Reviving a dead god

Anyone have any advice for running an adventure in 3.5 for the PC's to revive a dead Lolth who was slain by a previous adventuring group? My campaign has self-baked a legitimate reason for a party of mostly neutral/goodish characters to want Lolth alive again. I'd be interested in any ideas you have about how this might be accomplished in a fun way.

I think Monte had a whole book on dead gods. You might find some ideas there. Fiest's novel 'Darkness at Sethanon' involves a plot to revive dead gods. The Age of Worms adventure path involves a plot to revive a dead god, so you might look there also.

Your biggest logical issue I foresee is probably going to be if you take an interest in reviving Lolth, you'll have to probably do it over the dead body of some other god. I can't imagine that the Seldarine are going to be thrilled to have her back. I can't imagine for example Corellon Larethian just standing by and say, "Mortal, you wish to resurrect my greatest and most implacable foe? Yeah, I'm ok with that. Have fun." And she wasn't much into sharing either. So your 'legitimate reason' has to be sufficiently legitimate that the Seldarine is willing to go along with it.

As for accomplishing it, I'd think you'd need to check off some pretty significant events:

a) You need a get together a large number of sincere lolth believers to assist in your ritual.
b) You need to obtain a portion of the body of the dead god - a relic or artifact of some sort - that is embued with the power of the god.
c) You need to perform the ritual in a place of power that is powerful even by the standards of a diety - in the roots of the tree of life, on top the world stone at the heart of the world, on the throne of the gods, on the body of a newly dead rival god of lolth, at the shut gates to the Beyond where the creator left the universe, at the divine pool from when the gods were originally birthed, etc. Alternately, the place of power could be an artifact of divine salient power - something even the gods fear or covet.
d) To perform the ritual, you need to perform some pretty massive knowledge (religion) and spellcraft checks, and sink a massive amount of XP - probably pooled by simultaneously sacrificing the lives of 1000's of mortals - and perform a Wish. In the aforementioned, 'Darkness at Sethanon' novel, the ritual required sacrificing the lives of every living creature on the planet simultaneously. There is probably a good bet that the one performing the ritual is going to die, possibly to become the body that dead god's spirit takes over and kicks the old tenant out. There is a good bet that many of the worshipers are also planned part of the sacrifice. It's possible that the person performing the ritual doesn't realize this is going to happen. It's even more likely, especially in the case of CE worshippers, that they need to not realize that this is going to happen or they'll rebel.
e) There might be other sundry complications. Lloth's divine power and portfolio might have been mostly claimed by some other diety. You'll need to either kill that other diety or convince them to return the portfolio (fat chance). Or the portfolio itself might have just evaporated with Lolth's death, meaning that for example, there are fewer spiders, darkness, treachery, and intrigue in the world in her absence. To bring her back to power, you may have to do something that makes room for her portfolio in the unverse - an incredible act of treachery for example. Also, the ritual to restore an evil dead god probably has the [Evil] descriptor. Chances are, whoever performs the deed, even if they don't die, will be consumed by evil and undergo involuntary alignment change. Again, side effects like that might not be clear at the beginning of the process.

I'd also recommend the plot behind Dead Gods for info on reviving a dead deity. Also note that it might be easier to elevate one of Lolth's former servants (say, one of her yochohols) into her place, assuming the goddess's former mantle. There is precedence for this from FR with the goddess of magic (Mystara? - name eludes me at the moment and too lazy to look it up right now).

So as its your storyline, you can approach this anyway you want.

The easiest way out is off course she didn't die, merely withdrew after the defeat of a mortal form (think Sauron, or even the whole War of the Spider Queen novels). To bring her back the party needs uncover the truth behind her death/disappearance.

Next, if not truly dead (just "mostly dead"), why did Loth permit this, what is she trying to achieve. Then, where is she? Did she let herself be reborn in a different guise? The most obvious route here is in some form of holy form; leads to a wonderful seen where the good party convince a holy child that she must become what she once was... pure evil ...

If so, what is needed to have this happen; collection of many items, uncover a lost ritual, convince a pact of good gods its in their interests, if not, find ways of hiding that from powerful forces of good. Maybe even hunting down and killing the previous party??

Importantly, divorce her coming back from what she now has as a "portfolio", she'll reclaim that as needed ... maybe in your world the gods power does not come from worship (power as a stock price), but from something else and that discovery could be a defining moment in your world.

I used ideas from Monte Cook's Requiem for a God in a campaign where the PCs revived a dead god. I though it was pretty good.

A few things I'd like to know to be better helpful...

-How did she die?
-Why do they want to bring her back?
-How are the other gods involved?
-What level and class are your players?

