DM: Twilight, your awareness goes hazy for a moment, but as your vision starts to clear up, you find yourself in a thick fog full of light.
Applejack: Oh, dang, we actually killed her and sent her to heaven.
DM: No, no, geez...
Rarity: You have to admit the symbolic visual language here is a little close to the mark.
Rainbow Dash: Alright, girls! Call up the nearest Cleric. It's time for this campaign's first Resurrection!
Fluttershy: "First"...?
DM: AHEM. I appreciate that you're having fun, but before we get too carried away... Twilight, your eyes adjust to the fog, and you realize you're floating amidst a cloudy field of stars. Though you can "stand," there is nothing physical in any direction save for you.
Twilight Sparkle: That doesn't really help with the whole "I've died and gone to the afterlife" misunderstanding... At minimum, I've been transported to a transitive plane of existence, surely. What you've described is very similar to what I've read of the Ethereal Plane, or maybe the Astral Plane.
DM: Valid, but you are perhaps overthinking this a touch.
Twilight Sparkle: Look, just tell me up front: Will I need to make a new character after this?
DM: Well... You are going to need a new-ish character sheet...
Twilight Sparkle: Still not helping!
Were it not for the scale of change, I would say this may be the group's first paragon path, but the scale suggests an epic destiny regardless of paragon paths.
A race change to something that is a better version of your current one isn't that big of a rules-side change. A human character being 'killed' by a particular trap in the Shattered Star AP simply increases four stats by +2 and possibly has to add "fe" to the sex/gender entry.
(It's been called the best trap ever and the overall effect is to turn your character into an Azlanti human who happens to be the spitting image of one of the surviving Runelords.)
So apparently Princess Cadance ended up here according to one of the children's books explaining her origin, originally a pegasus, she redeemed a villainous witch with her love and was transported to what the book (and I sort of love this) calls "The Celestial Zone" where she leveled up to alicorn and Celestia took her on as her adopted niece.
I sort of wish The Celestial Zone had somehow made a comeback, like during Tirek's invasion perhaps the four alicorns temporarily escape to that plane and contemplate what to do next.
At least nobody has suggested that it be called "the Twilight Zone"
To some extant, I tend to think of it as "the Security Camera Monitoring" plane. Pretty high end security system -- a "hallway" of wide screen COLOR monitors. If I'm really snarky, it is the "Stalking Twilight" plane.
Not a GM, but mom has the most infuriating ways to answer questions on certain things... Namely the simple question if "does Gandalf come back after the balrog"... The correct answer is, of course, YES.
It certainly is not "yes and no", specially when me ever finishing the book depended on the question.
Got so mad I threw my glasses across the floor in frustration, I get she's a bloody Hippie, but I was asking objectively... The character of Gandalf coms back to the fucking story later, philosophical hoopla about the Color he goes by, has NOTHING to do with my question.
That God I God into Doctor Who before her, and I was the one who had to explain Regeneration...
But even then she kept trying to simultaneously overcomplicate it while also trying to make it more vague and less clear cut... Iunno she just seems to prefer shit less clear cut, whilst I demand explanations from what I read.
Watching Game of Thrones with her was impossible, as she would talk during all the mythology and fantastical shit, and then shush me and try to get me to hyper focus on the political bullshit... When the POINT of the politics in thos books, and show, is that they are pointless, and distract people from what's ACTUALLY important... The eminent ice-zombie apocalypse.
When I tried to talk to her about Azor Ahai, she had NO idea what I was talking about, because she blocked out everything certain Religous char acts have said... And while the shitty ending of the series subverted expectations and suddenly made the finale about the fucking politics, even she was not satisfied, because all character and subtlety with it was dead...
...one again I start on topic, and end up bitching about something. Rip.
I've been part of plenty after this many years gaming on both sides of the screen. Often, it's a sign you're so far off of the rails there isn't even a sketch of the landscape so the GM is stalling to try and get enough time to think of something. Once when I did it, it was very deliberate as the PCs had blind teleported into an area dominated by a (naturally occurring) super dense fog that would need some improvement before reaching pea-soup status. Not being able to really see or hear really freaked them out, especially when they couldn't just make it go away with Dispel Magic.
Ya know, I actually do have a story about an in-game resurrection, and how I'm certain I accidentally ended a campaign because my character needed a new template! Just need a minute to organize my thoughts...
Way back in ye olden days of D&D 3.5, before the schism driven in groups over the existence of 4e, I was in a campaign during college that the DM decided would be Gestalt. For those who aren't aware: gestalt rules have you picking two classes at each level. Anything they both get, you take the better version of. (Very common, because there's each saving throw individually, base attack bonus, hit points, skill points...) If it's something only one class gets, you still get it! A great way to make overpowered characters, to various degrees of broken. It also included psionics, which the mention of has started forum wars. My character? Wizard-Psion. Out of every possible combination, I went with something... so squishy it was hilarious compared to the options.
Over the course of the campaign, we ran into and did all sorts of shenanigans. Including things like "bidding war for old PC spellbook", killing a positive-energy monster to death with its crystalized negative energy teeth, and including my character finding a Fountain Of Youth and potentially being cursed to be 12 years old forever. Which came a lot sooner, due to one act of overwhelming stupid on my part. One of the things we found along the way was an epic-level sentient magic item that could attack for massive positive energy or negative energy damage. What we found out later... was that anything it killed came back with a vengance (and a template to match the energy that killed it, even if it happened more than once). When fighting monsters that had a chance to kill when you looked at them, I dared to look to use a spell that would hit them harder than normal... and failed the save. (As a note: It wasn't worth it. Would have been one extra point of damage. Woo...) After the fight, said magic item... turned my character into an undead using obscure templates in odd sources I can't remember. So... yay, technically resurrected?
But the story doesn't end there! (Almost, but not quite.) One of the other party members was a druid... which hunted undead for being abominations of nature. So, I sweet-talked the staff into "trying again" (yes, I talked the staff into killing me to do something else). An undead-variant... off of positive energy, to slip into a loophole and avoid infighting in the party and other complications. ... Except none of us had any clue how to do that at the time, so I never got the template(s) for that, and we never had another session. Oops accidental campaign kill?