what are all the ways to bring a dead pc back to life??
if they want to keep that character instead of making a new one or losing experience...
is there a chart anywhere that says how much money it costs or anything like that??
thanks
1.) Your standard issue true resurrection, wish, miracle or similar effect.
2.) Divine intervention. If it were me in the DM shoes for this instance, I would have the resurrected character be under a geas/quest for the deity in question (owesies!).
3.) Angelic/Demonic/Devilish intervention. While similar to divine intervention, this is something I would do particularly for lower level characters who haven't quite earned the attention of their patron deity. Side effects, while probably not too heavy in the mechanics area, would be more in the visual and roleplaying aspects of it (bonuses to dealing with devils/angels/demons).
4.) The body of the deceased taken to a holy/unholy location that will return the character to life (acting as one of the aforementioned spells).
No matter which direction you choose to take, I would make it clear that bringing the dead back to life has its ups and downs.
A question that begs to be asked is : does the character want to return to life, or did they pass in the doing of something they were willing to sacrifice their life for?
Hopefully this helps you out!
Depending on where you are in the campaign, you could use a raise dead (for lower level PCs), which will result in level loss, or a true resurrection, which is a very costly spell.
If the party has no means of doing those things themselves, it will come at a price.
Some examples from my campaigns:
A PC dies three times and is brought back to life with a true resurrect, which the PCs have to buy in a befriended temple. The PCs end up selling a lot of their magical loot to pay for it.
Total party kill for a two man party - we played a whole session in the afterlife which included some elements to enhance the campaign plot(PCs worship the same god, so that worked out well). They are brought back to life by their dwarven friends with a raise dead, both losing a level. The dwarves do charge them for the ingredients used.
Just last Friday in my age of worms campaign, a fighter of the group dies. While climbing down a cliff he is peppered by arrows (grimlock ambush in The Three Faces of Evil) and is brought below 0 just before fleeing back to the top. He plummets down - game over.
Now this PC is of noble birth and his father was a respected paladin of Tyr (the Forgotten Realms god of Justice). After his father's death, the PC was sent to Waterdeep to join the Academy and live a life of luxury until he recently found out that the family fortune has run out and learned that his mother and sister have been living in relative poverty for several years already.
With her son's death, the mother has taken desperate measures to get him resurrected. She sold the last bit of land she owned to the manipulative business shark Balabar Smenk and has promised him her daughter's hand in marriage (thus allowing the 'nouveau riche' a way into the nobility). He coughed up 20.000 GP instead. Then she wrote a letter to a friend in the temple of Tyr to have her son brought back to life, with a true resurrect. The PCs had to cough up the remaining 5.000 GP to pay for the material cost of the spell, and the resurrected PC will of course be in the debt of the temple.
This just shows that using even the 'simple' raise or resurrect spell to bring someone back to life can be used to enhance your campaign.
Of course, there are other ways to have someone brought back, apart from the spells. When my PCs were in Occipitus (Shackled City campaign - Test of the Smoking Eye), the cleric died, but since Occipitus is in the Abyss, his spirit was not free to return to his god's paradise. Instead he reappeared in ghost form, feeling how this demonic dimension was trying to absorb his essence.
He could still use his spells to influence the 'real' world, but every time he did, the Abyss's pull on him became stronger (his divine spell energy served as a kind of buffer, which diminished each time he used a spell).
In the final climactic battle, he sacrificed himself (that is to say, his ghost form) to the central column of fire in Occipitus. The player thought this would be the end of his character, but instead he made a willing sacrifice which awarded him with new life and the sign of the smoking eye. This again shows that you can use a character death in your favor to make the adventure all the more enjoyable. For me it was one of the most exciting sessions I ever played.
In short, a PC death does not have to be a bad thing. My players put a lot of time and effort into their PCs and want to play them throughout the campaign, if possible. I just use their very occasional deaths to enhance the plot.
what are all the ways to bring a dead pc back to life??
Bring them back?
After all the trouble you went through to kill them in the first place? Sound like some kind of DM hell to me - you kill them and then they come back and then you kill them again and yet again they return. It all sounds like some kind of endless tread mill to me except with a screen and some funny shaped dice.
*Shudder* The whole concept gives me me the heebee jeebees.
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One way to bing back a 'dead' PC is to later have it so they *didn't die*.
I once had a LE 6th-level cleric of Hextor that was killed when an entire temple collapsed on him (the sadistic and anal DM decided that he didn't like evil characters and killed off mine).
Later on, when the charaters in the campaign reached 18th level, Kerrik, my sorcerer character, died. Since I liked my cleric character better than the sorcerer, I thought it would be good to bring him back. I finally managed to coerce the DM to allow the character to have not *died* but instead fallen through a planar portal.
The story goes: Laucian (the cleric) fell through a portal to the (campaign-specific) Demiplane of Opposites, a chaotic mass of stable earth, positive energy, and negative energy inhabited by warring factions of undead and deathless. Laucian then was found by a faction of deathless druids and tought necromantic and druidic magic. Ergo, after a stay on the Plane of Opposites, The LE 6th-level cleric returned to the prime as a LN 6th-level cleric/6th-level Necromancer/6th-level druid with deathless grafts (from an Eberron supplement).
-Mr. Shiny