Deities of Death

[MonkeyDragon]

In my pantheon, the God of Life and Goddess of Death are two halves of the same diety. True neutral. The Death aspect is responsible for taking souls to the afterlife, bringing souls BACK from the afterlife, and bringing souls to newly created life. Her clerics perform a lot of funerals. She hates the undead.

So yeah, pretty similar to other people's takes on it.

 

[Voadam]

I love Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series. On a Pale Horse was definitely a different take on Death. Not evil, just an office that needed to be filled. What's interesting is that you can only become Death by killing Death.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Chemosh from Dragonlance. Now, he falls into the Death = Evil category. However, he's been developed a bit in the last few years with Margaret Weis' Dark Disiciple series and in Holy Orders of the Stars to be a bit more.

Firstly, he's been redefined not as a god of death, but as a god of fatalism. Yes, he's got the job of ensuring that souls go to the next stage on their soul's journey, but that's something he doesn't consciously think about. What he wants is to see things come to an end, whether it's life or the mortal spirit.

Secondly, he decided that death needed a new face. So rather than have rottings husks of beings around, he created the Beloved of Chemosh, who are beautiful and try to entice folks to join Chemosh's worship. Check out Dark Disciple for further details.

You can take even a traditional-style god of death and make him into something more.

I considered listing Chemosh but I've never seen that much of him and my memory associated him with undeath and not death. Novels developing him more sound interesting.