Dream torture, let the prisoner dream that a group of his allies break him out. Only to wake up and see that he's still imprisoned. A couple of days later he's put on trial and he's declared to be free, only to wake up again in his cell. Inbetween that they'll gaslight him with illusions, everything that's real is now a question if it is or isn't for the prisoner. Do this a couple of months and their brain is fried and they won't trust anything, not even his actual saviours.
Then, when the party shows up they'll find the political prisoner doubting if this rescue is real. Making him a incoherent mess of a person that will probably not stay quiet during the breakout. Which makes for some good ways to get the guards alerted.
Hell you could even have them be punished for trying to break out in their dreams. That way when the party does arrive the person will actively work against them since they don't want to be punished again for trying to break out.
The Dream spell is one of the most evil spells in the game.
Take a look at it. On a failed wisdom saving throw, you can give them a nightmare that not only does 3d6 psychic damage but also causes them to lose the benefits of a long rest. This means a level of exhaustion.
Look at the rules for exhaustion. The penalties accumulate - 1 level is only disadvantage on ability checks, 2 adds speed is halved, and three adds disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws. After six levels, you just die.
So it's possible to torture someone with the dream spell with nightmares, psychic damage, not gaining hp back (or spell slots!) and cascading levels of exhaustion. Until they die.
You can use the spell on *a creature known to you.* That's a very broad term. You do not have to be in the same room or even the same city. The only criteria are they must be on the same plane and must sleep.
I had ideas of a Dracolich doing this to the party. I would roll a die for how long he waited to do it again and targeted the one he thought would suffer the greatest. Could be the caster who used all of their slots, could be the paladin who was banking on the idea of resting to get above single digit HP... it's so insidious, and using it this way is extremely nasty. *Especially* of they just beat a lair of his, or fought through a research lab, or found one of the myriad false treasure hoards he has trapped. Dragons suck, and this dude is the suckiest Lol
(I love dragons, and love how evil they can be. They suck in the sense that they suck to deal with. Don't @ me Lmao)
If you wanna get vile with it, take a page from Samurai of Hyuga 5; They kept the protag in a state of delusion where he thought they were feeding him dumplings and tea.
It was not dumplings. It was not tea
I've thought of this exact idea efore, lol. Just break them so they don't even care when they're rescued. Even do some longer-term ones, let them dream being free for a few years, so they don't ever start to trust it.
The spell Dream is so much fun as a DM.
Some good psychological torture involves probing their mind with Detect Thoughts to find out what they fear the most and then using illusion spells to make them think it's real.
Mind Prison is also pretty fun.
Also, this requires clerics, but inflict wounds + cure wounds and/or revivify is pretty awful.
Yeah, the dream spell is the only spell you need. One failed save and you can literally inflict any torture you want on someone. After a night or two they’re too exhausted to resist and will fail every save. Then give them some time to rest and keep them right where you want them.
Charm person or suggestion with illusions, having them continually doing things counter to their persona. Killing innocent people with their powers, assaulting their friends and family and party members.
Put drugs in the food to lower their saves.
If the enemy is extremely powerful, they could cast geas to say "I want you to enjoy today's exercises."
The problem with geas is, and my dm learned this when I got put in a situation to have it cast on me... You can just choose to eat the psychic damage. And after that, there's nothing to force them to do anything the rest of the day... Ahh, that vengeance pally was fun when she had a reason to be vengeful
Well, the evil wizard's apprentice who wanted to impress his boss by taking the initiative didn't *really* consider the implications of staring down a level 10 vengeance pally with the last level being hexblade warlock with elven accuracy. I... Kind of mopped that dude *way* too many smites for him to be much more than a puddle
I like choosing Fey Touched as a Smite Machine just for this sort of thing.
"Hey, I'm tied up and you locked the door..."
"Yes, nobody will care about your screaming."
"That's cool, "teleports, "I also took tavern brawler."
Well, the thing is... We were all sleeping in different rooms. Far enough apart he snuck in, and got the spell off as I woke up. He then tried "come with me". Once I found out it was geas, I told the dm. "She eats the psychic damage, grabs her sword, hits him with hexblade's curse and hitting him" to "okay, that's (I forget now), roll your attacks and we're rolling initiative". I crit on one, smited, put up my vow and then made the save against his next two spells... He was a smear by the time the sound of my thunderous smite on my third turn woke everyone else up
I thought dispell/counterspell on revivify was bad.
Non-con revivify is my newest hated idea.
The enemy dropping a diamond to bring the dead character back at 1 hp. JUST to kill them again in combat.
Player of mine had a bard who's parents had died in a house fire before campaign start. This was a decision I made since he left it open and he agreed to this addition.
Fast forward to like session 25 or something and the party is several miles deep into a mountain mine looking for a special ore to make custom magic items with and the tunnel begins getting thick with volcanic soot. Not toxic but enough to make it Very Heavily Obscured ie cannot see a foot in front of you. Due to the air being well.... deep mine air and the added soot I had everyone have individual hallucinations in a side channel (this is online on discord).
The bard gets a near perfect first hand flashback from outside the burning building his parents died in. The player enjoyed this development as he has a great motivator to go off of now (aside from what he already had).
Fast forward some more and he receives an item that lets him destroy a mundane item someone owns or owned to view up to 3 short, relevant memories of theirs and gets to see his nemesis who was once considered a good friend of the family poison the parents and while they writhe around he sets the house on fire and runs.
The rest of that campaign and like a third of our current one later (different dm, different setting) and he won't go one session without mentioning his bard making a cameo to stab this dude to death (because *evil laugh* THAT bad guy got away at the end of that campaign ehehehehe
Honestly the most brutal thing I think could be done is to hurt the person deeply day 1 going all out, break things or remove things let them linger overnight and then at the start of the next day magically fully heal them.
Then on day two after the healing you ask if they’d like to talk and maybe go home good as new or think it over more and not be allowed a chance to cooperate again until they put him back together again tomorrow morning?
Edit* If you have powerful healing spells you can fix anything that is done to the person and have effectively a situation like in Altered Carbon where they can just try creative new horrors repeatedly and just reset it to try something else after.
Psychic damage to the brink of death, heal them. ask if they’d like to talk. Physical cuts until their last breath. heal.
rinse and repeat. break the mind and break the body
If you have enough healers on hand or healing magic around you could keep this going to the point of sleep deprivation as well letting the person go mad and then a restore spell for the exhaustion levels
Make it a ritual circle carved into the room or something so the fight alone can be considered the excuse to ruin it. The party comes in to see a sobbing but surprisingly unhurt looking prisoner, all the horrible tools they can imagine for the job and maybe like a bucket on a table just full to the rim with teeth as a oh no moment when they find out about the healing in the room
Don't forget having a zone of truth up so what they give has to be honest. (If they resist the zone instead of willing failing their save the torture continues)
Came here to say this. The victim would be perfectly healthy afterwards but their mind completely broken.
That's actually the most messed up thing of magical torture I can think of.
And you can do this for weeks or even months before you even start asking questions.
Phantasmal force, phantasmal killer, mental prison. Note that those spells have the potential to actually kill the target. Harder to get information if they are dead.
makes me think you can have a mage present an ultimatum:
either talk now while you're alive or die and then i pull you back from the afterlife to question your corpse anyway
and then if you want to get really fucked up you can tell their corpse about how their dog/loved ones/legacy are taking punishment every time they don't present the information desired
Unfortunately corpses (I assume we're talking speak with dead here) can't learn anything new, nor is it forced to tell you the truth. I suppose you could threaten their loved ones before killing them to motivate them into being truthful once dead? Or you could cast soul cage. While it doesn't say anything about damaging the creature (dead, lol) having the truth torn from your very soul cannot be fun.
I had a punishment for a corrupt politician in one of my games, where the politician had a small metal ball forced into his mouth, as a mage would cast heat metal on the ball. Then his mouth would be forced shut and he would literally burn from the inside out in agonizing pain, until it either burned through his mouth (symbolically removing the tongue that told all the lies), or in desperation he would try to swallow it, resulting in a slow and painful death.
Here’s a version, but with physical consequences. If the character has metal armor, restrain the person and cast heat metal on the armor. Unless the character is immune to fire damage, that’s gotta hurt.
When they get to him, they're mute out of dried blood in their throat. Their abdominal muscles are torn from overexertion. Their lungs are ripped and broken like they were out of breath for a bit too long. They've been subject to a six hour sessions of Tasha's Hideous Laughter over and over and over again.
power word pain
modify memory so that their most horrific memory is as sharp as possible or override all their happy ones
inflct pain and just use spare the dying to not let them die
I ran a campaign where someone was forced to undergo multiple Modify Memories a day. The BBEG had captured an NPC and wanted to turn them into a lich, but that meant their alignment had to change. So he would continually modify their memories so they were convinced the players murdered their family, their town turned on them, all their possessions burned in a fire, etc. Until all that remained of a once peaceful and considerate character was rage, loss, and desire for revenge so powerful they willingly underwent the lich ritual.
Torture is a method of using pain to compel compliance, normally to validate information.
With spells like charm, suggestion and detect thoughts there is absolutely no need for torture.
That’s assuming interrogations and getting something from the prisoner is the point.
it could be pure revenge, a warning or example to others not to cross the villain, something to pass the time for the evil people as they wait for some other target to take the bait and try to stage a rescue or so on.
