D&D 5E The horror of petrification in D&D

[MarkB]

If you remain petrified for long enough, eventually you may adapt, beginning to regain some awareness, regaining some capacity to move, so long as nobody ever sees you as anything but immobile stone, even finding the capacity to inflict those lost centuries upon other creatures...

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Here is more food for thought:

You need to collect the 7 shards of Nol Da'ar for >>insert quest<< You can't divine them, you can't rez the legendary heroes who hid them or speak to them using Contact Other Plane. They are gone!

Where are they?

The 7 legendary heroes, took them, went to different parts of the world and willingly got turned to stone. The shards are now part of the statues who stand vigil over them. You want the shards? You have to realize those statues are real people, then you have to undo the petrification and then you have to fight the hero.

(you can't break the statue in advance as that might damage the artifact)

 

[TheSword]

I don’t think you should be able to Rez someone who isn’t dead, no matter which level of spell you use.

Also the petrified condition is pretty specific about what it does to your stats etc. You gain resistance to damage so you keep HP. If your hp were all removed then you would die. The statue is helpless so out of combat this shouldn’t be too difficult, in combat you still need to deal the damage.

I like some of the home brew about sensing and coming slowly more alive. Maybe this could be the origin of a galeb dur style creature. Whose consciousness or proximity to elemental earth allowed the spirit control over the stone form. What if this creature gained some abilities that meant it was reluctant to be changed back. Perhaps it’s petrification could become contagious.
M
I always like Warhammer’s Old World interpretation of chaos dwarves. Their sorcerers were cursed to slowly turn to stone from the legs upwards as a curse for their perverse use of magic.

 

[Quartz]

The Petrified condition in the PHB seems fine to me for temporary effects(e.g. the 2E Statue spell) but permanent effects like a medusa's petrification are another matter entirely.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Re: turning to stone: wouldn’t it be cool if Medusas (or spellcasters) could choose what kind of rock to transform their victims into? That would be a plot driver, especially for the snakeheads.

Via intermediaries, victims turned into precious metal ores or gemstone then broken up could be sold to finance a variety of things. Deep dwarves or Derro allied with a Medusa could fund all kinds of stuff.

 

[5ekyu]

Has anyone else thought through Petrification in D&D? ISTM that most people play it that someone who has been petrified comes back to life when de-petrified, be it one round or a thousand years. But think about the implications: the creature's soul is forever denied the afterlife until their statue is de-petrified. Which may never happen.

ISTM that what should happen is that a petrified PC dies. It is the equivalent of a 6th level spell, after all. If the party want her back they can cast Stone to Flesh, Greater Restoration, or similar, followed by Raise Dead or just cast greater magics like Resurrection or True Resurrection. Just casting Stone to Flesh results in a dead body - which can then be the target of further magic.

How say you?

There is way too much story potential lost by not having the petrified come back.

But, I submit you can have your orrifying cake and eat it too with a soul gem feature.

What if a medusa captured the souls of their petrified victims when they were petrified and as long as they were petrified they lived on inside some internal VR medusa provided hell- maybe providing amusement or even sustenance to the medusa in their suffering.

That provides a lot of potential, not the least of which are possible meetings with other petrified victims during your incarceration.

 

[Oofta]

Like others, I view someone that's been petrified as neither alive nor dead, their soul is in stasis and trapped in the stone.

In my world people that have been petrified ignore minor damage, so it takes a fair amount of force to break the statues. So rain and general erosion doesn't have much of an effect but a tree falling on the statue could still shatter it. If broken, the soul is released and goes on to it's final destination. Eventually all souls would probably be released, but it could take millenia.

I can see it now. Some minor afterlife clerk is doing a review of "accounts" and comes across an unusually large number of souls that based on his actuary tables should have passed on to the afterlife but they're missing. Unable to balance the books he goes to his supervisor...

Clerk: "Excuse me sir, but I can't seem to get these books to balance."
Supervisor: "What is it this time Bob, I'm quite busy judging souls here."
Clerk: "Well, sir, speaking of judging souls there seems to be a bit of a discrepency. I was expecting these souls to pass through the gates but I can't seem to find a record."
Supervisor: "And you've double checked with Shirley? Remember liches store their souls, many races have quite extensive life spans."
Clerk: "Of course sir, I, umm, won't make that mistake again. But there's a cluster of human souls around this village that should have shown up a few weeks ago. I'm afraid they may have bypassed your eminence..."
Supervisor: "Nonsense!"
Clerk: "But the numbers..."
Supervisor: "It's probably some pesky medusa again. Why don't you have that adventuring company look into it. They've been keeping my ledger quite full lately, they owe us one."
Clerk: "Yes, sir, of course sir."

Sounds like the start of an adventure!

 

[S'mon]

The petrified aren't dead, which is great for dealing with liches, wizards with clone spell, contingency raisers et al.

 

[Oofta]

The petrified aren't dead, which is great for dealing with liches, wizards with clone spell, contingency raisers et al.

I agree with the clone (the spell specifically triggers on death) but whether or not a lich is "destroyed" when turned to stone is a DM ruling and I could see some leeway. After all their soul is stored in a phylactery, so it's not trapped in the statue.

 

[Hussar]

Honestly, I could see turning people to stone as a pretty effective way of actually assassinating folks in a D&D world. Just killing them isn't enough with all the resurrection magic around. But, petrifying them and then hiding the statue somewhere would be incredibly effective.

Heck, Flesh to Stone + Plane Shift = untraceable assassination that would prevent virtually any resurrection magic. Or even just turning something to stone, and breaking up the statue and stuffing it in a bag of holding.

The possibilities are pretty endless.

By the way, what the heck is "ISTM"? never seen that acronym before.