If you think life on Terrinor is hard... then don't die. Death should be your main reason to keep trusted friends (or well paid acquaintances) with you in your travels. As you might expect, being dead will severely restrict your character's options. In fact, they will be completely unable to act, unaware of their surroundings, and dependent upon others for protection from any scavengers or thieves that may come along. When a character dies, they have slightly more than one real life hour to be found and resurrected. While their spirit is thus estranged from its corporeal counterpart, their memories will slowly fade, and their bodies will decay. This is reflected in loss of skills and stats. After several hours of separation, a spirit may completely forget its terrestrial existence, and become unsalvageable. This is where fetishes come into play.
A fetish may be likened to an anchor or a beacon. Either way, it serves to keep your character's spirit from making its final departure. If, after being dead for 75 minutes, your character still retains his or her fetish, they will automatically be resurrected. Your character must be logged in to accumulate this time and eventually resurrect. While you are waiting to be resurrected, you can use the "deadtime" command to check how long your character has been dead. As there is little else you can do in the meantime, you might want to order up a pizza and/or read up on those pesky help files that never seem to get read ahead of time. If your character is unfortunate enough to have lost their fetish, and has died far from any likely source of aid, you will probably face what is called "permanent death". This means that your character has entirely ceased to be, and all of their belongings, both property and chattel, are forfeit. Attempting to relay a former character's belongings to a new character is considered "hoarding", and is a form of cheating punishable by temporary or permanent banishment. If your character has been permanently killed, that character ceases to exist. There is absolutely no interpretation of the player rules that canjustify bringing a permanently dead character back to life. If you create a new character and use it to mimic a previous character, you are breaking the rules and contravening every tenet of good roleplay. This is a bannable offense.