Raising the Dead

If you're going to have a D&D campaign in which PC death is possible, you need a way to raise characters from the dead.

There are some exceptions. It's much less important in an open table game, with many players and more or less ad hoc adventuring groups. It's also less important if the characters aren't going to go beyond about 4th level or so. And PCs don't need to be able to come back from every kind of death. But the DM should take care setting up situations in which unrecoverable death is possible. They are campaign-ending situations — unless you have a way for the campaign to keep going despite the PC's death. For most of us, that means finding a way for the PC's player to keep playing, despite the PC's death. And that's why you need a way to raise characters from the dead.

Characters from about 4th level and up need ways to be raised from the dead. In B/X, they'll have to rely on NPC clerics until a PC cleric reaches 7th level. In 5e, PCs can't cast raise dead until 9th level. Either way, the span of levels that PCs need access to raise dead but can't cast it themselves is fairly big. If you don't provide those characters with a way to be raised from the dead, you should follow the lead of some other games and just stipulate that PCs can't die.

Most campaigns have a fairly limited and stable set of players. But players need characters. So, when a PC dies, the player has a problem. They can't play without a character, and you can't (ordinarily) play dead characters. Raise dead and outlawing PC death both solve that problem.

Some DMs deal with character death in other ways, but they aren't good for the game. Here are some popular ones.

• Roll up a new 1st-level character to join the party. This is fine at low levels, but it has lots of problems when the other characters are more than about 3rd or 4th level. Basically, the challenges appropriate for the other characters are not appropriate for the 1st-level character. If the other players have stables with other, low-level characters, the new PC can adventure with them, but now the high-level campaign is on hold until the new character reaches a high enough level, and then there's still the question of how to explain the new character's appearance in the party.
• Roll up a new character at a higher level. Popular options are to give the new character XP equal to or a bit less than the lowest-level character in the party, or to base their starting XP on the XP of the character who died. But if you are going to allow a new character of that level, why allow the old character to die at all? Why not just dock them XP and carry on? It would avoid the narrative problems of incorporating a new high-level character (who, presumably, has some history) into the party. And if you're willing to handwave those narrative problems, why aren't you willing to handwave the narrative problems of simply deciding that Petey Paladin didn't die after all? Why not just say he lost consciousness and a level or two?
• Promote a retainer/henchman to PC status. If there is a retainer whose level is high enough, this could be a workable approach. But there does need to be one, and it needs to make sense that they would be promoted and be willing to continue adventuring rather than, say, retiring after their old boss got killed. If there isn't an appropriate retainer, it won't work. But if raise dead is available, then not only is it not necessary to promote a retainer to PCs status, but retainers have a reason to help their boss get raised—no boss, no pay.

There's always the possibility of making it very difficult for PCs to die, or declaring, as some games do, that PCs don't die—their failures will always take a different form. But if you don't rule out the possibility of death altogether, you need to plan for PC death and your players need to be able to plan for it too. And don't be a wuss about it. Don't pretend PC death is a real possibility and then start fudging to avoid it when it happens. Be honest with yourself and your players about whether PCs really can die.

But how can you make raise dead available to lower-level PCs?

The Local Temples

Raising the dead should be possible at temples and churches where there are 7th-level (B/X) or 9th-level (5e) clerics. It might be possible at other temples or churches, if the local clergy has access to a scroll with the spell on it. An appropriate donation should be required, and there might be other requirements as well.

Almost no religion will raise the dead of those whose alignments or religion conflict with their own. Fortunately for the churches, the recipient of raise dead is weak and has only 1 hp for a while after being raised. If someone is not already a member of the church, the cleric who raises them from the dead might give them a chance to convert. Those who refuse might be "returned to death," (i.e. re-killed), and that should not be considered an evil or chaotic act on the cleric's part. Rather, it is understood that those who are raised from the dead owe a certain loyalty to the religion that raised them, and refusing to pay means forfeiting the resurrection.

As for monetary costs, the AD&D 1e figure of 1,000 gp plus 500 gp per level of the recipient is reasonable for B/X. As characters gain levels, their wealth grows exponentially, and so raise dead becomes more affordable the more established and powerful a character is.

It is harder to set a price for 5e, because there is no firm relationship between character wealth and level.  As a rough guide, though, you might set the price for levels 1-5 to be 500 gp, 5,000 gp for levels 6-11, 50,000 gp for levels 12-17, and 500,000 gp for levels 18-20.

