How does death work in your setting?
enthusiastically
>>47715420
When they kill you, usually you die, that's how it works
>>47715420
9-5, weekends off, kinda lazy
I wonder if anyone on here right now actually plays tabletop
People die when they are killed.
If you kill your enemies, they win.
It's a secret.
The soul consist of two parts: The Self which is comprised of all of your experiences, learning, and memories and everything that makes you you and the Anchor which holds the Self together.
When everything functions as it naturally should, upon death the self and the anchor depart and typically the self either disipates and goes Beyond and the anchor accumulates another self in a new being.
That said, a ghost or spirit is the Self that is not held together by an anchor but has not passed on to the Beyond. In many ways they can be sentient and can retain their sense of being by fetter which is an emotional or physical bond. This is not replacement for an anchor and over time the spirit will lose all but whatever is tied to the fetter hence why you have ghost that act out certain actions over and over again because that's literally all that is left of them.
Sometimes a powerful Will or Self can impart some aspects of itself on an anchor which can lead to certain characteristics being present in a new being and thus constitutes a form of reincarnation.
Finally, Necromancy not only studies and understands these concepts but also develops the highest and truest form of undeath which is to create an artificial anchor (i.e. a phylactery) to which to hold the Self indefinitely otherwise you become a mindless being no different from a golem.
>>47715420
Kind of like Discworld Death.
>>47715420
You die, the local reaper finds you, might be able to answer a few questions since it's been watching you (and everyone else in your area) for the last thousand years, will talk with you and the others who have recently died.
He then offers you a choice : Let him guide you to The River where you will be adrift for untold years before being reborn, whatever is left of you, or stay here and fester until he is forced to devour you to keep you from manifesting as an undead. You can take as much time to think about it as you'd like, he has nothing but time and so do you. You can even speak with the other spirits still lingering.
PCs are offered a third choice, have your soul forced back into your body, bound there by Death's mark manifested as a countdown to your second reaping. You can extend this indefinitely by reaping those he puts a bounty on. Should your time run out, your soul is forfeit permanently. Death will suck it out and reconstitute it into a new reaper. If you die before your time, the local reaper will negotiate a deal, reducing your remaining time on promise of collecting on an important bounty.
This is how life goes on. If he did not do this, the world would have been drowned in the dead long ago and purified by the flames of the First God who cares little for those that worship him.
Every rune has a spirit, and any person can be described by a combination of runes. A person's spirit is made of these runes in certain measures. When you die that power flows back into those runes.
>>47715493I don't.
>>47715420
Pretty weak. Most of the PCs are murderhobos, so they go to hell when they die. The party's void warlock opens portals to hell on a regular basis, so it's not too hard to stage a breakout. When a PC escapes from hell, he returns to the normal world as a ghost and thus must find a body to occupy in order to be of any use.
>>47715420
In theory, the grim reaper shoves you through the soul gate where your soul is reprocessed.
At the moment, a bigass dragon devours your soul unless another god puts you in heaven.
>>47715420
Life and death work the normal way, but the god of death will sometimes make exceptions or bend the rules, resulting in nigh-invulnerable warriors roaming around in his service.
>>47715420
Well, causes of death are pretty standard for your generic fantasy world (disease, sword wound, magic bullshit, eaten by a grue, etc...).
As for what happens with the soul and stuff, souls are collected by the god of magic, who is also the moon. The souls stay for two full moons. Before the first full moon while they are there, they are relatively easy to bring back with resurrection magics, provided the death god allows it (and he tends to be stingy). After the first full moon, their souls are flooded with magic, and they become much harder to bring back. Attempts to bring them back using less powerful resurrection spells will seriously injure or kill the caster, and again this is assuming that the god of death allows it. When the second full moon comes, all the magic-infused souls are sent across the great distance between the world and the planet that is the death god, where they are then sorted and sent to their afterlives. It is impossible to revive someone after the second full moon.
Soul is recycled by the Gods.
Mind goes to afterlife.
Resurrection involves bringing back your mind, but without a soul, you're stuck in a perpetual state of now, unable to learn or change in any way, and there's no soul to carry your mind out of your body when you die (again), leaving you trapped forever in the material realm.
