This spell from page 104 the Dungeons and Dragons, 3rd Edition supplement Book of Vile Darkness–even more than the spell consume likeness–makes my head hurt. I'd just let it go and find a different spell, but I'm pretty sure it's the lowest-level spell that traps a soul.
Soul Shackles
Necromancy [Evil]
Level: Brd 5, Sor/Wiz 5
Components: V, S, F, Location
Casting Time: 1 [standard] action
Range: Close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Target: One living creature
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: None (see text)
Spell Resistance: YesThe caster draws out the soul of a dead creature and imprisons it within a specially made talisman. The subject must have had the talisman in his possession when he died, or the spell cannot function.
Henceforth, if the talisman is in the caster’s possession, she can call forth the soul of the subject and question it about what it knew in life for up to 1 round/level each day, asking one question per round. The soul looks as it did in life, including the clothing
and equipment it had with it on the day it died. Answers are clear, complete, and precise.If the subject is hostile, or if the answer to the question was an important secret to it in life, the subject gains a Will saving throw. A successful saving throw indicates that the spell ends and the soul departs to the afterlife.
Focus: The talisman that will be the receptacle for the soul.
Location Component: An area under the effect of a desecrate or unhallow spell.
The Spell's Two Readings
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The Dysfunctional Version: The caster slips the talisman in among the future target's possessions. The future target, while he's carrying the talisman, dies in some abrupt and horrible fashion–that certainly had nothing to do with the caster!–while in possession of the talisman. The caster casts the spell soul shackles on the now-dead target, imprisoning the target's soul in the talisman.
The dysfunction is that the spell, despite never being subject to errata, instead of reading Target: 1 living creature should read Target: 1 dead creature. This makes the spell interesting but not game-changing; the target's saving throw is, essentially, not accepting a gift from an evil wizard. The spell's manageable. Getting any important fellow to carry around something for no apparent reason in D&D 3.5 is a challenge.
This is how I'd read the spell for a long time. Then, when considering adding the spell into an upcoming Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 campaign, I looked at the spell again and thought Maybe it's not supposed to be played that way. Maybe the spell's doing something that defies my expectations. Thus below's the alternate rules-as-written reading.
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The Functional but Wild Version: The caster casts the spell on the target. Later, the caster convinces the target to carry with it the talisman. When the target dies, the target's soul is sucked into the talisman, which the caster retrieves at his leisure.
Maybe I rejected this rules-as-written reading as too frightening. With no saving throw and 1-standard-action Casting Time, the caster could cast this on anyone or everyone. With its instantaneous duration, there's no aura to give away the spell's effects–the target's soul's fundamentally and forever altered so that instead of the dead target's soul departing the Material Plane, heading through the Astral, and eventually arriving on the plane of its eternal reward the dead target's soul goes into the talisman.
That is, that's what happens if the creature dies while its carrying the caster's talisman. Nonetheless, the campaign implications are huge.
Casters might cast the spell on everyone, selling tchotchkes on the cheap from push carts and swiping them from the families of the dead, 'cause, hey, souls–awesome. Dozens of casters might've cast this spell on a single target, and the target may be carrying several talismans; where does the soul go? The instantaneous duration means there's no magic aura to detect on the talisman; a target's soul could be in anything he was carrying when he died, and the only way to find out if the target reached his reward is to ask a god if he's seen the target lately. If the talisman containing the soul's destroyed, and the creature had a different (or the same!) caster's soul shackles spell cast on him before he died, and that different (or same) caster's talisman was in his possession when he died, does the soul enter a new receptacle?
For those who've had experience with this spell, how've you used it? Did you use the spell as written, or did you house rule it? Did the spell change the campaign as much as I imagine it would, or am I overreacting?
Note: I've labeled this question house-rules because I'm comfortable with either reading of this spell, and both readings mandate going beyond the text.
Best Answer
Like many things in the BoVD, yes, this spell is horribly dysfunctional. There's no rules coverage for a lot of obvious consequences of the spell's use, and what rules there are are at best unclear and at worst contradictory.
Focusing on the part of the spell text that deals with the actual casting and not the aftermath:
If we try to extract from that the circumstances under which the spell can be cast...
As per standard spellcasting requirements, the caster must:
The target needs to be:
The talisman:
So, as written, this only works on a single living creature that has previously died with the talisman in their possession, but who is now alive; and the caster has to be nearby, with the talisman and stood in a Desecrated area. That's obviously silly, and not how the spell is meant to work. Although the spell isn't completely impossible to use as written, it's nonsensical garbage - it effectively works as a Trap the Soul with no save against anyone living if the caster possesses a talisman the victim held the last time they died (i.e. it only works on people who have previously died and been resurrected).
What I think this is meant to do:
I'm generally in agreement with your first reading. The immediate contradiction between "Target: 1 living creature" and the first sentence of the description calling the victim "a dead creature" seals it as an error for me.
The second reading is pretty much ruined by the use of the past tense in the text - "The subject must have had the talisman in his possession when he died, or the spell cannot function" - which places the target's death chronologically before the casting of the spell can take place. The talisman focus required to cast the spell is only complete once the target dies while holding it, and without it "the spell cannot function".
I think this spell was meant to be a lower-level version of the second usage of Trap the Soul (in which you trick someone into touching a prepared vessel, and it sucks their soul out), with the attendant extra restrictions and casting hurdles because it's level 5. In this case, you're meant to somehow get them to hold the talisman (reverse pickpocketing, disguise it as loot, a Sympathy spell, etc), then kill them in a Desecrated area while they still have it and quickly cast this spell on their corpse to trap them. You could also force the talisman onto an uncooperative enemy or sacrifice while they're restrained, then kill them to trap their soul with this.
How I would fix this broken mess:
First, change the target line to "1 dead creature (see text)". Add extra specifications to the text limiting the time the creature is allowed to be dead for (probably something like 1 minute/level), and specify that the target must also be in a Desecrated area.
Second, add some sort of description of how one prepares the talisman, and what forms it can take. I'd probably go for any object with some small gp cost for the process (something like a 1 hour ritual, one talisman per ritual, max simultaneously prepared talismans equal to level), and make it radiate faint Necromancy once "prepared" (presumably the caster would go to some effort to hide that, otherwise it's a potential tip-off for the victim).
Third, add extra rules describing what happens if the Talisman is destroyed or damaged - "the spell ends and the soul departs to the afterlife", as with a successful saving throw (or, if a victim hasn't yet been trapped, the spell simply ends). That plus the revised target requirements eliminates the possibility of one person being affected by multiple spells, as only one spell can affect their corpse initially (it's instant, and after the first cast there's no soul left to trap - if they had multiple talismans on them, the Necromancers responsible will have to race to be the first to cast this spell on the body) and once the soul is in the talisman it'll be outside this spell's targeting restrictions.