disintegrating the Big Bad Villain before they can blink. As a GM, you have to live with the reality that the PCs may wreck the pace of your adventure, and be prepared to adjust.
hi hi
Sometimes murder mysteries are split up based on when the crime is revealed. If anyone has ever watched an episode of Columbo, they’ll be familiar with the style of storytelling where the killer is given at the very start of the story. The other is when the killer is only revealed in the accusing parlor.
As long as your game is in a setting where the player characters can’t just walk up to someone in the street and cut them down without consequences, it is entirely possible to give away the killer right at the start. In that situation, it is more about making sure beyond a shadow of a doubt for everyone, rather than grasping at straws for where to begin.
After all, if Speak With Dead is a spell that is in common use, it probably won’t be admissible as evidence. At least, not after that one famous person found out that their significant other was cheating on them, and tried to get revenge by taking their own life and accusing them from beyond the grave.
I was going to mention Rashomon but I already got beaten to the punch. And if memory serves, the account of the deceased was one of the most unbelievable of the bunch. It doesn’t really fit into either category, and it ends up being more about the personal journey of the bystanders, and the one unrelated truth they find at the very end.
Welcome back. It’s hard to juggle life and writing a regularly updated blog.
I also write adventures with Speak with dead in mind. I have observed that players do not necessarily remember that you CAN shoot first and ask questions later, even among 10+ year DnD veterans. Another twist on this is making the mystery focus on finding the body (keeping in mind that Scrying is a thing) in order to get the key witness.
Speak with Dead combined with Gentle Repose allows people to consult the preserved poverty long periods of time. In order to understand how much that affects a society, imagine if the US Supreme Court regularly consulted the US founders on the ideas they knew while alive in order to make decisions on original constitutional intent.
While I have mixed feelings about it overall as an addition to the series, one of the strong points of the latest Ace Attorney game, Spirit of Justice, is that it features SEVERAL examples of designing murder mysteries to fit a divination spell that allows one to see the last several seconds of a victim’s memories. The classic DL-6 case in the original Phoenix Wright game is also a good example of designing around Speak with Dead.
Pushing Daises was a TV show that featured a detective who could talk to the dead, and it worked fine.
The dead person doesn’t always know who killed him/her. I mean, imagine being killed by a masked man on the street, even if you could talk to the dead person, it’s just another witness providing clues.
Second is the fact that a clever murderer in a magical world has to know the magical means of detection. It’s only natural. A murderer in the XVII century wouldn’t care about wearing gloves because fingerprints aren’t a thing, but a XXI century has to worry about traffic cameras, DNA, cell phones, bank account, etc. It’s not unrealistic to expect a smart killer in a magic fantasy setting to work around those issues.
I don’t know about D&D, but usually I use magic as a planning tool. You usually know what skills the PCs bring, so you design around them. Not to screw completely with an ability because a player invested points in that character so that wouldn’t be fair. But the spell could provide clues instead of immediatly revealing the murderer.
For example in HARP there’s this spell called Past Visions. Basically it allows the caster to see what happened minutes ago in that particular location(usually a room), and you can scale it up(providing you have enough skill ranks) further and further up the past. It’s available to Bards and Mages. So, imagine a woman kills a man in a crime of passion. She knows about the spell, so she moves the body(while wearing a disguise) to a completely different location. The caster would know exactly that so now in order to solve the mystery they need to know WHERE the murder took place. And if the party is low level, the spell has a limit as to how far back the caster can see, so now they have a time limit to find out before it’s useless. That both empowers the PCs while still providing a challenge.
And there’s more, in HARP there’s also a magical assassin profession called the Shadowblade who has a spells designed to counter magical detection like Past Visions. They can cast the spell so that whoever uses the spell will only see a shadow. They also have spells to change their appearance. That’s fair and square. You have magical detectives on one hand, and magical assassins on the other. (Of course, casting Past Visions still reveal that the killer was a Shadowblade, so it’s not a waste of time)
Anyway my point is a GM has to know the game system when designing a scenario and mysteries aren’t an exception. If you know your PCs are level 10 you wouldn’t pit them against normal lvl 1 goblins would you? The same goes for mysteries. Design the challenge accordingly and keep in mind the PCs resources, just like you would for any other adventure.
