Your settings god of death and/or the underworld is killed. What happened? What's the fallout?

Your settings god of death and/or the underworld is killed. What happened? What's the fallout?

>Planescape
>1 kabillion gods of death

It's no problem, we have spares.

In our settings, the characters are gods having to deal with a disgusting bureaucracy filled with other gods, with back stabbing and using our own followers as cannon fodder and shit like that. Gods are not allowed to kill other gods on the "godly" plane (because if gods were, then all hell would break loose), but you can kill a god when they leave this plane (which they have to for their followers) or you know, some people are sneaky enough to not get got. Now if the head god of Death died, then the thousands of other death gods who need to get enough votes to become the new head god from the other gods.

Death as a metaphysical force is integral to the continued existence of the universe. It can't be destroyed as long as life exists, because its opposite requires an antithesis.

Psychopomps and death spirits can be 'killed', but like demons, their energy is reconstituted.

naghash is dead all hail Carstein?

Well they're the one responsible for the creation of each person's soul so I guess people stop being born with souls.

Without a soul your existence vanishes once you die, by this I don't just mean you don't go to the afterlife, I mean all memory of you, things you did or created all fade away once you're gone. As soon as the last person with a soul dies the world would essentially enter a timeless stasis, people are born and die but there's no recollection of what came before and nothing ever changes, no progress, just survival.

So it would kind of suck.

oh and also since the god of death is also the god of music, no more of that either

That actually sounds really interesting. I like it.

>implying you can kill what's already dead
How do you think the god of the underworld got there?

My settings god of Death is already dead. That's why all these undead keep happening.

An entire nation of awakened undead would instantly and litteraly crumble to dust, as it is the will of the setting's god of death and undeath that keeps 'em shamblin'.

Also, the entities that ferry souls to their destined afterlife would cease to exist, so some a bunch of random Chaotic Evil chucklefucks could get flung into Heaven and kick it there for eternity, or the saintliest of saints could just drop straight into Hell to get tortured for all of eternity.

Congratulations! Now you are the new god of death. Oh, there is also a slight problem. You see - all gods constantly fight demons that are trying to devour the world. So now it is your work too. Once per 10 years you'll get a two week vacation. Good luck!

So the metaphysical concepts of life and death are erased, nothing ever dying or being born again?

>Homebrew mix of Exalted and WoD
>Old DeathGod now has to find a replacement.
>Similar to when you get fired and they make you train your replacement.
>He's kind of a cantankerous old man, so there'll be lots of applicants getting smacked with his bamboo cane.
>He'll probably just end up as a permanent resident on a beach somewhere with one of those old-timey full-body swimsuits drinking out of a bottomless coconut.
>This is what I had to do to our God of Death to stop our setting becoming an Edgefest.
>Help me.

So Dark Souls

sort of but not really, in pre-fire dark souls nothing ever lived or died. In this things live and die but the world, on a large scale, never progresses

In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill... and you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can't remember your lives, you can't change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life. You're trapped... like a nightmare you keep waking up into.

But each religion has its own underworld in my setting. I never bought into a shared underworld for all the races and religions.

Pick one. Surely you can shake something interesting out of it.

Hades looks like he needs a bath.

I'm sure he'll smell like death, regardless.

Things go back to normal. Souls are erased on death.

The god of Our Heaven was a usurper bitter at the other gods for the loss they made. It was he that created the afterlife within his own cavernous soul. Now that his plans have come to nothing, so too will mortals.

being killed as death god sends you back to the world of the living and whoever killed you becomes the new death god

I should note that Our Heaven was a matrix holding all points in time, all memories, not a simple after life. Your earliest childhood and the end of your life linger inside the catacombs.

Oh, so real life then?

The god of the underworld is merely the overseer/caretaker of the underworld, not the underworld himself. What is most important though is that without the god, the bureaucracy of the underworld becomes paralyzed. All spirits contained within the underworld will stay there, but cannot exit. All spirits of the newly deceased are barred from entry, dooming them to wander the earth restlessly. These are only minor problems compared to what true danger comes from killing the god of the underworld. It was from his power that the gates of Tartarus are kept sealed. With them open, the Old Gods are free, and they are as vengeful as they are powerful.

The total breakdown of the world's physics.

While he's often worshipped as a god of death, he is really the embodiment of entropy. Death just happens to be the end result of entropy on a living thing.

My setting's god of death is also the reason inter-planar travel is not possible. When The First God got bored and tried to leave the material plane, Death was there to greet him. After years of philosophical discourse and seconds of combat, Death and The First God blown chunks of one another all over the plane. Thus, the gods and the many personifications of Death arose. If any of the death-personifications die, a replacement is found from the ranks of warrior souls under their control, and all is normal again.

So the ramifications are pretty minimal, if it's just a few. If enough of them die, though, Death may begin to be reborn. The afterlife will have a civil war. Not sure how that would work out.

neat

Death is for the living. It has no power over the damned.

Sounds pointless, what was the goal of what amounts to simple record keeping? It's hardly a life after death.

Realistically, if it's a god of death, then it doesn't really make any sense for it to ever have been alive in the first place. I'd say that nothing has changed.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange æons even death may die."

Souls stop leaving bodies after death
God's need to physically grab the souls of their dead before some other asshole does

Nothing. The world goes on with or without the gods.