One thing the sourcebooks never touched on is exactly WHERE characters souls go when they die. One of the most admirable traits of the game was the permanent lethality. There is no cleric to come sashaying up the road and ressurect some dead PC.

But where does the character go when they die? Some astral plane?

If such is the case, what is the potential that one could come back from the dead?

I ask this because me and my group are going to attempt to resurrect our dead friends via: a free spirit with astral gateway, a ley line nexus, and (potentially) an exploding pheonix.

Any good GM will let you succeed in your tampering with such affairs, but it will later become apparent your good friends have all been absorbed by Master Shedim, and they will butcher the remaining living like lambs.

But then again, I have only one really hard rule in (most) games: try to tamper with affairs that big, and the big creatures will take notice.

Was bringing people back from the dead possible in Earthdawn? If so, then you could sorta use that as a basis for a campaign. Rumours about someone (perhaps an archeologist?) finding ancient texts/scrolls/tablets/whatever about a possible method of bringing back the souls of the deceased, of course the Big Boys would be interested in such a thing for themselves, or to prevent anyone from using it, etc.

Chained ghosts are sort of parts of the dead people, but that might also be illusional in that it might be only ripples (or sometimes white cap rollers) of magic kicked up the dead person's past emotions. [EDIT: Think Background count only organized somewhat instead of chaotic to our senses.]

But say you do manage to track a spirit down in the metaplanes that appears to be your dead teammate? What you going to do? Leave them in spirit form, or try some angle to get them into the flesh? At this point in the discussion somewhere an entire line-dance column of angels are prancing upon a pin head.....and as Adarael points out a player should be leary to join in that dance.

Also, something to bear in mind.

Under no circumstances (successful or not, Master Shedim or not) can such a process be cheap, easy, or even predictable. If it can be quantified, a megacorp can mechanize, automate, or commodify it. Even if it IS possible, my tongue in cheek commentary about killing all of your PCs horribly aside, it can never, ever be counted on. Because if it can...

All those hits you've pulled? Now worthless, cuz the targets are moving again. All those Delta clinic guards you've killed? Testifying against you. All those enemies you've whacked? Out for revenge.

I've seen two people come back from the dead... or 1.5, depending. Ibn Eisa came back, supposedly, and he sure has the earmarks of Shedim all over him. Also, an NPC that had about 45 extra exposive rounds emptied into his skull and spine from point blank range came back. He brokered a deal with a Horror, or a Shedim, or something, cuz he was NOT right in the dome.

That's the kind of stuff that brings you back, IMO. HORRIBLE, UNSPEAKABLE things.

The methods used for resurrection in Earthdawn required certain special circumstances which no longer exist.

Where a person's soul (or spirit, ka, gros bon ange, etc.) goes when they die remains a mystery. Many would debate the very existence of souls and the afterlife. Ghosts, supposedly reincarnate individuals, and astral projections would lend credence to the existence of the soul, but aren't definitive proof.

The only form of "resurrection" available in Shadowrun is cybermancy, which is the only known magic capable of affecting the metahuman spirit (not just their aura or astral self).

I knew I should've remembered to turn on the AH signal to get you here.

Imagine the look on the players faces though after they go through all that trouble, only to find out it doesn't work.

In Earthdawn, Nethermancers could keep the ghosts of players (kinda a house rule involving one've their spells, tho, NOT CANON). They could also create people. But even the Questors of Light or whoever they were that could restore limbs and stuff couldn't bring people back from the dead, afaik. The closest you ever got in that game was cheating death with blood charms and nethermancers.

Odd, no mention of ancestor spirits yet.

In Earthdawn, a 10th circle ritual could raise the dead. Or it could turn the sun on and off.

Noone has any tenth circle anything in Shadowrun. The crazy biggest magic ever used since the awakening isn't 10th circle magic. So is it possible? Sure. But it isn't going to happen. There isn't enough threading that can be done that will get you to the tenth circle.

-Frank

Well, assuming the Gm allows it, what are sound theories to make it possible from a roleplaying viewpoint? A mix of magic and technology?

Perhaps a clone from their deceased DNA and then conjuring adepts who have spent time studying their very souls?

Whether it works or not, I wont know unless I try. And I need ideas to try.

Sigh. Now I have to dig out all my old ED books.

1) There are a couple of ways to raise the dead in Earthdawn. The one that was mentioned previously is actually a 10th Circle Wizard spell called Jouney to Life. Essentially, you cast the spell, and it takes as many days as the person was dead for their spirit to find its way back. Must be cast in Safe areas (SR: no background count), otherwise very bad things happen.