(Sorry for my weird english, I’m not a native speaker)
I feel like the easiest and most interesting solutions to Speak With Dead are written in the spell description itself…
“The corpse must still have a mouth and can’t be undead.” Ok, the murderer decapitated the body and threw its head overboard.
“The spell fails if the corpse was the target of this spell within the last 10 days.” The murderer is a mage too, and cast Speak With Dead on the corpse- because they expect to be able to escape from reach within 10 days.
“The corpse knows only what it knew in life, including the languages it knew.” The big easy one: the victim doesn’t know who killed them! They didn’t see their attacker, or they were disguised, or they don’t know the killer’s name. Or perhaps they know something the party doesn’t, like the killer’s REAL name- and they only refer to them by it! Or maybe even: if your party doesn’t have access to Comprehend Languages, the victim doesn’t know Common, or any languages they know.
“Answers are usually brief, cryptic, or repetitive, and the corpse is under no compulsion to offer a truthful answer if you are hostile to it or it recognizes you as an enemy.” The victim is someone who hated the party, and they are suspects in the murder. The victim knows a key piece of information that the party doesn’t yet have the clue to understand, and keeps repeating it to them (this one makes for a great bonus clue!) Maybe the victim is racist against elves, and won’t answer anything the elven mage asks them.
“The corpse can’t learn new information, doesn’t comprehend anything that has happened since it died, and can’t speculate about future events.” Maybe the corpse doesn’t even understand why they were killed- the murderer did it to prepare for a future action they were planning to take.
You can work any of these into the story and make Speak With Dead a tool in your arsenal instead of the players’.
There is a reason why poison has been beloved by murderers for millennia, and is a staple of murder mystery novels.
@sav, the problem with cockblocking the spell caster like that, of course, is that it takes a power on their character sheet and puts a “The DM doesn’t want you to be cool” black line through it. It strikes me as much more interesting if you just treat the victim like any other eyewitness: either they were stabbed by surprise by a hooded figure, or don’t know who put the poison in the soup, or accuse someone the PCs know couldn’t possibly have done it. But make sure they do have some kind of clue to offer at least.
My general rule is that it’s fair pool to obstruct a character special ability with technicalities at most one time out of three or so that they try to use it. Otherwise why is it even on their sheet?
@colin r
That rule is also why I allow Pathfinder’s Detect Desires spell, but not its Detect Anxieties spell.
Detect Desires will by default give you a clue, potentially a very important one, and do so in a way that can bypass unwillingness to talk or reveal a lie (you say you want X? Nope, spell says you want Y), but will not by itself give the game away. I can work with a tool being that powerful.
By contrast, Detect Anxieties will by default tell you who the murderer is, because more often than not their greatest fear at the moment would be getting found out as the murderer. The entire game would warp around screwing over the Detect Anxieties user; therefore, I don’t allow players to have it in the first place.
@PuzzleSecretary, you could argue that multiple people could have pressing anxieties that they might be accused as the murderer, if they know they had motive, or other circumstances could make them look guilty. Is it necessary to distinguish “fear they might be correctly accused” from “fear they might be falsely accused”? I dunno. Also, a sufficiently evil (or psychopathic) killer might be more anxious about whether this mess is going to make the princess cancel her RSVP to his party or something.
But I’m just playing devil’s advocate. I definitely agree that if there’s something in a character’s default abilities that you aren’t happy with, you should let the player know ahead of time and edit it to something you’re both cool with. In the case of a spell list, it’s pretty trivial to just not give them that spell, but there might be more to negotiate if they want to play a monk or something and you hate the grappling rules or whatever. Sometimes games give characters abilities that make them better at “violent interrogation” and I refuse to GM a torture scene, so I’ll edit those.
