To Catch a Killer, Part 6: An Offer They Can’t Refuse
Well then. It looks like Quest Giver isn’t the only one passing out quest scrolls. Classy touch on BBEG’s part making them bone white.
Stationary aside, if the ladies of Team Bounty Hunter ever want to hear Magus yowling for her breakfast at 4:00 am ever again, they’re gonna have to play ball. Conveniently enough, that means a return to form. One can only hope that Thief has put some ranks into Escape Artist.
While we wait for that plot thread to develop, what do you say we talk about more immediate concerns? Namely, the disposition of that kitty corpse. In a sense, Inquisitor and Ranger are dealing with the opposite problem that Barbarian ran into back in “The Cleaner.” It’s in the nature of fantasy adventure games to produce a lot of bodies. And depending on how high up in the local government said body happens to be, getting rid of it is par for the course when you’re a merry band of murderhobos. On the other hand, when that body belongs to your soon-to-be-resurrected flanking partner, you’ve go to figure out how to preserve the silly thing.
If you’re a pedantic nerd (and if you’ve made it all the way to Handbook of Heroes #625, I assume you are) then you’re not doubt shouting GENTLE REPOSE! at your screen. It’s the obvious solution after all. But I’d direct your attention towards one little clause at the end of the Pathfinder version of the spell: “This spell makes transporting a slain (and thus decaying) comrade less unpleasant.” Methinks the spell text is trying to tell us something.
A dead body is an opportunity. That’s part of the reason that resurrection comes with a price tag. Getting your buddy back ought to be an onerous task, involving quests and financial hardship and irritated ghosts. It means protecting the body from corpse-nappers and carrion eaters. It means informing the next of kin in a solemn RP encounter. It means bribing a local clergyman to keep ’em on ice, finding rare components, and (at the very least) lugging around a lot of literal dead weight. So pity poor Ranger and Inquisitor. We may have come to the end of the “To Catch a Killer” arc, but their problems are far from over.
As for the rest of us, what say we while away the time by recounting our own adventures in resurrection? What kinds of difficulties have you faced in the cadaver transportation department? Tell us your own tales of corpse management and party member resuscitation down in the comments!
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Well, that is morbid.
Surprised the villains didn’t raise Magus as undead. I feel like that’s the standard approach to a dead hero by undead villains.
But it might actually be more evil to force them to lug around the body of their friend / lover as they act as hatchetmen for the monsters that killed her in order to scrounge up enough cash to bring her back
Also, undead Magus might make it harder for the bountyhunters to do the job.
If she got hungry along the way, she could cause an uproar.
And just her being undead would tip people off that something’s gone very wrong…
D&D Undead tend to be fairly controllable, at least in my experience.
The bigger practical problem here is morale. Working with a monstrous husk made from the corpse of a dead party member will probably make them less effective at their jobs, and less willing to collaborate with you
Sure, they’re controllable – as long as the boss is there, or paying attention remotely. When the boss (BBEG) is nowhere nearby, the undead might start feeling a bit … frisky. Also hungry.
OotS did the best strip on undead control: https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0830.html
I believe that possibility is the premise of this month’s pinup poll.
Is the other option a ‘Weekend at Magus’s’ pinup of Magus?
Magus’s pinup afterlife options are angel, devil, vampire, zombie, or ghost.
Angel is winning pretty hard at the moment.
… hopefully not a biblically-accurate one (“FEAR NOT”). She does have the eyes for it, though…
Angel (NG) is an odd choice for someone self-confirmed as chaotic in their afterlife. I’d pin her more as an Azata (CG celestials, very artsy/passionate), or a Archon (LG batman-esque angels, assuming her recent character/relationship upgrade altered her alignment to lawful).
Meanwhile, Druid/Eldritch Archer are both Agathion-bound I’d say.
Azatas don’t have a product line with Victoria’s Secret.
It’s no Victoria’s Secret, but it’s certainly eye-catching fashion.
https://pathfinderwiki.com/mediawiki/images/thumb/c/c4/Lillend.jpg/250px-Lillend.jpg
I see another problem here.
If Team Bountyhunter pulls off this mission, what’s to stop the Villains from pulling this stunt again? To BBEG and Gestalt, Inquisitor’s love for Magus will be a handle on her – unless something happens to persuade them that bullying Team Bountyhunter into service isn’t worth it, one way or another.
