Partially recover a dead system with known limitations and penalties.
What This Skill Does
In D&D, Raise Dead brings a creature back to life but with penalties: reduced ability scores that recover over time. Unlike Resurrection (full recovery), Raise Dead returns the target in a weakened state. The real-world version is partial recovery: bringing a service back online in degraded mode, recovering a database with known gaps in recent data, or restoring a system from an older backup knowing that some recent state is lost. In this grimoire, Raise Dead is treated as a metaphorical spell with a shipping-now delivery profile. Canonical reference input: Raise Dead (spell).
When To Use
- A system is dead and full recovery (Resurrection) is too slow or not possible.
- Partial recovery with known limitations is better than staying dead.
- You need something running now even if it is not at full capacity — a degraded-mode restart.
Prerequisites
- No extra runtime dependencies beyond Hermes Agent and the normal toolset for this session.
Procedure
- Restate the target, the success condition, and any no-touch boundaries before taking action.
- Assess what can be recovered: what state is preserved, what is lost, and what is uncertain.
- Define the penalties: what limitations will the recovered system have compared to its pre-death state?
- Execute the partial recovery with clear documentation of what is degraded.
- Set a timeline for full restoration: when will the penalties be resolved?
- Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.
Deliverables
- A partial recovery plan: what comes back, what is lost, and what the degraded-mode limitations are.
- A timeline for full restoration from degraded mode to normal operation.
Pitfalls / Guardrails
- Keep the metaphor anchored to a real mechanism instead of drifting into lore.
- Be honest about the penalties. Partial recovery with undocumented limitations is worse than acknowledged degraded mode.
- Raise Dead is not a substitute for Resurrection — it is a faster option with real tradeoffs. Document those tradeoffs.
Verification
- Check that the result includes every deliverable promised above.
- Check that confirmed facts, assumptions, and inferences are visibly separated.
- Check that the metaphor still maps cleanly to a real operational mechanism.
Example Invocation
/raise-dead bring this [system/service/environment] back in degraded mode. What do we get back, what is lost, and when will it be fully restored?