D&D 5E Gentle Repose Spotted in the Wild

[iserith]

When you've played D&D long enough in my view, the exciting bits are the ones you don't see very often. Tonight, we got to see a cleric casting good ol' gentle repose on the party's dead sorcerer.

We were a bit split up when many sarcophagi opened, belching forth over a half-dozen ghasts and wights. The sorcerer was set upon and, having already been weakened in an earlier battle by a wraith, suffered a critical hit from a wight's life drain power. With only 14 maximum hit points due to a previous encounter and the wight doing 15 necrotic damage, the only thing that could have saved the sorcerer was making that Con save to avoid the maximum hit point drain. The player spent Inspiration and still failed the save. The sorcerer was dead and in 24 hours would rise a zombie.

The cleric turned most of the undead and then subsequently cast gentle repose on the sorcerer - the first time I've seen that in I don't recall how long. We made short work of the remaining undead and bought ourselves some time to long rest and revivify our comrade when the cleric prepares the spell.

When's the last time you saw gentle repose used in a game?

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Never, I think.

 

[RangerWickett]

The closest I had was when the party made friends with an NPC wizard they met on the road after one of the PCs was killed, and they persuaded him to cast gentle repose so they wouldn't have to deal with a stinking rotting corpse while they trekked back to civilization to get him raised.

 

[Kurotowa]

The cleric turned most of the undead and then subsequently cast gentle repose on the sorcerer - the first time I've seen that in I don't recall how long. We made short work of the remaining undead and bought ourselves some time to long rest and revivify our comrade when the cleric prepares the spell.

Wait. Your party's Cleric didn't have Revivify prepared but did have Gentle Repose? ...please tell me they're Grave Domain, because otherwise that's the oddest spell choice I've ever seen.

 

[iserith]

Wait. Your party's Cleric didn't have Revivify prepared but did have Gentle Repose? ...please tell me they're Grave Domain, because otherwise that's the oddest spell choice I've ever seen.

Twilight. He may have prepared it but not had any 3rd-level slots left. I'm not entirely sure.

 

[Kurotowa]

Twilight. He may have prepared it but not had any 3rd-level slots left. I'm not entirely sure.

Could be, I suppose. Still, Gentle Repose isn't a Domain spell for Twilight, so it's one he deliberately picked. Good that it worked out in this case, I suppose, but still a surprise.

 

[Charlaquin]

Wait. Your party's Cleric didn't have Revivify prepared but did have Gentle Repose? ...please tell me they're Grave Domain, because otherwise that's the oddest spell choice I've ever seen.

I dunno, seems like a reasonable strategic decision. If you prepare Revivify and someone dies, you have to expend a 3rd level spell slot to revive them. If you prepare Gentle Repose and someone dies, you can save them without spending any spell slots until you’re somewhere safe and don’t have to worry about conserving them any more. The tradeoff is, you do have to get their body back to safety for it to work. So, bit of a gambit, but a pretty clever one in my opinion.

 

[Shiroiken]

I can understand not having Revivify prepared if you don't have the diamonds for it, but it is an odd choice to have Gentle Repose prepared. Given the prospect of facing these type of undead, it was the smart choice. Might not be a bad idea to try and pick it up in my wizard's spellbook.

 

[Nikosandros]

I dunno, seems like a reasonable strategic decision. If you prepare Revivify and someone dies, you have to expend a 3rd level spell slot to revive them. If you prepare Gentle Repose and someone dies, you can save them without spending any spell slots until you’re somewhere safe and don’t have to worry about conserving them any more. The tradeoff is, you do have to get their body back to safety for it to work. So, bit of a gambit, but a pretty clever one in my opinion.

One problem is that if you cast gentle repose as a ritual, it takes 10 minutes and then you can no longer revivify the target.

 

[MarkB]

I've seen it used a couple of times as a preservative rather than a lifeline. In one club game, the premise was that we'd killed the big bad dragon, and the adventure was getting its head back to town to get paid. So we used gentle repose to stop it from going off in transit.