What happens to people when they die in your setting?

What happens to people when they die in your setting?

Nobody knows for sure. Priestesses of Mormo guarantee that followers of their religion will be personally collected by the Mute Matron to lands further and brighter than we can ever know while we're alive. A world free of disease and famine, where all Morgals will be able to see their ancestors again.

When they die they're dead, because people die when they are killed.

They usually transition from "alive" to "dead".

This is still some subject of debate.

What is known: When you die, your quintessence (otherwise called mana, soul, etc) leaves your body and enters the aether. That's where the understanding of it breaks down some. It's known that someone's quintessence can be recalled for some time after death (albeit not for very long) and that there is a longer period where you can interact with a personal quintessence, but this eventually fades. This fading is where most of the arguments happen. Some people believe that your quintessence is slowly spreading itself over time after you die, dispersing into the aether. Others believe that it is seeking out a new host, and that you are reincarnating when you become unreachable. And some believe that the aether is not something your spirit remains in,but instead if something you are passing through. That your soul disappearing from the aether is a sign you've gone to heaven.

They rise back form the dead, eventually.

No one's sure exactly how it happens, but a seemingly random amount of time after you die, you spontaneously reanimate anchored to your corpse. Unfortunately, this occurs no matter what state your corpse was in. If you were a skeleton, you're now a walking, talking, moving skeleton. If you were a pile of dust after centuries of decomposition, have fun being a tiny tornado for the rest of your unlife. If for some reason you had no body left at all, you'll reanimate attached into the earth, creating colossal elemental monsters who are only partially aware of what their doing as they try and process their senses and throughts through inorganic material.

It gets even weirder if other things are touching you when you reanimate. If you're in contact with another corpse, you'll kickstart that corpse's reanimation as well but also cause your bodies to meld together, usually creating either a very confused pair of people, or a completely crazy amalgam of dozens. If a living body is in contact, you do much the same thing but the living body is still counted as "alive" by whatever causes the reanimation, meaning that you now need to sustain it through the acquisition of more living or just-living flesh to replace it as it decays or it is agonizing. This is how things like vampires happen.

Unforunately, you won't have any conscious memories of your previous life, but some subconsious habits and skills can stick around, especially if you did them a lot. The "Philosopher's Stone" of necromancy is Lichdom, the art of becoming undead while still keeping your memories in full. It's very difficult.

If you die again, your body turns to ash and cannot be used for any form of necromancy ever again, and slowly but surely gathers in a massive valley between two mountain ranges near the center of the continent. It's now a desert of volcanic and double-dead corpse ash.

The house of dust. Next question.

Causality. Unless it doesn't. Then Shit hits the fan and it's time to take your skeleton dog and a jar of suspiciously normal marmalade for a walk to the park by the mountains that everyone knows about and says they'll visit someday, but nobody ever really does.

One of the gods you followed in life takes you to their own realm. You might get a nice promotion or work closely alongside your god if you proved yourself worthy.

If you never followed a god, or none of the gods want your eternal soul, your spirit forever wanders the plane of the dead until you either resurrect or lose your mind, becoming nothing more than a babbling, insane ghost.

Their soul are stripped of memories and sent to ocuppy another body
Sometimes there's a few problems on the process and some people keep a few memories, which surfaces with the age
Those memories are used to keep the power of the demiurge and allow the world to function

Your physical body rots and breaks down like it does in real life and your soul does the same except not on a physical level.

With enough force of will or powerful emotion, you can become a ghost. The more willpower you have, the more sane your ghost. The more powerful your emotion at time of death, the more powerful your ghost (in terms of being able to affect the physical world). A ghost that has power typically lacks sanity, and vice versa.

The ghost is believed to be the soul, but anchored to the world in some way, whether it be through force of will, powerful emotion, magic, or some other means. It will inevitably break down, albeit much slower than the soul normally would. Being anchored to a physical object or location makes it last much longer.

Souls are created when beings with souls are born. It's hypothetically possible to perfectly synthesize souls, but if you really needed souls to power a homunculus or automaton you're much better off stealing it from a newborn.

sounds pretty metal

If they die... they die.

