Are there any spells or items that allow viewing or visiting a past event?

Question

Related: What Divination Spells, if-any, could allow you to learn sigils sequences....

This question is a proposed theory crafting extension of the previous question. Are there any spells, items or techniques that could be used to view, experience or otherwise capture information from a past event outside of Legend Lore or Wish?

If you have a method of time travel or other legal jank involving demons or creatures to accomplish this, I would consider that an acceptable answer.

Interrogations and investigations are time consuming and potentially unreliable - is there any way to go "Directly" or recreate the source?

Answer 1

Visions of the Past

I'll assume that by "information from a past event", you mean something that is not directly observable any more now, like who killed a certain person, ideally observing the past event.

The 17th level knowledge domain cleric can user their Visions of the Past feature to learn about one object they hold or an area in their vicinity to see dreamlike, shadowy glimpses of recent events (within your Wisdom score days):

Area Reading. As you meditate, you see visions of recent events in your immediate vicinity (a room, street, tunnel, clearing, or the like, up to a 50-foot cube), going back a number of days equal to your Wisdom score. For each minute you meditate, you learn about one significant event, beginning with the most recent. Significant events typically involve powerful emotions, such as battles and betrayals, marriages and murders, births and funerals. However, they might also include more mundane events that are nevertheless important in your current situation.

Apart from that, there are no spells that allow you to do this directly in a general way. 5e overall has cut back on what divination magic could reveal, likely to not entirely invalidate whodunnits and detective adventures. There is no know alignment any more, detect evil does not detect evil outright any more, just if there are fiends or undead in range, etc.

Depending on what exactly you want to know, how long it is past, and what the circumstance are, here are some other options:

• In case you have the reasonably well conserved corpse or skeleton of an observer, and it is not your enemy, you can use speak with dead to ask about it.

• In case you have a living observer, you can question it with detect thoughts, or, if your main concern is the lack of truthful reply, with zone of truth

• If you want to time travel, there are not a lot of options. You could visit a gynosphinx in its lair and nicely ask it to send you back up to 10 years in time (you cannot force it to with dominate monster, as it cannot be charmed).

You say that you are looking for something that is less time consuming and more reliable than an interrogation or investigation, so tactics like casting divination (and framing it in a way that is related to a prosperous outcome of some sort), contact other plane, or commune over many days to triangulate towards an answer are not a good solution here.