This week's Sunday playtest was held on February 13th. Feel free to discuss the events of it herein and give your opinions on your experience and feedback for the game.

I think we should all strive to do basically zero murders anymore in the game unless it's really, really impactful. Like a really big deal telegraphed well in advance.

In the context of the game's themes, which are intended to be "heroic fantasy/storybook" a la Disney's Robin Hood, it is not really a desirable outcome. If that's what people want to roleplay, and no one objects, I am not going to tell anyone otherwise. But to make it perfectly clear: Unnatural death is an extremely uncommon occurrence on Kalris. Intentional killing should not really be what any character aims to inflict on any other character, because it is so far outside of the Kalrisian culture as to be borderline unthinkable.

This is not Game of Thrones. Duels aren't potentially fatal. I don't care what they're like in real life. When critters get knocked out, they are fine unless agreed otherwise between the attacker and the victim OOC. This will change with the addition of Permadeath, but the expectation that characters aren't going to kill each other without good reason will not.

Stop being so edgy.

There are three tiers of Old World:

1. Medieval-tier technology, probably 11th-13th century, where Common has spread widely and Kalrisian ideals are generally accepted. Carnivorism, being considered on the level of cannibalism in modern human society, is essentially extinct -- even eating birds and fish is rare. Anything you can craft is assumed to be something these people have access to. Killing is considered ghastly the same way that Europeans in the Middle Ages would have considered it a deadly sin, even bandits. No one here is trying to kill anyone they fight unless they're a real bastard (outright war excepted). Species live intermixed much like in the game itself. This is where most typical Old World characters would come from.
   
2. Tribal society, probably 5th-10th century, on the fringes of the known world, where Common is less widespread. Hunting for birds and fish is still not uncommon, since they are not considered "intelligent" animals, but enough basic technology has filtered its way out here that eating other intelligent creatures is still considered deviant and freakish. Species are often separated into distinct clans which fight for territory and might enslave each other (think Viking thralls), but eating each other is the sort of thing only the greedy and powerful would consider for much the same reasons humans might have eaten each other. This is where most typical Foreigner characters might come from.
3. Wild society, which exists largely beyond the boundaries of the map, where animals still exist in their "natural" state, have no exposure to Common or Kalrisian ideals, and are basically entirely uncivilized. All technology more or less propagates through the world map outward from Kalris, which invented all of it and spread it through trade over hundreds of years. It's extremely unlikely that anyone would ever play a character from here, possibly that they'd have even heard about it. But it does exist out there somewhere.
   

That said, you are of course free to decide your character's backstory how you see fit and this isn't necessarily meant to dictate your character's backstory or attitudes. Just understand that the lore has been written with the game in mind, in order to accommodate the mechanics, and death is not a significant part of the mechanics and shouldn't be considered a common occurrence. Making characters who intend to kill people seems to me to violate the spirit of Combat Guideline #8: intending to kill other people's characters, which they have invested time and effort into, unless it's part of a planned storyline that you are working on together, seems to me the opposite of playing a villain (or hero!) in good faith and with respect for others.

Again, this is not Game of Thrones. This is heroic high fantasy. Swordfighters in this game are swashbucklers. This is not supposed to be a grim or dark setting. That, at least, I think I have been fairly straightforward about from the start. Characters don't drop dead in Redwall because they had a sparring accident. No one should expect to consider injuries anything other than a mild inconvenience unless the game explicitly tells you otherwise (and even then, they will always heal in time unless you took them as a trait as part of your character's backstory). If you want to play a character who takes dueling very seriously and considers it dangerous, go right ahead. But that is not the general expectation, we lean towards cartoon violence here.