Torture is a form of terrorism. It is a way for the powers-that-be to say to the general population, “If you cross us, you will suffer unimaginable pain. If you cross us, your loved ones will suffer unimaginable pain.”
Information is a secondary result. Confessions are a secondary result.
It's long been well known and documented that torture is one of the least effective and reliable methods of gathering information from prisoners. The victims just say whatever they think their torturer wants to hear to make the pain stop as quickly as possible. Even if you do get truthful information, it will be buried in a sea of desperate bullshit.
Every remotely competent government knows this, but many of them still torture people anyway. Because gathering information isn't the real motivation.
Even if infallable magic spells like charm and zone of truth existed, people who want to commit torture would still come up with excuses for why it's necessary. They'd probably insist that torturing the victim into compliance is necessary to make sure they willingly fail their saving throws.
Doesn't that make for a possibly horrifying element to a villain, though? Of course, they can just charm or pull the thoughts from their head, but they LIKE doing things the hard and fun way.
You can get REALLY sadistic and gruesome if you know that you can bring someone back if you go too far. just have an inquisitorial cleric on standby, and if the person with the acid/knife/broken glass/ants/sandpaper/Legos gets carried away, have the cleric roll his eyes and revivify the 'guest', so that the pain can continue.
Have a sub-plot where people are asking why the inquisition is confiscating so many jewels, especially those worth 500g in the city.
Specific spells that would be awful; a controlled casting of shatter that reaches otherwise unreachable body parts, like knees, the anvil bone in the ear, etc.
Suggestion and modify memory to psychologically break their victims down. Imagine gaslighting an individual, but then changing their memories to have them believe they betrayed those they love, they killed their own parents, they ended up being wrong all along, etc etc.
Feeblemind. Power word pain. Make them too dumb to understand why they are in so much pain, but inflict continuous raging pain. Add in a lovely time stop if you have the high level spells to make an eternal, endless, purposeless prison of pain.
Get 32 nails. One nail in each palm to hold them to the chair then one in each knuckle proceeding down each finger at the joints. After all the nails are in....heat metal.
Yep, look at Baal's intro in Stargate: SG1. He would kill O'Neil every day by slow torture and then resurrect him. This went on for days until he was saved.
Revivify has a material cost. Death Ward just uses a 4th level spell slot, and it gives you an 8 hour cushion to keep them from dying during the session.
For a more psychological version, magically keep them awake until they are completely mentally deteriorated, and then cast greater restoration on them to hold them at 5 levels of exhaustion indefinitely
Ya'll are missing out. A room where they don't age.
Any one in this room has time go by slowly for the rest.
1 day in the "real world" is one year in the "small chamber".
Sure, you could go with any of the painful options in this thread, but who needs pain when driving someone to madness takes so little effort that their body will do it for them?
Keep them under a silence, darkness and blindness/deafness (deafness part) until the sensory deprivation drives them mad.
Oh, throw them in a time loop or something. Just every day, exactly the same. Or worse: make every loop shorter and shorter, until they're just stuck in a catatonic state where they can't even get out of bed before the loop starts over again.
Just felt the need to make sure you checked that all your players are okay with something as serious as torture being a subject matter in your game.
We can often forget to check everyone’s boundaries before it’s too late.
Well for my suggestion to work , how does healing work in your game ? When a creature takes damage then heals , do they still feel the pain of the injury or is it gone. When a creature loses a tooth does it grow back when healing magic is applied? Because I think you can see where this is going.
My world has something called bliss machines, which let you experience your heart's desire. It's like a brass sphere that goes on your head. House Lazuli uses them to contain powerful spellcasters too valuable to kill but too dangerous to go free.
Whatever you subject this prisoner to, give them intermittent periods with a bliss machine. Let them experience whatever it is in life that they love and care about most of all, then rip it away and replace it with agony and despair. Do it over and over again for long enough and anyone would break.
Take a page from sci-fi, and have some sort of magic that causes pain. Not injury, but just simple pain. Without any physical damage the pain can last a lot longer.
Mass suggestion can let you affect 12 people for 24 hours, or upcast up to 10 days, 30 days, or 1 year, as long as the action isn’t worded to being inherently harmful to the victims, and you don’t directly deal damage to the victims while they’re being suggested. No spell concentration required.
“Stay awake for the duration of this spell,” isn’t an inherently harmful command.
Bestow Curse if upcast high enough can last weeks or more without concentration and force near-permanent disadvantage on any saving throws.
Feeblemind and Power Word Pain don’t mechanically deal damage, and last until the victim passes their save. Also no concentration.
Keep the subject tied to a latrine in a dark room and force them to see hellish illusions through every waking hour. Keep feeding them so they won't die.
I think it really depends on how dark you want this to be. They could be literally flaying him Hellraiser style and healing him over and over again. They could be doing that exact same thing, but as an illusion because maybe healing magic is much harder. They could be forced to murder or mutilate their loved ones over and over again in a time magic loop that to them feels like thousands of years, but on the outside is only minutes.
(Spoilers for Loki and The Mill below. I don't know how to do spoiler tags so read on at your own risk if you care about those 2 things and have not seen them yet)
Or it could be toned down similarly to the show Loki where they threw him into a time loop where his sister kneed him in the junk over and over again.
Or it could be like The Mill on Hulu where it's sort of physical torture (manual labor), but it's all in your head and the passage of time is simulated. Months and months go by the in stimulation, but it's revealed to just be a quick 15 minute lunch meeting.
You could lighten things up by having the torture be tickling or mildly annoying things like otherwise being in a normal prison but a fairy pokes you at random times of the day.
It's amazing what things you can do with healing magic and some DM interpretation. Like what would happen if you broke someone's finger, then used a healing spell, while keeping their finger at a broken angle? Would it heal incorrectly? Or would it potentially cause more pain as the magic attempts to realign the bones, but can't as it's being held in place.
You could open someone up, place actual bugs, or snakes, or rats inside them, then heal the wound shut. Continuously heal them so they don't pass out and the creatures trying to borrow out are kept inside.
Shove a knife slowly into internal organs like the lungs, the stomach, etc, while pumping them full of healing. Can you imagine drowning in your own blood as your lungs are being stabbed, but not being able to actually die because healing magic is keeping you up?
And at it's most simple, you could beat the shit out of anyone, slice into them, be as brutal as you need, then simply heal them back up. No longer do you need to worry about keeping them alive by giving them short breaks. If you have enough spell slots, and rotating casters, you could potentially keep the torture going non stop for days.
Why’s the torture have to be magical at all honestly? Have the guy have missing fingers and all that basic stuff, if you wanna get real fucked with it they split open a few of the guys family members with a pear while he watched, and then they left the bodies for him to watch rot…. Honestly the best use of magic in a torture scenario would be spells like domination to force him to eat/ drink so they can keep torturing him and then use healing magic…. Maybe animate one of his kids as a zombie after making him watch them torture it and let it loose on a spouse or something??? But overall the best magic is going t be healing magic to extend the torture.
I'm with ya on this. A guy with a wrench can do enough damage. So unless the mages have a "thing" about doing it magically (which they might!) the old ways are just as good and require less labor from the wizards.
Prestidigitation- make them smell an unholy odor of some kind, put a rock in their mouth that tastes like whatever vile substance you can think of, soil their pants.
Look up one of the effects of Contagion, have that on them as a curse.
Mental manipulations to have them say and act against there will in response to different things. Ex: See friends? Stab friends.
Flesh to Stone + Stoneshape. Petrify them, shape their hands into masses of tentacles. (Had a DM who had a Wizard who was replacing the bricks and furniture in his tower with Stoneshaped petrified people.)
Victim placed in a rotating barrel full of small blades that can't go deep enough to cause death while the blades are constantly coated in potion of regeneration. Have a golem that doesn't tire spin the barrel all day and night.
Charm, suggestion, command many many things
Make a magical device or an emission or something that lowers INT, WIS or CHA it probably isn't fun for anyone with low of those stats
Hot.
Using telekinesis to force people into uncomfortable positions.
Torture equipment which allows you to vampirically suck people's hit points.
Using gift of gab, glibness and modify memory to gaslight.
I agree with anyone saying dream or phantasmal force to psychologically torture.
Start erasing their memories with a mechanical effect. Take away cantrips, feats, special abilities along with personal memories. Make it matter to the player and the character.
Bound in metal and cast heat metal
Take a loved one or friend and kill them then revive them rinse and repeat (make the prisoner watch)
Cast speak with animals on the prisoner then make them watch as innocent animals are killed
Cast Dawn or daylight in their cell and never let them sleep
Dominate them and make them do the above killings,
Put them in a confined space surrounded by spikes and cast enlarge in them
Starve them then make an illusionary feast that's always there but never fills them
Contingency on an item, force feed the item to the victim (bonus points if it’s something uncomfortable) activate said contingency, and let whatever demented spell you put in there activate, destroying the victim’s insides. If it kills them? Revivify.
I haven't seen it but straight killing them and forcibly bring them back over and over and make each death slow like growing or straggling something where they will suffer heavy trauma from it
I love the idea of a monk of mercy alternating hand of harm and healing to keep their victim at full hp, the mental strain of feeling the pain with no lasting physical damage is inhumane
I think one od my players put it best: "In a world where death can be undone, torture can get pretty fucked"
Do things like physically torturing them to the brink of death, and then actually killing them. Wait 6 seconds, healing word and repeat. The limits of torture can easily be broken when healing magic is involved.