Sometimes their soul becomes a ghost, a type of spirit. Other times the soul seems to disappear. Interpretations of this latter phenomenon vary greatly among different cultures and religions.

You wake up naked at the nearest altar, stripped of everything save your signature gear. You’re probably also weaker, either sporting a new disadvantage, missing an advantage, or having lowered some attributes.

That’s what happens to adventurers killes in Hell at least. People that die of old age, accident, or suicide while in a Haven just stay dead. It is assumed their spirit returns to the Gods to await reincarnation.

They awaken on a ship sailing in a black sea. They are devoid of any features, lips, eyes, hair, genitals etc. They are told by the rest of the millions aboard the ship to start getting to work scrubbing the deck, or bilging, or doing the thousand jobs a ship large enough to carry every soul that has ever lived on it requires. People speak of a captain but if he exists he has never left his cabin. The ship is rotting, the nails are rusting and it's taking on mroe and more black water. being fully submerged in the water destroys your body, and no one know where it goes, if your soul even goes anywhere. The ship is slowly but surely sinking itno the black inky void and the problem is only going tobe compounded the more people board the ship. There are no stars to navigate by, no land to sail to. The oldest souls speak of a mutiny years ago, but they do not know the details, and time is so difficult to work out in this void that they couldn't say for sure when it happened, or if it is just a rumour and legend passed on between the press ganged crew.

Their spirits go onto their next reincarnation based upon the karma they have accumulated.
It's literally just Buddhist cosmology, only Nirvana is not achievable. At best you can spend 8000 kalpas in the realm of neither cognition nor non cognition, you don't get to truly escape.

Do people even read threads like this?

No people just want to post about their settings

Nope. Feel free to jack off about your setting with everyone else.

They go to a brothel forever. The hookers are free though

I do, but I rarely respond because there’s not a lot of reason to do so beyond replying with the occasional “neato.”

He gets his head split by an axe because of this act of cruelty to a cake.

They are either recycled in an eternal circle of reincarnation of used to fuel the end of the world if it happens to be imminent.

A surly skeleton appears as they look over their own remains, and demands that they get in the bag.

They see a familiar 7 ft tall skeleton with fiery blue pinpoints for eyes, maybe have a chat, and walk through the mists to wherever they end up.

And not the several chainsaw murders he committed during that arc.

"Death, uh, finds a way."

They are no longer alive when they die

An angel descends from the heavens and GRABS YOUR FUCKIN SOUL AND DUNKS THAT THANG THROUGH THE B-BALL HOOP OF THE AFTERLIFE.

Afterwards you spend all eternity playing basketball against god. If you win, you get reincarnated.

Everyone goes to hell, no matter what. how sinful you were determines how long you stay there however, because demons have to tear out and eat all your evil before you're allowed to leave. Once you leave you get reincarnated.

They get dropped into a celestial blender and recycled as material for use in building the next Kalpa

The combined experience of every dead soul contributed to the shape of the next world by literally becoming part of the firmament.

I have two worlds, and each has different rules.

In one, the intact soul is brought back to the collective essence of the universe. Once there, it breaks apart and eventually dissolves into it, but this takes a long time by mortal standards. Low level resurrection is possible if it can grab the soul while still whole, and higher level spells can mend a fractured soul, but nothing can pull back a dissolved soul (this is how I justify the d&d time limits on resurrections). New souls are created from the essence of the dead, but so intermixed with a zillion other souls that the new creation is, for all practical purposes, completely unique and a distinct individual. This process is somewhat proven, but no one can agree as to why.

In the other realm, the soul remains intact upon death and will eventually be reincarnated. The process strips the soul of memory, but its collective karmic weight remains. Depending on its actions, it may be borne as a higher or lower being in its next life. Once ascended to a high enough state, the soul eventually leaves the realm of mortals entirely. These people see the mortal realm as a sort of purgatory while the soul refines itself. The question of where the souls came from or go to aren't well understood beyond "a lower realm and a higher realm".

Absolutely, but I rarely reply. I like to see others ideas and make mental notes sometimes to steal an idea.

