Level: Sorcerer 2, Wizard 2
Components: V, S, M
Casting Time: 1 round
Range: Personal
Target: You
Duration: 1 round/level
The smell of wet animal dander assaults your nose even as the perfume of the material component fades. You feel suddenly more suspicious of beings around you, as if some of them might not be what they seem.
By taking a standard action to concentrate, you can see the true form of creatures within 60 feet. Each round, you can examine one creature you can see to determine whether it is polymorphed, disguised, or transmuted, and what its true form is. If you look at a shapechanger in its true form, you immediately sense its shapechanging ability, but you can’t determine what other forms it might be capable of assuming.
For the purpose of this spell, a shapechanger is any creature with the shapechanger subtype or a supernatural or extraordinary ability that allows it to assume an alternate form. A wizard who knows alter self is not a shapechanger, since a spell is not a supernatural or extraordinary ability—but a silver dragon is, since it has the supernatural ability to assume an alternate form, even though its type is dragon.
Material Component: A balm of honey and lotus flower costing 25 gp, smeared on your eyelids.
Source: Spell Compendium, page 66. Previously published in Complete Arcane, page 103. Replaced barghest as an example with silver dragon since barghests already have the shapechanger subtype. Silver dragons do not have that subtype but have the alternate form ability and so they make a better example. Also corrected “shapechanger type” to “shapechanger subtype” in the text.