How does death work in your setting?

>blend of low end cyberpunk and military sci-fi

Don't get shot. You can't afford the new regen treatments and working a rifle with one arm is a bitch

>just take off work until you heal
Yeah, and let your office rent go unpaid? Not today fuccboi

The title of god must not mean much in your setting if the they're all too incompetent to rectify a single problem the entire pantheon's working to fix.

In L5R if people die and they were bad, they go to one of the lower realms...
>Toshigoku, Realm of Slaughter
>Jigoku; Realm of Evil
>Gaki-do; Realm of the Hungry Dead
>Meido; Realm of the Dead
and finally
>Yomi; Realm of the Blessed Ancestors

The problem isn't that the whole "going to hell" thing is occuring, though that's a doozy, the problem is that they all hate each other and are constantly bickering about who has the best idea how to fix it, or what "fixing" it would even entail. It's more of a political problem than a technical one. Like any group project.

He's NEET

When you die, your soul falls to the underworld, which is just a rainy night beach on an obsidian island. You can either sit there contemplating the ocean forever, or allow it to drown you and rebirth you into another life. If you have strong enough a will, you can ascend to the Dreamlands as a dream shade.

What the players don't know is that the world of death is putative, and will change because of their actions.

He works the right way

Yes

I remember that time he said he got a letter from a child with a terminal illness, who said he hoped Death would be like in his novels. That'd be great, even though I'm not a wizard I probably wouldn't meet him. We could talk about cats.
This is pretty dope, I mean putting myself in that situation, the only way to get reincarnated would be to commit a harrowing form of suicide. The place sounds very cold and lonely too, so nit wouldn't exactly make me feel daring enough to just do it. Plus my fear of the ocean and the abyss would certainly kick in. I don't even swim that far on a bright sunny day. I wouldn't consider swimming at night at all.

I'd try doing the dreamshade thing but without direction on how to achieve it, I'd probably just end up building a hut in the Underworld.

Sadly there's nothing to build WITH. It's all sand, shores, water, and obsidian rock. The best you can do is chill on the shores (it's always warm actually which makes the waters even more inviting) and stare at the dreamlands and earth shining through when the rain rarely clears. It's perfectly safe, though. Silent, safe, and lonely.

Sometimes you can find another soul to talk to. One character who uses the dead as summons has a small pack who chill on the shore together in downtime.

>Mfw a setting where all murderers and serial killers are actually dudes paid by death to reap people that were going to die anyway and is considered a legit, normal albeit highly prestigious appointment.

>Someone has trapped and usurped Death
>They're making people die and kill each other at random for shits and giggles
>PCs have to somehow take out a dude who can kill them at any time

Ahh alright. By that description it reminds me of the Shivering Shore in Salt and Sanctuary. Is the place an island, like a really big obsidian chunk "inland" with a sandy shore all around?

The summoner thing sounds pretty nice. If I had any skill to contribute, I'd seek those groups out. Purpose is a hell of a drug. Or ask them for help for achieving this dreamshade state at least.

Never used it, but I liked the layers of Death mentioned in the Old Kingston books by Garth Nix.

Basically, Death is a big ol' river, shrouded by mist. When you die, your spirit is carried by the river through the various stages of Death until you reach the Ninth Gate, an infinite field of stars above the now calm river. As you look up, you find yourself called by it and ascend into them. After that, nobody knows.
Some of the river itself is dangerous, with whirlpools and hidden currents trying to drag the living visitors and undead denizens under the surface to join the spirits of the dead.

Undead beings are those who clawed their way out of the river due to magic or will, and the further in they can get the more powerful they are. But they all fear going beyond the Eighth gate into the Ninth Precinct with it's Gate, as one look at the stars and they would no longer be able to resist the lure of true death. Hell, even the living necromancers who visit try not to look up there as it's hard for anyone to not heed the call.

It's just one seemingly endless island in a black ocean, with near-infinite shore.

