SwiggitySwole

Is he stupid?

Technically, though Arena was all of Tamriel and Daggerfall was High Rock, northern Hammerfell and the disputed territory of Orsinium

It's not up to me, as the GM it's my job to interpret the players actions and ideas through the lenses of both the rules and the world.

Also we discussed it after it happened and everyone including the player who sacrificed themself wanted the plot to go forward that way.

Why is true resurrection out of range but plane hopping isn't? This seems like a great opportunity to have them complete a quest for some high level NPC who does have access to true resurrection

There are a few reasons for this that I left out of the post because the context required would have bloated the post, the first is simply that I try to avoid high level spellcaster NPCs because players tend to see them as the solution to everything, the closest thing they have is a wizard friend who studies magic but doesn't like to use it aside from things like identify.

Secondly the deceased character is from our previous campaign, which soft-ended when that character died because around the same time one of the other players had to leave the group but we got a new player who had never played before who wanted to join, we didn't want to slap them with an 8th level character sheet though so we started a new campaign with the understanding that around 8th level the two campaigns would converge and the new players character would join the old party. The player with the dead character is fulfilling the role of character who can enable the plane shifting, giving me a convenient way to write the character out when the time comes. The other 2 players will get to choose if they want to continue as their new or old characters. (This was all discussed with the players before starting the new campaign in very big picture terms)

Thirdly, plane hopping just feels more fun to me than standard resurrection and it adds to the weight of the moment. That character died by sacrificing themself. If you've played the 5e spelljammer adventure you'd be able to guess exactly how it happened. A running gag of the previous campaign is that no matter what misfortune befell them they'd always weasel their way out of serious consequences (despite my best efforts) and this would be the ultimate no consequences moment.

The backup plan is always just to make it up, but I prefer to stick to established lore with the hopes that 50 years of ironing out (or retconning) has made it internally consistent enough to get by.

It's a fairly realistic medieval adventure rpg, sword fighting is stance based and very hard, you also suck at everything to begin with because you start off as an illiterate blacksmiths son. The sequel is a continuation of his story. It's pretty story focused but you can definitely have a ton of fun just wandering around stealing shit and fighting people if you want to, once you get good at stealing and fighting

On the off chance that happens I'd probably give them one of the beast traits, probably one of the ones that's less useful like keen smell or web sense

This is a really good idea, I might make their laws very simplistic. I might even steal the ones from Animal Farm.

In my mind the mongrelfolk definitely won't be inherently evil. Paranoid or scared of outsiders, definitely. But they should have near-human intelligence, but slightly diminished.

Professor Moreau to me is the evil one but purely because he doesn't hold much regard for the lives of the people he has experimented on, especially in a world with polymorph magic and Druidic wildshape. Though Moreau will be helpful to the players and give them no good reason to kill him, since they're his chance to regain control of his lab.

I've been going back and forth on if Moreau will want the mongrelfolk dead, since they'd hold more scientific value to him kept alive.

I've not seen either of those but a quick search shows me that's 51 episodes of one series, 64 of another and a movie. That might be a little bit too much for the amount of prep time I have

I'm using flee mortals for my current campaign wherever possible, I have a werewolf quest planned, which isn't in FM. Though I might pivot to a basilisk hunt.

I know a handful of people who thought it looked like an impending disaster and gave it a wishlist so they could see the early negative reviews pour in

I don't want to make a "lifetime commitment" to a game, I've already tried that with my ex-wife.