D&D General No Resurrections in the Bronze Age

[Zardnaar]

If there are deities then these should teach mortals the core of civiliation. Prehistoric "deities" would be kami or nature spirits who would rather the Nature and wild life more the arts by advanced civilitations.

Instead metal it could be ivory, shells, scales and leather by the most dangerous monsters to be hunted.

Other option could be reincarnation into an animal, and later this polymorphed into a humanoid shape.

5000gp worth of tin

 

[jgsugden]

If we're following logic.... Magic, in general, is like futuristic technology. If you have the magic to raise the dead, you have magic available that will bust open the technological restrictions of whatever game age you're playing.

As a 9th level cleric you have access to the Divination and Commune Spells. If you want to Raise the Dead and the spell is available, but you're not sure how to get the components, these spells should allow you to figure out how and where to get the stones.

You also are likely to have either a druid or wizard in your party that can pull forth a burrowing elemental to fetch precious rocks beneath the soil. Low level spellcasters can shape water and move earth to mine relatively quickly, especially when walls of stone are then used to support tunnels.

 

[Steampunkette]

Making a diamond "look pretty" would require cutting it, which would be pretty difficult with bronze tools!

A bronze age diamond could be considered of negligible value, since at the time there was nothing that could usefully be done with it.

Any "sacrifice of great value" would be a reasonable substitute as a material component.

Diamonds are fragile. You can break them to reveal facets. It's not as nice as cutting it like we do these days, but...

In 400 BCE they weren't digging up diamonds in a specific diamond mine for the purpose of having very hard, very brittle, very ugly rocks that they couldn't shape for their uses. So they had to know, even then, you could strike it to reveal the crystalline structure. Which is all that's needed to make it look pretty.

That said, I was also -wrong-. When I looked up "Earliest diamond jewelry" google secretly gave me earliest diamond wedding ring. In fact, diamonds had been used in talismans for over a millennia by that point to ward away dark spirits. These diamonds were broken apart into fairly decent approximations of d8s of crystal.

... which is so much cooler.

 

[Zardnaar]

Diamonds are fragile. You can break them to reveal facets. It's not as nice as cutting it like we do these days, but...

In 400 BCE they weren't digging up diamonds in a specific diamond mine for the purpose of having very hard, very brittle, very ugly rocks that they couldn't shape for their uses. So they had to know, even then, you could strike it to reveal the crystalline structure. Which is all that's needed to make it look pretty.

That said, I was also -wrong-. When I looked up "Earliest diamond jewelry" google secretly gave me earliest diamond wedding ring. In fact, diamonds had been used in talismans for over a millennia by that point to ward away dark spirits. These diamonds were broken apart into fairly decent approximations of d8s of crystal.

... which is so much cooler.

Prefer emeralds and sapphires myself. Apparently rarer iirc.

 

[Steampunkette]

Prefer emeralds and sapphires myself. Apparently rarer iirc.

Well surely so! Prettier, too.

But do they ward off evil spirits? I think not!

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

Well surely so! Prettier, too.

But do they ward off evil spirits? I think not!

Sapphire and emerald engagement rings do ward off shallow gold diggers...

 

[Dioltach]

There are plenty of stones prettier than plain diamonds. Fancy coloured diamonds, for a start. Emeralds I can take or leave, for a green gemstone I prefer a nice tsavorite. Blue sapphires can be nice, but my favourite kind of corundum is padparasha sapphire.

 

[MoonSong]

In fact, not only was it not meaningfully mined, when the Conquistadors found large amounts of it in South America, they tossed it overboard, deriding it as "little silver" (platina) when they wanted silver proper.

Platinum is an industrial material that's only valuable cause it is very rare. Unlike silver and gold which are more desirable and would be more valuable if they were less rare. (Not enough of them to run an economy of the current size) It lacks a lot of properties that make it desirable, it won't tarnish, but it isn't as shiny and it is harder to work with for jewerly than gold silver and even copper.

I tend to prefer to run worlds on the silver standard, with electrum in platinum's slot and gold in the next tier (astral diamonds)

 

[TwoSix]

This is a pretty common reading of the implications of material components being listed in terms of gp value, but personally I find it overly literal. I’m inclined to take a more “doylist” view of material component costs - the material component required to cast a spell costing 500 gp means that if a player wants to buy that component, 500 gp is what it will cost them, not that the size or quantity of the component required is actually dependent on market forces. That’s how I prefer it anyway, as the alternative is just bizarre to me.

Yea, you can get into too many shenanigans if the value of the material components is actual dependent on external market actions. Like, what if you take a small diamond and a party member buys if off you for 500 gp? Or if you haggle a jeweler to sell a "500 gp" diamond to you for 400, does it now not work for raise dead?

The only way I can make it work is if "500 gp" is a gamist descriptor for how much "worth" an object has, and how much it actually sells for in-game is a function of the setting. A caster would simply be able to tell if any given material component meets the requirements of the spell.

 

[nevin]

I was writing up another thread to get ideas for power players and political schemes that might be afoot in a Bronze Age setting, when I stumbled upon the fact that the first diamond mine we know about was from the 8th century BCE, and the Bronze Age lasted until the 12th century BCE, so the likelihood of anyone having a 500 gp diamond to cast raise dead is pretty low.

I guess someone might have randomly dug up a diamond, and some 9th level cleric randomly paid them 10 pounds of gold for it, and then randomly tried waving it over a corpse while praying for them to come back. Seems unlikely though.

Reincarnation just requires oils and such. So if you end up in the Bronze Age, make friends with druids.

(Except the earliest record of druids date to the 4th century BCE. I love pedantry.)

since there are almost no records of druids by druids (they didn't keep records). That's not surprising. all the records we have of Druids are from other cultures mostly the Romans.