What happens in your settings to those who don't believe

Belief doesn't matter so much as action. Their soul will go to whichever god that their personality and actions in life is most similar/connected to.

Same nothing that happens to everyone else.

>>54548352
>What happens in your settings to those who don't believe in the God(s) when they die?
Are we talking my Star Wars campaigns? or my Black Crusade campaign?

They get fed to the moon.

They get eaten by cats from hell

>>54548352
Everyone believes in the Gods, because they're present in the physical reality, manifesting within their prison cells to create their miniature worlds.

Of course, the souls can't escape the prison on death, so most of the gods just absorb the soul's collected life-force (XP) and send it back out to be reborn.

>>54548352
The gods give them noogies and call them dumbasses

>>54548764
>>54548737
Knowing is not the same as believing. What's the point of having faith in something you can prove exists?

There is a race of creatures specifically devoted to harvesting the souls of the godless in my setting. They grab the wayward souls, and give them a comforting afterlife, and in turn, they get to feed off of that soul's energy for eternity.

>>54548388
"Your setting" so neither.

>>54548352

Without the psychopomp of a deity to guide them somewhere specific, they usually just wander the Hereafter until they find a place that suits them/they're suited for. These places are usually the specific domain of some kind of god or lesser supernatural entity anyways, but ones that wouldn't require explicit belief in them in life. If you get along with the people there and enjoy the lifestyle, you're the kind of person the god likes having around.

>>54548784
What's the point of faith?
Does a deity draw power from active worship, ritual sacrifice, or just a large number of mortal minds thinking it exists?
Do gods depend on faith specifically without proof, or do they just prefer it when a mortal believes in them as opposed to knowing their there?

>>54548352
Their souls wander eternity without a guide, until they discorporate into the substance of the Planes. Its not painful, it's just an end. Gods wont act to help or hinder it, they concentrate theit efforts on those who they truly care about.

>>54548352
They go straight to Hell, just like everybody else.

Okay, I haven't actually decided what I want to do with the afterlife in my setting. But that's probably the most notable option I'm considering, for the occasion where I want demons to be a particular kind of entity and not just something people call spirits they think are jerks.

>>54548352
They get placed in the care of whichever god who's creed they most closely followed in life.

EIther

>They're left to fend for themselves, and either become prey for some psychovore, fade into the aether, or lose their minds and become wraiths. If they can maintain the will, they can join one of the ghost kingdoms to stave off disolution or reincarnation, or try to ascend

or


>The psyche is absorbed into the nootic maelstrom, probably. Maybe gets reconstructed later if they're an important person and have a personal mythos, but it's really debatable if that's the same person or not

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Nobody knows what happens when someone dies. It is the great beyond.

Except for monsters. Every single monster really and truthfully believes in their monotheistic deity, the Red God. The more chaos and evil they do in the world with mortals, the stronger and better more evil forms they can be reincarnated with or absorbed by the evil God. Female monsters are often kept as spirit brides, male monsters become magic weapons and living spells cast by monster magicians. They are all absolutely stoked about this.

Sometimes, humans get crazy enough to join their evil little family. That's where cults come from, sacrifice a virgin or a bunch of gold to get daddy to notice you and invite you into his little family.

Same as everyone else who doesn't perform a deed worthy of being taken to the heavens, their soul is left to slowly dissipate until they cease to exist.

>>54548352
Given that the gods make physical appearances from time to time in my world, and their servants make appearances even more often, I don't think there are any atheists. You'd have to be pretty stupid to not believe in the gods.

Probably what happens is when Ankara (goddess of death) comes to collect your soul and you say "but I don't believe in the gods", she'd respond with something along the lines of "well, that was stupid", and then conduct the soul to its proper afterlife anyway (based on its actions and intentions in life).

>>54548352
Same as all others: they materialise as a shade of themselves in the shadow plane. PCs have to physically travel to the shadow plane and retrieve this shade if they want the person to not be a vegetable when they're resurrected.

>>54548352
They go to a paradise, filled with other enlightened souls and everyone is wearing a fedora. The Dew of the Mountain flows through the plain and one need only reach out their hand to have a small hand held pocket of fried dough filled with hot tomato, cheese and pepperoni fill their hands to sate their desire.

>>54548352
The gods eat them while they're alive and they get digested by the gods and pooped out into space energy.

>>54548352
The same thing that happens to everyone else (Which is fairly complicated in this setting). The Gods act, and your little mortal belief in them or not is pretty irrelevant to them.

>>54548352
I went the Pratchett way. If someone doesn't believe, the gods come down and slap their shit.

>>54548352
They get the same happy everafter as everyone else because even the misguided sheep is still part of the flock.

>>54548352
Their soul(memories, sense of self) gets separated from their fable(place in cosmic story).

Soul gradually forgets what it is and gets reabsorbed into Great Soul Putty, from which new souls spring when needed.

Fable goes on to entertain/power space dragons.

This also happens to people who elieve in gods as gods of the setting are dead and not born yet.

>>54548352

They end up as ghosts or undead, mostly. They aren't attuned to any afterlife, so nothing accepts them.

I went a little bubble-verse crazy in my setting so that my group could play in the "setting" even if every world/plane/universe was different.