The only thing that's known for sure is their souls travel through the Astral Plane in great streams known as lifestreams, all flowing toward a wall of light called the Great Beyond. Nobody has ever entered the wall of light and ever come back out. Even the strongest astral explorers and most powerful mages have vanished inside, never to be seen again. Nobody knows what happens inside it. It's theorized that resurrection spells work because it takes time for a soul to traverse the Astral Plane, and once it reaches the Great Beyond, it can no longer be brought back to its body.

I wanted to keep a sense of mystery in my campaign setting because I was tired of games that explain EVERYTHING about death and the afterlife.

Their property is confiscated in the favour of the state.

Well, first they turn into ghosts (or double ghosts, depending on if they died when they were a ghost), which is more of a minor inconvenience than anything. Eventually the Reaper's Guild takes notice, collects the ghost, and manually ushers them to the afterlife that they most qualify for. Or they get revified, which is a process that involves someone jamming the ghost back into its body and magically gluing them in there so they live again. Or they ghost-die too many times and fade to some kind of horrible unspeakable oblivion.
This is all because Death went missing, by the way.

Every religion has its own ideas of the afterlife, but no-one has confirmed any of these theries empirically.

Those rare souls who have returned to life have no memories of the time between dying and being returned, leading some scholars to believe that there is no afterlife, while others argue that such memories are merely left behind in the afterlife

Expeditions to find a way to journey into the afterlife via magical means have yet to prove successful

Just like real life,

NOTHING. They Rot.

Anyone brought back from the dead is either repaired and restarted, or a copy of a previous person.

DUH

No, this is just for failed "writers" to post about their "setting"

Depends mostly on who you are and how you acted. Potential options include:

Being judged by a ruthless, inscrutable entity who decides if you are just added to the ambient magic of the world, put in line for reincarnation as something or allowed to live in an idyllic, rigid city made wholly of gold.

Joining countless others in the afterlife as smelters, blacksmiths and miners to fuse to a god who, unbeknownst to them, adds their souls to his armour if they slow down too much or were disrespectful to it in life.

Turned into a spirit based undead like a ghost or banshee with sentience who is forgiven of all deeds before death except actively attacking the working dead; the soulless bodies left behind by the ghosts are controlled by necromancy and made to work and serve their people.

Joining a newly born god in attempting to break free from imprisonment to direct her fledgling people to glory and peace.

Reach the land promised so long ago, shattered, divine servants dead and rotting and their god now missing an arm and half his face. Most of these souls end up merging with the god to heal him, while those who lose their mind to despair and rage return to the world as a revenant.

Joining with whatever animalistic deity they worshiped and participating in a grand hunt in a colossal underground forest where upon death they will resurrect when the next hunt begins.

Forced to endure an eternal punishment based on their deeds in life and the demon punishing them. After a few hundred years of this the soul is twisted into a servant of the demon who tormented it.

Absorbed into the devil you made a deal with if the soul was the deal you made. If the deal was not for your soul, then made to eternally slave for them.

Souls are ambient magic pulled into a being upon its birth, and released as a coalesced entity upon death who is guided to their particular afterlife realm by messenger spirits from that realm.

Everyone goes to hell because the world is just that fucking evil. Very few notice the difference.

That's the end of it. Dead's dead.

This is for all my settings
>character sheet gets filed away
>death enjoys playing with fallen adventurers
>their souls are stordd in his toybox
>when he (all of us) are bored we do a one shot
>death fabricates a mini realm and set's up a scenerio
>players pick a dead character and play through the one shot
>characters are gone from their world but are bever forgotten

The newly dead find themselves in a land of muted colours and drifting mists, where they roam until they find their path. Those who performed great deeds, good or ill, find their paths quicker than those who drifted through life.
Once on the path, only divine intervention or the most urgent of needs can pull them back to the land of the living.
Each path inexorably draws the soul walking it to their final rest, each tailored specifically for that soul, or so it is said, for no soul has ever reached the end of their path and returned to tell of it

In my setting, the reanimation count down starts when you're born and not when you die, so just living long enough will cause you to reanimate while still alive, becoming a lich.

That's pretty interesting. Is there a set amount of time before you become one? It kind of reminds me of the mechanics behind Tsukumogami and multi-tailed animals in japanese mythology, only with people.