Death

Death System

Adventurers have dangerous jobs and death at some point is highly likely for any player character. Most PC deaths in Netheril: Age of Magic are temporary and can be survived either by talking to the NPC in purgatory and “respawning” (either to the Church of Conch or the place where the character died) or by the PC’s allies retrieving their body and resurrecting them via a scroll, spell or hiring the services of an NPC priest. All of these escapes from death will cost the character a percentage of their total experience points to represent the trauma of their occurrence. Current penalties are 5% to respawn, 3% if Raise Dead is cast, and 1% if Resurrection is used. In some situations, DMs will raise a PC without penalty, usually because a bug has caused the death.

As of the new release, we have added three new features to the death system above. One is the 'Well of Souls' where you can delete unwanted or completed characters, second is a 'Extra care' gold option currently set at 20k ( could be adjusted for balance moving forward ) which is instead of lost of XP and lastly 'Tyche's Luck' which is a random roll which may give you a boon or bane against your character returning to life.

Role-playing Death

There are no set rules on how a player should role-play a traumatic near-death experience, but it is advised and expected that players will do so appropriately in their chosen way. It is suggested that respawning straight to one’s body represents a “near miss” and respawning back to the church could be the character’s patron deity or other supernatural guardian spiriting them away to safety. It is common, and encouraged, for players to role-play their PC having some memory loss. For example, “How did I get here in the church? All remember is charging at that massive orc warlord…”.

Permanent Death

Player characters of level 20 or below may escape death in the above mentioned ways as often as necessary (though doing so often will become very expensive!). “Epic characters” (ie, those of level 21 or above) are considered to be extremely powerful and influential and playing for much higher stakes. Therefore they are subject to different rules regarding death, which can be found here. It is also quite acceptable for a player to choose themselves for their character to suffer a final death if they feel it is appropriate or fitting to a situation (such as losing a duel to the death with their archenemy). Note that for non-epic characters this is entirely at the player's choice and is not enforced.