letstalkabouttrek replied to your post: All the spells Caleb found in Halas’s lab are too...
Trap The Soul was a spell erroneously listed as a wizard spell in the first printings of the PHB, but it doesn’t actually exist because it was lumped into the ‘Minismus Containment’ effect of Imprisonment, so it could just be that element isolated as its own spell
Ah, yeah, that’s probably the way to transfer it to 5e. The 3.5 version of the spell goes into a lot more detail about different ways the spell can be cast or triggered (including in traps) but the 5e version as just one option within the “Imprisonment” spell seems to do away with that.
But if Matt is sort of reintroducing a 3.5 spell that was folded into a higher level 5e spell as its own thing in his 5e game, I wonder what level he will set “Trap the Soul” at. Imprisonment is a 9th level spell, but part of the power is in how many different variations it can take. So isolating only one of those variations and keeping it 9th level would seem like a de-powering to me. Which might comfortably set it back at 8th level, which is what Trap the Soul was back in 3.5 anyway.
But also - since it was once erroneously listed as a wizard spell in 5e, I wonder if Matt was just remembering a spell he knew from 3.5, and thinking it existed in 5e because he’d read about it in the PHB before. A few times he’s used names for items from older editions, just because he’s been playing so long (the recent Elven Chain debate was a good example of this), so he might have just off-handedly used the term he was more familiar with to describe what he wanted.
*edited to clarify my wording about spell levels in the 2nd paragraph
