The Clone spell immediately moves someones soul to a new body upon death. What happens if you try to use the Speak With Dead spell on the body of the person with a Clone? Presuming the body still has a mouth and the person is not undead. How to prevent the use of Speak With Dead question did not consider what happens with a Clone spell. This question said yes for Speak With Dead on a Reincarnated body but did not consider Clone either. I'm thinking about villans like Mansoon who use Clone to make themselves unkillable. I doubt Mansoon wants anyone interrogating his old body as he plots revenge from a discretely hidden lair.
What happens when you cast Speak With Dead on a person who used Clone
dnd-5espells
Related Solutions
Knowledge is key
Obviously, the target can only tell what the man knew before death: preventing him from knowing the one who paid (make him actively prevent others telling their names?) will prevent him from compromising the person. But of course, maybe that is no longer possible. In that case, let's look at the limitations of the spell.
Semantics for the win!
The spell has very specific triggers when it will not work, and you might exploit them:
If the corpse has been subject to speak with dead within the past week, the new spell fails.
This can be exploited: an item that casts "Speak with Dead" triggered by the death of the wearer will stop tests within the first week. The caster now would be a person that is not present, so he wouldn't answer any questions, just stand by for a few minutes. Even better, if dying triggers the spell to be cast once a week, it will prevent any questioning.
[...] the body must be mostly intact to be able to respond. A damaged corpse may be able to give partial answers or partially correct answers, but it must at least have a mouth in order to speak at all.
Destroying the body enough to not being able to speak is a sure way: have some sort of spell triggered at the point of death that immolates the head or blows away the jaw.
An other variant to prevent speech while keeping the body mostly intact would be to use a baleful polymorph spell triggered upon death, that just merges the jaws and lips. Mind, it targets "one creature" — not one living creature like polymorph!
This spell does not let you actually speak to the person (whose soul has departed)
This makes reincarnation not a protection against this spell, but...
This spell does not affect a corpse that has been turned into an undead creature.
Having a triggered spell upon death that raises the ninja as an undead, even for a moment, would prevent the spell from working: it has been turned into an undead creature and if it dies a moment later, it is the corpse of an undead creature without any memories.
Conclusion
Either prevent knowing the boss's name, or render the corpse unable to answer. To do so, you would need to find yourself a magician who is willing to make a custom magic item. This will cost up to (spell level × caster level × 2,000 gp) as it might be considered a "use activated/continuous" effect, or it might be as little as (spell level × caster level × 50 gp) for a "single use, use activated" item. So it might be a bargain.
- having an item, that destroys the head (or the whole body via disintegrate) upon death would surely prevent the usage of the spell — or rather the effective use at least.
- having an item that turns the body into an undead upon death will perfectly prevent the casting.
- having an item that uses baleful polymorph to remove the ability to speak (e.g. removing the jaws & mouth) upon the body upon death prevents answering, save for another baleful polymorph.
- Using a custom magic item that casts speak with dead once a week will prevent other questioning, but it is a more complex solution than a magical explosive leash (TV Tropes warning) that triggers upon death.
RAW, Yes.
grows to full size and maturity after 120 days... It remains inert and endures indefinitely, as long as its vessel remains undisturbed.
That means disturbing the vessel would result in a fully grown meat copy which the soul could no longer transfer to. So, your reading agrees with my understanding of the Rules as they are Written. It does seem that disturbing the vessel will prevent the clone body from being used in the designed way, but that isn't your intent anyway.
Best Answer
As written, speak with dead functions normally.
Speak with dead states:
So there is no interaction between speak with dead and the creature's soul, so we shouldn't expect clone to create a problem for us there. Unfortunately, the phrase "animating spirit" appears once in the entire D&D 5e corpus - in the spell description of speak with dead, so there isn't much to go on concerning what that really means or the lore behind how the spell works. As written, speak with dead works just fine, as it explicitly does not interact with the creature's soul.
Further, speak with dead requires only a corpse, not that the creature that the corpse was formerly be dead. So suppose we have the corpse of a creature that has used clone to inhabit a new, properly functioning body. What does speak with dead say?
Do we have a corpse? Yes. Next, speak with dead states:
Is it undead? No. Does it still have a mouth? We can assume yes, since this isn't really pertinent to the question. Here are all the requirements for using speak with dead, summarized:
A creature's use of clone does not complicate any of these requirements, so speak with dead works as usual.