Basically there's a life energy that generated all of "entirety" called Ar'Varos. Bubbles in this "entirety" are separate universes with different cosmos rules, magic, deities, etc.
So for example TES and any Final Fantasy, Forgotten realms would exist in their own settings as we know them, but they would be "bubbles" within entirety which could allow mythic tier characters to leap between bubbles and fuck over and interfere with other settings. (Which was a game where one DM invaded another DMs setting as part of campaign)

It started with a recurring joke in group, and I attempted (likely poorly) to flesh logic into it.

So souls remain in their bubble until they die, then get recycled through the life energy of entirety. They can stay, move to other bubbles, or seek "heaven". Souls are completely immortal and invincible in that sense.They can be "reawakened" to previous lives and experiences but that entails problems or mental breakdowns if not careful. The demon Lord could be reawakened to be the paladin of light from a previous life/universe if that soul achieved that.

Nothing. All souls, faithful and faithless, break down into aether when they die.

>>54548352
Nothing. The gods usually don't concern themselves with the dead. You can't persuade the dead to worship. Can't trick them either.

Only Death concerns himself (themselves) with the dead. They come for you, act like huge dicks, make fun of your life and give you visions of your most intimate personal nightmares. Like your old mother being burned alive in her house. Then they take you. Or send you back.

>>54548352
He laughs at their insolence then gives them weapons and armor to fight in the Unending War that is waged among the stars.

>>54548352
In my setting, mortals have gained the ability to rip souls back from the afterlife and place them in vat-grown bodies, so no one ever really dies for real anymore save for total memory destruction or the soul itself being torn apart, and in those cases you are either just slapped in a vat anyway and given a barebones set of operating protocols to start with (ie reincarnation) or your soul fragments are mixed with those of a bunch of other souls as catalysts to create Frankensteinian abominations of soulstuff that can walk in the real world without a physical shell. The closest things to gods in a setting a nations since the government is usually the one who has control over the soul collecting business. During a war, rival countries are killed to the last man so their souls can be collected and refitted to make them loyal to their conquerors.

>>54548352
Same thing that happens to those who do believe. Everything that makes them who they are disappears. They don't exist anymore and never will again.

>>54548352
There's very few of them because many gods jump around on the mortal lands.
That's why, when they would normally travel over the Acheron, one of the antitheist deities/other supernatural entity might take their soul into custody to make them into a powerful anti-god warrior who believes that what they're fighting aren't real gods, just powerful jerks.

>>54548352
There isn't an afterlife in my setting and ghosts are more the angry afterimage of the dead than the dead themselves

>>54548352
They're taken by the god of death and reincarnated into something more useful.

>>54548352
I've never actually elaborated on it because it's World of Darkness, I don't want to insert my own beliefs into the game, or contradict established/expected lore, nor have I really had a need to define it since the living usually interact with the dead on a case by case basis.

Ghosts will sometimes manifest, but those are less the souls of the dead and more a twisted reflection of them. I'm more concerned about the players believing/not believing in a deity while they're alive though, since for all intents and purposes there is a god made of machines and cogs that is attempt to calculate and dictate everyone's moves.

>>54548892
I always assumed it was a measure of a person's desire for hierarchy and order. A deity wants someone to have faith because someone with faith does not hold themselves to be the final authority/judge on matters relating to them.

It's two sides of the coin, you can say a man with absolute faith conforms without thoughts of his own, while a man with no faith at all holds himself to be the highest authority on all subjects since he affirms his own reality. So it might not be that having faith is particularly desirable in the sense that not having faith is simply undesirable (IE faith isn't the end goal, rather the act of having faith generates a community and an external attachment while lack of faith turns oneself within.).

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>>54548784
>Knowing is not the same as believing.
Of course not, but knowledge is a subset of belief. Name one thing you know but don't believe. You can't.
>What's the point of having faith in something you can prove exists?
No no no! I am sick of this infantile redefinition of faith! Words can have more than one meaning!
Do you have friends? Do you have faith in your friends? If they're good friends, you should. That doesn't mean you're not certain that your friends exist.
You have faith in your friends, in the sense that you strongly assume that your friends value your well-being as much as you value theirs. You strongly assume that your friends will be on your side when times are tough. You can have proof that your friends in fact exist as living people in this physical reality, and also have faith in their relationship with you.
A person who holds an unproven belief that gods exist, but doesn't hold any particular belief about the character and behavior of those gods, does not have faith in gods.
The gods could be obvious, they could write "WE EXIST" in the clouds for all to see, and there would still be people asking "what difference does it make that gods exist?" because faith can mean so much more than just lack of proof.

>>54548352
if there is an afterlife even the gods do not know about it

they might snatch your soul before you get there, though

They die. Because there are no Gods. There's no afterlife.

It's just a universe where magic is the fifth fundamental force. Which ironically means that over time, the beliefs of people will form collections of spirits out of raw magic that pretend to be Gods, but given how they're created out of the collective dreams and nightmares of millions of human(oid)s that all think subjectively about things, they cannot truly perform actions like creating an afterlife. They're more like physical illusions.

Of course, no one realises this, because if you die in the wrong place, raw magic might just create a spontaneous imprint of your consciousness, creating the illusion of a life after death.