Modify Memory: If I Recall Incorrectly…
Spell Level: 5
School: Enchantment
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 30 feet
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
Components: V, S
You attempt to reshape another creature’s memories. One creature that you can see must make a Wisdom saving throw. If you are fighting the creature, it has advantage on the saving throw. On a failed save, the target becomes charmed by you for the duration. The charmed target is incapacitated and unaware of its surroundings, though it can still hear you. If it takes any damage or is targeted by another spell, this spell ends, and none of the target’s memories are modified.
While this charm lasts, you can affect the target’s memory of an event that it experienced within the last 24 hours and that lasted no more than 10 minutes. You can permanently eliminate all memory of the event, allow the target to recall the event with perfect clarity and exacting detail, change its memory of the details of the event, or create a memory of some other event.
You must speak to the target to describe how its memories are affected, and it must be able to understand your language for the modified memories to take root. Its mind fills in any gaps in the details of your description. If the spell ends before you have finished describing the modified memories, the creature’s memory isn’t altered. Otherwise, the modified memories take hold when the spell ends.
A modified memory doesn’t necessarily affect how a creature behaves, particularly if the memory contradicts the creature’s natural inclinations, alignment, or beliefs. An illogical modified memory, such as implanting a memory of how much the creature enjoyed dousing itself in acid, is dismissed, perhaps as a bad dream. The GM might deem a modified memory too nonsensical to affect a creature in a significant manner.
A Remove Curse or Greater Restoration spell cast on the target restores the creature’s true memory.
At Higher Levels. If you cast this spell using a spell slot of 6th level or higher, you can alter the target’s memories of an event that took place up to 7 days ago (6th level), 30 days ago (7th level), 1 year ago (8th level), or any time in the creature’s past (9th level).
Review by Samuel West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Altering a creature’s perception of reality and events is a giant mess of hard moral questions that gets posed when you cast Modify Memory. I’m going to ignore these, as I tend to with most D&D spells, because I challenge you to find a spell that is cooler than Modify Memory. The potential this spell brings to the table is bananas. Modify Memory gives you the power to rewrite recent events in the mind of an individual; it can reshape how they believe something happened, regardless of what actually transpired. That deal they made? Maybe it went south, and they believe the shipments won’t be coming in. Diplomatic relations go too well for your liking? It’d be rather convenient if the diplomat remembers hostility in place of hospitality!
Unfortunately, these moments are rare. Modify Memory typically is making a lone watchman forget you and your party were ever there, which is handy, but not really the big narrative powerhouse the spell can be. Even at its worst case scenarios, though, Modify Memory can act as a save or die in the thick of things to incapacitate something in a pinch. That’s genuinely a powerful tool to have access to, especially if you can pull it off right before a fight breaks out.
A lot of tables won’t get all of what Modify Memory can offer. It requires intrigue, deception, espionage, information brokering, and all other assortments of counterintelligence style events to flourish. In games where that is the central focus, this spell shapes the world. Players need to both think about how best to use Modify Memory as well as attempt to figure out ways to detect truth when their own memories may be unreliable.
From a world building perspective, as a DM you may even consider a premise involving false memories being fostered between rulers to breed conflict. A villain can twist a single chance encounter with a lord to start wars simply by being in the right place at the right time. False memories can be a central focus, challenging reality and creating a psychological horror kind of villain who excels at manipulation and reshaping events to steer the world towards their devious means.
I can’t praise Modify Memory enough; the spell isn’t going to be for everyone or every table, but at the tables where it can thrive, it will. If you want the chance to go back in time a few hours and change one small thing, Modify Memory is as close as you can get.
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