Death

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.

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.