You summon a mysterious physical book bound in dark leather, adorned with silver lettering and glowing magical symbols. The book is known as the Tome of the Forgotten.

When you touch a willing creature and speak its name, the tome begins to fill with written words, illustrations, and even moving images made from the creature's memories.

The spell allows you to explore three aspects of a creature's mind:

• Forgotten Memories: Recover memories the creature has lost, forgotten, suppressed, or buried deep within its mind.

• Hidden Trauma: Reveal painful experiences, emotional wounds, fears, and events the creature has tried to bury.

• Hidden Truths: Discover secrets, important details, forgotten relationships, and information the creature may not consciously remember.

The book records everything it discovers, creating a permanent physical record that can be read later.

The creature does not necessarily need to consciously remember what is revealed.

Upcasting: The Deeper the Memory

The higher the spell slot used, the deeper into the target's mind the tome can reach.

Additional Mechanics

The Physical Tome: Once the spell ends, the book remains. Its contents cannot be changed by ordinary means. It can be carried, hidden, stolen, or destroyed like a normal book.

Memory Preservation: Memories recorded in the tome remain even if the target later forgets them again.

Emotional Echoes: When reading particularly painful memories, the reader may experience brief emotional impressions of what the creature felt at the time.

The Unwilling Mind: If the target is unwilling, it must make a Wisdom saving throw against your spell save DC. On a success, the spell fails. On a failure, the tome can access its memories, but the target knows its mind has been invaded.

The Limits of Truth: The book reveals memories as the target experienced them, not necessarily objective reality. False memories, mistaken perceptions, and magical alterations may still appear, though higher-level castings can reveal inconsistencies.

Tome of the Forgotten – Expanded Spell Mechanics

Dangerous High-Level Magic

At spell levels above 10, the Tome of the Forgotten begins forcing its way into the deepest and most protected parts of a creature's mind. The knowledge becomes increasingly difficult to retrieve, and the process causes psychological and psychic damage to the target.

Mental Damage: The Cost of Forbidden Knowledge

When cast using a spell slot above 10th level, the target must make a Wisdom saving throw against the caster's spell save DC.

On a failure, the target takes psychic damage based on the spell slot used. On a success, it takes half damage.

Additional Effects at Higher Levels

The mental damage represents the strain of forcing open memories that the mind has spent years, decades, or even centuries protecting.

• 11th–13th Level: The target experiences headaches, confusion, and emotional distress.

• 14th–16th Level: The target may become frightened or incapacitated until the end of its next turn.

• 17th–19th Level: The target risks temporarily losing access to certain memories, skills, or the ability to distinguish memories from reality. The DM determines the effect.

• 20th Level: The target experiences a complete psychic breach. It must make a second Wisdom saving throw or become stunned for 1 minute, repeating the save at the end of each of its turns.

Important limitation: A creature cannot be killed by this spell's memory-extraction damage alone. If the damage would reduce it to 0 hit points, it instead drops to 1 hit point and falls unconscious.

“Some doors were locked to protect the world from what lies behind them. The Tome does not care why they were locked.”

Optional Legendary Feature: The Final Chapter

At 9th level, if you spend an additional 1,000 GP worth of rare magical inks and materials, the tome can reveal one memory that has been completely erased through powerful magic.

The book records fragments of the original event, even if the creature has no remaining recollection of it.

However, some memories are lost for a reason, and recovering them may reveal something far more dangerous than the caster expected.

DM Note: This spell is particularly useful for investigative campaigns, uncovering character backstories, interrogations, forgotten prophecies, recovering lost identities, and exploring the psychological history of NPCs.

I would make this a rare and potentially dangerous spell: the caster gets to discover what is hidden, but not necessarily what they are prepared to learn.