[RPG] Can you revive someone after using the Phantom Rogues “Tokens of the Departed” ability

dnd-5eresurrectionrogue

As a phantom rogue when someone dies you can make them into a soul trinket as a reaction, to use later for a few abilities.

At 9th level, when a life ends in your presence, you're able to snatch a token from the departing soul, a sliver of its life essence that takes physical form: as a reaction when a creature you can see dies within 30 feet of you, you can open your free hand and cause a Tiny trinket to appear there, a soul trinket. The DM determines the trinket's form or has you roll on the Trinkets table in the Player's Handbook to generate it.

Say a player character dies and the Phantom Rogue uses their reaction to make a soul trinket, as they might want to talk to the player character later.

As an action, you can destroy one of your soul trinkets, no matter where it's located. When you do so, you can ask the spirit associated with the trinket one question. The spirit appears to you and answers in a language it knew in life. It's under no obligation to be truthful, and it answers as concisely as possible, eager to be free. The spirit knows only what it knew in life, as determined by the DM.

You have to decide to do it immediately with your reaction, or before your next turn at least depending on what you dm rules.

Now that you have a soul trinket of them does this mean they can't be resurrected?

I would argue yes as most resurrection spells require a "willing soul" and as quoted above the soul is eager to be free which implies to me that it couldn't leave of its own volition before.

But this does then leave us in a weird place with revivify as that doesn't require a "willing soul".

Thoughts?

Best Answer

Nothing in the Tokens of the Departed feature indicates an interference with resurrection magic.

You state that you make them into a trinket - this isn’t the case:

you’re able to snatch a token from the departing soul, a sliver of its life essence that takes physical form

A soul trinket is not the soul. You aren’t destroying the soul when you destroy the trinket. You’re just snatching a small piece of its essence. The ultimate fate of the creature’s soul is not described. There is just nothing in the feature description that indicates it would interfere with resurrection magic in any way, so it doesn’t interfere with resurrection magic.

User Yakk pointed out that we can compare this to the 6th level spell soul cage:

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.

Soul cage is very specific about how it works. It explicitly states that it traps souls and that the creature whose soul is trapped cannot be revived.

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