Can a Sending (3rd level spell) contact a soul or just a living creature?

Question

The bard in my group lost his mother and 2 sisters under mysterious circumstances. Unbeknownst to him (or them) his father traded the wife and children to Asmodeus in exchange for success in business.

The bard just turned 5th level and has announced that next session he is using Sending to contact his mother and/or sisters.

I haven’t completely settled on whether or not they still live a tortured existence as playthings for Asmodeus’s favored minions or if they are dead and their souls are continually tormented. (Very dark part of the campaign, I know.)

If they have been slain will the bard’s sending be able to contact them or does Sending only work on the living?

Answer 1

Sending would not work for contacting the dead

The first line of the spell:

You send a short message of twenty-five words or less to a creature with which you are familiar.

You must choose a creature to hear the message. Since death causes a creature to, in game vernacular, change from a "creature" to an "object", with regards to targeting, the spell will fail.

However, you did mention in the question that they might not be dead. If that is the case, it should work barring other problems:

• Torture includes being in an anti-magic zone
• They live on a different plane (5% failure rate)
• Asmodeus has other powers to prevent it from working
• Etc...

Answer 2

Sending likely cannot contact the soul

Sending says

You send a short message of twenty-five words or less to a creature with which you are familiar.

Creature: It is unlikely to work, because sending needs a creature to target. The former creature they are trying to contact consisted of a body and a soul,

• the body now that they are dead counts as an object
• the soul of a creature is not the same as the former creature. Whether a soul or spirit counts as a creature at all is not entirely clear, but I think it does not, unless it got turned into a ghost, specter, or similar entity.

So the spell would not work. What the caster knew as a creature to contact now is part object and part up to the DM, but probably not a creature.

Familiar: the body of a creature can be polymorphed, petrified, and exchanged in many other ways by magic such as the Clone, Magic Jar and Reincarnation spells. For example, if your character's soul were to inhabit a new body from Clone, and you were contacted by Sending, no matter if the old body lies rotting in a dungeon somewhere, you would expect the sending to reach you.

If the DM rules that the soul is really what makes the essence of a creature, and souls count as creatures, sending also demands you are familiar with the creature, and this is a hurdle the DM will need to allow you to clear, too. Are you still familiar, when the target has changed in such a substantial way?

Lastly, whether alive or as souls, it certainly would be within Asmodeus's power to block sending (it is not a divination spell, so normal anti-divination measures do not work, but Asmodeus is a deity).

So, in essence, you can decide if you want them to be able to reach their relatives, or not, but the rules would point to no.

Answer 3

It is up to the DM to turn this into an interesting story.

As other answers have noted, RAW the spell only works on living creatures. Even if you decide they still live somewhere in the Nine Hells, Asmodeus probably has measures against such spells to reach his prisoners.

However, just disallowing it would be "boring and therefore wrong (tm)". Instead, think of how this could lead to an interesting story arc. Here's how I would solve this:

When the Bard casts sending, instead of his family, he manages to contact some minion of Asmodeus, who (after a lot of chatting) might propose the following:

"The souls of these people have bored my lord, who is searching for someone of more potential, of ambition. Someone like that would make a fine addition to his collection of fiends. As such he is willing to make a trade. Give him the soul of the one that sent these useless mortals into his realm, or someone of similar capabilities, and he will trade them for the mortals you seek"

This way, your bard gets sent on a quest to find the one who sold them (his father) and trade him in for the others. First he has to find out it was his father who did this, and then the bard needs to either murder him in Asmodeus' name with the proper rites, or if he does not want to do this, he has to trade his own soul for those of his family members. I think a devil like Asmodeus would be far more interested in a greedy businessman or a powerful bard than a couple of poor girls (which I assume to be less powerful than both the Bard and the father, because otherwise the father would not be able to sacrifice them so easily without their consent).