Corpses, Looting & Skinning¶

"The blade does the hard part. The rest is just a matter of checking pockets before the sun moves."

When a hostile foe is killed in Ghelmyon, they don't simply vanish. The body drops in the room, carrying whatever they had on them - and it stays there long enough for you to do something about it. This is the guide to what a corpse is, how to loot it, and what else you can do with it before it's gone.

At a glance¶


All hostiles leave a corpse	After a kill - coins, carried gear, whatever they had
Loot it	`loot <name>` / `loot corpse` - takes coin + items
Search it	`search corpse` / `search <name>` - alias for the same
Look inside	`look in corpse` - see what's there before taking
Skin it	`skin corpse` - animals yield a hide; humanoids generally don't
Decay	Corpses don't last forever - roughly a day, less for skinnables
Exceptions	Some deaths haul the body away - no corpse left

What drops¶

Every killed hostile leaves a corpse in the room, treated as a container holding:

Coin - whatever they were carrying in their purse. A bandit might have quite a bit; a wolf has none.
Carried gear - weapons, armour, and items they had on them. Quality varies; what you take is what you keep.

A corpse can hold nothing - a penniless creature with no gear is still a body, just not a profitable one.

Taking the loot¶

Three verbs all do the same thing - transfer coin and items out of the corpse and into your inventory:

loot <name>
loot corpse
search corpse
search <name>

If there are multiple corpses in the room, name the specific one you want (loot the guard, search the wolf) to avoid ambiguity.

To see what's there first: look in corpse (or look in <name>) shows you the contents without taking them, so you can decide what's worth the carry weight.

Skinning - animals only¶

Some creatures yield a material harvest beyond their carried loot. Use:

skin corpse
skin <name>

Animals - wolves, deer, bears, and other wildlife yield a hide on a successful Gathering check. The check is roll-over: Gathering above the threshold succeeds; a failed roll means the pelt is spoiled.
Humanoids - soldiers, bandits, most two-legged hostiles - don't yield anything worth harvesting. The attempt returns nothing useful.

Hides are crafting materials. They sell to leatherworkers and traders, and they feed into the Leatherwork and Tailoring skill chains if you're building toward those.

Time matters¶

A skinnable corpse has a shorter useful window than a plain one. If you're after the hide, skin before you loot and move on - not the next day.

Decay - don't wait too long¶

Corpses don't persist indefinitely. The rough timeline:

Skinnable corpse (animal, harvestable) - roughly half a day before the usable yield is gone.
Plain corpse - roughly one day before it disappears from the room entirely.

Decay is driven by the world's phase clock - the same tick that moves NPCs through their schedules. You don't get a countdown, but you do get a feel for urgency: a combat at dawn gives you until midday for the skin and until the following dawn for the loot.

Exceptions - when there's no corpse¶

Not every hostile death leaves a body. Two cases to know:

Skulker's Alley - a specific location where the resident underworld hauls its dead away before anyone asks questions. Kills there produce no persistent corpse.
Certain scripted deaths - story-significant NPCs may have their death handled differently. If the body is gone, it was intentional.

Quick reference¶

You want to...	Do this
Take everything off a body	`loot corpse`
See what's there first	`look in corpse`
Take a specific item	`take <item> from corpse`
Harvest an animal hide	`skin corpse`
Multiple corpses, target one	`loot <name>`, e.g. `loot the wolf`