In my world, when a character dies, they stay dead. Probably because of how annoyed I got by Disney Deaths as a kid. Everyone who dies is Killed Off for Real.
edited 2nd Apr '11 7:19:47 PM by RoosterHat
Go, into the sand, and the dust, and the sky. Go now, there's no better plan than to do or to dieAll Deaths Final, with one exception (maybe), and even then that is just to serve as a Mind Screw/ Gainax Ending.
edited 2nd Apr '11 9:09:03 PM by Schmitty
:3
I've actually been thinking about a D&D homebrew setting like that. With the relative simplicity of the Raise Dead spell, murder would cease being more than an inconvenience- it would be a bigger crime to steal a plasma TV than slash someone's throat.
Basically, D&D meets Valhalla.
My name is Cu Chulainn. Beside the raging sea I am left to moan. Sorrow I am, for I brought down my only son.I really like the idea of coming back from death, so resurrection is posible in my fictional universe. However, it is overused and commonly seen as stupid (even by myself) so I avoid it at all costs, mostly by making believe that the character died but actually didn't, making it retribution-like (you know, paying a high, terrifying price for doing it), or making the process ridiculously hard (as I assume it should be). The few times that happens. Yeah.
I'm fond of making "Anyone can Die" in my stories, and in fact as long as my stories go, only one of my major characters is still alive... all because he's a pathetic coward that runs away from danger, he's immortal (in the "not dying of old age" way), and is of a half-spiritual nature. He learns a way to bring back the dead as long as the dead's spirit (conscience) and body are still intact, but only uses it once because it could go wrong, destroying the dead's spirit in the process; plus, the rituals needed for the resurrection are hard and tortuous, and the resurrected would have to feed on the character's life energy until it dies again. This character later learns how to "build" bodies, but that just adds another horrible and morally questionable ritual to the combo... And he's a pussy, remember?
So nope, Death is not cheap here, but a luxury...
I cannot understand how a lot of geeks are still single ):There's a spell in my world that can resurrect people, but the book it's in is an Artifact of Doom, and even attempting to learn it can end quite badly. One character is brought back from unexistance, if that counts, and another comes back as an alternate version of himself after dying. But other than that dead = dead.
Since most of my stories are set in fairly realistic world's, once someone's dead they tend to stay there. Of course since I typically write said death before much of the character's story they many show up again.
edited 26th Apr '11 12:07:35 AM by hotelkilo
Let God do His work, we will see to ours. Bring in the candles.Nobody really dies in my Weird West 'verse, because conservation of souls and there's angels and spirits and whatnot walking around. At least one major character has a resurrection in his backstory. Resurrection tends not to be a regular thing though, it usually requires the person in question to be involved somehow with extranormal beings. Most human souls go undisturbed until the End Times.
At one point I do want to get around to writing about the End Times, though... Not sure how things are going to play out, exactly, but I'll worry about it when I get there.
Magic doesn't work when you're dead so only people with psychic powers can come back by their own actions (via some sort of astral projectiion/re-possesion of their own corpse kinda thing). Wizards and the like can be brought back too sometimes If they hitch a ride with the dead psychic. Everyone else is out of luck barring divine intervention.
edited 26th Apr '11 5:49:17 AM by Azreal341
It's an "anyone can die" (and probably will die unless they can adapt to their newly-gained freakish powers) situation for me. In my 'verse, a fifth of the world's population is already dead anyway, or warped into grotesque beasts of superpowers but mad enough to make Werewolf!Lupin seems very benign. It's a post-Apocalypse world when the end was brought about by the pent-up resource of mana, a kind of energy humans and pretty much anything sentient can control with their thoughts. Most of the humans could not adapt to the sudden rush of energy, so yeah...
And dead people stay dead. No question asked. I do not fancy Disney Death.
In Island Song: Death is extremely expensive. There are three ways you can come back from the dead without coming back wrong: The benevolence of a unicorn (and even they have a seven-day deadline), getting out of a physical afterlife (or helping someone do it), or getting restored by a major god that you believe in. (The gods are all real, they just keep to their own followers due to the inherent workload of looking after a nation's worth of people.)
In Imbas: Death is also extremely expensive. There is a single spell that can do it, and it needs to be done to the punctuation mark to work.
edited 26th Apr '11 8:49:59 PM by Sharysa
It depends on what you consider "death." If you define it as a lack of a physical body, than yes, my characters stay dead after they are killed.
If you define it as no longer around in any sense, though, it gets a bit cheap. I kill off a lot of characters and they tend to come back as ghosts. Then for added fun you can kill/erase/destroy ghosts as well.
They also figure out a way to take a soul after it's been detached from a body and reattach the soul to the body. The problem with this resurrection though is that the body is in the exact same state as it was when it died. So you basically have a sentinent and self aware zombie. ...And in some cases just old-fashioned ones.
This isn't even getting into the fact that vampires and other immortal beings exist...Yeah, I'd say death is cheap.
Saint Cyprian: Well for the cast it may as well be impossible, but complete resurrection has been achieved eleven times in known magical history. Twelve if your willing to put aside retaining nasty crucifixions wounds.
Life's Gonna Suck When You Grow Up... But Is It That Great Now?... Also I'm Skylark2 now.

It's plenty cheap. People regularly get it for free.
You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.