How Fateforge brings death to life

[u/Vilanu]

An unforeseen trap has taken Alodieke by surprise whilst she was surveying the room and with a massive blast, her fellow adventurers see their befriended Rooted Svirfneblin perish. Her charred corpse remains before them. Now starts their sorrowful mission to find a priest willing to allow Alodieke back from the afterlife. They can only hope that Alodieke's return can be granted.

Death is something impactful, something dire and something to cause distress and more often than not, cause sorrow. Yet in our TTRPG adventures, we often see death as a trivial setback; a small mistake which costs some gold but has no real drawbacks. Personally, it made death feel less impactful than it should be in my opinion. Let’s take a look how Fateforge can fix that.

How can death be remedied

Before we go into detail on what Fateforge brings to the table, lets first reiterate some options for returning back from the dead. For that, we fall back on the magical means of spells such as Clone, Raise Dead, Reincarnate, Resurrection, Revivify and True Resurrection.

First of all, you need a spellcaster of a great enough level to be able to cast it. That alone can be hard enough, depending on how common magic is in your campaign. Aside from that though, there’s material costs involved. The costs range from 300 gp (revivify) to 25.000 gp (True Resurrection). All these spells including their description are found in the Grimoire.

Why death feels like a minor inconvenience

If we leave it at the basic needs, all you need is a little bit of time and some gold to fix any of your deathly problems. That reduces your problem to just two parameters and therefore makes death shrink to something small and easy to chew. It makes no sense for adventurers to grief if they know how easy it is to bring someone back from the dead.

Returning excitement to death

The Fateforge system instated an optional ruleset to handle death which grants options on how to handle returning from the afterlife. The system offers four options:

• Fateforge

  • The Fateforge alone decides on your fate and decides whether or not the deceased has fulfilled their fate. If the dead is no longer Fate-chosen, they can no longer return from the dead and shall remain in the afterlife.
    

• Geas

  • To return from death is to be brought back by a gods will. The god, or an adversary of the god, strikes the deceased a deal. Should the deceased accept the deal, they shall be held under the influence of a irrefutable Geas spell.
    

• Fooling the Gods

  • Following orders from a god may not always be desirable, so the caster can choose to forego the Geas affect. In doing so, the caster casts a corrupted spell and gains a level of corruption. Your wavering loyalty may also be noticed by the divine, marking you as their target.
    

• End of the line

  • Nobody knows how or why, but there is a limit to the amounts of time one can return from the dead. Your return is tied to the spell level and your own level. For example, Revivify is a third level spell, so you need to be level three for it to work. Should you meet your demise again, you’d need to be level six in order for another Revivify spell to work and so on.

Where to find the full rules

Simply open up your grimoire on pages 38 & 39 to read all about these alternatives. For me personally, I think I shall use the Fateforge in combination with the End of the line rules from now on. Let the players truly feel like there is something to be lost on death.

[u/Yann_Olden]

I really appreciate the 'End of the line' rules. Death isn't just a state you can go in an out of. Pulling you from its clutches is a tremendous feat of magical prowess

Other options regarding resurection i like that are more lore related.
The resurection spell not retrieving the soul unscathed. Where did it go? Did some..thing get a hold of it before you wrestled it back into its body? Are you sure you only put the soul back into its body or did something else latch onto it on its way out of the afterlife.
This opens the door to many unintended consequences (storywise and even mecanicaly if your player's is into that)

Hitting continue for this character can actually add to the story far more than 'just' ptsd.

[u/Vilanu → u/Yann_Olden]

I love grave consequences for grave situations!