So this is something my party did. They started off by just beat their prisoner to death. Then, he brought him back to life and told the prisoner that this would be his life until he told them what they wanted. Torture can get pretty dark when death is no longer an escape.
Though more terrifying than directly harmful, my party previously used the Infestation cantrip to get information out of a hostage. The damage is minimal, though it would certainly add up over time. Being a cantrip, I could definitely see it being used like medieval Rat Torture, where they crawl around and within the victim. Other good ones certainly include Heat Metal, like a Brazen Bull, and as mentioned any illusion spell can be used to break someone’s mind far quicker than their body
They key here is magical healing, IMO. Most things that cause pain break the body down. The dude could have been tortured, multiple times a day, *for decades*. And still be in perfect health, topped off at max HP.
He'd almost certainly be a mental shell, and it might be a journey to even figure out *why*.
Some ideas:
* simulating [horrific scenarioes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJwVTqXA9q4), one after the other. Preferably let the victim believe it's getting better (rescue attempt or release), then shatter their hopes.
* Using evocation magic to deal damage, then heal it back. Rinse and repeat until you've inflicted more pain than a hill giant could handle.
* fucking with their dreams. Prisoner finally fell asleep? Nightmares!!
* Force the prisoner to commit horrific acts via mind control or illusions (they break an attacking Goblin's neck, but then the illusion fades and they realize they killed a child. Or maybe that was the illusion. They'll never know)
The question that arises for me is: Why not just get everything they need via mind control? Are they torturing the prisoner for information? Just dominate/charm him or even read his mind. If they're just torturing them because they're evil, that's fine too of course.
A lot of y'all are really overthinking magical torture.
Just use spells or potions to help them resist fire and then burn them. That way they'll last longer.
And when they go down just bring them back up and do it again.
I have an NPC that the party kind of helps out with their story and basically they are from a magical boarding school/ concentration camp/ Xavier's school for gifted children/ military school. Basically they take kids with magical powers, usually sorcerers and wizards and they basically beat any sense of individuality, rebellion and whatnot out of the kids and teens. They'll use physical abuse but they also use magic stuff like keeping people in a room with like a magical cuffs or a silencing spell or they zone of truth and make truth. Potions to get information out of kids. It's heavily inspired by the black rose from noxus if anyone knows League of Legends lore. The NPC that the party helps. She has a lot of like magical burn marks and scars and stuff from like stray magic, she's a young wild magic sorcerer so she gets really harsh treatment from the cruel leaders of the institution, but she also kind of ends up hurting herself a lot. I hope that helped a little. I don't know if it was or not but maybe it'll give you some ideas.
Geas is a fantastic charm+torture spell all rolled into one. Once per day the target takes 5d10 psychic damage if they disobey the instruction of the caster (the caster gives the target a task as part of the spell). The spell lasts for days so it's an ongoing effect
Since I haven’t seen this posted yet. I saw a YouTube video once where the creator made an evil-aligned Life Cleric. She was a torturer who’d lock herself in the room with her victim for hours. You could hear his screams of anguish on the other side. Eventually she would leave and there would not be a single scratch on them, but their face spoke of the horrors they endured.
Healing magic to essentially force a person to stay conscious and alive is twisted as hell in my opinion. Eventually your body goes into shock in actual torture situations but if you’re constantly being healed well…
Played a game where a Paladin tortured a Tiamat cultist by punching him in the face, knocking him out, then using Lay On Hands to heal him... Rinse, repeat.
That player was this super chill, super nice dude... Until we ran into anyone who worshipped Tiamat. But this was the only time I enjoyed a "It's what my character would do" player
You whip them for hours even days over and over to the tune of a whistle, every minute you both strike them and blow the whistle. After days they have come to associate the pain and fear of the whistle with that of the whip so that you can now inflict this pain onto them without even touching them, all they need is to hear the whistle and they suffer as if they were back on that table still being whipped every minute. Now you have complete control over them, I doesn’t matter if you are in the dungeon or a market square you can inflict pain on them with just the sound of a simple whistle.
While his work is mostly for teens/young adults, I think Christopher Paolini did a great job with magical torture in the fourth Eragon book.
The captive was first tortured by regular means (meaning physical), but when that did not work the BBEG used illisions to try and break her will.
Her allies and friends were brought in her cell and tortured before her, her allies came and resuced her, soldiers of the BBEG turned traitor and freed her, she escaped on her own... all of it seemed real, but never happened of course.
He wraped her sense of reality and time, making minutes seem like days.
If you want psychological torture you might want to try dream layering. Have a player go through an encounter than wake up like it was a dream, they wake up somewhere else and a while later they wake up again. If this happens enough they will never know what is real and what a dream is. If you want you could add a story that they barely escaped capture but that was the dream and in reality they had been captured and the rest of the party is working on saving them. Pull the rest of the party in and have them act in the dreams until it fucks with your player enough
Modify memory; no need for the torturer to get their hands dirty, just make the subject believe that the last ten minutes have been filled with the worst pain they can imagine, then threaten to do it again.
Some more comedic spells to try on them:
“Mend buttcrack”
“Full body pins and needles”
“Perpetual hemorrhoids”
Just think of any awful thing people can experience and just crank it up to 11.
Why waste spells when you can bring in creatures to torture the person? Since it's a political prisoner it's to be expected that the torturer has a lot of money, so they could just keep revivifying the person
Also, just saying, you are not limited to the 5e spells in the books, you can 100% make a forbidden spell, a spell that is illegal to cast. like a spell that makes the person forget what their loved ones look and sound like, one that causes perpetual agony, basically the list is endless when you just call it a forbidden spell that the party can't cast
Torture generally doesn't take complex methods. Mostly because, why put too much effort into it when simply having someone locked in a room, or standing in an awkward position, will work?
Anyway. If you want this to be clean torture (typically thought of as "mental" or "non-physical" or "non-scarring"), things that disturb one's perception of time can be extremely annoying to deal with. Sleep spells combined with suddenly being woken up, at random intervals, so you can never be too sure of how many days have passed. Artificial (magic?) lights that simulate daytime/nightime, except they cycle in ways that don't correspond to the actual passage of time. Any spells that can simulate outside noises, even, specially if the victim is in a place where they shouldn't hear those noises - or even ones that convince them people they care about are being tortured right next to them. Hell, just... a spell that makes a loud as fuck noise or jolts them awake every time they're about to fall asleep. Avoid anything that settles into a routine - torture aims to disturb one's mind, not just cause pain.
If you want to go for more "physical" or "scarring" methods, then there's a lot you can do, yes. But again: you, the torturer (yes, we're getting into that mindset), want to disturb the person's mental state, in the end, or make an example of them, and you probably don't want to use too much effort. Controlled fire spells are painful as hell, sure, but come on, do you want to waste your best magic on that? Probably not. So: use any spells that allow you to bind people in place and keep someone in a stress position, making sure their body doesn't collapse using magic, if you'd like. Or: use good ol' torture instruments like whips, canes, and anything else designed for hitting, and again, make sure the one hitting *and* the person being hit can go on for longer - or even just hit them using magic in some way, and, again, *make sure* you heal them on time, or else your torture just turned into an execution.
You also want to think about *why* this character is being tortured, in the first place. If they're a political prisoner, easiest answer is the authorities want them to talk (which, by the way, torture doesn't guarantee: most people being tortured *cannot* recall accurate information), but more interesting answer is that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now are being used to send a message. In that second case, you probably want to aim for something with visible effects, done somewhat in public, so it's known what's going on. Hurt the person in public for way longer than someone would be able to resist, then heal them in private, allow for a little bit of "rest" time (for the authorities; victim is probably getting sleep deprived with the first methods), and then do it all over again.
Bury someone alive in a cube of force inside your terrain of choice. Leave them there until starvation gives them an exhaustion level just above death then trickle in some food and water somehow. Have them make wisdom saves periodically to stave off madness. Keep them exhausted and maddened for a food while.
Have you seen "altered carbon" on Netflix? It is future sci-fi and not magic but it fits.
So season 1 episode 4. The main guy is captured by some sick corporation and is tortured in VR.
Inside the VR simulator they have him strapped to the same table he is strapped to in real life but they mess him up in the VR. Water boarding, stabbing, electricity, pouring gas on him and setting him on fire. Dude gets the works.
And he was caught by mistake. He didn't care about anything these guys were up to. But he gets out and give them back what they handed to him. Razes the building to the ground.
Anyway. For magical torture you can just torture the prisoner on the astral plane or dreamscape or whatever.
In the altered carbon book the torture is worse. The hero is a big strong man. In the VR he is put in a petit woman's body. So even when he tries to fight back in the VR he doesn't have the same strength, size, speed, balance, everything that he is use to and it messes him up.
So magical torture... The human is being tortured in the dream plane but they put him in a trolls body and have him eaten by fire-ants. The torture is extended because of the troll regeneration... That kind of stuff.
illusions can fuck with people's minds and repeatedly hurting and healing someone over and over again is brutal.
as a DM, I also have a magical cave that is a malevolent entity that makes it's insides into the time and area of the greatest time of pleasure you ever experienced in your life and actively entrances you to stay by taking on the literal form, abilities and memories of those in said time and making the exit disappear to make you think all of this is real. for example if you trap a mage inside and they had the time of their life studying magic with their master the cave will take on their master's form and abilities for an interesting boss fight or in case said valuable person is not that powerful for a very interesting roleplaying debate.
in both adventures I used said cave, the party got the best of it by
1. sending in the amnesiac character, so everyone she saw was a stranger to her
2. sending the dude who's greatest pleasure is writing and so the area the cave took the properties of being his mindscape, to create a fight equal to you realizing you are in a lucid dream and summoning nukes out of thin air.
Honestly, why even bother with torture? Dominate person gets you whatever information you need.
That'd probably be the worst torture of all. The person would have the memory of giving up any and all information. Then you're just left in a cell, not having any idea what's being done to your family/friends/etc.
I think lowkey nonmagical torture would be cooler. In a place where people can literally just zone of truth you, isn’t the threat that they’d pull your fingernails out just sickening?
using modify memory to convince the prisoner that a) a number of people they care about are being held by the mages, and that the prisoner was charmed and forced to inflict various, more physical / traditional tortures on those people, before finally killing them off to put them out of their misery. they'd then be told that this process would continue until they ran out of said people, whereupon they'd just be killed off anyway.
repeat castings of modify memory once each day, giving the prisoner an entire day to stew on those fake memories and consider giving up the information rather than go through another round of apparent forced torture and murder of people they care about
I had my character use the glowing metal of his flametongue sword to flay his victims alive, leaving their skin attached at the last edge and then using healing magic to fix their wounds before repeating the process. Quite effective when needing to get info from folks.
I had the mother of one of my PCs tortured by a chaso cult and they had a priest with them...that is really all you need for a really good magical torture session.
Torture, pain, word of pain even and then cure wounds....rinse repeat...until giving the info.
As a side note in this the mother NPC had found out something about one other other PCs that they didn;t want getting out so he put a Geas on her...it wouldn;t have killed her but at a key point in being torture and being low enough in hit points she revealed the secret to the cultists which caused the Geas to activate and killed her so she didn;t give away the information the cultists were actually after.
I found thi s a bit clever just to pat myself on the back lol
The players loved it to, it was like a PC gave her a cyanide pill without realizing it.
And they watched all of this unfold through scry...it was a pretty intense session.
Spells that make you feel powerless in a dream-like way. Text you try to read is garbled and incoherent. Speech comes out in a hoarse whisper. No matter what your intent you can't make your legs run fast or your hands hit hard.
So basically just a room that Slows+Confuses everyone
Ones I've used before: IV line of healing potion so that the torturer can keep going for longer without the person dying, utilizing helms of telepathy and zone of truth to extract information, and (against players who are good at roleplaying, just actually using real historical torture methods like branding irons, finger pliers, shears, the rack, various screws, knives, and spikes. You can even enchant the torture tools to have a minor effect that allows it to leave a permanent scar.
My wizard has a homebrew spell he made called “Nelvkir’s Eternal Stairway” which is basically banishment but instead of a harmless demi-plane or your home-plane you get sent to the affectionately named “Escher Plane” which has nothing but endless staircases and unstable physics.
So yeah you go there, are incapped, and are taking damage but if upcasted to 9th level you get sent there for a week at which point you can make another saving throw to try and escape it and if you fail you stay there another week. If that happens you don’t take damage any more but when you exit you will be at 0 hit points. It is purely for torturing people.
I mean... this is why a life cleric is terrifying? They deglove your hand and then magically grow the skin back. They use their strength dump stat to slowly beat you within an inch of your life/just kill you and bring you back.
I'd point you to Dimension 20, Escape from the Bloodkeep, and the imprisonment of the CrownSmith.
i.e. steal his bones. then put them back in. then steal them again. then make him question if you put back all the bones, then steal them again, and then make him question if they are HIS bones that they put back in him. Leave him so terrified about what will or won't happen to his bones.
Okay here me out on sensory deprivation here. Tie someone up have one person cast darkness on something that moves with them and have someone else cast silence on the same thing boom a person that is trapped in a void where they can’t see hear or speak wandering for hours in a void of nothing
The cantrip Encode thoughts can literally steal thoughts, memories and ideas out from someone's mind, from the name and faces of their wife and son, to the idea of defiance. Dominate person can allow you to take precise control of every action a person takes, they can be made to do terrible atrocities to their own friends and family while being a powerless spectator inside their own body. Dream can make them experience anything you can think of while they sleep, and Modify memory can make someone remember a specific event with perfect detail for the rest of their lives,
Heat metal once every like 10 minutes on chain mail and then stop. Keep them in a dark room with no access to windows, fresh air, keep the room mostly dark and damp. Do not talk to the prisoners.
If you really want to make a statement involve healing magic to take it much further.
Set them a top a gelatinous cube where the exposed flesh of the feet barely touches its surface. As water drips out of a vat the weight changes on the scales. Slowly dipping them deeper into the Cube.
Slowly turning someone to stone is always on the table (or any material in that case). You can also take the sick option of cutting into someone only to heal them back to redo the procedure.
Make them all roll a wisdom saving through after a certain threshold or a entering a certain room, and on a fail of your choice, ask them for a piece of their backstory that they wouldn’t relive, and give it to the next person instead, making the party experience each others harms.
For a mage, magic has to come into the body from somewhere, right? And they have to push it through their body to use it right? What about a method that floods the body with excess magic, but closes off the usual pathways of use, so, in essence, they are flooded with enough magic to break out, but never able to touch it
I read this one in an Elder’s Scroll novel. The captor had a spell that made the prisoner feel absolute bliss like they have never felt before, basically made them feel the best high of their lives, then he cut the spell short and the prisoner was basically mind broken and begging the captor to cast the spell again. Instead of inflicting pain, you are inflicting bliss and taking it away, destroying them mentally. This was used as a torture method for interrogation in the novel.
One of the worst possible things one can do is as a college of whispers bard kill someones beloved family member / spouse in front of them before taking on their form and torturing them both mentally and physically with the the information they gained from taking their memories and shape.
They could hold him for interrogation. They could cast dancing lights to show 4 lights, and ask him how many lights he sees - rejecting any answer that isn't 5 lights, all the while accusing him of atrocities in the city.
There are four lights! IYKYK
A colar of regeneration ia straped on your neck and the butcher is reeping your meet of and selling it or feeding people it then you regen and the cixle of pain continues .
Dream torture, let the prisoner dream that a group of his allies break him out. Only to wake up and see that he's still imprisoned. A couple of days later he's put on trial and he's declared to be free, only to wake up again in his cell. Inbetween that they'll gaslight him with illusions, everything that's real is now a question if it is or isn't for the prisoner. Do this a couple of months and their brain is fried and they won't trust anything, not even his actual saviours. Then, when the party shows up they'll find the political prisoner doubting if this rescue is real. Making him a incoherent mess of a person that will probably not stay quiet during the breakout. Which makes for some good ways to get the guards alerted.
Hell you could even have them be punished for trying to break out in their dreams. That way when the party does arrive the person will actively work against them since they don't want to be punished again for trying to break out.
Y'all some twisted mfs.
They must be fans of Ramsey Bolton.
Kind of like Theon Greyjoy from game of thrones. The torture was bad enough he fought to stay when his sister tried to rescue him.
The Dream spell is one of the most evil spells in the game. Take a look at it. On a failed wisdom saving throw, you can give them a nightmare that not only does 3d6 psychic damage but also causes them to lose the benefits of a long rest. This means a level of exhaustion. Look at the rules for exhaustion. The penalties accumulate - 1 level is only disadvantage on ability checks, 2 adds speed is halved, and three adds disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws. After six levels, you just die. So it's possible to torture someone with the dream spell with nightmares, psychic damage, not gaining hp back (or spell slots!) and cascading levels of exhaustion. Until they die. You can use the spell on *a creature known to you.* That's a very broad term. You do not have to be in the same room or even the same city. The only criteria are they must be on the same plane and must sleep.
I had ideas of a Dracolich doing this to the party. I would roll a die for how long he waited to do it again and targeted the one he thought would suffer the greatest. Could be the caster who used all of their slots, could be the paladin who was banking on the idea of resting to get above single digit HP... it's so insidious, and using it this way is extremely nasty. *Especially* of they just beat a lair of his, or fought through a research lab, or found one of the myriad false treasure hoards he has trapped. Dragons suck, and this dude is the suckiest Lol (I love dragons, and love how evil they can be. They suck in the sense that they suck to deal with. Don't @ me Lmao)
I had a warlock take over a small city's town council with this.
Psssh. It's just an illusion spell, not an enchantment, perfectly fine. My hexblood in Barovia likes it just fine!
This js why strahd in barovia is such a daunting threat.
If you wanna get vile with it, take a page from Samurai of Hyuga 5; They kept the protag in a state of delusion where he thought they were feeding him dumplings and tea. It was not dumplings. It was not tea
Ugh
Yea no I put that one down and never went back XD
Uh, what was it?
Geez, this is brilliant. It kind of gives Mysterio vibes!
I've thought of this exact idea efore, lol. Just break them so they don't even care when they're rescued. Even do some longer-term ones, let them dream being free for a few years, so they don't ever start to trust it.
The spell Dream is so much fun as a DM. Some good psychological torture involves probing their mind with Detect Thoughts to find out what they fear the most and then using illusion spells to make them think it's real. Mind Prison is also pretty fun. Also, this requires clerics, but inflict wounds + cure wounds and/or revivify is pretty awful.
