Every single undead creature in D&D probably got created as undead from a non-undead creature.
It doesn't change the fact that only True Resurrection will get past the fact that a corpse/creature has been converted into an undead.
RAW doesn't mention a soul in terms of Raise Dead, Resurrection or True Resurrection. They require you to touch a "dead creature" (true res says "creature that has been dead no more than..."), no mention of "soul" at all. The first two say that it doesn't work on an undead.
That is incorrect, with respect to RAW:
Raise Dead:
"If the creature's soulis both willing and at liberty to rejoin the body, the creature returns to life with 1 hit point."
Resurrection:
"If its soul is free and willing, the target returns to life with all its hit points."
True Resurrection:
"If the creature's soul is free and willing, the creature is restored to life with all its hit points."
(1) You're absolutely right. That's just a flat-out misreading on my part. The general point remains: a hand or ear or lock of hair will not work, because it requires a "creature." How much is required for the target to actually count as a creature, as opposed to just a part, becomes a DM's call, which is very annoying territory to be in.
(2) Finger of Death changes the fundamental nature of the creature; it doesn't create a new creature the way Animate Dead does. Therefore, Resurrection does not work.
(1) I'll interpret this as "a hand or ear or lock of hair will not work at my table", as "DM's Call" is firmly in "maybe" territory.
(2) I think the language is vague enough that I would rule differently at my table, depending on the relevant lore. Do you know if there is an official "basic rules" reference for how vampires and resurrection interact? I know that certain campaigns, such as Curse of Strahd, have specific rules and encounters that supersede general mechanics, but I'd like to examine the specific wording of the general rules.
I understand the issue here with the confusing nature of using the terms related to death, life, and undeath that result in this thread. Unfortunately, the wording on true resurrection makes it pretty clear the intent of the rules: all the other spells return a creture that (to a varying degree) recently had some hit points and lost them back to the same general general creature state (to a varying degree) that they were in when they most recently had hit points.
That intent is good enough for many tables. If a spell doesn’t say it makes the target non-undead again, it probably doesn’t.
Something like Animate Dead doesn't seem to do anything to the original creature. It uses the corpse to create a new creature.
The animate dead spell targets the corpse of a humanoid. The target becomes a skeleton or zombie. So the spell DOES do something to the original creature!
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. As you say, the target is the corpse of a humanoid, so the spell does nothing to the original creature.
Um, I'm not quite understanding your position.
The creature died. It is now a corpse. The spell targets the corpse to turn it into a skeleton or zombie. Thus once the undead is killed, the corpse that ends up lying on the ground is the corpse of a skeleton or zombie.
The creature died. It is not now a corpse. Its corpse is a corpse. What the creature is now depends on setting, but using Forgotten Realms as a default, the creature is a soul hanging out with its patron deity somewhere in the outer planes. The spell targets the corpse, which has no impact on the original creature. It doesn't call its soul back and bind it to a zombie body, it doesn't touch the original creature at all. In contrast, Finger of Death, explicitly says the original creature becomes a zombie.
(1) You're absolutely right. That's just a flat-out misreading on my part. The general point remains: a hand or ear or lock of hair will not work, because it requires a "creature." How much is required for the target to actually count as a creature, as opposed to just a part, becomes a DM's call, which is very annoying territory to be in.
(2) Finger of Death changes the fundamental nature of the creature; it doesn't create a new creature the way Animate Dead does. Therefore, Resurrection does not work.
(1) I'll interpret this as "a hand or ear or lock of hair will not work at my table", as "DM's Call" is firmly in "maybe" territory.
(2) I think the language is vague enough that I would rule differently at my table, depending on the relevant lore. Do you know if there is an official "basic rules" reference for how vampires and resurrection interact? I know that certain campaigns, such as Curse of Strahd, have specific rules and encounters that supersede general mechanics, but I'd like to examine the specific wording of the general rules.
1) Nah. D&D is still based on the English language, and unless the creature in its entirety is a hand (which I can definitely imagine! but that creature would not be a humanoid), a hand absolutely does not meet any criteria of the English word "creature." Where exactly the line is is definitely ambiguous, but just as there's not any room for "an entire intact body" not counting, there's likewise no room for "a hand" or "an ear" to count. A DM is obviously always empowered to override rules text, and again, there is room for fuzziness in what does and doesn't count as "a creature." But not that much room.
