Speak with dead

Speak with dead was a necromancy spell that allowed the caster to ask a corpse questions and receive answers.

Effects
The corpse being subjected to this "reading" had to be intact enough to speak and the questions asked had to be in a language that the deceased understood. The more complete the corpse, the more complete the answers. The knowledge stored in the corpse after death was only that which the deceased knew in life. Answers were usually short, truthful, and cryptic, like a riddle. More experienced priests could ask more questions for a longer period of time. For the older version of speak with dead, the longer the person had been dead, the higher the level of priest was needed to cast the spell.

If the deceased was a different alignment than the questioner, the imprint of the deceased on the corpse could resist speak with dead and negate the spell. This spell also failed if the corpse was undead or if the same corpse had been questioned within the past week.

Realmslore
Tessaril Winter, Lord of Eveningstar, acquired an arcane version of speak with dead, that she used to interrogate all murder victims. Her version could extract up to ten questions from a corpse, but the corpse got a chance to resist answering each question.

The Red Wizards of Thay also created an arcane version of speak with dead which allowed exactly three questions.

Components
The newest version of this spell required only verbal and somatic components plus the priest's holy symbol or divine focus. The older divine versions required burning incense as part of the casting, as did the Red Wizard version. The speak with dead that Tessaril Winter learned required a drop of the caster's blood, a sprig of mint, a sprig of parsley, and red or black gem worth at least 100 gp that had been crushed to powder.