The secret is that the players, after 5 years of gaming, have managed to accidentally turn their home town into a divine plane, and a potential Heaven - once the game ends, all the dead will be revealed having moved on to a new existence beyond this one.

Death is any condition that damages your body or vessel so badly that it can no longer support your soul. Right now, when you die, your soul is pulled towards the Afterlife, the form of which depends greatly on what goes you believed or disbelieved in. Your soul can stay behind if there's unfinished business or something like that, but unless you have powerful magic within you, you won't be able to do much.

I said "right now" because for about 150 years, there was a period in which magic stopped working, the gods fell silent, and the Afterlife slammed shut. The dead grew restless and hungry. Cremation became very popular. During this time, souls built up throughout the plane, a problem nobody was really aware of.

This setting also has low level steampunk technology, so I have to include something about photographs capturing part of your soul. I think it will work a bit like that metal from one of the Complete books that would hold a soul if it was touching someone as they died. In other words, you don't need 1000gp worth of diamonds, just a photo of someone.

So like Final Destination only as a Mystery?

Exactly. They find out Death has been usurped by some (dying) guy, and then gotta figure out who, how, what, where, and how they keep silent enough to do this without being slaughtered when they just so 'happen' to run into a pack of 80 Lv.20 orcs.

The afterlife is like a giant communal tulpa.

It only exists as long as people believe it does

First you die.
The next few days, and usually no longer than 2 weeks, your soul loosens its attachments to the body, usually through decomposition. This is usually when funerals happen, which often aid in helping separate the soul from the body. It is also the time in which any psychopomps usually show up.
Next your soul either joins the River of Souls, usually escorted and guarded by some variety of psychopomp, or it attaches to a nearby object/area, creating a ghost and possibly a haunt.
After traversing the River of Souls to the Great Boneyard, the soul is sent to its racial God of Death for judgement and placement in the afterlife. Rarely a soul might require input from the Tribunal of Bone, the rest of the Gods of Death.

If you didn't join the river of souls, you'll eventually be hunted down by psychopomps, undead hunters, and nasty things that eat souls. Its also generally unpleasant to become a ghost and eventually go insane.

Pic is of the lowest form of psychopomps, the Nosoi. Messengers,clerks, and scribes for the bureaucracy of death. Prone to mischief and bird activities.

>"Bird activities"
youtube.com/watch?v=O7D-1RG-VRk

I'm ok with this.

I like this idea.

When you reach the end of your negative hp, instead of just dying, you can chose to bargain for your life. You immediately stabilize, but you lose one Con point. Once per character, you can also choose to take a Flaw, and thus get a bonus feat out if the whole thing.

Thus, the party cohesion, the narrative drive, and the character development you've built up over time doesn't go to waste.

I came here to post this.
It was the first post.

Is it possible to get a job as a psychopomp before/after death?

I love that fucking meme.

I think if I ran a game with something like that I'd rather have Death arrange some kind of rebus puzzle.
Most people know about that, but there are a few people whose job is to learn how those puzzles work and to decypher them. Most of the time they work with undertakers, funerals and lawyers but sometimes they have to help the cops solve a case. Most puzzles would also be intimately linked to the life and death of the person that left it. Maybe you would have to talk to the family and friends of the dead person to fully understand the symbolism that underlines it.
You could even have criminals whose business is to sabotage the puzzles to change their meaning and mislead investigators.
Maybe there are several different Death with different styles of puzzles.

I don't know, maybe that's way too complicated and would be impossible to make relevant in an RPG, but at first glance I think it could make for a very interesting campaign.

There's a little black library in every town. Great archives of black cards with Last Words written on them. Some meaningful, some useful and some just bizarre.
All signed by the same symbol, with a design of bones on the other side flanking words in a language no one can decipher. Some say it is Death's true name. Other his address, or motto. Others think it's a date, for the final Death.