Raise dead has a time limit. In 5e, the person must be no more than 10 days dead. In B/X it depends on the level of the cleric casting the spell, ranging from a maximum of 4 days (a 7th- or 8th-level caster) to 28 days (a 14th-level caster). In practice, though, these spell casters are unlikely to have the spell prepared and ready to cast as soon as the PCs show up with a body at the temple doors. The party will have to wait at least a day, so that the NPC cleric can prepare the spell.

If a party doesn't have a cleric able to cast raise dead, either from memory or a scroll, there is thus a limit to how far from a temple they should travel. They should never go so far from a temple that they can't get back to it in time to raise their dead colleagues.

Whether your campaign is a sandbox or not, you need to bear that in mind when you are setting it up. Do not arrange things so that the PCs have no choice but to travel beyond their ability to get to a temple for raise dead, unless they have the ability to cast the spell themselves (and a backup in case the cleric is the one who dies!). Otherwise, you haven't really given them access to the spell at all.

Scrolls

Instead of paying a high level cleric to cast raise dead, characters might want to cast it from a scroll or pay a lower-level cleric to cast it from a scroll.

The benefit of this is that the PCs don't have to stay within a few days' travel of the temple. However, it is more expensive as well. The PCs need the scroll.

Clerics should be able to buy scrolls with the spell on it from their churches. They will probably be expected to follow all the church's rules about whom to raise and what donations to collect. In 5e, the scrolls cost 250 to 2,500 gp. That's a wide range, but 2,500 gp is likely unaffordable to anyone below 6th level or so. You might use prices on the lower end of the scale for clerics under 6th level or so, supposing their churches only expect the highest prices from their wealthiest clergy.

In B/X, scrolls of raise dead cost at least 2,500 gp to make, and so 5,000 gp may be a reasonable price. That amount is affordable to most 4th or 5th level PCs—and those are the levels when access to raise dead becomes most important.

Additionally, it's probably a good idea for a scroll of raise dead to be part of the treasure a group recovers sometime while they are around 4th level.

Banning Death

I like for character death to be a real possibility. For most campaigns, though, that means there needs to be a way to recover characters who have died in most cases. But there's an alternative that some games use. You can simply stipulate from the start that PCs don't die, except in truly exceptional cases.

This turns the game into something more like a superhero game. The stakes for characters are not their own lives, but they may be other things they care about, including the lives of other people they care about.

In 5e, there's a fairly straightforward way to ban death. When a character fails three death saving throws, they are unconscious and injured. They roll on the DMG's lingering injury table to find out the exact nature of their injury. Whatever it is, it'll probably keep the PC out of action for a period of game time while they recover from the injury or find someone to heal it. That can be more than enough to make failing three death saves extremely undesirable, even if it doesn't mean losing the character permanently.

In B/X, you can adopt similar mechanics, or something even simpler. A PC reduced to 0 hp or less is incapacitated for a turn, and then they have all the disadvantages of a recipient of raise dead: they have 1 hp, can't do anything but move at half speed, and can't be healed by magic. That state lasts for two weeks, just like raise dead.

It's still bad to get dropped to 0 hp. If your PCs have to pay for upkeep, those two weeks are unproductive downtime that still has to be paid for. It's two weeks during which Team Evil's plans get to advance without the PC being able to do anything to stop them. That can actually be worse than what would have happened if the PC were replaced right away with a new one just a level or two behind.

Make a Plan!

When people allow replacement PCs at higher than 1st level, or they force players to use 1st-level PCs who aren't close to the level of the rest of the group, it's usually because they haven't planned for PC death, and they haven't planned how to make raise dead available to the party. With a little planning, though, you can easily give PCs access to the spell, and you can do so without making the campaign too easy. Coming back from the dead is expensive, and it can require new in-character commitments. Until the PCs can cast the spell themselves, they have to stay near the clerics who will cast the spell for them, or they have to pay for expensive scrolls. When the players know all this, they can also face potentially deadly situations with more confidence. Character death can become an opportunity for new campaign events, rather than a campaign killer.

But if none that makes sense for your campaign, then you need to be honest with yourself about whether you want PC death to be possible at all. What are you going to do when someone's character dies? Are you going to let that end the campaign, or are you going to do things that make no real narrative sense just to keep the player in the game? The best move might well be simply to ban death for PCs—except for a handful of cases in which you want the campaign to have the possibility of ending with, "Some PCs died here, and so the group didn't accomplish the campaign's objective."