The god of death suddenly disappears and people, animals, and plants alike all find they can no longer die...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_with_Interruptions

Nobel price, m8.
Pretty good book.

Watch the anime "Sunday Without God." It's been done.

Dawn of the Dead (1978) please.

>Watch the anime
>It's been done.

I... I don't know how to tell you, but this concept predates anime.

>captcha is JAPON HOUSE

People live how they are until their body decay enough to not function anymore and in essence dead. After all, they are still a biological construct and will respond to pain and other warning. This mean that God of related field just got promoted.

It would be a bit crowded.

Read Greek mythology. It's been done.

Everyone goes hungry forever. Everyone goes into stagnation and before long, ends up in a state where they can't do anything but suffer, since they no longer have any sort of energy, since they can't eat. Just endless suffering, forever.

Tomb-Colonies.

Someone else claims the mantle of the God of Death, as is the way of the world.

That brings up an interesting point, could you digest stuff that's still alive? Could living organic material still be recycled into new life? How would that work?

If you've ever read Elantris, my guess would be something like that, only for everything, not just the people in the city.

Was going to post this

Technically, there are living bacteria in yogurt that survive at least until they get to the stomach.

We also have all sorts of single cell critters in our digestive tracts, and when they die, they get absorbed or passed out of the body just like anything else.

I suppose it depends on what we consider "alive" Like, cells are the smallest functional unit of life. The wording of the curse suggests that cells, and probably the sub components like organelles would be susceptible to damage. I'm not sure how to qualify random bits of protein and lipids as "alive". Where does the absurdity stop? Do we have living and non-living atoms? How would you be able to tell the difference? Would a living organism still be able to metabolize "living" atoms from other organisms?

I think we need clarification on this curse and its specific rules concerning the furthest extent of damage possible.

Read reaper man or Mogworld.

>death no longer occurs
infinite cancer, much like this thread

What happens to abortions?

Are they immune to harm, or do they just persist on living no matter how badly damaged/mutilated they are? Also, if this is the case, what would happen if you smashed or burned someone until there was nothing left of them?

Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man would be my recommendation. The world would be shitty, grimdark, or outright dysfunctional without deah, but in Discworld it's a lot more complicated and amusing.

The biggest chunk of ash would slowly heal until it eventually became a body again years later.

I saw an anime about this that I was told was good but it was actually fucking shit and I haven't touched anime since

torchwood had a whole season dedicated to it from memory

SUFFERING

I hate posts like this. As if because a tv show did an episode on how they think it would be, it is objectively that way.

God of Death dying does not equal nobody dies anymore. Death Gods are never (in my experience) responsible for making sure folks die. They ferry your soul into the afterlife, they look over you when you die, they act as guides and oftimes judges; but they are not the actual cause of your death (except in shitty movies).

But lets say in this imaginary world that IS how it works. Okay. Stream of conciousness to think this out follows :

Souls forever bound to flesh. No matter how badly mangled, the flesh just keeps going.

Depending on how the mechanics work, this could be anything from horror to complete insanity.

People get bored and start doing the most dangerous things for kicks, because no consequences.

Nobody ages because aging is caused by cell death. So everybody would grow to maturity, hit their peak, and stay there. Older folks who are "grandfathered in" get to stay old forever, but with the bonus that given enough time they'll eventually heal.

Folks will be hungry, but you can still eat, assuming that if you cut a leg off an animal the leg dies but the body regenerates. If, on the other hand, the cut off leg generates a new animal? Now we're into crazy territory.

Things can be harmed, so stomach acid and enzymes would still break down food. You'd just live with knowing you were eating something that is STILL ALIVE.

People on the edge of death due to frailty/disease/etc will live forever and suffer on the edge of death. Chronic pain will be forever.

Women have only so many eggs to fertilize in a lifetime; still, the population would grow exponentially, unless folks just stopped having children. Maybe fertility goddess would step in and say "Yeah, no more babies for anybody, ever."

Cannabalism. Self Cannabalism. Autoerotic Cannabalism; because no consequences.

Wars no loger fought, because what's the fucking point? How do you win when you can't kill the enemy? Oh wait... You can bury them all alive. cont....

Surely Veeky Forums has read Death's best book right?

Advances in medicine like we've never fucking seen before

Simpsons did it.

So wars are going to be much much much worse and far more nightmarish. You will dismember the enemy and store their parts in seperate places. Wagons full of heads, full of legs, full of arms, full of torsos. All of them wriggling and still moving/alive. Heads trying to scream but with no breath to make a sound.

Have a god you need to make a living sacrifice to? Well, that god is kinda pissed off now.

Bragging rights : who's been eaten by the nastiest monster? Who's done the dumbest thing that _should_ have killed them?

Plants eventually choke out every square inch of space because everything is now a weed that cannot die. On the other hand, the dog shitting in your yard won't make brown spots anymore.

Mosquitos and flies and other pest species will be EVERYWHERE.

New punishment for terrible crimes : being tied up and thrown into a pool of flesh eating maggots that slowly devour you. You get pulled out and allowed to regenerate, only to be thrown back in to experience this hell of being slowly eaten alive for however long your sentence is; because this is the only sort of deterrrent that could work now; no death sentence. Only thing worse : to be buried alive in a stone sarcophagus under boulders, to be forgotten.

