D&D General No Resurrections in the Bronze Age

[nevin]

A wizard's fabricate spell, in conjunction with proficiency in Jewellers tools could let you take raw diamonds and make them pretty or turn it to dust etco

or dwarves or gnomes do it for you. DND rules are not historical at all.

 

[MNblockhead]

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.)

My reaction to the first half of the posts: but its a fantasy world, forcing historical timelines on D&D is blah, blah, blah.

My reaction after reading the second half, OMG! what a cool idea!

 

[nevin]

Well, imagine you're the first ever god with a cleric. How are you supposed to know what to reveal to them about the ways of magic?

problem with this is the gods give it too you. At this point it starts sounding a bit arcanish......

 

[MNblockhead]

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.

I've never found diamonds to be all that pretty. Almost any other gemstone or metal or wood is more attractive to m

I like to think the ancients shared my sense of taste.

 

[RangerWickett]

I've never found diamonds to be all that pretty. Almost any other gemstone or metal or wood is more attractive to m

I like to think the ancients shared my sense of taste.

Courtesy of The Good Place.

Michael : Tahani, here's yours.

Tahani Al-Jamil : [soft ding] Holy mama. Is this a diamond?

Michael : Yeah. Honestly, I don't get the appeal. Diamonds are literally carbon molecules lined up in the most boring way. They're worthless space garbage. What you're holding right now, that's basically meteorite poop.

Tahani Al-Jamil : [squealing] And I have the biggest piece!

 

[Umbran]

Well, imagine you're the first ever god with a cleric. How are you supposed to know what to reveal to them about the ways of magic?

Let me answer the question with a question - if this entity is bumbling around in basically the same state of profound ignorance of how things work as mortals do... why are they a god?

Gods typically know and decide how their universe works, rather than have to learn it from scratch.

 

[MNblockhead]

Let me answer the question with a question - if this entity is bumbling around in basically the same state of profound ignorance of how things work as mortals do... why are they a god?

Gods typically know and decide how their universe works, rather than have to learn it from scratch.

I don't know. You read enough stories from ancient polytheistic times and you read about gods being tricked and just doing dumb things that a being who decides and knows how their universe works probably wouldn't.

 

[MoonSong]

I've never found diamonds to be all that pretty. Almost any other gemstone or metal or wood is more attractive to m

I like to think the ancients shared my sense of taste.

Diamonds, another industrial material that is overrated for silly reasons.

 

[RangerWickett]

Let me answer the question with a question - if this entity is bumbling around in basically the same state of profound ignorance of how things work as mortals do... why are they a god?

Gods typically know and decide how their universe works, rather than have to learn it from scratch.

Not my gods. My gods aren't things that exist that people discover or that reveal themselves to mortals.

My gods are the manifestation of what mortals believe, limited by the minds of the believers. You can believe your god is omniscient, but it cannot know anything that is unknown to a mortal.

 

[Umbran]

Not my gods. My gods aren't things that exist that people discover or that reveal themselves to mortals.

My gods are the manifestation of what mortals believe, limited by the minds of the believers. You can believe your god is omniscient, but it cannot know anything that is unknown to a mortal.

Way to bury the lede.

But it also both negates and answers your own question - the god knows it because the people believe it!

If they are a manifestation of what mortals believe, then if the mortals believe that some specific method will call the god's power, then that should do it. Layer on a bit of consensual reality if you need - the consensus on how the power is drawn defines it.

So, that first cleric believed their god could raise the dead, and talked about it to their followers. They all believed it. When the congregation brought a dead body that needed raising... the cleric made something up that they believed, in the context of extant dogma, would do the job, and their people believed in the cleric, so they all believed it, and therefore it worked!