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sodder) wrote in soddersays2018-04-28 11:10 pm
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Death Certificates
DEATH CERTIFICATES
Death in Deerington is a complicated process. With each death comes a price and this page is meant to explain and catalogue those experiences. Players do not need permission to kill their characters in game but we request that death certificates be filled out per death.
To organize this effectively, please make a blank top level with your character's name and canon in the subject line. Reply to that comment with the following form per death. With each death, please put in the new subject line in which death is being used. An example in the comments has been posted.
As of September 2020 the Seventh Death has been unlocked. This has changed some of the consequences of death within the game as well as added new ones. Updated/new sections will have a ♦ next to them.
This page has also been updated to reflect how post-death symptoms can be alleviated within the setting without bonus points as of 09/2020.
THE FORM + BANISHING
Please use the following form to track your character's death. Every character requires their own separate section, even if you play multiple characters.
♦ BANISHING YOUR CHARACTER'S HAUNTING ♦
Character hauntings can be banished in a variety of ways. They must be done in-character. You do not need to role-play the scene of the banishing out but we ask that you explain with some detail how you plan to banish your character's ghost. This can either be done in your original death form or in a reply to our acknowledgment of that form.
Other characters can banish one another's ghosts. Please make sure to get OOC permission before doing so. We will assume this was done, but if you notice someone banished your character's ghost without permission, please let us know ASAP.
Banishings should always be done intentionally. Characters do not need "magic" or access to the supernatural to banish a ghost. We leave it up to players to determine how their characters would ICly approach the situation. For some that may include looking up seance rituals at the library or drawing symbols in chalk around the ghost, etc. Have fun with it.
Hauntings will only appear after a first death and only one deer statue is permitted per character from banishings.
POST DEATH SYMPTOMS
Deaths in this game have severe consequences. The consequences stack, so if it is your fourth death, you will have the symptoms of deaths 1, 2, 3, as well as 4 for the duration of that death's suffering period.
Symptoms can range in severity and we leave it up to player choice how severe or gentle the symptoms manifest.
➟ First Death Symptoms
Duration: 1 Month
Chills, intense body aches, sweating, trouble sleeping. Severe flu-like symptoms.
➟ Second Death Symptoms
Duration: 1-2 Months
Amnesia of their canon lives pre-Deerington. They will still remember their own names and some facts about their home lives but will have forgotten major events/relationships/information from their own canons.
➟ Third Death Symptoms
♦Duration: 2-3 Months♦
Amnesia of their canon lives and whatever lives they have created in Deerington. Characters will forget both canon and Deerington memories/relationships. They may even forget their own name.
➟ Fourth Death Symptoms
♦Duration: 3-4 Months♦
This will be at least a weekly occurrence for four months in which characters will have extremely vivid, lucid dreams in which they are being pulled and removed from their bed by some obscure, malevolent force. They will be powerless against whatever is pulling them from their beds, and even if they think they are screaming their heads off, they won’t make a single sound. They will eventually wake up in a cold sweat out somewhere in the middle of town, having slept walk there, and thankfully there will probably be a deer there who has made sure to keep them safe.
Other characters can help the sleepwalkers either keep from leaving the house or at least keep them safe if finding them somewhere in town. Sleepwalkers CAN be woken up. People who wake up from the nightmares will feel extremely disoriented and queasy, and it will be difficult for characters to tell the difference between reality and dreaming for quite some time. This often leads to characters trying to avoid sleep if at all possible.
➟ Fifth Death Symptoms
♦Duration: 3-4 Months♦
The character will lose a sense. The player may choose what sense the character loses whether it is sight, sound, taste, touch, or smell. They can only lose one sense. Death doesn't just take away a sense though...
✹ Sight: They will mostly see immense darkness, but it will be textured darkness that shifts and moves. The character will feel like they are never quite alone like someone is always standing around them in some proximity. This is worse if a character is alone or in a quiet environment.
✹ Sound: This can go one of two ways. A character may be deafened by HYPER hearing meaning they hear every single sound within a mile ranging from someone scratching themselves to organs passing through bodily fluids. Literally. Everything that can make a sound will be heard by this individual. For. Six. Months.
Or they will hear absolutely nothing at all, except...They will always on the rare occasion hear someone they know calling their name or maybe hear a child crying in the distance or a dog whimpering in the dead of night.
