RPG settings with a heavy focus on Saṃsāra and reincarnation

I'll give this a bump because this interests me as well.

>>54251866
Exalted, which has as its primary conceit that you're playing Solar Exalted, reborn demigods who have been sealed away for 1500 years, now released and empowered to make the world a better place.

>>54253042
>bumping 2hu

>>54253221
Exalted doesn't really do anything with that theme though. It's just a background note.

>>54253465
Why not?

>>54253578
You can pretty easily make a storyline out of it. Have your PCs play the same Exaltations reincarnated throughout the ages, add in some Sidereal crap about reincarnation being handled in heaven, etc.

>>54255165
>Exalted
>throughout the ages
Hahahahahahahahahaha.

>>54251866

Honestly this sort of thing would works best in a system with high death rate, and a bunch of mechanisms for the reincarnations being a fairly common thing that doesn't break up parties but does produce some "lingering" issue.

Wraith's whole system of "when your corpus or your fetter is entirely destroyed the entire party is sucked into a psychic play that the PC has to argue and fight their way out of to avoid being consigned to eternal oblivion, but it leads to your shadow getting stronger/spending a load of willpower points/pathos and all the other PCs learn a little bit of their backstory.

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>>54258755

I myself find appealing the prospect of playing through a single incarnation who is interested in what they were before, and in trying to settle the unfinished business their past lives left behind.

Now that I think about it, D&D 4e and Pathfinder both have such a thing in the deva and samsaran races respectively, although the setting is not quite set up to emphasize such previous incarnations.

>>54251866
My headcanon's always been that petitioners and whatever they evolve to remember their lives just fine, but it's a few decades at the very beginning of their existence of millennia after millennia, so it simply doesn't matter that much after a while. Mortality is the infancy of an outsider, and who wants to dwell on theirs? Especially since, D&D defaulting to a pseudo-medieval setting, life sucks for almost everyone.

>>54251866

Pathfinder's Asia supplement had a PC race that was essentially based around remembering previous incarnations. Cool idea, even if the setting was a hodgepodge that didn't do anything interesting with it.

Also, in Rokugan's d20 iteration, the only available raise the dead spell was reincarnate. Interestingly, rather than simply spawning a new body, they fluffed it as someone realizing who they once were, and the soul having somehow traveled through time such that they've had time to grow up all over again. Hell of a way to come back!