>"Sorry I had to go on ahead fellas, I'll hold you a good spot."
>"My killer wore a mask of bone, find her!"
>"Death seems a nice enough sort, I think I'll be fine."
>"Brother, why?"
>"Look, it's not that weird a fetish."
>"The cards lie."
>"If you three don't sort out your grievances I'm going to bloody haunt you until you die so I can smack you."
>"I forgot to feed Mittens, can someone do that please?"
>"A fucking falling star? Really?!"
>"Please help me momma!"

There are two groups in conflict: Death Union Rippers, and Non Unionized Death Rippers.

DUR
>Free labor days = sometimes you don't die if you are killed
>Guaranteed work = however, eventually death rippers can take you away
>Higher rights from the Divine Forces, but also autonomy.
>Work divided evenly, so regularized shifts

NUDR
>Vacations vary
>Higher posibilities for retirement and salary
>Depending on the group, you get uniform
>Fight between reapers to fill quotas = mass genocides

And then there's the Death Rippers that go one step ahead trying to be entrepeneurs and redefine the concept of life and death, making their ways to "kill" concepts such as planets, ideas, or even death itself.

>AnCap setting

>People don't have to die if they don't want to

You die and reappear in the ethereal world, a realm where human thought and imagination takes physical form allowing for such things as trolls, dragons, unicorns or whatever local folkloric beliefs were espoused by a society. This is where gods and spirits can be found and exert some influence on the real world to further their following and purposes.

Dying in the ethereal world entails falling deeper into the next realm where mental anguish accumulates shaping a realm that closely resembles hell and is generally teeming with creatures that resemble lovecraftian horrors and other unpleasant things. This is where dark gods and creatures aligned with evil appear and leak into reality to sow chaos and fear.

One more death and you reach the archetypal world where the abstraction of human thought means most things don't take a solid form and are constantly shifting in shape and ideal. This world is very loosely defined by the most instinctual and basic of human thoughts and emotions. This is where things like the idea of "A true hero" or the desire for "a kind ruler" take shape and influence reality.

Finally after the archetypal world things enter a universal plain where only the most common thoughts and desires of all life bleeds into the creation of a world that resembles an infinite plain with little to no characteristic, for anything to take shape here requires it to be shared by all life as a common thread which means few things ever make it.

After this there's nowhere to go but for the abstracted souls to stretch outwards losing all shape, consciousness and memories, through a period lasting several thousand years these souls break into the components that will be reconstituted into new souls and the basic energy blocks that allow for the phenomenon of magic in the basic world. The concept of reincarnation stems from the undigested memories that are absorbed into nascent souls before reaching the surface world.

There's more to it but that's a short summary.

>How does death work in your setting?

Not very well. Reapers are notoriously lazy and very easily bribed and/or distracted. This results in quite a few souls left uncollected, which often meander around as ghosts. Such a state is only a minor inconvenience, however, as they can still use magic to interact with the physical world. It is also quite easy to resurrect someone, as you can shove the ghost back into their corporeal body and keep them in there until life takes hold again.

Now resurrecting a ghost that has double died is a different matter entirely.

>I remember that time he said he got a letter from a child with a terminal illness, who said he hoped Death would be like in his novels.

How do you recieve a letter like this and not collapse into a bawling husk?

I pretty much stole Apocalypse/Dungeon World's whole shtick.

>If you die roll dice
>high roll, death says it's not your time and implies there are some deeper reasoning to why you live (and usually will be once I figure out how)
>Average roll, death gives you a hard choice and you can either accept his proposal or pass on
>Low roll, death takes you

The specifics will be different lore wise every game but it's usually a God at the other side. Haven't played a game in a while where Gods didn't exist so I haven't really figured out what is going to happen in that case.

He's more of a middleman, who's job it is to make sure souls safely get to the afterlife. He keeps an eye on events happening in the world of the living and the dead, but doesn't care much unless they interfere with him doing his job.

