Does Revivify work on trapped souls?

Question

Nearly all the resurrection spells state that your soul has to be free and willing to be revived. The DMG on page 24 further states that A soul can't be returned to life if it doesn't wish to be, so the soul always has to be willing, whether the spell says so, or not. But curiously the DMG omits that the soul also needs to be free. And revivify, the lowliest of resurrection spells, lacks any explicit requirement that the soul needs to be free and willing.

I think revivifying a trapped soul may not be intended to work, as all the more powerful spells can't do it; but outside of such a balance consideration, is there any rule support for that?

Examples for effects that can trap a soul upon death (so one could cast revivify to try and bring it back in under one minute) are: the Blackstaff, a Night Hag's soul bag, or the Soul Cage spell from Xanthar's Guide to Everything.

Answer 1

Revivify cannot bring back trapped souls

There is a general, DM facing rule that precludes revivifying a trapped soul. The DMG states under Bringing Back the Dead on page 24:

When a creature dies, its soul departs its body, leaves the Material Plane, travels through the Astral Plane, and goes to abide on the plane where the creature's deity resides. If the creature didn't worship a deity, its soul departs to the plane corresponding to its alignment. Bringing someone back from the dead means retrieving the soul from that plane and returning it to its body.

By this logic, you can only bring someone back from the dead, if you can retrieve their soul from the plane where it naturally would reside. If the soul is trapped anywhere else or no longer a soul, then you can not bring its owner back from the dead, and revivify will not work.

Nearly all trapping effects trap the soul in an item, transformed into a lemure or larva in the lower planes, or resorb it into a monster, which in general are different locations from the natural home plane of the soul, so in all of these cases, revivify will not work.

(Thank you to Trish for finding this answer).

Answer 2

No, they're trapped.

This is a case of "specific-beats-general":

Remember this: If a specific rule contradicts a general rule, the specific rule wins.

Here, the text of revivify is the "general" rule:

You touch a creature that has died within the last minute. That creature returns to life with 1 hit point. This spell can't return to life a creature that has died of old age, nor can it restore any missing body parts.

Now, this spell does explicitly outline some limitations - it cannot restore a creature that died of old age and it cannot restore missing body parts. These are the only limitations the spell places on itself, but that doesn't mean that the effect of the spell cannot also have exceptions caused by other effects. A soul being trapped is one such effect.

The general rule is that revivify works as long as the target doesn't fall under the spell's stated limitations. And this makes sense, because not being trapped is the default state for the soul of a creature that dies. A soul being trapped is caused by a specific effect applying at the time of death that creates an exception to the general rule of revivify.

To think about it another way, there is no reason to believe that revivify creates an exception to "trapped" since it doesn't mention being free or trapped. Does the spell say it can free a trapped soul? No, so it can't free a trapped soul.

If revivify can free trapped souls, then it is a secret effect of the spell nowhere to be found in the spell’s description, that isn’t even explicitly mentioned anywhere else, that can only be inferred from the text of other spells that do mention a requirement that the target’s soul be free. I typically avoid mentioning it, but this is exactly the sort of thing Jeremy Crawford was trying to help us avoid when he said “There are no secret rules.”.

Answer 3

RAW

The description of the spell Revivify does not require that the deal creature's soul be 'untrapped'. While other resurrection-type spells do mention that requirement, those descriptions only apply to those spells.
Revivify itself only requires that the creature have died from some cause other than old age, and that the death have occurred less than one minute before.

When a creature dies, its soul departs its body, leaves the Material Plane, travels through the Astral Plane, and goes to abide on the plane where the creature's deity resides. If the creature didn't worship a deity, its soul departs to the plane corresponding to its alignment. Bringing someone back from the dead means retrieving the soul from that plane and returning it to its body.

This description of Bringing Back the Dead from the DMG has been mentioned to suggest that trapped souls can not be revived, because they do not meet the requirements here. There are several problems with taking the criteria here as literal rules, rather than general background, however.

The first problem is that it requires that the creature's soul be on either the plane of the creature's deity or its alignment plane. If the soul was anywhere else, even if not trapped, then this 'rule' would require that all Resurrection-type spells fail.

Second, in a similar manner, any spell effect that blocked planar travel would also cause all Resurrection-type spells to fail, since the soul would be unable to be "retrieved" from the planes as this 'rule' would require.
It seems odd to have spells like Private Sanctum or Hallow prevent spells like True Resurrection from working.

There is also the fact that the other spells do, explicitly, lay out the untrapped requirement. At the same time, spells and effects that trap souls usually state, explicitly, that the creature cannot be restored to life while the effect is in place (Soul Cage, early edition Demi-Liches, etc). The presence of that effect in each of the spell/effect descriptions strongly suggests that there was no general rule for the writes to fall back on.

RAI

It seems clear, from the wording of other Resurrection-type spells and soul-imprisoning effects, that souls considered "trapped" are not eligible for returning to live. It seems an accidental oversight and for balance purposes it seems best to treat Revivify as if it has the same "no trapped souls" restrictions as other Resurrection-type spells.
Attempting to twist other rules into covering for the flaws in this one spell description would have worse side effects.