End of Afterlives

There used to be an order to this dying business. You lived your life well, served your god, and went to their realm when you died. Or you were a wanker, and you went straight to Hell - and rightly so, ya bloody git!
Now... Who the fuck knows what happens?

— Grumbling Priest

When the End of All Things came, the afterlife was an unexpected casualty. In all the plans and prophecies, the whole system would be obsolete - either everlasting glory or oblivion awaited , depending on who won. Nobody had really made a contigency for what followed, and every limbo, every purgatory, every waiting-room-for-the-dead wound up shattered like every other plane... Leaving souls nowhere to go. The gods fared no better, their home planes torn apart and destroed, raining down across Ithekshem like so much celestial rubble, leaving everyone to wonder... Now what happens when you die?
The lack of an afterlife has made things a great deal more complicated for everyone, not just mortals.

After the Afterlife

These days, if someone dies in Ithekshem, they're just gone. All magic that used to work just doesn't. From Speak to the Dead to Resurrection fails to find something to grasp. A frightening void is all that is left behind and even the surviving gods have no answers to give their remaining followers. Life, for many, have suddenly become a lot more valuable with no reward promised beyond it.
Even worse, every soul that was enjoying a calm afterlife have found itself thrown back into the world as its home plane cracked open and shattered against Ithekshem. For everyone who survived the impact, thousands perished - and nobody knows where they went.

Worst of all, at least from their perspective, is the mortality thrust upon creatures used to a certain measure of immortality. Devils, demons, celestials, and more - being slain used to be a setback, a temporary annoyance that saw them reform back in their home plan... That is no longer the case, and if they die now, it's for real.

Cosmic evil has fared no better, either. Devils and demons both had long considered themself to be simply infinite, spawning more of their kin by a steady flow of sinful souls that fell like rain on their realms. Those days are over, and now they have to scrounge for scrap of reinforcemets. Where there were once legions, there are only fragments remaining, most of them slain in the wars of the End Of All Things and now they've got no way to replenish.

by http://www.tribalartasia.com/

Reincarnation

One spell that still works are the ones that reincarnate a recently deceased into a new form, with the operative word being recent. Unless the spell is cast as the light leaves their eyes, it fails just like tha rest.

Ghosts and Ghouls

Undead still happen, but is more a matter of proximity to places of magic than anything else. As planes of negative energy or other spooky powers broke apart and emerged in Ithekshem like maggots from rotting flesh, their influence anchors undead to the world.

For this reason, some especially desperate people turn such places of power into their funeral grounds, hoping to rise again as some sort of horrible undead monstrosity rather than disappearing.

And so, everyone in Ithekshem are asking themselves...

What Now?

With the old promise of life after death gone, people have started trying to figure out how to fix it with something new. Though only a handful of decades separates Ithekshem from the End of All Things, the threat of violent death seems just as likely as then, and few want to throw themselves at the mercy of the universe and just hope there's something after.

Artificial Afterlives

Some creatures or spellcasters of exceptional power have begun to construct miniature afterlives to do something, anything, to sort this whole mess out. Slowly, haltingly, gods and mortals experiment to make a world after death for the people around them
Unlike the heavenly rewards of the past, these are physical places in the the world with all the drawbacks of that. They need to be built, maintained, and can be destroyed. Souls need to be transported from their cooling corpse into the building, or they are lost to whatever lies beyond eternity.

Stasis Safety

Others don't wait until death comes to them, but create great tomb-structures were the near dying are placed in great arcane machines that keep them on the precipice of oblivion and their minds in a pleasant dream-world.
These sort of facilities tend to be limited and who can access them, and just as prone to catastrophic failure as any artificial afterlife. Tombs draw adventurers like flies to fertilizer, posing a constant danger to any who would try to cheat death like this.

by Miguel Eins