What Spells can be Cast to disguise a Murder? & Detecting Magic on Scrolls

[Mars Ultor]

The killer knifes someone and wants to make it look like an accident. The victim is stabbed and has a visible knife wound to cover up but Mending won't work, it's got a size limit. I thought about Make Whole but there's a limitation--no creatures or constructs. I'm guessing they don't want it used to heal so it can't be used on a living creature, the constructs limitation might apply only to "animated" creatures? Can it "repair" a corpse? Are there any other spells that can cover up a wound or conceal an injury?


Someone uses a scroll and discards it. The books give a pretty clear description of a scroll, it's distinctive from just a roll of parchment. Although the writing disappears after the spell is cast, is there any way to determine what spell was on that scroll or at least what type of magic it contained?

[liquidformat]

What level are we talking about and what resources are available?

The best bet is to make the corpse disappear especially since there are spells like speak with the dead that can make short work of solving the cover up.

Here are my suggestions:

• The old cheap method, feed the corpse to pigs
• polymorph any object the corpse into a rock or something
• disintegrate
• other fire spells...
• acid spells...
• permanent image
• Prestidigitation can be used to cleanup the crime scene pretty well.

[Elkad]

Scroll - sounds like an off-use (houseruled) case for Object Reading
Also available on gloves.

[Mars Ultor]

What level are we talking about and what resources are available?

The best bet is to make the corpse disappear especially since there are spells like speak with the dead that can make short work of solving the cover up.

Probably low-medium level, under 10th certainly. Mostly core stuff.

I want the players to be able to find the corpse and then realize there's been a murder, it's not actually an accident. Anything that destroys the body won't work.

The thing about Speak with Dead is that you can only learn with the body knows. If you can't see your assailant or his face is covered you can't tell who killed you.

[Jack_Simth]

Make Whole: Boils down to "is a corpse an object or a creature" - which has a definitive answer only for individual tables.
Most other answers will have the same problem. Well, unless you import Pathfinder's Dress Corpse spell.

[Zaq]

Flesh to stone —> stone shape —> stone to flesh is unnecessarily elaborate, and that makes it interesting.