Kinematics
Hero
This is related to other "How does magic affect the world?" topics, such as last year's topic on the impact of the Frabricate spell on the world's economy. There may be some similarities, or reuse of ideas.
The motivation for this thread was sparked by the recent Hostage Crisis comic from the Handbook of Heroes webcomic. The comic itself was about how to make a hostage situation actually threatening in a world where resurrection is available. My thought is that that's a backwards approach. You should first look at the implications of resurrection on a world, and people's behavior in light of that, and then extrapolate to determine what sort of threats people would actually make, given that scenario.
Note that I'm viewing this from a 5E perspective, but it seems like it could largely apply to any ruleset or setting.
First, a refresher on available spells:
Reincarnate has some unique conditions attached to it, so I'm not going to include it in the analysis. Revivify is also not relevant for our purposes because of the time limit (1 minute). So let's start by looking at the availability of the spells.
From the Fabricate thread, I felt that a reasonable approach to estimating the adventurer population was to assume that only half of the adventurers at level N would make it to level N+1 (so the fraction of adventurers at level N is 1/2N). Perhaps they died in some remote dungeon, or perhaps they decided that adventuring just wasn't for them, and they'd prefer settling down in a nice home with a wife and kids, rather than gallivanting across the countryside, risking the wrath of orc tribes, vicious goblins, pit traps, evil viziers, and all the rest.
Regardless, we want to know what portion of the population is capable of casting Raise Dead. And that pretty much boils down to the clerics. Paladins can cast it, but only at 17th level, so they're pretty much a non-factor. Druids have Reincarnate, which as already noted isn't the best or most desired equivalent. On the plus side, clerics are a fairly popular class choice, and probably even more popular among the world's population, where there's a fair bit of status in being a priest.
Now, the first level a cleric can cast Raise Dead at is 9th, but we actually want to look at slightly more than that. A 9th level cleric can cast Raise Dead once per day, a 10th level cleric can cast the spell twice per day, and an 11th level cleric can cast it three times per day. Taking only 9th, 10th, and 11th level clerics (1/3 of 1% of all clerics), we get an average of 2 casts per day. We actually won't have that many available, but I'll save that for a later part of the calculation.
Then if we figure 1/10th of all adventurers are clerics, and 1/10th of the adult population is adventurers [1], and 2/3 of the entire population is adults, we're at 1 in 40,000 population is a cleric who can cast Raise Dead. We'll also say that only 1 in 2.5 clerics in that level range are actively taking up this duty. That means each such cleric covers a population spread of 100,000.
Next is death rate. For a variety of reasons related to the common estimation of living standards (something closer to Victorian era than medieval era) and the presence of magic to substitute for technological advances, I picked the year 1900 to get an approximate estimation on general death rates. In the US, that death rate was 17.2 per 1000 population per annum. That's 1720 deaths per 100k population per year.
Meanwhile, the cleric can raise 730 people per year. We seem to be a bit short. However...
Now we need to know what percentage of those deaths are raisable. Basically, the "Injury" column of the chart, vs the "Cancer"/"Alzheimer's"/etc columns. From the numbers on this page – FastStats – accidental deaths comprise just 6% of all deaths. Cancer and heart disease comprise 44% of all deaths. Looking at other categories, you can easily say that 50% of all deaths are of the type that Raise Dead would not fix, and that's just out of the most common options.
Accidents, drugs, alcohol, and firearms add up to 11% of all deaths. We don't have firearms in the fantasy setting, but general violence is almost certainly higher. A wide variety of diseases cause deaths, though if those are fixable, they're probably done so with Lesser Restoration rather than waiting for the person to die. As such, we can probably scale up the percentage of deaths that are raisable, assuming many of the causes of death are treatable with lesser, more common magics.
To be fair, I'll scale the 11% up to a full 25%. Factoring in a vastly higher rate of infant mortality (as was the case pre-1800's), perhaps even up to a 33% rate. That means a total of 575 relevant deaths per year, which is within the range of what the cleric can cast.
Next we need to consider costs.
Each Raise Dead costs 500 GP for the diamond itself, plus the costs of the bureaucracy that's needed to manage this endeavor. Why a bureaucracy? Because there's a massively blatant business opportunity here: Insurance.
The overhead compared to the cost of the diamond is honestly trivial. Two raises per day is 1000 GP for the diamonds. 5 skilled hirelings (bureaucrats) are 2 GP per day each, for 10 GP total. Even if you triple that, and double it again to pay the cleric, you haven't even reached 10% overhead. There's probably more for transport of the bodies and such, but I'll just work at the 10% rate.
