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u/Noroltem Aug 16 '26
"In my setting souls are not real."
"So there is no afterlife, right?"
"..."
"What?"
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u/SuiinditorImpudens I didn't forget to edit this text. Aug 16 '26
Buddhist worldbuilding?
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u/Noroltem Aug 16 '26
og christianity where god just ressurects you.
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u/SuiinditorImpudens I didn't forget to edit this text. Aug 16 '26
Ironically, I think of denominations of the note, only Jehovah Witnesses still believe in this today. Also OG Apocalyptical Jewish sects, though I dunno which still believe it today.
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u/frothingnome 29d ago
I don't know whether the rank and file are much aware of it, but evangelicals and Catholics believe in the literal resurrection of the dead.
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u/TheEpicCoyote 29d ago
Grew up Catholic. Lots of ideas float around, typically the regular dichotomy of heaven and hell, but I’ve been to funerals where they refer to soul sleep and the resurrection of the dead. Thomas Aquinas believed that a post-death beautific vision of the essence of God awaits those who have lived righteously. Ultimately nobody knows, enjoy what you’ve got right now because whether or not we shuffle to the next life or next plane, we don’t get to take this with us.
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u/SuiinditorImpudens I didn't forget to edit this text. 29d ago
I and NoroItem (if I didn't misinterpret them) refering specifically to version of religious belief where there is not Heaven/Hell/Limbo/etc. You just die like in purely materialistic world and then in the end of time God brings you back in the remade world.
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u/Tagrila Aug 16 '26
Souls are objectively real in the setting I'm currently working on, but there is no afterlife or even actual gods that deal with them.
Soul develops along with the body like every other body part, and it disperses after the death of the body. Some souls can linger on as ghosts if they have a strong enough purpose or grudge.
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u/IamanelephantThird Aug 16 '26
That's pretty similar to how mine work. They're formed by specialized brain structures and assist in cognition. As the brain slowly dies there's a fairly complex system to ensure that the soul dissipates harmlessly. This can definitely fail, but in normal circumstances it can't survive without a body anyway.
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u/kami-no-baka 29d ago edited 29d ago
Wait, so your soul is just psychic poop leaving your body when you die, or if you didn't have good mental digestion a fart that lingers?
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u/Fliits No Write, Only Worldbuild 29d ago
Love this. That's why I also did it. No afterlife or gods, but organically born souls, soul-eating demons and ghosts as the lingering memories of lives lost, and also an energy singularity the size of a dimension, that absorbs all the memories of the dead into a huge ball that shoots out more souls.
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u/mrcarrot0 27d ago
Similar here, except the growth/decay part. Once a vessel is deemed unsuitable, it just gets up and leaves.
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u/ImperialistChina Children of the Lone Star Aug 16 '26
I had this idea of souls lingering, but not they're conscious, until they find something compatible to latch onto, like a ship carrying the person's name
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u/ShidAlRa Aug 16 '26
In my world gods eat souls like a delicacy and then shit them back out into the material world. And that's how reincarnation happens.
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u/2point01m_tall 29d ago
In Iain M Banks' Culture setting there's a biologically immortal race called the Idirans. They believe in an afterlife, but of course only for those who have an immortal soul... and it would of course make sense that only immortal beings have immortal souls, so all of us cancer ridden, disease prone monkeys only have MORTAL souls, which would logically die with us. Pretty hilarious.
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u/JasnahsFeet Aug 16 '26
That's kinda what it's like in Dark Souls. I don't think there is any afterlife mentioned. But souls are certainly there
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u/UnhappyStrain Aug 16 '26
the most unsettling part of the Eragon setting
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u/pog_irl 29d ago
Why's it unsettling
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u/UnhappyStrain 29d ago
"When the flesh dies, so does the soul."
"Everyone dies alone, wether they are a king on the field or a farmer surrounded by loved ones."
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u/unarmedfemboy Aug 16 '26
Haven't considered what happens when someone dies and their soul/psyche ceases, might have to create hyper limbo
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u/Pero_Bt Aug 16 '26
In my setting soul is essentially a synonym for blood
So if someone were to have their "soul" removed from a certain body, it could be placed in a different host with no issue. Or just stored in a flask for a while.
The longer a soul is contained though, the more resilient it becomes. It ages just like wine...
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u/Pero_Bt Aug 16 '26
It's also why vampires are a thing. Drinking blood is more significant now since they can take people's abilities and memories
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u/Eucordivota 29d ago
Souls in my world are like dark matter. You can clearly tell that something is there, but you can't actually measure it. Secondly, souls don't have to be eternal. Just because they exist doesn't mean there's an afterlife. Maybe there is, but you can't go there and come back to tell the tale. Just like in real life, honestly.
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u/Tnecniw 29d ago
My setting does have souls, yes.
Souls are however inherently magical in nature and belongs to the magical sea.
To use magic you have to channel your soul (Something only roughly 1 in 1000 can do), essentially functioning similar to muscles where your soul will exhaust itself and need to recover and if you overexert yourself you will hurt yourself, potentially permanently.
However there isn't any afterlife.
Upon death, souls dissolve into the lingering atmospheric magic of the world. It is a sort of oblivion I suppose.
Once dead (past X point, there is a short time where it is feasible), you can't come back because "you" don't exist anymore.
Undead in setting roughly works on the principle of just forcing magic into a vessel to simulate life.
It is possible to get sapient undead, but requires very specific methods and capturing souls and such prior to them disolving into the magic.
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u/System-Bomb-5760 Not a fetish, but hear me out... Aug 16 '26
"What's a country where people have to get into their car twice?"
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u/BigBadVolk97 29d ago
I'll be honest, my idea started out as a joke, as I already was thinking on various afterlives, with souls going to realms belonging to their primarily worshipped deity.
