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Death & Respawn

Death is a setback, not a wipe. It costs you pace — absorption slows until the grave-chill thaws — but you keep your level, banked experience, skills, gear, and learned spells.

What kills you

  • HP reaching 0 from damage, a bleeding wound, or a trap.
  • A critical of rank 8 or 9 to the head, neck, or eyes — instant death regardless of remaining HP (see Combat).
  • A high-difficulty trap triggered at low HP.

On death: the death-rest

You do not respawn instantly — you lie where you fell, able only to speak and think, while a decay timer (about 5 minutes) runs:

Choice Consequence
Be raised (a cleric casts spell 318) Wake where you fell at quarter HP, with only half the chill — and your unabsorbed field experience survives
The temple road (friends DRAG your body to a temple cleric, you say CONFIRM) Same half-chill mercy, bought with silver — see below
Lie still When the timer lapses, the world reclaims you gently — the normal grave-chill
DEPART CONFIRM Go to your region's resting place now, at double the chill (DEPART alone shows the time left)

The mercy ladder: raised < reclaimed < departed. Without a raise, you wake at your region's resting place — the chapel in Coldhollow (room 1021), the Temple of the Dawnflame in Emberford, or the Kettle hot spring in the Highreach; death never carries you across a region's border:

Consequence Detail
HP Half your maximum HP
Spirit You return at 1 spirit
Posture Standing; roundtime cleared
Gear Fully intact — nothing drops or is lost
Skills & spells Fully intact

The grave-chill

Death takes no banked experience — but any unabsorbed field experience slips away with your body, and a grave-chill settles in: while it lingers, absorption runs at a quarter rate, the withheld share thawing the chill.

You work it off by hunting: only pulses that have field experience to absorb reduce it. A cleric's raise (318) halves it and spares your field pool; departing early doubles it; and a banked deed waives the respawn chill entirely (HELP DEEDS, earned at the shrine). EXPERIENCE shows any chill you still carry.

The temple road — the pay-for-cleric

The classic rescue when no player cleric is at hand: drag the dead to the temple.

  1. A friend takes the body — DRAG <name> — and hauls it room by room (heavy work; the body trails like freight).
  2. The moment the body lies in a temple cleric's room, the Flame keeps vigil: the decay clock stops, and the priest makes the offer once — the fee, and one word.
  3. The dead player's spirit must consent: say CONFIRM. No spirit is compelled back unwillingly.
  4. The temple takes its due — 100 + 30 × level silver, from your purse first, your bank account for the rest. If coin is short, the Flame keeps honest books, and you keep lying there.

The raise itself is the same half-chill mercy as a cleric's 318: quarter HP, one spirit, field pool intact, wake where the body lies. Father Hollis keeps the vigil at the Coldhollow chapel; a GM can consecrate other priests (/MAKECLERIC).

The shaken debuff

For 45 seconds after respawning you are shaken: −10 Attack Strength and −10 Defensive Strength, applied as a timed effect (source shaken). It expires on its own; there is no way to shorten it.

Do not run straight back into a fight after dying. Rest in town, let the shaken effect lapse, heal to full, then return.

Bleeding out

A bleed that drains faster than you recover will eventually kill you even after you escape combat — common after fleeing a fight wounded, or from a trap sprung while lockpicking. Counter it with TEND, POSTURE prone (fastest regen), or a recovery node. If it wins, normal death rules apply.

The REROLL command

Distinct from death, REROLL sends an existing character back through character creation as a fresh level 1, keeping only the name. It is destructive: it wipes all carried and worn items and zeroes silver (a carried pet is spared), and is blocked while dead or in combat.

REROLL            preview what you would lose
REROLL CONFIRM    perform it (irreversible)

A disconnect mid-reroll rolls back cleanly — nothing is saved until creation completes.

GM note

A GM can /heal (/revive, /raise) a player to full with no exp penalty and no forced respawn, or run the real death path on themselves with /killself for testing. See the GM Guide.

See also