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Resurrection and Royalty


Steve

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In a friend's adaptation of the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, he said the gods are bound by a law of balance in raising the dead. If one side raises a dead person, any opposing factions get an opening to raise someone on their side. So, one must be quite valuable for a god to grant the resurrection. I don't know all the details, but as a player I didn't need to. One of the confirmations that our PCs were involved in something very important was that gods were waiving the "You get one, we get one" treaty. Whatever it was, they all wanted us to succeed.

 

In my own campaign, there just aren't that many people powerful enough to raise the dead. They are of course swamped with requests, but they can pick who they choose. When it comes up, I'm going to adopt my friend's rule: The gods raise the dead for their purposes, not those of mortals. Yes, some people might squyeal that this deprotagonizes clerics and druids. Tough patooties. You wanted to play a character who serves the divine, don't complain when you are expected to serve the divine.

 

In D&D, resurrection magic also does not rejuvenate. (Resurrection and true resurrection specifically say they don't work on people who died of old age.) So even the most generous availability of such magic could let a monarch live a long life... but their reign still must end in time. If you really want to be the Eternal King or whatever, look into becoming a vampire. Hey, it works for Strahd.

 

Dean Shomshak

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I could see resurrection magic perhaps coming into play where an assassination has occurred, and that would require assassins to take measures against it. Kind of like a magical life insurance policy.

 

However, it is far more likely that the next person in line would decide to just let the old royal stay dead or the church who could perform such magic doesn't like the recently deceased royal, as the webcomic in my original post demonstrates.

 

It could be quite dramatic in a campaign if this sort of thing ever got explored.

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In a number of settings resurrection magic either won't work or has limited effect on people who die of old age - might get them functional for a short time, but they're just going to die again, and given the difficulty of resurrection magic, not worth the trouble. Such settings would likely result in a lot of long reigns, punctuated by civil wars.

As far as assassination goes, I imagine that mutilating the corpse would be a common method of prevention. A lot of settings only allow resurrection of an intact corpus. Taking the head and disposing of it would be effective there.

In settings where resurrection magic is common, a counteractive approach would likely be considered. Steven Brust's Taltos novels feature both hiding the body until resurrection is no longer possible, and Morganti blades, which kill the soul as well as the body.

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Its like any game you play, significant deaths are part of the game storyline, but your character can always come back to life whenever they die and raise dead spells are all over the place.  It makes no sense, unless the game explicitly and particularly says that there's something about the PC(s) that makes them particularly able to come back to life and even then its silly.

 

That's one of several reasons why I made bringing people back from the life either gruesome and temporary (the necromantic version that uses transform to bring someone back... but they "heal" back the transform as normal and rot away over time), or complicated and special (a particular ritual or herb that can preserve someone's soul in their body a short period of time like Westley being "almost dead" in Princess Bride) which then other techniques can be used to heal them back to life.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Synchronously, this has been something I've asked of some OSR players recently. How common was/is Raise/Resurrection in your games? The answers were mainly 'exceedingly rare' to 'quite common'. There didn't seem to be much of a mid-ground.

 

I asked it largely because it seems as though the main objection of Old School DMs was the "invulnerability" of 5E D&D characters, i.e., "It's too hard to kill them". Personally, I feel that whilst the threat of death should loom large, I don't see that as the primary way to challenge them. I try not to kill my characters willy-nilly as I invest a lot of time into weaving them into the campaign. As I've always been a GM who has had Raising been very rare, that's a lot of wasted work. In any case, if you kill PCs readily but allow Raising as fairly commonplace, what are you achieving?

 

On a related note, I've always been interested in the general ability of healing/curing in D&D communities via the clergy and how that impacts day to day life. Any village with even a resident 1st level cleric would be significantly different to a real-world medieval community. 

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