Victim talking to Cleric: “No clue. I was stabbed from behind. They might try to kill me again, so maybe keep an eye out? Thanks for the resurrection, though. Those flames looked seriously unpleasant. I think I was robbed when I died, so don’t expect me to pay you for the diamond.”
“Oh, sorry mate, this is just Speak With Dead, the ‘welcome back’ was just a pleasantry. You’ll be heading back where you belong once the paperwork’s done.”
“Ah hells. I know I don’t exactly have a lot of useful information, but you could always ask me three more questions if you like. I might be able to give a vague clue to build deductions from. Just the three questions, though. No need to use up the entire spell tonight, right?”
Speak With Dead doesn’t bring the soul back.
I was playing my evil cleric, just hiding amongst a party of do-gooders, as a follower of Cyric do, and had recently leveled up to where I could now cast Touch of Death(?), a touch attack spell that has basically a 50/50 chance of straight up killing your target and I happened to be talking to an NPC, all alone, that was crucial to the rest of the party’s plans. Naturally I tested out my new spell.
The party investigated, of course, but none of them were spell casters or had enough ability to discern anything. Including interrogating me, since I also had +30 to deception due to some special feats and items I earned previously in the adventure. Since we play entirely online, only the DM and myself knew the truth as the events. Up until my ultimate reveal toward the end of the campaign, they suspected nothing. That was a fun-ass game.
I don’t know your group and maybe this went over well. But I was in a group that had a similar situation happen, but when it happened in my group it completely killed the campaign. We didn’t know a party member was doing it, but we felt like we were being undermined at every step and the DM wasn’t allowing us to make sufficient progress to enjoy ourselves.
They’ve repeatedly asked me to bring back the same character in other campaigns so I think they thought it was fun too. Everyone generally has their own goals and our primary DMs are all into the political intrigue angles over straight dungeon crawling, so there’s always a kind of Game of Thrones thing going on between the party members even when they’re all good guys.
Kind of a reason why I use a cleric of Cyric; the goal isn’t to straight up fuck everything up as that may lead to war, the domain of Cyric’s rival god, Tempus. It’s to plant the seeds of doubt and make everyone paranoid. 😁
Reviving someone is expensive. What you do is kill the Zealot Barbarian, have him ask the victim who killed him, then revive him.
