D&D 5E [Forgotten Realms] The Wall of the Faithless

Hussar said:

So, if I'm understanding this right, you want to take one of the few truly unique features of Forgotten Realms, of which there are very few, scrap it and turn FR into yet another generic D&DLand?

I mean, if we remove the Wall AND the Fugue Plane, the FR afterlife is pretty much basic Generic Land. No different than Greyhawk or, of course, Planescape's take on the Afterlife.

At that point, as a DM, I'd have to turn to the player and ask why they want to play in this setting. Obviously there are some serious disconnects between what the player wants and the setting that's being played. Why have a character whose base goal (and this is a pretty fundamental part of the character) is to blow up the setting? If you want a setting where souls are not judged but simply go to whatever alignment plane they should go to, there are a number of settings for you. Greyhawk works this way. GenericLand D&D works this way. Planescape works this way. I'm sure there are other settings too.

Why are you trying to turn Forgotten Realms into another setting?

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wow, for once I totally agree with you.

One option is to keep the lore in the game and have the character search for an Amulet of Afterlife Protection.

I'm A Banana said:

So your point is that without the Wall of the Faithless, FR is just not *special* anymore? That the only thing saving FR from being Generic Land is the Wall?

That's wrong in two ways:

FR is Special Without the Wall: It wasn't necessary in the Grey Box presentation, in the 4e presentation, and for 99% of the word count for 3e and 5e. The Salvatore novels seem to mostly ignore it. Pretty sure changing the wall changes very little of the rest of the setting that has inspired so much gaming delight, and, in fact, brings it closer to what the setting has often been presented as.

Also, FR is Pretty Generic Even With the Wall: If what you're looking for is a setting that's not generic, FR's going to struggle to provide that, even WITH the wall. There's still a Tolkeinesque land seen through a funhouse mirror where murderhobos raid dungeons and slay dragons with spells and swords. FR has distinguishing traits (mostly, its deep history), but "People have to worship a god or they get punished" isn't really one of 'em. If it was, it would've come up more than as a side-paragraph in the SCAG for all that has been written about it so far in 5e. In fact, it NOT being a more central trait is part of its weirdness (you'd think that it would feature along with Thay and the Zhentarim or Menzoberranzen or the orcs of the north or the other BBEG's of the Realms).


Would you ask the same thing of someone who wanted to fight the Red Wizards or stop the Cult of the Dragon? Would they be guilty of trying to turn FR into GenericLand? Because it's no different. When you introduce something monstrous and cruel like the Wall into your setting of heroic fantasy adventure, you have to expect that heroic characters will be motivated to change that. That's what heroes do. Sorcerer-kings fall, evil gods are slain, wicked kings deposed, armies of evil stopped, and goodness is restored to the multiverse. This happens every day at tables all around the world. Why should the Wall be any more immune to this fate than Kalak or the Red Wizards or the Dragonarmies? It is a thing that produces suffering and pain. Why SHOULDN'T a hero seek to end it? Nefarious things are THERE for PC's to fight and overcome.

It's not breaking the setting to want to fight against the villains it gives us.


Why are the Heroes of the Lance trying to turn Dragonlance into another setting? Why are the faction members in Planescape trying to turn Planescape into another setting? Why are the rebels in Dark Sun trying to turn Dark Sun into another setting? Why are the Knights of the Raven trying to turn Ravenloft into another setting?

Your question rests on flawed assumptions.

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I think that if you are going to make a character with such a goal, most FR DMs will fully support you. The other characters in the party won't likely share the same goals anyway so the campaign will still maintain its flavor.

Still, I really don't think it's fair to over react to the campaign lore and demand that it change. I certainly don't want the lore to change. I'd rather not work against the lore because in my opinion it's more fun to work with it.

Hussar said:

See, that's the fundamental breakdown. You are insisting that the Wall must be interpreted as evil. I'm saying that I have no problems whatsoever with a religion that punishes the faithless. Your claims to the contrary ignore one very important fact - when people within those particular cultures you named repudiate the faith of their people, then they don't get to go to whatever heaven that culture claims.

Someone who ignores Ma'at and is from that culture, is judged and doesn't get to go to Egyptian heaven.

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That's not really the way it worked. Ancient (polytheist) religion by and large doesn't care about what you believe in, it cares about what you do. It doesn't matter if you believed in ma'at or not (or worshiped at her temples), you'd be judged by it all the same, and your belief in ma'at was irrelevant for how it weighed on the scale.

