New Spell: Past Life Regression

Past Life Regression

Level 3 Cleric/Mystic spell (necromancy)
Requires: Incantation, gestures, holy symbol
Casting Time: 18 seconds (3 segments)

This spell allows the caster to lay hands upon any character and thereby allow the character to remember some specific aspect of his past lives. In practical terms, this allows the player of the character in question to apply “meta-game knowledge” learned from some previous player character who has died in the past. This knowledge can span whatever the previous character knew; the location of traps on the specific level of a dungeon, identity of a traitor, answer to a particular riddle, the location of a secret door leading into the king’s bed chamber, etc. Each application of the spell allows the character to remember a single distinct piece of information, but does not extend as far as learning entire skills, class-specific abilities, etc. The character in question must be a primary character of the same player; player A’s character cannot learn anything gleaned during the life of a character belonging to player B. It is not the case that the former character has to have died before the birth of the current character; such are the mysteries of the Multiverse, and all must serve the Lords of Necessity.

Published under the auspices of the Open Game Licence and declared to be Open Game Content. Copyright (c) 2012 Joseph Bloch all rights reserved.

Written by 

Wargamer and RPG'er since the 1970's, author of Adventures Dark and Deep, Castle of the Mad Archmage, and other things, and proprietor of the Greyhawk Grognard blog.

3 thoughts on “New Spell: Past Life Regression

  1. Cool. DM's can have alot of fun with this. Players will try to abuse this spell, but the DM is in control, so it would work well. This gets me thinking of Moorcock and H.R. Haggard.

  2. Nice solution of a typical issue at the game table 🙂

    As a DM I always feel bad if a character is forced to walk into a trap or something similar, although the player already knows that this will not end good. Very demotivational for the player.

  3. Actually, I think it's kind of fun to have a later character get tripped up by the same trap as a previous one.

    And I'm not saying that just cause it happened to me on Saturday.

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