Death and Semantics. My players stay out!

[valadil]

Hey folks. I'm running a 4th ed game. An NPC did some weird shenanigans with Raise Dead and after the fact I realized they might not be RAW. I have no problem deploying GM fiat for plot in this way, but I can't even figure out if what I did was fiat or not. So I'm looking for your opinions. No, it won't change anything in the game at this point. I'm simply curious.

The Raise Dead ritual says the following, with emphasis by me:

You must have a part of the corpse of a creature that died no more than 30 days ago.

So if somebody loses an appendage and then is killed, does that appendage count as part of the corpse? The appendage is certainly part of the person's body and the appendage is dead, but it was never part of the person when they were a corpse.

Of course, corpse comes from the latin corpus which means body. It was part of the body, but I think going for corpus is a bit of a stretch.

Certainly an arm that was severed after death would be part of the corpse. Does that have any functional difference from an arm that was detached beforehand?

And just for the sake of argument, what about an appendage that was removed at the moment of death? If I put a PC through a guillotine and the party finds the head, nobody at the table would question that the head is a part of the corpse and thus sufficient for raise dead. And yet there's some evidence (and I leave googling this evidence as an exercise for the reader) that a head remains conscious for some seconds after severance, indicating that the head was never part of the corpse.

[Yora]

Conventional Wisdom is that it had to be part of the body at the time of death. Everything else stoped being part of the body before the body became a corpse.

[2xMachina]

... I'm think that rule only exists so that PC's don't chop off a finger and store it with a priest to ress later when they died.

Also, based on 3.5 (not sure if 4.0 changed it), raise dead does not give you back your body. So raising the chopped off hand will get you just a hand at best.

So, raise dead a body with no head is useless. Raise dead on a head with no body is also useless.

EDIT: Google told me that 4.0 changed it. But anyway, the intent is that you can only raise if you get a piece of them after death. Otherwise, people will store their body parts, and be able to Raise Dead regardless of how throughly they're killed.

[valadil]

Conventional Wisdom is that it had to be part of the body at the time of death. Everything else stoped being part of the body before the body became a corpse.

I disagree with the bold part. I'd still say that a detached arm was part of the body or had previously been part of the body. But that's using body in the living body sense. It wasn't part of the corpse.

[valadil]

... I'm think that rule only exists so that PC's don't chop off a finger and store it with a priest to ress later when they died.

Which is exactly what an NPC did. My players haven't figured that out yet though.

Also, based on 3.5 (not sure if 4.0 changed it), raise dead does not give you back your body. So raising the chopped off hand will get you just a hand at best.

4e did change it. I just checked the 3.5 rules and there's no way this would work in 3rd ed. Death is much less of a penalty in 4e. You lose ~500 gp, 8 hours, and are at -1 for the next 4 combats I think.