That means that resurrecting 575 people per year has a total cost of 316,250 GP. You'll also want to round up a fair bit to add in profit. I'll call it 400,000 as a target. If that's spread over the entire covered population of 100,000, that's 4 GP per person per year. Honestly, trivial. Modest living expenses are just 1 GP per day. Even a Poor person could afford the 3.5 SP per month. Even if you add a 25% inflation to maximize the cleric's spell slots (raising a full 730 instead of 575), that still only increases it to 5 GP per person per year.
Next we figure that the top and bottom 10% aren't paying for this. The bottom 10% can't afford even this small amount, and the top 10% are paying for something better.
Poor: Nothing
Normals (Raise Dead): 5 GP per person per year.
Rich (Resurrection): 500 GP per person per year, plus 1000 GP per incident.
Ultra-rich (True Resurrection): 5,000 GP per person per year, plus 25,000 GP per incident.
Impact
First, the vast majority of the population can reasonably expect resurrection services for accidental and general harm-caused deaths. This also cures some diseases. There's enough wiggle room that it still works even if the rezzable death rate is higher. If it's substantially higher, there's enough money coming in that extra clerics can be motivated to sign up for the job.
People will quickly come to expect this to be a normal standard. Accidental death simply isn't a 'real' threat (though still scary and painful and to be avoided) when you're almost guaranteed to be back up and about within a week. The threats are things that 'break' Raise Dead: a lost arm won't be replaced; decapitation means you can't be raised at all; a necromancer raising your corpse is desecration, as that also means you can't be raised. Though people in the higher tiers have protection against some or all of those. Also: wars and plagues can kill too many people in too short a time for this program to be effective. Those become more worrisome threats for common people.
This also drops a lot of power into the churches' laps, as they are likely the ones who will be keeping these types of records. After all, you need to know who's paid up, and which tier of service they get. Which in turn leads to corruption. A petty bureaucrat who "loses" your tax registration records? That's terrifying for many. Lots of bribery probably crops up.
What about travel? If you go to another city, how do they know that you're paid up? Probably need some sort of personal papers/amulet/whatever that you can carry on you to prove your standing, though that, in turn, becomes a target for theft. Also kind of hard to provide it to the police officer when you're dead. A magical brand? Seems more reasonable.
It also opens up trade war leverage between countries. If Country A refuses to acknowledge the Raise Brands of Country B, or accuses them of killing people in Country A's territory in order to drain their Raise resources, things can get ugly. Who has control of the best diamond supply chain?
There aren't enough clerics to support a war effort, but wartime will almost certainly follow the guideline of "always decapitate the enemy to be sure he's dead, and won't show up on the battlefield again the next day". This bends the standard practice of combat styles. It also does interesting things to "To the death!" style duels.
Assassination attempts will follow similar patterns, though the assassin might just chop a leg off at the knee to torment you when you do eventually get raised. Nobility starts buying magic items that specifically protect against decapitation. Assassins go for anti-magic to neutralize those items, or magical poisons. The arms race continues.
Which swings all the way back to the original hostage situation. How is it a threat? Well, spur-of-the-moment hostage-taking probably won't have many options, but someone with some prep work can threaten to decapitate the victim and throw the body into a swamp. Maybe have a necromancer on call to raise the body and send the shambling corpse back into town to terrorize her relatives. Without True Resurrection, you aren't getting that person back. For those at the very top, you simply don't kill them; instead you go for imprisonment and torture, keeping them alive until their minds break.
In a direct standoff, unless you have a means of disposing of the body, wounding becomes more valuable than killing. A lost arm or leg can cripple in a way that a knife through the heart can't. Killing the damsel may not matter, but cutting up her face might. That might even explain those who seem to accumulate an excessive number of scars. Standing still is definitely not the way to escape punishment. In fact, even being killed doesn't necessarily mean escaping punishment.
Threats are not, "I will kill you!", but, "I will kill you and destroy or desecrate your body, or leave your body in hostile territory, where they won't resurrect you!" Blackmail is, "I will get your name removed from the resurrection records!" Losing family status or being disinherited can mean not only the normal loss of face, money, or power, but also loss of access to the higher tiers of resurrection. You have to live with the scars and dismemberments, and losing your head can actually end you.
And how does that change the perspective of penalties for killing? Permakilling is obviously different than a normal kill. Is there actually Adventurer Insurance? Are adventurers expected to pay fines if their actions increase the local death rate? Are higher insurance premiums a greater motivation to hunt down murderhobo adventurers than merely handling the deaths they cause?
