Aetrimonde

I recently wrote about failure modes and what a GM might be able to do if an adventure goes awry. One of those things is resurrection: bringing back a dead character so that they can still participate in the adventure. Today, I’m going to go into more detail about how that works in Aetrimonde.

The Problem with Resurrection

Resurrection has two drawbacks, one mechanical and one narrative.

Mechanically, resurrection lowers the stakes of the campaign. Being able to bring a character back from the dead lessens the incentive to keep them alive in the first place. If resurrections are simple and easy, players may throw their characters into greater peril, expecting that they will be able to bring them back instead of making a new character, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy: taking those risks is likely to cause more character deaths, and a high rate of character deaths makes it tempting to employ resurrection as a solution. Campaigns with frequent deaths and resurrections have their fans, but Aetrimonde is not designed for them by default.

Narratively, easy resurrections raise a lot of questions with regard to the campaign’s setting, mostly related to why it isn’t widely used among NPCs. If it’s within the realm of possibilities for mere adventurers to resurrect one of their own, surely it must be feasible for kings, wealthy merchants, and other powerful personages to arrange for their own resurrection–which, for players who think about such things, takes a lot of the urgency out of trying to prevent (or arrange) the assassination of powerful NPCs. Depending on the exact mechanics of resurrection, it might even raise the question of why anybody ever dies, even of old age. Campaign settings that explore questions like these have their place–but Aetrimonde is not intended to be one of them.

The Purpose of Resurrection

With those drawbacks in mind, Aetrimonde has a fairly narrow intended role for resurrection. It is a solution for a character death that either:

• Interferes with the plot because the dead character was somehow integral to it,
• Cuts short a story arc or series of encounters that the GM or player had put a lot of work into, or
• Occurs at a really inconvenient point in the plot, where it would be difficult to introduce a replacement character.

It should not be a solution for every character death, at least not in a typical campaign, but it still has a niche.

Mechanics for Resurrection

Aetrimonde’s philosophy on mechanics for resurrection is simple and straightforward: there are no such mechanics. Because resurrection should be employed to resolve plot-related problems, it should always work in the manner that the GM needs it to. This means that unlike many systems, Aetrimonde contains no “Raise Dead” or “Resurrection” spell accessible to players. Instead, it has guidelines for how a GM can employ it, which lead naturally to a few different scenarios:

• Resurrection Should be Difficult: Performing a resurrection is not something that ordinary characters can do on the regular. It should require special training and knowledge, special circumstances, or special resources that aren’t generally available.
• Resurrection Should Involve the PCs: Resurrecting one of their number shouldn’t be a process where the PCs drop off a corpse and pick up a live character an hour later. It should require them to participate in the process, or at least do something to enable it. It can even form the basis for an adventure in itself…
• Resurrection Should Have a Cost: A resurrection solves a problem, but it should not be a perfect solution: either the PCs performing the resurrection or the resurrected character should have to pay a price for the solution.

Forms of Resurrection

So with that in mind, here are three different formats that a resurrection could take:

• Illicit Vitalism: In an effort to resurrect their fallen comrade, the PCs take his corpse to a vitalist: a mad scientist practicing the forbidden art of vitalism, reviving the dead using lightning bolts and chemicals. The vitalist requires a bit of assistance obtaining supplies for his machinery, including some chemicals that have been impounded by the watch specifically because they can be used in vitalism…and the process is still experimental, of course, which means that the resurrected character might have a few…quirks…to sort out afterward.
• Churchly Resurrection: Because of the world-saving nature of their quest, the PCs seek out a suitably large temple, with suitably potent clergy, in the expectation that they might be able to reunite body and soul. Which they can…if said soul can be found in the Underworld, contained, and brought back to the land of the living. And the clergy may also require the resurrectee or one of their intercessors to make certain vows to justify performing such a sacred ritual…
• Embodied Spirit: Having discovered that their fallen comrade had earned enough of a reputation to form a spirit of sorts in her image, the PCs decide to embody the spirit, binding it into her corpse as an emergency form of resurrection. This requires, first, that they strengthen the spirit by telling stories about her living self, until it has the power to animate a corpse…and then to continue telling these stories to ensure that the resulting person stays a person instead of being a spirit inhabiting flesh.

There are any number of other forms that a resurrection could take, dependent only on the inventiveness of the GM, but these three provide examples of the level of difficulty, involvement, and cost that it should involve.

Having dipped my toes into the topic with mentions of vitalism and other forms of resurrection, I think I may put out a couple more posts touching on mad science and occult magic in the near future.