The Gaming Den

Useable only if the DM is willing to use discretion.

Ressurection Of The Dead
Level: Sor/Wiz 5, Drd 5, Clr 5
Components: M, L
Casting Time: 1 round
Range: Touch
Target: Sacrifice

Cleric
Material: A sacrifice acceptable to your god, a piece of the dead creature
Location: A place holy to your god

You must barter with your god with a living sentient sacrifice (Good: Willing, Evil: Unwilling and preferably virgin, Neutral: Willing but mind control is cool) in exchange for the dead creature. The god may not have access to the creature (Unwilling, belongs to another god, is on the other side of the Planescape).

Wizard
Material: A sacrifice of equal value to the dead creature (Same level), dead creature's whole body (Or at least whatever you want him to come back with)
Location: A place of great death

The wizard makes a transaction with Death Himself for the dead creature's soul.

Druid
Material: A sacrifice that is, oh, about the same size as the dead creature, enough clay to cover the body
Location: Place of mystical significance under a full moon

During a ritual under a full moon, the body must be covered in clay and carved into the likeness of the dead creature (Craft check DC 20). If the check fails, the ressurected is subject as if the Reincarnation spell was used. Either way, they break out of the dry hardened clay at sunrise.

What if your setting has more than one, or less than one moon, or the moons never go through all phases the way that Earth's moon does?

No, I'm actually serious about that. Some planets have a bunch of moons. Also... you could be on a moon.

JE, you just blew my mind.

Judging__Eagle wrote:What if your setting has more than one, or less than one moon, or the moons never go through all phases the way that Earth's moon does?

No, I'm actually serious about that. Some planets have a bunch of moons. Also... you could be on a moon.

Come up with some similar natural event that happens roughly once per month?

That works Robby, but it should be specified in advance.

Making resurrection more difficult in D&D comes with baggage. Specifically, you are encouraging people to use the myriad of alternative ways to bring back the deceased in some form. So people are going to be brought back as undead with class levels or soulbound to golems or whatever much more often.

Now, this can be seen as a good thing or a bad thing. Personally, I like the idea of being able to bring someone back at the cost of changing them somehow enough that I make those options even easier to access in my games than they are normally. But if you don't like the idea of bringing back the dead at all, you are going to have to make much more dramatic changes to the game.

No, I like soul bound golems and undeadiness.

In that case, splendid! Resurrection is more or less patched for you. You might want to consider keeping Revivify, though. It resurrects people, but only if they've been dead for a round or less. That makes death effects a little less crazy-awesome.

Actually, you probably want to make the spell level 1-5, not level 9.

There already has to be a huge sacrificial ritual and stuff. You don't gain anything by making them search out a level 17 Wizard/Cleric for their resurrections.

That actually makes the game worse.

Well that idea was tha raising the dead was a big epic thing.

But by level 5 spellcasting, they are level 10 overall so... yeah, low level epic, I suppose.

God_of_Awesome wrote:Well that idea was tha raising the dead was a big epic thing.

But by level 5 spellcasting, they are level 10 overall so... yeah, low level epic, I suppose.

Right, and I'm saying, if you want the PCs to have to go find someone cooler than them at low levels to get a res, that's fine, make it level 10.

But if a level 2 character dies, they actually have the money to buy that level 9 spell cast by a level 17 Cleric.

But they sure as crap aren't going to be able to find one.

Also, maybe think about providing an evil Wizard/Cleric alternative option that is like "And then you sacrifice 1000 CR 1/4 commoners to resurrect your level 8 friend." Or whatever. Just so people can sacrifice small towns and be extra evil.

I think the idea is that resurrection is special in that you come back no different than you were when you died. So if you can't find someone more powerful than the deities in some fantasy literature to bring back your dead pal, you have to do something that changes him. Often into something mechanically superior, but less "human" or "mortal".

We already have a bunch of options for bringing people back as undead with class levels, so that could provide a decent guideline for the sorts of stuff that PCs should be able to do instead of resurrection.

The issue of resurrection being at a certain spell level probably depends on campaign-specific stuff such as roughly how many people of each level exist in your game. If the most powerful people in your world who can still be vaguely accessible to experienced adventurers are level 10, it should be a level 5 spell.