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Came recently up in my campaign. One of the party members is a geniekin and theorized they might go to the elemental planes after they die instead of the 'regular' afterlife.
Which honestly would surprise me, but made me think.
So what happens if elementally hypercharged beings or straightup elementals dies?
a) they go to pharasma like everybody else
b) they go to the elemental planes and become (re-)incarnated as an elemental
c) something else that nobody at my table thought about
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It might depend on how they got to the prime material plane (PMP).
If they were summoned, they go back to their specific elemental plane.
If they came to the PMP of their own volition, they could very well be dead permanently.
I can't see an elemental going to Pharasma's Court to be judged.
BTW, folks who have already been judged and sent to their afterlife, don't get judged again if they're killed on the PMP.
If they're an outsider and they came to the PMP on their own and die, they're dead forever.
If they were summoned to the PMP and die, they just go straight back to their own plane.
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It might depend on how they got to the prime material plane (PMP).
If they were summoned, they go back to their specific elemental plane.
If they came to the PMP of their own volition, they could very well be dead permanently.
I can't see an elemental going to Pharasma's Court to be judged.
BTW, folks who have already been judged and sent to their afterlife, don't get judged again if they're killed on the PMP.
If they're an outsider and they came to the PMP on their own and die, they're dead forever.
If they were summoned to the PMP and die, they just go straight back to their own plane.
That seems about what I would think too. Most of the other planar stuff seems to just go back to their plane and reincarnate. We know in the first world nothing really dies there and the lower planes are basically the same and I assume the higher planes are the same.
As they said in the good place just a drop of water returning to its ocean.
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It's from 1st edition, but it's lore-based and still accurate as far as I know:
Pages 64–69 of *Planar Adventures* goes into great detail about how the River of Souls and the soul cycle works. The nutshell version there is that elementals as "outsiders" (a blanket term used in 1st edition to cover all forms of life from other planes that weren't mortals) that die have their quintessence (the sum total of their physical and mental and spiritual remains, which includes their soul) re-absorbed into reality. This re-absorbed energy gravitates toward the plane the elemental is associated with, and if for whatever reason it doesn't go there, it eventually gets sucked into the Maelstrom and churned back through the Antipode to be "recycled" into new soul energy... or in rarer cases is eaten and lost to supernatural predators.
In 1E, elementals and outsiders are among those creature types that can't be raised from the dead or resurrected. That's not the case in 2nd edition Pathfinder, where those effects are limited by the level of the dead creature and the time they've been dead and not by what KIND of creature they were.
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Good luck hunting down an Air Elemental's corpse to resurrect it, though!
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In 1E, elementals and outsiders are among those creature types that can't be raised from the dead or resurrected. That's not the case in 2nd edition Pathfinder, where those effects are limited by the level of the dead creature and the time they've been dead and not by what KIND of creature they were.
Off-topic question but reading this got me curious: RAW can you resurrect an undead who has been destroyed?
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In 1E, elementals and outsiders are among those creature types that can't be raised from the dead or resurrected. That's not the case in 2nd edition Pathfinder, where those effects are limited by the level of the dead creature and the time they've been dead and not by what KIND of creature they were.Off-topic question but reading this got me curious: RAW can you resurrect an undead who has been destroyed?
My take: Once you destroy an undead (and assuming it doesn't require extra steps to make that destruction stick like you get with ghosts and liches and vampires), the soul is released and you can resurrect/raise the soul back to life—if it's not been dead longer than your spell can handle, and if the soul WANTS to come back to life, of course. Those spells do not return the soul to its previous undead state. I don't believe we have any spell in effect yet that lets you "reanimate" a destroyed undead back from destruction. Cool idea for a spell even if it's something that's more likely to be on the GM side of the toolbox, at which point the GM can just create those effects as they need as items or monster abilities or plot devices for the adventure to use anyway...