And so the Wall works like ma'at except that it also takes into account your devotion to some sky-person into account as well as a trump card. And since you can be good without giving two sods about any sky-person, good people are made to suffer. In a game about devotion to ma'at, we wouldn't have D&D alignments (it likely would not be traditional heroic fantasy!). In a game with D&D alignments, we wouldn't have this entirely separate and irrelevant metric determining whether you suffered in the afterlife or not, unless it was something evil.

At some point, when can the DM just turn to the player and say, "Get with the program"? Dragon lance as a setting is not about deeply nuanced moral issues. It's black hats and white hats straight up heroic fantasy. It's frustrating as hell to have one or two players who insist on playing a different game than everyone else at the table. Everyone else is playing heroic fantasy but, there's that guy who's trying to change the game to something else.

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I'm cool with a DM setting limits on what they want, but if a DM doesn't set those limits, I don't see why I'm beholden to them. If the DM says "you must be a gully dwarf," then I'll be a gully dwarf. If a DM says "you must be Good," I'll be Good. If the DM says, "This game is about fighting the Cult of the Dragon," I'll make a character who fights the cult of the dragon.

"You must accept that the Wall of the Faithless is fine" is not a precondition of playing in FR. It objectively isn't.

Trying to ignore the level of faith that is important in the setting because it didn't exist in the original boxed set ignores tons and tons of setting material. Good grief, how many gods are there in Forgotten Realms? How many of the factions in FR are directly tied to the gods? Harpers spring to mind. Good grief, Drizz't stories are all about Drow society which is a theocracy. Removing religion from the Drow and what are they? Kinda funny looking elves with a leather fetish? One of the best video games for FR was Baldur's Gate where you actually play the offspring of a god.

It's not like faith takes a far backseat in FR. It's right front and centre.

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FR is a kitchen sink, so it's not always front and center. It's not front and center in most Drizz't novels, it's not front and center in the original boxed set, it's not front and center in 4e, it's not front and center for the FR Dragonborn, etc, etc, etc,.

Me, I'd rather play a setting for what the setting has to offer rather than try to rewrite the setting to suit my tastes.

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The job of PC's is to rewrite the setting. If I'm not changing the world, my Hero's Journey isn't very Campbellian, now, is it?

Hussar said:

It's just that I just recently proposed a Low Magic, Sword and Sorcery campaign for Primeval Thule. First three character concepts that came back to me were a warlock devoted to the Old ones, a full on wizard and a shadow monk. It's very, very frustrating to pitch a concept, have the players say, yup, we want to play that concept, and then get concepts that are pretty much the exact opposite to the concept that you pitched.

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If you say "I want to play a Primeval Thule game," these are all perfectly acceptable characters in most Primeval Thule games.

If you say "PT is a low magic setting," these are all still perfectly acceptable characters in PT, it just gives them some context.

If you say "I want to play a game with a low-magic PC party," the last one could STILL be an acceptable character, depending upon the calibration of "low."

It's not like you provided a list of classes or races - your players are likely still trying to figure out what that proposal means in practice. I think I've got an idea, but that's only after locking it down to "no at-will spellcasting" (and that still includes Vengeance paladins who can heal wounds with a touch and totem warrior barbarians who can speak with animals and monks that can heal their own wounds, two of which you decided to add even though the setting material removes them, so ¯\(°_o)/¯ )

Hussar said:

Could you play the Realms where faith and whatnot isn't a major mover and shaker? Sure, anything's possible. But, at that point, I really have to ask, why bother? Why not use a setting where that's true instead of stripping out major elements of an existing setting?

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The Driz'zt stories seem to do just fine with him going "Uhh...this one, I guess," when asked about a patron deity. The HotDQ game you're in doesn't have ANY PC's that care about the gods (now that the cleric's dead).

FR's distinctive features lie in the common magic (yeah, red wizards know how to call back gods, run with it) and ancient history (that old castle and the Mere itself and the lizardfolk), IMXP. You play FR because you want to explore ancient magical ruins, have a world where wizards are a common feature, or have some association with the previous fiction. WotC uses FR as a staging ground because it's pretty generic, they don't have to alter Generic Plots much to fit within it, and they can just visit a few locales from the other media properties and run with it.

I'm A Banana said:

I'm not inclined to stop telling the truth. The Wall fails to be like anything in the real world. The Real World afterlives aren't nearly so monstrous. That's fine. It can be monstrous - we can have villains to fight against in our D&D settings. We should stop imagining that it is anything other than that, though, and treat it for what it is - a horrible fate inflicted on undeserving souls for the enrichment of a system whose benefit of this torment incriminates the whole thing as detestable. That's a valid character narrative, and a valid campaign arc, just as overthrowing the lich of Thay is.

