by Kai » Mon Mar 26, 2007 9:10 pm
I don't know. Maybe that reaper has never dealt with ghosts before, or people who want to be one. Maybe the reaper is counting on him getting his shit done before the decay really sets in. Maybe maybe maybe.
The following is based on Philsys speculation and analogy from other systems such as D&D regarding returning people from the dead. I don't think we've got a formal revivify spell (yet?) in Philsys, so this is theoretical and has rarely come up.
Some people have suggested resurrection is easier provided the soul is still nearby, as evidenced by the fact that a cleric/healer (in D&D, for example) can revivify someone before they're powerful enough to truly resurrect them. This amounts to fixing the body quickly enough that you can stuff the soul back into it rather than calling it from the afterlife and fitting it back into the abandoned meat-casing it left behind.
Resurrection is harder once a soul has been processed and sent where it's judged worthy to go. Resurrecting something without the body handy doesn't work in Philsys, so forget bringing back some ghost who's been dead for several hundred years.
The spell in question:
[Heal=18]Resurrection (120 MP, 20 TP) - Revives a deceased person from the dead. The person must be willing to be revived, must not have died as a result of incurable diseases or old age, and the majority of the body needs to be largely intact--a person may be revived if missing limbs, but those limbs will obviously be missing after resurrection. Deceased characters must be revived within 48 hours in order to preserve the character's prior memories and skills.
A resurrection ritual involves reshaping and calling the aura of the deceased back into its prior state of organization, and a standard resurrection ritual requires either (4+1d6) - (any modifiers in Ritual, Astral or Resurrection Magic that would logically benefit the caster) hours, of which must be a minimum of 2 hours regardless, or some other GM determined time period.
If the character cannot be revived within this time period, it is still possible to animate the corpse, creating a zombie with the assistance of death magic through any number of processes. A zombie has none of the skills or abilities it had in life, but retains all physical statistics except INT and WIS.
I don't know what End has planned for Greg. I'd say that if he's been dead for more than two days, Greg either needs to pass on like a normal dead person.... or End has some major plot device that will make things work for him to come back. It's his call, but this is what's been on the table so far.