As The Daily Bestiary attests, "Death has gotten pretty complicated in Pathfinder. You’ve got psychopomps who want to shepherd souls to their just reward, sahkils who want to terrorize them, night hags who want to bottle and sell them, daemons who want to destroy souls entirely, shinigamis and inevitables who will take you out if you try to defy death (except the shinigamis who take bribes or go rogue)…look, it’s a mess."
The goddess of death in Golarion is neutral, but the process of ferrying and judging the dead is a bureaucracy. This is effing stupid and another clear example that nobody understands alignment. The goddess of death hates undead, because undead are arbitrarily evil or something... Oh, and the grim reaper is a cosmic baddie because that totally makes sense. Like I said, the world building of Golarion is generally retarded.
In real world mythology, every afterlife where souls were judged portrayed this as a lawful, orderly concept. In Egyptian mythology, this judgment was explicitly part of ma'at (order). In Chinese folk religion, hell was literally part of the same bureaucracy as heaven and clerks were recruited from the souls purified there. The deities of death were almost always referred to as judges.
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| Judgment in the Egyptian afterlife |
There is a huge amount of overlap between inevitables and psychopomps. The marut inevitable, morrigna psychompomp, and shinigami all share the exact same premise of hunting down those who try to avoid death. In addition, valkyries ferry the souls of slain warriors. All these different groups do not make sense to exist in the same setting without radical rewriting. I have seen one valiant attempt to explain shinigami as contract employees or bountry hunters for the psychomps, but this is too little too late.
If I had to force them into a semblance of logic, I would toss the alignment baggage in the trash where it belongs. The goddess of death is lawful and all the psychopomps are lawful because the very concept of judging the dead is lawful. Conveniently for me this is the premise of the planar cosmology presented in Classic Play: The Book of the Planes, which I wholeheartedly adore and adopted myself.
In this totally logical scheme, the shinigami and valkyries become nominal members of the psychopomps. The psychopomps and inevitables do not necessarily get along, since the psychopomps are more liberal and the inevitables are more unyielding. This reflects a similar division in Elric's multiverse, where the forces of law are divided between the Lords of Law that protect the cosmic balance and the dangerous Singularity that seeks to stamp out all chaos.
Order is conservative and at its logical extreme considers change to be morally wrong. Death is a transition, and as such is seen as morally wrong in and of itself. However, Order is responsible for ferrying and judging souls to their ultimate reward. Because of this, Order has an oddly varied approach to dealing with undead, and indeed anyone who tampers with the mysteries of life and death. Different agents often work at cross purposes due to the inefficiency of the bureaucratic system.
Some agents of Order hunt down and punish those who try to avoid or reverse death, regardless of the circumstances. An adventurer raised from the dead and a lich are considered equally criminal in this light. Other agents of Order try to prevent or reverse death by raising or animating the dead. Life and undeath are considered equivalent in their eyes.
Since life itself exists in a constant state of change, some agents of Order are devoted to exterminating life. Such agents include the Grim Reaper (who simply kills everyone... eventually) and the Theologians of the Order of the Gash (who torture the change out of their victims until they are properly orderly).
Links
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_(afterlife)
- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Psychopomp
- https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DontFearTheReaper
- http://dailybestiary.tumblr.com/post/74126334507/valkyrie
- http://dailybestiary.tumblr.com/post/57666606394/shinigami
- http://dailybestiary.blogspot.com/2016/11/grim-reaper.html
- http://dailybestiary.blogspot.com/2012/12/marut.html
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