You're dead! Now what?

[Steve]

When a character dies in a fantasy world, what then? What does it mean to be dead? What should you do if a party member dies?

 

Drag the body to a priest and perform a "Raise Dead" spell? If you do it fast enough, the soul doesn't go to the afterlife. Is there an afterlife? Are there multiple places you could go?

 

Perform rituals/spells to keep the body from rising as one of the undead?

 

Do souls even exist in the setting? If they don't, then does being dead mean that you're really, really dead? No raising because the life force is simply extinguished instead of going to some afterlife where it can be retrieved from?

 

How is death treated in your campaign or campaigns you have played in?

[Nolgroth]

When I played whatever variant of D&D my group was interested in, life was cheap because Raise Dead and Resurrection spells existed. In a way, I hated that because heroic sacrifice became cheapened when you could just drag the meatsack back to town and have any ol' priest shove the soul and life back into a carcass. And all it costed was a measly 5,000 GP and a Constitution point on the part of the victim. Bah!

 

In almost every other game I played in, death was pretty final. I ran a fantasy game once where the characters were reincarnated into different bodies. I had a pretty neat reveal for when they found their former (now long dead) bodies. A lot of the players were very perturbed with me. It was all in the spirit of fun though, so a lot of the grumbling was for theatrics sake. It, for the very short remainder of the campaign, became a focus for the players to figure out who they used to be and what got them into the situation where they died. Sadly, didn't last long. Military gaming group. Should have stayed episodic and kept that one for later.

 

For most of my fantasy games, I have followed (explicitly or by assumption) the Laws of Magic from Ars Magica 4th Edition. Among those rules is one that basically states that the soul is off limits unless you are of divine origin. Most divine agents refuse to disrupt the natural order of things. It might have happened in a couple of campaigns, had the subject ever come to pass. As it was, only one of the characters came real close to death. He survived.

[BlueCloud2k2]

I've always had the rule that a character has 3 days to get raised from the dead. After that, their soul is judged and they are sent on to their eternal reward.

[Ternaugh]

Death in my FH game is pretty much final (though extremely rare). There are a few behind the scenes ways of resuscitating or preserving a "mostly dead" body, but in general, the PCs have never run into those methods.

[Derpy Tubbz]

Dead is dead, in all the games I ever played in or ran.

[L. Marcus]

As for what happens to the dead, there's joining the gods if you're a virtuous/greatsouled person; or if you're an average Joe/Joeina, it means hanging around a sort of Limbo until you've completely forgotten your old life and then reincarnate; or if you've been wicked and corrupted, you get thrown Outside the world for the demons to feast upon your soul.

[bluesguy]

When you are dead, you are dead in my world.

[Roter Baron]

In 30 years of roleplaying there hasn't been one resurrection in any campaign I gmed or played in, excluding "adventure resurrections" that are really just scenarios ("You are dead - now fight your way out of hell!").

 

But that is in my oppinion not a resurrection in the sense of the first post but innovative storyline away from the "In the tavern a grey-bearded wizard approaches your heroes and tells you yadayadayda ..."-classic.

[QuietusEmissary]

I've only had one resurrection, but I allowed it because:

1) We were playing D&D, and that stuff is available by default.

2) I hadn't said anything at the outset to establish that it wasn't allowed, and it didn't seem fair to spring that on them mid-campaign.

3) The player was really attached to his character concept, and permanently losing his character would have really hurt his fun, and by extension everyone else's. No one wants that.

 

To me, that second point is really crucial. If death is permanent, I like my players to be aware up front, since resurrection is so often available in RPGs.

 

To actually be on topic with the thread: The setting used was Eberron, in which the souls of the dead go to the plane of Dolurrh, a dark realm that leaches away its inhabitants' memories until they become husks of their former selves. It's pretty dark. I like it, though, because the religions in the setting all have their own theories not on where you go when you die--since it's demonstrable where you go--but rather what happens after that. Some believe that Dolurrh really is the end and try to avoid death or change what happens to the soul, while others say that the gradual loss of memories represents a soul's gradual transition to the "real" afterlife. It's a very agnostic setting, and I've always loved that about it.

Edited July 22, 2014 by QuietusEmissary

[massey]

In our D&D games, dead was dead, but not because "raise dead" did not exist.  It's just that nobody would pay the money to bring you back.  Everybody was like "thank god he's dead, I want that sword!"

[Roter Baron]

Oh, nothing soothes the pain of the untimely departure of a friend like the looting of his body!

