Gentle Repose: Delay the Decay

Spell Level: 2

School: Necromancy

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: Touch

Duration: 10 days

Components: V, S, M (a pinch of salt and one copper piece placed on each of the corpse's eyes, which must remain there for the duration)

You touch a corpse or other remains. For the duration, the target is protected from decay and can’t become undead.

The spell also effectively extends the time limit on raising the target from the dead, since days spent under the influence of this spell don’t count against the time limit of spells such as raise dead.

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

D&D is full of fights you and your party absolutely can not win. We all have gotten a bit too big for our britches and decide to poke the bear, the bear in this example being a CR 14 dragon with a grudge. Inevitably, these moments lead to character death, and need resurrection magic to manage. Gentle Repose says it gives you a way to preserve the body, a means of keeping the dead on ice to resurrect later. In reality, nobody in the history of 5th edition has prepared and cast Gentle Repose to meaningfully extend a dead ally's resurrection window. It just doesn’t happen.

Let's start with the easy stuff: if you’re a cleric, you have access to Revivify starting at 5th level. Revivify is the kind of effect you bank a 3rd level slot on for particularly dangerous fights at 5th level, and keep around without feeling too bad about it in most other circumstances in the higher tiers. This spell, on its own, entirely replaces the need for Gentle Repose by literally just bringing them back to life then and there. If somebody is dying in a fight and enjoys their character to a point where they need to be resurrected, which probably is only happening past the earliest stages, Revivify covers you.

If you’re too low level for Revivify, Gentle Repose doesn’t save lives either, though. You instead have to bank a 2nd level spell slot to get a chance to find somebody to Revivify them down the road. When you’ve got six to seven spell slots per long rest total, banking your highest level slot for the chance to bring back a dead ally seems INCREDIBLY suspect, not to mention a massive waste of resources the majority of the time. You could instead be killing creatures outright, or just using good old fashioned Healing Word to get near dead characters off zero.

Even in a situation where instant death happens, if said instant death entirely dismembers or shreds the body (which is often in a world full of giant, toothy, hungry monsters), even Raise Dead can’t save them, meaning Gentle Reposing the remains is more or less useless. If the body somehow is in tact, you’ve been unable to get to it within the minute window for Revivify and you are yet to have access to Raise Dead yourself, Gentle Repose will only be useful in a situation where there isn’t a capable 9th level cleric spell service within TEN DAYS of you for Raise Dead.

Gentle Repose is a ritual spell with no good reason to use its ritual tag. At its best, it's a flavor enhancer for the protector of the dead, a tool to mitigate zombie rebirth in a undead centric campaign, but that’s it. And that isn’t good enough for more or less any character to take. Having taken this spell personally and seen a myriad of players take it “just in case”, all my experiences have yet to see a single person CAST the spell. There simply aren’t enough real scenarios where Gentle Repose does anything to justify preparing it or learning it. So don’t!

5e Spells

Gentle Repose: Delay the Decay