Whenever enough new folks join the Dreamland RPG Facebook group or Discord server, I’m going to be posting new Dreamland material (the FB and/or Discord folks get to vote on what it is). In celebration of the Discord reaching 350 folks, here is a brief post on funerary customs of Dreamland.
What happens after death is one of the great mysteries, even to inhabitants of Dreamland. The people of Dreamland live closer to death than most people of the modern world, and many die young due to accidents, violence or disease.
In most cultures, death is followed by communal ceremonies. Such ceremonies may be joyous or solemn, but are usually less about remembering the deceased than about reaffirming the survival of the community. The will or inheritance of the dead may be a point of strife or an opportunity for adventure. Death rituals are also a source of power for necromancers (also known as Grey Magicians), those feared wizards who raise the dead as liches and undead slaves.
50 Death Customs
1-2 professional mourners are hired for important funerals
3-4 keep sepulchers with preserved corpses of saints
5-6 consider birth more sorrowful than death
7-8 disinterested in death, but obsessed with (and afraid of) the before-birth state; they may fear or worship the spirits of the unborn
9-10 cremate the dead
11-12 liquefy the dead in acid
13-14 feed the dead into a gigantic machine (or numerous smaller machines, such as neighborhood suicide pods) which disintegrates them
15-16 the dead are placated by offerings of food & drink
17-18 when important people die, they must be buried far away at a particular spot
19-20 when important people die, living people are sacrificed to serve them in the afterlife
21-22 when people die, their spouses ritualistically follow them into death
23-24 when someone becomes old, they willingly commit suicide
25-26 when someone becomes old, their neighbors or family kill and eat them
27-28 have no fear of death; kill willing people to send them as messengers to the gods
29-30 suicidal, will always find excuses to commit suicide (1-2=they are deeply pessimistic and depressive; 3-4=look forward to death with a lemming-like, religious passion, 5-6=do not want to die but helplessly commit suicide when triggered by a certain environmental, pheromonal or astrological phenomenon)
31-32 it is considered good luck to murder beautiful & strong people so their ghosts may guard/haunt your house
33-34 fear the dead; when people die, they mutilate them to prevent them from coming back to life (1-3=cut off the head, 4-6=destroy the brain, 7-8=destroy the heart, 9=destroy another organ, 10=completely burn or dismember)
35-36 keep bones or bodyparts of dead relatives as souvenirs
37-38 embalm the dead, making them into mummies
39-40 the dead are not buried, but left to rot openly on the ground
41-42 the dead are not buried, but rather hanged from trees (to air-dry)
43-44 the dead are buried secretly in unknown places that they may not be remembered
45-46 corpses are spoken to or interrogated about their experiences in the afterlife
47-48 death-obsessed: import or export knives, rope, poison, gravestones, etc.
