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Afterlives

I’ve been thinking about afterlives as places, and especially how they show up in games. In this momentary obsession, I’ve at least partially reviewed the following:

  • Ghostwalk
  • Wraith: The Oblivion, Orpheus, and Geist: The Sin-Eaters
  • Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen etc.
  • My own take on it.

Two dark robed figures face each other holding hands. To their right, in the foreground, a man kneels and watches them. In the center, from behind a curtain, half a third robed figure can be seen. The whole image is blue-tinted and dominated by vertical cyan artifacts.Kelsey Krogman of Burnt Thicket Theatre, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Extant Afterlives

What features does a good “interactive” afterlife have?

First, all of these afterlives have a universal and centralized geography. Death opens up a unique spatial dimension with new areas to explore, and the intersection of this plane and our own is used to explain the phenomena of “haunting.” (This implicitly makes haunting as much about where as about who.) And this dimension is the same for everybody, which creates larger-than-life structures and truths.1 Any city is the city; any river is the river; any mountain is the mountain.

And these strange geographies can be visited by the suitably prepared. This means both that some members of the living can effectively “haunt” the dead, and that the dead and the living need not be immediately irreversibly separated.

That said, these afterlives are transitory: in all of them there is a further mystery, the danger of a second death, and a “default” course of action enforced or encouraged by the rules of the environment. Implicitly then, people who stray from that path of least resistance are somehow exceptional, if numerous.2

One of the ways these souls can meet their second death is almost always through danger: beasts and hazards that can harm ghosts. This is not usually the exclusive method of “moving on,” but it is a persistent option.

Center-right, a tall dark figure with a staff and a winged helmet is framed by the moon. About him numerous others kneel and wail and grasp at his robe. The whole image is blue-tinted and dominated by vertical cyan artifacts.Souls on the Banks of the Acheron. Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Gameable Afterlives

There’s really only a few ways this comes up in a game.

  • A character dies, but the player would like to continue playing as a ghost (like Ghostwalk).
  • The characters must venture to the afterlife to consult a shade (like Odysseus) or beg a favor (like Orpheus).
  • All the characters are dead, or at least necromancers, and they’re going to do ghost things in the afterlife or get involved in the politics of the dead or stop mystical menaces to the living that only they can (like Abhorsen).
  • The characters are facing a threat big enough to require ghostly as well as living assistance (maybe like the host of Dunharrow).

Outside the all-dead campaign, I think it may not be worth defining the afterlife more than needed. But it was a good thought-exercise and a fun “lit review.”

Small in the center, a haloed Buddha in lotus position. Arrayed about him, at least the suggestion of numerous buildings, walkways, gardens, and other seated figures. The whole image is blue-tinted and dominated by vertical cyan artifacts.Unknown artist (Tang Dynasty), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Illustrations

This draft has been kicking around for a while, but every time I remembered it I wondered what it would look like with specially-dithered art. The illustrations here are all shrunk to 512x512 size, dithered with a “rainbow” pattern, remapped to a three-color blue palette, and scaled 200%.

Top left a dark figure looks down across a dark chasm at a light figure in the bottom-right. The whole image is blue-tinted and dominated by vertical cyan artifacts, but where the artifacts serve to highlight the dark figure, the light figure seems to be made of them.Lady Izanami goes to the land of Yomi. Warwick Goble, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I really like the way the artifacting 'inverts' here, creating Izanami and Izanagi out of opposite bands.

  1. Perhaps this scale issue is a problem with modern afterlives: “what happens when you and I die?” is a different question than “what happens when humans die?”↩︎

  2. Classically, these are people with “unfinished business” or simply those with “unusually strong presence” or will to live. Orpheus introduced a drug so addictive that its subjects all become ghosts when they die, regretting that they never got another hit.↩︎

Tags
Catacombs Essays Dithering Death Undead
Date
June 24, 2025
Previously
Recovered: Cathedrals Construction on York Minster Cathedral was finished in 1472, having begun c. 1220. For two-hundred and fifty years, the unfinished cathedral was a
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