It may be time for Inquisitor and Ranger to step outside their comfort zone and attempt … intrigue.
Ranger of all people trying to do intrigue would truly be a sight worth seeing 😮
Well, you have to admit Ranger has a great pokerface for negotiations. 😉
And a commanding presence as a public speaker: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/strong-silent-type
I dunno man… Bounty hunters gonna bounty hunt.
If Team Evil makes a habit of killing off bounty hunters to put them in their debt, Team Bounty Hunter’s going to quickly realize their bottom line is best served by banding with the “heroes” against the villains and getting out of that debt trap.
The villains need to be more subtle to wrangle the bounty hunters into that sort of exploitative professional relationship.
Fear will keep the local parties in line. Fear of this battlestation.
Ah yes, the Tarkin Doctrine. It works until they hate you more than they fear you.
Getting resurrections tends to be rather pain-free in the games I have been in (or rather the ones where it’s on the table at all).
This is for the simple reason that making it an onerous task with a bunch of challenges translate to several hours, possibly even multiple sessions, of the player of the dead character sitting there twiddling their thumbs unable to participate.
It’s just not worth it.
You mean, “Rolling up a goofy replacement character and chewing some consequence-free scenery for a few session?”
No, I do not.
“consequence free” is just another way to say “meaningless”. After all everybody else would still react as normal, it’s only consequence free because you don’t care about the consequences for the character.
Making a player play a character they don’t care about instead of one they do and which they want to play isn’t my idea of a good time.
(goofy also wouldn’t fit the tone of our typical games, but that’s neither here nor there).
Bro… Your hypothetical character died. No one poured hypothetical lighter fluid on their character sheet.
https://giphy.com/gifs/there-is-no-need-to-be-upset-meme-gorilla-JwNPAckJDiPsI
My point is that you don’t have to stop playing just because your character is dead for the moment. You already know my stance on resurrections more generally:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-worth-of-a-life
That dude is coming back if the player wants it, but that doesn’t mean it won’t take a little narrative work. Of course that’s a negotiation between player and GM.
Usually, a slain body or body parts (of a PC or a NPC) you need to carry with you is a good reason to always have a Bag of Holding/Portable Hole ready, or have a pack mule or wagon of some sort – pretty much the same logic as with bulky loot you sell off later.
Otherwise, Gentle Repose is a good bet – even a scroll of it is cheap. More expensive options include Temporal Stasis and certain consumable magic items that specifically preserve the body, or even triggering a Sepia Snake Sigil effect on the corpse somehow.
When it comes to rezzing finances, it’s a tricky ordeal. One can argue that by selling some of the slain PCs magical gear (which almost always is in the tens of thousands in value, even with the 50% sell value), one can easily afford a raise dead or a rez in any circumstance. After all, they’d certainly be glad to be back in the realm of the living instead of rotting with said gear buried with them or sold in a back alley, right?
But this comes at the assumption that the person raised will not be pissed off at you using their belongings in such a way (IC and OOC). Indeed, selling the ‘wrong’ items might gimp them harder than keeping them dead and replaced with a new PC would, in an odd meta way. You also can’t guarantee they didn’t want to ‘stay dead’ (i.e. reroll). After all, sometimes the player is content staying dead and rerolling to a new PC. At which point the issue of burial and looting becomes the main issue.
There’s also the stigma of ‘looting’ a fallen PC (and then that player ‘inheriting’ their gear with their new PC). It can bring a massive influx of gold into the game if they were particularly rich and the new PC has their standard purchasing rights as well.
In most groups I’ve played, the rez bill is handled by pooling or planning ahead. By pooling, I mean that everyone in the group chips in towards the ‘rez bill’, usually lessening the massive cost out of anything spare people had lying around – without it necessarily being an equal value. Sometimes the ‘dead’ PC even accrues a ‘rez debt’ that makes their next loot split deducted from until they pay up for the cost of raising them.
As for planning ahead, I mean setting aside a number of our finances (particularly diamonds or diamond dust) or even special resources (scrolls of raise dead/rez, oils of life) purposefully for revival – the same logic applied for keeping spare healing potions or restoration scrolls.