Scavengers go forever hungry but cannot die. Sucks to be a vulture.

Medical science advances to alleviate the suffering of the permanently old and almost dead. We can just keep trying shit out until we get it right. Nobody is going to die if the leaches don't work.

I'm sure there's more, but I'm done for now.

The vampires in my setting are kinda like this ,they can't die, so vampire hunters don't try to put a spike through their hearts but they destroy their bodies completely so they can forever suffer their immortality (thay can't regenerate beyond a certain point on their own, maybe if given enought time their flesh begins to warp and transform) one of my players thought that it would be a great idea to use them as food so he carries a torso of a vampire he incapacitated.

that's whishful thinking user

I'll break it down for you.

Torchwood: Miracle Day only affected humans, and the results were pretty bad. All because you can't die doesn't mean you can be incapacitated. So, essentially, hospitals become overrun with the bodies of people that are still 'alive' but will probably never wake up and never be able to return to functioning as a person ever again.

Eventually, you have to decide when you label someone as 'effectively dead' and burn them to ashes/drop them in a hole somewhere. All these people who are 'dead' from disease are still infection vectors FOREVER if their body never actually dies from it.

So the social and ethical screwups here are sort of nasty. Torchwood also brought up the case of a notorious serial killer/rapist who was executed by the state on the day that death stopped working. He is afterwards, legally speaking, free to go. The state carried out its punishment, they can't lock him up again for the same crime because that is double jeapordy. The law doesn't handle death failing to work.

Of course, that was only humans. If NOTHING really dies anymore, we have about a week before there are so many insects on the surface of the Earth that we can no longer move or breath.

Dark Souls

>we have about a week before there are so many insects on the surface of the Earth that we can no longer move or breath.
they'd spread until there wasn't food left. then probably turn to eating us or each other. but they wouldn't populate so much that we couldn't move, because there's only so much potential organic matter on earth

Sine Requie (italian rpg) is exactly this, happening right on D-Day.
Germans win the war, America disappears in nuclear fallout, Italy goes back to Inquisition, Egypt is ruled by the Pharaohs, everyone who dies becomes a zombie, some with awareness, most merely hungry. Heavy occult, hard mortality, and zombies. Just. Don't. Die. Dismemberment is required.

>He is afterwards, legally speaking, free to go.
"What are you gonna do, kill me?"
-quote from man raped

>Reaper Man
This is what I came to contribute. Love Discworld.

Also this isn't really a novel concept at all. In fact I'm pretty sure that Simpsons did it.

Saramago is a fucking hack

So, Don't Fear the Reaper?

Sounds like a run of the mill Siderial adventure for Exalted

>> The god of death has gone missing again, better go find him before creation alt+f4's itself and humans realize the universe and everything in it is a complete fucking sham

The world is quickly overwelmed by short lived fast breading species.

The world would fucking burn over night. People wouldn't even consider things like threat of imprisonment and social repercussions because they'd be too caught up on not being able to be killed.

Fuck's sake if you live in a big city all they have to do is turn the lights off for an hour and murders, rapes, and robberies goe through the fucking roof.

...

Initially? Madness. The worst humanity has to offer. Murder, rape, arson, pointless destruction and violence on a grand scale as people realise that the ultimate consequence has been removed. Not only do the people who stay in line for fear of being punished in this world go wild, but also those who fear being punished in the next. Not being able to die means you don't get to go to heaven. Faith dies, in blood and fire.

But no inferno will burn forever. The chaos fades, eventually. Most of the world rendered nigh-uninhabitable and hundreds of years of progress lost. No food, little water. Doesn't really matter anymore. Some people try to return to a facade of normalcy, but they quickly find that it is impossible. As the implications of immortality really set in, a deathly pallor falls over mankind.

Centuries later, ennui reigns. Most people have simply... Stopped. They fall, one by one, smashed to the ground by the weight of existence. They cease to move, cease to think, their minds closed off, their muscles atrophied.

Those who do not fall to despair pick apart the ruins of a civilisation they barely remember. There is a perpetual twilight cast over their thoughts as they cling desperately to any sense of meaning they can find. They walk amongst the silent bodies of those who came up empty, hollow shells, alive and yet unfeeling, unthinking. They aren't like them. Their every thought is bittersweet, their every feeling crestfallen, and yet they keep on going, one step at a time.

They cross paths, trading stories as they sit beside the fire, the old world being burnt for fuel in more ways than one. Some go mad, turn violent, raging against a world that has betrayed them. Others give up, and join their hollowed brethren in death-sleep. But some, some keep on going, wandering forever, living only for the moments when their paths might cross, when they talk amongst each other beside the dying firelight

This is the Undying Land. Cursed, and blessed.

Dark Souls Modern

I can dig it

Why are you cutting each blade of grass one at a time? Why not do a whole bunch at once?

YOU CAN DO THAT? NO. I THINK IT IS BETTER LIKE THIS.

>exist in a time before living organisms. It's been done.