Resurrecting after 1 turn being dead


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion


My question is, what does someone being dead only for 6 seconds or less experience?, my char got killed but in the same turn they breath of life him back.

PS: Dunno if this goes here, if not, I apologize.


Probably you get the tunnel of light effect as your brain gets starved of oxygen, then blackness. I'm not sure there's time for anything more.


You know, that is actually a very good question. The core book does not actually state one way or another.

There is a sort of collective agreement that dead characters don't remember what happened while dead. This is clarified in Golarion setting books and Bestiary 2, via the Petetioner:

Petitioner wrote:

Petitioners are the souls of mortals brought to the Outer Planes after death in order to experience their ultimate punishment, reward, or fate. A petitioner retains fragments of its memories from life.

Creatures who die, become petitioners, and then return to life retain no memories of the time they spent as petitioners in the afterlife.

In Golarion a dead soul travels down the river of souls to Pharasma's boneyard, where it waits to be judged and sent to where it's supposed to be. It is assumed that souls "still in line" are the ones that can be still be brought back from the dead. Basically, raise dead lets you get a guy out of line. Ressurection can get a guy who might already have gone through initial processing, but isn't in a courtroom yet. And true res can actually pull a guy out of an ongoing trial. Breath of Life is so fast compared to that, its grabbing the guy before he even gets in the river of souls.

But yeah, short version? The dead don't experience anything they can describe to the living.


I just rule it that the dead, if they remember anything, have a confused feeling of pain (probably), aimlessness and lightness, then are shoved back into their bodies. While IIRC there isn't any source anywhere saying how long it takes a soul to leave the body, I usually say they hang around for a few seconds (6, to be precise) before heading off. How long it takes a soul to travel to whatever afterlife in whatever setting depends very much on the setting. A 'river of souls' sounds like it takes a bit of time to arrive at the Boneyard.


In the specific case of breath of life, you're looking at the awkward simulation of simultaneity through initiative. Because it's all happening within one round, it's all happening at the same time; death-blow and healing magic. The victim doesn't actually die, despite temporarily having the dead condition.


To me, this is all up to the DM and the Player to work out. While the character was only Dead for a round, time may or may not work the same in Death as it does in Life. As others have said, if playing in Golarion than you remember nothing, if in a homebrew, I would work it out with the DM dependent upon your character, their beliefs, and how interactive the Gods in your game are.


Within existent Golarion lore, as already noted, you become a petitioner for a limited time and when resurrected you remember nothing of what happened.

So anything you remember will only be the process of dying itself.


Well, it was an insta-death, from 68 HPs to -20, so not much process of dying there, it was instant.


Example equivalent to Breath of Life, although admittedly with a much longer lead-up than the example just above.

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