There’s also the possibility of individual players ‘saving up’ gold on their person and leaving a will or other instructions on what to do with the gold / how to rez them, if at all. Or buying a rez scroll of their own and trusting the party to use it on them as they might on another.
It’s also clever to leave behind with the main party a piece of your body – a locket of hair or such – so they can perform the spells that require it, in the case of utter annihilation from stuff like Disintegrate or your body becoming unrecoverable. This does come at the danger of a baddie acquiring said body parts and using them against you (usually by scrying or witch hexes).
These are all sensible strategies. But all this talk of bills and savings accounts and insurance policies feels awfully lame-sauce.
If you treat resurrection as a known quantity with specific costs and penalties, then that approach makes sense. But for my money, the idea of diamond dust is to force the party into gathering a rare and valuable component. Treating the hardship out of a rez as a business expense isn’t exactly the fantastical trials and tribulations I signed up for.
Sure, if you hit an “oops-I’m-dead” against a wandering monster, then get your buddy back and get on with the game. But if you’ve got a suitably climactic death, I say that the diamond dust is metaphorical. You’ve got to work for that rez. You’ve got to go to Heaven and demand that soul return. You’ve got to settle unfinished business on the ghost’s behalf before it will agree to come back. You’ve got to appease the shaman, find the elixir of life orchid, or at least retrieve your portable-hole-baggage after an airport mixup.
The return from death is a mythic moment. It doesn’t have to be mundane.
Alive AND unspoiled? Clearly BBEG hasn’t seen the other handbook.
* Relatively unspoiled.
What I want to know is: what does BBEG want Thief “alive and relatively unspoiled” for…?
Rock out here asking the important questions….
Undead and/or demonic chicanery? Strip #666 is coming up soon, after all…
She is directly related to a powerful demon queen
Relatively? What, they’re going to Wizard to declare a mulligan or something?
“Not dead” counts!
Chin up, BH. There’s always the assistance of Necromancer from Team Evil. Or Drow Priestess/Cleric from Team Main Cast. Or beg druid for forgiveness of almost hanging her boyfriend and getting a reincarnate (she can’t say no to reviving an adorable feline, can she?).
Or waiting for vampirism/lycantrophy to kick in, given Gestalt’s templates are probably contagious. Magus is probably too daf-I mean, pure and innocent enough to not get those pesky ‘evil abomination’ alignment shifts, right?
I don’t think Magus wants to be a bugbear.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/karma
Magus’s karma is bound to be better than Fighter’s.
The only creatures she’s malicious to are small rodents and the like! ^_^
And those rodents were probably evil themselves!
Magus has arguable assumed the office of a devil before:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-outer-planes-part-6-rat-bastards
My first major campaign we had a weird set of luck (literally) with our rez costs. First character death was our gnome cleric. It was toward the end of the session and she failed a save vs some fire spell, I can’t remember which (she was a confectioner in her down time, and her player joked that she smelled like cookies right afterward). Earlier in the session we’d found a ring of three wishes with one wish left. No gumdrops for guessing what we wished for. Second character death was also the same gnome. This time she died pushing out if the way of a trap floor that dunked her into boiling oil (this time she smelled like doughnuts, apparently). Thankfully in the last session we’d randomly rolled a luckblade in the loot and were saving it for an emergency rez. We just didn’t think we’d need it so soon. Third and final death in the campaign was, you might have guessed, the gnome cleric. To a meteor swarm this time iirc. My summoner (the cleric’s cousin) had to wrap her up in tarp and get his giant squirrel eidolon to carry her back to the base of the rebellion we were helping at the time. Thank the gods their leader was also a decently-high level cleric and we had some spare diamonds.
Freshly baked cookies? I mean, it’s hard to resist once you’ve smelled ’em.
The big question, in our case, is: How much of the body do you need to preserve? If a body’s decomposing, with bits dropping off everywhere, it stands to reason that you don’t need the full thing to revive someone. But what’s the limit? How little of a body do you need?
In the Curse of Strahd game I’m currently co-DMing, for fun we ended up hand-waving that limitation and saying that you only need a small piece of a body to resurrect someone. The result is that the party cleric has a box full of labelled fingers, some skeletal, some fresh, that she intends to revive as soon as she’s strong enough to learn the appropriate spell. She’s even been collecting fingers from slain innocents throughout the story. “No one has to die,” indeed.
