Church & State Negative Levels

(From an earlier email)

Just for everyone's information.  I'm changing how Negative Levels work.

They still act as they do in the normal rules in the following manner:

• Imposing a -1/negative level to most rolls, including checks, attacks, saves, and effective level (when level is used to determine an addition to a roll)
• If Negative Levels exceed Character Level the character dies and likely becomes undead.
• Grant the attacking creature 5 extra HP

They do NOT have the following effects:

• Spell reduction
• Normal method of removal

When afflicted by negative levels, the following new rules apply:

• An afflicted character may make a fortitude save at dawn after the negative level was gained, against the normal removal difficulty.  Success removes ONE negative level.  Checks may be made every following dawn until all negative levels are removed.  Failing a check simply means that the negative level persists, it DOES NOT remove a character level.
• Spells such as Restoration may remove negative levels as normal.
• While afflicted by negative levels, the character suffers the following additional problems:
      No natural healing rate.  Without magical healing hit point loss and ability loss persists until the last negative level is removed.
      Slow Con Bleed (new rule).  At sunset of every day that a character is afflicted by negative levels he takes a point of temporary Constitution damage for every remaining negative level.  A character that reaches 0 Con dies and will likely become undead unless properly disposed of.  This is to simulate the slow transitions to undeath as recorded in myth and literature.  If a character succeeds at a Fort save to remove a negative level, one point of Constitution lost to this effect returns as well.
      Magic Reduction.  Magical HP healing is reduced by the total number of negative levels possessed.  A character with 3 negative levels loses 3 HP (to a minimum of 0) for every healing spell cast on him.
  

     Basically, I removed the threat of permanent level loss and replaced it with slightly more annoying and somewhat more subtle negative level effects to compensate.