So I'm designing a campaign world with a very somber and alien feel (heavily influenced by Dark Souls), but I've run into a snag. I want powerful, imposing enemies for the players to struggle against. I want traps that severely punish careless exploration. I want death to be a very real possibility. However, I don't want the players to have to make new characters constantly. Instead of cheapening the characters, I'd rather cheapen their death. I want death to be a big enough hassle that they'll be extra cautious, but not so big that they avoid danger entirely. A major premise of this setting is that the players have gotten their powers by absorbing the 'soul' of a real hero. I thought about doing a 'corruption' system like in Dark Souls, where the stolen soul reanimates the player but gets degraded in the process, eventually atrophying altogether and turning the player into an undead. However, my players are all big Dark Souls fans and I don't want it to be too similar. Any ideas on other ways to cheapen death (and still make it equally punishing across multiple levels of play)?
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My opinion: there is some sort of central location that acts as your "soul harbor". You can resurrect ONCE between visits to it, so long as someone else performs the proper ritual to guide your soul back to its body. Otherwise, your body and soul reunite at the "soul harbor" after 24 hours of being dead. I believe the threat of being set back and having to re-travel to where you last died is penalty enough. The "bad guys" must accomplish something while the PCs resurrect and travel to make it work though. In this way, hero death affects the story, not the heroes. A TPK is 24+ hours that the "bad guys" get to do whatever they want without the PCs interfering.
Until the release of the GMs Guide to Kaidan, the only place that contains the rules for the twisted Kaidan reincarnaton system are the first module of the Curse of the Golden Spear trilogy - The Gift, in Appendix A. Otherwise the reincarnation system in practice (but not the rules) can be found in the Kaidan one-shot module, Up from Darkness.
In the Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG) when you die, you will reincarnate, unless some tragedy forces you to become undead or sentenced to Hell, however Raise Dead, Reincarnation (by spell) and Resurrection do not function. Essentially most everyone has an adventuring career that exists across multiple lifetimes - nobody ever goes to "heaven".
Someone came up with similar question before and someone replied with a great system that mirrors Dark Souls. I'm not sure if I can find it though.
You could have a dead player go to the underworld. And then they'd have to find a way out of it. This would work best if it was a tpk because party split and all. But hey it can be done briefly too if only one person died. Every time escaping the underworld should be a challenge though. Don't think they should be able to die there again though.
Thanks for the suggestions guys! I'll be working on this for a while so I have time to mull it over. Cyrad, if you ever stumble across that system I'd be very grateful.
Keep in mind that systems which penalize hit points, attacks, stats, or saves will make fighting something that killed them when they weren't penalized even less likely to succeed.
"Surely the beast who defeated me when I was in perfect health will fall before my weakened form."
Take a page out of World of Warcraft's book: when they die, they have to go through some extra effort to get their loot back the way they had it before.
People take their loot seriously.
I saw an add for a video game where you come back fine, but the monster that killed you levels up.
My new ideas for Land of the Dead, while dead your spirit(Prepetitioner) gains levels in a spooky prestige class such as Poltergeist or Reaper. Change the time limit on raise dead to the longer dead, the more the gp cost of casting. Now make the week of the church waiting for the high priest to come to town equate to a month in the Land of the Dead.
You can also take the Supernatural approach, and a friend looks out for you, comes back with you, and they are a monster. What was the name of the vampire who came back from purgatory with Dean?
One season of Buffy was fun, because they dragged her back from Heaven.
I saw an add for a video game where you come back fine, but the monster that killed you levels up.
Guild Wars was sort of like this. You'd return (with a 15% penalty to hp and energy) and the monster would gain experience from killing you, based on your level, which would cause it to increase in level if it gained enough. Exploitating this system was the key to reaching max level in the preview/tutorial area of the base game.