Dead on Our Feet

Question: Working to create a new Titanrealm of Death and I was interested to see what 'Titans' would call it home and why. Japanese, Norse, Egyptian, and Aztec are of particular interest since its what we have in our game.

Well, good news - we actually wrote a Titanrealm of Death for our most recent pantheon supplement, The K'uh, which is available for free download and might give you some interesting starting places! It starts on page 27 of the PDF and contains Maya, Persian, Hindu and Greek Titan Avatars.

However, none of those Avatars are from the cultures you mentioned - bummer, right? It's actually very difficult to find true-blue Avatars of Death in many mythologies, which is at first glance surprising considering how much humanity tends to be afraid of and unhappy about death as a concept. It's that very fear and dislike that makes it less likely for there to be Titans of Death, however; because death is always the end of mortal life and therefore of supreme importance to humans, it's necessary for there to be gods to oversee it, lending humans the comfort of knowing that someone will take care of them after death, that there are rules, rewards and punishments that make the whole thing make sense. This is why there are tons of death gods, at least one or two per pantheon and in some cases many more, and why conversely there are few Death Titans; human societies don't like death-aligned figures, but they seldom invent ones that don't in some way help or reassure them about the great unknown of the afterlife.

That doesn't mean they don't exist, though! The easiest of your cultures to find one in is actually the Amatsukami, where the terrible figure of Izanami, murdering as many people as her husband creates each day and dragging them down into the miserable depths of Yomi, has many of the hallmarks of a Titan. She's a goddess in the original writeup, and we've gone back and forth on whether she should stay that way or move over to becoming Titanic, but if you want the death-aligned big bad of the Amatsukami, she's obviously it. Unlike most death gods, she doesn't really have any positive side, any things she does to help or safeguard humanity; she's a prison warden who is always looking to add to her prisoners so they can be miserable along with her, and that's a setup perfect for Titanhood. Plus, the tragic story of how she died and ended up as what she is now often lends a lot of emotional resonance to the dealings of gods and Scions with her, and might give you a lot of cool story options. There are other death figures in the Japanese pantheon, most notably Susanoo (who was cursed to become part of the Underworld when he sided with Izanami against his father) and Jigoku (lord of the Buddhist hell, most likely an import of Yama who later took on his own identity as a Japanese deity), but since they do have stories and functions as deities, interacting with the other gods or rehabilitating the dead according to their deeds in life, they're probably better left as gods instead of Titans.

The Norse are not so easy: they have three death people, and they're Odin, Freya and Hel, and none of them are straight-up easy choices for Titanhood. As leader of the pantheon, Odin's pretty clearly out of the question (although sometimes his behavior is downright Titanic, amirite, guys?), and as one of the Vanir prisoners and a major and generally benevolent goddess who features in many important stories, Freya's not a good choice, either. That leaves Hel, who, like Izanami, is not a very nice person thanks to her pantheon shitting on her, but she doesn't have the same Titanic flavor as her Japanese counterpart. Hel doesn't actively do anything to oppose the gods; nobody likes her, true enough, and people are generally afraid to go to her house, but she doesn't attack anyone, doesn't go around trying to kill more humans for her own ends, and doesn't cosmically try to screw anyone, spending most of her time sullenly watching over the kingdom they punted her into. She does try to prevent Baldur's resurrection, but you can hardly blame her for being A) not very inclined to be nice to the Aesir, and B) enforcing the rules of the domain they demanded she take over in the first place. If you don't use Hel, unfortunately there really aren't very many other options among the Norse gods and antagonists; the best other option I can think of is Modgrud, the giantess who guards the bridge to Hel and controls whether or not the dead (or living) are allowed across it, but since she's both fairly minor and also not very antagonistic, I really wouldn't recommend her.

The Egyptians have the opposite problem from the Norse - ten bazillion kajillion death-aligned gods, but almost all of them are benevolent friends to humanity and their pantheon, hardly Titans bent on opposing them. Because the ancient Egyptians were so strongly invested in the idea of the afterlife being a second chance for them if they observed all their death rituals and were judged worthy, there are veritable slews of gods helping take care of the place, from guiding lost souls to performing burial rites to defending them from demons to judging their worthiness to continue to a new life. That doesn't leave a lot of room for deathly gods who are trying to ruin all that, but you do have a few options you might be able to explore nevertheless. The first is Ammit, the terrible crocodile/hippopotamus/lion amalgam creature that is said to dwell in Duat; eternally hungry, she devours the souls of anyone who fails to measure up when weighed against feather of Ma'at, consigning their souls to awful oblivion instead of allowing them to move on. While we use Ammit as an Avatar of the Titanrealm of Destruction, emphasizing her role as the void that utterly destroys, we could also see her as an Avatar of Death representing final, irrevocable and afterlife-less death, something that surely gives most people extreme heebie-jeebies. Ammit is slightly problematic, however, in that she works for (or at least with) the gods, allowing Anubis and Thoth to decide who she gets to eat and doesn't, so you'd need to come up with a backstory reason why she's ditched that job and begun rampaging on her own. The only other suggestion I have for you is a minor god called Ba-Pef, who is believed to have represented the grief and suffering associated with death and who lives in the House of Woe in Duat. Ba-Pef was on our original list for possibilities for our own Titanrealm of Death; we ended up cutting him since he was such a minor god with very little information on him out there, but he does fill a neat death-related niche, so he's an outside option.

Finally, the Aztecs, with a similar lack of useful possibilities. Like most Mesoamerican cultures, the Aztecs had a pretty overwhelming fear and hatred of death and things associated with it, but as a result they set up several gods as goalies to keep dead people from getting out to frighten the living and called it a day. Huitzilopochtli, Tlaloc and other gods who technically control Underworlds are obviously not Titan material, and while Itzpapalotl does oversee the souls of dead infants and miscarriages, she's so strongly tied to the tzitzimime that it would be a pretty weird move to set her up in a Death realm instead of the Stars. The really major scary death figure for the Aztecs is Mictlantecuhtli (and his wife, Mictecacihuatl, who fucntions with him as a unit), but he has the same problems as Hel above - performs the useful function of keeping the dead away from the living, doesn't oppose or endanger humanity or his pantheon, has no particularly evil issues other than being very unpleasant to be around, and only clashes with the gods when they invade his home and try to break the rules of death. He's certainly scary and disliked, so you could decide that he's a Titan, but it's hard to extrapolate much misbehavior out of him when his favorite pastime is staying at home and refusing to not do his job. If you want to get creative, though, you could try going modern and using Santa Muerte ("Saint Death" or "Holy Death" in Spanish) as a new Titan Avatar horning in on the traditional Aztec territories. Santa Muerte is probably actually a figure synthesized from Mictlantecuhtli/Mictecacihuatl and the influence of Catholicism from the invading Spaniards, but wherever she came from she's become one of the most powerful (and frightening, depending on who you ask) cult figures in Mexico, with cults reaching all the way up into the US and down through Central America. If you want to use her as a being in her own right, she could be parlayed into an interesting Titanic figure opposing the old death gods of the Aztlanti, flourishing in worship where they did not.

That's about all I've got to suggest for you, I'm afraid. Death's a very hard one, and I salute you for giving it a good go. In addition to the suggestions above, we also had Iapetus, Greek Titan of mortality and the lifespan, as a possibility on our original list for our Death realm, as well as Mrtyu, Hindu personification of death.