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https://2e.aonprd.com/Rituals.aspx?ID=123
Rank 5 and 6: body must be relatively intact
Rank 7 and 8: a small portion of the body must be present
Rank 9 and 10: "You can use resurrect even without the body as long as you know the target’s name and have touched a portion of its body at any time."This seems to imply that if someone dies and leaves no remains that only someone who has physically touched that person at some point can resurrect them, even with rank 10 magic.
Am I missing something here?
If Bob falls into magma and is incinerated there seems to be no way for a level 20 NPC to resurrect him if the NPC has never made physical contact with Bob.
Not missing anything, no. The restriction keeps the story interesting. Without it, the party can resurrect arbitrary historical figures with no special effort or quest- just fork over a bunch of money, hit the checks, get a refund to try on somebody else if Pharasma says no, and that's that.
The way the restrictions are worded, the party can almost always eventually raise a party member, even from death by a black hole, but arbitrary historical figures still require a quest to locate the remains.
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That's why when a powerful cleric comes to town, everyone goes to give their welcome and reaches out to touch them as the cleric passes by.
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It is in fact a weird thing for Chris to do say, do, or even want to do. That's why the rules don't contemplate him doing it.
Rituals are always in "ask your GM territory," if he wants to allow it he can.
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That's why the first thing you do is cast the Wish ritual to recreate the body then resurrect them.
Considering the wish ritual can straight up turn someone into a god now*, it seems trivial to use it as the resurrection ritual, but overcoming limitations like "has ever touched this person".
*Please note, I hate the treatment wish has received, mortal magic shouldn't approach this level of power.
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That's why when a powerful cleric comes to town, everyone goes to give their welcome and reaches out to touch them as the cleric passes by.
"Kiss his ring."
"I'm not kissing his ring."*whisper whisper*
*licks Pope*
(guards drag party away)
"What the hell?!"
"People are gonna remember we've touched."
"Yeah, but some of us hadn't yet!"
"..."
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If the PCs are trying to resurrect someone without any of their remains and name, then it seems that whatever they're planning on doing is something where it would be appropriate to go on a quest to collect enough stuff to resurrect their target.
Like if there literally are no remains whatsoever, I would make sure there is somebody out there somewhere who touched the target. There are people who live for incredible amounts of time who might be persuaded to help with your ritual.
Like the nature of the resurrection ritual is that there's a certain amount of GM fiat anyway, what with the clause about "if the target doesn't want to return" or Pharasma already judged them. So if you want to help your players, then help your players, but there are plenty of people who are entirely impossible to resurrect for a variety of reasons. So there are a lot of knobs and dials for the GM to adjust to make resurrection harder or easier (like if someone can cast a 10th rank ritual, they can also travel to the Boneyard to track down the unjudged soul that doesn't want to return and talk to them.)
So I would definitely allow "you went to the boneyard and touched their soul" to count for this.
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Yeah....if you're looking for a way to make this possible, just turn it into a quest.
A quest for a variant of the ritual, that allows for someone other than the caster to fulfill the requirement of "has touched the person". And a little extra work research of finding someone who has touched the person. To someone else's point, there are exceptional long lived people in the setting, someone who touched the target is probably still alive. Maybe there's some extra "quest" there because the person didn't like the target, so getting them to agree will take extra effort, they're going to want something in return.
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It is in fact a weird thing for Chris to do say, do, or even want to do. That's why the rules don't contemplate him doing it.
Rituals are always in "ask your GM territory," if he wants to allow it he can.
I am the GM.
I'm trying to avoid my players feeling like they're getting screwed over because the cleric didn't explicitly say they made physical contact with an NPC at some point.
The characters are level 15 so they're close to being able to do this kind of magic.
The easy fixes are:
- Assume that anybody the players interacted with enough to remember the name of had at least a bit of brief physical contact at some point- a clap on the back, a handshake, passing some food, the bestowing of a blessing, etc.- Just... don't go chucking bodies into volcanoes? A bit of divination to locate the body clears up the issue in almost every practical case.
As the GM, this is a lever for you to adjust as you need, not some "Gotcha!" that you're forced to spring.