EDIT: Adding in because I should: This is my personal take and even though I'm the creative director of narrative for Pathfinder and I'm posting this on the Paizo forums, the above response is my own personal take on the matter how I'd rule it in games I run and is not meant to be "official errata".
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PC undead kinda force the rules to act funny, I guess. PC Skeletons also take bleed damage, for example. Weird.
As for mindless undead, they are animated purely by the void necromancy energy and utilize only a slight sliver of the soul. This means a person whose body is turned into a zombie or skeleton or other mindless undead can be resurrected normally. It also means that the body that's being turned into a skeleton or zombie can be as dead as long as it wants before it's animated, since it doesn't require the soul's corruption. The rules don't 100% support that I think, but the lore does—if a soul's been judged, it can't become a sapient undead any more than it can be brought back to life.
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Im fond of the idea that once a body has been dead long enough, it loses some of its 'affiliation' to its original soul (presumably this takes about as long as for the soul to be judged) and at that point you can stuff any old scrap of a soul into it to animate a mindless undead. Same with spontaneously risen undead in areas with enough ambient void and some wayward soulstuff not quite strong enough to form a haunt or independent spirit creature.
The text of most resurrection magic puts specific time limits on bringing someone back, proportional to the power of the magic. Planar Adventures also states:
In her capacity as the goddess of fate, Pharasma knows which souls are and aren’t done with life, including those destined to be called back to the Material Plane via magic. These souls are not judged or transformed into petitioners. Rather, they’re left to wait in the Boneyard until resurrected and allowed to progress toward their true deaths.
So there's just a crowd of…I guess Phantoms would be the appropriate stage?…hanging around the Boneyard counting up the spell ranks necessary to drag them back into living, probably at some point realizing anyone who could still bring them back is dealing with problems wildly out of their league. And how the hell does that interact with the whole Age of Lost Omens thing?
I guess a more cohesive system would be to link the rankings of resurrection magic to the stages of the afterlife, rather than arbitrary time limits. It takes a 5th Rank ritual to bring someone back from the Etherial/River of Souls, 7th from Pharasma's Court, 8th once they're a Shade, 9th once they've ascended to another Outsider status, and 10th if their outsider form has dissipated. That'd be a little harder to impliment, though, and would kinda lock people into this specific worldbuilding.
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The text of most resurrection magic puts specific time limits on bringing someone back, proportional to the power of the magic. Planar Adventures also states:
In her capacity as the goddess of fate, Pharasma knows which souls are and aren’t done with life, including those destined to be called back to the Material Plane via magic. These souls are not judged or transformed into petitioners. Rather, they’re left to wait in the Boneyard until resurrected and allowed to progress toward their true deaths.So there's just a crowd of…I guess Phantoms would be the appropriate stage?…hanging around the Boneyard.
This would not be that strange, there's possibly thousands of pre-judgement souls wandering the Boneyard at any given time, most of them without even a particular cause like impending resurrection. That they are specifically held aside doesn't necessarily mean that the souls awaiting judgement are getting judged any faster--it's heavily implied that it can take decades to centuries to get judged for some souls. And then again for others, it can take no time at all, which is what makes it worth having those awaiting resurrection kept out of line.
I guess a more cohesive system would be to link the rankings of resurrection magic to the stages of the afterlife, rather than arbitrary time limits. It takes a 5th Rank ritual to bring someone back from the Etherial/River of Souls, 7th from Pharasma's Court, 8th once they're a Shade, 9th once they've ascended to another Outsider status, and 10th if their outsider form has dissipated.
While there is a certain poetic simplicity to this, I feel like it might only be the way we have it now, but with extra steps. This requires us either to nail down exactly how long it takes to go through each stage of judgement (say, 1 year for the River, a decade in the Boneyard, etc) which we've already seen contradicts the intentionally variable nature of the afterlife and is not meaningfully different from the arbitrary limits we already have, or they're purely GM fiat, in which case it's just a second way the GM declares a soul impossible to resurrect.
