Death and Injury

Quick about death for those desperate and impatient

If you die, your ghost will leave the dead body behind, and you need a new one.

For this, you can:

• find a shrine for resurrection or
• find a cleric (player) to resurrect you.

Shrines can be found all over the world. Each shrine is dedicated to a certain god or goddess, and the god you chose for yourself will affect some effects of the resurrection. So you cannot take all your combat experience over to the new body. It depends on the god to decide how much you loose, so be a faithfull follower.

Note that a Cleric does not NEED to do that, and it's his their right to choose the conditions.

For those not so unfortunate

First of all I'd like anyone who is completely new to Xyllomer, and especially anyone who has not MUDded before, combat as a new character (newbie) can be lethal. In fact in a one on one fight, most new characters have a hard time to kill a rabbit.
Yes, this a somewhat unrealistic feature of the game, I rationalise it to myself by thinking of very large rabbits with big, pointy teeth. Many of you who have played D&D in the past will recognise the ancestry of this issue of physical power as regards a newly made character.

Alright, now let's deal with injury. Unless your character is intended purely for roleplaying and will never venture into contact with any of the monsters that populate the world, you are going to have some need of the knowledge on this page. Whatever you fight, if your character is young and inexperienced they will end up doing some bleeding. If you fight something too strong, you will probably end up doing a lot of bleeding and even if you run away, you may die of bloodloss. This is a terribly frustrating way to lose a character's life.

There is a command available to you to halt your character's bloodloss, but beware, the use of this command requires knowledge of the first aid skill. The command is: aid and it cannot be used while in combat. The skill should be one of the very first that you train if you wish your character to enter combat. But if your character is already physically in a bad shape and you do not know the skill well, you should not attempt to use it, since you might open your wounds even further, which is worse than waiting for the bleeding to stop on its own.

Once you know how to deal with bleeding, your chances of survival are much better. However there will still be many enemies stronger than your young character on the game. If they are strong enough and are also using a heavy enough weapon with a cutting edge, you can find yourself suddenly bleeding heavily and missing a limb!

The bleeding you can care for with your first aid skill, but how do you deal with the limb? If you have time before you leave the room, you should pick up the limb. Then you should take it as fast as you can to a temple and ask the priest to replace the limb. Usually the command: fixlimb <limbname> will work. You should give the full description of the limb as it appears to you and give it to the priest.
A priest will do this a few times for free, but after a couple of services from a priest you will find you have built up a debt. It is wise to: check your credit after each time you recieve a service from a priest. It is also best to use a priest of the god that you follow or a friendly god, both for In Character reasons and for game-code reasons briefly described below.

Just as a piece of additional information, if you lose an arm or if somehow you break an arm then all armour that covers that part of your body falls to the ground. Even if you are wearing a long coat of chainmail and you break an arm, the whole armour falls off. It would be great if you just lost the sleeve along with the limb, but sadly this is not yet possible.

Allright. So you bled a little and you had your arm chopped off. What next? Well, after that you quite often find that you are dead. If you die, your ghost will leave the body and rise into the air above it. If you really need to then you can shout curses at whatever killed you before you leave. Once dead you can travel in most of the same directions that you could when alive, although some you can't, and trying some actions will earn you a reminder of your non-physical state. You can also use the command: start to travel to either your racial, or another nominated start point.

Now is probably the time to say that exploring parts of the world in a ghost state, that you can't reach whil alive, is frowned upon by the wizards. Doing something that is frowned upon by the wizards is not a good idea. Because you can't see the frown, a wizard may find another way of letting you know that you did something they are not happy with .. like dropping a bolt of lightning down your newly ressurected character's back and watching them dance.

Which brings us nicely to the subject of ressurection. You need a new body and the only power that can give you one is the power of a god. You should travel to a temple and: pray there for a new body. Dying and getting resurrected costs your character some of the experience that they have earned. In case you are not aware of the concept, experience points are used to determine your character's mental and physical development. Experience can be earned by talking with NPCs or other player characters, by killing NPCs or monsters (NO experience is given for killing other player characters), or by completing one of the many tasks that NPCs may tell you about if you ask them questions that seem appropriate to themselves and their physical location.

There are also player clerics who have the power to ressurect. This is not easy for them, the procedure leaves them drained physically. In some cases, such as ressurecting someone who is an enemy of the deity they follow, this might be shown by a drop in fitness condition, which has to improve again before the character's physical statistics will return to their full potential. Player clerics will rarely resurrect followers of any deity other than their own as it may leave them in a weak position should they have to confront their enemies.

Apart from the obvious reason that they are the god your character has faith in, it makes sense to get resurrected at a temple of the god that your character follows. Depending upon the relationship between your own god and the god whose power ressurects you and the character's alignment, your character may find they retain more or less of the power they had before death. As with replacing a lost limb, it is best to: check your financial standing with a priest after ressurecting - no-one wants to be trapped as a ghost.

So we have an In Character and a common sense Out Of Character reason. Always remember that when you play the game, you play the character. If your holy character dies at a time when for some terrible reason they are evil or even worse, damned, don't play clever and get resurrected at the shrine of a god who cares less. If your character for some reason follows an evil deity, but either is from the start, or becomes a nice guy, then that should NOT change where they resurrect. Not unless they want to change their deity, an act which can incur the wrath of the god they abandon!

Fitness condition:
The skill fitness condition has direct impact on your characters mental and physical vital stats. After losing a limb or dying, you will find that your fitness condition is lower than before.

Do not panic!

The skill will rise again with time, allowing your body to reach almost the same state as it had before the limbloss or the death. It simply takes some time. However, you should be careful when entering combat, while your body has not fully recovered yet.

Content by Verdigris - updated by Nube 2007