The dead find themselves in Death's Corridors, a series of hallways Death constructed that lead souls to the afterlife, keeping them safe from the....things that would devour their souls. For strong enough souls, Death himself guides them, since the strength of their soul attracts these things.

He prefers to keep his existence a secret from the living and from the gods, and claims his existence being public knowledge could cause "problems."

He makes no secret that he dislikes the current gods, being far more ancient than even they can comprehend. They had only been around for 1000 years or so and already caused massive damage to the land of the dead, their infighting causing the afterlife to split into 4 separate planes(one for each god), which makes his job of guiding souls more difficult.

He won't take any real action to solve that, as he won't interfere in affairs outside of his job unless he deems it necessary, as the things he deals with are far more dangerous than some lowly ex-mortals who fancy themselves deities.

Does belief from the people in the afterlife count?

The only reliable way of finding out what happens after you die is to die.

Sure, there are a few people who claim to have been resurrected. Some of them might even be telling the truth. They all disagree with each about what happened after they died.

Is there a hidden truth to death that the player's don't get access to or do you prefer to keep it unknowable?

Discworld death is a pretty cool guy.

>There's no afterlife in my setting
how sad

You die and get reincarnated forever and ever, hoping that you never somehow get sucked out of that cycle because then the Godhead will find you

Death is ultimate and final. Sentient undead and people who were resurrected exist, but neither has been "truly" dead. Ghosts are spiritual and mental corpses as much as zombies are physical ones. Liches, vampires and revenants are just stalling. Everything dies the true death and Death is a universal constant.

I'm running a sunless sea campaign so not very well, its more of an inconvenience than anything.

You die, and go to whatever god-constructed afterlife is waiting for you. So if you're a murderer you're likely fucked, unless you made an evil god happy enough, in which case you'll probably get some sort of cushy assignment torturing the innocent.

Unfortunately, the afterlife is temporary. After 77,500 years (by most estimates) your soul disappears. Time spent undead (such as being a Lich) counts against your afterlife time as well, whcih really sucks.

Where do disappeared souls go to? Well, nobody really knows. A lot of people think that's the end of existence. Some thing you go on to another, greater afterlife. Others have theories of reincarnation.

The gods themselves actually have no idea, but they do know that they don't get any afterlife time at all. Most are pretty fucking paranoid about dying as a result.

>sand
>water
>nothing to build with
nigger it takes less willpower to pack mud into sandstone than it does to jump to space

Now imagine 20 (or a hundred) of them with human level intelligence all breaking out into singing and bird noises. That's your average tuesday in any place on the Boneyard. It's like a goddamn Disney movie sometimes.

Pic is of another Psychopomp, the Catrina. The guides for particularly important individuals, they dress to ease the newly deceased. It also doesn't help that they exude a magical aura of calm that suppresses any urge to freak out.

>Is it possible to get a job as a psychopomp before/after death?
Of course. Where do you think many of the psychopomps come from?

>"The cards lie."
Definitely the most disturbing.

>How does death work in your setting?
At one of my settings its like this

If you are 95%+ evil you go to hell.
Hell is an alternate earth, the moment the first sapient living being was born at earth, the same didnt happened at hell and stopped to happen there.
Evil people appear there at the moment they died, there is not one hell for every evil person that dies, just one for everyone, you appear at the middle of whateaver the hell its happening there, at the same point you were at real life.

People that is 50% or less evil, go to heaven.
Heaven is basically adam and eve paradise style of stuff.

People between 50% and 95% evil go to limbo.

The second comming of christ is not really the second comming of chirst. At this moment the universe reset (including heaven and hell).
At second comming of christ, the ones that are at limbo, or would go to limbo if they died the moment the universe restarted, will reincarnate at this new universe.
The evil guys at hell will merge with the reality.
The good guys at heaven, or that would go to heaven if they died the moment universe restarted will go back to the restarted heaven.
The guys that would go to hell if they died, will reincarnate and this new hell after some amount of time.

