Quote Originally Posted by Elana View Post
One of the easies way would be to make diamonds a bit rarer.
(They were all used up with those thousands of ressurections in the past)

And since raise dead, resurection and true ressurection needs lots of diamonds, they have the trouble finding enough of those.
(probably there is enough in the lair of ancient dragons, or a lot of smaller ones, depending on what makes sense at the current point in the campaign)


(For reincarnate you can say the same, that they have to questto find those rare oils and unguents)
As a player this would irk me like no other, I rather live in a DM world similar to Breaon. Don't try to yank the player chain's by making them jump through silly hoops.

Furthermore "diamonds" is more or less a place holder. Balance wise you just need to spend about 5000 gp. In your campaign world you can easily say the material component is water worth 5,000 gp if in a desert campaign, gold, 5,000 gp of slaves, etc. In your world you may not spend the material component when you cast the spell, perhaps you summon certain outsiders and the cost for the life is the 5,000 gp.

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Another option you can do is have a quest similar go to the land of the dead, the well of eternity, the endless waste, heaven whatever. These quests can be short or long. After retrieving an item, a truename, the actual spirit you can now resurrect them. Depends on how you do it you can have the players only make the quest once, if a player dies again since they now done the quest they can use the relevant spells.

For example clerics have raise dead and true resurrection, they must though call the true name of the lord of the dead before they can summon him and then bargain with him to allow the dead to return to life, the initial quest is to learn the true name of the dead once learn you won't forget it unless the memory is erased. Perhaps since it is a truename you can't tell other people it, for you can only learn it from the lord of the dead himself or some other powerful outsider, when you try to say or write his name to people who haven't heard the name it is just gibberish, you need to hear the name from the original source and then it is no longer gibberish to you.