Character Resurrection
In Pannotia the cold grip of death comes for all, but it isn’t necessarily the end. Many who would’ve had their lives cut short by accident, malicious intent, or disease have been brought back to life. Such a practice is called resurrection, a carefully protected field of study that is only available to the most disciplined of minds. It is a science and magical art to bring back the dead successfully, one that even in our modern times is not guaranteed to work every time. On this page, you will learn about the Out of Character mechanics of resurrection and the lore surrounding the resurrection, life after death, and the role of the soul in Pannotia.
The Soul & Dying in Pannotia
The Soul is the ghostly incarnation of the consciousness. Whenever a new sentient life is created in our world a soul forms with it. It tethers to the body, creating a symbiosis between flesh and mind. The soul is where the self resides. Your memories. Your passions. Your fears. Your troubles and your talents. Without it you simply wouldn’t be yourself. No one would.
Death occurs when the bond between body and soul is broken. This can happen from all sorts of things. Violence, disease, poison, and the remaining usual suspects that we’re accustomed to. When this happens, your break-away soul floats out from this world into a place called the Middle Realm, a void between different realms and dimensions. There are thousands of theories of what the Middle Realm might lead to, and by the looks of things, they may all be right. But, so far, nobody can say for sure if an afterlife is real.
The Art of Resurrection
Resurrection is performed in many ways to varying degrees of success by practitioners known as ‘Resurrectionists’. However, in Galudon only two known methods are allowed to be performed by authorized organizations. Those two are Soul Trawling and Delving. They both carry imperfections that make resurrection an uncertain affair which can be dangerous to both the soul and the resurrectionists. Each method operates on the idea of reaching into the Middle Realm and seizing the soul before it disappears to a place still unknown to mortal understanding. Souls of the seriously ill or elderly are fragile and difficult to find, thus ignored by legal resurrectionists in favor of those who have met an untimely demise.
The fortunate few whose souls are successfully rescued by resurrectionists will have their souls temporarily stored in enchanted jars. They will remain there until the bodies of the deceased have been recovered and their deathblows healed. To simplify, the cause of death is ‘reverted’. Magic and medicine is used in equal measure to bring the body back to a state of bare minimum for sustaining life, and then the soul is artificially bound back to the body. Once the bond is restored the work can be done to reawaken the consciousness of the resurrected person. The person has now returned to life.
Life Anew
The newly resurrected are weak, fragile beings. The resurrectionists release them from their care the moment their bodies can barely sustain life, leaving them still vulnerable to the dangers of the outside world. The soul is not meant to be without its host for long, every minute away is perilous for the soul’s condition. In the following week, the resurrected will experience severe mood swings, moments of confusion, hallucinations of past memories, and an inability to use magic and innate abilities. These are symptoms coming from the weakened soul repairing itself, and while they may only last a week it does not mean that the soul has finished healing. It takes one more week before the soul is whole and healthy again, letting the resurrected return to the normal life they once knew before dying.
OOC Details
Some simple rules and guidelines to live and die by regarding the Resurrection mechanic.
- Resurrection is a privilege. This privilege can be withdrawn from a player as punishment for roleplay rule breaking or if they’ve been found to somehow abuse the mechanic for unfair gain in roleplay. P.S.: Send in a ticket at the time of your character’s death, so staff can have a point of reference!
- You can always resurrect a character unless you’ve been warned otherwise. This is, again, a privilege and one that your character is not aware of at all. Resurrection is canonically an unreliable and uncommon phenomenon. Out of respect for the lore and the mechanic’s intentions your character cannot confidently expect to rise from the dead, and thus cannot act as if it is a given. Death should still mean something. P.S.: Send in a ticket at the time of your character’s death, so staff can have a point of reference!
- Employ some suspension of disbelief in character when it comes to the frequency of resurrections in Galudon. This somewhat falls in line with respecting the lore and also prevents characters from becoming unreasonably nonchalant about their mortality. P.S.: Send in a ticket at the time of your character’s death, so staff can have a point of reference!
- Your character will not remember anything leading up to their demise. Your character cannot be resurrected if it is killed during the two-week soul-healing process. Lorewise, this is because the soul is too weak to be saved, and mechanically it is to bring some stakes to a theoretically deathless setting. P.S.: Send in a ticket at the time of your character’s death, so staff can have a point of reference!
- You cannot attempt to prevent another character from being resurrected. This is practically metagaming as your character would have no reason to assume they’re likely to return. P.S.: Send in a ticket at the time of your character’s death, so staff can have a point of reference!
Trivia
- Any character can become undead after a resurrection if the player wants to, but keep in mind that you can’t revert this decision.
- Resurrected characters can’t get hangovers during the two-week soul-healing process!
- A popular conspiracy theory claims that resurrection technology improved after a captured necromancer secretly sold her knowledge to the Galudonian government for a full pardon.