Can a bard who takes Contingency at 14th level use Spell Glyphs to Contingency-Revivify the party

dnd-5espellcastingspellstargetingtraps

Here's the premise- Upcast your glyph of warding as a 7th level spell slot, select spell glyph. Trigger for glyph is "When [Desired Party Member] touches this glyph."

Cast Contingency->Revivify into glyph, contingency trigger "when targeted creature dies." Desired party member immediately touches the glyph.

Contingency can normally only be cast on self, but Spell Glyph overrides that via

You can store a prepared spell of 3rd level or lower in the glyph by casting it as part of creating the glyph. The spell must target a single creature or an area. The spell being stored has no immediate effect when cast in this way. When the glyph is triggered, the stored spell is cast. If the spell has a target, it targets the creature that triggered the glyph.

The last paragraph for Contingency says

The contingent spell takes effect only on you, even if it can normally target others. You can use only one contingency spell at a time. If you cast this spell again, the effect of another contingency spell on you ends. Also, contingency ends on you if its material component is ever not on your person.

What we have here are two exclusionary clauses. The first is bypassed by spell glyph; the contingent spell can't normally target others, but spell glyph allows the spell to target others via means that aren't normal, and specific beats general. It's also worth noting that functionally, you are not actually casting the spell- you're storing it in the glyph and the glyph is casting it later.

Finally, casting a second contingency (which you effectively aren't during the glyph, because when you cast the spell into the glyph the spell has no effect- which would include the trigger effect of contingencies ending when the spell is cast- it does that later when the Glyph casts it for you) might be argued to end any contingencies on you, but RAW does not end contingencies on other creatures, which means if you deliver a glyphed contingent revivify to your party one or two people per day at a time, in a 4 person party on the 2nd or 4th day you could contingent revivify yourself, and the party would have 6/8 days of auto-phoenix.

Does this work or did I miss some glyph errata designed to prevent this beyond the 10 feet of movement bit?

Best Answer

Probably, but this is a call for your DM

Both Contingency and Glyph of Warding break how normal spellcasting works, and consequently, there is heavy need of DM adjudication for them, as the rules only describe in detail how normal spellcasting works.

  • Contingency on another. Contingency says: "The contingent spell takes effect only on you, even if it can normally target others.". The question is who is you in this case: is the spell limited to "you, the caster", or, to "you, the target of contingency". They normally are one and the same, but if you allow Contingency to be cast on another via Glyph, they differ. This is nowhere clarified in the rules, and so is up to the DM.

  • Multiple Contingencies: One can argue that there can only be one contingency at a time, because you means the caster, and Contingency states "You can use only one contingency spell at a time". On the other hand, one can argue (as you do), that Glyph overrides who you is, changing it to the target of the Contingency. This is the same ambiguity as above. This again will be a call for your DM.

For what it is worth, the consensus answer is that you can store spells that target self into glyph, and have them work on others. That would suggest "you" in spells that target Self should be read as the target of the spell, not the caster of the spell, or they would not work as intended. Which in turn would mean that your scheme could work. But this is just an accepted consensus answer on the internet, not a rule or Sage Advice ruling, so the official rules tell us that it is up to the DM.

Xanathar's Guide to Everything, p. 5:

Many unexpected events can occur in a D&D campaign,and no set of rules could reasonably account for every contingency. If the rules tried to do so, the game would become a slog. An alternative would be for the rules to severely limit what characters can do, which would be contrary to the open-endedness of D&D. Here's the path the game takes: it lays a foundation of rules that a DM can build on, and it embraces the DM's role as the bridge between the things the rules address and the things they don't.

(Funnily enough, here contingency is the contingency.)