Suitably morbid and manic for Ravenloft.
Interesting note about the “finger box insurance policy.” It’s actually an old trick! Check out this line in the Pathfinder version of resurrection:
That last bit was specifically to prevent regrowing party members from a collection of fingernail clippings.
Hackmaster had a spell called Walking Corpse, which rather than being your typical zombie-maker spell, just literally got a body back on its feet, so you could gently drag it on a lead back home. We never had to use it, but we did discuss having a spare set of clothes (baggy, with plenty of accessories) to pretty-up the remains if we had to bring someone home in that manner.
In the same campaign we seriously considered amputating all the party members little finger (or toe), and keeping them in stasis in a place where only a couple of very trusted henchmen knew the location of for that “no remains” TPK possibility.
I would like to point out that your “Hackmaster” campaign had an amputation strategy. That sounds on-brand. 😛
My Sorcadin performed three resurrections in the closing chapter of a 1-20 campaign in 5th edition DnD. All three of those resurrections happened because the party didn’t have proper curse-busting magic available at the time, and killing the victim of the curse and then raising them was deemed the best option.
The first time was to rescue one of our Kobold minions from a cursed hat that set them on fire. We cut down the kobold, removed the hat, then my Paladin resurrected them again.
Second time was when our huge ‘mother of all dragons’ ally got mind-controlled by the BBEG. We killed her, then resurrected her again, now free of the mind control magic.
The last time was when my Sorcadin’s body got taken over by the obviously evil artifact I had used to help kill the BBEG. My Sorcadin’s soul/ghost got kicked out and could still cast spells, so after my party members killed my body and removed the evil artifact I quickly resurrected myself.
lol. Methinks you’ve found a loophole in the curse mechanics.
To my way of thinking, curses and death function similarly:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/curses
Doing the old “cast spell, solve problem” thing feels unexciting to me. YMMV of course, and I do applaud the creative workaround.
Kind of adjacent to the prompt, but there was a campaign where the party used a portable hole to bring the corpses of everyone we killed back to the party patron (read, quest-giver). It started because the first quest involved retrieving the body of some weird undead, and continued because most of the party thought it was funny.
They were rotten, of course, but I think that was half the fun.
I should think that “hole cleaning duty” was not a popular chore among that party.
As a GM, I’d be all kinds of tempted to have scavengers track the stench and harass the party as random encounters.
At some point, an otyugh might try to move in.
That is an amazing premise for an encounter.
“When did that thing get in there?”
“I dunno. You were supposed to be on watch.”
“Well it’s in there now. Fireball maybe?”
“Are you kidding? Do you know how much valuable loot we’ve got in this thing?”
“Well what do you suggest?”
“Nose plugs and rubber boots. You go first.”
Otyugh: “Orrr you guys could keep chucking in delicious food and I could promise to chuck out all the inedible treasure. How does that sound?”
I get the feeling Gelatinous Cubes were created exactly for this kind of scenario, only for a dungeon.
This isn’t a hard encounter. Just hit Thief and Fighter in the Will save, use a busted skill that slipped through erata on Cleric, and punch Wizard in the hit points. Grab thief, run, tie her up, run some more. Do the hand off, get the money, rez your friend with the supplied rez scroll!* Easy win.
*May not be a conventional rez scroll, terms and conditions apply, see catch 22 for details.
The errata is a powerful, but unpredictable ally. Woe to the unfortunate soul who would wield its power to their own ends!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/errata
Had about 4 of our group die now, including my own character, and for the most part, everything went smooth with getting each of us back, except ironically for our cleric!
Not only was the story helping to hold her back (she is a drow and Lolth has taken exception to her trying to “escape” her dark web), but also, we use a ritual returning similar to what is done in Critical Role, and TWO bad dice rolls on our part meant she was at risk of not coming back at all. Fortunately, the third attempt was made by someone else (an NPC), and we got her back, but it sure made for some interesting play and story telling… especially since our cleric player was not there to witness any of it! (She was too worried to actually be at the game)
Playing out the resurrections as something more serious really adds to the overall game in my opinion, rather than just mechanically, you cast X spell and bam, your back.
