/5eg/ - Fifth Edition General

>This ugly SON OF A LICH is REDUCING ADVENTURERS TO ASH and basically you are FUCKING STUPID

>How do you handle resurrections and death? Do you go by the book or use one of the alternative rules written in other 5e books?
Very carefully. I think the most important thing about balancing it is knowing how to manage resources your players get, and balance encounters.

Other ways I handle it are, having afterlife experiences mentioned, making so player actually have to bargain with the higher powers that have the soul now rather than just dump gold into the problem, those type of things.

AKA - make death fun!

Most campaigns I've ever played and ran in would end before a player would have access to any resurrection, and NPCs with access to those spells are quite rare as well. Such NPCs would demand payment in the needed materials, as well as a lump sum--though they'd naturally be willing to take it out in trade. There's a lot a group of motley, traveled adventurers can do for a person or group to balance those scales.
I've also always wanted to do the classic, "journey into hell/Hades/Tartarus/a strange immaterial plane to retrieve the party member's soul!" thing.

That said, I've never been a game where a PC died and resurrection seemed to be an actually achievable goal at all, so it basically has never come up any which way.

whenever someone gets res'd they roll on the reincarnate table no matter what spell was used.

So I'm currently running a high level mini-campaign for my players, and they're about to finish it up. They're on a remote island that's inhabited by friendly natives that have helped the PCs throughout the campaign. The party has finally located the BBEG responsible for all the evil shenanigans on the island - it's a lich.

I want to set up the final encounter so that once they kill the lich and find his phylactery, the party will be met with a conundrum: If they destroy the phylactery, the idle volcano on the island will explode and cover most of the populace in lava and ash because the lich cast a spell on the volcano to keep it idle and preventing eruption.

That said, I'm not opposed to the party having their cake and eating it, too. Can anybody think of a solution that could destroy or permanently neutralize the lich, but keep the volcano from exploding?

I'm interested in this too. It seems half their domain spells are outside the cleric list, at least.

Slows down gameplay.

>Can anybody think of a solution that could destroy or permanently neutralize the lich, but keep the volcano from exploding?
That's the players' job, not yours.

Gandalf is totally a Celestial Pact Warlock

Also is anyone using the encounter building rules presented in Xanathar's?

I disagree. But I understand it's just a different style of DMing I prefer, so I'm not going to argue at length about it.