2) I'm not sure exactly which part you're saying is vague. "A humanoid killed by this spell rises at the start of your next turn as a zombie" is extremely unambiguous. The humanoid becomes a zombie. The zombie is not a new creature. I'm not sure what vampires have to do with it?
More generally on the topic of bypassing the undead state, I would ask everyone to consider the Clone spell.
Scenario:
Wizard creates a clone, dies of boredom (leaving a perfectly normal corspe), and then transfers to new Clone.
Wizard(clone) slips when stepping out of the sealed vessel, because they forgot to put down a texture shower mat and subsequently cracks his head on the edge of the vessel and dies.
(A) Necromancer turns the original body into a zombie. Apprentice resurrects the Wizard(clone)
(B) Necromancer zombifies the Clone body. Apprentice resurrects the Wizard(Original)
Are both (A) and (B) viable options at your tables?
Note: the Clone spell does state, "The original creature's physical remains, if they still exist, become inert and can't thereafter be restored to life, since the creature's soul is elsewhere.", but I understand the RAI of this to mean that the corpse can't be resurrected because the soul is bound to a living body. I suspect that if the user died again, the soul is intended be free to return as normal.
Thoughts?
A) Absolutely.
B) Absolutely not. Once the wizard enters the clone, the clone body is their body and the original body is not their body. The wizard can't be resurrected with the original body any more than they could be with any random passer-by's body.
1) Nah. D&D is still based on the English language, and unless the creature in its entirety is a hand (which I can definitely imagine! but that creature would not be a humanoid), a hand absolutely does not meet any criteria of the English word "creature." Where exactly the line is is definitely ambiguous, but just as there's not any room for "an entire intact body" not counting, there's likewise no room for "a hand" or "an ear" to count. A DM is obviously always empowered to override rules text, and again, there is room for fuzziness in what does and doesn't count as "a creature." But not that much room.
2) I'm not sure exactly which part you're saying is vague. "A humanoid killed by this spell rises at the start of your next turn as a zombie" is extremely unambiguous. The humanoid becomes a zombie. The zombie is not a new creature. I'm not sure what vampires have to do with it?
(1) Fascinating, and curiously arbitrary. The ambiguity arises from a continuity, there is no "line". An "entire intact body" and "No body at all" are the two polar limits, but everything else in between is transitional, and any decision therein is purely subjective. To say there is "no room" for a hand or ear to count, is simply baseless.
We've already established that a "Corpse" and a "Creature" are two separate, but related, entities. A "corpse" is not literally the "dead creature", but rather the physical remains thereof.
In a transcendental sense, both the body and soul of a creature combine to make the "creature" itself. Touching a hand or an intact corpse are both being "in contact" with the "dead creature", because the "dead creature" is more than physical, we just can't touch the non-physical parts.
I've spoilered a reference image showing "ideal", "damaged", and "fragment" variations for consideration. With this interpretation, the physical body acts as more of a material conduit to the creature, rather than being wholly the creature itself. Resurrecting with just a hand is basically high-fiving a ghost.
The issue is that D&D alludes to, but doesn't actually go into the details of the metaphysics of death, so there is lots of room for interpretation. There should be some practical limits, for the sake of simplicity, but there are lots of questions that can be raised. For example, what if a creature grows a tumor that is larger than they are? Would casting resurrection on the tumor suffice despite it being non-essential, nor part of a healthy body? How about just the brain? With D&D's spiritual duality, the brain really isn't that important. That's not where the personality and thoughts exist, though the brain may carry its imprint.
Edit: Consider also the scenario where you have all of the creatures body parts, but they have been diced into 1 inch cubes. You are only ever interacting with one small piece. Is this situation somehow better just because the parts are all in the same pile?
(2) Vampires are the common example of an undead transformation and the language of Finger of Death mirrors the language of creating a vampire spawn. I agree that the RAW interpretation of Finger of Death likely qualifies as transformative, but it's also easy to imagine that "rises at the start of your next turn as a Zombie" is simply being used as a "common English" expression to describe exactly what is being seen without regard for the nuance of the situation, because the writers didn't consider that we would be having a conversation like this.
They could have written, "The corpse of a Humanoid killed by this spell rises at the start of your next turn as a Zombie", but the narrative reality and the mechanical reality are often not in alignment. In most cases, the distinction is irrelevant.
Reading about the mechanical origin of Vampires could shed more decisive light on how the fantasy world is meant to work.