2) Among other ways of resurrection is the Last Chance Salve. Must be applied to a body dead an hour or less, and allows the character to roll all their remaining Recovery Tests (adept Fast Healing on steroids). If the Tests cure enough damage to bring their hit points (remember, this is ED, not SR) above 0, the character lives.

3) All of this is contingent upon the belief that the Passions imprisoned Death below Death's Sea (modern: the Caspian, I think, I don't have a map with me), which turned it into a sea of lava. With Death imprisoned, all of these resurrection magics work. Whether this is *actually* true was never revealed, nor whether there was a different reason the Caspian went from water to lava and back to water. Sure would be interesting if it was linked to mana level instead and suddenly one day trasnmuted itself, wouldn't it?

After reading through the blood magic book (what earthdawn magic is basically based off of) and conjecture from various other books (ala Harlequinn's Back, etc), anything powerful enough to resurrect someone would probably be along the lines of a ghost dance and probably tear big old cheese holes in astral space.
[edit] BTW, i wasn't meaning to imply ED magic is based off the blood magic SB for shadowrun, just that most of the powerful ED magic involves taking damage to perform various feats/skills/spells/powers/what-have-you[/edit]

This is from many years ago, but didn't one of the ED books mention something about magic masks and going into Death's domain, involving a masked ball or something, being able to get people back as well?

I think that was a legend, where a Thief goes into Death's Domain to steal the soul of her lover back after he was killed.

Though it was suggested in one of the sourcebooks that players could do something similar, and pretty much gave the DM carte blanche to go wild.

What if?
After months searching you find the spell the spell to reattach your dead friends soul to her body.
After a exhausting Astral quest you find your dead friends spirit and learn how to summon it.
Your friend is happy where she is and does not wish to return.
Something else does wish to live again.
After the spell nearly kills you, you find out that you now have to go out and stop the evil thing that is now running around in your old friends body.

Y'know, I very specifically mentioned that the conditions that allowed resurrection in Earthdawn are no longer true in Shadowrun. It's not just the high mana level - Death is no longer imprisoned.

There is a solution for that. The PCs just have to track down the Vampire Killer whip and wait around Wallachia untill a giant castle magically appear.

While Death isn't imprisoned, there also isn't any evidence that Death exists at the current level of the mana cycle. It's entirely possible that there is a window of time when resurrection is possible.

-Frank

I'd allow a PC mage to research the Journey to Life spell from Earthdawn, and set the Drain to be OMGWTF! huge.

I'm talking Naval drain codes, here. Hello, blood magic.

If Death is an actual supernatural entity then the players can track it down by metaplanar quest or they can discover its True Name via metaplanar and summon it. I wouldn't even dare trying to bind it, however.

In mythology, Death is a gamester. He will make wagers on the outcome of contets of skill and one can win life by defeating him. Sometimes, one can even win eternal life, which inevitably leads to making a deal with death so that you can die a few thousand years later.

My recomendation is that the PCs should have a very high Twister skill double digit Battleship wouldn't hurt, either. They should also have the ability to survive a rating 100 Astral Quest.

If you a really serious about this, I recomend reading Popul Vuh, specificly the story of how the Corn heros go down to the underworld and trick the Gods of Death. Have the PCs take a really trippy astral quest that involves ball games, impossible challanges, and being decapitated and hung from a tree while still conscious and impregnating a female Death God by spitting on her hand.

Naval Drain. OMFG I love that!!

Honestly, I'd certainly let players try to raise someone from the dead. It would simply never, ever work, and like mentioned it would most likely only ever summon Something Really Bad. Still, people can be deluded enough to think that spell they just went through so many elve mages to acquire really is a ressurect spell. All that build up, and such a huge let down. It's so perfectly Shadowrun!

Edit: You know what, a grief crazy but extremely wealthy Johnson hiring runners to "ressurect" his young daughter that tragically died recently, only to have the dug-up corpse of said daughter become possessed by Something Evil and taunt him is just too good a scenario to pass by. Cha-ching, a new scenario for my magic campaign.

One thought about the theoretical possibility (practical problems aside) of reviving the dead:

First, the question araises, wether there is a "soul" / unphysical part of a person. If there is not, if a person is a pure mechanical being, it is very possible to revive anyone: Clone him in advance, have his memories recorded and impose those memories on the clone. Same person. You could say there is no continuity so it is another person, but this does not matter for either the dead person (as there is no soul) nor for the clone (he can not tell the difference). It only starts to matter if you have both living at the same time, so simply don't do this

Now, if there is a soul, next question: Is the "soul" something that exists in the astral part of existence (I would say there is strong evidence for this in SR) or is it on a completely different level? If it is "astral" you have the possibilties that were described by others in this thread. If the soul, or maybe some part of it, is actually in a "higher" realm, in my view the only thing you could hope for is divine intervention. As the last sign of something like that is 2070 years old, I would say that possibility is very remote.

