In Book of the Dead, undead characters brought down to Dying 4 are destroyed. So it seems implied that the PC is gone for good. But can they still be resurrected and returned to life by the ritual, so long as the spell's requirements are met (died within the past year), yes?
I think saying the PC is destroyed is a holdover from talking about bringing undead monsters and NPCs down to 0 hp, because doing so doesn't "kill" the undead creature. And resurrection requires "the target’s body to be present and relatively intact." This is up to GM interpretation, but I'd imagine that a destroyed (0 hit point) undead is "intact" enough for resurrection purposes.)
EDIT: What got me thinking about this was the 9th-level ancestry feat Rejuvenation Token, which specifically says that resurrect using your soulbound object doesn't bring you back to life but returns you to your Skeleton state.
In Book of the Dead, undead characters brought down to Dying 4 are destroyed. So it seems implied that the PC is gone for good. But can they still be resurrected and returned to life by the ritual, so long as the spell's requirements are met (died within the past year), yes?
I think saying the PC is destroyed is a holdover from talking about bringing undead monsters and NPCs down to 0 hp, because doing so doesn't "kill" the undead creature. And resurrection requires "the target’s body to be present and relatively intact." This is up to GM interpretation, but I'd imagine that a destroyed (0 hit point) undead is "intact" enough for resurrection purposes.)
EDIT: What got me thinking about this was the 9th-level ancestry feat Rejuvenation Token, which specifically says that resurrect using your soulbound object doesn't bring you back to life but returns you to your Skeleton state.
So, if you're talking about a skeleton, then they're not really intact... and if you're talking about a skeleton who's been undead for more than a year they don't qualify under that, either. Now, if its heightened to 9th, then those issues go away.
Now, Resurrection heightened to 10th is actually even more interesting, since (by the way the Golarion afterlife works) those souls will eventually reincarnate. So... it gets weird, because fo the two caveats.
"The Lady of Graves has decided that the target’s time has come" - I mean, once you're more than 50 years after their death, wouldn't that be kind of a given? How are the increasing time spans for the really high-level versions of this even applicable?
"the target doesn’t wish to return" - so even without that, we can pretty much assume that the soul in question will have been washed clean and moved on eventually. So this suggests the possibility where you try to resurrect someone who's already living a different life as a different person. Obviously, they might say "no", if they like the life they have, but what if they don't? What happens if they say "yes"?
Being destroyed and dying are distinct, a resurrected pile of bones from a skeleton would come back as the person they originally were when they died.
The Rejuvenation Token ability allows this to be circumvented, as does other types of similar restorative abilities like a lich's soul cage.
For reference, this thread from the subreddit seemed to come down on the side of being able to resurrect destroyed undead: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/hbe9id/can_you_resurrect_und ead/
No official word from Paizo on this. Since Resurrect in 2E doesn't preclude resurrecting undead creatures (whereas it did in PF1E), I think RAW is that it can.
As for the corpse "destroyed," the only operable rules in 2E are in reference to items and not creatures. And in previous editions, having "some small portion" of the body was all you needed to resurrect someone (and 9th level PF1e True Resurrection didn't even need this). Yes, it's another edition, but the only precedent for preventing the raising of undead is language in the PF1 raise dead spell, which itself is explicitly ignored for the 7th and 9th level resurrection spells: "You can resurrect someone killed by a death effect or someone who has been turned into an undead creature and then destroyed."
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For reference, this thread from the subreddit seemed to come down on the side of being able to resurrect destroyed undead: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/hbe9id/can_you_resurrect_und ead/
No official word from Paizo on this. Since Resurrect in 2E doesn't preclude resurrecting undead creatures (whereas it did in PF1E), I think RAW is that it can.
As for the corpse "destroyed," the only operable rules in 2E are in reference to items and not creatures. And in previous editions, having "some small portion" of the body was all you needed to resurrect someone (and 9th level PF1e True Resurrection didn't even need this). Yes, it's another edition, but the only precedent for preventing the raising of undead is language in the PF1 raise dead spell, which itself is explicitly ignored for the 7th and 9th level resurrection spells: "You can resurrect someone killed by a death effect or someone who has been turned into an undead creature and then destroyed."
The effects of Resurrection is explicitly "They return to life." At level 6, you need the whole body, and they must have died within the past year. heightened to 7, you can have only part of the body (say, a decent supply of bones) and they have to have died within the past decade... and so on. Thus, you *can* cast resurrection on a "destroyed" undead... if their original death was recent enough for the level you've heightened the ritual to. If you do... they return to life (and not to being undead).
The undead *is* destroyed... and rendered into parts that are suitable for calling that person back to a fully living state via resurrection. The thing that returns from a resurrection (barring appropriate feats) won't be undead.
Actually, technically... I think you could cast resurrection on an undead PC even if they aren't destroyed. They're still the corpse of a dead creature, after all - it's just a moving around kind of dead.
Distinction here: the undead creature being destroyed doesn't mean the soul is destroyed. Indeed, the soul may not have been part of the undead creature at all, depending.
Actually, technically... I think you could cast resurrection on an undead PC even if they aren't destroyed. They're still the corpse of a dead creature, after all - it's just a moving around kind of dead.
but you do collect bones you can use to help yourself mend.
PATCHWORK SKELETONS
A skeleton’s connection to its mortal
remains is tenuous. One that’s damaged
can fairly easily replace a broken
bone with a similar bone scavenged
from another creature. A skeleton can
eventually have its entire body replaced,
bone by bone. Skeletons don’t have
much of an identity, making it unclear
whether this is still the same creature.
oh boy, that's gonna mess with any resucrecction attempt
imagine critically succeeding at 'resurecting' a skeleton and suddenly you have two dozen naked totally unrelated people around
oh boy, that's gonna mess with any resucrecction attempt
imagine critically succeeding at 'resurecting' a skeleton and suddenly you have two dozen naked totally unrelated people around
Now I'm imagining some sort of freaky heist/escape plot where a skeleton smuggles out bones of eight different (rather high level) friends so that they can be resurrected in safer territory.
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I think this is a case of having the game mechanics take second priority to the characters and players actually playing the game.
If the player and the GM want to allow reviving a skeleton PC after it gets destroyed, just homebrew a variant of the Resurrection ritual that does that - restores to unlife the skeleton character that died.
If the player and the GM don't agree that it should be allowed, then that is a different problem than a vague edge case in the rules - and needs to be handled by something other than a rules debate.