Further complicating the matter, Zombies have listed in their entry "Languages understands the languages it new in life, but can't speak", which implies that even Zombies created by Animate Dead is somehow transformative, because the Zombie can only know languages if it was once alive. Whereas, it could have read "Languages understands the languages known to the humanoid it was created from, but can not speak".
I suppose one could rule that zombies created by Animate Dead don't understand any languages, but that would make the spell pretty pointless.
The parlance for these types of creatures is streamlined, resulting in contradiction and ambiguity.
The creature died. It is not now a corpse. Its corpse is a corpse. What the creature is now depends on setting, but using Forgotten Realms as a default, the creature is a soul hanging out with its patron deity somewhere in the outer planes. The spell targets the corpse, which has no impact on the original creature. It doesn't call its soul back and bind it to a zombie body, it doesn't touch the original creature at all. In contrast, Finger of Death, explicitly says the original creature becomes a zombie.
Unfortunately your logic doesn't work for the Raise Dead or Resurrection spells, both of which say "You return a dead creature you touch to life". In your example, the caster would have to touch the "soul hanging out with its patron deity", which I think would be quite a difficult task.
The creature died. It is not now a corpse. Its corpse is a corpse. What the creature is now depends on setting, but using Forgotten Realms as a default, the creature is a soul hanging out with its patron deity somewhere in the outer planes. The spell targets the corpse, which has no impact on the original creature. It doesn't call its soul back and bind it to a zombie body, it doesn't touch the original creature at all. In contrast, Finger of Death, explicitly says the original creature becomes a zombie.
Unfortunately your logic doesn't work for the Raise Dead or Resurrection spells, both of which say "You return a dead creature you touch to life". In your example, the caster would have to touch the "soul hanging out with its patron deity", which I think would be quite a difficult task.
Problematically for Saga, the distinction they make between animate dead and finger of death will only work if the corpse isn't the creature - the corpse that you target becomes the zombie when casting animate dead. Conceding the point that you make, Farling, would break their other interpretation. And again, most of what is being discussed here (what exactly constitutes the essential nature of a creature) seems to be firmly off of the page of the rule text.
Edit: then again, if the corpse isn't the creature, then I don't understand why it matters at all what portion of the corpse you have for any of these spells, since that isn't the creature anyway.
l read that unless you use a wish or true res,a undead cant be returned to life. However,what exactly counts? like l can guess that you cant use revivify to turn a lich into a normal guy,but what about if you are attacked by a person that was just turned into a zombie and kill it? Could you bring that back to a living body? or does anyone effected by animate dead/create undead become unable to be revived?
So what counts is anything undead. That includes the guy just attacked and turned into a Zombie. I think it still counts as undead once you kill it, and therefore only a true res or wish spell can bring the person back. I might play a little loose with those rules if it was a PC that was trying to be brought back. But otherwise, you are going to need a true Res.
1) Nah. D&D is still based on the English language, and unless the creature in its entirety is a hand (which I can definitely imagine! but that creature would not be a humanoid), a hand absolutely does not meet any criteria of the English word "creature." Where exactly the line is is definitely ambiguous, but just as there's not any room for "an entire intact body" not counting, there's likewise no room for "a hand" or "an ear" to count. A DM is obviously always empowered to override rules text, and again, there is room for fuzziness in what does and doesn't count as "a creature." But not that much room.
2) I'm not sure exactly which part you're saying is vague. "A humanoid killed by this spell rises at the start of your next turn as a zombie" is extremely unambiguous. The humanoid becomes a zombie. The zombie is not a new creature. I'm not sure what vampires have to do with it?
(1) Fascinating, and curiously arbitrary. The ambiguity arises from a continuity, there is no "line". An "entire intact body" and "No body at all" are the two polar limits, but everything else in between is transitional, and any decision therein is purely subjective. To say there is "no room" for a hand or ear to count, is simply baseless.
We've already established that a "Corpse" and a "Creature" are two separate, but related, entities. A "corpse" is not literally the "dead creature", but rather the physical remains thereof.
In a transcendental sense, both the body and soul of a creature combine to make the "creature" itself. Touching a hand or an intact corpse are both being "in contact" with the "dead creature", because the "dead creature" is more than physical, we just can't touch the non-physical parts.
I've spoilered a reference image showing "ideal", "damaged", and "fragment" variations for consideration. With this interpretation, the physical body acts as more of a material conduit to the creature, rather than being wholly the creature itself. Resurrecting with just a hand is basically high-fiving a ghost.