But in none of these scenarios is it theoretically impossible to revive someone So there is always hope!

Logicaly speaking, something that is not an entity cannot be imprisoned. Therefore, Death is an entity. However, it seems to be obvious that the entity Death is not the totality of the concept death. If she were then everyone in Earthdawn would be immortal.

With regards to the Ship of Theseus, I believe both solutions are unsatasfactory.

The change of an entity over time can be expressed as a (Delta)X/(Delta)T to find the average rate of change. This, in turn, can be expressed as dx/dt to find the instantaneous rate of change.

An entity only has continuity when dx/dt=0. However, Thermodynamics tells us that dx/dt can never be 0 due to the effects of entropy on the entity.

Therefore, no entity is continuous. No entity exists for more than an instant.

Identity, then, can be defined as a degree of continuity with previous entities rather than an absolute continuity of an entity. This can be expresses as the inverse of definite integral from t1 to t2 of dx/dt where x= 0 at t1.

Where x is divided into components and then reintegrated one can express each componet as a seperate variable x and add the areas under all of the curves together.

Neither ship B nor ship C is ship A. However, one could argue that ship B possesses ship As identity to a greater degree.

Identity is a complicated and unresolvable issue. Various famous philosophers and major religions have at various times tackled this problem, with invariant lack of success. Here are some theories:

Budhism: Discontinuity. The idea is that you are different now from how you are now. And if fact, every now that I care to name in the future will have you being different from now.

Descartes: Continuity of the Soul. The idea is that there is an entire unaccessible and undetectable thing at the core of your being which arbitrarily carries over from before birth until after death and is the final arbiter of what is you.

Locke: Continuity of Memory. The idea is that your memories tie you to your own past, that you are a the result of all those past experiences run together to make the you of today.

Turing: Continuity of Response. The idea is that you are what you do. Your identity is your actions in response to stimulus.

Hume: Prove It, Dude. The idea is that since none of those other ideas are provable, that there's really no reason to believe in identity at all.

So before we can answer whether a clonal body with a spirit bound into it with necromancy is "you", we have to answer the following questions:

Is a good merge insect spirit "you?" Sound like a trivial question? It's not. The good merge has as many of your memories as you do. The extra knowledge and beliefs one gets for having an ant bound into one's soul could be thought of as analagous to any other life changing experience. Discovering that you like carrots, or anal sex for example.

Are your kids "you?" Again, sounds like a silly question. But it's not. If you believe that you have a soul, some running account of what you've done that carries over past your death for the easy reference of some omnipotent yet undetectable being - why wouldn't your kids be you? If you build a rocket and launch it at England, that goes on the list, if you have a kid and teach him to hate black people, wouldn't that go on the list too?

Is a Bunraku chipping your program "you?" The person in the parlor has no idea that she isn't you, and reacts to stimuli as you would, to the limits of the recording. If she says what you would have said, and reacts how you would react, isn't she you?

Are you "you?" Do you remember your fourth grade birthday party? How about your 4th year birthday party? Are you the same person you were as a child, when did you stop being that kid who was too embarrassed to go to the bathroom alone and just whizzed all over himself?

Does it matter? If you put a spirit into a body, and you think it's your friend, and the new creature also thinks that it is your friend, what difference is there from that "actually" being your friend?

-Frank

owie... my head hurts...

I deny this. I consider the "self" to be the first exposed molar on the left side of your mouth. Thus, you have no self as a baby, become a different person when your first teeth fall out, and cease to be a person should it ever be extracted.

You have solved nothing unless you add assumptions that have not been agreed upon. That's really the crux of the matter.

~J

Yeah. Toothless people have no souls!

Or midgets. Midgets don't have souls, either. Damn creepy Oompa-Loompas.

interesting.

but the ultimate point, is its a game with magic in it. Magic can probably do anything. some things are just more difficult than others. If it serves to improve the story, then let them find a way. use an NPC mage. and make the next story arc about the consequences, the side effects, and who else wants the secret.

Shadowrun 'magic', isn't.

Technically the sourcebooks and general flavor of the setting have left the options open. There is nothing saying that magic isn't simply a scientifically measurable and definable process beyond the understanding of current science.

Now, many of the novel writers and individual sourcebook writers like to try and sneak in contradictions to this, to define the way magic works absolutely, but in the grander sense they're generally thwarted. Shadowrun does not make absolute statements about the 'rightness' or 'truth' of any religion or view of magic.

If anything, because the rules of the game have magic working by such clearly defined, absolutely limited (Magic cannot permit time travel, magic cannot bring back the dead, etc.) standards it's more reasonable to say that there's nothing inherently magical about it, and it certainly doesn't allow one to do anything or even most things.