So, there are lots of implications of taking Raise Dead all the way to its conclusion, and they don't always mesh with real-world expectations. But they definitely change the dynamic of how characters interact with the world.
[1] I am aware that several people feel that this number is too high, and I actually agree. See further posts in this thread for thoughts on how to approach this figure.
The motivation for this thread was sparked by the recent Hostage Crisis comic from the Handbook of Heroes webcomic. The comic itself was about how to make a hostage situation actually threatening in a world where resurrection is available. My thought is that that's a backwards approach. You should first look at the implications of resurrection on a world, and people's behavior in light of that, and then extrapolate to determine what sort of threats people would actually make, given that scenario.
Note that I'm viewing this from a 5E perspective, but it seems like it could largely apply to any ruleset or setting.
First, a refresher on available spells:
- Revivify (3rd level spell) — Has to be cast within one minute of death. Doesn't fix anything. Requires 300 GP worth of diamonds.
- Raise Dead (5th level spell) — Bread and butter for resurrections. Doesn't cure magical diseases or restore lost limbs, and won't work on decapitated corpses, nor raise undead. 10 day limit. Requires 500 GP diamond.
- Reincarnate (5th level spell) — Reincarnates target into a new, random body. 10 day limit. Requires 1000 GP worth of materials.
- Resurrection (7th level spell) — High-tier resurrection. Doesn't cure magical diseases or raise undead, but will restore lost body parts. 100 year limit. Requires 1000 GP diamond.
- True Resurrection (9th level spell) — No limits except 200 years and doesn't work if the target died of old age. Requires 25,000 GP worth of diamonds.
Reincarnate has some unique conditions attached to it, so I'm not going to include it in the analysis. Revivify is also not relevant for our purposes because of the time limit (1 minute). So let's start by looking at the availability of the spells.
From the Fabricate thread, I felt that a reasonable approach to estimating the adventurer population was to assume that only half of the adventurers at level N would make it to level N+1 (so the fraction of adventurers at level N is 1/2N). Perhaps they died in some remote dungeon, or perhaps they decided that adventuring just wasn't for them, and they'd prefer settling down in a nice home with a wife and kids, rather than gallivanting across the countryside, risking the wrath of orc tribes, vicious goblins, pit traps, evil viziers, and all the rest.
Regardless, we want to know what portion of the population is capable of casting Raise Dead. And that pretty much boils down to the clerics. Paladins can cast it, but only at 17th level, so they're pretty much a non-factor. Druids have Reincarnate, which as already noted isn't the best or most desired equivalent. On the plus side, clerics are a fairly popular class choice, and probably even more popular among the world's population, where there's a fair bit of status in being a priest.
Now, the first level a cleric can cast Raise Dead at is 9th, but we actually want to look at slightly more than that. A 9th level cleric can cast Raise Dead once per day, a 10th level cleric can cast the spell twice per day, and an 11th level cleric can cast it three times per day. Taking only 9th, 10th, and 11th level clerics (1/3 of 1% of all clerics), we get an average of 2 casts per day. We actually won't have that many available, but I'll save that for a later part of the calculation.
Then if we figure 1/10th of all adventurers are clerics, and 1/10th of the adult population is adventurers [1], and 2/3 of the entire population is adults, we're at 1 in 40,000 population is a cleric who can cast Raise Dead. We'll also say that only 1 in 2.5 clerics in that level range are actively taking up this duty. That means each such cleric covers a population spread of 100,000.
Next is death rate. For a variety of reasons related to the common estimation of living standards (something closer to Victorian era than medieval era) and the presence of magic to substitute for technological advances, I picked the year 1900 to get an approximate estimation on general death rates. In the US, that death rate was 17.2 per 1000 population per annum. That's 1720 deaths per 100k population per year.
Meanwhile, the cleric can raise 730 people per year. We seem to be a bit short. However...
Now we need to know what percentage of those deaths are raisable. Basically, the "Injury" column of the chart, vs the "Cancer"/"Alzheimer's"/etc columns. From the numbers on this page – FastStats – accidental deaths comprise just 6% of all deaths. Cancer and heart disease comprise 44% of all deaths. Looking at other categories, you can easily say that 50% of all deaths are of the type that Raise Dead would not fix, and that's just out of the most common options.
Accidents, drugs, alcohol, and firearms add up to 11% of all deaths. We don't have firearms in the fantasy setting, but general violence is almost certainly higher. A wide variety of diseases cause deaths, though if those are fixable, they're probably done so with Lesser Restoration rather than waiting for the person to die. As such, we can probably scale up the percentage of deaths that are raisable, assuming many of the causes of death are treatable with lesser, more common magics.
