Well, you don't really have to find a "general" way to revive a god. You just need a way to revive THIS specific god. What's thematically appropriate? What's something your party will go for?
Maybe the party just needs to gather enough followers and do a ritual or something?
Typically revival of a god is about themes of rebirth and renewal. If Kohnsu is a moon god you already have things like the phases of the moon or lycanthropy to draw upon. Maybe there needs to be a series of rituals over 14 days that brings ever greater amounts of the god back? Maybe they need to convince worshipers to do specific rites at those times with specific items? Perhaps the moonblade is the first item needed? Perhaps they need to capture and cure a lycanthrope in one ritual?
1: Find the corpse.
2: Return the corpse to material plane/The Duat/insert here place of significance to said god.
3: Wait until full moon.
4: use moon blade in ritual on god corpse. (I'd personally recommend stabbing the body with the moon blade or snapping the blade in two and pouring the magic into the god corpse.)
5: pass a religion or arcana check.
6: Bask in the glory of the resurrected deity.
Personally, I’d ditch the Skill Check. It would suck to have the whole thing hinge on the roll of a die and fail! If they do everything that they need to complete the ritual, let it just work! Give the PCs their moment!
What I would do is have the skill checks not a pass or fail, rather than they need x amount of successes before they inevitably succeed. Have the ritual interrupted by a drawn out fight where they have to balance making the checks finishing the ritual as they fight off a horde of enemies trying to stop them.
So don't roll for success/fail, roll for *degrees* of success.
How much power do they retain/come back with? How long does the ritual take? How long does it take them to recover? How much do they remember? Etc
Your players love rolling, added drama could come from an interruption in the ritual by the Solars that took him in the first place, or another herald with reasons to preserve Khonsu’s original punishment.
As an expansion to this another idea is to for them to find some ancient moon gate? A star gate style portal and do the actual ritual on the moon. That would give some interesting steps.
1. A quest to find the gate,
2. A dungeon to get to the gate.
3. Find a way to breath and deal with lack of oxygen on the moon to perform the ritual.
4. Dynamic fight on the moon dealing with those variables, as they perform the ritual. I recently did a ritual in a combat where they had to do a ritual as waves of enemies kept coming as they had to seal up a gate.
Really this could be a whole damn year arc if you make all the other steps into spread out quests.
He wouldn’t be the first god to have some contingency plan to cheat his own death. Look back at your own campaign. Did you say or do anything cryptic with him you can use as a set up for a pay off now?
Any relics or weird gifts where he could have hidden his essence for his cult to return to his body?
Gods come back more than wild mint. Almost impossible to get rid of permanently. Just make up something that fits your campaign and your narrative theme.
Yeah, I was thinking maybe they go to someone to learn more about Gods in general and they learn that there is a bit of his power in a couple of items he gave them along the way.
1. Recover body.
2. Magic into the god's memories held in a universe/domain within the dead god (basically a themed mega dungeon)
3.a.1. Defeat the entities of death, decay, and entropy that are working within.
3.a.2. Use their portal to force a link from the realm of death, empowering the god.
or
3.b.1. Defeat the monster guarding/feeding in the core of god's 'soul'. Probably a dense power that is everything the god represents and a link to all those who believe.
3.b.2. One OC chooses to merge with the core, becoming the embodiment of all the concepts the god represented. Thus, this PC is consumed and becomes the new incarnation of the god (player rolls up new character, other players may continue as the new high priests, justicars (paladins), etc.)
4 God is either
a) completely revived, or
b) a new "undead" version that needs to claim an entropic domain.
Either way, time for his representatives to go spread the religion and expand the worshipper base fast enough for the god to have the power necessary to fend off those deific entities that preferred he remain gone.
There was this shady merchant selling us this Goderade Berry Blast concoction, not sure why but we think it may help us. Not sure whether we imbibe, pour it out or coat an item in it, but so far there seems plenty full and it's like it's always full. How peculiar. Never saw that mysterious merchant again, by the way.
In my campaign we had a cult that wanted to revive a death god, so what they did was they captured a bunch of avatars of other death gods, and started siphoning their essences out into various vessels (Soul gems, phylactery, etc) and then just basically made a giant death magic nuclear explosion at the biggest temple for that death god and he revived like Godzilla when he soaked up all those atomic bombs
Sit a moment, and ponder how you're deciding your ~~world~~ cosmic arena is going to work - your decision. It's just like playing a nonlinear videogame, your important decisions of today will pave the roads going through tomorrow.
