Raising the long dead

[Raunchel]

Once again I come to the Playground to ask for advice and help. I just read the text of Ressurection and True Ressurection, and apparently they are limited to ten years per caster level, and that has led me to wonder if it is possible to raise someone who has been dead for longer, for instance someone who has been dead for milennia, and preferably without 'just' becoming a level 100 cleric.

[Segrain]

If ninth level spell is not good enough, see if epic spellcasting is an option. Life seed (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/seeds/life.htm) has no upper limit on death duration (Spellcraft DC for a spell capable of raising millennium old corpse is 107, but mitigating factors can help with it), as long as small portion of remains is available and target had not died from old age.

[Segev]

For the most part, this sort of thing enters into plot territory, and would best be handled by the DM creating an ad hoc "usable only with the right ingredients that are only available according to plot requirements" ritual or procedure.


Failing that, there ARE tricks and techniques for increasing your CL. Consumptive Field is popular (especially in conjunction with slaughtering chickens), as is circle magic. Kill 100+ chickens and your CL rockets to 117+ or so, which should let you resurrect somebody dead up to 1170+ years.

[Zaq]

You could arguably do it with Wish.


Revive the dead. A wish can bring a dead creature back to life by duplicating a resurrection spell. A wish can revive a dead creature whose body has been destroyed, but the task takes two wishes, one to recreate the body and another to infuse the body with life again. A wish cannot prevent a character who was brought back to life from losing an experience level.

The contentious part is in the "by duplicating a resurrection spell" bit. Is Wish, when used to revive the dead, subject to the same limitations as casting Resurrection normally? I can honestly see an argument either way. It would be worth running it by your GM, if nothing else. If you are the GM, it's not really likely to break anything to allow Wish to revive long-dead folks.

[Segev]

Wish or Miracle could do it, but not by duplicating a spell, since duplicating a spell would require obeying the spell's restrictions. I don't really see an argument to the contrary.

You CAN do it without duplicating a spell, but that puts it into the "DM can screw with it" territory, because you're asking for something beyond the power of the Wish. With Miracle, obviously, you're just in "does your god feel like it?" territory, since Miracle doesn't get messed with; it just gets told "no" if the DM doesn't like it.

[StoneCipher]

Teleport through time. Problem solved.

[Segev]

Teleport through time. Problem solved.

That raises some fascinating questions.

First of all, is it the corpse's subjective time that matters for how long it's been dead? If you grab a corpse just after it died, then jump 10,000 years into the future, can you cast Raise Dead on the corpse and get the person back? Has it been 10,000 years since they died, or just a few minutes, for purposes of Raise Dead (or Resurrection or True Resurrection or whatever)?

How does this interact with True Resurrection? True Res explicitly doesn't need the corpse; obviously, if you hop forward 10,000 years sans corpse, it will not work as the guy's been dead for 10,000 years. But what if you bring it with you? If bringing it with you works, what happens if Jimbob the Wizard takes the corpse 10,000 years into the future, but Billybob the Cleric doesn't go with him and instead casts True Resurrection? Does True Res work? If it does, does the True Res cast by Bobbyboy (cleric of the far future) on the brought-forward corpse work?

What about going back in time? If your friend dies, and you take his corpse back to yesterday, can you Raise Dead his corpse, or is the fact that he's still alive going to prevent this? What if you go back to before he was born? What if you go back to yesterday with your friend, and your friend dies while "back in time?"

Now consider Reincarnate with all of this.

[ericgrau]

Gentle repose says it can preserve a body for the purpose of raising the dead. Time under the repose don't count against the raising the dead time limit. It takes some preparation but it could keep a dead body ready to be raised indefinitely.

[Segev]

In a setting that I ran, but never got the players into this aspect of the plot, humanity as a race was thousands of years extinct (and viewed by the remaining races as a sort of legendary horror that is used to scare children into behaving). A half-orc, half-elf bard became fascinated by the snippets of legend that surrounded this lost race, and went about trying to learn more. Eventually, he found out that humans had left keys to their own return, in the form of locked and sealed preservation chambers. Only a human, apparently, could open them, which presented a conundrum.

A winter wraith, he would discover, guarded a means to bring back ONE human. A young girl. The wraith is the girl guarding her own tomb, and a specially-constructed music box could trigger a series of psionic devices and the girl's own long-buried memories to re-unite body and spirit and rejuvenate the body.

The resurrection scene is set to Rammstein's Speiluhr. I'm sure you can identify the singers by voice.