Part 20: On Character Death/Rebirth
Thought I'd do a little game system update since I had to do all this junk to prepare for scenario 3. Since I've been mistaken about the whole resurrection process until now, I'll clear the air...THE SAGA OF LIFE AND DEATH
When a character dies in (and is not resurrected in) battle, their corpse will just hang out on the character list while "DEAD FOR (X) YEARS" begins to get tracked. There are two ways to raise this kind of stiff:
1) At the Temple. This has no chance of failure, but the character doing the resurrecting has to have prayed "enough" in their life. Note: I dunno what "enough" is. Apparently the dead guy's Karma plays into this too.
2) At the Magician. A chance of failure is involved but prayers and KRM don't matter here. The chance of failure increases as the years pile up, as does the price.
Failure means a character is lost entirely. I had to reload several times before I hit that 10%.
The reason I did all this: Magician resurrection incurs side effects. Most of these are bad (loss of stats/max HP) but if an old or middle-aged character has been pickling an exceptionally long time you can get a benefit. Raising an old guy who's been dead for 20-29 years confers immortality. I guess 29 is the cutoff point for being able to resurrect at all, shoulda checked that...
Breaking tables in the OP, breaking tables in the game. Anyway, just like it sounds, immortal characters don't age and don't lose stats yearly from being old.
Dying of old age is different, though. It could happen any year once the portrait changes to "old." The age is randomized for each character, but set in stone. Unlike with resurrection, no amount of reloading was gonna get Fenwick past 62. Sorcha didn't kick the bucket until 89.
At this point you can create a new character of the same class--you can change gender though--who inherits all the old character's stats up to the level 0 cap of 10.
Naturally Sorcha would name her son Madmartigan.
As you can see, you also inherit all their money, equipment, herbs, and even training knowledge. Not sure how he started with 51 XP though.
Soon, the son Sorcha gave birth to at age 73 (er, let's say he was adopted, actually), the freakish old frankenstein man, and all their friends will embark on the final stretch of Sorcerian...