• View
• Edit
• History
• Print

HarvestExperience

Harvest Experience (Necromancy)

You grant the semblance of intellect to a corpse, and subsume its experience into an external vessel. This allows a gain of up to 500XP per level or Hit Die of the deceased creature; these experience points must be spent in the creation of magic items or the execution of a ritual and may not, on risk of insanity, be used for level advancement or to recover lost levels. If the creature’s alignment was different from yours, the corpse gets a Will save to resist the spell as if it were alive.

If the corpse has been subject to speak with dead within the past week, this spell fails. You can cast this spell on a corpse that has been deceased for any amount of time, but the brain must be mostly intact to be able to be harvested. A damaged corpse may be able to give partial experience, but it must have some of its brain intact in order to be harvested at all.

This spell resurrects the body for the barest minimum of time necessary to harvest its experience, but otherwise does not let you actually interact with the person whose soul has departed. It is therefore not an inherently evil act. Since the spell draws on the imprinted knowledge stored in the corpse rather than the soul, there is no ability for the departed to resist it. The partially animated body retains the imprint of the soul that once inhabited it, and thus can release the knowledge that the creature had while alive.

This spell does not affect a corpse that has been turned into an undead creature.

The procedure can only be performed once per corpse, although the same corpse can be later raised as an unintelligent undead as normal. Raising the corpse as an intelligent undead requires that its knowledge be returned by using the resultant gem in the reanimation spell. Resurrecting the corpse can be done as normal.

Material Component

The corpse must have an at least somewhat intact brain, and a mixture of unguents and acids worth 450GP must be injected into the brain. You must place a sapphire gem worth at least 50 gp per Hit Die of the deceased creature into the mouth or eye socket of each corpse you intend to harvest. The magic of the spell crystallizes the brain as well as instincts and experiences therein, allowing it to be stored. Note that according to the wizard's understanding of where the seat of thought is, the relevant organ may be substituted for the brain.