God's Good Graces

In the event of your characters untimely demise, worry not, for the gods smile upon you. When killed, your body becomes a tombstone with your name and face on it. It weighs as much as you did, including all of your equipment. This tombstone can be carried back somewhere to perform a ritual and bring the character back to life, or destroyed to end them permanently and get their loot.

This can be a place of significance to this god, something generic like a church or something with more story relevance. It can be wherever home base is, or you can require the players to reach certain points in the campaign in order to get their characters resurrected (your friend died by the lich's hand, now to get them back you have to destroy his phylactery, make a temp character >:).

The basic idea is there: satisfy this entity's conditions and life will be restored.