Besides which, the only meaningful stages you've listed are being in the Ether and being in the Boneyard--currently, being judged and becoming a shade is intended to be a hard limit on a soul's resurrection, because they enter a fundamentally new existence no longer metaphysically tied to their mortal life. I'm sure we could come up with additional stages, but again that's just trying to nailing down the ocean when the fluid and inconstant nature of the afterlife is a feature, not a bug.
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As for how it interacts with the Age of Lost Omens, probably the same as everything else--with margin for error. While it's in Pharasma's nature to have knowledge of life and death, and to know which souls are destined to be resurrected and which not (as a sense subtly distinct from prophecy, same as a person might know it should rain today by seeing dark clouds, even without receiving a weather forecast) I'd bet that in all the resurrections that happen across the Universe, there's probably at least a few that should have happened, but never do because the predicted conditions that should have allowed them to come to pass simply don't.
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I'd bet that in all the resurrections that happen across the Universe, there's probably at least a few that should have happened, but never do because the predicted conditions that should have allowed them to come to pass simply don't.
Newest crackpot theory : Aroden was already dead for a long time and waiting patiently for resurrection before coming back to Golarion as predicted.
But when the Seal disappeared, and with Pharasma utterly dismayed by the loss of prophecy, she inadvertently judged his soul and sent it to its proper place.
PC undead kinda force the rules to act funny, I guess. PC Skeletons also take bleed damage, for example. Weird.
Small tangent, but... do PC skeletons take bleed damage? When they were printed in Book of the Dead they didn't, since the legacy rules for bleed damage specifically excluded undead (this was part of the rules for bleed damage, not part of the rules for the undead trait, and therefore wasn't something overwritten the PC version of 'basic undead benefits'; Core Rulebook 452: "As such, it [bleed damage] has no effect on nonliving creatures or living creatures that don’t need blood to live.") and nothing in Book of the Dead indicated that they were exempt from that.
The remaster (in an errata) removed that flat-out immunity from the bleed rules, and the remaster instead selectively adds bleed immunity it to the relevant stat blocks as they've been reprinted (which is a huge improvement, by the way, I greatly appreciate not having immunities hidden elsewhere in the rules text), so I figured if/when the skeleton ancestry gets remastered it (or the basic undead benefits) would get that same note added to it like the reprinted undead stat blocks have been getting in order to keep the same gameplay as they had when they were released under the legacy rules.
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PC undead kinda force the rules to act funny, I guess. PC Skeletons also take bleed damage, for example. Weird.Small tangent, but... do PC skeletons take bleed damage? When they were printed in Book of the Dead they didn't, since the legacy rules for bleed damage specifically excluded undead (this was part of the rules for bleed damage, not part of the rules for the undead trait, and therefore wasn't something overwritten the PC version of 'basic undead benefits'; Core Rulebook 452: "As such, it [bleed damage] has no effect on nonliving creatures or living creatures that don’t need blood to live.") and nothing in Book of the Dead indicated that they were exempt from that.
The remaster (in an errata) removed that flat-out immunity from the bleed rules, and the remaster instead selectively adds bleed immunity it to the relevant stat blocks as they've been reprinted (which is a huge improvement, by the way, I greatly appreciate not having immunities hidden elsewhere in the rules text), so I figured if/when the skeleton ancestry gets remastered it (or the basic undead benefits) would get that same note added to it like the reprinted undead stat blocks have been getting in order to keep the same gameplay as they had when they were released under the legacy rules.
I think the non-bleeding undead PCs was an oversight. Unlikely to come back IMO.