Thanks for the awesome replies!

The party is ECL 14 high magic and includes 6 players - fighter, warmage, cleric, arcane heirophant (half druid-half wizard from RotW), druid and rogue.

She was killed by a previous adventuring party run by some of the current players under another DM around 30 years ago IRL... yeah there are some old school gamers in my group and I love it! I don't think they now remember exactly the blow that killed Lolth, but they recall that it happened in the demonweb pits.

When another DM was running the party, Corellon Larethian came to the human cleric in disguise, and told him that Lolth must be restored - her death 40 years ago caused an unexpected imbalance in power in the underdark and now the "new management" of the drow pantheon (Kiaransalee and Selvetarm) are teaming up to attack the surface world. Restoring Lolth is seen as the lesser of two evils. However, it is not known to the PCs how the rest of the Seldarine feels about Corellon's plan.

The PCs havent got past just contemplation of reviving Lolth, they have no idea how it could be done yet. So far I have found all the ideas here very helpful in putting this into perspective and giving me ideas. Thanks again!

Scott

Just as a twist ... it wasn't Corellon that visited them. It will turn out that another powerful, evil being with an interest in reviving Lolth impersonated Corellon to get the PCs moving. So the PCs will turn out to have been working for one of the bad guys the whole time. Perhaps it's a group like the Cult of the Dragon or Eldrath Veluthraa who want a distraction so that they can pull off some other scheme, or a great demon like Orcus who just wants to sow chaos.

Let's see ... the adventure needs an epic ritual, so the PCs quest will need to include an adventure to discover the ritual itself, a series of adventures to obtain the various ingredients, tools, and artifacts needed to pull off the ritual. The artifacts will of course be in the hands of various powerful beings or hidden in the most dangerous of places. All will have to be brought together after penetrating an exceptionally dangerous place on another plane to pull off the ritual at a very specific moment in time, so the party is working against the clock, too.

This sounds like tremendous fun. "Place the crushed skull of Acererak the Demi-Lich into the Chalice of Night, mixing it with fresh Ambrosia from the Seven Heavens and the heart's blood of Bahamut the Platinum Dragon, making seven passes and casting a wish to give the mixture life. Coat the petrified core gem of the deity you wish to resurrect with the mixture and place the gem atop the assembled Rod of Seven Parts while standing atop the highest peak of the 666th layer of the Abyss, and at the exact moment of the conjunction of the seven planes of power the energy of divine resurrection will strike the rod and its wielder will transform into the revived god ..."

A good first step would be to make them retrieve her body, or at least some pieces of her body.

I'll second the vote for Requiem for a God, btw- I thought that it was a great product. I have it around somewhere; if I can turn it up, I'll look it over and see if anything jumps out at me.

In the "revive a dead god" campaign I ran, one thing that was important was that a "dead" god has many and diverse manifestations.

In that game, the physical body of the god was a giant stone "statue" standing in a harbour, the top of the head poking forth as an island (with a lighthouse on top - I ran a version of the Freeport modules as part of this). Dramatic things happened when the dead god's eyes "opened", and in one encounter which involved various planes merging together into the prime material a PC was able to interact with and "inhabit" the dead god - who came to life and leapt out of the water, dramatically diverting a falling star before resettling as an island.

At the same time as the physical body was this stone statue, the god's psyche was split into ethereal shards which the PCs would encounter from time to time - so-called "Echoes of the dead god" which were, in mechanical terms, high level ghosts/spirits, and which in story terms (i) expressed the god's madness - he had "died" when trapped in the outer void fighting against an elder evil, and been driven insane in the process - and (ii) permitted the PCs (and their players) to learn bits and pieces of the dead god's story over time.

Finally, because time in the outer void does not pass in the same way as in the prime material, there was the temporally cyclic, ever-living presence of the dead god still fighting in the void - whom the PCs, when they got powerful enough, were able to contact, rescue and restore to mental health while leaving a karmic simulacrum of the PC paladin in the dead god's place to continue the fight against the elder evil. This was how they brought the god back to life, as the culmination of the campaign. (The PC paladin, in the after-events of the campaign, went on to found a monastery on the island that was still present, now a statue of the dead god rather than his dead body.

I don't have any particularly good suggestions for how you would do this sort of thing with Lolth - other than involving spiders and demons - but I think the idea of multiple manifestations, and playing with the idea that body, spirit and even time don't mean the same thing for a god as they do for a mortal, can help generate the sense that this is something different from just bringing a PC back to dead with a Resurrection spell. And more prosaically, it also gives you multiple pegs on which to hang the various story and mechanical steps that the players will have to undertake to actually bring Lolth back to life.