Update: See the page on Character Death.
When you retire a character, you can create a new character with experience equal to your old character’s * 2/3. That is roughly equivalent to a drop of 2 levels.
For magic items, choose one item of your level -1, one item of your level -2, and one item of your level – 3. If these are 0 or less, you get no item for that slot.
In addition, you have gold pieces equal to the value of one magic item of your level – 3. At a minimum you get the same as a 1st-level character.
In this sense, character death is a kind of “forced retirement”.
PS: I love gaming, I love GMing, and I especially love it when I can do those things without hosting / organizing. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that the players care enough to get the game to happen. That makes me psyched to GM everything.
Tag's Folly 
August 19, 2009 at 11:02 AM
What about the “raise dead” ritual?
August 19, 2009 at 12:20 PM
For that you need a ritual book. Not saying it’s impossible to find one out there, just don’t count on buying one at the corner store.
August 19, 2009 at 1:21 PM
That’s what I thought.
August 19, 2009 at 3:53 PM
I’m curious as to why you changed the starting magic items for new characters above level 1. Just to make things a little less easy, I suppose? 🙂
August 19, 2009 at 3:53 PM
Whoops, replied in the wrong spot. :S
August 19, 2009 at 3:56 PM
You got it, Mike. Also, I want there never to be an incentive to dying. “Wow, the party really needs a magical whoozits. Time to go wrestle the sandworms on my own…”
August 28, 2009 at 12:50 AM
Okay so how is char. death resolved during a session. Do you just sit there quietly?
‘Cuz it really would suck to sit there if you were out halfway thru, but then again the whole new PC on scene seems a bit weird with the Husk theme?
“Hi! I was just wandering the Wastes by myself and wow, what a coincidence I arrived just as soon as that guy died… say, it’s okay for me to have his stuff b/c he’s dead right?”
August 28, 2009 at 3:38 AM
As an aside: with char. death my old DM used to get the character-less player to roll dice, track battle and do waterboy runs XD for the DM, as a means of power-abuse, yet still have player involvement. No it wasn’t me as DM. I’m not _that_ mean.
We’d call the poor shmuck “Casper” alluding to the cartoon. XD And actually one guy had a hot hand and our whole party almost died.
Damn, that was mean, but we were kids and it held until a break for the player to roll a new char. We’d totally hoard the stuff and give the new char. a hard time… Capital A-Hole DMing rubbed off on us I guess. Man I love to hate the old days XD
August 28, 2009 at 10:37 AM
Hey Ron, the big deal of the campaign is that the PCs are the adventurers. So there will definitely be the occasional “salty dog” at the bar that you can recruit (i.e. a new PC) who has spent some time in the wastes, and others have headed out before, but what you don’t see are prominent NPC adventurers.
When you’re looking for a new PC, you’re much more likely to be looking for some poor fool who’s been captured by scurvs, a Waster or Tiefer who tries to live out in the Wastes, and so on.