So in my campaign a character died in a way where the body is entirely destroyed, but the players wanted to revive them anyway. The only spell that they can possibly access can fix this for them is true resurrection which is way out of range for them. The backup plan was to go find their soul and figure out a new plan from there. I’m fine with that with my understanding of what happens when you die in Forgotten Realms lore (as follows)

Step 1. You die.
Step 2. You go to the fugue plane and get judged by Kelemvor.
Step 3. Your soul is sent to whoever has a claim to it in cases of warlockery, religious beliefs or other deals.
Step 3a. In case the above doesn’t apply your soul gets sent to it’s alignments plane.
Step 4. You either become a native being of the plane (lesser devil, demon, planetar, etc) or are a spirit that resembles your original body.

This character was chaotic good, meaning they’re in Arborea/Olympus. My players are on a crash course to getting into that plane and finding this character, but Olympus is a plane of heroes and has lots of things to fight, what happens if this character dies? Do they get rejudged and just end up where they are again? Are my assumptions wrong and I’m missing something?

  • dumples@midwest.social
    9·
    11 days ago

    Dealing with the afterlife and the planes is really up to you. I think making this a little unclear, vague and inconsistent leads to a little mystery to the game. In my game I would follow something similar to what you had laid out above. Here is how I would run this for my campaign.

    • The players would have to find out where their soul went. This would be some adventure to find this out by petitioning Kelemvor or another method to ensure they find the correct location
    • The players find a method to travel to the plane (I would do olympus because it would have some fun fights). I would either have some quest to get a planar aligned tuning fork (if they have plane shift) or some kind of planar tunnel to get there.
    • Once there they will have to find the soul (who I would treat as a different creature for spells like scrying / divinations). I would have them continuously fighting and dying from the same fight.
    • After they defeat this boss again, I would have some RP / skill check to convince the soul to come with them because their memories would be wiped / reduced. I would have time move very differently for the part vs this player.
    • On the way back if the soul dies outside their fight arena I would have it dissolve into the essence of the plan (a.k.a. DEAD except for wish) or return back to their fight arena.

    This sounds like a fun series of adventures.