Does your setting have resurrection?

[jqavins]

From a game perspective, my problem with "resurrection as quest" is what to do with the player of the dead character...

I'm not endorsing or condemning quest-for-resurrection in general, but in answer to this, the player often can temporarily take over a prominent NPC. I've done this successfully; it wasn't a resurrection situation, but a different case of a player who needed a character that would last only one adventure.

Spoiler: Self-serving Tangent

Show

I was taking over as DM for one adventure to give the regular DM a chance to play a character in the world he'd created. I took a favorite NPC, a centuries old, very successful elven shop keeper, and gave him a past as a high level thief (AD&D) on a lifelong quest to regain a family heirloom. He'd gone into business on the theory that if you sit long enough in one place the whole world will pass by, and it worked; when he obtained a lead on a piece of it, he asked his friends - the party - for help retrieving it, and he went along. His skills had gone rusty over the years, but came back during play with each success. It was a great success, if I do say so myself.