Nope! By taking Afterlife, they permanently and unconditionally detach their realm from any other world's afterlife system. They can design whatever afterlife setup they want, though, and they could spend some of their Gateway allowance to connect it to other afterlives if those exist in a form that can be travelled to! 

"Huh."

"Huh?"

"I was just thinking that I don't want Hell to exist, but it would be good if we could invade and liberate it. Does the Afterlife take up our space budget? Or is that optional depending on our parameters" She asks the marbles.

It has its own separate space budget that is the same size as the regular world's space budget! Unless they go with a reincarnation setup that means people just land back in the same world, in which case they don't get any extra budget. 

"I don't know what answer I was expecting to that question but that wasn't it," Isra comments, making a note of this next to Demiplane Size in her notes.

"Do we want to go any bigger to accommodate a bigger afterlife? Unless we put gateways in that let people come right back, the population of our afterlife is only going to go up over time." 

"Only if people die. We're going to make them all immortal, remember?"

"We will, I am all for spending 8 points for Longevity 1 and 2, but it doesn't cover every way someone could die. Three points is cheap enough to put on the top of the maybe list for me. Could we have a physical afterlife and reincarnation? With reincarnation, we could have people taking turns being alive if the population gets too big."

The marbles would like to clarify that if you buy Longevity 2, you don't need to buy Longevity 1 as well. That's the same for any set of numbered options—you only have to buy the highest-numbered one you want. 

The afterlife can work however they want it to work! 

...as long as how it works doesn't involve interfering with the way other worlds work, or producing the effects of other options that they haven't bought. If they want people to reincarnate as dragons, for instance, they have to spend the points to have dragons. That'd be Species 2 and probably also Metahuman Population. 

"Ah, that makes sense." She notes on the point clarification.

Meghan conjured a paper notebook a while back, deciding against a laptop, because typing distracts her too much.

"Do you guys have preferences for Afterlife if we get one?"

"I might need some more time to think about it. For some reason, the question 'what would you do if you could design the afterlife from scratch' never occurred to me before." 

"Same here." Millie wasn't going to be the first person to admit that, but now Isra's said it she won't be the only one. "My plan was always to avoid going there in the first place." 

"My plan was to become immortal or die trying. By inventing immortality that is."

"We could just let anyone that wants to die stay dead? And the rest comes back? Or I guess, stay dead for an amount of time if they want to wait for something. Huh, would it be bad if people killed themselves so they wouldn't wait for their book series get a new installment?"

"That doesn't sound like a good reason to commit suicide to me, even suicide you know is going to be temporary." 

"Lighten up! It was just a joke." 

"Uh... it kinda wasn't? I have a friend that would do it. But he was dying at the time, so maybe it was a joke? Hard to tell sometimes."

"I guess people who are dying are allowed to make jokes about it if they want." Isra is pretty sure she's heard someone say that at some point. 

"But, anyway, setting aside the suicide part, letting people say that if they die they want to stay dead, with or without conditions for when we should bring them back, sounds okay to me." 

"Sounds weird to let people to stay dead, but hey, we are deep in weird. Maybe put a star to mark it 'important to review later'?"

"Sounds good to me." If she's honest, Millie has been finding the afterlife nitpicking kind of boring. "What's next?" 

Isra adds a column to her spreadsheet to track items they want to return to later and hash out in more detail. 

She checks where they were up to. "We were talking through the Planar Features. I think someone proposed taking Insertion and Transient, which sounds like it would let us move between our worlds if we want to do that." Isra considers the remaining options in that section. "Defense 1 seems like a good investment in that case, and it would probably be convenient if we had either Gateways or Portals for times when we want to access a world but not move the whole realm there." 

"Yeah, absolutely take Defense 1. I think Defense 2 might be better than having, say, Transient or Portals."

"With Transient we can move Gateways too. I think it's better than Gateways 3. The place is going to be big, but I don't think we need a hundred thousand gates."

"Hold on, let me come up with a way to rank things..." 

Isra adds a column to her spreadsheet for a comparative ranking. She gives Defense 2 a value of 50 (out of 100), Transient and Portals 40 each, and Gateways 3 a value of 10. Defense 1 gets a value of 90 because there seems to be general agreement that it's worth taking. 

"Okay, I think I've got all that down. We're taking Defence 1, and then Defence 2 is better than Transient and Portals, which are better than Gateways 3. I agree that Gateways 3 isn't a massive value-add for the domain size we're considering, especially if we take Transient, so we can move the gateways, or Portals, which we can create at will." 

...as an afterthought, she adds a column for value-divided-by-point-cost. 

Millie peers over Isra's shoulder at the spreadsheet. "I think you're right about Gateways 3. I think Gateways 2 seems worth taking if we're doing gateways at all—although Transient would replace some of the value in being able to deactivate and reactivate gateways."