Sequester: A Tool As Old As Time

Usable By: Wizard

Spell Level: 7

School: Transmutation

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: Touch

Duration: Until dispelled

Components: V, S, M (A powder composed of diamond, emerald, ruby, and sapphire dust worth at least 5,000 gp, which the spell consumes)

By means of this spell, a willing creature or an object can be hidden away, safe from detection for the duration. When you cast the spell and touch the target, it becomes invisible and can’t be targeted by divination spells or perceived through scrying sensors created by divination spells.

If the target is a creature, it falls into a state of suspended animation. Time ceases to flow for it, and it doesn’t grow older.

You can set a condition for the spell to end early. The condition can be anything you choose, but it must occur or be visible within 1 mile of the target. Examples include “after 1,000 years” or “when the tarrasque awakens.” This spell also ends if the target takes any damage.

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

Sequester isn’t a spell: it's a narrative device. This is a magical deep sleep stasis chamber out of science fiction. Nothing about sequester should exist as a spell. As a tool to get an ancient entity into the “modern” game, it's great! Hide away an important McGuffin or keep an ancient evil on ice until the players are ready to kill it. As the DM you don’t NEED Sequester to do that, mind you, but it does provide the text to get you there mechanically if you like. There are no practical instances where a player should have to use their spell slots for this effect, though. None.

I can’t express in writing how something can not be; it just isn’t. There aren’t examples of games where this spell will find use because they don’t exist. If for some reason you are in the market for indefinitely suspending a person or thing, that should not be a normal ass spell you can learn. Like Imprisonment, this is a spell that exists to promise a fantasy that should be established before an adventure even begins. It's the predecessor to adventure, not the tool of an adventurer.

If you're DMing for somebody that loves the idea of Sequester and wants to use it to seal away some horrible artifact or hide a person for thousands of years for some reason, you can build a campaign arch around that idea. If you’re doing that, the players will need a whole lot more than just Sequester anyway, making it so you have to figure out all the other logistics and making me believe Sequester would be better as a ritual or curse the DM figures out rules to on the fly or has access to in the DMG. At minimum you need a place to stick the sequestered thing, and that place has to be functionally unfindable to have any reasonable effect, as anyone looking for a Sequestered object is beating the Invisibility bit with the underwhelming 2nd level spell See Invisibility. In that case, Demiplane seems like it’s doing this spell's job better. Stashing away an artifact in an extradimensional space only you can access seems a bit more reliable than just endlessly suspending it then needing to find a hole to hide it in.

If you want to play a Futurama style game where the whole party suspends themselves for a few thousand years, play that game. You don’t need Sequester to do it. If you're in a typical D&D setting, though, that probably means you’re throwing out all the current plot goals and objectives and shipping the massive burden of world development onto the DM’s plate. All of this lines up with spells like Plane Shift and Astral Projection; they come so late into play and offer tools whose main purpose is aiding in ignoring set goals while burdening the DM with a bunch of work to establish stuff they may not have wanted to spend the mental effort on. Unlike planar travel, though, Sequester isn’t going to offer nearly as engaging or diverse a setting expansion, making its existence troubling. It just offers a way to suspend yourself and objects in time.

In the rare circumstances you need to hide somebody from divination magic, you have access to a plethora of better lower level options. 7th level spells include things like Resurrection exist to solve problems with people. Somebody dying of an incurable magical disease? Sure, Sequester COULD suspend them until a cure is found; alternately, you could just let them die, wait a few days, and revive them. Seems like an easier plan than hiding them away potentially forever.

As a concept for world building and as a tool in the hands of a villain hiding a powerful weapon or storing an ancient evil, I love Sequester. It isn’t ever a spell I think a player should consider taking, and ultimately is a waste of time for players to read in nearly all cases. It shouldn’t be a player option like this; Sequester is a DM tool, and should be treated as such.

5e Spells

Sequester: A Tool As Old As Time