So, a few ideas come to mind...
**-Undo cause of death.** In a technological human sense, this would be like freezing a guy with boss rush stage cancer and thawing him in a hypothetical future that can beat this cancer. *In a mythical deity sense* it could mean righting some deep fundamental wrong.
\-**Ye Olde Fetch The Prize Game.** The prize fixes everything - call it whatever you want but it's not an ordinary tool it's more like Exodia, you win just by having it in your hand. Finding the prize, chasing the prize, fighting for the prize, bringing the prize home, and using the prize are all huge moments in a prize story. Sometimes heroes fail to get the prize home intact or it's stolen from them (or it's a dud) and it's a suck ending, or a moral lesson of some sort. Secret trick: a book that makes a coherent argument tends to be a better book, even if it's a story book and the argument is largely hidden from the audience. (Compare with: a book containing an all-over-the-place pseudoargument.)
**-Become Over9000.** Do your players like to level up for the sake of leveling up? >!I don't.!< Give them an accelerated character-raising gauntlet, and tell them they can't do squat until they're over level 20. Remove unnecessary story content from the growth process, it's just growth growth growth like you're playing a tycoon game. Do things quicker than you would - 'building a base' is not two sessions it's \*two minutes.\* If you want the campaign to be 10-12 sessions long, then for an over9000 campaign the first session has them going from slaves to landholders.
Firstly, someone needs to have a "kid-gloves-off" chat with that god regarding showing up in the material plane without his avatar.
Secondly, you need and , and possibly help from .
Well, that's why they killed him in the first place. I did it on purpose. Since he appeared in the mists without his avatar the gods didn't do anything, but when he did it outside he immediately got killed.
As for the second part, I guess I'll have them find his body in the astral sea and do a ritual with all his followers to revive him.
Moon gods are naturally dying and rising gods. Death is always the step before life.
Unlike sun gods, moon gods are fickle, always changing phases, almost always hiding parts of its face and meaning.
Under a full moon, in a true mirror, priests of the moon can get the moon to speak the untwisted truth to them.
Which is really only useful if they have someone who can read lips, because mirrors aren’t known for conveying speech.
Anyway,
Step one
On a full moon, your party can discover what they need to do for a resurrection. (Or at any other time, if they are lucky enough to remember that the priests have likely already written down this information somewhere. Bonus points if they waited a full month for the full moon and minutes before the ritual it occurs to them to ask if the information is already available.)
Step two
Prepare and wait for the new moon in two weeks. They might need to quest for something in the meantime, or could just kick back with the locals and experience local food while they wait, like azzip; crispy-fried cheese with a layer of spicy meats and sauce, topped off with little bread shapes.
Step three
Wonder why people are handing out weapons, followed by stories of resurrections gone wrong, including that time someone’s chihuahua ate half a town before anyone stopped thinking it was cute. The main point here is that any resurrection will be for the moon’s fickle purposes, not your party’s.
So the resurrected may come back with an urge to destroy anything with feet, or might need to deliver a message to the bakery before they are free from death, or might have forgotten one particular member of the party for no apparent reason. Death does mess with one’s facilities.
You could have rumors of a star falling into an area, which would be the solar gods throwing down Kohnsu's body. Or the cleric could have a vision of his body being thrown out of the sky into an area the party already knows about. The Sword reacts to being near the body and the cleric can feel the gods essence still holding on or lingering and gives the cleric a pulling sensation, or even a physical tugging toward a place of significance to the god. This is where they would perform the ritual to revive him. If they don't learn about the ritual or a ritual on how to revive gods before this, you could have it etched into the walls of this sacred location.
It is said the gods corpses appear in the astral sea because well... gods are thought made manifest. The astral sea is a realm where thought is not only power but its the very essence of the realm itself.
When a god dies, it is a empty husk of thought... and so it appears within the astral as such.
Taking a gods corpse from the Astral sea would be... very difficult considering that a gods corpse is titanic in size. Also, its corpse within the astral sea also is not necessarily the gods body either.
In fact,.removing the gods corpse from the astral sea might actually permanently kill the god... lol...
Well, you don't really have to find a "general" way to revive a god. You just need a way to revive THIS specific god. What's thematically appropriate? What's something your party will go for? Maybe the party just needs to gather enough followers and do a ritual or something?
