Cities: changing your residency

Residency is your hometown. It is where the gods drop you when you recall, where you reappear when you die, where your sacrifice pit stands, and where the city guard counts you as one of their own. It is assigned when your life begins, from your class and alignment -- but once per life you may change it, and a remort gives the right back.

Municipal clerks handle it -- the same window that sells the craft licence. Each clerk registers people into their own town only: if you want to live in Solace, walk to Solace and queue. Seven windows are open:

• Midgaard -- the secretary in the town hall
• New Thalos -- the receptionist upstairs from the town hall
• Solace -- the Chief Tax Collector
• Shire -- the hobbit secretary in the Green Dragon inn
• Drow City -- a handmaiden of Lloth on the dais
• Valley of the Titans -- the town sheriff in the prison office
• New Ofcol -- chaplain Jerold in the Golden Citadel

The other hometowns in the list keep no registry window. You can be born into them, but nobody there will move you in.

The clerk reads out the list of services. To hear the terms, say residency; to go through with it, say register. The fee is 25 gold per level plus 500 for every remort, and never less than 50. In Midgaard the clerk registers you by alignment, so a good, a neutral and an evil citizen of the same city end up with three different recall points.

Your recall point moves, and so do the altar you wake at and the sacrifice pit you share with the townsfolk. Below level 15 your corpse is carried to that altar too; above it your body stays where you fell. Anything already lying in the old pit stays in the old pit, and a corpse made before the move still empties into the old town's pit when it rots.

A clerk will refuse you for several reasons: you already live there; the town does not admit your race, class or alignment; you have already spent this life's change; you are wanted, or marked a thief or a killer; or you have an unfinished quest tied to a hometown -- the clerk will name that one. And, of course, if you cannot pay.

Druids are settled in the Holy Grove from birth, and almost every city refuses them outright. If you are a druid who was settled somewhere else in an older life, the Midgaard secretary will strike you off her books and resettle you in the Grove, for the same fee and the same once-per-life right. The Grove keeps no paperwork of its own, so it has no window.

Careful. The clerk hears everything said at the window and does not listen for whole words. Any sentence with "yes" in it buys a craft licence, and any sentence with "register" in it changes your residency -- and there is no changing it back this life. Near the window, say nothing you do not mean.