Rebirth in DnD

[Kae'Yoss]

In Rokugan, the answer is rather easy: You can't resurrect someone period. Even though they're not reincarnated at once (they first spend time in whatever afterlife they have earned, and depending on their deeds, they might never get to enter the mortal world again), the Celestial Order forbids raising people from the dead again, since it was their fate to die. To bring someone back to life amounts to saying that the gods were wrong, which would dishonour you, probably beyond the hope of redemption.

 

[WayneLigon]

One interesting thought in a cyclical reincarnation worldview meeting D&D is what happens when you get Raised? Does your new body die at whatever age it has achieved prior to the old you being brought back?

The wife of a friend of mine came up with this: that exact scenario is what causes Spontaneous Human Combustion. The new body is consumed in sorcerous fire to power the transfer of the soul, and so that someone can't use a chunk of the old body to re-Ressurect that person. (This was back when you didn't get a choice about being Ressurected and such; now, I'd say that the soul would 'auto refuse' to go back to the previous existance unless there was some overwhelming otherworldly reason - ie, the World needs Tyros the Warlord, not his current incarnation, Joe the Beet Farmer).

 

[Phlebas]

Anyone have any critiques or suggestions on how to develop this further? Could this be a basis for religion in a homebrew

Funnily enough I use reincarnation as the default assumption for my homebrew (with a delay between death and rebirth to allow for raise dead) without any major impact on PC's

It also gives you a reason why good characters would want to slay evil creatures. It's out of pity. Their negative karma resulted in being reborn as a vicious race, and by killing them, you are releasing them from their negative karma by letting them be reborn as something else. Thus, killing even orc children is a A Good Thing To Do (TM) because it is letting them be reborn again, possibly as something better.

errm.... maybe this is where i differ. Karma is gained from the gods who influence your rebirth. someone who serves their god(ess) well (or his cause even if he never goes to church) gains the re-birth reward appropriate to their god. In this scenario you could (in theory) transfer between species, but only by serving a god / cause appropriate to justify the transfer ("He's so good with stone he'll be reborn as a dwarf")

Since whats good for one god can be bad for another, most unremarkable lives end up in an unremarkable re-birth. But to achieve promotion - potentially even the nirvana of joining the deities themselves - you need to be more than average and thats where PC's come in.

In this scenario, orcs are just being orcs - cowards would come back as weaklings, the strong might come back as Uruk-hai. to truly save the soul of an orc you would need to persuade them to walk another path, and that might mean going backwards (eg animal) in order to move forward. On the other hand if everyone is reborn - and this is known for sure - then murder is less of a moral absolute which does make for an easier game unless you really like low combat - high angst games

On the negative side, this assumes a sliding scale of which species is top, which i'm not too happy about.

One thing i haven't explored too much is the impact on a culture where you could, in theory, track down your dead relatives in their new rebirth and restart. i've always wondered if this would be a viable alternative culture for elves.....

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

The reincarnation spell with its random table would really mess with this culture's beliefs, then.