D&D General No Resurrections in the Bronze Age

[RangerWickett]

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.)

 

[Charlaquin]

Platinum wasn’t mined until the 19th century, but platinum coins are still a thing in standard late medieval/early renaissance fantasy. I think in any setting with dwarves, you can safely throw out any real world historical present for when things were mined.

 

[cbwjm]

If this is the sort of stuff you care about, then this is an excellent opportunity to come up with alternate components. Maybe resurrection excited but before the gods allowed the casters to substitute diamonds, they took 10 years off the caster's life (pretty sure earlier editions did age the caster). A ritual with multiple people might have been used to "spread the load" so that they each aged a year. This would still making raising the dead an uncommon practice.

Perhaps raising the dead was the province only of those priests who succeed on an intervention with their god, allowing the target to return to life. Fail the roll though, and you'll need to directly enter the underworld and plead with the god of death to allow your ally to return, or maybe your ally is already attempting to fight their way out.

 

[Steampunkette]

Agreed with Charlaquin, but also:

1) Diamonds can be found in places other than Diamond Mines. Specifically they can be found in areas of extreme upthrust and erosion, eruptions from deep gas chambers, and placers along rivers, seas, and oceans where the natural flow of water can deposit diamond-containing minerals that aren't water soluble. (Archean Terrane, essentially. Like Bighorn Pass out in Montana where people pan for diamonds in streams and rivers)

2) Clerics don't learn their spells by experimenting, they pray and are granted divine insight. No need to 'wave a random object over a corpse', they knew when the spell was given to them what it would require.

3) The value of a given diamond is going to fluctuate on market rates. A 500gp diamond could be 3 karat or 30 karat depending on availability.

4) The first known piece of a diamond used in jewelry wasn't 'til the 1300s CE, even though they were mined in 400 BCE. That's 1700+ years of no one going "Maybe I could make this pretty and set it in a piece of gold to look shiny." which is not relevant but is deeply weird.

 

[Charlaquin]

Agreed with Charlaquin,

but also:

1) Diamonds can be found in places other than Diamond Mines. Specifically they can be found in areas of extreme upthrust and erosion, eruptions from deep gas chambers, and placers along rivers, seas, and oceans where the natural flow of water can deposit diamond-containing minerals that aren't water soluble. (Archean Terrane, essentially. Like Bighorn Pass out in Montana where people pan for diamonds in streams and rivers)

Yeah, a lot of materials that are traditionally mined can be sourced in other ways, just in lower quantities, and often with more impurities.

I’ve recently thought about porting elves as a society that eschews mining. They might still quarry minerals, but don’t dig for them, so they would have access to metals, gems, etc. in small amounts, but would predominantly use animal and plant products. This could also serve as an explanation of the Druidic aversion to metal armor but not metal weapons - it’s not that they’re opposed to the use of metal as a material, it’s that they’re opposed to the practice of mining, without which it would be very difficult to get enough metal from which to make a full set of armor from.

3) The value of a given diamond is going to fluctuate on market rates. A 500gp diamond could be 3 karat or 30 karat depending on availability.

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.

 

[Krachek]

Thank for the information about the diamond mine,
but a DM would restrained himself to play an historical setting because this setting may lack some essential spell component? Really?!
A DM job is to close and fill those gaps. Using the rules only as reference, not to be stuck by them.

 

[Zardnaar]

Thank for the information about the diamond mine,
but a DM would restrained himself to play an historical setting because this setting may lack some essential spell component? Really?!
A DM job is to close and fill those gaps. Using the rules only as reference, not to be stuck by them.

Some settings certain spells don't exist, material components may be very difficult to rond or they substitute components.

AKA ask the DM.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Platinum wasn’t mined until the 19th century, but platinum coins are still a thing in standard late medieval/early renaissance fantasy. I think in any setting with dwarves, you can safely throw out any real world historical present for when things were mined.

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.

One of my favorite factoids is that there actually is an IRL material that might meet the stringent mechanical description of Tolkien's mithril: the intermetallic compound yttrium silver. (This differs from an alloy because it's actually yttrium atoms bonded to silver atoms, not just the two mixed together.) No known natural sources of yttrium silver exist, but given we know there have been multiple vast deposits of silver on Earth (e.g. the Comstock Lode and Cerro Rico aka Cerro Potosí), it's entirely possible that one or two fictional places could've had just the right conditions to naturally produce such an intermetallic compound--and we do know that mithril was incredibly rare, with Moria being the only reliable source (though Numenor and Aman may also have had sources.)

But yeah. "Mithril! All folk desired it. It could be beaten like copper, and polished like glass; and the Dwarves could make of it a metal, light and yet harder than tempered steel. Its beauty was like to that of common silver, but the beauty of mithril did not tarnish or grow dim." The cool thing with YtAg is, you actually do need to "make of it a metal," because it remains ductile until you quench-harden it, at which point it develops a beautiful, glittering sheen; the exterior becomes extremely hard, while the interior remains ductile, so it keeps an edge but is resistant to shattering. And until you do that, it is in fact quite ductile (not quite as much as copper but damned close) and, of course, should polish beautifully if allowed to cool normally rather than quenching it. IIRC, it does not make the martensitic transition on its own unfortunately (but perhaps it would if alloyed with titanium, another metal essentially unknown to the medieval world that might be a magical/mystical thing or "dug up by dwarves" etc.)

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Maybe I could make this pretty

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.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

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.