a black cloak with only grasping grey hands underneath. Anything they touch withers, anything pulled inside disappears, never to be seen in the living world again.
2
a knightly flea in chitinous armour mounted atop a giant rat pocked all over with buboes.
3
the first person you’ve ever known to die, invisible if you’re ignorant of mortality.
4
an eroded skeleton dancing a clattery jig to the flutish sounds of wind whistling through the holes and grooves in its bones.
5
a pale lady dressed in a trailing miasmal gown and sarira-studded jewelry.
6
a black dog as big as a bear, its footprints and empty eye sockets sputtering plumes of ash.
7
a non-Euclidean Wound Man pierced simultaneously by every possible weapon and tool.
8
a cairn crawling on stony legs.
9
a dirt-caked gravedigger with a vulture’s head.
10
a sow-sized, kindly-eyed maggot carried about on a carpet of flies.
11
a scythe-headed blackbird.
12
a trio of crones joined at the neck, whose shared head is a spider. It constantly spins, weaves, and cuts its own silk.
13
a hunter whose skin is tanned leather, with antlers crowning its brow. When it needs a spear or arrow it snaps an appropriately-sized tine from its antlers.
14
a halfway-mummified corpse chained to something like both a clock and a breaking wheel.
15
an iron maiden articulated into a humanoid form, snapping open to a spiky grin.
16
some freakish deep-sea creature barely glimpsed through the gloom, all pale, dangling lights and glassy teeth.
17
a giant crab whose shell is an ossuary, bones molded into crustacean shape.
18
a severed head bloated and floating with corpse-gas, its greasy hair dangling in a noose-braid.
19
a roadkill chimera, some crushed bits of jackal there, some whip-poor-will there, some hyena, and so on.
20
a skeletal bat wrought from iron and lead, bluish light shining from within its skull and ribs.
D20
This reaper primarily collects the souls of
1
those who die by being crushed.
2
those who die after being swallowed whole.
3
those who are burned to death.
4
those who die of deprivation.
5
those who die by all sorts of impalement.
6
those who die by falling from a height.
7
those who die in several pieces.
8
those who die in complete darkness.
9
those who die far from home.
10
those who die at the hands of a friend.
11
those who die to fulfill curiousity.
12
those who die of poisoning.
13
those who die while seeing their own viscera.
14
those who die after being resurrected.
15
those who die due to incautiousness.
16
those who die from a miraculous misfortune.
17
those who die from a thousand cuts.
18
those who die in another’s place.
19
those who die from a wizard’s mistake.
20
those who die clutching gold.
D20
If this reaper is after you, it might let you go if
1
you can outrace it.
2
you can remain perfectly still for longer than it can.
3
you bribe it with hell-money. The moment the bribes stop coming, it’ll come back to collect you.
4
you can wrestle it into submission.
5
you can provide it blackmail on a dead person in the underworld.
6
you swear an oath to hunt down an undead creature of its choosing.
7
you promise to clear a once-sanctified catacomb of the things that have defiled it.
8
you can give it three good reasons why it should in ten seconds or less.
9
you make a pact with it to arrange the deaths of three other people in the manner it prefers.
10
you can wear a mourner’s veil over your face for the rest of your life to hide yourself from it.
11
you can tell it a riddle it can’t solve before you get away.
12
you can provide the blood-and-wine mixture necessary to propitiate it.
13
you agree to sabotage its rival psychopomp’s collection quota.
14
you agree and are able to take it to the living world as your familiar.
15
you promise to take its position the next time you die.
16
you offer up someone precious to you in your place.
17
you trade it your memories of the living world.
18
you gamble with more than your life as the stakes.
19
you can beat it in a game of its choice.
20
you can (im)mortally wound it.
D20
This reaper views mortals
1
with distrust, as it does anything that lives.
2
as products to be packaged and delivered.
3
as sources of entertaining gossip.
4
as a nuisance that should all die out already.
5
as irrationally attached to their bodies.
6
as children to be herded for their own good.
7
like a cat does mice.
8
as clients for whom it is performing a commendable service.
9
as waste to be recycled.
10
as immortal spirits confused by their brief time clothed in flesh.
11
as barely above animals.
12
as admirable and tragic figures.
13
as bundles of untapped potential.
14
as amalgams of everything they’ve had to kill and consume to survive.
15
as unwelcome intruders in the underworld.
16
as the underclass of the post-life economy.
17
as a chemical accident.
18
as little divinities.
19
as a strange sort of people, but people all the same.
20
as being terribly naive about how the world really operates.
D20
This reaper works for
1
a necromancer, who it fetches souls for and advises against the most egregious violations of the natural order.
2
one of the rebel-hells, to supply the innocent souls they so rarely get a taste of.
3
heaven, in the hope of eventual ascension.
4
lich-lords recruiting for their deathless wars.
5
an extinct pantheon, to steal souls for their crumbling afterlife.
6
an ancient emperor, to gather slaves for their work projects.
7
esoteric merchants of the outer realms.
8
a spirit-eating abomination, to stock its larder.
9
a bodhisattva, to speed souls along the cycle of reincarnation.
10
the ghost of a dragon who hoards the dead.
11
a lesser archon, to render down souls into fuel for its sub-creation.
12
a fallen angel seeking enough souls to bribe its way back into heaven’s good graces.
13
a union of ancestral spirits pooling their resources to hire it.
14
an abyssal tribunal, to bring souls to their proper judgement.
15
the Fates, to archive souls and their stories.
16
valkyries, to provide mooks for the einherjar to practice on.
17
a necropolis attempting to undergo a population boom.
18
a philosopher of the deeply buried qliphoth, who wants to study the essence of alien (to it) beings.
19
the highest bidder.
20
a charitable god who wishes for all the dead to have a peaceful rest.