✹ Taste: Everything your character puts in their mouth will instantly taste like it has gone putrid and rotten even if it is perfectly fine. This will induce vomiting, no doubt, and may result in characters struggling to eat at all.
✹ Smell: For six months they will be able to smell nothing but horrendous odors. A player choice as to what exactly- but it will be something the character can scarcely stand. They will not be able to escape the smell no matter what they do- even if they plug their nostrils.
✹ Touch: This is a lot like the hearing dilemma. Either they will have HYPER sensation where so much as a breeze will feel like razors cutting across their skin, or they will be absolutely positively numb. This numbness may cause limbs to fail since it will be extremely difficult for characters to move their body when they can’t feel it at all. They will be CAPABLE of walking, yes, but it is more of a mental hurdle than anything.
➟ Sixth Death Symptoms
♦Duration: 1-2 Months♦
This character is not in a good spot. Not only are they suffering from all the rest of this bullshit, but whatever way they died is how they will be living for the next seventh months. This means that if they were decapitated? Yeah, they’re going to be stumbling around with their head in their hands. If they were obliterated? They’ll be stitched crudely together and walk around as some kind of clumsy Frankenstein. And they will always feel that wound the entire seven months (unless they have the numbing hindrance from month six).
➟ ♦ Seventh Death And Beyond ♦
The seventh death is the only death that erases the majority of symptoms typically seen after death. Characters will not get the death flu, lose memories, or any of the listed above. Instead, they feel an odd sense of detachment permanently. They will always feel like something is a little off in them. That is because whatever makes up their soul has been permanently damaged by the number of times they have died in-game.
You can go as deep with this or as light with this as you please but all characters would be able to sense this within themselves. Similarly, characters with abilities to sense souls/individual minds/essence of characters would be able to detect the difference. Some would even be able to see the "damage" done to the soul. You can translate this in whatever way you want.
Some days may cause dissociation more heavily than others. One may be subject to feelings of longing and restlessness. If a character continues to die after their seventh time, they will not feel any crippling symptoms, but that feeling of dissociation and otherness will grow more and more each time, and it will progressively take longer for a character to be revived. While the traditional amount of time to revive is seven days, those who die past the seventh death will begin to take ten or more days to return to their bodies.
The immediate "side-effect", once they come back, is that they will have to slowly "wake up." They will be delayed in speech, movement, prone to zoning out, and will require some patience as they center themselves back in their regular bodies.
It isn't all bad though. After all, the seventh death has opened up The Seventh Door. The Seventh Door is an ability innate to all Sleepers and was gifted by Ramona Derwin in hopes of granting every Sleeper, no matter how ordinary, a potential for power to use even after their souls have been torn apart by Deerington. More information about the Seventh Door can be read here.
It used to be that players could cash in bonus points to alleviate death. This system has changed as bonus points have been removed from the game and now players can alleviate death symptoms through IC choices.
There must always be a fair exchange for those escaping death and Deerington is no exception. One cannot be revived without paying their dues and to Deerington that either means paying up with months of death symptoms or...paying up in other ways.
Characters can make IC sacrifices of some sort to keep themselves or loved ones alleviated from death symptoms. You can choose how these sacrifices occur. There must be one fair exchange per stacked symptom. Meaning f you are on your fourth death and want to avoid all of the symptoms leading up to the fourth death's then your character/another character must make up to four sacrifices.
Sacrifices can be varied. They can be intentionally done such as a character doing a blood sacrifice or a spiritual sacrifice. Characters can do these sacrifices post-death or even pre-death to ensure their symptoms are alleviated (characters may be able to plan ahead of time - maybe a character has prophetic abilities or just thinking it's a good idea just in case etc). Other characters can sacrifice things to alleviate another character's symptoms. You can decide on the schematics.
Alternatively, characters can unintentionally sacrifice things to alleviate symptoms. Maybe they unknowingly sacrifice a favorite item or a favorite food they had waiting in their fridge. These sacrificed items can be vanished permanently from a character's possession or turn up weeks/months later in an unexpected place.
No matter what your choice is for alleviation, please make sure to explicitly detail how you plan to alleviate death symptoms. These sacrifices can be as significant or insignificant as you choose.
DEATH FAQ
♦ What happens to my character's body? ♦
The body, if not ripped up or otherwise completely destroyed, will remain in a constant state of rot until it has been properly discovered or until characters have properly acknowledged that a character has died. Only through acknowledgement can a character begin to go through the "reincarnation" process, so to speak.
