Routine ressurection magic

RPG rulebooks skip over a lot of inplications in favour of making it easy to do the expected thing. So there are spells for bringing back the dead. And there's a sort of assumption that you'll use them on PCs, and use the money you earn for things other than Raise All The Dead Ever. Like, if you use it for that, you'll be severely under equipped later and probably get eated. And the adventure paths so far have mostly dealt with the potential to bring people back by just saying they're too far down the river of souls and it dont work.

But the world they write is way too unstrange for ressurection to be any degree of common, even for the aristocracy.

A lot of social institutions are way too lazily familiar even without magic. Primogeniture as the only inheritance method? Marriage without definition, meaning in practice lifelong monogamy? And the ways the social norms entirely fail to reflect the diversity of the deities! There was a priest of the goddess of travellers who set off the plot by punishing his daughter for having sex outside of marriage. For a goddess of luck and dreams and following your own light, how does that value set even make sense?

But then, add magic.

It's awkward if your ex turns up at your wedding. It is past awkward and into worlds of plot if they had been until recently deceased.

You'd get all sorts of problems that even Bujold with Cryoburn barely dipped into.

It is a fundamental fact of Pathfinder or DnD that death is reversible. If you have enough money and enough magic, you can get anyone back. If you're on good terms with a druid you can even get them back from death of old age, possibly as another species, but with their mind basically intact.

So what does that do to every legal and financial structure and institution? How do they deal with persons who only intermittently exist? Do they swear Until Death and if so are they realistic about what that means?

What do you do about inheritance if the deceased comes back and wants their stuff?

Heck, with high enough level magic, time is almost no object: what do you do about entire royal lines if famtasy King William or Queen Elizabeth is suddenly alive and well again?

You'd have problems of identity, obviously. You'd need to confirm someone was who they said they were. But having done so... then what?

And the thing is all those different religions in the rule book would each approach this *differently*, due to the fundamentally different approaches each represents. And every one of those religions would have internal divisions too. And these disagreements would be about the most fundamental day to day stuff.

... I keep landing back on who is married to who and under what circumstances it could wear off, because how much fic could this be relevant to? Like, fantasy world Steve and Peggy and Bucky would have *layers* of complication.

... fantasy world Captain America would have to deal with being the once and future. People would call him back to life any time they thought their side needed a little mythic support. ... exhausting.



I like stories where nobody gets killed off because then questions need answers and problems need dealt with, not just ended.

But it do have some knock ons.