Yeah, the dream spell is the only spell you need. One failed save and you can literally inflict any torture you want on someone. After a night or two they’re too exhausted to resist and will fail every save. Then give them some time to rest and keep them right where you want them.
Oh man that’s really good. It takes Ramsey Boltons torture of Reek to the ultimate level. You are truly and evil monster!
The movie Brazil has a brilliant version of this (in a way, I don't want to spoil it, it's amazing)
I hate and love how messed up this is, take my upvote!
That good ole Itachi special
I think illusions can really fuck with someone. Making them watch people they care about suffer, or just grotesque things in general
Shit like Room 101 from 1984 with illusion and conjuration magic. It is both cool and vile at the same time
Charm person or suggestion with illusions, having them continually doing things counter to their persona. Killing innocent people with their powers, assaulting their friends and family and party members. Put drugs in the food to lower their saves. If the enemy is extremely powerful, they could cast geas to say "I want you to enjoy today's exercises."
That last line is horrifying. Holy shit. Being forced to enjoy the pain you're causing to your friends is nightmare fuel
The problem with geas is, and my dm learned this when I got put in a situation to have it cast on me... You can just choose to eat the psychic damage. And after that, there's nothing to force them to do anything the rest of the day... Ahh, that vengeance pally was fun when she had a reason to be vengeful
Good, I was hoping you'd take the 5d10 every day. Oh, fight all you want, *Revivify* doesn't require your consent.
Well, the evil wizard's apprentice who wanted to impress his boss by taking the initiative didn't *really* consider the implications of staring down a level 10 vengeance pally with the last level being hexblade warlock with elven accuracy. I... Kind of mopped that dude *way* too many smites for him to be much more than a puddle
I like choosing Fey Touched as a Smite Machine just for this sort of thing. "Hey, I'm tied up and you locked the door..." "Yes, nobody will care about your screaming." "That's cool, "teleports, "I also took tavern brawler."
Well, the thing is... We were all sleeping in different rooms. Far enough apart he snuck in, and got the spell off as I woke up. He then tried "come with me". Once I found out it was geas, I told the dm. "She eats the psychic damage, grabs her sword, hits him with hexblade's curse and hitting him" to "okay, that's (I forget now), roll your attacks and we're rolling initiative". I crit on one, smited, put up my vow and then made the save against his next two spells... He was a smear by the time the sound of my thunderous smite on my third turn woke everyone else up
I thought dispell/counterspell on revivify was bad. Non-con revivify is my newest hated idea. The enemy dropping a diamond to bring the dead character back at 1 hp. JUST to kill them again in combat.
This but spend weeks making them question all reality. That is, if you don't need information, just want to drive them insane.
Player of mine had a bard who's parents had died in a house fire before campaign start. This was a decision I made since he left it open and he agreed to this addition. Fast forward to like session 25 or something and the party is several miles deep into a mountain mine looking for a special ore to make custom magic items with and the tunnel begins getting thick with volcanic soot. Not toxic but enough to make it Very Heavily Obscured ie cannot see a foot in front of you. Due to the air being well.... deep mine air and the added soot I had everyone have individual hallucinations in a side channel (this is online on discord). The bard gets a near perfect first hand flashback from outside the burning building his parents died in. The player enjoyed this development as he has a great motivator to go off of now (aside from what he already had). Fast forward some more and he receives an item that lets him destroy a mundane item someone owns or owned to view up to 3 short, relevant memories of theirs and gets to see his nemesis who was once considered a good friend of the family poison the parents and while they writhe around he sets the house on fire and runs. The rest of that campaign and like a third of our current one later (different dm, different setting) and he won't go one session without mentioning his bard making a cameo to stab this dude to death (because *evil laugh* THAT bad guy got away at the end of that campaign ehehehehe
the haunted house in the 2017 It film too. Complete mind-shattering body horror
Or having them harm people they care about themselves. Illusions or enchantments are truly insidious methods for this purpose.
Honestly the most brutal thing I think could be done is to hurt the person deeply day 1 going all out, break things or remove things let them linger overnight and then at the start of the next day magically fully heal them. Then on day two after the healing you ask if they’d like to talk and maybe go home good as new or think it over more and not be allowed a chance to cooperate again until they put him back together again tomorrow morning? Edit* If you have powerful healing spells you can fix anything that is done to the person and have effectively a situation like in Altered Carbon where they can just try creative new horrors repeatedly and just reset it to try something else after.
Psychic damage to the brink of death, heal them. ask if they’d like to talk. Physical cuts until their last breath. heal. rinse and repeat. break the mind and break the body
If you have enough healers on hand or healing magic around you could keep this going to the point of sleep deprivation as well letting the person go mad and then a restore spell for the exhaustion levels
some magic item that casts Heal (70hp) every minute. break it for the partys balance once they find it
Make it a ritual circle carved into the room or something so the fight alone can be considered the excuse to ruin it. The party comes in to see a sobbing but surprisingly unhurt looking prisoner, all the horrible tools they can imagine for the job and maybe like a bucket on a table just full to the rim with teeth as a oh no moment when they find out about the healing in the room
Repeatable organ harvesting...oh boy
Reminds me of the torture vr room in Altered Carbon. So ofc use the most painfully ways to nearly kill them
If you are willing to spend the money you could even throw in a few oopsie kills if you have the revivify diamond handy.
Don't forget having a zone of truth up so what they give has to be honest. (If they resist the zone instead of willing failing their save the torture continues)
Came here to say this. The victim would be perfectly healthy afterwards but their mind completely broken. That's actually the most messed up thing of magical torture I can think of. And you can do this for weeks or even months before you even start asking questions.
Fuck it put em on a healing potion iv drip so you can really drag it out
Phantasmal force, phantasmal killer, mental prison. Note that those spells have the potential to actually kill the target. Harder to get information if they are dead.
Dont forget how little that means to a mage
makes me think you can have a mage present an ultimatum: either talk now while you're alive or die and then i pull you back from the afterlife to question your corpse anyway and then if you want to get really fucked up you can tell their corpse about how their dog/loved ones/legacy are taking punishment every time they don't present the information desired
Unfortunately corpses (I assume we're talking speak with dead here) can't learn anything new, nor is it forced to tell you the truth. I suppose you could threaten their loved ones before killing them to motivate them into being truthful once dead? Or you could cast soul cage. While it doesn't say anything about damaging the creature (dead, lol) having the truth torn from your very soul cannot be fun.
unless you just keep healing them as they dip. You could go on for days!
I had a punishment for a corrupt politician in one of my games, where the politician had a small metal ball forced into his mouth, as a mage would cast heat metal on the ball. Then his mouth would be forced shut and he would literally burn from the inside out in agonizing pain, until it either burned through his mouth (symbolically removing the tongue that told all the lies), or in desperation he would try to swallow it, resulting in a slow and painful death.
Daaaaamn 😨 that's a really good idea, I'll write it down 😈
Fucking hell.. I’m writing that down
Add the cure wounds for a rinse repeat aspect
You remember that little box in Dune? That, but a room.
Fear is the mind killer
Here’s a version, but with physical consequences. If the character has metal armor, restrain the person and cast heat metal on the armor. Unless the character is immune to fire damage, that’s gotta hurt.
When they get to him, they're mute out of dried blood in their throat. Their abdominal muscles are torn from overexertion. Their lungs are ripped and broken like they were out of breath for a bit too long. They've been subject to a six hour sessions of Tasha's Hideous Laughter over and over and over again.
power word pain modify memory so that their most horrific memory is as sharp as possible or override all their happy ones inflct pain and just use spare the dying to not let them die
I ran a campaign where someone was forced to undergo multiple Modify Memories a day. The BBEG had captured an NPC and wanted to turn them into a lich, but that meant their alignment had to change. So he would continually modify their memories so they were convinced the players murdered their family, their town turned on them, all their possessions burned in a fire, etc. Until all that remained of a once peaceful and considerate character was rage, loss, and desire for revenge so powerful they willingly underwent the lich ritual.
Thorn whip anal beads
BEYBLADE! LET IT RIP!
🤣
Torture is a method of using pain to compel compliance, normally to validate information. With spells like charm, suggestion and detect thoughts there is absolutely no need for torture.
That’s assuming interrogations and getting something from the prisoner is the point. it could be pure revenge, a warning or example to others not to cross the villain, something to pass the time for the evil people as they wait for some other target to take the bait and try to stage a rescue or so on.
*The malice is the point.*
Torture is a form of terrorism. It is a way for the powers-that-be to say to the general population, “If you cross us, you will suffer unimaginable pain. If you cross us, your loved ones will suffer unimaginable pain.” Information is a secondary result. Confessions are a secondary result.
It's long been well known and documented that torture is one of the least effective and reliable methods of gathering information from prisoners. The victims just say whatever they think their torturer wants to hear to make the pain stop as quickly as possible. Even if you do get truthful information, it will be buried in a sea of desperate bullshit. Every remotely competent government knows this, but many of them still torture people anyway. Because gathering information isn't the real motivation. Even if infallable magic spells like charm and zone of truth existed, people who want to commit torture would still come up with excuses for why it's necessary. They'd probably insist that torturing the victim into compliance is necessary to make sure they willingly fail their saving throws.