To be fair, I'll scale the 11% up to a full 25%. Factoring in a vastly higher rate of infant mortality (as was the case pre-1800's), perhaps even up to a 33% rate. That means a total of 575 relevant deaths per year, which is within the range of what the cleric can cast.
Next we need to consider costs.
Each Raise Dead costs 500 GP for the diamond itself, plus the costs of the bureaucracy that's needed to manage this endeavor. Why a bureaucracy? Because there's a massively blatant business opportunity here: Insurance.
The overhead compared to the cost of the diamond is honestly trivial. Two raises per day is 1000 GP for the diamonds. 5 skilled hirelings (bureaucrats) are 2 GP per day each, for 10 GP total. Even if you triple that, and double it again to pay the cleric, you haven't even reached 10% overhead. There's probably more for transport of the bodies and such, but I'll just work at the 10% rate.
That means that resurrecting 575 people per year has a total cost of 316,250 GP. You'll also want to round up a fair bit to add in profit. I'll call it 400,000 as a target. If that's spread over the entire covered population of 100,000, that's 4 GP per person per year. Honestly, trivial. Modest living expenses are just 1 GP per day. Even a Poor person could afford the 3.5 SP per month. Even if you add a 25% inflation to maximize the cleric's spell slots (raising a full 730 instead of 575), that still only increases it to 5 GP per person per year.
Next we figure that the top and bottom 10% aren't paying for this. The bottom 10% can't afford even this small amount, and the top 10% are paying for something better.
Population covered by 1 cleric with Raise Dead: 100,000 (1 in 2.5 clerics between levels 9 and 11)
Clerics with Resurrection are 1/8 as common, and clerics with True Resurrection are 1/16 as common again. Add those multipliers to the cost.
Non-rich = 80% of 100,000 = 80,000. 17.2 deaths per 1000 = 1,376 deaths. 1/3 are raisable = 459 Raise Dead. 550 GP per cast = 252,450 GP. Spread over 80,000 population = 3.15 GP per person per year.
Rich = 9.9% of 100,000 = 9,900. 17.2 deaths per 1000 = 170 deaths. 1/3 are raisable = 57 Resurrection. 1200*8 = 9600 GP per cast = 547,200 GP. Spread over 9,900 population = 55.3 GP per person per year.
-- However, because of the lower population of clerics that can cast Resurrection, it ends up being limited to fewer than 100 casts per year, for a population of 100,000. That means the costs have to go up til only the top ~5% are paying for it.
Ultra-rich = 0.1% of 100,000 = 100. 17.2 deaths per 1000 = 2 deaths. 1/3 are raisable = 1 True Resurrection. 26,000*8*16 = 3,328,000 per cast = 3,328,000 GP. Spread over 100 population = 33,280 per person per year.
-- More likely, pay 5,000 GP per year to have a cleric with True Resurrection on hand, and a reasonable guarantee of prompt revival, with an additional immediate cost of 25,000 for the diamonds per resurrection.
-- Thus, the Rich rate gets scaled to 500 GP per year (1/10 should drop from 0.1% to 5%), plus 1000 GP per incident.
-- And to keep the prices in a neat line, the non-rich have the price rounded up to 5 GP per year.
Clerics with Resurrection are 1/8 as common, and clerics with True Resurrection are 1/16 as common again. Add those multipliers to the cost.
Non-rich = 80% of 100,000 = 80,000. 17.2 deaths per 1000 = 1,376 deaths. 1/3 are raisable = 459 Raise Dead. 550 GP per cast = 252,450 GP. Spread over 80,000 population = 3.15 GP per person per year.
Rich = 9.9% of 100,000 = 9,900. 17.2 deaths per 1000 = 170 deaths. 1/3 are raisable = 57 Resurrection. 1200*8 = 9600 GP per cast = 547,200 GP. Spread over 9,900 population = 55.3 GP per person per year.
-- However, because of the lower population of clerics that can cast Resurrection, it ends up being limited to fewer than 100 casts per year, for a population of 100,000. That means the costs have to go up til only the top ~5% are paying for it.
Ultra-rich = 0.1% of 100,000 = 100. 17.2 deaths per 1000 = 2 deaths. 1/3 are raisable = 1 True Resurrection. 26,000*8*16 = 3,328,000 per cast = 3,328,000 GP. Spread over 100 population = 33,280 per person per year.