In our old vaguely-steampunk-pseudovictorian Pathfinder campaign, the closest thing to “magic” that existed was the relatively recently-discovered science of alchemy (which could duplicate some but not all aspects of Pathfinder’s alchemist class.) My mad-surgeon PC spent almost the entire campaign feverishly working to sustain and eventually (he hoped) repair his beloved wife, currently a disembodied brain on jury-rigged alchemical life support. Technically, I suppose it was not a resurrection quest, because Doktor Krauss would not hesitate to throw a punch at anyone who suggested that Leah was dead. “Would you say that about a man who lost a leg in the Wars? Leah’s injuries differ from his only in degree!”
One of the other PCs became an undead-rights activist, allying with “the Scorned”, Frankenstein-style zombie/golem beings created by the campaign’s big bads. Once we had reverse-engineered enough of the bad guys’ methods (Miss Chesterfield motivated by a sincere desire to improve the quality of “life” for existing Scorned, and Doktor Krauss willing to obliterate any moral line that stood in the way of restoring Leah), Scornification became a potential solution for dead PCs or allies. Chesterfield and Krauss never understood why so many of our friends took pains to ensure that if they died, they would NOT end up on our lab tables…
Soup 😛
You only need an small body part for the spell to work. So you get that part, be either head, hearth or something and do as you want with the rest 🙂
Three guesses for what the party did with the leftovers on a bleak cold mountain once of the party members were dead 😀
In fact we used that as a plot point. Once a NPC was dead we got most of the body but the bad guys also got a part so it was a career to resurrect the NPC again so he could be killed 🙂
Once during a game my dwarf seer was devoured by a swarm of flesh eating beetles (My bastard party shut the door in my face, as my short legs didn´t allow me to get out in time), with only his skeleton remaining.
The party, lead by my seers brother (Who was also my other character in that game) learned of a wishing well, able to fulfill any wish your heart desired, but it was a long and dangerous journey.
So we had our Argonaut momemt, where our party gathered a crew consisting of every single surviving player character we had played in that world (A sizable group at that point) as well as their NPC henchmen and allies. And set off on a quest.
It was a long and harrowing journey. We fought great swarms of dangerous, and often poisonous, beasts. Braved seas, mountains and great walls of fires. Went through trials, traps and tribulations. Finally we arrived at the dungeon the well resided in. We fought pasts its guardians, completed its trials and riddles and bested its arch wizard guardian. Finally we where there and my seers brother (Also played by me) wished for his brother to come back to life. Which he did. As a skeleton. And so began our next quest of getting my Seer an outfit to hide the fact that he was a skeleton man.
My most annoying resurrection was when I played a changeling (The Eberron kind) Cleric of Selune. My characters story was that she was found and adopted by a elf priestess of Selune and grew up in a wood elf village dedicated to the goddess. As she grew she struck out as an adventurer, both to spread the word of Selune, but also because she feared outgrowing everything and everyone she loved there. My plan was for her to always be in the form of an elf, until a suitable moment arrived for her to reveal her form as a changeling. The character arch that I had discussed with my DM revolved around her perhaps finding a way to become elven or coming to terms with being mortal. Overall I was rather looking forward to playing around with the concept and I had been looking at playing a changeling for quite some time.
The session she joined (She was my replacement character after my original left the party), the DM had us get trapped in an obtuse dreamworld for 3 sessions straight where she died because my DM had a rather lackluster concept of “Balancing” and “Encounter Design” and “Grappling Mechanics”.
When the party left the dream world and found her corpse she was in her changeling form (Due to changelings reverting their true form upon death). So instead of it being a dramatic moment where a person they have gotten to know and trust revealed her secret to them, it was instead this random woman they had known for a couple of days who apparently turned out to be a chameleon woman. After the group spent some time bullshitting up a reason for using a lot of resources and time on getting this almost stranger resurrected (With no help from the DM on that part), the went straight to the cleric of the temple of Selune, which my character had slept and thus died in (You die in the dreamworld your body dies in the real world) and asked them to rez her. They were promptly informed that no one in one of the biggest temples to Selune and one of the most magical cities in the setting had the power to cast a Raise Dead spell.
After a bit of looking around they learnt that a druid they had helped earlier were in town and after a bit of questing they managed to get him to cast Reincarnate on me. Which promptly reincarnated me into an elf. After that I kinda had to struggle a bit to justify why my character didn´t just go back home.
Ok get comfy.
