ZEITGEIST Resurrection at Zeitgeist

[Hitomi Camacho]

Hello everyone!

My group is actually playing "The Dying Skyseer" and they had two casualties (one at smugglers night after going against the two ships at the same time, the other against the arsonist when a lonely player faced the dragonborn brothers)

So after those demises I started to think about how to manage resurrections. The first doubt came when I though about the cosmology of the universe, in a world where planar travel i so restricted, how "rare" should resurrections be?


After reading in Dr. Recklinghausen text box that " in a world where resurrection was a known -if exceedingly rare - ocurrence" its seems that the "official" statement is that resurrections rituals shouldn't be available to RHC officers, at least at low levels.

How are you managing player's deaths at you campaign?

 

[Tukka]

Personally, I don't like having to deal with the various setting implications and plot issues that can come up when resurrection is as freely available as the standard rules/setting seems to indicate it is.

While I'd like to be able to give my players second chances, to maintain a sense of verisimilitude, characters that are as powerful or resourceful as the PCs should also have access to resurrection, which really cheapens the significance of death -- especially if you let the players hire an NPC to do the resurrecting, or allow the resurrection after the completion of a perfunctory quest.

I put the question to my players how they want to handle death. Those who've volunteered an opinion want resurrection to be rarer and seem to be OK with starting with a new character if they die, so I don't think the PCs will have access to it in the heroic tier unless it's like a one-off thing -- maybe I'll have them find one un-copyable scroll of raise dead early on (or maybe a prototype defibrillator that explodes after its first use) and emphasize what a rare treasure it is, and let them decide if and when to use it.

 

[RangerWickett]

What I meant by "known, if exceedingly rare" was that the PCs can be resurrected because they're PCs if you're cool with that (and some of the villains might have an escape clause, if you want them to come back), but the rest of the world can't bank on that sort of stuff.

The setting survives if you want to allow resurrection.

 

[ve4grm]

As far as setting flavour and planar travel goes, the ritual does have to be performed within 30 days. I'd assume that during this time, the spirit hasn't crossed over to the bleak gate yet (but is dormant), or is still in transition, and a strong spirit (the PCs) can be brought back with some assistance.

As RangerWickett said, the setting most definitely can survive it.

Personally, I'm allowing resurrection, but I don't expect it will really come up, as nobody is a ritual caster.

 

[Hitomi Camacho]

Actually I'm discussing it with my players, some of them feel "no raise" fits reallly well in the environment while other are afraid because of the "very difficult" encounters resulting on a TPK (encounters that where not that deadly, both deaths came from wrong player choices). To get to a consensus I'm thinking about restricting raising at heroic tier and the allowing at higher levels but that depends much on how the campaign plot develops.

 

[Ajar]

I don't intend for resurrection to be available to the PCs early on. I'll reevaluate in Paragon tier, probably.

 

[Tukka]

I also agree that the setting can work fine without any special resurrection rules, and clarify that I didn't mean to say that there's anything about the Zeitgeist setting that makes resurrection any more problematic than in other settings ... I just feel that resurrection is difficult to "do right" in general. In past games I've had the villains kill NPCs close to the PCs, only to have the PCs rather casually drop the coin necessary to bring back the NPC.

[sblock]This is one reason that if I did run the normal death/resurrection rules, I'd be glad that a soul-trapping substance plays a fairly prominent role in the plot early on in the campaign. That makes it seem less like the DM is pulling something completely out of thin air to explain why an NPC can't be brought back if he feels it's dramatically appropriate to keep the person dead.[/sblock]

 

[Hitomi Camacho]

Great idea Tukka!,

Spoiler

In fact, the corpse of one of the players is missing, I planned to bring it back as a witchoil infused zombi

 

[Ajar]

Oh, that's devious. Nice!