How to resurrect dead characters?

If you don't want to see some character you liked getting killed, you can always use a mysterious technique known as "save edit" to resurrect them, like I did.

As a warning, there will be spoilers ahead, especially at the final part.

Tools

All you need is a text editor. I personally recommend Notepad++, but you can always go with something else you like, i.e. UltraEdit.

How does "dying" work on a technical standpoint

You can skip this part if you aren't interested in why it works.

From the save file point of view, when a character dies, 2 things happen. The character is removed from your roster and a tag of "xdied" will be generated. The first prevents you from using this character later on and the tag will indicate for certain events to happen later on since they check for these tags.

To resurrect someone, we need to revert these two actions.

How to actually resurrect someone?

First off, you need to find the save file.
It should be located at C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\TheBannerSaga\Local Store\save\saga1
Once you get there, look for the profile. 0 for profile 1 and 1 for profile 2, yada yada (The game uses 0 indexing for all you computer nerds out there).
Then when you get in there, you are generally looking for resume.save.json since that is what gets loaded once you hit the resume button (duh). However, if you are looking to import the file to TBS2, look for sav_finale.save.json.

1. The roster resurrection. The character is simply removed from the roster, you can just put it back into the roster. Use ctrl+f to open up the search box (most text editors have this hotkey, but this may vary). Look for a string of "roster": [". Make sure you look for the right caravan since you don't want to put this character in the wrong caravan. You can see what other characters are in this caravan to help you determine this. Go to the bottom of the roster and add the dead character back in. REMEMBER TO PUT IN THE COMMA. You need to add a comma after the current last character before starting a new line with the character you want to resurrect. If you forget the comma, then the save will be broken, you don't want that.

2. The story resurrection. Use ctrl+f to open up the search box (most text editors have this hotkey, but this may vary). Then look for "xdied". x being the character's name. For example, if you need to get Egil back, look for "egildied". There will be a "1" at the end of the line, indicating for a true boolean, change it to 0 and the tag will be gone.

Applications

Warning, this bit will contain major spoilers. Turn back if you don't want the story be spoiled.

My only application for this in TBS is to resurrect Egil because Onef betrayed me. I tried disabling some of the tags of Onef joining in hoping that this won't happen but it didn't work. If you want Ekkill, I suggest just recruit him. After the Onef betrayal, what happens is that Egil dies (if he didn't already, but then again, you can always just resurrect him like how I taught you to) and Oddleif gets stabbed.

On a technical point of view, what happened was that Egil was removed from your roster, a tag of him being dead appears, Oddleif gets an injury tag and some of your clansman gets killed (they are nameless so nobody cares, you can resurrect them if you want by looking for their tag and adding them back to the caravan). To counter this effect, you can do what I said earlier and resurrect Egil. I also suggest looking for the tag "6_onefstrikes": "1" and changing the 1 to 0 in case they check for the event in later games which may override some of the other tags.

If you want to get the innocent achievement (Alette doesn't want to hurt human or varl), look up the word "guilty" and change that tag to 0 and it should pop at the end.

To think of it, if anybody wants to give it a try, there is a tag "onefdied": "1" you get after the Onef betrayal, maybe if you add it into the list of tags, Onef won't be able to spring the trap since it means he gets killed earlier on, I'm not sure whether it will impact how Ekkill functions but someone is always welcome to try.

For the final choice of Rook and Alette, you can technically resurrect them by removing the tags and adding them to the roster. However, there will be a tag "7_alettedoomed": "1" or "7_rookdoomed": "1", do not mess with these two tags. If you change one of these to 0, your game will get messed up when you play TBS2. So if you just really like one of the characters, you can resurrect them in TBS2 by just adding them to the roster. I wouldn't suggest changing tags since it may screw up the story.