GLOGtober Challenge: A Fate Worse Than Death

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of Phlox: https://whosemeasure.blogspot.com

Out of Game

In most cases, death seems pretty bad - in our lifetimes? - likely permanent. What could be worse than death?

Certainly there are particular deaths that are worse than other deaths, like being eaten alive by rats is worse than blowing up in a monster truck rally, but is there something which is worse across the board? 

Hard to say. Hell, probably, if we interpret it as a temporal eternity of being on fire and you never get used to it. Being eaten and your consciousness digested by invading aliens, motes of your awareness spread across their swarm as they destroy the world and everyone you've ever known, knowing you're trapped alongside their consciousnesses too but unable to communicate, a backseat passenger as the aliens devour world after world, spreading throughout the universe until heat death or the big crunch (if that's how it goes down), thinking it's finally gonna end, but oh no! the aliens figure out a way around that and it's nightmare cycles forever.

So hell again basically, just different flavours of hell. Those are probably worse than death. Can I claim it confidently? No. I've never met a dead person, nor one in hell. The out of game stuff is less interesting than the in game stuff, I should've put a disclaimer at the start attesting to that.

In Game

Your character in a game dying can be an exciting culmination of a plan or arc or whatever, but it can also blow - you lose experience, equipment, potentially the rest of the session, yadda yadda yadda.

How can it be worse? Some ideas:

• You can't be brought back from death. That's assuming the setting has resurrection magic. Maybe this happens if you're killed by a demon, or Bad Magic.
• You return as an undead critter, corporeal or ghostly, and haunt the remaining party. It might be fun if your character is under your control when this happens, so to be worse than death it'd have to be an NPC. This probably happens if you're killed by a vampire or wraith or whatever.
• The death is so bad that your next character has a detriment related to it, like a mutation, or a missing limb, or they have to reroll constitution and take the lower result, or if they encounter the thing that killed your last character they have to save or flee in terror. Again, this is probably something Bad Magic can do, stay away from Bad Magic, maybe you don't even have to be killed by Bad Magic, maybe using Bad Magic will do this to you as well, or maybe there's some Schwarzeneggerian warrior who is just so strong that when he kills you he kills you so much that it follows you into your next life.
• If your character dies you have to die in real life. Potentially controversial, illegal. Can't recommend this one. If you can get a message back, tell us whether being dead is worse than being in hell, or vice-versa.
  
• When a character dies the world's doomsday clock ticks forwards a step - maybe because their soul or life energy or whatever is being harvested by the Apocalypse Engine - first character death you might just get an omen that lets you know what's up, but after a few character deaths the plagues start, the moon turns red, whatever, and when you reach 10 character deaths or whichever number the campaign's over, you lost, world's ended. Variant: Each death makes the Armageddon Beast stronger and more active in its rampages.
  
• Your next character's got a debt they have to pay off before they starting getting gold-for-xp, and the amount of that debt is based on your last character's karma. If they were a straight-shooter paladin? Minimal debt. If they were a real piece of shit? Big debt, great tragedy. This represents paying monks to pray for their sake, to send solace and merit as their flesh freezes and shatters in Padma Naraka or whatever.
• A character dying blocks off that class or race or race/class combo for everyone... don't die too much or you'll be forced into Suboptimal Character Options... Maybe do something like this for a campaign where you unlock new classes & races by befriending factions, and you lose the options because you dying offends them...
• You only get one fancy character sheet and after that character dies you burn it and from now on you have to use handwritten ones. Hard to justify this diegetically. Maybe the DM just feels an aimless and petty spite. Truth be told I don't even like the fancy character sheets. Maybe this one isn't so bad.
  
• Your corpse doesn't rot and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger every day and it's not so bad at first but then it's blocked off the dungeon passage and you can't move it or hack it up fast enough and then the dungeon's burst around it and it's flopped over the whole hex and it's all downhill from here.
• You wake up in a dungeon and you have to figure the way out on your own time before you can reincarnate as a new character. If you die in the dungeon you go right back to the start, or to a new, even harder dungeon.