49-50 the dead are pickled in alcohol or vinegar, or candied in honey or sugar (roll 1D6; on a 1, they’re then eaten)
51-52 the dead are petrified (1-2=turned into live-size public statues; 3-4=shrunken into tiny statues or petrified severed bodyparts; 5-6=crystallized or merged with the rock; the locals believe immobile stone and crystal is the final perfect destiny of all living things)
53-54 the dead are ritualistically dismembered and fed to birds or another animal
55-56 all deaths in the town are caused by a monster which has dwelled in the area for generations; the monster and Death are synonymous to the inhabitants, who may be unaware other forms of death exist
57-58 the dead are thrown in water, such as a river, the sea or a swamp
59-60 the dead are sent into “heaven” in the sky (1=on rockets, 2=using balloons, 3=on the ends of tall flagpoles,4=at the top of a tall tower; 5=carried by tamed birds or other flying creatures, 6=by a reliably recurring geyser, whirlwind or other natural phenomenon)
61-62 the dead are turned to plants (1-2=used as mulch and seed-beds; 3-4=consumed by carnivorous plants; 5-6=magically transformed into plants in the vague shape of the deceased)
63-64 build mausoleums that look exactly like the houses of the living (or, live in houses modeled after mausoleums)
65-66 locals deny the existence of death (1-2=and make excuses that the dead have “gone to live on a farm” and so on; 3-4=and rewrite records and deny that the dead ever existed; 5-6=and keep corpses among the living and treating them as if they are still alive)
67-68 the dead are represented in art by (or manifest as ghosts in the form of): (1=simple geometric shapes or lines; 2=faceless figures, 3=completely blurred or ‘blank’ figures, 4=ciphers or words, 5=music or a recurring sound; 6=a smell)
69-70 the dead are exhumed and their corpses put on trial for their past crimes
71-72 locals revere the dead, and take on identities of (or imagine themselves to be the spirits or reincarnations of) dead people
73-74 believe in reincarnation (1=as people, perhaps their own descendants; 2=as people randomly somewhere in the world; 3=as people in a specific faraway place, which may have a Heaven-like importance; 4=as animals; 5=as plants; 6=as gods)
75-76 times of funerals are determined by astrology; corpses are kept unburied until the stars are right
77-78 a funeral must always be paired with a marriage or a birth
79-80 consider corpses beautiful, and use makeup to attempt to emulate their appearance
81-82 obsessed with glorifying images of the dead, and draw them everywhere as they were in life (or considerably idealized)
83-84 haunted by ghosts; such ghosts may be sometimes or always invisible, though dreamers can always see them by spending a Mystery half-Memory to have a vision (1=immobile, unresponsive afterimages of the dead; 2=moving, unresponsive images of the dead reliving their lives; 3=uncommunicative or ambiguous spirits silently watching their former loved ones or other living beings; 4=talking, nagging ghosts trying to stay involved with their surviving family; 5=temporary ghosts driven by some great need or unfinished business; 6=ghosts in the form of birds, snakes or another spiritually potent animal; 7=ghosts have no individual identity but are more like a collective blob; 8=vengeful ghosts punish locals and outsiders who break certain rules; 9=mostly uncommunicative ghosts gather as a sign of impending doom or to escort the newly dead into their ranks; 10=the ghosts don’t communicate and don’t appear to be anyone from the local culture; perhaps they are transformed in death, or perhaps the area is on the wrong ‘channel’ and receive ghosts from people who died somewhere else)
85-86 haunted by reanimated corpses; locals may take precautions to prevent this, or may claim that only sinners become zombies (1=slow Romero-style unintelligent cannibal zombies; 2=fast unintelligent cannibal zombies; 3=predatory, stalking, intelligent vampire-like undead; 4=intelligent zombies who retain all their personality and memories until they rot completely away, a process which may or may not be painless; 5=unintelligent zombies which mindlessly attempt to continue their life’s work or hobbies; 6=unintelligent and uncoordinated zombies which simply never stop moving spasmodically unless destroyed or restrained; 7=corpses possessed by inscrutable demons to perform strange tasks; 8=only a single bodypart, such as the hand, detaches and comes back to life; 9=tame corpses revive periodically on important occasions, such as a religious festival or the marriage of one of their descendants; 10=the so-called ‘undead’ are actually some kind of beast or monster pretending to be their dead relatives)
87-88 people live underground so that when they die, they can be ‘buried’ by simply having their room walled off and/or filled in
89-90 the living must physically carry the remains of their ancestors (siblings may divide the remains among them, providing an incentive to have large families)
91-92 when people die, survivors beat & mutilate themselves in mourning
93-94 when people of their culture die, all visual representations of the person also magically decompose and eventually turn to skeletons
95-96 people believe they have already died, and that their land is Heaven (or Hell)
97-98 ritually mark “save points” at positive occasions in their lives, and believe that after death they can go back in time and relive these events
99-100 instead of rotting, locals’ bodies blink for a few seconds after death, then vanish