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Y u no ressurect Erika? [game lore, possible spoilers]


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In Exile 3 and its Avernum counterpart, Erika perishes when Rentar-Ihrno activates the curse that Garzahd put on her. Erika doesn't appear in any later canon, so it would be safe to assume that she's gone for good.

 

However, death doesn't seem permanent in the Avernum universe as there are resurrection spells and whatnot. In that case, is there any official reason why no archmages have tried to resurrect Erika (or any other key character for that matter)? Or is she deader than dead?

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Except for the party itself, all deaths do seem final in Avernum. No one else is ever revived. No one else talks about resurrection, as far as I can remember. As of the second trilogy, even your party only falls unconscious.

 

—Alorael, who thinks revival of the dead is just a remnant of Avernum's history as Exile and Exile's descent from Ultima and D&D.

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  • 2 months later...

I seem to recall the only reference to raising the dead in cannon I can think of is in A1 when you slay Hawthorne. I believe something gets said about how his dust blows out the window so they can't resurrect him. Could be fuzzy memory on my part, though, as it's been over a decade now.

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You know, we can get into a lengthy discussion over how adventurers preserve the dust of their fallen comrades intact, and the mechanical difficulties of rendering something as nuanced as the way in which a fireball scatters the ashes of the recently deceased, and how magic that can restore human life to something that no longer bears even the vaguest resemblance to a human corpse (let alone a living body) can't just work on one mote of dust or a few and instead takes a good hefty dice bag's worth of the stuff (herein defined as the amount preserved from a standard dusted adventurer, which is also more than was left of Erika, Solberg, Hawthorne, et al)...Or we can just recite the MST3k mantra, as Jeff* himself seems to be inclined to in this case, and acknowledge that resurrection in the older Exile/Avernum games doesn't make sense, and maybe doesn't need to.

 

*He has not addressed this particular question as far as I know, but his commentary on similar questions tends to be "it's magic. Why do you expect it to make sense?"

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Except for the party itself, all deaths do seem final in Avernum. No one else is ever revived. No one else talks about resurrection, as far as I can remember. As of the second trilogy, even your party only falls unconscious.

 

—Alorael, who thinks revival of the dead is just a remnant of Avernum's history as Exile and Exile's descent from Ultima and D&D.

 

 

Indeed, it seems that A4 retconned resurrection out of existence, so all sequels after Erika's death preclude it.

 

In-universe, if the curse on Erika was so powerful even she couldn't lift it, isn't it plausible it could have precluded resurrection as well?

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This is the man who kept himself alive long after he should have died for Avernum. I think if he were called back he'd come, exhaustion and all.

 

—Alorael, who would rather take the explanation that Solberg's half-lich self-maintenance fell apart when he died. He couldn't be resurrected because his existence was already too delicate of an arcane balance.

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Originally Posted By: Trenton the Crazed Twilight Teen
Yes, but this is Avernum, Not DnD


But my understanding is that Exile had a lot of things "borrowed" from D&D, which have been left in throughout the remakes. Thus, things like resurrection might not make sense in the games anymore (and especially in A4-6 and A:EftP), but they're still present within them.
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Not really. Resurrection seems to be entirely ignored by the plot. Putting restrictions on when or how it works can fix plot holes, and D&D-congruent restrictions work well enough, but it's all just patching. The easy but entirely outside narrative explanation is that resurrection is there as a game mechanic but not as a fact of the fictional world.

 

—Alorael, who finds it equally plausible to think that only a very small handful of people can be revived. Think of it as a genetic quirk. You're just lucky enough to have that vital ability!

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Well, they're arguably amongst the most powerful forces in Avernum, at least on the human side of things (since the Vahnatai and the dragons are probably stronger, and also inaccessible, we won't count them). Who is stronger? The Five, and maybe a select few like Aimee, or Mahdavi?

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Originally Posted By: Milla
And so just happens that all player characters have this skill?

Yes. It's a trait with a number of other advantages without which you really just can't make it as an adventurer. There are others, of course, but you don't play as them; their lives are nasty, brutish, and short without save/reloads.

—Alorael, who doesn't think the world is ready for realistic depiction of life as people who charge overwhelming numbers of enemies with swords.
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I remember a friend describing a D&D game where he played a group of 4 peasants. Most of the time it was normal hack and slash. The fun came when the evil party he ran with would send his peasants into town to buy supplies and being peasants the first thing they would always do was hit a bar and spend all the money drinking. Then they would return to camp without the supplies, get killed by the other players, and he would roll up new peasants.

 

He said he never got them past 2nd level. smile

 

Realism is where you make it.

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Originally Posted By: Click friend and enter
Originally Posted By: Milla
And so just happens that all player characters have this skill?

Yes. It's a trait with a number of other advantages without which you really just can't make it as an adventurer. There are others, of course, but you don't play as them; their lives are nasty, brutish, and short without save/reloads.

—Alorael, who doesn't think the world is ready for realistic depiction of life as people who charge overwhelming numbers of enemies with swords.


That means true the true heroes are from Nethack and ADOM who finish the game.
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