by J.S.R. Schutt
The afterlife is not something to be taken lightly: neither here in the real world nor by characters in the fictional worlds of roleplaying games. In our world, there is no way to know what lies beyond the barrier separating life and death. Theories exist and belief systems surround the world after this one (read: religions), but no one person, no matter how powerful, loved or worshipped, can truly tell. What we believe informs what we expect. Like most things though, without having been there and seen it, there is no way to be sure.
In fantasy settings however, where magic exists to bring the dead back to life and to visit places where souls go to rest, these questions, hopes and fears find answers. Sometimes these answers are tales of wondrous palaces filled with the joys of all mortal goodness; others are a hellish abyss where every unknowable torture can take place. Death, in these worlds, is either something joyous or the greatest punishment one can experience.
I propose something different. Few RPG settings are complete without some overlying planar structure, and it is to those planes that people go when they die. My own system is radically different, depending not on the will of gods or other divine powers, but on the power of humanity alone. I say we have the power to create our own afterlives through our actions, our hopes and our desires. Our death is the opening of a door onto worlds we, and we alone, wish for.
It goes something like this: One man lives his life a simple farmer, growing wheat and corn and a few other vegetables to pay his way and feed his family. He has a wife and three children, who all do their part in the family, whatever that may be. It is a comfortable, hardworking life of few luxuries. The farmer dies within a few months of his wife after his children are grown and out of the house, doing whatever their hearts and minds have led them to. His afterlife is also a simple one. If he and his wife were true lovers, with existences intertwined so tightly that separation was impossible, then they are reunited in death and they follow a path much the same as they had before.
Add some conflict into the farmer’s life, and the afterlife changes. One year, his crop fails and one of his children falls sick, passing on the disease to his wife. Unfortunately, due to his relative poverty, the farmer can do nothing as he watches them die. He falls into a depression, having lost his lovebird, and dies himself within a year or so, leaving his children, not quite ready to live on their own, but very close, to fend for themselves. What does the afterlife look like now? Would the farmer find his wife again? Would he play with his child in fond memory of the best years, or would his death world be dark, sad and filled with unknowns? What does a man who has lost almost everything wish for, and how do those wishes fulfill themselves?
In a world with an afterlife such as this, how would religious belief systems take shape? If the world turns as I propose, they don’t. With no real knowledge of the “deathscape” created on death, people remain free to fantasize about their gods and whether or not they have a place for the humble mortals in the grand plan. Indeed, the more devout in the populace would likely believe that the gods create the deathscape for each and every one of their servants based on that god’s tenants and demands. Clerics in a world like this probably find it easy to vouch this creed and find ready listeners.
If divine magic still plays a role, the gods could very well be beings of great power who reside outside the regular dimensions and apart from the deathscapes, somewhere inaccessible through mortal magic but easily (or not so easily) communicated through. Alternately, clerics may receive their spells through their devotional energy alone, so powerful is their belief in their cause. In the extreme, perhaps the deathscapes themselves, created as they are by mortal minds and spirits, grant power to those who know how to tap into them, for good or ill.
What of adventurers in a world such as this? As always, these mortals have the greatest option of them all, if magic allows it: explore the deathscapes. At one end of this spectrum, the deathscapes act as an infinite number of demiplanes, each with its own challenges and dangers, populated only by the creations of the dead. The possibilities for adventure and treasure seeking become endless at this point, for, in a setting where desire is the creator of the planes, what isn’t represented within them?
At the other end of that line is the limitation of access to the deathscapes. Reaching them becomes a campaign within itself, as only certain conditions allow for entry, and then into only ‘scape at a time. The party must be around the dying person and know the exact instant of their death, for it is only at that time that the doorway between life and death opens. And, once inside, how do they escape, as, for all intents and purposes, the adventurers are dead as well. Worse still, if they did not leave their bodies in the physical world, they all but ceased to exist. The campaign then becomes not only escaping, but also discovering how long they spent outside of their own world and inside the death of someone else’s.
The middle road, then, is where the ‘scapes are places entered only in the most dire circumstances, because interference with the fragile construction of a single mortal soul might shatter the deathscape entirely. Then where would you be? In settings like these, what warrants risking not only lives, but existences as well? And what are the belief systems in settings like this, where records show people going in and coming back, but also remaining lost to time once inside? How does a culture deal with that kind of risk after death?
Like anything involving death, the unknown is truly the most fearsome aspect.
What would you do if death knocked on your door, but it was someone else he was looking for?
Edited by Jonathan Jacobs
