Role-playing Games Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for gamemasters and players of tabletop, paper-and-pencil role-playing games. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Mind flayers (Monster Manual, p. 222) have the Extract Brain action:
Extract Brain. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one incapacitated humanoid grappled by the mind flayer. Hit: The target takes 55 (10d10) piercing damage. If this damage reduces the target to 0 hit points, the mind flayer kills the target by extracting and devouring its brain.
If a mind flayer kills a creature with their Extract Brain action, will revivify return the creature to life as normal?
I would say no. Revivify says:
This spell can't return to life a creature that has died of old age, nor can it restore any missing body parts.
Raise dead, which is more potent than revivify, expounds on this, saying:
This spell closes all mortal wounds, but it doesn't restore missing body parts. If the creature is lacking body parts or organs integral for its survival--its head, for instance--the spell automatically fails.
So Raise Dead and Revivify would both fail. Resurrection is the lowest-level revival-type spell that would work, as it:
....closes all mortal wounds and restores any missing body parts.
So there are a couple of interesting things going on here.
One, while Raise Dead says the spell automatically fails if the creature is missing vital parts or organs, Revivify lacks this clause. It is an open question, therefore, whether the spell actually functions on such a target or not.
Two, Revivify also lacks several other clauses. It lacks the clause in Raise Dead that resurrecting a creature causes that creature to take penalties because of strain. It can be cast on any creature that died in the last minute, willing or no, and it allows no saving throw! It is cast in a single action, instead of 1 hour. These are very odd, because Revivify is lower level than Raise Dead. One might say that this is counterbalanced by Revivify only working on those who have died in the very immediate past, but this is not balanced.
When I want to rez somebody, there's a very good chance it's because the party is currently getting its ass handed to it. In this scenario, all the other resurrection magic is useless; you can't rez someone until the fighting is over. But Revivify will get them back into the fight with no ill effects for the cost of one action, able to take actions immediately. This is beyond even the power of True Resurrection, a ninth level spell!
Finally, interestingly enough, by RAW, it doesn't actually matter whether it works or not. If it doesn't work, well, it doesn't work. But there is the absurd possibility that it does work, but the resurrected creature immediately dies a second time.
In other words, Revivify probably needs to be errata'ed. It's a third level spell in many ways more powerful than a 9th level spell. And in this specific case, it doesn't matter whether the spell works (unless some other game effect triggers as a result of the target coming back to life momentarily) - technically, the target is still dead after the spell is cast, although it may briefly have come back to life in the interim.
The most reasonable interpretation is the spell is supposed to include those restrictions, but the designers cut too much out of the description.
