D&D 5E The horror of petrification in D&D

[EzekielRaiden]

I've actually got a 4e character I keep trying to play (well, not actively in the past few years, but still) that leverages this horror.

See, there's a Theme (effectively the crunchy parts of 5e Backgrounds, for folks who never played 4e) called "Ghost of the Past." The Ghost from the Past theme is that, by whatever mechanism, your character is from a long-lost era of history. Everything they knew is gone, whether vanished completely or decayed into ruin. You get History training (or any other skill, if you already have History trained), and the Guidance of the Past Encounter power (effectively, advantage on any d20 check, but if the dice come up equal, you're Dazed UEONT, which is a pretty nasty condition in 4e.) It's really fun, and I love that it's just dripping with flavor and roleplay potential. It isn't particularly powerful, but it's got some neat features. (One of the alternate utility powers you can take at level 10 literally lets you disappear from time for a couple rounds.)

The version I've gone with is the character went out to deal with an unknown monster terrorizing the land...and it ended up being a medusa or some other petrification-causing creature (perhaps a classical basilisk) and got petrified. All his comrades in arms either died or escaped and couldn't save him, so he's been sitting in a cave (protected from the elements!) as a statue for centuries, until someone else comes along, discovers him, and is kind enough to free him from his stony form. Now he has to figure out how to put his life back together and fix the ills that plague the present--and decide whether he wants to stay in this dark future or return to a past that may already be beyond saving.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Petrification is horrifying in the time it takes to happen.

It is as an attack but doesn't have to be. I ran a game in the low-magic period of Krynn where a Medusa sold petrification as a service for people with curses, diseases, poisons that couldn't find any relics able to cure them. It was like the cryofreezing except people knew it could work...if they had the magic. It was up to their family/factors to find a way to restore them to flesh and cure them.

The PCs kicked off a huge number of lawsuits and a wave political intrigue when they restored a number of powerful figures.

And then comes the restoration. ..... you're into Rip Van Winkle territory where those you loved are dead and gone, and those you barely knew for their young age are become peers... or elders.

Which is also known as "elf/dwarf/gnome leaves the lands of the short-lived to visit relatives for a few decades and returns"

 

[Lanefan]

However, if your petrified form is damaged, that goes against your current hp total.

Note that enacting this would need you-as-DM to rule on how much damage is represented by the breaking off of a body part, as the RAW doesn't go into this in any way and the most likely non-erosion damage will be the snapping off of an arm or a foot or whatever.

If that reduces you to 0 hp, you die and your spirit is free to be raised as of the moment you hit 0 hp. You have no body, effectively, until it is unpetrified.

You'd need something more powerful than a Raise, though, as there's no corpse left to work with.

I have general rules for assigning damage due to time passing. They deal 1d8 damage per period, and the length of period depends upon your environment. A well preserved crypt would deal 1d8 per 1000 years. Something buried in non-corrosive soil would deal 1d8 per 200 years. Something pertified in a flowing river would take 1d8 per year. Something petrified in a place frequented by sandstorms might take 1d8 per week.

I like this in principle. Qualifier: the damage shouldn't start accruing to the character until it's also-stone clothes, armour, and other gear have mostly eroded away, as those are on the outside. What this might very well mean, though, is that after a long time as stome a character comes back without some of its gear and items as they have eroded away in the meantime.

However, your death at 0 idea makes an assumption I'm not sure I'm fully on board with, that being that the spirit is only tied to the stone if the stone remains whole. For me, shattering a petrified being could have one of three results: either the spirit is also shattered (meaning no revival ever, short of a full Wish); or the spirit remains stuck in one of the pieces; or the spirit is "freed" from the stone but must remain in contact with the largest piece of it.

 

[Lanefan]

Turn to Stone was scarier when it was one save and not 3.

Even more so when returning to flesh required a System Shock roll to not have the process kill you.

 

[wingsandsword]

Here are some other implications: after a millennia of erosion on the statue, what happens when they get reverted back? Or if that gorgon only ate half of you before you could get get tuned back. Messy. In which case you may need a restoration or resurrection.

I've seen it played that if the statue is so damaged the body would die effectively instantly upon being reverted, the spirit is freed.

Petrification is a curse that transmutes the body. . .if the body is too wounded to hold the soul, the soul is freed.

 

[wingsandsword]

Being aware while petrified is an interesting idea, if a rather horrific one. That is, unless being petrified left you with a stone heart (emotionless) in which case it probably wouldn't be so bad.

I've known a DM that ran petrification that way.

He admittedly had a petrification fetish and read/wrote lots of stories about people being petrified. He was fascinated by the idea of people being turned to stone but remaining completely conscious and aware. . .just totally immobile and effectively immortal.

It didn't affect his DM'ing much. In playing in several campaigns with him I can only recall actual petrification coming up once and it was in a fight with a medusa and the petrification was promptly undone by the party at the end of the fight so it really didn't change anything, but it's something that came up in casual conversation that it was how he'd run petrification in D&D if it ever comes up.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Re: turning to stone: wouldn’t it be cool if Medusas (or spellcasters) could choose what kind of rock to transform their victims into? That would be a plot driver, especially for the snakeheads.

Via intermediaries, victims turned into precious metal ores or gemstone then broken up could be sold to finance a variety of things. Deep dwarves or Derro allied with a Medusa could fund all kinds of stuff.

And if you go with the idea that the person's soul sticks with the stone when broken, you end up with the potential for haunted jewelry and such.


On a slight tangent on the subject of petrification horror, one of my characters is a fighter from Eberron. On being introduced to the rest of the party, I tell them that the first thing they notice about him is that he's wearing the uniform, armor and badges of a famous unit of Cyran soldiers that were wiped out during the war. But he's just barely in his late 30's.
So, either he's lying about having been a soldier in the war... or he hasn't aged a day in almost fifty years...
The Eberron setting is supposed to take place at least half a century after the war, but the character has no idea where he's been in the time between the war and eight years ago when he suddenly regained consciousness. He wasn't with his unit at the time they were wiped out, as he was travelling home to get married to a nobleman's daughter and arrived at the Cyran border just in time to witness the Mourning. He has no memory of that event, how he managed to survive it, where he's been since then, why he hasn't aged...
He wasn't there for his unit when they died, he wasn't there for his wife when she died... And now he's haunted by both the things that he remembers and the things that he can't.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Thank y’all for lifting the petrification curse from this thread!

Re: my recently quoted post about choosing the kind of stone, which I followed with this:

Good way to set up a salt merchant, too...

When I came here and saw that follow up, I was immediately sent on a tangent about an assassin who turns targets into salt. Bloodless target removal makes him wealthy as he grinds some of the victims to be sold. But some, he ransoms. And some he keeps in his house to gloat over. Maybe even as his own personal salt supply.

Imagine going to a fête at his mansion, and noticing where the waitstaff get the salt for the meal. That statue looks sooooo familiar…

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Thank y’all for lifting the petrification curse from this thread!

Re: my recently quoted post about choosing the kind of stone, which I followed with this:



When I came here and saw that follow up, I was immediately sent on a tangent about an assassin who turns targets into salt. Bloodless target removal makes him wealthy as he grinds some of the victims to be sold. But some, he ransoms. And some he keeps in his house to gloat over. Maybe even as his own personal salt supply.

Imagine going to a fête at his mansion, and noticing where the waitstaff get the salt for the meal. That statue looks sooooo familiar…

Oh you know I'm going to be stealing this for my Dungeon World game.