Alternative Ressurection Rules

Character death can often prove to become a minor inconvenience in some campaigns once the adventuring party reaches a certain level, with spells being available to return fallen comrades from the afterlife with temporary setbacks, robbing a small element of danger and threat to future conflicts and challenges within the story. If you wish to elevate the gravity of character death, you can introduce any of these optional rules.

A Taxing Return

This rule calls to the old D&D rules where every time a character is restored to life, the process corrodes a fraction of their vitality, slowly consuming the body until it can no longer sustain life. Each time a character is brought back to life via a spell or ritual, that character suffers a permanent loss of 1 point of their Constitution ability score. This loss cannot be restored outside of a carefully worded wish spell. Use of the spell true resurrection to restore a character does not impose this loss of Constitution. Characters that reach a Constitution ability score of 0 are permanently dead and cannot be resurrected.

The Fading Spirit

This resurrection rule set is designed to add an element of party roleplaying and narrative to the resurrection attempt, as well as the creeping threat of permanent death to a character. Any of the following DC modifiers are easily adjusted to fit your campaign needs.

Resurrection Challenge

If a character is dead, and a return from death is attempted by a spell or spell effect with longer than a one action casting time, a Resurrection Challenge is initiated. Up to 3 members of the adventuring party can offer to contribute to the ritual via skill checks. The DM asks them each to make a skill check based on their form of contribution, with the DC of the check adjusting to how helpful/impactful the DM feels the contribution would be.
For example, praying to the god of the devout, fallen character may require an Intelligence (Religion) check at an easy to medium difficulty, where loudly demanding the soul of the fallen to return from the aether may require a Charisma (Intimidation) check at a very hard or nearly impossible difficulty. Advantage and disadvantage can apply here based on how perfect, or off base, the contribution offered is.

Resurrection Check

After all contributions are completed, the DM then rolls a single, final Resurrection success check with no modifier. The base DC for the final resurrection check is 10, increasing by 1 for each previous successful resurrection the character has undergone (signifying the slow erosion of the soul’s connection to this world). For each successful contribution skill check, this DC is decreased by 3, whereas each failed contribution skill check increases the DC by 1. Upon a successful resurrection check, the player’s soul (should it be willing) will be returned to the body, and the ritual succeeded. On a failed check, the soul does not return and the character is lost. Only the strongest of magical incantations can bypass this resurrection challenge, in the form of the true resurrection or wish spells. These spells can also restore a character to life who was lost due to a failed resurrection ritual, should you allow it.

Quick Resurrections

If a spell with a casting time of 1 action is used to attempt to restore life (via the Revivify spell or similar effects), no contribution skill checks are allowed. The character casting the spell makes a Rapid Resurrection check, rolling a d20 and adding their spellcasting ability modifier. The DC is 10, increasing by 1 for each previous successful resurrection the character has undergone. On a failure, the character’s soul is not lost, but the resurrection fails and increases any future Resurrection checks’ DC by 1. No further attempts can be made to restore this character to life until a resurrection spell with a casting time higher than 1 action is attempted.

PC Deathcounters: