D&D 5E Resurrection & Healing Magic with a price ... for the caster

jasper

Rotten DM
Okay the official cost of Raise dead is 500 gp, Reincarnate/Resurrection is 1000, Revivify 300, True R is 25K. So which average person is going to have that type of dough. And the family knees to know the caster. Is the family/person in good graces of caster? Or is the caster board of the whole family? Does the caster upcharge and does he take credit?
 

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I think this is a solution in search of an actual problem.

The reality is, you have to create this problem. Revivify is 3rd level, and only works within a minute, so that's a non-issue as res spells go. Raise Dead is 5th level, so that means the caster must be 9th. Do you really have a significant number of 9th-level casters running around, just with nothing better to do? If so, then you created the problem so you could "solve" it. Which um, isn't like, amazing.

If you look at settings like the FR or Eberron, where there is some degree of assumption that basic healing spells get cast and so on, it still isn't really a problem, because two situations are likely.

1) In a large town or city, demand will wildly outstrip supply. People will be dying all the damn time, and Raise Dead requires a specific 500gp reagent and the person to have died within 10 days (also, historically, it required them to not have "died of old age", which makes sense, and is probably missing from 5E because all spell descriptions have been hugely cut-down, and makes sense because presumably they'd just die again pretty soon). As such, only very wealthy people would be able to afford it, and obtaining the reagent is likely to be non-trivial in many cases. If a few rich people who get into stupid accidents get res'd, that'll create societal inequality and tension but you've already got a ton of that in most settings. It's also likely religions will be touchy about who they let get raised, and 500gp for the reagent will be a fraction of the massive bribes some people will need to pay to get their dear horrible son who snapped his neck horse-riding whilst drunk in the woods at night, raised.

2) In a small town or the like, not only will few/no people really be able to afford it, but there will likely be relatively little demand, because people won't be dying much, except when something terrible happens, then demand will wildly exceed supply. If a few people who would died in childbirth or the like get raised in return for the family swearing service to the local church, that probably just binds the community together.

Certainly this would lead to people who had access to the spell potentially wielding a fair bit of political clout.
 


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