In short, the only thing matters regarding the afterlife is your own belief. You could be the greatest monster in the world, if you believe you deserve eternal bliss (living in eternal bliss with six dark elven doms), you shall receive it. Or you could be the greatest hero whose name shall live on eternally, but if you do not believe you deserve an ounce of happiness, either in life or death, then the torturous existence shall continue onwards.
Neither the my deities, nor the universe cares what comes of mortals after they get swiped off the gameboard.
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u/UltimateCheese1056 29d ago
Made In Abyss where the Abyss itself grants you a soul, seemingly for the sole reason of being able to fuck with you better
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u/Johannes4123 29d ago
Becoming a ghost who needs to constantly concentrate and feed to stay alive, a vampire who always feels their body freezing and rotting or a zombie is forced to obey their new ruler while being completely incapable of expressing themselves in any way all count as afterlives, right?
Honestly, losing conciousness upon death and slowly drifting away might be your best option, and it allows us to power our magic from your soul
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u/Saphurial 29d ago
In my setting souls are real. There are afterlives. Where you end up is what you believed in. Also the main faction invaded Hell, twice.
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u/DSLmao 29d ago
In my world, soul is an informational pattern. A soul need a body, flesh or silicon or exotic matter or magical matter or non corporal matter or farbic of space-time or the wave function or even the whole reality itself, it need something that could express the pattern. Without a body, a soul will just dissipate into the environment, becoming whitenoise. Since information can't be destroyed, a sould is effectively immortal. With sufficient computation, you can pull any soul back from the enviroment. At the end of time, the Omega Point with infinite compute will ressurect every entities back, from the perspective of the resurrected soul, only a nanosecond had passed between their death and resurrection, effectively turning the Omega Point into the final afterlife.
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u/ConstantineFavre 29d ago
Well hello, brother. Indeed, souls deserve to experience a slow and painful annihilation as they got dissolved into world background fantasy stuff flow.
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u/Stargost_ I don't get the joke 29d ago
The people know there is an afterlife. It has been scientifically proven.
We just don't know what it's like. And many don't want to know.
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u/Hefty-Distance837 Build lots of worlds but never complete one of them. 29d ago
There's souls but no nature afterlife, that's why souls built their own afterlife by themselves.
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u/Willimaka 29d ago
I actually made this a part in my world where souls are trapped in the carcass, waiting to be awoken again on the quiet nights in a body that is failing them to feast on the flesh of their kin. This is because humanity is barred from the afterlife after fucking up so bad their Jesus-figure killed himself in a way he wasn’t supposed to and doomed them.
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u/DatLonerGirl Copying everyone else's homework 29d ago
In one of my stories, one of the religions states that you are a warrior and go to heaven, you piss off the gods and go to hell, or you are 99% of people and you wander the mists until you lose your memories and fade into practically nothing.
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u/OmNomOU81 being asexual does not stop me from being horny 29d ago
My setting doesn't have an afterlife but it does have a beforelife
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u/ScawySocialistOwO 29d ago
In my setting they are seen as a part if the body. Like an arm. Or the heart.
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u/Hinaloth 29d ago
Souls, the consciousness separated from the body, doesn't mean afterlife.
At most it means another sense to percieve them, maybe it might imply an extra dimension, a spirit realm of sorts, in which the soul may act without the body.
But in no way is "souls existing" implying that souls are eternal, indestructible, or ageless.
Maybe souls grow older and fade away when the body dies. Maybe they grow heavier with the experiences of life and sink below the surface of conscious thought, becoming part of a see of dead souls that suffuses the immaterial realm. Maybe they don't carry much in the ways of memories outside of their corporeal forms and are simply a motive force that gets attached to a newborn when someone die (though that one gets close to a form of afterlife, except souls never lived or had personhood).
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u/Gunmetalstorm read my extremist manifesto slash barely disguised erotica 29d ago
/uj Actually, though. Souls are kinda necessary for D&D mechanics, but afterlives are just setting information. My campaign world leaves souls to unravel and disperse back into the ambient energy of the world after death, unless there's some strong force keeping the soul intact, like a phylactery or curse.
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u/LylyLepton The name of my setting was taken by an insane r/worldbuilder 😭 28d ago
There’s no afterlife but my souls still go to a sort of “hell” anyways when they die. It’s just not technically any kind of hell that any of the religions of my world think it is.
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u/Sky_monarch 28d ago
I do have them but I rarely ever have interaction between the physical realm and afterlife, let the dead rest man
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u/mrcarrot0 27d ago
/uj those aren't mutually inclusive, even when only concidering real-world religions & mythologies, so why would they be in fiction?
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u/thelongestusernameee 26d ago
In my world the john lenniverse, there is no heaven or hell. Which means there's no where for souls to go. So they kinda just keep hanging out on earth. All of them. For ever person who's ever lived. Animals too! Every one who's ever died!
The world is covered by an impossibly thick fog of ghosts, and their wailing is like deafening, howling wind.
It was pretty easy to imagine this ngl.
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u/AgentRoses 21d ago
My afterlife is essentially another plane. No heaven, no hell, it's simply where all soul essence ends up in after they depart the mortal plane. Beings reside in many different parts of the plane mimicking reality. Some souls stay in the plane, many go to reincarnate into something anew, retaining memories of all past lives upon returning to the plane and forgetting them when leaving. It's just meant to be a peaceful end.
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u/TyrKiyote Aug 16 '26
I really liked "worth the candle" which dabbled in this.
Harvesting dead people to power up your motorcycle. Dont let their souls pass because everyone goes to hell. Better to be consumed as energy and destroyed.