Does Revivify work on trapped souls

dnd-5eresurrectionsoulspellstraps

Nearly all the resurrection spells state that your soul has to be free and willing to be revived. The DMG on page 24 further states that A soul can't be returned to life if it doesn't wish to be, so the soul always has to be willing, whether the spell says so, or not. But curiously the DMG omits that the soul also needs to be free. And revivify, the lowliest of resurrection spells, lacks any explicit requirement that the soul needs to be free and willing.

I think revivifying a trapped soul may not be intended to work, as all the more powerful spells can't do it; but outside of such a balance consideration, is there any rule support for that?

Examples for effects that can trap a soul upon death (so one could cast revivify to try and bring it back in under one minute) are: the Blackstaff, a Night Hag's soul bag, or the Soul Cage spell from Xanthar's Guide to Everything.

Best Answer

Revivify cannot bring back trapped souls

There is a general, DM facing rule that precludes revivifying a trapped soul. The DMG states under Bringing Back the Dead on page 24:

When a creature dies, its soul departs its body, leaves the Material Plane, travels through the Astral Plane, and goes to abide on the plane where the creature's deity resides. If the creature didn't worship a deity, its soul departs to the plane corresponding to its alignment. Bringing someone back from the dead means retrieving the soul from that plane and returning it to its body.

By this logic, you can only bring someone back from the dead, if you can retrieve their soul from the plane where it naturally would reside. If the soul is trapped anywhere else or no longer a soul, then you can not bring its owner back from the dead, and revivify will not work.

Nearly all trapping effects trap the soul in an item, transformed into a lemure or larva in the lower planes, or resorb it into a monster, which in general are different locations from the natural home plane of the soul, so in all of these cases, revivify will not work.

(Thank you to Trish for finding this answer).