Mortem Aeternum Permadeath

Dungeons & Dragons Online with permanent death

The land of tears gave forth a blast of wind,
And fulminated a vermilion light,
Which overmastered in me every sense,
And as a man whom sleep hath seized, I fell.

— D. Alighieri, “Divina Commedia,” canto III, trans. H. W. Longfellow 1867

Rules: TL;DR

An abridged & incomplete version of the Rules.

Entering the Guild

To join the guild (located on the Sarlona server), a player is required to read the rules and to agree to abide by them. Upon confirming that the player is familiar with the guild rules, any officer may add the player to the guild, provided that the new member is a new toon at level 1 with no prior deaths.

Character Death

If your character dies, you must delete your character or that character must leave the guild. For exceptions, see Character Death.
Exception: characters that are legally raised from death do not permanently die. There is a limit to how many times a given character can be raised. Other limitations apply based on how powerful the raise ability is. See Raising the Dead and Being Raised from the Dead.
You can loot the bodies of dead party members. See Looting Bodies.
When you die, you don't get to keep your items, except for item(s) that you designate as heirlooms. There are staunch limits on which items you can designate. See What About My Gear? and Heirlooms.

Items

Generally, you can only get items that you found yourself, or items from guildmates that found them while adventuring with you. See Items and Equipment.
This means no twinking (transferring items from your other characters).
This also means that other ways of getting items are generally highly restricted, like e.g. the DDO Store. See DDO Store, Magic is (Not Quite) Everywhere, Daily Dice, and Auction Houses and Brokers.
More specifically, you cannot purchase magical items from anywhere; see Magic is (Not Quite) Everywhere for exceptions.

Hirelings

You may not purchase hireling contracts or use hirelings.

Grouping and Questing

You may not group with others that are outside of the guild, and within a given group, the difference in level between the highest level character and the lowest may not exceed 3. For more details, see Grouping.
In order for a given character to be allowed to enter a given quest, the adjusted level of the quest must be greater than or equal to the level of the character. See Questing.
You must do quests on at least Elite difficulty.
Exception: if you don't have enough XP to advance to level 2, you can do stuff on any difficulty. For other exceptions, see Questing.
Quests cannot be repeated, unless at least 50% of the members of the party have never done the quest before.

Shrines

Resurrection shrines are forbidden.
In any group, if one member rests at a shrine, every other member must also use it or forgo it entirely (for the rest of the quest).
Once a shrine has been used, no group member may go back and use it later.
For more, see Shrines.

Veteran Status

If your character levels to 8 or higher and that character dies, you may re-roll it as a level 4 veteran (Veteran Status I).
If your character levels to 14 or higher and that character dies, you may re-roll it as a level 7 veteran (Veteran Status II).
For more, see Veteran Status.

Them's the Rules

DDO is a game. If you play in a permadeath guild like Mortem Aeternum, you're doing it to have fun. If you, for some strange reason, go around breaking the rules and/or being kind of a jerk, expect to be kicked from the guild.