I don't care how you die, the most fun way to come back is reincarnation. Sure, spells like
raise dead and
true resurrection bring you back just as you were before, but with
reincarnate, you could come back as
anything! Well, so long as your definition of 'anything' is 'bugbear, dwarf, elf, gnoll, gnome, goblin, half-elf, half-orc, halfling, human, kobold, lizardfolk, orc, or troglodyte'. I really like the element of chance involved in
reincarnate; it feels right to be rolling on some big percentile table when you come back from the dead in D&D. But it feels like there should be more options for what you come back as, for better or for worse. So when one of the characters in
one of my ongoing campaigns died (you'll see who in a later update), I decided the time was right to make my own table. Well, tables.
I took some inspiration from the old AD&D version of
reincarnate, which gave you a chance to come back as a centaur, a satyr, a badger, or any number of other woodland creatures. It makes sense for a druid spell. So on my tables, you have a chance (albeit a much smaller one) to come back as an animal or fey creature. I even added plants and vermin, something I feel druids would appreciate, though the recipient of the
reincarnate might feel a little less comfortable with it. I think the possibility (however small) of coming back as a flower or a cockroach really adds to the sense of risk that this inexpensive shortcut back to the world of the living should have.
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"Okay, maybe we should have sprung for raise dead, but I think we still have what it takes to bring down that lich!"
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I also wanted to expand the number of races you could come back as, making full use of the
Advanced Race Guide. This is where more of my own personal opinions went into this table, because there are some races in the the
ARG that I am wholly against. Some, like the half-vampire
dhampir or the sci-fi
android I left out because I think they are dumb and I would never let my players play them. Others, like the half-wyvern half-kobold
wyvaran and the four-armed
kasatha, I think are overpowered, cheesy, and dumb, and I would never let my players play them. But, hey, feel free to modify these tables to include them if you like them. I won't judge. I would have excluded the notorious Mary-Sue-bait catfolk race from my campaigns had one of my players not convinced me that they could be played realistically, like asshole cats, not just as special snowflake fetish-fodder.
I also, of course, put
my own homebrew races in there.
So there are a lot of things a player could come back as using these reincarnation tables. Even some monsters are available as rare options! Take a look, and use them in your game if you like.
