Sending spell to contact the dead?

[eBarbarossa]

Sending works between different planes (most of the time), so can I use it to contact the dead in the afterlife? Could dead people contact the living this way?

[Tzardok]

Theoretically yes, but practically you need to keep in mind that a soul sheds most of its memory on the way into the afterlife. A manifest soul in the afterlife (a "petitioner") also has different abilities, appearance and priorities. For the purpose of this spell I would say that familiarity with the "owner" of the soul is not familiarity with the petitioner, so you would first need to meet them there, and the petitioner propably has no interest in contacting you this way.

[Metastachydium]

Alright, but how about an eternally damned Warlock making Warlock's Prank Calls from the Abyss and the demons just let it be because they think it's funny?

[Telonius]

How many Warlocks do they have down there? I'm imagining a DDOS attack with thousands of souls contacting the High Priest of Pelor (or whoever) all at once.

[Tzardok]

This is what we call an "unlikely scenario". :smalltongue: Petitioners lose their class abilities in most cases.

[Duke of Urrel]

This is a VERY GOOD question, which means that I don't have an answer to it.

I have only recently thought about what happens to the souls of most ordinary creatures (that is, creatures that were not Elementals or Outsiders in life) after they die. I made this commentary about pages 129 to 130 of COMPLETE_DIVINE v. 3.5 (2004). (These pages are also good to read or re-read if you want some background.)

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In the D&D multiverse as I imagine it, the “vast majority” of disembodied souls whose final destination is another plane of existence do not “become one with the fabric of the plane itself,” as the passage “Become One with the Plane” in the quoted text above states. If they do become one with the plane, this happens only after a long time – decades, or even centuries – and the soul retains its memory of its former life right up to the moment of its dissolution. The only creatures whose souls become one with their plane of destiny immediately after they die are Elementals and Outsiders with the Extraplanar subtype.

In the D&D multiverse as I imagine it, most disembodied souls do get new bodies and become petitioners – eventually. They do not need to have been “exceptionally good or wicked in life,” as the passage “Get a New Body” in the quoted text above states, and it is not necessary for a deity to see “great potential” in them. Becoming a petitioner such as a dretch or a lemure is not, after all, a very great honor, in my opinion. Moreover, as a house rule, I allow every disembodied soul to be aware that it cannot begin a new life in a new body until it gives up: (1) all memory of its previous embodied life and (2) any chance to be restored to life in its former body. I assume that disembodied souls usually wait at least a year or two before they agree to make this trade. Indeed, if you are a former player-character with “strong force of personality and unfinished business among the living” and you were still young when you died, I assume that you may wait decades before you agree to abandon your past life in order to begin a new one.

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So I would say that there is a good chance that you can contact a departed soul before it gets a new body as a petitioner and forgets all of its former life – provided that a spell actually empowers you to make such contact.

The strongest objection to the claim that you can use the Sending spell to contact a departed soul is that a disembodied soul does not qualify as a creature. Is a disembodied soul really a creature?

Not to derail this thread or anything, but "Is a disembodied soul really a creature?" is a doozy of a question.

There are spells that explicitly allow you to contact extraplanar beings and ask them questions. The Commune spell and the Contact Other Plane spell do this. In my opinion, asking questions about departed souls falls well within the power of these two spells.

Even if we allow that a departed soul with no body is a creature, we may ask what that creature actually knows. This soul is now a resident of an Outer Plane. It does not necessarily have any knowledge of what is going on in the place where it used to live in a body. A soul who now lives in the Beastlands could tell you what that was like, of course. But what else could it tell you that you really want to know?

This kind of question might bring us closer to a satisfactory answer to your question. Would the answers that you get from a departed soul be a good thing to carry your adventure forward? If so, then I think that I, as a dungeon master, would be pleased to allow you to get some answers of this kind – in some way.

[Tzardok]

I personally go by the 2e definition: a petitioner is a soul in the afterlife. As soon as the soul reaches the Outer Planes - boom! - petitioner. Also, manes and lantern archons and so on aren't petitioners, but created from them. Memories are left behind while traveling through the Astral on the way to the destination. Petitioners are driven by the desire to transcend, working to become more of their alignment (petitioner of a plane; the petitioners climbing Mount Celestia striving for enlightenment are very good example) or their deity (petitioner of a deity), and achieve this after who knows how long by either fusing into the plane or deity or evolving into an outsider.