No. I had an Oath-1 noble die and rot; when the body finished rotting
I received 2 NP back. I can't vouch for Rodger, but I don't see any
reason why Oath-1 nobles would behave differently for different factions.
The bug is probably due to the noble having no current loyalty, or
loyalty to the/a NPC faction (like "Independent Player"). The NPs
need to return to the creating faction rather than the current owner,
assuming that the database tracks who invested NP in the noble as well
as who he is currently allocated to. If this information isn't in there,
it'll be a lot harder to fix the bug because he'd need to rebuild the
entire database plus fix the special cases by hand.
-- Carl Burke cburke@mitre.org