As a follow up to my post about the death hover. I think that is a good fit without breaking the permadeath concept because honestly, this is a world of magic and dragons and gods. People die, but in a magical world there should be a chance to recover even from death if it can happen before the "spirit leaves the body" kind of thing. This would make death out by yourself a very bad thing, but if you are in a group with a priest with the power of his god, why couldn't you heal (rez) the person before the body completely ceases to function.

I like the ideas of what you have going on here so far. I would agree that skipping levels 1-10 probably is not a bad idea. Additionally, it would be good to log on to the live servers and see what the updated tutorial zone rewards are (they were changed with ROF I believe). Add that gear as the starting gear in addition to level 10 would really balance out the horrible imbalance that the stock EQ newb levels are.

Given the possibility of perma death:

Would it be an acceptable idea to guild all players (unless they are guilded already) into a community guild with the banker flag? New characters could be flagged automatically when they are created. This way we can store gear we cannot use/ outgrow for folks later on to use.