The issue is that D&D alludes to, but doesn't actually go into the details of the metaphysics of death, so there is lots of room for interpretation. There should be some practical limits, for the sake of simplicity, but there are lots of questions that can be raised. For example, what if a creature grows a tumor that is larger than they are? Would casting resurrection on the tumor suffice despite it being non-essential, nor part of a healthy body? How about just the brain? With D&D's spiritual duality, the brain really isn't that important. That's not where the personality and thoughts exist, though the brain may carry its imprint.
Edit: Consider also the scenario where you have all of the creatures body parts, but they have been diced into 1 inch cubes. You are only ever interacting with one small piece. Is this situation somehow better just because the parts are all in the same pile?
(2) Vampires are the common example of an undead transformation and the language of Finger of Death mirrors the language of creating a vampire spawn. I agree that the RAW interpretation of Finger of Death likely qualifies as transformative, but it's also easy to imagine that "rises at the start of your next turn as a Zombie" is simply being used as a "common English" expression to describe exactly what is being seen without regard for the nuance of the situation, because the writers didn't consider that we would be having a conversation like this.
They could have written, "The corpse of a Humanoid killed by this spell rises at the start of your next turn as a Zombie", but the narrative reality and the mechanical reality are often not in alignment. In most cases, the distinction is irrelevant.
Reading about the mechanical origin of Vampires could shed more decisive light on how the fantasy world is meant to work.
Further complicating the matter, Zombies have listed in their entry "Languages understands the languages it new in life, but can't speak", which implies that even Zombies created by Animate Dead is somehow transformative, because the Zombie can only know languages if it was once alive. Whereas, it could have read "Languages understands the languages known to the humanoid it was created from, but can not speak".
I suppose one could rule that zombies created by Animate Dead don't understand any languages, but that would make the spell pretty pointless.
The parlance for these types of creatures is streamlined, resulting in contradiction and ambiguity.
Animate Dead essentially requires a creature. You aren't creating the zombie out of nothing. Thus, the creature understands the languages it knew in life.
That is incorrect, with respect to RAW:
It seems like (A) works because of the way that both spells are worded.
For (B) only the zombifying the clone body would work, since resurrecting the "Wizard(Original)" isn't allowed by the wording of the Clone spell.
Whilst Clone refers to a soul, all of the "restore to life" spells require a "dead creature".
(1) I'll interpret this as "a hand or ear or lock of hair will not work at my table", as "DM's Call" is firmly in "maybe" territory.
(2) I think the language is vague enough that I would rule differently at my table, depending on the relevant lore. Do you know if there is an official "basic rules" reference for how vampires and resurrection interact? I know that certain campaigns, such as Curse of Strahd, have specific rules and encounters that supersede general mechanics, but I'd like to examine the specific wording of the general rules.
I understand the issue here with the confusing nature of using the terms related to death, life, and undeath that result in this thread. Unfortunately, the wording on true resurrection makes it pretty clear the intent of the rules: all the other spells return a creture that (to a varying degree) recently had some hit points and lost them back to the same general general creature state (to a varying degree) that they were in when they most recently had hit points.
That intent is good enough for many tables. If a spell doesn’t say it makes the target non-undead again, it probably doesn’t.
The creature died. It is not now a corpse. Its corpse is a corpse. What the creature is now depends on setting, but using Forgotten Realms as a default, the creature is a soul hanging out with its patron deity somewhere in the outer planes. The spell targets the corpse, which has no impact on the original creature. It doesn't call its soul back and bind it to a zombie body, it doesn't touch the original creature at all. In contrast, Finger of Death, explicitly says the original creature becomes a zombie.
1) Nah. D&D is still based on the English language, and unless the creature in its entirety is a hand (which I can definitely imagine! but that creature would not be a humanoid), a hand absolutely does not meet any criteria of the English word "creature." Where exactly the line is is definitely ambiguous, but just as there's not any room for "an entire intact body" not counting, there's likewise no room for "a hand" or "an ear" to count. A DM is obviously always empowered to override rules text, and again, there is room for fuzziness in what does and doesn't count as "a creature." But not that much room.
2) I'm not sure exactly which part you're saying is vague. "A humanoid killed by this spell rises at the start of your next turn as a zombie" is extremely unambiguous. The humanoid becomes a zombie. The zombie is not a new creature. I'm not sure what vampires have to do with it?
A) Absolutely.
