Horses and Houses and Boats, Oh My!

Bam! Gauntlets of Ogre's Strength +x, Mithral Full Plate, and Belts of Healing are favorites of of any good adventuring party but these are only the transparent loves of the combat-loving ruffian. Behind the scenes players need a lot of stuff. Obviously food and water are needed constantly (unless your DM is nice or doesn't care) but from 1 to level 20 thousands of gold pieces are spent on all sorts of non combat related expenses. Socialism is fine but devoting the tiniest share of the loot to expenses helps. Lodging is big, if your DM's evil sleeping under the stars will grant you an early breakfast of gelatinous cube so long term thoughts on beds are a must. Apartments are dirt cheap in awful parts of the city but make your own guild house. If you don't mind converting a bunch try the 3.0 Stronghold Builder's Guidebook for ideas and base prices but your sourcebooks have basic info and Campaign settings should come up with more lodging options. Try designing your own castle for once, its very satisfying.
Unless you're agoraphobic I suppose you'll need some transportation as well. Easy answer for overland storage is to get a horse or five. One for riding, 2 for storage, 1 testing for traps, and a fifth for tax-returns --whatever you want. They're cheap to feed and at those early levels when a bag of holding is either too expensive or too small they're economically worth it. Alternatively get something big n' nasty which can work all purpose. Run over to the Talenta plains and wrangle a dinosaur or find yourself an axebeak, whatever works for you. Running a campaign in Eberron I found it helped to have the players keep a carriage or some other sort of moving platform. A stable base gives you speed, some protection, and a place to call home.
Oh and boats, those I could write a book on. Boats in RPG's are my life's work. I'm going to get back to you on boats.

PC Death

The death of a player is something that all gaming groups have to deal with at some point.  Whether it is due to malicious DMing, poor rolls, or just plain old stupid roleplaying, there are a couple of things that need to be considered.
A)  Can the body be recovered?
This is a pretty big thing when you think about it, as most forms of resurrection require the body (or at least some chunks of it) to work.  This also matters for the items the body had on them; if the player wants to make a new character after death, but the party still has access to everything the dead PC had on it, what is the DM to do?  I really feel that the players and DM should, right then and there, make an agreement on whether or not to take items and leave them.
B)  Does the player want to be resurrected, or do they want to make a new character?
In a reality, death is a pretty annoying thing to have happen as a PC.  From experience I can tell you that it makes you feel like the character that you built is weak, and that you should build a new character.  This should be avoided; it's more than likely that you died not due to character weakness, but to a few bad dice rolls or bad situation that escalated beyond the party's control.  Stick to the character, it's part of the game.
C)  This is an odd one; did they die epicly?
I know for a fact that, after a sufficiently epic death (see Gandalf vs Balrog) that I wouldn't want to be resurrected, and that I would be perfectly happy making a new character after that, so that the legend could live on.

Well, that's my opinion on PC death, more may be added later.  For that one guy reading this, I'll be sporadically putting more stuff onto here.

Why you need to run Tomb of Horrors

One word: Catharsis.
A good DM does nothing but keep their PC's alive. A good %95 percent of the time none of your players will die and after level 10 the chance only goes down to %85 percent tops depnding on what kind of a game you're running. And yes every single goblin you play is trying to kill the PCs but in reality if by some horrible will of God the PC should be on the brink of death by the hands of my CR 1/8 toad I can assure you the DM will find a way to save you the embarassment.
For this reason the Tomb of Horrors is beautiful. Not only can the Tomb be easily found online legal and free for most any version (cept 4.0 but that's running around $20 on Amazon) but it was originally written by the gaming messiah Gary Gygax himself. Furthermore the sad sorry lot that calls themselves players will die by their own hand. Not to give a single piece of the dungeon away the players will die. They are tasked with complex traps and puzzles and a few nasty monsters that will destroy the sorry lot of animated meatbags. Best part of their demises will be the fact that there are always hints to there upcoming dooms and even then PC's will usually be granted one free save before they are devoured by howler monkeys. And when those howler monkeys picked the last shiny kidney stone from your sorry remains the DM will begin to silently giggle behind their screen.
Now the extreme difficulty of this dungeon does give some issues for up and coming players. Its suggested for 4-6 lvl 9 players but higher level players can't hurt especially because much of their success hinges on their own metagaming common sense. Since the PC's will die, maybe all at once and sometimes their corpses and gear can never be recovered, you'll have to make some sort of societal contract. This isn't hard to do, as Dungeon Master you will receive the catharsis of having your howler monkeys eat the PC's entitled corpses and in return the PC's will get revived at no cost, they will only lose the gear they found in the tomb, or perhaps most logical the PC's build temporary, expendable characters just for fun.
If you're a DM at least read it you'll at least get some nice ideas for your next personal dungeon crawl.