So we were in the plane of shadows which turned off my cleric powers for….reasons (dm likes to be dramatic and just cut me short) while the paladin’s powers are working fine. One player has died so my strength cleric is lugging his body around. We come to a door that is a dc 60 to crack it. We don’t have that. The tunnel behind us is falling apart and the “light” of the shadow dimension dissolves our skin. I grab our halfling and throw him in my bag of holding as our alchemist has potions of gaseous form. We don’t have enough for everyone though. We slam one in the paladin’s face to save them since they’ll sacrifice themselves. There’s one left and two people. I realize in the time it takes for the tunnel to dissolve away I could snap the alchemist’s neck chuck them over my shoulder and gaseous us all through to the other side.
The dm laughs that killing each other is only way to win the situation and the alchemist finds another gas potion and we all escape to the other side. We eventually get out of the shadow plane and I bring our gunslinger back to life but he’s now missing his shadow.
This game was a hot mess of the dm basically telling me no I couldn’t use magic to solve our problems because he had encounters set up along the way. Like when I wasn’t allowed to teleport because we didn’t know where we were going (we were going to help form a colony) when we got there we found a small town which apparently was set up by the people we were travelling with. People who could’ve told me about the place and letting me teleport (the dm figured there had to be someone there first for them to establish a colony.) We spent two years in game travelling on that stupid boat.
Oh, no! The plot thickens, Team Bounty Hunter hunts bounties, the world is changing, at it’s core… Heh, I adore the composition of this piece. It’s so weather-worn, and the poster resting on Magus is somehow comic, and highlights everything. I’m loving this arc, eager to see how it affects comics ten, twenty, a hundred strips out.
Before I begin – the reason I can’t see/respond to your comments without thumbing through the entire backlog, and have to sign in every time, is this. https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/finding-comments-ive-made-responses/
I don’t think there’s much to be done, but I appreciate every response. I should remember to check off the new post by e-mail button, save I’m 99% sure I did and just never got notified, ahah, hah…
So! Story time.
As a GM, I tend to have resurrection be super lenient early on, and make access to it more and more challenging as the party continues. If rules allow for player resurrection or similar, and the players have it, I won’t stop that! But, otherwise… Player resurrection in the middle or late campaign is a wonderful excuse to have unscrupulous powers or enemies of the adventurers holding a hook over them. BBEG and I went to the same university, you see. We remain in christmas card contact.
Me, personally? Pfah, oh, lordy.
For any of you who played the classic New World Computing Might and Magics, specifically 7/8, you could go to a temple to rez any heroes in need of rezzing. But if you went to certain ‘dark-magic-aligned’ temples, you might be greeted with a (cheery!) dark priest saying sternly:
WE CAN FIX YOU…
As you can probably imagine, I was playing a meatheaded fighter-type. My party had no healers. It wasn’t the beginning of the campaign. We did have a necromancer!..
My limbs were sewn back on, I was ‘rezzed’ as a zombie loosely under the control of the necromancer, and for whatever reason the group & gm figured it would be fun/funny to have me play on as the zombie pet, who even needed conscious thought, anyway? I worked the heck out of this, replying in a limited system of mumbles and grunts which the necromancer would interpret however she liked. The GM hand-waved me gaining levels for some reason, and I was basically the team mascot.
An incredibly stupid, fun campaign.
As a DM I really appreciate when players get access to Raise Dead because it means I can be lethal without permanently taking away someone’s beloved character. When the Paladin was looking for a Necklace of Prayer Beads I jumped at the opportunity to give him one with Greater Restoration because it meant I could throw shit that could only be cured with it at the party and not have to worry aboot the Cleric being irreversibly petrified. (Petrified creatures weigh 10x as much, the Cleric was a Dwarf, and the Paladin a Warforged, and both wore heavy armor, so there was no way either of them would be schlepped out of a tense situation)
Then during a battle with the Death Tyrant MegaDeath the Cleric narrowly avoided a petrifying ray I told them “This is why I made sure the Paladin had access to GR through the necklace. Except no: The Paladin had changed up his attunements so the Cleric was bequeathed the necklace; if the Cleric got petrified it would stick. I was very upset.
