by JSR Schutt
I have seen death. Thoughts circulate in my mind of what I wrote in that last post, what I understand now I did not then, what better men than me had to say about my theory. I retract nothing, yet feel I need to clarify my statements and add to them. This is how I do that, by starting with the real life tale.
Today, my mother brought me to support her in her decision to end the pain of a horse she saved twice, at great emotional and monetary expense to herself. Bella experienced two horrid colics in the last to years. To those who don’t know, a horse cannot vomit, and so when the GI tract becomes clogged, the horse experiences a great deal of pain. Colic is a condition with no cure save surgery, and Bella went through two major surgeries in an eight week period. This last episode was by far the worst, since it took a very different initial form from the last two. Without the telltale signs of colic, it was allowed to exacerbate into a fatal condition that surgery could only hope to salvage, though it probably wouldn’t have. So I, my father and mother, along with two of her close friends, watched with tear-filled eyes as Bella died on our word and promise. I proposed my theory to my father, a more religious person than myself, and he persuaded me to take another, parallel stance to what I proposed in the last post. I present that to you now, and then return to my grieving, hoping my mother returns home in a condition conducive to relatively normal life. Let us hope.
The interesting thing about the afterlife in roleplaying games is that they are very humanistic. The gods of fantasy worlds, based so closely on the humans who resemble them, are creatures of passion and vice, with errors in their own judgment and fears that no other creature cares to hold. The afterlife too caters to the human. In these fantasy worlds, human souls retain their shape and go about life as they always did once they reach their final “reward” amongst the planes.
When I proposed a still more humanistic afterlife, where deathscapes are forged from the life and death of their creators, I brought all the human baggage into the mix as well. Sadness in life led to twisted paradises, pockets of shadows and depressions scattered through fields of green and skies where only happiness reigned. Storms in the distance told the story of a life of turmoil on the sidelines. The farmer and his wife were happy only if their life had been so, and the uncertainty of the afterlife if tragedy intervened brought a wealth of options to adventurers or for simple storytelling.
What I realize now, however, is that the afterlife is not humanistic at all. We humans are beings that inhabit a mortal form, and this form is imperfect, bound by our wills and our dreams and desires, hatreds and fears. We’ve created words like sadness and sorrow, happiness and joy, to describe the truly indescribability of emotion. We approximate what we feel within the limitation of language. Fantasy games, themselves based solely in the world of language and imagination, follow a very close suit in this, and we let that pass by without much of a care. The logic of the planes and the movement of souls as human shapes bound by their actions in life make sense, and so we allow it to be the foundation of the cosmos in these worlds. Again, however, I propose something different, something I will now fail to truly capture in this, the cumbersome, useless flailing that is human language and word.
When a person dies, the deathscape idea still holds true. However, rather than being informed by the actions in life and the manner of death, the ‘scape is the paradise created by the deceased’s wishes, dreams and desires. It is their Eden, shall we say. If they desired a simple existence during life, and sought nothing more than their own hands could acquire them, this idea, taken to its highest intensity and most perfect form, is where they go on death. Using the example of our farmer, regardless of his life’s trials and tragedies, he and his wife reunite in the hereafter. They live as they always did, and they wait for their children to join them someday. While they wait, they are allowed to watch the lives they created blossom, enter twilight and end. During the hard times, the parents do not feel sad, nor do they feel guilty for the actions their children take. Theirs is a satisfaction, I suppose, that cannot be easily described without experiencing it. The ideas of sadness, happiness and anger do not, in this case, transcend the mortal coil. Emotions as we understand them, are nonexistent, replaced by something purer, distilled to its most essential element and allowed to blossom into a beauty unlike anything this world offers.
For those people who valued pain and destruction in life, their paradise is a reversion of our farmer’s. Their paradise caters to their basest desires and allows them to revel in their evil and cruelty. For these deathscapes, the unimaginable is commonplace and the horrifying is tame.
What then, for the adventurer? What does he want with a deathscape catered solely to its original occupant and creator? For the “good” ‘scapes, knowledge or wisdom, for the two are subtly different; for the “evil” ‘scapes, power and the means to acquire it. Everything in between sees its place as well. The same rules would apply for entering deathscapes, as would escaping, but one final change is necessary.
These ‘scapes are alien and disturbing to mortal viewers with no conception of their fundamental element. Because each caters wholly to it original occupant, and since logic, knowledge, wisdom and emotion could very well be ideas obsolete and trivial to these perfected spirits, gaining what is sought becomes a challenge unlike any among the worlds of the universe. What do you ask to someone who knows no anger, or of someone to whom sadness it a curiosity, pain a quickly fading dream?
What do the simplest things become, when the life you once lived is but a distant memory, slowly disappearing into the mists of the Eden you always sought?