And no, the ability of magic to do something in Earthdawn is not relevent to this discussion. It's a fun line of logic for 'What If's' but Shadowrun and Earthdawn aren't the same game, so just because something can or did happen in one is not a guarantee it can or will happen in the other. The Earthdawn/Shadowrun links exist as Easter Eggs for fans, not as a straightjacket to restrain Shadowrun by forcing it to work like Earthdawn and accept its tropes.

You got me, tisoz. I thought it was one of the absolute restrictions in Magic in the Shadow's spell-creation section. I just flipped through there, however, and you're correct: the inability to bring the dead back to life is not one of the absolute rules of spell creation.

I don't believe, on the other hand, that I've ever heard of the 'Golden Hour' in Shadowrun. If that's some Earthdawn thing, please see my post above, which I will paraphrase here in a more concise manner: I couldn't possibly care less. I play Shadowrun, not Earthdawn. I think they have a message board for Earthdawn if you want to discuss that game.

I suppose the fact that reviving the dead isn't explicitly forbidden brings us back to the other reasons why it shouldn't happen. I believe most of them have been well covered in the first page or two of the thread, but if you want to retread that ground the first place to start is here:

Shadowrun does not make absolute judgments about the correctness or incorrectness of any religion or philosophy. Many religions and philosophies are specifically incompatible with ressurecting the dead in the way that is being discussed here - for instance, someone who believes in reincarnation would obviously be proven wrong if you could go and find someone's spirit and bring it back to their body without allowing it to reincarnate according to the mandate of their religion in an appropriate new form.

Because of this, we can generally assume that ressurection is not possible within the setting of Shadowrun, because it would violate one of the stated setting goals (equality of all religious beliefs in regard to magic).

Of course, you're welcome to do whatever you want in your own game - you're even allowed to ignore the absolute limitations of magic printed in MitS, if you want - but I assume a person wouldn't be posting here asking for opinions if they'd already decided to throw the setting out the window and do it their way.

Please don't tell me we're going to have to go into the thorny (if sometimes entertaining) philosophical ground that is 'the definition of death'.

Death, for our purposes, is the cellular death of all tissue that constitutes the body, or at least a large enough percentage that returning the body to a functional state is impossible. This can be caused by prolonged system failure or more immediate damage (for example, incineration).

In Shadowrun terms, this is represented by exceeding the character's Body rating in overdamage (except in specific cases where characters have more overdamage, such as Phoenix shamans and those with the Will to Live Edge). The period in which a character can be ressucitated/defibrulated - with technology or magic - is represented by the boxes of overdamage before this point is reached.

A character who has exceeded this point isn't just 'medically' dead or 'legally' dead, he's the dead kind of dead that everyone here should understand the exact definition of. The question here is, as far as I know, whether or not magic can bring a person back from beyond this point - if anyone was talking about something else, feel free to clarify now.

If - as I rather suspect - no one was talking about bringing a person back from overflow damage less than their Body rating, then can we please not abuse our common language by clutching at irrelevent technicalities? We (hopefully) aren't lawyers, here.

Edit: I apologize if it sounds like I'm running short on patience, but I honestly don't believe that you don't know the difference between what we were talking about and what you said, so it's hard to answer with a straight face.

I beleive the exact definition of 'dead' isnt the reason to argue.

Type 1 dead: overflow damage, followed by bleeding to death. easy to mistake for dead if you dont have any medical skills. easy to fix.

Type 2 dead: Past the overflow by just a little bit. this is where those Docwagon resucitations come in handy. The heart has stopped, breathing has stopped. blood loss. but with CPR and a blood infusion, theres a chance of survival. Just hope your buddy can keep doing CPR until the ambulance gets there.

Type 3 dead: Death by essence loss. could be from a para-critter. either way, its cannon that you CAN survive this, but at an incredibly high cost. you need immediate delta-grade care with magical healing. you may even be otherwise unharmed.

Type 4 dead: MASSIVE damage. blood gone in moments, large chunks missing. check dental records to ID the body. (unless the heads whats missing).

Type 5 dead: body? WHAT BODY?!? get the persona chip in the clone, and hope nobody notices.

now, type 4 is where the arguments are. but lets keep in mind- if you CAN take a dusty old pile of bones and revive it... then what bones does a dragon want restored to life?

There is a reference to reincarnation in the SR novel 'nosferatu'. about two elves, lovers who were never together. born again time and again, across the ages.

To get someone back to life from the dead, at a minimum, i would require a body (the more the better, missing parts raise the threshold), an initiate mage going on a Quest to a metaplane, and a LOT of power(blood magic and up). I would set the threshold based on damage(at time of death), essence, and magical ability.