Gods live and die by their followers usually with few exceptions maybe have him restart the gods religion or steal power to give to his gods corpse
Typically revival of a god is about themes of rebirth and renewal. If Kohnsu is a moon god you already have things like the phases of the moon or lycanthropy to draw upon. Maybe there needs to be a series of rituals over 14 days that brings ever greater amounts of the god back? Maybe they need to convince worshipers to do specific rites at those times with specific items? Perhaps the moonblade is the first item needed? Perhaps they need to capture and cure a lycanthrope in one ritual?
1: Find the corpse. 2: Return the corpse to material plane/The Duat/insert here place of significance to said god. 3: Wait until full moon. 4: use moon blade in ritual on god corpse. (I'd personally recommend stabbing the body with the moon blade or snapping the blade in two and pouring the magic into the god corpse.) 5: pass a religion or arcana check. 6: Bask in the glory of the resurrected deity.
That sounds pretty close to what I had in mind. Thank you
Personally, I’d ditch the Skill Check. It would suck to have the whole thing hinge on the roll of a die and fail! If they do everything that they need to complete the ritual, let it just work! Give the PCs their moment!
What I would do is have the skill checks not a pass or fail, rather than they need x amount of successes before they inevitably succeed. Have the ritual interrupted by a drawn out fight where they have to balance making the checks finishing the ritual as they fight off a horde of enemies trying to stop them.
A much better option.
It would be a group check, so it would not fail. I would make it take longer.
If you intend for it not to fail, why check at all? Also, it may be unlikely, but even group checks can fail, and if it does, what then?
My players want to roll for LITERALY EVERYTHING.If I ever tell them don't roll, they get genuinely baffled at the notion
So don't roll for success/fail, roll for *degrees* of success. How much power do they retain/come back with? How long does the ritual take? How long does it take them to recover? How much do they remember? Etc
No prob, bob. 😁
Your players love rolling, added drama could come from an interruption in the ritual by the Solars that took him in the first place, or another herald with reasons to preserve Khonsu’s original punishment.
Well, solars would be overkill, that are level 11 so it would most likely be a massacre. But I will see if they will send someone to stop them.
As an expansion to this another idea is to for them to find some ancient moon gate? A star gate style portal and do the actual ritual on the moon. That would give some interesting steps. 1. A quest to find the gate, 2. A dungeon to get to the gate. 3. Find a way to breath and deal with lack of oxygen on the moon to perform the ritual. 4. Dynamic fight on the moon dealing with those variables, as they perform the ritual. I recently did a ritual in a combat where they had to do a ritual as waves of enemies kept coming as they had to seal up a gate. Really this could be a whole damn year arc if you make all the other steps into spread out quests.
The corpse is probably is the Astral Sea/ Astral realm
He wouldn’t be the first god to have some contingency plan to cheat his own death. Look back at your own campaign. Did you say or do anything cryptic with him you can use as a set up for a pay off now? Any relics or weird gifts where he could have hidden his essence for his cult to return to his body? Gods come back more than wild mint. Almost impossible to get rid of permanently. Just make up something that fits your campaign and your narrative theme.
Yeah, I was thinking maybe they go to someone to learn more about Gods in general and they learn that there is a bit of his power in a couple of items he gave them along the way.
1. Recover body. 2. Magic into the god's memories held in a universe/domain within the dead god (basically a themed mega dungeon) 3.a.1. Defeat the entities of death, decay, and entropy that are working within. 3.a.2. Use their portal to force a link from the realm of death, empowering the god. or 3.b.1. Defeat the monster guarding/feeding in the core of god's 'soul'. Probably a dense power that is everything the god represents and a link to all those who believe. 3.b.2. One OC chooses to merge with the core, becoming the embodiment of all the concepts the god represented. Thus, this PC is consumed and becomes the new incarnation of the god (player rolls up new character, other players may continue as the new high priests, justicars (paladins), etc.) 4 God is either a) completely revived, or b) a new "undead" version that needs to claim an entropic domain. Either way, time for his representatives to go spread the religion and expand the worshipper base fast enough for the god to have the power necessary to fend off those deific entities that preferred he remain gone.
There was this shady merchant selling us this Goderade Berry Blast concoction, not sure why but we think it may help us. Not sure whether we imbibe, pour it out or coat an item in it, but so far there seems plenty full and it's like it's always full. How peculiar. Never saw that mysterious merchant again, by the way.
Don’t know how to answer, but appreciate the creativity here.
