Concept: a D&D-like setting that plays ease of access to resurrection magic by the book, except there are like a billion different methods, ranging from ones that are cheap, safe and easy, to ones that have lists of baroque requirements and improbable side effects as long as your arm – and each method only works once for any given individual. So you have a milieu where it’s not unlikely that even your average peasant could manage to get brought back once or twice, but adventurers quickly exhaust all of the convenient resurrection methods, and then things get Weird™.
An example of a simple method: lay the corpse out under an open sky on the first new moon following the victim’s demise, and speak eight words in Latin. The specific eight words vary depending on both the time of year and the date of the victim’s birth, but the calculations are simple enough that any hedge wizard can look them up for you, for a nominal fee. This one won’t restore any missing body parts, and the victim will be laid up in bed for at least a month recovering (take care they don’t overexert themselves and die again!), but it works for anyone – the celebrant doesn’t even need to understand the words.
An example of a moderately difficult method: prepare a potion using water from an underground spring, sap from a tree grown on a mountain’s peak, and ashes from a burnt lock of the victim’s hair. None of the ingredients can be exposed to sunlight or moonlight between the time they’re harvested and the time they’re consumed. The potion must be drunk by the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, who then recites the victim’s maternal lineage going back seven generations; any mistake or inaccuracy renders the ritual ineffective. This one doesn’t require the corpse to be present or intact, but if it isn’t, the victim has about a 30% chance of coming back as a barn owl. Nobody’s entirely sure why.
An example of a hard method: use your imagination!
The simplest method: shake them vigorously by the shoulders and command them to live, live, damn you!
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