-- More likely, pay 5,000 GP per year to have a cleric with True Resurrection on hand, and a reasonable guarantee of prompt revival, with an additional immediate cost of 25,000 for the diamonds per resurrection.
-- Thus, the Rich rate gets scaled to 500 GP per year (1/10 should drop from 0.1% to 5%), plus 1000 GP per incident.
-- And to keep the prices in a neat line, the non-rich have the price rounded up to 5 GP per year.
Poor: Nothing
Normals (Raise Dead): 5 GP per person per year.
Rich (Resurrection): 500 GP per person per year, plus 1000 GP per incident.
Ultra-rich (True Resurrection): 5,000 GP per person per year, plus 25,000 GP per incident.
Impact
First, the vast majority of the population can reasonably expect resurrection services for accidental and general harm-caused deaths. This also cures some diseases. There's enough wiggle room that it still works even if the rezzable death rate is higher. If it's substantially higher, there's enough money coming in that extra clerics can be motivated to sign up for the job.
People will quickly come to expect this to be a normal standard. Accidental death simply isn't a 'real' threat (though still scary and painful and to be avoided) when you're almost guaranteed to be back up and about within a week. The threats are things that 'break' Raise Dead: a lost arm won't be replaced; decapitation means you can't be raised at all; a necromancer raising your corpse is desecration, as that also means you can't be raised. Though people in the higher tiers have protection against some or all of those. Also: wars and plagues can kill too many people in too short a time for this program to be effective. Those become more worrisome threats for common people.
This also drops a lot of power into the churches' laps, as they are likely the ones who will be keeping these types of records. After all, you need to know who's paid up, and which tier of service they get. Which in turn leads to corruption. A petty bureaucrat who "loses" your tax registration records? That's terrifying for many. Lots of bribery probably crops up.
What about travel? If you go to another city, how do they know that you're paid up? Probably need some sort of personal papers/amulet/whatever that you can carry on you to prove your standing, though that, in turn, becomes a target for theft. Also kind of hard to provide it to the police officer when you're dead. A magical brand? Seems more reasonable.
It also opens up trade war leverage between countries. If Country A refuses to acknowledge the Raise Brands of Country B, or accuses them of killing people in Country A's territory in order to drain their Raise resources, things can get ugly. Who has control of the best diamond supply chain?
There aren't enough clerics to support a war effort, but wartime will almost certainly follow the guideline of "always decapitate the enemy to be sure he's dead, and won't show up on the battlefield again the next day". This bends the standard practice of combat styles. It also does interesting things to "To the death!" style duels.
Assassination attempts will follow similar patterns, though the assassin might just chop a leg off at the knee to torment you when you do eventually get raised. Nobility starts buying magic items that specifically protect against decapitation. Assassins go for anti-magic to neutralize those items, or magical poisons. The arms race continues.
Which swings all the way back to the original hostage situation. How is it a threat? Well, spur-of-the-moment hostage-taking probably won't have many options, but someone with some prep work can threaten to decapitate the victim and throw the body into a swamp. Maybe have a necromancer on call to raise the body and send the shambling corpse back into town to terrorize her relatives. Without True Resurrection, you aren't getting that person back. For those at the very top, you simply don't kill them; instead you go for imprisonment and torture, keeping them alive until their minds break.
In a direct standoff, unless you have a means of disposing of the body, wounding becomes more valuable than killing. A lost arm or leg can cripple in a way that a knife through the heart can't. Killing the damsel may not matter, but cutting up her face might. That might even explain those who seem to accumulate an excessive number of scars. Standing still is definitely not the way to escape punishment. In fact, even being killed doesn't necessarily mean escaping punishment.
Threats are not, "I will kill you!", but, "I will kill you and destroy or desecrate your body, or leave your body in hostile territory, where they won't resurrect you!" Blackmail is, "I will get your name removed from the resurrection records!" Losing family status or being disinherited can mean not only the normal loss of face, money, or power, but also loss of access to the higher tiers of resurrection. You have to live with the scars and dismemberments, and losing your head can actually end you.
And how does that change the perspective of penalties for killing? Permakilling is obviously different than a normal kill. Is there actually Adventurer Insurance? Are adventurers expected to pay fines if their actions increase the local death rate? Are higher insurance premiums a greater motivation to hunt down murderhobo adventurers than merely handling the deaths they cause?
So, there are lots of implications of taking Raise Dead all the way to its conclusion, and they don't always mesh with real-world expectations. But they definitely change the dynamic of how characters interact with the world.
[1] I am aware that several people feel that this number is too high, and I actually agree. See further posts in this thread for thoughts on how to approach this figure.
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