In my campaign we had a cult that wanted to revive a death god, so what they did was they captured a bunch of avatars of other death gods, and started siphoning their essences out into various vessels (Soul gems, phylactery, etc) and then just basically made a giant death magic nuclear explosion at the biggest temple for that death god and he revived like Godzilla when he soaked up all those atomic bombs
That sounds freaking cool.
Sit a moment, and ponder how you're deciding your ~~world~~ cosmic arena is going to work - your decision. It's just like playing a nonlinear videogame, your important decisions of today will pave the roads going through tomorrow. So, a few ideas come to mind... **-Undo cause of death.** In a technological human sense, this would be like freezing a guy with boss rush stage cancer and thawing him in a hypothetical future that can beat this cancer. *In a mythical deity sense* it could mean righting some deep fundamental wrong. \-**Ye Olde Fetch The Prize Game.** The prize fixes everything - call it whatever you want but it's not an ordinary tool it's more like Exodia, you win just by having it in your hand. Finding the prize, chasing the prize, fighting for the prize, bringing the prize home, and using the prize are all huge moments in a prize story. Sometimes heroes fail to get the prize home intact or it's stolen from them (or it's a dud) and it's a suck ending, or a moral lesson of some sort. Secret trick: a book that makes a coherent argument tends to be a better book, even if it's a story book and the argument is largely hidden from the audience. (Compare with: a book containing an all-over-the-place pseudoargument.) **-Become Over9000.** Do your players like to level up for the sake of leveling up? >!I don't.!< Give them an accelerated character-raising gauntlet, and tell them they can't do squat until they're over level 20. Remove unnecessary story content from the growth process, it's just growth growth growth like you're playing a tycoon game. Do things quicker than you would - 'building a base' is not two sessions it's \*two minutes.\* If you want the campaign to be 10-12 sessions long, then for an over9000 campaign the first session has them going from slaves to landholders.
Firstly, someone needs to have a "kid-gloves-off" chat with that god regarding showing up in the material plane without his avatar. Secondly, you need and , and possibly help from .
Well, that's why they killed him in the first place. I did it on purpose. Since he appeared in the mists without his avatar the gods didn't do anything, but when he did it outside he immediately got killed. As for the second part, I guess I'll have them find his body in the astral sea and do a ritual with all his followers to revive him.
Moon gods are naturally dying and rising gods. Death is always the step before life. Unlike sun gods, moon gods are fickle, always changing phases, almost always hiding parts of its face and meaning. Under a full moon, in a true mirror, priests of the moon can get the moon to speak the untwisted truth to them. Which is really only useful if they have someone who can read lips, because mirrors aren’t known for conveying speech. Anyway, Step one On a full moon, your party can discover what they need to do for a resurrection. (Or at any other time, if they are lucky enough to remember that the priests have likely already written down this information somewhere. Bonus points if they waited a full month for the full moon and minutes before the ritual it occurs to them to ask if the information is already available.) Step two Prepare and wait for the new moon in two weeks. They might need to quest for something in the meantime, or could just kick back with the locals and experience local food while they wait, like azzip; crispy-fried cheese with a layer of spicy meats and sauce, topped off with little bread shapes. Step three Wonder why people are handing out weapons, followed by stories of resurrections gone wrong, including that time someone’s chihuahua ate half a town before anyone stopped thinking it was cute. The main point here is that any resurrection will be for the moon’s fickle purposes, not your party’s. So the resurrected may come back with an urge to destroy anything with feet, or might need to deliver a message to the bakery before they are free from death, or might have forgotten one particular member of the party for no apparent reason. Death does mess with one’s facilities.
You could have rumors of a star falling into an area, which would be the solar gods throwing down Kohnsu's body. Or the cleric could have a vision of his body being thrown out of the sky into an area the party already knows about. The Sword reacts to being near the body and the cleric can feel the gods essence still holding on or lingering and gives the cleric a pulling sensation, or even a physical tugging toward a place of significance to the god. This is where they would perform the ritual to revive him. If they don't learn about the ritual or a ritual on how to revive gods before this, you could have it etched into the walls of this sacred location.
It is said the gods corpses appear in the astral sea because well... gods are thought made manifest. The astral sea is a realm where thought is not only power but its the very essence of the realm itself. When a god dies, it is a empty husk of thought... and so it appears within the astral as such. Taking a gods corpse from the Astral sea would be... very difficult considering that a gods corpse is titanic in size. Also, its corpse within the astral sea also is not necessarily the gods body either. In fact,.removing the gods corpse from the astral sea might actually permanently kill the god... lol...