Ipsophagia (3.5e Spell)

''Upon the completion of the ritual, you speak the words with which you claim dominion over everything your target was in life. Your form wavers and loses cohesion, and like a vortex of living tissue you inject yourself within the corpse before you. When you finally rise from the ceremonial dais, you will have become someone else.''

This spell is what remains of an ancient tradition among many of the more sinister cults within the Realm, where the death of even one member can greatly impact the future of their remaining numbers. They go to great lengths to obtain the bodies of their brothers and sisters, and consume their bodies, thoughts and essence into themselves. This devouring of the self is known as ipsophagia.

The first stage of ipsophagia is the Inhabiting Phase; you inhabit the body of a recently deceased creature, like a vessel. The creature may not have been dead for longer than one day per 2 caster levels. The Inhabiting ritual is done by drawing an intricate transmutation circle and placing the desired target within the center of it, a process that takes 10 minutes to complete. When the words are spoken, you inject yourself within the vessel, overriding its dead impulses and taking its likeness, knowledges, and certain of its abilities for yourself. This is not a disguise or an illusion; for all intents and purposes you are the creature that you inhabit, and the bonding brings with it understanding into the creature's psyche. Only through discrepancies in the unconscious behavioural patterns the vessel exhibited in life (tics, twitches or otherwise) can a creature that knew the vessel very well in life discern, with a Sense Motive check against your Bluff check, that you are not who you seem to be. Otherwise any such attempts to sense your motives is done with a -20 penalty. This penalty is waived if you publicly perform any actions that are diametrically opposed to the vessel's moral or ethical alignment.

In the Inhabiting Phase, you possess the vessel's ability scores, which may possibly impair or inhibit your own ability to cast spells or use other personal class features. You retain your own skill points and feats, as well as your own hit points, base attack bonus and base save bonuses, and gain the skill points and feats of the vessel where they do not overlap with your own. You retain any supernatural class features and racial abilities you possess, but you lose any extraordinary ones that are dependent on your own physical form. You possess any readily available knowledge of the target creature, including its memories in life, and are capable of using its class features, if any, up to a combined class level equal to your own class level. You gain the target creature's special abilities, special qualities, powers and spells as long as they are dependent on their physical form or experience. You would, for instance, be able to gain a rogue's trapfinding and evasion, but not a paladin's Smite ability or a cleric's spellcasting, as they are granted them by divine accord. You are also unable to prepare or renew your own spells when you are inhabiting a vessel.

The inhabiting is not perfect, however, and after a certain amount of time, the vessel will start to strain against your will and degrade. After the first 10 days of Inhabiting, the vessel is drained of 1 point of Constitution every day. Using your own spells, spell-like abilities and other special attacks while inhabiting your vessel will speed up this degradation, and cause 1 point of Constitution drain right away after every spell or ability used. Performing actions that are very much opposed to the vessel's alignment will also cause its flesh to fight against your control, causing similar degradation. If you are killed while inhabiting your vessel, or if your Constitution reaches zero, you yourself also die. It is therefore advisable to discard your vessel before it degrades too far or when it is forced into a difficult combat.

The second phase of the ipsophagia is the Devouring Phase; as a mental action, you may compel your physical form to devour your vessel from within, consigning the vessel to final death and destroying it completely. You lose all of the benefits the vessel granted you, and regain your own ability scores. Any Constitution drain your vessel incurred is restored upon the Devouring, and you return to your own appearance. You do retain all of the knowledge and memories you have consciously obtained during the Inhabiting.

Material Component: The recently deceased body of a sapient creature.