The D&D campaign with my wife's family is closing up. The motif of the campaign has been people trying to escape death and instead experiencing something far, far worse.
The climax that we're moving onto kind of involves my reimagining of the astral plane as the place people go when they're dreaming. There is a lot history of people trying to physically enter the astral plane, sort of metaphysically turning their soul out and allowing them to dream in the real world. Not as true Gods, but as something more akin to gnostic archons.
(This is kind of a cursed way to live, because your physical body will slowly die of hunger in thirst in the astral plane while you dream yourself as a god for centuries. When your body finally gives out, your dream ends, but your soul is already turned inside-out to your afterlife is left ambiguous but horrifying.)
The Cult of Silence is, in the long tradition of hubris driven immortality attempts, trying to do this anyway so they can rule the world for a few hundred years as physical gods. And my party is very nice and I love them but they're terrible at interacting with other groups and being diplomatic so the cult has amassed quite a lot of power and is now very difficult to take down in the material plane.
Fortunately, what my party lacks in ability to work with people and prevent the cult from gaining power, they made up for being lore-hounds and combat strategists. So they found a previous civilizations mechanism for entering the astral-plane physically (this is part of a cycle that kills civilizations) and are going to activate it, beat the cult leaders to the punch, and then kill them in the plane when they're seperated from their armies and bodyguards. Their "escape plan" is keep some lackeys by the portal to open it a second time, then exit instead of just. Staying forever.
They are smart enough to not want to trade a few centuries of godlike power for an eternity of unspecified awfulness, thank god.
It's a clever plan, honestly. There was a long period where I was worried the cult was just gonna win and the party was gonna get check checkmated.
The one downside to it is that it is forcing me to think of the details for what happens to people that die while already physically inside the afterlife. The two options I'm playing with are
Some kind of spiritual cronenberg body horror where their soul arrives in the plane, but horrifically mutilated because it is, as stated above, kind of inside-out. Then either fighting the cronenbergs as round two bosses, or bailing on them so that their afterlife is as monstrous as their life. (What happens if you kill a soul? Is the thing just fully, truly, Richard-Dawkins-atheist dead? That's not the worst but kind of horrific in a world where most people go to some kind of eternal party with their friends.)
The soul is trapped in the material plane, powerless and alone, forever. There is no afterlife and it has no corporeality and the environment that it is in is not psychically reactive. Thus there is no physical sensation and no way for it to interact with the environment. It's just an eternity of touchless, tasteless, scentless, sightless, silence.
Those are my ideas but I'm bringing it to you guys because I'm curious if anyone can think of anything better? Or, worse, actually. Better at being worse? One thing I'd like would be for their victory to have some string attached that ultimately winds up setting up the conflict for a future campaign. Also just for giggles, Dagoth-Ur lore attached below. It just feels the closest to what I'm working with right now. The nature of D&D is occasionally reinventing the cosmology of Michael Kirkbride.
