Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 KlaudisRex May 28, 2015 17:23:15	this question concerns spells like revivify, raise dead, resurrect, etc...   In previous editions, a soul would have to want to come come back to life in order to be resurrected or revivified. There is no mention of this in the players handbook or DMG (unless I overlooked it).  Do you know if this is still the case, that a soul still needs to want to to come back to life, in order for those spells to work?   To put into context, my cleric just got a hold of revivify. I want a certain NPC in my campaign to die, as a twist, but this really won't work if my cleric just pops him back up the next round. i can of course work around this, and have my NPC die at a different time, but it lessens my dramatic scenario, and even so, I still am interested in what you guys think...or if you know a legitimate rule in the books.   Thanks in advance!
#2 Tempest_Stormwind May 28, 2015 17:35:51	Raise Dead says "If the creature's soul is both willing and at liberty to rejoin its body...". If a person is happy in death, Raise Dead won't work.   Revivify, however, doesn't have that clause. Think of it as a defibrillator - it's not restoring a soul to a body, it's saying "you're only mostly dead!" to the body before shocking it back to life.   To make the twist work, keep the cleric away from the corpse for a minute (outside Revivify's window; it's a touch spell), or decapitate the NPC (either as a means to kill him or before the cleric can reach the body; Revivify doesn't restore any body parts, so if it revives, he'll just die again, having no head. By the way, a villain decapitating a body is not doing so for malice - he knows the cleric's a cleric, and this is a world where he knows Revivify exists.).
#3 KlaudisRex May 29, 2015 0:46:04	I'll just chain him up and throw him over a ship into the sea.
#4 Razintarr May 29, 2015 2:40:48	Or a nice clean decapitation works as well. Revivify doesn't reattach heads.
#5 BRJN May 29, 2015 20:36:21	For my Tiamat group, if I face a character death and the player wants to be resurrected, I'll describe a vast grey featureless plain - Greek Hades - then a voice asking "Do you know Alavos of Kilrauma?  Will you go with him?"  Alavos is my ex-PC character, soon to be employed by the Council of Waterdeep to devise a Campaign Plan (because I became the DM).  If the dead character decides YES, then Alavos has had a Resurrection (or whatever) ritual performed on him.  If he decides NO then an ambassador of the gods eventually comes to take the soul to its eternal fate. Of course, before too much longer Alavos will have to ask for a lock of hair / whatever from everybody, plus a few of the gems we got out of the Treasure Hoard...
#6 BRJN May 29, 2015 20:40:45	KlaudisRex wrote: