Up to a point, Veilwalkers are immortal while they are in Veilguard.
When you die in Veilguard, or after passing through the Godscore Gate, your body and all the items you were carrying dissolve into mist and you regain consciousness just inside the mists of Veilguard, just outside of town.
However, after a Veilwalker has spent enough time in Veilguard, their body starts acclimating to the Veil that cradles the demiplane. Dying and respawning from the mists after this condition has set in is debilitating and always leads to eventual death within a handful of days, leaving just enough time to say your goodbyes before death permanently claims you.
Mechanically, your character cannot die permanently in the game until you reach a certain amount of Character Points, after which they can die only once, just like any mortal. Until you hit that CP threshold, though, after your character dies you walk back to the edge of the in-game town of Veilguard and reenter it, “Respawning,” restored to full health.
If your character dies after passing through the Godscore Gate, you must walk back to town and back through the Gate, at which point your character has Respawned and regains consciousness. However, you cannot reenter the Gate to return to whatever battle you died in — the magical resonance left over by your character’s transition through the Gate while they were dead won’t let them pass through until it has been closed and reopened once more.
If your character dies while within Veilguard, you must walk to the nearest edge of town, after which your character Respawns and regains consciousness.
When you Respawn, you retain all memories you had until the moment of death. We would ask, however, that you pretend not to have heard/seen anything while you walked to your Respawn point.
Once you have accumulated 6 Character Points, your character loses the ability to Respawn properly, and the next time you die it will lead to your character’s permanent death.
When you have 6 or more CP, you still Respawn as usual. However, after you Respawn you become Terminal and suffer from the following effects:
You are dying. This condition has the following effects:
<aside> 💀 The intent of this set of rules is to give players time to grow accustomed to the game and to their character, to make mistakes without any of them resulting in the loss of their character, and then after that “training” period is over to raise the stakes of the game. Once a player hits the 6 CP threshold, they are playing for keeps. No longer can they rush alone into a crowd of monsters, secure in the knowledge that even if they die they’ll come back right as rain; now the fear of death is real, and if they push too far or make a careless mistake they may lose a beloved character forever.
This means, among other things, that combat-focused characters face a good chance of dying permanently at some point along the line. This is part of the intent, to encourage those characters to measure the risks they take in combat, focus on teamwork, leverage any tools at their disposal to survive, and (if and when they do die) to make way for newer players to take a more prominent role on the battlefield.
To be clear, we do not expect permadeath to be inevitable — there are a lot of tools you can use to keep your character from dying, and the longer you play the more of those tools you’ll learn how to use or get access to. What we want is to have a situation where there is real risk in combat, a real sense of danger, so that combat that should feel dangerous to your characters inspires feelings of danger in you, the players. Just as no story can feel truly gripping without having real stakes for failure, a narrative game like a LARP that lacks real consequences for losing (even on an individual level like a character’s permadeath) can become bland and boring all-too-easily.
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