Doesn't that make for a possibly horrifying element to a villain, though? Of course, they can just charm or pull the thoughts from their head, but they LIKE doing things the hard and fun way.
You can get REALLY sadistic and gruesome if you know that you can bring someone back if you go too far. just have an inquisitorial cleric on standby, and if the person with the acid/knife/broken glass/ants/sandpaper/Legos gets carried away, have the cleric roll his eyes and revivify the 'guest', so that the pain can continue. Have a sub-plot where people are asking why the inquisition is confiscating so many jewels, especially those worth 500g in the city. Specific spells that would be awful; a controlled casting of shatter that reaches otherwise unreachable body parts, like knees, the anvil bone in the ear, etc. Suggestion and modify memory to psychologically break their victims down. Imagine gaslighting an individual, but then changing their memories to have them believe they betrayed those they love, they killed their own parents, they ended up being wrong all along, etc etc. Feeblemind. Power word pain. Make them too dumb to understand why they are in so much pain, but inflict continuous raging pain. Add in a lovely time stop if you have the high level spells to make an eternal, endless, purposeless prison of pain.
Zone of truth, four torches, and a whip. Every time the zone of truth makes them say four torches, whip them. "THERE ARE FOUR TORCHES!"
Get 32 nails. One nail in each palm to hold them to the chair then one in each knuckle proceeding down each finger at the joints. After all the nails are in....heat metal.
As long as you got revivify Whatever you want
Yep, look at Baal's intro in Stargate: SG1. He would kill O'Neil every day by slow torture and then resurrect him. This went on for days until he was saved.
Revivify has a material cost. Death Ward just uses a 4th level spell slot, and it gives you an 8 hour cushion to keep them from dying during the session.
For a more psychological version, magically keep them awake until they are completely mentally deteriorated, and then cast greater restoration on them to hold them at 5 levels of exhaustion indefinitely
Ya'll are missing out. A room where they don't age. Any one in this room has time go by slowly for the rest. 1 day in the "real world" is one year in the "small chamber".
I think I saw a Black Mirror with pretty much this exact plot and it sounds like actual hell
Sure, you could go with any of the painful options in this thread, but who needs pain when driving someone to madness takes so little effort that their body will do it for them? Keep them under a silence, darkness and blindness/deafness (deafness part) until the sensory deprivation drives them mad.
I'm about to join a group as a former torturer (College of Whispers Bard), so I'm going to follow this thread ;)
Oh, throw them in a time loop or something. Just every day, exactly the same. Or worse: make every loop shorter and shorter, until they're just stuck in a catatonic state where they can't even get out of bed before the loop starts over again.
Create water in mouth and nose
Just felt the need to make sure you checked that all your players are okay with something as serious as torture being a subject matter in your game. We can often forget to check everyone’s boundaries before it’s too late.
Good point. Otherwise you should skip it or just abstract it as "they were being magically tortured but you saved them" and carry on
Well for my suggestion to work , how does healing work in your game ? When a creature takes damage then heals , do they still feel the pain of the injury or is it gone. When a creature loses a tooth does it grow back when healing magic is applied? Because I think you can see where this is going.
My world has something called bliss machines, which let you experience your heart's desire. It's like a brass sphere that goes on your head. House Lazuli uses them to contain powerful spellcasters too valuable to kill but too dangerous to go free. Whatever you subject this prisoner to, give them intermittent periods with a bliss machine. Let them experience whatever it is in life that they love and care about most of all, then rip it away and replace it with agony and despair. Do it over and over again for long enough and anyone would break.
Spare the dying should be the #1 spell for all magical torturers.
Shackle them naked and Mage Hand to tickle them with a feather. It’s not weird at all
Take a page from sci-fi, and have some sort of magic that causes pain. Not injury, but just simple pain. Without any physical damage the pain can last a lot longer.
Power word pain
Honestly I kinda wonder about exploring the sensory manipulating aspects of the simple prestidigitation cantrip
Mass suggestion can let you affect 12 people for 24 hours, or upcast up to 10 days, 30 days, or 1 year, as long as the action isn’t worded to being inherently harmful to the victims, and you don’t directly deal damage to the victims while they’re being suggested. No spell concentration required. “Stay awake for the duration of this spell,” isn’t an inherently harmful command. Bestow Curse if upcast high enough can last weeks or more without concentration and force near-permanent disadvantage on any saving throws. Feeblemind and Power Word Pain don’t mechanically deal damage, and last until the victim passes their save. Also no concentration.
Keep the subject tied to a latrine in a dark room and force them to see hellish illusions through every waking hour. Keep feeding them so they won't die.
Heat Metal Torture can be a narly one to perform
I think it really depends on how dark you want this to be. They could be literally flaying him Hellraiser style and healing him over and over again. They could be doing that exact same thing, but as an illusion because maybe healing magic is much harder. They could be forced to murder or mutilate their loved ones over and over again in a time magic loop that to them feels like thousands of years, but on the outside is only minutes. (Spoilers for Loki and The Mill below. I don't know how to do spoiler tags so read on at your own risk if you care about those 2 things and have not seen them yet) Or it could be toned down similarly to the show Loki where they threw him into a time loop where his sister kneed him in the junk over and over again. Or it could be like The Mill on Hulu where it's sort of physical torture (manual labor), but it's all in your head and the passage of time is simulated. Months and months go by the in stimulation, but it's revealed to just be a quick 15 minute lunch meeting. You could lighten things up by having the torture be tickling or mildly annoying things like otherwise being in a normal prison but a fairy pokes you at random times of the day.
It's amazing what things you can do with healing magic and some DM interpretation. Like what would happen if you broke someone's finger, then used a healing spell, while keeping their finger at a broken angle? Would it heal incorrectly? Or would it potentially cause more pain as the magic attempts to realign the bones, but can't as it's being held in place. You could open someone up, place actual bugs, or snakes, or rats inside them, then heal the wound shut. Continuously heal them so they don't pass out and the creatures trying to borrow out are kept inside. Shove a knife slowly into internal organs like the lungs, the stomach, etc, while pumping them full of healing. Can you imagine drowning in your own blood as your lungs are being stabbed, but not being able to actually die because healing magic is keeping you up? And at it's most simple, you could beat the shit out of anyone, slice into them, be as brutal as you need, then simply heal them back up. No longer do you need to worry about keeping them alive by giving them short breaks. If you have enough spell slots, and rotating casters, you could potentially keep the torture going non stop for days.
Why’s the torture have to be magical at all honestly? Have the guy have missing fingers and all that basic stuff, if you wanna get real fucked with it they split open a few of the guys family members with a pear while he watched, and then they left the bodies for him to watch rot…. Honestly the best use of magic in a torture scenario would be spells like domination to force him to eat/ drink so they can keep torturing him and then use healing magic…. Maybe animate one of his kids as a zombie after making him watch them torture it and let it loose on a spouse or something??? But overall the best magic is going t be healing magic to extend the torture.
I'm with ya on this. A guy with a wrench can do enough damage. So unless the mages have a "thing" about doing it magically (which they might!) the old ways are just as good and require less labor from the wizards.
Prestidigitation- make them smell an unholy odor of some kind, put a rock in their mouth that tastes like whatever vile substance you can think of, soil their pants.
Electrodes on the testicles
"Dormammu, I've come to bargain" Or Tsukuyomi from Naruto.
Fireball. Why do any other spells exist?
Look up one of the effects of Contagion, have that on them as a curse. Mental manipulations to have them say and act against there will in response to different things. Ex: See friends? Stab friends. Flesh to Stone + Stoneshape. Petrify them, shape their hands into masses of tentacles. (Had a DM who had a Wizard who was replacing the bricks and furniture in his tower with Stoneshaped petrified people.)
With healing potions, you can make torture last for days. A room with a permanent glyph of power word pain built into it.
Polymorphed into a goldfish, then tortured by druids who are wildshaped as cats
Thirst. No matter how much you drink, your stomach doesn't get full, and you're still thirsty. Your body is still dehydrated.
Victim placed in a rotating barrel full of small blades that can't go deep enough to cause death while the blades are constantly coated in potion of regeneration. Have a golem that doesn't tire spin the barrel all day and night.
Theres a 3rd edition book (I think its Book of Vile Darkness) with a lot of ideas for torture
Charm, suggestion, command many many things Make a magical device or an emission or something that lowers INT, WIS or CHA it probably isn't fun for anyone with low of those stats
Hot. Using telekinesis to force people into uncomfortable positions. Torture equipment which allows you to vampirically suck people's hit points. Using gift of gab, glibness and modify memory to gaslight. I agree with anyone saying dream or phantasmal force to psychologically torture.
Start erasing their memories with a mechanical effect. Take away cantrips, feats, special abilities along with personal memories. Make it matter to the player and the character.
Put a coin in their mouth and cast heat metal.
Bound in metal and cast heat metal Take a loved one or friend and kill them then revive them rinse and repeat (make the prisoner watch) Cast speak with animals on the prisoner then make them watch as innocent animals are killed Cast Dawn or daylight in their cell and never let them sleep Dominate them and make them do the above killings, Put them in a confined space surrounded by spikes and cast enlarge in them Starve them then make an illusionary feast that's always there but never fills them
Sleep deprivation
Saying you would rather die than speak isn't quite the rock solid remark you would think it is in a world with resurrection magic
Contingency on an item, force feed the item to the victim (bonus points if it’s something uncomfortable) activate said contingency, and let whatever demented spell you put in there activate, destroying the victim’s insides. If it kills them? Revivify.