Because I can’t edit I’ll be adding the bit I remembered right after I posted in this additional post. Thankfully the Cleric had Freedom of Movement prepared. EU Citizenship means you can’t be restrained. This matters because a Beholder’s petrifying gaze restrains on the first failed save, then petrifies a restrained creature that fails their second save. This gave them an out.
When faced with a lot of dead family members for the party Bard (a rather messy final moment of spite from a personal antagonist to the character, long story), one of my favorite Pathfinder 1e characters I played was able to assist (an Undine Magus with a Parrot Familiar who handled the talking for her… and crucially for this story, the Craft Wondrous Item feat).
Now, mass rezzing isn’t exactly an easy task. Tons of money, lots of spell slots, not a whole lot of time before the clock ticking on the corpses being fresh enough to try runs out. There’s another issue, too: we didn’t have bodies, so much as skulls. Most resurrection spells are very particular about the conditions of the remains, the exceptions being especially pricey and beyond the reach of most NPCs.
Enter Reincarnation. Normally, Reincarnation isn’t your best option for reviving people- too much random chance, nobody wants to come back as a Tiefling, Gnoll, or Troglodyte. However, its expensive component is a Focus, not a Material- reusable, in other words. It also is a specific case where having intact remains is not an issue- since the spell is basically making a new body from scratch, the soul need only be free and willing to return, and you only need some scrap of the previous body to ensure the spell can find said soul.
Problem 1: the time limit on Reincarnation is particularly stiff, with a one week timer. Lots of dead bodies means we’re gonna have problems. Enter the Unguent of Timelessness, a magic item no team should leave home without: 180 gp for 10 applications, one of which slows the process of decay to roughly 1 day over the next year before wearing off. With the low cost, my Magus was able to produce enough of the stuff within the week to buy time for actually bringing folks back.
Problem 2: We don’t have a Druid, and carting around a ton of preserved skulls is as stated an issue. Can’t exactly run from town to town to hit up the tavern with a pile of preserved skulls without some unfortunate questions. Thankfully, we had another option: plant ourselves down in a safe-ish place once the fate of the world was a little less in immediate danger, secure a perimeter, and get to crafting again.
Salve of the Second Chance is a magic item I found once and was floored by the existence of; 1600gp (800gp crafted) a pop to apply Reincarnation to the target, and on the night of a full moon you roll twice on what they come back as and they get to take their pick.
As for the issue of coming back as something weird, this was a family that had both lived in a town run by amoral alchemists, and had suffered the unfortunate distinction of evil outsiders being in their ancestry (a deal with one such being was the origin of our killer, in fact, who was himself an ancestor of the group and had taken to raising- and burying- families. Guy was… uh, a piece of work as I’m abridging here). Suffice to say, new body that is horrible disease/mutation and likely evil outsider-blood-free was a bonus feature, not a bug.
The location these folks were raised in on the night of the new moon became its own town. The party Bard got to work with her lute of building- not exactly much point of bringing people back if we were just gonna dump them in the woods without resources- and had a genuine settlement going in some choice real-estate (well, it was close to some not-choice real estate the party had dealt with some time ago, that’s a story unto itself).
My Magus ending up a local hero for the town afterward, and her and the party Bard who had been distant from each other were fast friends after the fact, both for obvious reasons.
Moral of the story: Magic Item crafting is broken, high level PCs with cash money to spare (or a willingness to give up their loot for a good cause) are a force to be reckoned with, and I’m not good at telling stories, but I can be good at finding happy endings in what should be completely unsalvageable scenarios.
Ah, I’ve got some stories for this. In my my main 5e D&D campaign, we recently had a brutal fight against an archfey that left the party shattered. Literally in a couple of cases, as they’d been turned to ice. My totem warrior barbarian and the divine soul sorcerer were frozen and shattered, the ranger/warlock couldn’t make a reflex save, and the other warlock got feeble minded. Of the surviving party members, only the monk was in reasonably decent shape. They shoved the corpse of the dead ranger into a bag of holding along with some pieces of ice from our bodies and had the monk guide the warlock along. We spent a LOT of money on doing a true resurrection on the barbarian and sorcerer (the ranger/warlock’s patron brought them back with some new demands) and removing feeble mind. My barbarian declined to come back, feeling that his need for death in combat against a worthy opponent had been met and the sorcerer did come back, but had to leave to retrieve a relic that we’d failed to collect from his shattered corpse when he died.