What a player saw
A member of the party dies on the road home. You cast Healing I, the cheapest spell in the game, on the body, and he stands up again. There is no trip to a temple and no Resurrection, and he keeps every point of his Constitution.
I remembered Healing IV doing this when I played on the Amiga. The code shows that every level of Healing does it, Healing I included.
What should have happened
The spell for the dead is Resurrection, and the manual warns that it has a price. "The shock of dying will permanently lower the victim's Constitution one or two points." The program does exactly that. A hero raised by Resurrection comes back with 1 hit point and loses one or two points of Constitution, though never below 3.
Why Healing does it for free
When you cast a Healing spell outside a fight, the game never asks whether the target is alive. It adds the hit points it rolled, mends wounded parts of the body (more of them for the higher Healing spells), and then works out the hero's state again from his body and his hit points. A body with hit points above 0 and nothing missing counts as alive. Healing skips the shock of dying entirely.
There is some small print:
- The hit points have to end above 0. A body at -4 hit points needs at least 5 points of healing; a low roll leaves him dead, and you can simply cast again.
- A hero who died of a lost body part, such as a head that is gone, stays dead under Healing I and II, however many hit points they give him. Healing III and IV grow the part back, and he lives.
- It works only outside a fight, on the road, in a dungeon or in town. In battle the spell heals only a hero who is still alive.
In the hard early game, where a single Goblin can kill a fresh hero, a Priest with Healing I is quietly a resurrection service.
How I found out
I ran the original code for casting outside a fight with every Healing spell, on living members and on dead ones. The healing part has no test of whether its target is alive, and a dead member at 0 hit points healed by 1 comes back alive with the same Constitution.
Then I watched it in the 1987 game itself, in an Amiga emulator. Healing I cast on the map raised a dead Wizard to 5 hit points with his Constitution unchanged, and Healing III raised a member whose head was gone. In a fight it did nothing. Cast five times on a dead member, Healing I cost its magic point every time and left him dead. I had to force that order with the emulator's debugger, because as far as I have read the code, the battle menu would not offer a dead target at all.
In my recreation
My recreation plays the game exactly as it shipped in 1987 unless you ask for a fix. This one is listed as Healing raises the dead.
In 1987
Cast outside battle, the Healing spells bring a dead member back to life with no loss of Constitution, which makes Resurrection pointless.
With the fix
Healing refuses a dead member ("This character is unable to do this.", no MP spent), the way a potion does.
I left it out of my fixes, so a game disk made With Justin's fixes plays it as in 1987; pick Choose my own to have it.
When you make a game disk, the game asks which rules it plays: The 1987 original, With Justin's fixes, or Choose my own. To change a disk later, pick Set fixes on disk on the list of disks.