Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
(B) to the one to four 9th-level-or-higher clerics you might find in a Large Town or larger settlement
According to the standard D&D demographics a large town has a 17% chance of having a 9th level cleric (1d6+3), but a small city has a 75% percent chance of having a 9th level cleric (1d6+6, roll twice), a large city is guaranteed to have multiple 9th level or higher clerics (1d6+9, roll three times) and has a 42% chance of having a shockingly powerful 15th level cleric. A metropolis is guaranteed to have at least four 13th level clerics (1d6+12, roll four times) and has a 47% chance of having a game-breakingly powerful 18th level cleric (which also means you get an extra 2 9th levels in the bargain).

Keeping in mind that D&D defines settlements in restricted fashion, so these larger categories are not uncommon. A small city only requires 5000 people, a large city only 12000, and a metropolis only 25000. This is actually fairly common. This list gives me 36 such metropoli in Europe in 1300 AD. A rule of thumb is you'll get a metropolis under D&D assumptions for every 50,000 square miles (depending upon environmental and political factors) an area roughly the size of Greece. That will also net you around 5 small and large cities and at least a dozen large towns. So even a relatively small kingdom (Greece is less than half the size of Italy or Poland) has a pretty good chance of having close to a dozen clerics of level 9 or higher. Assuming a roughly even distribution of alignments among the high-powered servitors of the gods (which is necessary of your kingdom is not strongly pulled in one ethical direction), there is almost certainly at least one cleric capable of casting raise dead for a person of any alignment in a given state.

And that's just clerics. Druids - which have a really weird demographic presence in D&D - can bring people back from the dead starting at 7th level using reincarnate, which is both cheaper and doesn't care about the condition of remains. Yes, it sticks you in a new form, but there are various ways around this.

Additionally, you don't actually need a 9th level caster to cast raise dead, you just need a divine caster of any level with a raise dead scroll (which only costs 6125 gp). It only takes one cleric of one appropriately greedy faith (FR has several, starting with Waukeen, any church of wealth in D&D is effectively big pharma) to flood the market with scrolls of this type. Any rich family with any sense keeps just such a scroll in a vault somewhere in case of need and has their resident cleric cast it when such a need arises. Effectively, anyone whose net worth hits the mid five figures (50,000 gp and up) should be expected to have a raise dead contingency of this kind in place, and anyone in the six-figure range swaps in resurrection instead. This certainly includes any king. A king is the highest level aristocrat in a metropolis, and therefore has a minimum level of 13 and 120,000 gp to his name personally.

Ed Greenwood's paragraph about the laws actually confirms this. It's special pleading on the part of the author intended to neutralize a distortional effect built into the rules that would ruin the feel of the world he tried to generate. In point of fact, banning the use of a rare but exceedingly valuable process from access by the upper classes is the exact opposite of how social systems work. This is one of several examples of special pleading inserted by Ed Greenwood into FR campaign materials that make it very clear how actually playing by the rules makes FR impossible.

At the end of the day you basically have one of four scenarios when it comes to any powerful magical effect that violates known understanding of living processes, and the corresponding distortions on the historical condition you are attempting to match as a result:
1. Not available at all, no distortion.
2. Requires an epic question, minimal distortion that may have historical significance but does not impact everyday life.
3. Rare, restricted to a special subgroup or those with vast resources, significant distortion that will have a broad impact on everyday life.
4. Common, available to roughly everyone to at least some degree. Distorts setting such that it bears little to no resemblance to historical model.

In D&D, resurrection operates under the third grouping, but the distortions are largely ignored in extant settings along with the impact of a massive number of other magical abilities because at the end of the day no one has any idea what really results because you're dumping too much weirdness into the system and attempting to redesign from first principles throws up possibilities that are not amenable to functional gameplay - such as eternal rule of dragons over everyone else with humanoid civilization never developing.