What is the highest punishment in your land?

Mine is not as fleshed out as some of the cool worlds here, but within most human nations, cannibalism will earn you extradimensional exile especially because it is representative of the puritanical bone-men culture. Someone caught consuming human flesh would be bound and placed inside a coffin-like device, awaking in any of a few places...unless you're lucky and end up somewhere instantly deadly or with impossible physics. You may be sent to the planet made of maggots, a sea of pus, a universe composed entirely of worms feeding on each other, other worlds conquered by worms, etc. You may find yourself in a volcanic hellscape with no discernable sky surrounded by curtains of toxic smoke, a universe made of endless porous rock like some kind of stone sponge, or a starless clicking black space.

You don't need to travel that far though. In the northernmost territories, you may be forced to kill yourself through exposure. Suicide is not allowed in those places unless ordered, seen as turning your back on the community. That is except through "giving yourself" to the cold due to the willpower required. The strange sky-worshipping humanoids from across the sea prefer to kill by exposure too, covering the victim in their own blood and viscera to attract insects while they hang by their arms from a tree. They are also fond of crushing wrongdoers under huge stones. So if you're lucky they would just throw off a cliff instead.

In the southernmost mountain range, a race of artificial humans is slowly rising, they would love to remove your limbs and put you back together wrong. It is believed they also have the means to allow a severed head to survive for a long time.

One punishment used by the dog-men of the southeast involves slowly cooking and eating the victim one piece at a time. They are totally sadistic and love to play games with their prey. The nearby amphibious humanoids perform executions by gradually scraping the flesh off with seashells, frequently salting the wounds. Less civilized cultures like these sometimes also offer criminals to the man-sized insects which inhabit certain tropical areas...your fate would depend on the species but the worst is probably the eidocids, they would inject you with a paralyzing venom and leave you buried for up to several days before eating you alive.

All of the other punishments I have written about seem lame in comparison. The biggest Cora cities like Cria and Iberros are run by huge underground slave complexes with horrible conditions, so that would be unpleasant. To the northwest in places like Volgent the worst punishment short of beheading, is being locked in a tiny box for days. Long ago that box might be buried or cast into the sea but that isn't really allowed anymore. Their neighbors the elusive cave humanoids rarely feel a need to execute their own, blinding or deafening with hot irons is usually sufficient.

/r/worldbuilding Thread