Afterlives

you live the same life over and over but based on your actions in your previous life things get slightly better or slightly worse

http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Wraith:_The_Oblivion

http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Orpheus

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>>54530630
I always specifically avoided answering this question in any of my settings, as I feel it over-simplifies questions of faith and morality to confirm gods or an afterlife exist in any kind of definite study'able form. Even priests and other "holy" classes are drawing power from an entity they can't really comprehend or communicate with, outside of vague uncertainties like dreams or meditative hallucinations.

Unless you seriously fuck up at dying, death will take you away and you'll never be heard from again. Ancestral echoes are still possible, but they're more of a memoir of you than you-you.

Gods creates souls, but the patron god of the elves have died and now the elves survive by reincarnating themselves. Capturing their own souls and giving them to newborns (or fetus, not sure yet)

As dwarves age, they turn to stone. Their creator god died, but their new patron god creates souls for them from stone, though imperfectly. Their afterlife is that of a statue, bound to the earth, standing in Halls of the Ancestors. Their will, feelings and opinions affect their family, keeping traditions and wisdom intact.

The orc god doesnt know how to create souls (he is an ascended mortal), so he shares his divinity to ensoul the orcs. Individuality corrupts this divine spark and the god have to have the spark back before that happens. Ritual suicide, short lives, and honorable combat death are part of their culture.

Humans have their soul created from anything, their patron god alive. Not sure about their afterlife - if they should have a specifc afterlife like the other races.

Death, the grim reaper, collects souls. I want to keep 'Why' out of in-universe and player knowledge like for similar reasons to >>54530729 though my gods are real.

Angels doest serve gods and are in a sense their own faction. An angel is a fusion of the best from many souls to create a superior being. Their Valkyries watch and bring worthy souls to join their crusade.

Fiends also seek to obtain souls to bolster their armies, through faustian deals and claims of (particularly?) evil souls. Fiends are age-old tortured souls, enslaved and indoctrinated.

When you die, you go to the afterlife. And if you die in the afterlife, you go to the after-afterlife. And if you die in the after-afterlife, you go to the after-after-afterlife. And if you die in the after-after-afterlife, you go to the after-after-after-afterlife... etc. ad infinitum.

All of the gods are dead because they held a great war and killed eachother.
This of course, means that souls have nowhere to go and just stick around as ghosts. or worse. Now, the only higher beings who survived the divine war were neutral parties, the strongest of which was the grim reaper Death itself, who previously served all of the gods and was thus ignored.
Death of course didn't want a bunch of ghosts everywhere, and so he constructed the Soul Cage deep within the depths of the earth. What he does with all these imprisoned souls is a mystery to mortal kind. He's using them as fuel to keep creation going, as without the gods to power it reality started to fall apart.

>>54530630
People in the setting I'm working on used to just reincarnate, float around in the aether, or live in the dream world. But the living figured out a way to drag themselves back into bodies and now the afterlife is empty and death has lost all meaning. You are born, you live, you die in an accident, you're brought right back forever. There is no way out except for blanking (loss of all memories stored in the soul (not just the brain)) or having the soul itself destroyed, which takes a fuckton of energy to do. When a nation goes to war, the conquered citizens are killed to a man, and then brought back in bodies with memories and programming that ensure they are happy in their current position. By which I mean their personality is modified so they behave like they had never been conquered at all. So all of existence is essentially a bunch of souls piloting one meat-puppet after another in a quest to subjugate rival souls and bind them to the mentality they support. Really, you could say that by conquering the afterlife, they brought the afterlife right down to them.

>>54532768
>Death, the grim reaper, collects souls.
That's one thing I don't get in so many fictions. In worlds with so many different gods and semi-real mythologies, why should death and its personification have only one face? Sure death is the great equalizer, the same for all, but it's also different for all. Every death is unique and it has as many names and faces as there are people.
There are also just a lot of great variants for the "reaper" roll that wasting them is a shame.

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>>54530630
The average person reincarnates. There's even a sect of assassins which specifically target people who they feel wasted their current lives, so they have another go and do better. Powerful people are reincarnated in more than one new soul, so leveling up pleases the universe.

There are ways to avoid this, but they all have their ups and downs. The most common is to somehow be a servant of a deity, you get immortality but loses a lot or even all of your individuality.

The local death god hates who sells souls to devils, even their own's. Those folks are personally colected and put to die, over and over and over again.

If you're famous enough, it's hard to ever really die. That's why Ancient Evils reappear. Any knowledge about them has to be erased so they disappear into nothingness and never are remade from their descending reincarnations.

>>54530630
Not the campaign I'm in currently, but a DM I played with did a horrifying take on the usual DnD afterlife

>21 gods
>At the point of death, your soul is drawn to the God you most resembled (not necessarily the one you worshiped), to their home demiplane, eventually to be turned into a lesser angle in their service.
>The demiplane's processes work on any soul though, not just one that is ideologically aligned, so pretty much all the gods try to cheat and grab any soul they can get their hands on, so your afterlife is pretty much a crapshoot.

Technically there isn't one. You see, every living being has a soul. Your soul is simply a magical energy concentrated heavily enough to create you. Whenever your physical body dies there isn't anything to keep your soul bound to the physical world as your soul is only kept in the physical world by being bound to your organs. Remove the organs and you fade back into the ether. Now, once inn the ether what happens to you depends on a lot of things
>What you are
Depending on what you are your soul will dissipate into the ether, erasing your soul, faster. An ant's soul will dissipate in a second, a rabbit, a couple minutes, a deer, half an hour, a skaven, an hour, a human, a couple hours, an elf, a day, a mammoth, a month, a dragon, a year etc etc
>How famous you are
Magic only works in this setting because people think it does. The more people that focus on a spell the more likely it'll be supercharged, ork waaaagh magic sort of stuff. If a lot of people know who you are the time before you dissipate is increased exponentially, worship increases it even more so. Extremely famous individuals take the place of gods in this setting since they're effectively immortal as long as people believe in, and worship, them. Great warriors can remain alive for hundreds of years, mortal kings and famous dragons, thousands, mortals worshipped as gods, indefinite periods of time.
You can do a lot of other stuff with souls before they dissipate but that's unimportant right now. A lot of other factors come into play like spiritual deterioration and, whether or not a necromancer grabs your soul and binds you to something, soul powered spells, etc. Most people are just given a couple hours to think before they peacefully fade away though

>>54536890
wow that sounds really fucked up the more I think about it

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