Corrupting Touch and Raise Dead

[T'kk'tck Greenbeak]

Short form:

Can you use Raise Dead to bring someone back to life who has died from a Ghost's corrupting touch?

Situation:

I'm the DM, I can by fiat do well, whatever the players are willing to let me do and still play with me. But for the most part we try to stick with the generic rules because it makes the game "more better".

My player's were exploring below an abandoned gambling den and ran into a ghost, the rogue had been hit with a curse and was rocking a wonderful 4 WIS and decided to gamble with said ghost and further lost 2 CON. At this point the party decided they would fight the ghost. Said ghost rocks a CR7 7d6 corrupting touch and 3d6 sneak attack.

Rogue ends up dead, party flees. We stop for the evening. As they plan how to come back and get their dead companion I mentioned the scroll of raise dead that they found previously to the Rogue and suggest they use it on his old body as soon as they get back in.

He nods and then asks "but doesn't corrupting touch age you? You can't come back from old age...."

And so I'm here asking my question, because I'm not sure if I would rule that raise dead can't bring people back from "supernatural aging" and I want to hear other people's opinions on how they'd rule it or find out if Paizo had already made a ruling that I wasn't able to find while searching google.

[Pizza Lord]

True that the ghost's Corrupting Touch causes supernatural aging, the damage however is from physical pain and aches from the stress put on the body by the aging. I know it seems semantic, but I think in all fairness, the damage is not from dying of old age, just system shock and such.

Bear with me, normally aging in itself doesn't do physical wounds. You reach your set age (expiration date) and die. You don't just start taking 1d6 damage every year over X or every day you are older than Y. It's akin to you suffering a heart attack or organ failure from advanced age, but you aren't actually dead from old age.

It would be different if the Corrupting Touch actually did increase your physical age (either by a year per touch or 2% of your max lifespan, to make it fair for all races, including the long-lived ones), but it doesn't. Technically if you took 100 damage from a Corrupting Touch attack and didn't die, then you healed the damage you aren't regaining years or youth nor are you actually 100+ years old.

So yes, you are correct about raise dead and dying of old age but I wouldn't say that if you die from supernatural aging, in the case of Corrupting Touch, that it's from old age, as opposed to the strain on the body of aging, if that makes sense to you.

[T'kk'tck Greenbeak]

Thank you. I like that reasoning.

[Pizza Lord]

That's good to hear. If you didn't like the reasoning I was going to go with the explanation that just because you may be 30 years old, for example, that doesn't mean that any part of you is 30 years old. Our actual cells probably have a much shorter lifespan and age and die all the time. Even if a person is 30, the skin on their arm or face is probably much younger, probably only a year or so.

So you could just explain it as the part of your body being touched is being aged. This manifests as your skin and muscle cells atrophying at dying and causing pain. Normally this stuff happens all the time, cells dying, but we have so many and they replace themselves so quickly (our entire upper layer of skin is dead) we don't tend to notice. This attack kills a whole fist-sized hunk of body-matter and thousands (if not millions) of skin, muscle, or organ tissue cells and our systems reel in shock trying to deal with it. If you survive the damage, then you're still 30 years old, just with a damaged liver (which may medically be the equivalent of a 60-year person's liver in terms of health) that needs time to heal.

Again though, if the attack actually does increase a person's physical age, then it would count as dying of old age if it exceeded their max age or lifespan and caused them to die. Corrupting Touch does not.