New Power: Return from the Dead, please review!

[Pantheras]

I'm a fan of In Nomine and I was looking for a power to emulate coming back from the dead.  Not finding one, I wrote one.  I'd like feedback. 
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Return from the Dead (-4)
Description: Everyone dies, but … you can get better.
Musts: You must have a level of Recovery: Inhuman, Supernatural or Mythic.  You must attach this power to the same Catch as your Recovery.  This power has an inherent additional catch: Old Age.
Skills Affected: Endurance
Effects:
- Healing Corpse.  After death, your body will heal.  Your healing time is based upon the level of Recovery that you possess. If your body has been utterly destroyed, you will form a new body at the place that fits the story, either your personal story, someone else’s story, or the overall story.  If the final blow that slew you was dealt using something that satisfies the Catch for your recovery, then you’re not coming back.  Recovery from an extreme circumstance takes at least three days (what can I say, there’s a precedent for this sort of thing.)  New bodies will have same age you had when you died.
- Ghostly Form. (+1)  In this variant, your “soul” appears near to where you died, opening you up to the vulnerabilities of Ghosts (destroyed by sunrise, being consumed by other ghosts, etc.)  If your “soul” is destroyed before your body has recovered then you’re gone forever, leaving behind a very good looking corpse.
- Patron. (+1)  This variant means that your Power depends upon an arrangement with a Supernatural Patron providing you with either a new body (that looks exactly the same) or the healing of your body despite its dead condition.  In choosing this variant, you must incur a debt to your Patron each time you come back. The location the new body appears depends upon where your Patron can put it, or in a place that’s appropriate for the story.  Essentially, this variant means that you don’t really own the power, per se, only that you have ready access to it.
- New Face (+1) Each time you come back from the dead, you have a new body, with a new face, a new voice, possibly even a new gender.  The only caveat is that your new body does look related to your previous body (like a brother or daughter, cousin or uncle.)  Your new face and form will make it difficult for your old friends and allies to trust the new you, though it will also make it more difficult for your old enemies to target you.  Most pieces and parts from your old body (hair, nails, etc) are no longer useful to connect to you, magically, but blood from your previous body can be used.   Family members, objects important to you, and your True Name, however, are still viable symbolic targets.

[Hick Jr]

There's actually already a [-0] power for this, Undying. But this looks great.

[Quantus]

Are you playing this in a DV setting, or something more akin to the In Nomine worlds?

Some DV setting notes:
I would change the New Face Option to be more along the lines of possession of an existing body, similar to what we saw the villain of Ghost Story attempt, or else add it as another variant.  And similarly, an option that bypasses the Old Age Catch would make sense based on that same character.  Also, Re. Ghostly form:  would that be a normal Ghost, or the disembodied Soul like Harry.  GS featured both types, and there were extra downsides to the latter (which may or may not have any real bearing in your game). 

Random thoughts:  A higher power variant where you can come back as multiple copies of yourself starfish style could be cool. The classic Hydra would have a limited version of this. 

[Deadmanwalking]

Uh...being immortal sans Catch is already available for free, at least by implication. Check out the Ghoul Catch, which involves staying dead if killed. This strongly implies that at Supernatural Recovery or better, you just don't die unless your Catch is used. And...not dying isn't actually that cool, mechanically. You can already not die whenever you like by conceding, so it only comes up in very specific circumstances, and even then you can sill inflict an immortal with permanent fates worse than death.

It's just not worth any Refresh, to be honest. I mean, I guess coming back instead of not dying might let you play possum...but that's worth -1 Refresh at most. Look at Living Dead.

[Quantus]

I dont think the other versions cover you quite so thoroughly as this one.  I mean, in the other cases if the body is completely destroyed thats pretty much it, yes?

[Deadmanwalking]

I dont think the other versions cover you quite so thoroughly as this one.  I mean, in the other cases if the body is completely destroyed thats pretty much it, yes?

That's still really niche, since your Catch still works to do the job. It's worth -1 at most.

[Quantus]

That's still really niche, since your Catch still works to do the job. It's worth -1 at most.

You might be right.  You could conceivably get some useful things from the Ghost Form, or from the New Face bit.  At ther very least you should probably add some extra downside to teh effect of how this will attract the attention of some cosmically heavy hitters, as has been alluded to in CD and by WOJ.  This is supposed to be something very few have actually managed to do (as opposed to just healing damage or preventing it)

[Pantheras]

hrm - I didn't see the Undying power.  If you could give me the page number for Undying, I'd really appreciate it so I can modify it towards what I'm going for.

Return from the Dead doesn't -prevent- you from dying, it just brings you back once you do, even from total annihilation of your physical body.  Once you come back, you're not the Living Dead, you're alive - so very, very alive.  The Toughness powers don't prevent you from being killed, they just make it more difficult.  The Recovery powers don't allow you to totally recover from extreme consequences, and I assume Death is one of those.  If either of those two sets of powers did what this power does, I wouldn't have written it up.

Maybe the word "Healing Corpse" was a misnomer  - I was trying to imply that the person's body would heal Even If the person was dead.  Once the soul/spirit/whatever is -back- in its body, then it wouldn't be a corpse anymore.