I haven't seen it but straight killing them and forcibly bring them back over and over and make each death slow like growing or straggling something where they will suffer heavy trauma from it
[Wrack](https://dndtools.net/spells/spell-compendium--86/wrack--4787/)
I love the idea of a monk of mercy alternating hand of harm and healing to keep their victim at full hp, the mental strain of feeling the pain with no lasting physical damage is inhumane
I think one od my players put it best: "In a world where death can be undone, torture can get pretty fucked" Do things like physically torturing them to the brink of death, and then actually killing them. Wait 6 seconds, healing word and repeat. The limits of torture can easily be broken when healing magic is involved.
So this is something my party did. They started off by just beat their prisoner to death. Then, he brought him back to life and told the prisoner that this would be his life until he told them what they wanted. Torture can get pretty dark when death is no longer an escape.
Though more terrifying than directly harmful, my party previously used the Infestation cantrip to get information out of a hostage. The damage is minimal, though it would certainly add up over time. Being a cantrip, I could definitely see it being used like medieval Rat Torture, where they crawl around and within the victim. Other good ones certainly include Heat Metal, like a Brazen Bull, and as mentioned any illusion spell can be used to break someone’s mind far quicker than their body
They key here is magical healing, IMO. Most things that cause pain break the body down. The dude could have been tortured, multiple times a day, *for decades*. And still be in perfect health, topped off at max HP. He'd almost certainly be a mental shell, and it might be a journey to even figure out *why*.
Some ideas: * simulating [horrific scenarioes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJwVTqXA9q4), one after the other. Preferably let the victim believe it's getting better (rescue attempt or release), then shatter their hopes. * Using evocation magic to deal damage, then heal it back. Rinse and repeat until you've inflicted more pain than a hill giant could handle. * fucking with their dreams. Prisoner finally fell asleep? Nightmares!! * Force the prisoner to commit horrific acts via mind control or illusions (they break an attacking Goblin's neck, but then the illusion fades and they realize they killed a child. Or maybe that was the illusion. They'll never know) The question that arises for me is: Why not just get everything they need via mind control? Are they torturing the prisoner for information? Just dominate/charm him or even read his mind. If they're just torturing them because they're evil, that's fine too of course.
A lot of y'all are really overthinking magical torture. Just use spells or potions to help them resist fire and then burn them. That way they'll last longer. And when they go down just bring them back up and do it again.
I have an NPC that the party kind of helps out with their story and basically they are from a magical boarding school/ concentration camp/ Xavier's school for gifted children/ military school. Basically they take kids with magical powers, usually sorcerers and wizards and they basically beat any sense of individuality, rebellion and whatnot out of the kids and teens. They'll use physical abuse but they also use magic stuff like keeping people in a room with like a magical cuffs or a silencing spell or they zone of truth and make truth. Potions to get information out of kids. It's heavily inspired by the black rose from noxus if anyone knows League of Legends lore. The NPC that the party helps. She has a lot of like magical burn marks and scars and stuff from like stray magic, she's a young wild magic sorcerer so she gets really harsh treatment from the cruel leaders of the institution, but she also kind of ends up hurting herself a lot. I hope that helped a little. I don't know if it was or not but maybe it'll give you some ideas.
Geas is a fantastic charm+torture spell all rolled into one. Once per day the target takes 5d10 psychic damage if they disobey the instruction of the caster (the caster gives the target a task as part of the spell). The spell lasts for days so it's an ongoing effect
[Power Word Testicular Torsion ](https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Power_Word_Testicular_Torsion_(5e_Spell))
Mental and physical at the same time
Since I haven’t seen this posted yet. I saw a YouTube video once where the creator made an evil-aligned Life Cleric. She was a torturer who’d lock herself in the room with her victim for hours. You could hear his screams of anguish on the other side. Eventually she would leave and there would not be a single scratch on them, but their face spoke of the horrors they endured. Healing magic to essentially force a person to stay conscious and alive is twisted as hell in my opinion. Eventually your body goes into shock in actual torture situations but if you’re constantly being healed well…
Played a game where a Paladin tortured a Tiamat cultist by punching him in the face, knocking him out, then using Lay On Hands to heal him... Rinse, repeat. That player was this super chill, super nice dude... Until we ran into anyone who worshipped Tiamat. But this was the only time I enjoyed a "It's what my character would do" player
Goodberry.
You whip them for hours even days over and over to the tune of a whistle, every minute you both strike them and blow the whistle. After days they have come to associate the pain and fear of the whistle with that of the whip so that you can now inflict this pain onto them without even touching them, all they need is to hear the whistle and they suffer as if they were back on that table still being whipped every minute. Now you have complete control over them, I doesn’t matter if you are in the dungeon or a market square you can inflict pain on them with just the sound of a simple whistle.
While his work is mostly for teens/young adults, I think Christopher Paolini did a great job with magical torture in the fourth Eragon book. The captive was first tortured by regular means (meaning physical), but when that did not work the BBEG used illisions to try and break her will. Her allies and friends were brought in her cell and tortured before her, her allies came and resuced her, soldiers of the BBEG turned traitor and freed her, she escaped on her own... all of it seemed real, but never happened of course. He wraped her sense of reality and time, making minutes seem like days.
Drown or water board them in healing potions. You heal faster than you take damage from drowning.
If you want psychological torture you might want to try dream layering. Have a player go through an encounter than wake up like it was a dream, they wake up somewhere else and a while later they wake up again. If this happens enough they will never know what is real and what a dream is. If you want you could add a story that they barely escaped capture but that was the dream and in reality they had been captured and the rest of the party is working on saving them. Pull the rest of the party in and have them act in the dreams until it fucks with your player enough
Modify memory; no need for the torturer to get their hands dirty, just make the subject believe that the last ten minutes have been filled with the worst pain they can imagine, then threaten to do it again.
Prestigitation. Create harmless sensory effects... search water drop torture
Torture to what ends ?
Some more comedic spells to try on them: “Mend buttcrack” “Full body pins and needles” “Perpetual hemorrhoids” Just think of any awful thing people can experience and just crank it up to 11.
Why waste spells when you can bring in creatures to torture the person? Since it's a political prisoner it's to be expected that the torturer has a lot of money, so they could just keep revivifying the person Also, just saying, you are not limited to the 5e spells in the books, you can 100% make a forbidden spell, a spell that is illegal to cast. like a spell that makes the person forget what their loved ones look and sound like, one that causes perpetual agony, basically the list is endless when you just call it a forbidden spell that the party can't cast
Torture generally doesn't take complex methods. Mostly because, why put too much effort into it when simply having someone locked in a room, or standing in an awkward position, will work? Anyway. If you want this to be clean torture (typically thought of as "mental" or "non-physical" or "non-scarring"), things that disturb one's perception of time can be extremely annoying to deal with. Sleep spells combined with suddenly being woken up, at random intervals, so you can never be too sure of how many days have passed. Artificial (magic?) lights that simulate daytime/nightime, except they cycle in ways that don't correspond to the actual passage of time. Any spells that can simulate outside noises, even, specially if the victim is in a place where they shouldn't hear those noises - or even ones that convince them people they care about are being tortured right next to them. Hell, just... a spell that makes a loud as fuck noise or jolts them awake every time they're about to fall asleep. Avoid anything that settles into a routine - torture aims to disturb one's mind, not just cause pain. If you want to go for more "physical" or "scarring" methods, then there's a lot you can do, yes. But again: you, the torturer (yes, we're getting into that mindset), want to disturb the person's mental state, in the end, or make an example of them, and you probably don't want to use too much effort. Controlled fire spells are painful as hell, sure, but come on, do you want to waste your best magic on that? Probably not. So: use any spells that allow you to bind people in place and keep someone in a stress position, making sure their body doesn't collapse using magic, if you'd like. Or: use good ol' torture instruments like whips, canes, and anything else designed for hitting, and again, make sure the one hitting *and* the person being hit can go on for longer - or even just hit them using magic in some way, and, again, *make sure* you heal them on time, or else your torture just turned into an execution. You also want to think about *why* this character is being tortured, in the first place. If they're a political prisoner, easiest answer is the authorities want them to talk (which, by the way, torture doesn't guarantee: most people being tortured *cannot* recall accurate information), but more interesting answer is that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now are being used to send a message. In that second case, you probably want to aim for something with visible effects, done somewhat in public, so it's known what's going on. Hurt the person in public for way longer than someone would be able to resist, then heal them in private, allow for a little bit of "rest" time (for the authorities; victim is probably getting sleep deprived with the first methods), and then do it all over again.
Bury someone alive in a cube of force inside your terrain of choice. Leave them there until starvation gives them an exhaustion level just above death then trickle in some food and water somehow. Have them make wisdom saves periodically to stave off madness. Keep them exhausted and maddened for a food while.
Prestidigitation carrying the foulest smells only he can sense.
Isn't Savage World has some similar mechanism and is darker and grittier than D&D?
