Graves

Death is permanent. What is left of a character is the spot it fell on.

A grave appears there and stays. Everybody sees it — a headstone on the map in the game client, † on the terminal one — and it names who it belonged to.

Stand on one and a panel opens, the way it does for a stash or a Meditation Sanctum: whose grave it is, how long ago they died, what killed them, and the two things you can do about it.

Praying

Stand on a grave and pray. You get 10 health and 10 stamina.

The boon belongs to the grave, not to you. A grave gives once every 30 minutes, to whoever gets there first; if somebody prayed there ten minutes ago, it has nothing for you and says so. Two people standing on the same grave get one prayer between them.

It is the only healing outside a Meditation Sanctum, and it is small on purpose: somewhere to catch your breath on a long walk, not a substitute for resting.

You cannot pray in the middle of a fight.

Desecrating

You can also put a grave out. It stops being a grave — for you and for everybody else — and it never comes back.

It gains you nothing. No loot, no experience, no advantage of any kind. All it does is take a rest spot away from every player who would have found it.

And the dead sometimes answer. Desecration is a contest between the two characters at their strongest: the best stat of whoever is buried there against the best stat of you. Equal footing is a coin flip. Robbing the grave of someone far weaker is near the floor — but never zero, so no desecration is ever safe. Pulling apart the grave of someone far stronger is near certain to wake them, though never quite certain.

When one answers, the character comes back as a ghost, with its own stats, its own level and the techniques it actually carried. It fights like any other monster: you can flee it, it takes turns, and it hits with what its owner hit with. Beating it pays the experience a monster of that strength would, and it hands over everything the dead character still owned.

Be careful what you wake. A ghost is a player build, and a player who lived long enough to be worth robbing is stronger than anything wandering the sector around them. The name on the grave is the only warning you get, and it is a better one than it looks: you can go and find out what that character was.

A ghost left standing goes back to rest. Run from it, or die to it, and it returns to its grave — the marker comes back, for everybody, and you can come back for it when you are stronger. Desecration only sticks when somebody finishes it.

Which means a tile can hold more than one grave: the one you failed to put down, and your own, if it was the ghost that finished the argument.

Unless the ghost is the one that leaves. A monster that has landed nothing for five turns gives up and rolls to escape, and a ghost is a monster in that respect. If it gets away there is nothing left standing to go back to rest: the grave stays out, permanently, for everybody. You keep the experience you earned against it and none of what it was carrying — it left with its possessions, exactly as any runaway does. That is worse than losing the fight, because losing gives the grave back.

You choose which one. Name whoever is buried there — the map lists them all — and that is the grave you pray at or put out. Ask for one that is not there and the game says who actually is. If you name nobody, praying takes the first grave on the tile with anything left to give, and desecrating takes the oldest and tells you whose it was.