You can't create a soul without the direct aid of the Gods, so unless you steal or staple your mind onto someone else's Soul, resurrection is pretty horrible. Also you need a Soul to do Magic. So yeah.
>>47715420
When you die, your body and soul split and you enter the spirit world. Angels collect souls in the spirit world to take to Heaven, which is basically a spiritual "matrix" style illusion that gives you the perfect afterlife. While in heaven, angels syphon off spiritual energy from souls and use that energy to keep demons bound within hell. If you realize that heaven is an illusion, you can break out. Sometimes demons escape hell. If a demon finds you in the spirit world, you can make a deal with it to return to your body if you let it tag along. Your spirits meld and you now share the body as an undead, generally a vampire.
Death works long and tedious hours for little pay; however he doesn't complain, because deep down he loves the beauracracy that is the Department of Afterlife Processing. Death derives great pleasure from having to explain to fresh souls that they must process form B-45 and submit it to Susan in Room 203 before 5:30pm.
In essence, Death is Hermes Conrad.
>>47720067
Me and death would be good friends. I consider myself Flint Lockwood from cloudy with a chance of meatballs. Together we would rule the universe.
>>47715420
Depends on what the gods and philosophies claim.
Which in truth is false but there is some truth to what their claims. Just don't ever ask the extremely rare resurrected they are biased as hell.
What actually happens when you die your soul is picked up by a agent of death before being dragged to the underworld for 'processing'. Which is just fancy way of saying checking whoever has dibs on your soul. This can be a good thing if you worshiped a particular god as then they have dibs or bad if your bound to hell.
Sometimes however a soul is unclaimed and doesn't swing one way or another in which case they will be cleansed before being reused. As it turns out creating new souls is a real pain in the ass which is why everybody wants them.
That is what happens when things work according to plan. Some souls don't WANT to get cleansed, die, or dragged to hell in which case they attempt to resist. Those who don't get caught by the agents are doomed to become an ethereal undead as they soul rots but isn't allowed to die. Which is actually quite agonizing and even if the soul gets picked up later on being so heavily damaged will cause them a lot of trouble in the afterlife.
Some souls wish to be reincarnated but with their memories intact. In which case they must figure out how to do so.
While other souls escape from their fates but once they leave their designated afterlife they start to rot but due to the taints of their left behind homes they can turn into something much worse then a mere ethereal undead.
Sometimes those who work for death are biased in which case they can at times manipulate how things work. One of the most infamous immortals ever to live was that way because as it turned out his sweetheart was a high priestess for a death god and constantly leveraged things into his favor.
Some people when they die will be offered a 'bargain'.
>>47720104
I actually have a worker at the Department who is based off of Flint. All in all its been surprisingly fun to flesh out.
When you die, your name is released from it's form, and passes through the Veil and into the Otherworld. The Otherworld is a mass of empty potential, swirling around endlessly, full of names of people, places, things, that have all lost their form. Eventually these names will "float" to the surface, pass back through the Veil and return to the materium, where they will be given a new form. The names will never completely change into a new name, but their trip through the Veil will alter them just a bit, so names never return the same.
>>47720257
In exchange for service to Death they will be allowed to live once more. What those agents of death fail to tell those poor bastards whom get the offer is no matter what always wins. Its to the point where the devils can actually learn about deal making from Death because of how insanely one sided it is.
Sure your allowed to 'live' but your basically forever damned as when you'll die(and you WILL die eventually) you wont get an afterlife. Instead your soul will be forcefully converted into an Agent of Death and release will only come with the universe dies.
While your alive you'll most likely be required to go after the 'bounties' that death put out. Its pretty much guaranteed that ALL of those bounties in some shape or form screwed over death. Most of the time this means they are an Immortal(in which case killing them is obviously a truly daunting challenge). While some are particularly troublesome mortal or much more likely they're important people who save many lives.
Naturally your job is to prevent that from ever happening. Some bounties actually require you to SAVE the life of killers and lifetakers.
If you should fail to live up to your side of the bargain you will die. Until then you'll be offered 'incentives' and other benefits as reward for services rendered. Many of the most infamous mass murders, assassins, and immortals are actually in service to Death. As the benefits are as it turns out quite nice but you'll be more damned then soul in hell.
As for those whom death sees as criminal scum?