 

I know how that feels. Had an AD&D dwarven fighter-thief who died because dm did not let me drink a healing potion (well, an the fireball did the rest). I then played a paladin.

After I a few weeks continuing the campaign I was wondering why everybody had so many magical items (the dm kept us rather short on that which is fine). Burst of laughter at the table and shouts of "That was your stuff!" was the answer.

 

Of course I knew that nothing but the naked body of my dwarf hit the grave (burial all paid by my treasure of course) - I just had chosen to forget the ghoulish act.

 

I am better now. But deep within I am still hurting ... badly ...

[bluesguy]

A long time ago I was playing a samurai in an AD&D campaign.  Due to a strange circumstance his katana was broken while trying to save a member of the party.  My character was so distraught that he committed seppuku .  The other players were startled.  They wanted to have my character resurrected or re-incarnated.  But I told them that they knew him well enough to know he would not want to be resurrected or re-incarnated. 

[Old Man]

I think I had a character resurrected once or twice back when AD&Dv1 was state of the art, but since then, dead is dead.

[GhostDancer]

Re: Samurai

 

...in the past, the samurai did not regard surrender to an enemy, or even changing sides, as an unforgivable deed.  If samurai lost a battle they would flee from the field and prepare for the next.  A close reading of the historical sources proves that for samurai to choose to fight to the death was a rather unusual event; they may have aspired to the unbending code of bushido, but in reality they often failed to live up to it.  

 

[A samurai] wears a cape, to entangle arrows from behind him; this later evolved into the horo or balloon-shaped back-flag.

 

In war, every ruse was considered fair as long as it brought victory.

 

-Samurai, An Illustrated History by Mitsuo Kure

 

[The Shimazu clan] favourite move was the use of a decoy force to draw an advance from the enemy.  The decoy unit would then go into a rapid and controlled false retreat, stimulating pursuit.  Other units of the Shimazu would lie to the flanks in ambush, with the main body held back.

 

During the 16th century we begin to see the use on the battlefield of the sashimono, a small flag flown from the back of the samurai's suit of armor.  Three-dimensional objects such as fans or lacquered wooden 'sunbursts' were sometimes used instead of flags.  

 

-Samurai, The World of the Warrior, by Stephen Turnbull

 

Mitsuo Kure stated that the myth of the absolute moral code of bushido was Japanese government propaganda from the 1930s.  Naturally, he also showed how the myth was rooted in chivalrous acts of some samurai.

 

I'd love to see other Samurai notes.  No doubt they belong in another thread- I beg your pardon.

[Markdoc]

In my own games, dead is dead. PCs die but rarely, though it has happened.

 

But one very short campaign I ran, set in viking-era Ireland, all the PCs died after a short adventuring career, thigh deep in dead gaels, after a heroic last stand. They were then intercepted on their way to Valhalla, and recruited for a mission to Jotunland on behalf of the Æsir, since they still smelled "mortal" on account of their very recent deaths.

 

Cheers, Mark

[SteelCold]

Dead is dead in my own FH campaign as there were only two gods in the world, when people who were worshippers of these gods die, would have their souls go either to the sun that resembles the positive energy plane of you know who or the negative energy one (called the void). The souls of the first plane gets transfered into sunlight and power good aligned magic while the second plane's souls change into necromantic energry which is sent to the world and rises the dead or power evil spells.

 

Atheists would just have their souls split into two and sent to both planes fully aware before they are transformed.

[GhostDancer]

Atheists would just have their souls split into two and sent to both planes fully aware before they are transformed.  -SteelCold

[Steve]

Yes, being an atheist in a fantasy world can be pretty bad.

[L. Marcus]

Unless you're a Golem named Dorfl.

[TheQuestionMan]

The PC's of our Fantasy Campaign have Characters Powerful enough to Ressurect another PC.

 

But, it is very very expensive and time sensitive/consuming.

 

Occurs frequently. Most Character deaths are my characters

 

Go figure

 

QM

[Steve]

Hopefully they weren't deaths due to "friendly fire." I've been in campaigns where that happens sometimes.

[Nolgroth]

Oh it depends on the reason for friendly fire. If it is a deliberate attack made by another PC, then yeah that sucks.

 

If, on the other hand, your GM insists on using the obscene Critical Tables from Rolemaster, you fumble and permanently disfigure his Mary Sue GMNPC?  Well I've had worse gaming experiences.