B) Absolutely not. Once the wizard enters the clone, the clone body is their body and the original body is not their body. The wizard can't be resurrected with the original body any more than they could be with any random passer-by's body.
(1) Fascinating, and curiously arbitrary. The ambiguity arises from a continuity, there is no "line". An "entire intact body" and "No body at all" are the two polar limits, but everything else in between is transitional, and any decision therein is purely subjective. To say there is "no room" for a hand or ear to count, is simply baseless.
We've already established that a "Corpse" and a "Creature" are two separate, but related, entities. A "corpse" is not literally the "dead creature", but rather the physical remains thereof.
In a transcendental sense, both the body and soul of a creature combine to make the "creature" itself. Touching a hand or an intact corpse are both being "in contact" with the "dead creature", because the "dead creature" is more than physical, we just can't touch the non-physical parts.
I've spoilered a reference image showing "ideal", "damaged", and "fragment" variations for consideration. With this interpretation, the physical body acts as more of a material conduit to the creature, rather than being wholly the creature itself. Resurrecting with just a hand is basically high-fiving a ghost.
The issue is that D&D alludes to, but doesn't actually go into the details of the metaphysics of death, so there is lots of room for interpretation. There should be some practical limits, for the sake of simplicity, but there are lots of questions that can be raised. For example, what if a creature grows a tumor that is larger than they are? Would casting resurrection on the tumor suffice despite it being non-essential, nor part of a healthy body? How about just the brain? With D&D's spiritual duality, the brain really isn't that important. That's not where the personality and thoughts exist, though the brain may carry its imprint.
Edit: Consider also the scenario where you have all of the creatures body parts, but they have been diced into 1 inch cubes. You are only ever interacting with one small piece. Is this situation somehow better just because the parts are all in the same pile?
(2) Vampires are the common example of an undead transformation and the language of Finger of Death mirrors the language of creating a vampire spawn. I agree that the RAW interpretation of Finger of Death likely qualifies as transformative, but it's also easy to imagine that "rises at the start of your next turn as a Zombie" is simply being used as a "common English" expression to describe exactly what is being seen without regard for the nuance of the situation, because the writers didn't consider that we would be having a conversation like this.
They could have written, "The corpse of a Humanoid killed by this spell rises at the start of your next turn as a Zombie", but the narrative reality and the mechanical reality are often not in alignment. In most cases, the distinction is irrelevant.
Reading about the mechanical origin of Vampires could shed more decisive light on how the fantasy world is meant to work.
Further complicating the matter, Zombies have listed in their entry "Languages understands the languages it new in life, but can't speak", which implies that even Zombies created by Animate Dead is somehow transformative, because the Zombie can only know languages if it was once alive. Whereas, it could have read "Languages understands the languages known to the humanoid it was created from, but can not speak".
I suppose one could rule that zombies created by Animate Dead don't understand any languages, but that would make the spell pretty pointless.
The parlance for these types of creatures is streamlined, resulting in contradiction and ambiguity.
Unfortunately your logic doesn't work for the Raise Dead or Resurrection spells, both of which say "You return a dead creature you touch to life". In your example, the caster would have to touch the "soul hanging out with its patron deity", which I think would be quite a difficult task.
Problematically for Saga, the distinction they make between animate dead and finger of death will only work if the corpse isn't the creature - the corpse that you target becomes the zombie when casting animate dead. Conceding the point that you make, Farling, would break their other interpretation. And again, most of what is being discussed here (what exactly constitutes the essential nature of a creature) seems to be firmly off of the page of the rule text.
Edit: then again, if the corpse isn't the creature, then I don't understand why it matters at all what portion of the corpse you have for any of these spells, since that isn't the creature anyway.
I just want to know why the corpse of a humanoid becomes an object but the corpse of a zombie is still a creature type (undead).
Both would be objects, and each would still retain their creature type. Typically death doesn't change the material composition of said corpse.
So what counts is anything undead. That includes the guy just attacked and turned into a Zombie. I think it still counts as undead once you kill it, and therefore only a true res or wish spell can bring the person back. I might play a little loose with those rules if it was a PC that was trying to be brought back. But otherwise, you are going to need a true Res.
Animate Dead essentially requires a creature. You aren't creating the zombie out of nothing. Thus, the creature understands the languages it knew in life.
Regarding objects, corpses, and creature types, there was a great debate here—just in case you're interested in reading different points of view.
(spoiler: there's no clear consensus :D)
Can you twin true resurrection? - Rules & Game Mechanics