Would Summoning an Object Inscribed with Glyphs of Warding Via Drawmij’s Instant Summons Invalidate the Glyphs

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Drawmij's Instant Summons. You touch an object weighing 10 pounds or less whose longest dimension is 6 feet or less. The spell leaves an invisible mark on its surface and invisibly inscribes the name of the item on the sapphire you use as the material component. Each time you cast this spell, you must use a different sapphire.

Glyph of Warding. When you cast this spell, you inscribe a glyph that creates a magical effect triggered by other creatures, either upon a surface (such as a table or a section of floor or wall) or within an object that can be closed (such as a book, a scroll, or a treasure chest) to conceal the glyph. The glyph can cover an area no larger than 10 feet in diameter. If the surface or object is moved more than 10 feet from where you cast this spell, the glyph is broken, and the spell ends without being triggered.

I'm a bit bumfuzzled how these two interact. Is the phrase "moved more than 10 feet from where you cast this spell" referring to physical distance traveled over time? Or is it referring to distance between point A and point B being less than or equal to 10 feet? My reasoning is that teleportation could be understood as a folding of space-time, rather than actual distance traveled, thus circumventing the limitation.

Best Answer

The glyph is broken if the object is more than 10 feet away when you summon it

Movement as a game term is only defined in the context of characters moving themselves (PHB, p. 190). Objects do not have their own speed to spend1, so they cannot normally move in that sense. Unless your DM rules that "is moved" really means the much more narrow and technical "is carried by someone expending movement", for which there is no indication in the text, that means we fall back to the plain English meaning of the word, and the dictionary tells us it means:

to (cause to) change position

So, the object would be moved if it is made to change position, no matter how. If that change of position leads the object to being more than 10 feet away from the point where the glyph was inscribed, the glyph is broken.

If you crush the sapphire and you are further away than 10 feet from where the glyph was inscribed, you typically change its position and you will break the glyph by summoning the object.

One exception may be what happens when there is no defined distance between where the object originally was when you inscribed the glyph, and where you are. This can happen if the object is inscribed on another plane, because instant summons can summon an object across planar boundaries, and the distance between planes is generally not defined.

In such a case, because there is no explicit rule for that, the DM will have to decide if they count the summoning as moving or not. Xanathar's Guide to Everything explains this on page 4:

The DM is key. Many unexpected events can occur in a D&D campaign, and no set of rules coukd 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.

1 with the exception of vehicles, those do have a speed for overland travel purposes.

P.S. Regarding your other musing what it would mean for the glyph to be on the surface of a large moving structure, that question has been asked before.

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