Maybe I should go with "Death is a Minor Inconvenience" : Unless killed by special means (outlined by your Catch), you won't stay dead.  Even if your body is wholly destroyed, no "death" result is ever permanent.  The time before you return is based upon the level of Recovery that you possess.  The return time from total annihilation is at least three days.

Setting a low value on this Power's refresh cost seems ... I dunno.  I mean, shouldn't coming back from the dead be a really big deal?  Wasn't there actually an entire book about it?  Or is this power something that just Should Not Exist in the Dresdenverse? 

Really, the purpose of this power was to explain a character whose only "real" power is that he can never really die.  He's been burned to death, cut to ribbons, drawn and quartered, drowned, thrown into a star, torn apart by wolves, swallowed whole a few times, stabbed in the heart, decapitated, and shot.  He's been shot a lot, actually.  He just ... gets back up after a while and keeps going.  He's older than time and yet ... he Endures.  (He has the Doesn't Age power, which is considered a +0 refresh I think.)   So, I was thinking this power seemed relatively powerful.

But maybe this power can be achieved by combining Spirit Form with Human Form (Involuntary Change) and Recovery (-3, -5 or -7 refresh) where your Recovery Power are not available unless you've "shifted" into your Spirit Form which can't happen unless you've been killed.

[Deadmanwalking]

What you're missing is that Recovery powers already do this, and are useful otherwise. Living Dead also does this as well, mechanically speaking. Charging crap-loads of Refresh for something that's already available cheaply isn't really a good plan.

[Pantheras]

I haven't read anything in the Recovery powers that state you can come back from the dead.  Inhuman Recovery's Total Recovery says you can recover totally from any consequence except extreme ones (so yes to a Broken Leg, Second-Degree Burns, etc, but not Extreme Consequences, which I is assume is much, much worse.)  Superhuman Recovery doesn't expand on Total Recovery and Mythic Recovery also doesn't expand on Total Recovery.  What Superhuman and Mythic Recovery -do- is speed up recovery time, increase your fatigue limits and help you to clear away mild physical consequences.

Is Death considered only a Severe Consequence in this game, and thus Inhuman Recovery allows you to come back from the dead?  Or is Death considered a mild physical consequence and is thus covered by other effects of the Recovery powers? 

[Deadmanwalking]

Death isn't a consequence at all, it's a result of being taken out, and like all such, entirely based on GM fiat. It's not a real mechanic at all in at least one sense. As mentioned, read some existing Catches, the one for Ghouls explicitly includes the phrasing "Also, dead is dead with a ghoul; if you inflict enough massive trauma (e.g., decapitation), it’s not something they come back from."

If that doesn't at least imply that otherwise you could get up from 'death' with Supernatural Recovery, I don't know what does, or what it means.

Also, leaving Recovery aside entirely, there's still the example of Living Dead.

[Hick Jr]

I'll reiterate- Coming back from the dead absolutely isn't worth this much Refresh. In point of fact, it isn't worth refresh at all. The [-0] power Undying does this. I'm not saying this is a bad power. I'm saying it's overcosted to all hell. What DMW means is that a Recovery power makes you immortal in the sense that you won't die of old age. Ever. And you become extremely hard to kill. This power's only use that I can think of (Accepting a concession or take-out that involves you dying) is so niche it's almost not worth mentioning. 


Also, what? Mythic recovery explicitly gets rid of Extreme consequences.

[Quantus]

Is Death considered only a Severe Consequence in this game, and thus Inhuman Recovery allows you to come back from the dead?  Or is Death considered a mild physical consequence and is thus covered by other effects of the Recovery powers?

I wouldnt have thought so, but it sounds like others disagree.  In terms of the DV as shown in the novels, being an "immortal" (which honestly is an overused and ill-defined term) has more to do with aging and natural lifespan than it does with being able to come back from actual Death, and none of the powers would cover the kind of complete annihilation of your body the way this would (Which is why EVERYBODY is affraid of Nukes).  Harry has supposedly attracted the attention of "Big Things" by pulling it off.  And with how Corpsetaker was able to pull  herself back together and start affecting the world after having been properly Killed, which fundamentally changed how she was able to influence the living and ultimately possess other bodies. From a story standpoint, it /should/ be expensive.  Whether it is actually worth the (-5) refresh is more subjective, and probably has to do more with how it is implemented in your specific game. 

[Dr.FunLove]

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Some beings are defined as hard to kill. Others are hard to kill and ageless (like the Fae). Others are true immortals (never grow old, never die unless somehow something figures out that Halloween is a bad day for you) such as the Faerie Queens.

Probably only needs to cost something if it has a mechanical effect - like your stress and consquences fill up to take you out...but you the blow that would take you out fails to do so, as an example.

[GryMor]

It's a trivial restriction on the sorts of Consequences you can take, Concessions you can give and the Taken Out results that can be imposed upon you. It doesn't stop you from being taken out, it has no mechanical impact, I'd leave it as an aspect and invoke/compel it as needed. You may also want to take Recovery if it clears out pesky issues like missing body parts, but it many ways this is mechanically worse than a group of spirits with: "We are Legion" and "Distributed Consciousness"