What happens when you mix the Legion of Superheroes and Kafka
So, I've been thinking about the ghostly superheroes concept again. That concept, in brief, is that people who die in extraordinary circumstances gain powers in the afterlife. So, Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider and dies, waking up to find that he is a monstrous half-man / half-spider creature.
Setting: Well, it should be Manhattan, to fit the genre, but any large city with history works. The afterlife, however, is based on memories. The geography is based off of the mythology of the place, rather than the actuality.
So, for instance, the Peace Tower is visible from everywhere in Ottawa, but the downtown core is only a few blocks, surrounded by a mass of low-density suburbs and commercial buildings.
The level of detail in a given area is proportional to how it's imagined, as is the size of that place. So the majority of Ontario becomes a vast dense forest, with towns dotted throughout. Travel from place to place is difficult unless there is a major route.
Finally, the geography doesn't try to average out to a consensus. When you enter a place, you see it in a certain way. Residents see it differently, and likely with more detail and, depending on mythology, you and the residents may not see each other at all, or may see each other in caricature.
Population: Most people, when they die, simply continue doing what they did when alive. No eternal reward, just an eternity of going to work, coming home, going to bed. Sure, the call centre where they work may be in a crumbling monolith and all the numbers they call may result in horrible screaming, but beyond a few superficial differences, it's another day at the office.
As individuals are forgotten, they become more and more translucent until they fade into nothingness. Until that point, most of them sleep-walk through an unvarying routine.
There are four exceptions to that. People who led virtuous lives or spent their lives causing harm to others have free will in the afterlife, before continuing on to their reward (if there is one).
If a ghost is pulled away from their routine and cannot return to it, they wake up and become in control of their actions.
Finally, people who died in traumatic events may have free will, or may simply end up a regular ghost, repeating the moment of their death over and over until they are forgotten.
There's a catch to all of this, though. The ghosts who repeat a routine over and over like automatons can't die again. If they do, they simply wake up the next day and start their routine over. Ghosts with free will, on the other hand, can die and do.
On the other hand, ghosts with free will no longer rely on being remembered to not fade away. They remember themselves, and that's enough to continue to exist.
The player characters are the ghosts of people who died in unusual, tragic and possibly funny ways. Because they are notable for their death rather than their life, they arrive in the afterlife changed in a way that exaggerates the way in which they died.