Speak With Dead - Is a Soul Required

[gnrrrg]

SPOILER ALERT - I am running Beneath the Silver Tarn soon - skip the next paragraph if you have not played/ran it and don't want to know what is happening.

The main purpose of the tarnspawn is to kill people and take their souls back to the tarn. Taking the soul from a dead body is a standard action. It seems reasonable that someone might try Speak With Dead on a corpse and I'm wondering if it would be possible.

END SPOILER

The main question revolves around how long does a body retain its soul after it dies. For those of you who didn't read the spoiler, there is reason to believe that for the purposes of the scenario listed above the soul stays in the body for a brief period of time after death.

The spell Speak With Dead doesn't say anything specific about the soul being present or available. The only caveat to the spell deals with it not working on bodies that have been turned to undead. What happens to the souls of the undead itself is not a clear thing.

Would a soul have to exist or at least be somewhat free (wandering around its afterlife) in order for Speak With Dead to work?

[RainyDayNinja]

The spell doesn't indicate the soul has to be present to function, especially since there is no time limit on how recently dead the target must be.

In fact, in one of the novels, a character casts speak with dead on a corpse specifically to find out who took his soul and why.

[gnrrrg]

RainyDayNinja wrote:

The spell doesn't indicate the soul has to be present to function, especially since there is no time limit on how recently dead the target must be.

Yep, but the corpse does maintain some of its original personality (attitude towards questioner is the same etc.). It made me think that maybe there was something to it.

RainyDayNinja wrote:

In fact, in one of the novels, a character casts speak with dead on a corpse specifically to find out who took his soul and why.

I've read that one. The books stray from RAW often enough that I don't trust them to answer rules questions.

[GM Lamplighter]

Yeah, it is really "speak with corpse" - speak with dead would be much more useful (but probably higher level).

[MurphysParadox]

This spell doesn't do what you think it does. What it actually does is summon a generic spirit that moves on into the head of the corpse, settles into the brain, and answers questions based on what the corpse knew up to the time it died. That's why it has to have a head with a working brain that hasn't had any evil necrotic undead magic stuff to screw it all up.

You are not talking with the ghost of the dead person. You are talking to a ventriloquist dummy operated by someone who just read the dead guy's autobiography.

[Zhayne]

I think of it more like a form of psychometry, myself, or reading a psychic resonance from the body. You're accessing the remnants of the mind; it's just manifesting as 'he's talking to you'.

[Dave Justus]

However it works (and the generic spirit or the psychometry are both cool) it is clear that a soul is not required. In fact, you specifically can't get information from the soul as it currently exists, you only get information about what the subject knew in life. Clearly, you are not talking to a soul, whatever it may be you are really talking to.