I am in the process of porting Project Rassilon (originally written for Bukkit by Squawkers13). It is a server plugin that allows you to regenerate upon death, just like a Time Lord from Doctor Who. For those who don’t watch Doctor Who: regeneration is a process by which a Time Lord can “cheat death.” Upon dying, a large amount of energy is released (in the form of a flame-like effect, see below), and every cell in the Time Lord’s body is changed, repaired, etc. This usually results in a complete change in appearance, but also a gain in health. The Time Lord is limited to 12 regenerations per cycle, for a total of 13 incarnations.
Project Rassilon does that same process, in Minecraft. Upon player death, if the player has the permission associated with it, the player will regenerate. Upon regenerating, there is a Ghast fireball noise, health will be regained, and a flame particle effect will be applied to the player. The player’s hunger, inventory and armor remain unchanged.
It is missing a few things that Bukkit had, like EntityDamageEvent, and for some reason, I can’t find EntityChangeHealthEvent in version 2.1-SNAPSHOT. There are bugs, but I’m working on it. Were you planning on porting it yourself? I’ll defer to you if you want to.
I’ll try to clean it up for you as much as possible, I’m just now implementing Metrics, so that might take a bit to clean up. Gotta learn some new stuff. I’ll get that repo/request up as soon as I can.