After the first reset, the universe will happen again as the "second comming of christ" happens again

My setting has several gods of death.

Alzer is the god of death and aging. The god of life gives to the Material Plane, the god of death takes from it after some time, and so it must be. His divine domain is that of the natural death but regardless of how someone dies, he is the one responsible for taking their soul and escorting it to his realm. They remain in his dark, vacuous realm until he can deliberate what kind of afterlife they deserve. Alzer is not infallible and not unemotional. He fulfills his duties begrudgingly, and being the reaper of the world is a role that saddens him greatly. His benevolent, pragmatic approach to death is contested by the active destruction of his fellows:

Voorheez is the god of monsters and mayhem. He is the origin of all the world's murderous impulses, violent rages, and unjust wars. He created the world's monsters by planting his gnarled teeth in the soil like seeds.

Roquefell is the god of misfortune and lack. He orchestrates terrible accidents and inflicts terrible twists of fate on people below. He targets the young and healthy so that their untimely deaths may rejuvenate his decrepit, skeletal body.

Fujita is the goddess of storms and desolation. Natural disasters, famines, droughts, and wildfires are her domain. Whenever things on the Material Plane get too quiet, or when a civilization seems too self-assured, she seeks to uproot, overturn, and destroy.

Polionus is the god of illness and pain. Every disease known to the world runs through his foul blood, and it drips into the Material Plane as a plagued rain. Nearly immobile from his own condition, Polionus takes great pleasure in spreading sickness on the Material Plane from the comfort of his own squalid realm.

>Roquefell is the god of misfortune and lack.
>Roquefell
>lack
Is this a subtle Rockefeller joke?

Most of the time, Death is a kind, straightforward, gentle and even genuinely playful. She's part of the cycle of creation, and is not hateful, vengeful or filled with malice. She fully understands that mortals fear her, but is an expert at calming their souls and leading them to whatever lay beyond.

This gentle and kindly demeanor disappears entirely when faced with powers or forces that break the cycle of life and death, seek to usurp her power, undermine the laws of creation, wrest control of mortal souls, or corrupt life with undeath. /Then/ death becomes the fearful and dread force people have come to call the reaper. Death's mandate was created by the very primordial forces that sparked the birth of creation, and nothing, not gods, spirits, wizards, demons or anything one can name is beyond her power. Trifle with her at ones own peril.

>death pulls a soul aside and asks it's last words
>meanwhile the library has a special room for an ever expanding card as an old man filibusters his own entry into the afterlife so he can communicate with the living

I prefer to keep it unknowable so I can focus on detail that is more likely to matter to the players.

Yea, I based the god on Rockefeller because that guy got like six heart transplants before finally dying. The thought of some god orchestrating fatal accidents just so he could subsist on their unused lifeforce seemed like a cool idea.

Death is a chef who picks out good souls and puts them into his primordial soup, ready for when life ends so he can tip the broth over to start life again.
He's basically constantly refiltering these souls until a good sustainable universe pops out.

So, do souls go bad, or is this the first time he's doing this and the next universe will be all good? Or maybe he's just bad at filtering?

My immediate thought is that that feathery fucker acts like the soul hunting equivalent of a shrike when you resist. This thought terrifies me to no end.

He's still trying out different combinations with the soup. All combinations tested so far have resulted in good souls going bad and once a soul goes bad it'll ruin the soup entirely so it can't be put back in.
Otherwise they'd have to go back to how it was before when they'd remove all the current souls and wait for a new batch of souls to potentially pop into existence, which they'll still have to do if they run out of good souls to put in the soup, but reusing at least gives them something to work with in the mean time.
He's only done this recycling/re-filtering process once before, so he isn't very experienced at it and that only served to remove the nastiest beings. Most of the current beings in universe will be thrown away due to it being a bad broth.

pic related explains it a bit better but souls aren't colour coded in universe, so it's a bit harder picking them.