Oh hell, someone is going to put two and two together and shit their pants, but I need to ask anyway...
When demiliches trap the soul, is there a saving throw? The Monstrous Manual does not mention one. The write-up for the demilich in S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (love that name!) specifically states that there is no saving throw against this trap the soul ability. Is that pretty much considered BtB RAW?
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The Monstrous Manual does not mention one. It does say an amulet of life protection stops the attack though. However, the monstrous manual does use italic print, letting us know its the same as the spell trap the soul which in an instance such as a demi lich would permit a save vs spell and any magic resistance applies.
The demi-lich in the Tomb of Horrors pretty much just takes the soul of the character with no save as well and stores it in one of the gems within the skull.
As for the soul
Tomb of Horrors wrote:If the skull is destroyed, each gem trapping a soul must make a saving throw versus magic as if it were the character trapped within. Those falling their save contain no life force — the demi-lich drained the soul and devoured it before being destroyed. Those which succeed still contain the character’s soul, and this is evidenced by a faint inner light (and visible as a tiny figure within the gem if viewed with true seeing, true sight or a gem of seeing.) The soul can be freed by crushing the gem, but some material body must be ready within 10' distance to receive it — a clone, a simulacrum, a souless body of some sort.
"We played Dungeons & Dragons for three hours! Then I was slain by an elf." -- Homer Simpson
Wait...where did you find the saving throw in 2E? I checked the MM and it says:
"The physical body of someone hit with the demilich's spell collapses and rots away in a single round."
There's no mention of a saving throw, except for the note that an amulet of life protection will prevail over the soul absorption aspect, but the character still dies. If you're talking about the spell description for trap the soul, both the 1E and 2E versions have a saving throw to negate the effect, and yet in 1E there is no saving throw for the effect coming from the demilich, so I'm not sure where that changed in 2E because there is still none mentioned in the 2E monster write up. It seems to be the same to me.
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Ah, I see! You must have been thinking about ghosts - they get magic jar and there's a saving throw for it. I've referred so many times in the past to the demi-lich using magic jar that I confuse the two all the time. Probably because I don't recall any other monsters being able to trap the soul like demi-liches. It's such a rarely used spell, I forget it exists!
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