Unless other forces ALSO see them as criminals what death does to them is utter annihilation of the soul. There will NOT be an afterlife for you if death gets its way. So at that point you best pray REAL hard someone has dibs on your soul even if it is in hell. According to the Agents of Death the soul annihilation is EXTREMELY painful. Even far more painful then being twisted into an agent which is far worse then even a personalized eternal hell.
In my setting, the 'science' of the soul has been discovered and isn't really a big deal at this point. People can bring them into existence, switch between bodies, ect. A soul is essentially a tear in reality that is constantly exuding magical energy, and is formed when a being of any kind develops self-awareness. The soul then essentially becomes the person, who if they don't know any better, won't be aware they are anything but the body until they die, at which point they may be surprised to see the afterlife is essentially a bureaucratized transport system used to move people about almost instantly. You have a job on another planet? Turn off this body and travel through the afterlife to a new one, specially prepared to accept your soul in particular and grown to your particular tastes. Gods in the setting are humans who originally started out as naturally powerful or trained to produce a lot of spirit energy, and offered to protect others if they gave him some of their own essence every so often. They then use use their incredible power to protect you from permanent death in return for the aforementioned soul essence offering and following their behavioral guidelines which vary from deity to deity.
Real death only occurs under two conditions.
1. the memories of the soul are destroyed completely. After all, if they are destroyed then the person as you know them no longer exists. The blank soul is then usually dropped back into the system as a new human.
2. The soul constantly exudes magical energy, but only at a certain steady rate. If the flow is supercharged beyond a certain amount, the soul and its memories are reduced to fragments suspended in the aether.
The only use those soul fragments have is that, when combined with the fragments from other souls who have been destroyed the same way, one can create essentially a spiritual frankenstein's monster called a revenant.
>>47715420
People die when they are killed.
>>47715479
This
Your soul travels up into the sky, where it automatically begins moving towards the nearest Well to the Netherworld. Wells are one-way portals, but there are wells leading from the Netherworld to the regular world, as a "just in case" thing. Once your soul is in the Netherworld, what your afterlife consists of is dependant on your subconcious. Noone has, as far as is known, been able to alter what their afterlife consisted of, with a single famous exception. What you perceive as afterlife is more or less just illusions; the Netherworld is infinitely large so there's ample space between the various illusions surrounding the souls.
Once a soul is in the Netherworld, it's stuck there unless it can find one of the back-up exits. You can't resurrect someone if their soul is in the Netherworld; resurrection only works on souls strong enough to slow the pull of the Wells (players are, typically, assumed to be of the kind of mindset (soulset?) neccessary to slow the approach to the wells.
It's a little bit different if you're aligned strongly enough with one of the spheres of magic. One extremely devoted to Law/Order would find his soul travelling to the realm of Law, where the god of Law gets to decide what to do with your soul. Usually they wipe your memories and have you become an angel in their service.
Further complicating matters, the evil gods have linked their realms. If you're destined to one of them, you always end up in the first layer, to descend slowly step by step.
>>47715493
What kind of asshole would you have to be to ignore players you're playing with right now and browse /tg/?
Despite playing what most people would recognize as D&D style fantasy games, I really hate it when the afterlife is scientifically studied and understood.
There are legends, but they're no more verifiable than in our world.
That said, reincarnation apparently happens, and stuff like the Magic Jar spell works, so apparently the soul is real and can be manipulated by magic.
>>47724327
I'm the anon who posted this >>47721714
and I kinda agree with you. But at the same time I wondered how far I could extend the concept of the afterlife being scientifically studied, and tried to make it as empty of wonder as any other mundane task we do on earth.
>>47724327
It might be known to the sort of people who would be figuring this stuff out but it's not going to be common knowledge to the every man.
I mean, just because you can go around and ask someone what E=Mc^2 means most people will probably just say Einstein came up with it and know nothing further.
Similarly I imagine if it came to magic in that regards where it can be taught someone might go, "yeah you can do necromancy to talk to the dead but hell if I know how to do it, I've never even seen a ghost!"
>>47715420
You either die or pass into undeath. As the setting is a locked sort of plane sequestered away from the multiverse by a god who feared the end of his creation, the souls sort of fill up the heavens, being reincarnated as fast as possible to prevent clogging.
It's quite a neat system, but somehow almost everyone ends up a goblin in the end.
