Make Whole on Corpses?

[The Viscount]

Raise Dead has a number of limitations that prevent its use. One of them is that it requires the corpse in question to be intact. This can pose problems, as there are several effects which can kill you by decapitation or dismemberment, such as a vorpal weapon or decapitating scarf.

One might say that these would mean you have to move up to resurrect, but what bout another option?

Make Whole can repair any object to intact state, so long as certain effects haven't been used. It seems that this could be used to restore a corpse so that you could then cast Raise Dead on it and spare yourself the money (and also allow you to raise someone if you're too low level for resurrect).

When using this, would you need all the pieces to be in one place, or would this allow you to replace a creature's entire head if it was taken away?

Thoughts? It seems like the writers didn't intend for this to happen, but am I missing any actual rules preventing it?

[Ashtagon]

As long as all body parts are presented and essentially in their original form (flesh, not warped or otherwise distorted by some effect), it seems this approach should work.

[BlackOnyx]

When using this, would you need all the pieces to be in one place, or would this allow you to replace a creature's entire head if it was taken away?



As long as all body parts are presented and essentially in their original form...


I'd agree with Ashtagon on this one; if there's any chance for the spell to work, all the components would have to be present.


That said, I could entirely understand if a DM nixed this sort of spell use on the premise of corpses not counting as "ordinary" objects (being too complicated and/or still counting as a "creature" in death). Whatever you interpret as RAW or not, this is probably one of those situations best left up to a DM judgement call.

[BloodSnake'sCha]

There was a thread with this debate.
In the end everyone agree that this is a "Ask your DM" question.

Because you can view curpses as a dead creature and as an object.

[Zaq]

I'd allow it if all (or almost all, at least) of the most important bits were gathered together. I definitely wouldn't allow it to regrow missing parts that aren't present.

While on the topic of "what if there are parts missing," if it were narratively interesting and not something being repeatedly abused, I might allow either a group casting of Regenerate timed to coincide with the Raise Dead spell or else a special casting of Regenerate in conjunction with some combination of a Heal check and a Spellcraft check to target a corpse rather than a living creature, but again, that would depend on it being narratively interesting. Though the fact that Resurrection is the same spell level as Regenerate means that in order for this to be narratively interesting and not simply a way to get a 5k gp discount on bringing someone back to life, we'd likely need to be dealing with someone who isn't an actual Cleric and who therefore somehow has both Raise Dead and Regenerate but not Resurrection. But I'm just idly musing anyway. It would take an awful lot of money to get me to actually GM a proper game of 3.5 again.