How has your group treated the cleric’s Resurrection spell at the table? As per the SRD, a cleric is capable of returning life to any corpse “whose soul has not yet fully departed this world,” with the GM setting the specific costs for doing so.
As long as a corpse can be recovered, this is the most straightforward way for player characters to try returning particularly unfortunate comrades from the kingdom beyond the Black Gate. The rule book heavily encourages making death an adventure unto itself, so I’m interested in hearing what costs and consequences some of you guys have applied to raising dead characters In your home games.
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The only instance of a cleric reviving someone with the spell in my games was when the fighter died while holding off some guards. The party was inside of an ancient ruin of a goddess’s temple. They were in the middle of trying to help the prediction of the goddess the cleric follows come true, so when she tried to resurrect the fighter and got a 7-9 I first asked the fighter’s player if she wanted to be revived. She said yes, so I told them it would require the help of a god (a long time NPC follower had just received the powers of the temple’s goddess, so she qualified) and the sacrifice of a godly artifact. They chose to sacrifice a blade they found in another deity’s ruin. In the mean time, the fighter saw the Black Gates as a moonlit field. There she encountered Death. However, the cleric’s goddess also appeared and distracted them both by talking about the stars (she was a goddess of the stars, the night, and secrets). So the sword was destroyed (though later I revealed that the properties of it had been transferred over to the fighter’s signature weapon), the cleric’s goddess overrode the deal with Death (instead making the fighter promise to see the prophecy out to the end), and we all got to enjoy another great bit of role-play that started with Last Breath!