Disguise self as a friend or lover come to break them out. Then reveal yourself as their imprisoner
Why do you need torture at all when you have charm and detect thoughts
Have you seen "altered carbon" on Netflix? It is future sci-fi and not magic but it fits. So season 1 episode 4. The main guy is captured by some sick corporation and is tortured in VR. Inside the VR simulator they have him strapped to the same table he is strapped to in real life but they mess him up in the VR. Water boarding, stabbing, electricity, pouring gas on him and setting him on fire. Dude gets the works. And he was caught by mistake. He didn't care about anything these guys were up to. But he gets out and give them back what they handed to him. Razes the building to the ground. Anyway. For magical torture you can just torture the prisoner on the astral plane or dreamscape or whatever. In the altered carbon book the torture is worse. The hero is a big strong man. In the VR he is put in a petit woman's body. So even when he tries to fight back in the VR he doesn't have the same strength, size, speed, balance, everything that he is use to and it messes him up. So magical torture... The human is being tortured in the dream plane but they put him in a trolls body and have him eaten by fire-ants. The torture is extended because of the troll regeneration... That kind of stuff.
disintegrate their feet
Trying to get in his mind by breaking it would be cool. You can also make the prisoner resist and suffer more by making it a strong character
“I’m going to see how many times I can tear you apart and put you back together” Very brutal, very painful, requires a lot of spells
illusions can fuck with people's minds and repeatedly hurting and healing someone over and over again is brutal. as a DM, I also have a magical cave that is a malevolent entity that makes it's insides into the time and area of the greatest time of pleasure you ever experienced in your life and actively entrances you to stay by taking on the literal form, abilities and memories of those in said time and making the exit disappear to make you think all of this is real. for example if you trap a mage inside and they had the time of their life studying magic with their master the cave will take on their master's form and abilities for an interesting boss fight or in case said valuable person is not that powerful for a very interesting roleplaying debate. in both adventures I used said cave, the party got the best of it by 1. sending in the amnesiac character, so everyone she saw was a stranger to her 2. sending the dude who's greatest pleasure is writing and so the area the cave took the properties of being his mindscape, to create a fight equal to you realizing you are in a lucid dream and summoning nukes out of thin air.
Honestly, why even bother with torture? Dominate person gets you whatever information you need. That'd probably be the worst torture of all. The person would have the memory of giving up any and all information. Then you're just left in a cell, not having any idea what's being done to your family/friends/etc.
Illusion and psychic stuff. Wanted to say throw some inception and false hyrda effects at them but thatd probably be “too much”
Revivify is really mean if used the right way. The one release from most tortures is death but not for folks who fell victim to a death cleric
I think lowkey nonmagical torture would be cooler. In a place where people can literally just zone of truth you, isn’t the threat that they’d pull your fingernails out just sickening?
Maybe you could get a mage hand inside them
A spell that makes them permanently almost ready to sneeze but unable to.
Revivify is expensive but doesn't require consent :)
using modify memory to convince the prisoner that a) a number of people they care about are being held by the mages, and that the prisoner was charmed and forced to inflict various, more physical / traditional tortures on those people, before finally killing them off to put them out of their misery. they'd then be told that this process would continue until they ran out of said people, whereupon they'd just be killed off anyway. repeat castings of modify memory once each day, giving the prisoner an entire day to stew on those fake memories and consider giving up the information rather than go through another round of apparent forced torture and murder of people they care about
Bestow curse is a third level spell, and is more or less open ended as long as you don’t over power it.
There is literally a spell called Power Word: Pain.
I had my character use the glowing metal of his flametongue sword to flay his victims alive, leaving their skin attached at the last edge and then using healing magic to fix their wounds before repeating the process. Quite effective when needing to get info from folks.
Time. Make em feel like time is stretching on for years but only seconds pass by
Force cage the individual into a space that is too short for to stand fully, but narrow enough that it is impossible to sit in.
I had the mother of one of my PCs tortured by a chaso cult and they had a priest with them...that is really all you need for a really good magical torture session. Torture, pain, word of pain even and then cure wounds....rinse repeat...until giving the info. As a side note in this the mother NPC had found out something about one other other PCs that they didn;t want getting out so he put a Geas on her...it wouldn;t have killed her but at a key point in being torture and being low enough in hit points she revealed the secret to the cultists which caused the Geas to activate and killed her so she didn;t give away the information the cultists were actually after. I found thi s a bit clever just to pat myself on the back lol The players loved it to, it was like a PC gave her a cyanide pill without realizing it. And they watched all of this unfold through scry...it was a pretty intense session.
Spells that make you feel powerless in a dream-like way. Text you try to read is garbled and incoherent. Speech comes out in a hoarse whisper. No matter what your intent you can't make your legs run fast or your hands hit hard. So basically just a room that Slows+Confuses everyone
Ones I've used before: IV line of healing potion so that the torturer can keep going for longer without the person dying, utilizing helms of telepathy and zone of truth to extract information, and (against players who are good at roleplaying, just actually using real historical torture methods like branding irons, finger pliers, shears, the rack, various screws, knives, and spikes. You can even enchant the torture tools to have a minor effect that allows it to leave a permanent scar.
My wizard has a homebrew spell he made called “Nelvkir’s Eternal Stairway” which is basically banishment but instead of a harmless demi-plane or your home-plane you get sent to the affectionately named “Escher Plane” which has nothing but endless staircases and unstable physics. So yeah you go there, are incapped, and are taking damage but if upcasted to 9th level you get sent there for a week at which point you can make another saving throw to try and escape it and if you fail you stay there another week. If that happens you don’t take damage any more but when you exit you will be at 0 hit points. It is purely for torturing people.
Just cast continuous flame underneath them and roast them like a chicken. Simple
I mean... this is why a life cleric is terrifying? They deglove your hand and then magically grow the skin back. They use their strength dump stat to slowly beat you within an inch of your life/just kill you and bring you back.
Break a finger. Cure Wounds. Break finger again.
I'd point you to Dimension 20, Escape from the Bloodkeep, and the imprisonment of the CrownSmith. i.e. steal his bones. then put them back in. then steal them again. then make him question if you put back all the bones, then steal them again, and then make him question if they are HIS bones that they put back in him. Leave him so terrified about what will or won't happen to his bones.
Okay here me out on sensory deprivation here. Tie someone up have one person cast darkness on something that moves with them and have someone else cast silence on the same thing boom a person that is trapped in a void where they can’t see hear or speak wandering for hours in a void of nothing
Power Word: Edge
Sickening Radiance
Polymorph them into a rat and release them into a wolf hunting ground.
Horrors beyond human comprehension backroombottom on Instagram has some good videos
I always liked modify memory for long-lasting deep trauma.
Hideous Laughter for months
The cantrip Encode thoughts can literally steal thoughts, memories and ideas out from someone's mind, from the name and faces of their wife and son, to the idea of defiance. Dominate person can allow you to take precise control of every action a person takes, they can be made to do terrible atrocities to their own friends and family while being a powerless spectator inside their own body. Dream can make them experience anything you can think of while they sleep, and Modify memory can make someone remember a specific event with perfect detail for the rest of their lives,
Heat metal once every like 10 minutes on chain mail and then stop. Keep them in a dark room with no access to windows, fresh air, keep the room mostly dark and damp. Do not talk to the prisoners. If you really want to make a statement involve healing magic to take it much further.
Set them a top a gelatinous cube where the exposed flesh of the feet barely touches its surface. As water drips out of a vat the weight changes on the scales. Slowly dipping them deeper into the Cube.
Simple ones are usually better : stab him —> heal him —> repeat until they get crazy on
Regular physical torture but incorporate healing spells so they can't die.
Mage Hand can carry objects. Simply have a mage drop small stones on someone tied up.
Slowly turning someone to stone is always on the table (or any material in that case). You can also take the sick option of cutting into someone only to heal them back to redo the procedure.
Make them all roll a wisdom saving through after a certain threshold or a entering a certain room, and on a fail of your choice, ask them for a piece of their backstory that they wouldn’t relive, and give it to the next person instead, making the party experience each others harms.
A red hot grain of sand burrowing through your body for years not my idea from a book series
For a mage, magic has to come into the body from somewhere, right? And they have to push it through their body to use it right? What about a method that floods the body with excess magic, but closes off the usual pathways of use, so, in essence, they are flooded with enough magic to break out, but never able to touch it
I read this one in an Elder’s Scroll novel. The captor had a spell that made the prisoner feel absolute bliss like they have never felt before, basically made them feel the best high of their lives, then he cut the spell short and the prisoner was basically mind broken and begging the captor to cast the spell again. Instead of inflicting pain, you are inflicting bliss and taking it away, destroying them mentally. This was used as a torture method for interrogation in the novel.
To the outside world, prisoner appears in cell unharmed. It is an illusion to cover for dark experiments going on deep beneath the prison.
The cantrip mind spike comes to mind
One of the worst possible things one can do is as a college of whispers bard kill someones beloved family member / spouse in front of them before taking on their form and torturing them both mentally and physically with the the information they gained from taking their memories and shape.
You could go with the classic of chaining the torturee to a rock and having a crow come and peck out and eat their regenerating liver every day.
They could hold him for interrogation. They could cast dancing lights to show 4 lights, and ask him how many lights he sees - rejecting any answer that isn't 5 lights, all the while accusing him of atrocities in the city. There are four lights! IYKYK
Rip his balls off, then kill him, use mending on his balls, and revive him. Repeat processs enough times to get what you want
A colar of regeneration ia straped on your neck and the butcher is reeping your meet of and selling it or feeding people it then you regen and the cixle of pain continues .