Press 'X' to revive?

Insert coin to restart.  Use phoenix down to restore.  Cast Resurrection to bring back the dead.  Select start to continue.  Load from save.  Press 'X' to revive.  From the simplest of games harkening back to the earliest days of modern gaming, most players have wanted a way to continue off where they have left off, or close to it at least, in order to be able to get to the finish of a game, even if its difficulty makes doing that challenging.  Certainly, some games have given only one life without a save or restore point to go back to, needing to go back to the beginning, but permanent death in games highly discourages players from continuing, especially knowing it will only get more difficulty if they get further than where they last died.  Many roleplayers who do play permanent death games end up starting with a new character similar to their last one and quickly trying to regain all they had lost until the two are almost indistinguishable.  While challenge excites and generates interest in a game, rarely does brutal, relentless masochistic punishment draw as large a gathering as games that have other death systems in place.

MaL is designed to be a game where everything is constantly active, regardless of player input, always shifting and generating new challenges so that no two players experience the same play-through unless playing together.  Even in the pen and paper version of it, the GM can have other player groups or solo players interacting in the same world as each other, and have NPCs and terrors mobilizing and living their daily lives regardless of if the player is close enough to notice.  A group might leave a town for a week to slay a sphinx and come back to find that their favorite pub has been infested by rats and the exterminator the owner had hired didn't come back out of the basement.  Tragically, Joe Schmoe the exterminator is found dead, ate by the rats which have somehow mutated to grow four times their natural maximum size.  Should poor Joe be denied the same methods of revival that the players are given simply because he isn't one of them?  Conversely, if he is to be revived and all NPCs able to be revived, then what sting has death?  Without purpose to push players onward, death has no meaningful emphasis on character development.  Without the death of his father, would Inigo Montoya seek revenge in The Princess Bride and dedicate his life to swordsmanship?  Without the death of Optimus Prime, would Hot Rod open the Autobot Matrix and blast Unicron into pieces?  Without the death of Obi Wan, would Luke Skywalker have fought as hard to become a better Jedi and help defeat the Empire?  Without the deaths of all his friends and others, would Ash Williams have saved the day by the time we get from Evil Dead I and II to the end of Army of Darkness?  Without the deaths of Bruce Wayne's parents, would he have become Batman?  Without the death of Uncle Ben would Peter Parker have become Spider-man?  While yes, some of these have been explored as alternate ways of a character becoming similar to the ones we are familiar with, they are not exactly the same characters.  Death has impact.

The central issue of the death system within MaL is balancing the impact of death for both players and NPCs alike, without cheapening it, and making the game still fun to play, offering a way for a player to continue without needing to start completely over.  A challenge with this is the wide range of characters both NPCs and players can be.  They can be religious and have a higher power choose to take notice of their death.  They can be advanced enough in science to have their body reconstructed.  They can have a phylactery enchanted to bring them back to life.  They can have their essence possess another with weak enough willpower and find a way to morph to a more familiar form.  They can also choose to simply start with a new character as holding some of the character's memories to unlock or completely new.  All of these possibilities exist as potential ways of coming back from the dead for both players and NPCs alike, including for foes.  Clearly some mechanic behind the scenes needs to be in place to allow characters--from the onset of their creation to being at their most powerful--a way to come back from the grave.

Regardless of the character's personal background, some form of method should be used to ensure sentient characters have a way of coming back.  The simplest way that I have come up with is to have each character tended to by a reaper, a shade of themselves that they must face in order to win the right to return unless another intercedes on their behalf.  NPCs will rarely ever mention what they saw, instead forgetting it as part of coming back to life.  Most will fail their challenges as they will be difficult but still possibly.  After a challenge is won, the character comes back to life in the method appropriate to their type of character, having to regain anything not on their body when they return to it unless using an item or skill of some sort that protected them for the character.  Any experience gained between levels is lost.  Any temporary spells cast on the body and not the soul are lost until.  The same goes for temporary technological modifications.  The character will return as if having not eaten or had their thirst quenched in two days, if such applies.  Renown will maintain that a character suffered a defeat that they barely came back from.  A character that has a profession will have no wages gained during the time between death and resurrection.  If a character fails to beat their reaper in a challenge, then they will have to perform a quest for the reaper while bodiless, with no experience gain of any sort, and then can challenge the reaper again if they pass the quest, until they win a challenge.  If they fail the quest, they can take another.  If they choose not to challenge the reaper, it will usher the character on to what awaits them afterward.

The character's reaper will only challenge the player according to what is possible to do with a character's current abilities, but it will be difficult.  The reaper is a symbol of their own struggle with mortality to come back from near death, or succumbing to it.  In the case of the manner of death in question destroying the character's original body, and their type of character has no other body in place to return to, they will be brought back to life first in a nearby graveyard or equivalent, coming up as the dust to which all go to and forming their body moments later.

Please let me know what you all think about this particular mechanic as it is very much conceptual at this stage, and I want to keep a balance between permanent death and cheap death.  Death should have impact, but it shouldn't be so harsh as to drive away players.  Those that wish to in this system still have the option of having to create a new character, but are not forced to do so every time.