D&D General Reincarnate is and has always been, weird.

If it truly is a random body, is it also random chance whether you end up the same physical gender as you started?
The only time I've ever seen this explicitly systematized in the description of the reincarnate spell is in the version found in Sunburst Games' Intrepid Realms RPG - Revisited Races (Pathfinder First Edition) (affiliate link), which assigns it as a percentage chance (based on caster level) of being the same as the reincarnated character's old body.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

The weirdest thing is that you don't reincarnate, a new, completed body is created. That's clearly magic, but is that really reincarnation? I think reincarnation means you're literally reborn. You're not going on adventures unless your comrades are ready to change your diapers (assuming you even reincarnate in something diaper-using). Obviously, such a spell would be mostly useless and probably doesn't to be part of the core rules, but it feels without that, it isn't really reincarnation.

All the afterlife stuff in D&D tends to bother me. If a person's soul isn't some absolutely indestructible thing that maintains the continuity of your existence, it just doesn't seem to be philosophically a "soul". Because I think the fundamental idea behind the soul is the belief or hope that there is something beyond our body that is our true self, a thing that can never be gone entirely, something that "lives on" even if our body is long gone and no one remembers us anymore.
If you take that away from a soul, and allow it to be consumed, disintegrated or whatever, you are still positing an end to the existence of an individual, and if you're already okay with the idea that people can be truly gone, you don't really need the soul concept. Demons wouldn't need to use souls to create demon larva, they could just transform humans, for example.

The only thing you might do to a soul is put in a different body, in hell, or in heaven, maybe in "limbo" or other waiting state from which it will return, but it will never cease to exist. But if you allow it to be destroyed or dissolved, you kinda defeat the point behind souls.
Obviously that's just my take on it, but if I am building the cosmology, souls are eternal and immortal, no one is literally eating souls or transforming them into demons, at best they are temporarily borrowing them (and maybe torturing them) for their purposes.
 
Last edited:

One of our characters died in 2e (PC death was a pretty rare occurrence in our group) and we didn’t have access to her body for a raise dead spell. I can’t remember how but we got her reincarnated. I think the player rolled « Bugbear » and said « hell no! », rerolled and was reincarnated as a fox. Or was it another animal and she change it to a fox? Can’t quite remember.

At any case, we went on a huge side-quest to Wish the character back to her original body, playing at least a douzain sessions with the player playing as a fox. I think the DM let her keep her ranger’s Hide in Shadow and Move Silently scores but otherwise had the crappy stats of a fox (or perhaps a wolf), participating in the game and combat in myriads of small but inventive ways, especially scouting/spying/stealing.

These were among the best games of that campaign. When she got her old body back, we were almost disappointed…
What's wrong with being a Bugbear?
 

Was there a reincarnate in 4e? I would assume it would be a ritual if it is there but I don't see one in Player's Handbook 2 which has the druid.
Not as far as I can tell. I'm pretty sure 'Raise Dead' was the only ritual that could bring a dead PC back. They don't even have Resurrection/True Resurrection in 4E, the cost of Raise Dead just goes up with the power of the character.
 

The weirdest thing is that you don't reincarnate, a new, completed body is created. That's clearly magic, but is that really reincarnation? I think reincarnation means you're literally reborn. You're not going on adventures unless your comrades are ready to change your diapers (assuming you even reincarnate in something diaper-using). Obviously, such a spell would be mostly useless and probably doesn't to be part of the core rules, but it feels without that, it isn't really reincarnation.
Reincarnation comes from Re + Incarnate (to make flesh). It has nothing to do with being reborn--that would be Renaissance.
 

Recent & Upcoming Releases

Remove ads

Top