Soul Cage: So Evil, Yet So Good
Spell Level: 6
School: Necromancy
Casting Time: 1 reaction, which you take when a humanoid you can see within 60 feet of you dies
Range: 60 feet
Duration: 8 hours
Components: V, S, M (a tiny silver cage worth 100 gp)
This spell snatches the soul of a humanoid as it dies and traps it inside the tiny cage you use for the material component. A stolen soul remains inside the cage until the spell ends or until you destroy the cage, which ends the spell. While you have a soul inside the cage, you can exploit it in any of the ways described below. You can use a trapped soul up to six times. Once you exploit a soul for the sixth time, it is released, and the spell ends. While a soul is trapped, the dead humanoid it came from can’t be revived.
Steal Life. You can use a bonus action to drain vigor from the soul and regain 2d8 hit points.
Query Soul. You ask the soul a question (no action required) and receive a brief telepathic answer, which you can understand regardless of the language used. The soul knows only what it knew in life, but it must answer you truthfully and to the best of its ability. The answer is no more than a sentence or two and might be cryptic.
Borrow Experience. You can use a bonus action to bolster yourself with the soul’s life experience, making your next attack roll, ability check, or saving throw with advantage. If you don’t use this benefit before the start of your next turn, it is lost.
Eyes of the Dead. You can use an action to name a place the humanoid saw in life, which creates an invisible sensor somewhere in that place if it is on the plane of existence you’re currently on. The sensor remains for as long as you concentrate, up to 10 minutes (as if you were concentrating on a spell). You receive visual and auditory information from the sensor as if you were in its space using your senses.
A creature that can see the sensor (such as one using See Invisibility or truesight) sees a translucent image of the tormented humanoid whose soul you caged.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
There’s a fantastical staple of fantasy worlds around resurrection and the soul. Angels seek to shepherd this immaterial essence from the dead to a glorious afterlife, while evil-doer necromancers and liches seek to harness the very essence of the dead to fuel their own malicious objectives. D&D has always mingled a bit with soul magic, but Soul Cage is the first major spell that gives you a tremendous amount of power for committing the despicable act of trapping a soul. While you might be a bit of a bastard for doing this, the effects it offers are AMAZING!
For 100 gold a use, you can transmute a soul into the cage to turn it into an incredible magic item. Steal Life and Borrow Experience may not appear particularly busted at first glance, but with six uses total between all the modes, the flexibility you’ll have every round with a trapped soul is so valuable. Regaining 2d8 HP as a bonus action is functionally a fighter’s second wind: and you get up to six of them. Granting yourself advantage on an attack roll or ability check for free, no action requirement, is literally just getting a free help action whenever you’d want it!
Query Soul and Eyes of the Dead each offer potentially invaluable utility bundled in with the combative features. Sometimes you’ll kill a lacky and get exactly what information about their boss you want to know. Sometimes you really need to keep an eye on a specific area invisibly; Eyes of the Dead offers you the power of Scrying without actually needing to cast that spell.
The only major hurdles Soul Cage faces are how and when you decide to make it. If you want the out of combat utility goodies, you need to kill somebody first, so this isn’t something that can really assist your first encounter after each long rest. Once you kill one group of soul-bearing baddies, it’s on the table, but should you be confronting undead, constructs, devils, or demons, a soul might be unobtainable outside of… let's go with more creative methods.
I love the Soul Cage fantasy and its execution here is superb. None of the effects are game warping powerful, but give you just enough to justify the slot over the duration. Nearly every character could get some amount of use out of every mode. If you’re looking for ways to make your warlock just that much more evil and edgy, consider Soul Cage.
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