Awww.

You would think that the power of magic would rid the world of stingy insurance companies. I should've known they would be too powerful for that...

The problem isn't so much the stingy insurance companies. It's the cost, both financial and physical, of restarting a dead body in working, living order :P

And even then, odd's are you just get a zombie.

Well yuh, if you pay someone who isn't a certified cleric of the Theocracy, sure :P

Certified? You gotta go to college for it or something?

Well, no, but you can't just walk around claiming to be a ranked member of a religion without someone having said you can :P

Like how you can't just claim to be a rich dude? Gotta dress like one too, huh? xD

plot thickens

Oh so he wants to save his sister? :o

That is the gist of it, yus :3

thats so sweet ;w; i hope he succeeds

How hard is it in this world to resurrect someone? it was always a problem I had with D&D games, the ease of which you could bring a dead player back. it made the games a bit bland at times.

Depends on your definition of Hard. Learning the magical processes necessary to rejuvenate and then restart a dead shell isn't "hard" by comparison to, say, learning how to scribe a permanent portal into a surface. The problem comes with the cost; the resurrected individual will return to life as they were, and, excluding being murdered or otherwise cut short, regain any lost time to live their life in. However, the person performing the resurrection will age significantly as a result; anything from as few as 4 or 5 years, up to as many as 50 years extra. Not only is that a massive shock to anyone's system, there are very few people willing to make such a sacrifice for a stranger.

Not only that, the body has to be 'fresh', so to speak - resurrecting a corpse is a nightmare nobody wants to suffer, not just for the caster, but also for the poor soul who finds themselves reborn, but in a rotten, decayed body. As such, the Theocracy offers a preservation service, similar to embalming but with less of the "pulling out insidey-bits" part, to ensure the shell is still ready for the mind to be booted up inside it again.

The Grand Theocracy of the Divine Mother trains and prepares young men and women from prepubescence to become Resurrectionists, and being chosen as one is a huge honour. Once they reach a certain age, as a result of performing Resurrections or otherwise, they're automatically 'promoted' to a higher caste within the Theocracy and given an extremely comfortable retirement as thanks for their sacrifice. Nonetheless, due to the obvious human cost, the price of performing such a task is set extremely high; currently 250,000gp, not including the cost of preserving the body until Resurrection can be performed; in order to prevent everybody and their dogs from having everybody else and everybody else's dogs resurrected every other week, which would chew through the young population of potential Resurrectionists insanely quickly.

For the sake of perspective, an extremely rich man (like, for example, the one Red stole his Ring of Beauty from) would make 250,000gp in about 2 years, if they played it right; but Red's not that patient, nor that rich. ;)

Im guessing he only has so much time before the spell will no longer be effective?

To a degree, yes - The Grand Theocracy of the Divine Mother can preserve the body, but only for so long.

I get the body bit, and I understand your explanations of the process, and even factoring in the otherworldy dimensiony powers accessible to people I have to ask. What of the cost of retrieving a human soul? Is that the cost of aging? Because nobody wants this to get all full metal alchemist-y i'm sure, especially red. That thing was nasty. Or is retrieving the soul the easy part? And if that's the case, could they just stick people in suits of armor for cheap, but with maybe a time limit? The very implecation of resurrection raises many issues one must consider. (also is the whole world ran by a theocracy, or part of it, or is it a order thing?).

You're assuming the existence of a "soul" in the first place. ;) The ghosts and wraiths drawn from magic like Selana was using are just lesser demons, with no mortal origins to speak of. In the world of CnC, there's only one religion that believes in a post-life existence where the person goes once they're dead, and that only begins once the body has been destroyed by cremation. It's universally understood and acknowledged that a person's essence, their being - who they are - is tied innately to their body, and once the body is gone, so is the person.

For the same reason, somebody who's been killed violently - incineration, disintegration, crushed under a giant's hammer, torn apart by animals etc. - can't be resurrected as there's no complete body to revive. Think of Resurrection as very delayed defibrillation - it's not returning life, it's just jump-starting it. By the same logic, attempting anything akin to a Resurrection on an incomplete body results in a Zombie - with an incomplete body and damaged/decayed brain, the resulting creature is just a shambling, mobile corpse.

As for the Theocracy thing, no - I'll do up an infographic explaining all this noise once the story has introduced y'alls to the main parties in the political landscape of this world :D