Failure Recall

This spell is a part of the Flashback spell chain and is found in the Flashback rune stone.

For anyone who draws breath there was a time where their success or failure had effects that reached farther or affected more. Perhaps it was the spell to save a friend. Perhaps it was the jump they just couldn't make or the failed proposal. Maybe they simply failed to see what was right before them, missing the chance of a lifetime or locking themselves into a future of heartbreak and betrayal. It matters not, what matters is that these events happened and they are defining events in that person's life. Events that play over and over again in their minds when things are quiet and doubt has its way with them. Something from the past that they just simply cannot let go of.

Such is the way of Rumination. When the praeteriamancer casts Failure Recall they are unleashing the power of Rumination over the past memories of the target. Whatever check, whatever roll, whatever action that they failed from the past that still haunts them is brought to the surface and takes hold. The failure settles over the target like a shroud, and for the duration of the spell every successful check the target makes is treated as a failure. The dice may roll well. The target may have every ability and every advantage needed to succeed. It does not matter. Rumination has already decided what the outcome is, and the outcome is the one it has been holding since the moment things went wrong. 

The target could try to make a Hard Mental check to resist and suppress the haunted failures of their past, therefore resisting the effects of Rumination's cruel power. Should they fail that check, every success they achieve for 1d4 rounds is quietly undone by the past failure overwriting it. They are not weakened. They are simply unable to escape what they already were in their worst moment.  The praeteriamancer watches with the detached interest of someone studying what happens when a person cannot let go of what they got wrong. They see someone who, when it matters most, falls to Rumination's tricks.