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PC undead kinda force the rules to act funny, I guess. PC Skeletons also take bleed damage, for example. Weird.Small tangent, but... do PC skeletons take bleed damage? When they were printed in Book of the Dead they didn't, since the legacy rules for bleed damage specifically excluded undead (this was part of the rules for bleed damage, not part of the rules for the undead trait, and therefore wasn't something overwritten the PC version of 'basic undead benefits'; Core Rulebook 452: "As such, it [bleed damage] has no effect on nonliving creatures or living creatures that don’t need blood to live.") and nothing in Book of the Dead indicated that they were exempt from that.
The remaster (in an errata) removed that flat-out immunity from the bleed rules, and the remaster instead selectively adds bleed immunity it to the relevant stat blocks as they've been reprinted (which is a huge improvement, by the way, I greatly appreciate not having immunities hidden elsewhere in the rules text), so I figured if/when the skeleton ancestry gets remastered it (or the basic undead benefits) would get that same note added to it like the reprinted undead stat blocks have been getting in order to keep the same gameplay as they had when they were released under the legacy rules.
In my games, no, PC skeletons wouldn't take bleed damage. But also I probably wouldn't allow PC skeletons in my games, because personally I much prefer more traditional games. If I were to do an "all undead PCs" story, I'd START with the rules in Book of the Dead and probably limit the player choices to a very small selection and then build the adventure with the assumptions that they're all skeletons or all ghouls or whatever, to lean into their unusual ancestry and to justify the non-standard choice.
But that all said... do what works best for your game!
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PC undead kinda force the rules to act funny, I guess. PC Skeletons also take bleed damage, for example. Weird.Small tangent, but... do PC skeletons take bleed damage? When they were printed in Book of the Dead they didn't, since the legacy rules for bleed damage specifically excluded undead (this was part of the rules for bleed damage, not part of the rules for the undead trait, and therefore wasn't something overwritten the PC version of 'basic undead benefits'; Core Rulebook 452: "As such, it [bleed damage] has no effect on nonliving creatures or living creatures that don’t need blood to live.") and nothing in Book of the Dead indicated that they were exempt from that.
The remaster (in an errata) removed that flat-out immunity from the bleed rules, and the remaster instead selectively adds bleed immunity it to the relevant stat blocks as they've been reprinted (which is a huge improvement, by the way, I greatly appreciate not having immunities hidden elsewhere in the rules text), so I figured if/when the skeleton ancestry gets remastered it (or the basic undead benefits) would get that same note added to it like the reprinted undead stat blocks have been getting in order to keep the same gameplay as they had when they were released under the legacy rules.
In my games, no, PC skeletons wouldn't take bleed damage. But also I probably wouldn't allow PC skeletons in my games, because personally I much prefer more traditional games. If I were to do an "all undead PCs" story, I'd START with the rules in Book of the Dead and probably limit the player choices to a very small selection and then build the adventure with the assumptions that they're all skeletons or all ghouls or whatever, to lean into their unusual ancestry and to justify the non-standard choice.
But that all said... do what works best for your game!
I will add that for the Blood Lords AP, using the free archetype rules and having the entire party be undead works pretty well. Also allowing a skeleton ancestry PC to go with the reanimator and/or undead master archetypes, plus letting them qualify for the lich archetype after taking the Rejuvination Token ancestry feat to upgrade into their soul cage.
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Im fond of the idea that once a body has been dead long enough, it loses some of its 'affiliation' to its original soul (presumably this takes about as long as for the soul to be judged) and at that point you can stuff any old scrap of a soul into it to animate a mindless undead. Same with spontaneously risen undead in areas with enough ambient void and some wayward soulstuff not quite strong enough to form a haunt or independent spirit creature.We've seen that happen in an AP, actually. Heck, it happens pretty fast from an in-universe perspective, too. Spoiler for Tyrant's Grasp.
** spoiler omitted **The circumstances are about as extenuated as circumstances can get, but it's still cool that it's happened at least once to my knowledge.
Amusingly, I was referencing the first book in that AP in my previous post, but since most of my reading on that AP has been localized to The Dead Roads, I forgot how the events mentioned applied to the other things I was thinking XD