Once this occurs, the body will fleck away in faint, purple dust, peeling away from the character until nothing is left.
This dust rearranges itself into the character and create a sort of ghostly hologram. This image will repeat on an endless loop the exact moment of death of that character. For example, if Jane died from falling off a building, everyone who walks by that building will see a ghostly type image of Jane falling off that building and dying again and again.This is a "haunting" of your character. The haunting can be banished as explained above.
Before the seventh death was unlocked, ghosts were merely repeating images. Now, however, if you get near a ghost the ghost may react to people with either hostility or anguish, crying for help or threatening to attack whoever is near. Ghosts can briefly possess people, possibly giving a character memories of the ghost's immediate death and what they might have been thinking before. The possession will not last long. Ghosts may also be able to levitate objects/throw them around. This should be done with OOC permission. Players can play their character ICly haunting others in this case.
What happens after I banish my character's ghost?
A deer statue, selected by the mods, will manifest in the location nearest your character's death.
A character may be able to witness the statue taking place. The same strange, purple flaking dust will glow in the air, slowly taking shape of the statue until it finally becomes solid.
Deer will often visit this statue, laying near it, even taking naps by it. They also seem to bring flowers to the statue, as if they are paying their respects to the fallen.
Anyone who may have access to spiritual awareness whether through abilities or items will be able to feel the presence of the deceased's soul in the statue. It will not feel like the complete soul, but instead part of it. If they are capable of seeing the spirit realm in any way, the statue will seem to have an unnatural glow around it.
These statues cannot be destroyed and are present in all layers of Deerington.
What happens with my character's injuries/scarring?
Players can choose for characters to keep scarring/amputations when they have come back from the death or they can choose for scars/amputations to be healed upon revival.
♦ How long does it take for them to come back to life? ♦
It takes all characters 7 days to come back to life.
♦ What is the IC process of them coming back to life? ♦
Your character will awaken with their head rested against Deeringon's God Of Death (creature to the right). It is warm and your character will feel oddly safe despite the unsettling face peering down at them. They are surrounded by a field of whispering gray and white grass, soft as silk, endless. Behind the God of Death is a magnificent tree made out of onyx. Whenever your character is feeling a little more coherent, the God of Death will gently remove themselves from the character and stand up against the tree to pull a dark red apple-sized fruit down from the tree. From inside the fruit, a dull glow is being emitted. The creature will hold the fruit out to the character, urging them to eat it silently.
If your character doesn't eat it, they will never leave this place. They may start to feel absent and amnesiac, forgetting how they even came to this place, to begin with...But after some time, that amnesia will make a curiosity grow within them. They soon will eat the fruit simply to see what happens.
The moment a character eats the fruit, they will feel power flourish through their bodies. They will hear a voice coming not from the God of Death, but somewhere beyond, soft and feminine saying: "It is all right now. I will bring you back. You will have another chance."
The field all around them will begin to grow brilliantly, the sky above rapidly moving, and you too will begin to glow. Flecks of gold and purple lights will float from the tree, swirling around them. The God of Death will lay beside them, gesturing to its back with its head, offering a ride. Whenever your character finally gets on, the creature will stand and begin to walk. From that point forth, the memories are a winding blur and the next thing your character will know, they're awake in their bed in their Deerington home.
♦ What if someone is there to witness their revival? ♦
They will see what a material similar to the white and gray grass from the field beginning to weave itself through the air, forming the skeleton, then the muscles, the flesh, and so on (or whatever body your character may have) until it has perfectly replicated the character's original body. Then in the blink of an eye, they will be flesh and whole again, a fine purple mist sparkling in the air just above them.
Does my character know they have multiple lives?
Unless they are told by other characters who have experienced this or it has been made public information by a character who has experienced it: no, they do not know.
Can my character kill another character?
Yes. Please discuss this with each other ahead of time OOCly to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Can my character hunt animals in game?
Technically, yes, but please apply appropriate content warning for if they do. Hunting in the actual National Park is illegal, however, because of the fact that there are camping grounds within.
Do I need to play out every death my character has?
Yes. You do not need to be even remotely graphic or detailed. It doesn't have to be an ornate death- but if your character dies there must be an in-character reference to it somewhere in the game. That can be through a log of their actual death, a character mentioning it on the network, or some other means.
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