Feantar
2018-11-05, 06:00 PM
Can planar binding be cast without a magic circle? Would good outsiders ask rewards for doing deeds such as saving someone's soul from being stolen?
A recent thread on planar binding and slavery brought to mind a past campaign and a question that welled up in one situation within said campaign.
Our party had encountered a cult led by an alienist, worshiping a being and/or a group of beings that called themselves Speakers in the Silence (or something to that effect) hailing from the far realm. They had managed to create an effect in which created a type of co-location of the far realm and the material (think a Xoriat Manifest Zone from Eberron). The way it worked is, they made a plantlike growth that functioned like the heroes of horror taint, and the souls of the people who were tainted were post-mortem forced through the barrier of the planes rupturing it and causing small pinholes to form. As you can tell, that also resulted in people not actually going to the standard afterlife, but becoming permanent residents.
At this point in the story, we managed to kill the alienist but not before he managed to cast Phantasmal Killer on a little boy we rescued. The reason was that the barrier was really weak and one more soul could rupture it completely. That meant that, very very soon, the boy's soul would be lost as none of us had any resurrection magic. But my wizard(Celestial Mystic) had a scroll of Lesser Planar Binding.
So my plan was as follows. I bind a Movanic Deva and clarify the situation in an expeditious manner, then offer her carte blanche on what reward she gets for saving a child's soul by raising him(as we could not waste time bargaining).
And here's the kicker: I did not have any Magic Circle spells available. Now the DM liked the idea, so she ruled that since the spell cannot be cast without a magic circle, the scroll included the circle.
Two questions derive from that:
Can planar binding even be cast without the Magic Circle against Alignment? Because the text implies it cannot, but the Dread Necromancer spell list implies it can.
Would you, as a DM, have the Deva ask for a reward?
A recent thread on planar binding and slavery brought to mind a past campaign and a question that welled up in one situation within said campaign.
Our party had encountered a cult led by an alienist, worshiping a being and/or a group of beings that called themselves Speakers in the Silence (or something to that effect) hailing from the far realm. They had managed to create an effect in which created a type of co-location of the far realm and the material (think a Xoriat Manifest Zone from Eberron). The way it worked is, they made a plantlike growth that functioned like the heroes of horror taint, and the souls of the people who were tainted were post-mortem forced through the barrier of the planes rupturing it and causing small pinholes to form. As you can tell, that also resulted in people not actually going to the standard afterlife, but becoming permanent residents.
At this point in the story, we managed to kill the alienist but not before he managed to cast Phantasmal Killer on a little boy we rescued. The reason was that the barrier was really weak and one more soul could rupture it completely. That meant that, very very soon, the boy's soul would be lost as none of us had any resurrection magic. But my wizard(Celestial Mystic) had a scroll of Lesser Planar Binding.
So my plan was as follows. I bind a Movanic Deva and clarify the situation in an expeditious manner, then offer her carte blanche on what reward she gets for saving a child's soul by raising him(as we could not waste time bargaining).
And here's the kicker: I did not have any Magic Circle spells available. Now the DM liked the idea, so she ruled that since the spell cannot be cast without a magic circle, the scroll included the circle.
Two questions derive from that:
Can planar binding even be cast without the Magic Circle against Alignment? Because the text implies it cannot, but the Dread Necromancer spell list implies it can.
Would you, as a DM, have the Deva ask for a reward?