Raise Dead: From Carrion to Carry On
Usable By: Bard, Cleric, Paladin
Spell Level: 5
School: Necromancy
Casting Time: 1 hour
Range: Touch
Duration: Instantaneous
Components: V, S, M (A diamond worth at least 500 gp, which the spell consumes)
You return a dead creature you touch to life, provided that it has been dead no longer than 10 days. If the creature’s soul is both willing and at liberty to rejoin the body, the creature returns to life with 1 hit point.
This spell also neutralizes any poisons and cures nonmagical diseases that affected the creature at the time it died. This spell doesn’t, however, remove magical diseases, curses, or similar effects; if these aren’t first removed prior to casting the spell, they take effect when the creature returns to life. The spell can’t return an undead creature to life.
This spell closes all mortal wounds, but it doesn’t restore missing body parts. If the creature is lacking body parts or organs integral for its survival—its head, for instance—the spell automatically fails.
Coming back from the dead is an ordeal. The target takes a −4 penalty to all attack rolls, saving throws, and ability checks. Every time the target finishes a long rest, the penalty is reduced by 1 until it disappears.
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
A big part of the roleplaying game experience is falling in love with your characters. You get to know their strengths, their weaknesses, their constant running jokes and unbelievably stupid character traits you adore. Then, they die. Horribly. The DM may have alerted you 1,000 times before it happened that maybe sticking your head in the scary dark hole covered in blood is a bad idea, but you did it anyway, and now your beloved level 9 character is dead. Well, if learning from your mistakes isn’t something you’re interested in, 5e has you covered. If you’ve got a nearby cleric, or a bard who learned it for some reason, Raise Dead solves your woes for 500 gold; all you need is a town somewhere within 10 days of you, most of the body, and you’re good to go, back to life, character ready to live and not learn!
Raise Dead to me marks the shift from the lower mid tier to the upper mid tier. Just by existing, most characters can now make fatal mistakes, where instead of needing to roll up an entirely new character, you just get a small gold tax and are out of the game until the party gets to a spot where they can resurrect you. Competent parties that expect death probably have quick access to Revivify, nullifying most of this problem in the lower mid tiers, but occasionally the small window isn’t enough in case of larger scale separations. In those instances, you probably just want to have a diamond on a couple players, but it’ll be rare that this will actually come up.
Conceptually I like the idea of the penalty, as it encourages players to take death more seriously, but in execution it often just feels bad for multiple sessions without really changing or adapting how players proceed. A lot of the time death will feel like the DM screwing up more than the players, with breakdowns in communication, missing information, or over tuned encounters and unfortunate crits leading to unsatisfying player death. If Revivify isn’t an option to remedy those moments, Raise Dead feels like the players are getting punished for something entirely out of their control. The penalty lasting for what typically will be three to four sessions (which amounts to months of real world time) makes it feel miserable to play the character. One session makes sense; four with the penalties seems excessive.
Raise Dead is the game telling DMs and player’s they’re allowed to make mistakes, and beloved characters are typically hard to permanently kill so long as your group gets to this tier. Prepared groups don’t need this, but groups without a cleric probably will seek this out in the upper mid to high tiers from NPCs to resurrect a beloved dead player character. It won’t be the right fit for some game styles, but most games where players get attached to a character, invest in some art and dice for them, and are having a blast with their build and friends, Raise Dead does its job fine enough. You shouldn’t ever be preparing this, though; prepare Revivify if death seems likely, and take a long rest and prepare this post death to bring an ally back to life.
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