I wouldn’t call that “cockblocking the spellcaster” or “the DM doesn’t want you to be cool” at all. I think the article covers it pretty well: “But what you can do is design your mysteries to the reality of the spell. Generally speaking, after all, people in the game world know that the spell exists, right? So they aren’t going to plan their murders in ways that will expose them. (Any more than people in a magic-free setting will commit their murders while standing directly in front of surveillance of cameras.)”
But it’s about expectations. Speak with Dead is a second-level spell. Are we in a setting where every municipality above a certain small size has a friendly local priest who can cast the spell, and can often be seen working with the town guard to solve murders that way? Then you would expect perpetrators to be aware of this and work around it. But if it’s a low-magic setting, then it would make more sense for your average criminal working alone not to be aware that the spell exists, so the corpse’s head being stolen or destroyed would be a sign that someone who’s learned in magical matters is involved. The GM described by Sav is roleplaying the NPCs appropriately to the world that they’re in, not just screwing players over for the heck of it. [Side note: the only one I’m iffy about is the language one, though the Tongues spell can obviously help if the PCs know it or can hire someone who does.]
And, of course, you may be envisioning your world as one where the Speak with Dead spell doesn’t exist at all, just like a GM might create a world where warlocks or dragonborn or whatever don’t exist.
I will say that as a player who’s played a cleric in 5e, I never expected Speak with Dead to be a solve-the-mystery win button, but rather assumed that NPCs could tamper with crime scenes or manipulate the victim into having false beliefs about how they died, or whatever. I don’t see it as denying my ability, but leaning into it. In fact, if the spell worked perfectly every time, I kind of feel like I would have been less likely to use it. Like if I were playing in a game set in our world and I had proficiency with a fingerprint kit, and every time I searched for fingerprints, they gave me the correct solution to the mystery — I wouldn’t be thinking “ah, wonderful, the GM is giving my character a chance to shine and not cockblocking my abilities!” It would be more like “…oh. that’s it?” In my ideal world as a player, the ability is the starting point, not the ending point, and I think Sav’s suggestions are potential steps toward achieving that.
@claire, technically I don’t disagree with any of that. I’m reacting to my experience, which is that in 20+ years of play I can’t remember a single time a DM allowed me to learn anything useful from that spell. My expectation is that people are going to err *very* far on the side of always finding a way to shut it down. If you have a DM that actually supports you casting it and having it be useful, that’s awesome, glad that not everybody is afraid of it.
I hope it’s clear that by “having it be useful” I mean that you learn *something* worth knowing, not that it’s a “solve the mystery win button”. (Unless of course the DM is clever enough that “whodunnit” is not meant to be the real mystery, and getting that answer raises more problems than it solves…)
“I don’t know. A short woman, with dark hair and a dagger.” (Now search for suspects.)
“He was wearing a mask, but I know it was that awful Munsler, he could never disguise his Gevven accent!” (it was a different guy from the same town)
“Hilfler, he lives just next door!” (He’s fled the city, but where to?)
“It was Nestor, the baker, but I can’t imagine why…” (blackmail)
“I only heard a voice speaking strange words behind me…” (so, magic involved!)
“…a five-year-old girl. I don’t understand.” (Shapeshifter? Mind control?)
“I tripped on the knife and stabbed myself accidentally. Five times.” (Someone they still love, even now.)
“Why, the high lord’s heir. Good luck.” (Do you want a new powerful enemy?)
“How dare you come back to mock me!” (someone framed the party!)
“Three men in a darkened alley? But—as I was bleeding out, they held their hands out and sad ‘out of the tumult, peace’—do you know what that means?”
“My wife, obviously. The scheming bitch hasn’t been shouting that I deserved it?” (She hasn’t, but he really, really did: truth or peace?)