Soul Bind Vs. Trap the Soul

[Bardic Dave]

Interesting.

Yes, for a spell (whatever its name) with the requirement that the creature must be dead first to me means the spell would be a reasonable level 1 spell for balance purposes, since you must defeat the creature first.

Of course, it very well can't be allowed to prevent Resurrection or Wish in that case. And you might want to up the level somewhat just to put a lower limit on the business of soul harvesting.

But I don't see any huge problems with making such a spell level 4, say, provided the language about preventing resurrection is changed to require the spell to be cast at least at the same spell level as the restorative spell.

So for example, in 5th edition, the spell would indeed prevent Revivify from working. It would have to be cast using a 7th level slot in order to prevent Resurrection.

If we instead use Pathfinder 2, the spell must be heightened to spell level 5 in order to prevent the basic Resurrect ritual or the Breath of Life spell. It would need to be heightened all the way to level 10 to foil a Wish.

Fifteen year old thread! That might be a new record for necromancy?

 

[Len]

Fifteen year old thread! That might be a new record for necromancy?

Might be. It beats this one by a few months.

 

[CapnZapp]

Just trawling the bottom of the forum (when sorting the threads oldest first) would be no challenge.

In this case, I'm having a NPC "Grimslade the Black" offering players gold to harvest select monsters' souls in my Pathfinder 2 xp-for-gp campaign. I then researched which spells there was to base my (low-level) "soul gem" on. The idea: Kill the monster and suck its soul into the gem (Ghostbuster style), then get cash upon delivery of the filled gem back in town.

One googling led to another and here we are.

Point of post remains: I can't see any compelling reasons why this mechanism must be particularly high-level in nature. (If the players, whose characters are level 3-4, were given a black sapphire appropriate for level 17(!!) they could just run off and sell it, and bypass all the low-level content)


Z

PS. As for thread necromancy, I'm sure there have been stronger resurrections, but thanks for the vote of confidence