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I agree on all points other than that real world afterlives aren't nearly so monstrous. The Wall is merely a watered down Hell. And Heaven? According to the Summa Theologica (about as orthodox as you can get) Heaven's the place where people get their passions including their sense of compassion and pity removed and learn to rejoyce in the eternal suffering of others no matter what their prior relationship.

But if I can kick Lolth in the face at high levels why can't I dynamite the Wall?

Neonchameleon said:

I agree on all points other than that real world afterlives aren't nearly so monstrous. The Wall is merely a watered down Hell. And Heaven? According to the Summa Theologica (about as orthodox as you can get) Heaven's the place where people get their passions including their sense of compassion and pity removed and learn to rejoyce in the eternal suffering of others no matter what their prior relationship.

But if I can kick Lolth in the face at high levels why can't I dynamite the Wall?

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I can see your point. Part of my thrust here is that there are ways where someone who believes in Hell can still fit it into a worldview that is just and fair and good (C. S. Lewis does a good job here, I think). Depending on your faith, you can accept it or reject it, have problems with it or not, but it's consistent. Smart people have given this a LOT of thought. A fair monotheistic Hell usually relies on two basic ideas: 1) The One God is the actual source of all truth and goodness (even if He's unacknowledged as such), and 2) Anyone in Hell is continually rejecting that truth and goodness, after being shown the truth. So if you actually do reject actual truth and goodness, yeah, almost by definition, that's suffering. If God is all the love, then anyone in Hell has rejected all the love. They bring the suffering on themselves.

FR kills that careful balance by replacing a one true and transcendent god of goodness with a squabbling grab-bag of powerful magical beings. So you have 1) The Gods are a squbbling grab-bag of powerful magical beings, and 2) Anyone in the Wall rejects devotion to one of a squabbling grab-bag of powerful magical beings. In history, pantheons that were such squabbling grab-bags weren't concerned with the orthodoxy of their followers, so they didn't punish non-believers (or else the Roman Cult of Isis would've been in trouble).

If FR was monotheistic, we could still have a Wall that "worked." Though it being a setting of fantasy adventure, I'd still expect it to be the kind of thing you could have a PC harrow on occasion.

Christian Hell isn't necessarily incompatible with justice (though it requires some complex theology to get there). The FR Wall really is.

Neonchameleon said:

I agree on all points other than that real world afterlives aren't nearly so monstrous. The Wall is merely a watered down Hell. And Heaven? According to the Summa Theologica (about as orthodox as you can get) Heaven's the place where people get their passions including their sense of compassion and pity removed and learn to rejoyce in the eternal suffering of others no matter what their prior relationship.

But if I can kick Lolth in the face at high levels why can't I dynamite the Wall?

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Some assume that those in hell have chosen to be there or rather that they haven't prepared themselves to live in heaven... and then we get into concepts like purgatory or a transitional state. Of course, existing outside of time, which is God's / Heaven's apparent location, is rather impossible to fathom. This means that the suffering of others requires the passage of time, but if you're not experiencing that, it's not happening, or rather all possibilities are happening, making it irrelevant.

As for the FR, I don't recal if the wall has a time limit or not, but I do remember reading about it in the Prince of Lies novel. I think demons even raided the wall for souls.

I'm a Banana said:

It's not good as most of us would understand it, but it is fair. If you want a heroic afterlife, die a heroic death. It doesn't matter if you think Thor is unworthy of worship or if you burned down an orphanage or if you saved innocent lives.

The Wall isn't fair, so it fails to be like Valhalla. You don't have to be good to avoid the Wall, you have to be devout. Which isn't the same (unlike in monotheisms). And you do this in a world where the gods are often not worthy of devotion (again, unlike in monotheisms). Valhalla was never won by praising the gods. who you might understandably often deride - stupid Thor hitting the mead hall with his lightning bolt, burning it to the ground, wreckin' all the mead.


Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...he-Wall-of-the-Faithless/page66#ixzz3vu0ogn78

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Ok, that doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. You are saying that deeds count. Ok, is belief a deed or not? Note, you don't actually have to be devout. You just have to not deny the gods are gods. It is fair. There's no difference between, "You get to go to the best afterlife if you die in battle, but, live a good life but die in bed, and you don't" and "You get to go to the best afterlife if you choose a god as a patron". Again, it might be good as we understand it, but, it is eminently fair. Believe in the gods, go to a good afterlife. Refuse to accept the gods and go to oblivion. End of story.

A thought occurs.

Those that fought and died against the Vikings wouldn't go to Valhalla. Or if they did it would be an awful shock to Early Christian Englishmen.

So those that deny the pantheon don't go to that pantheon's afterlife. So if someone denies the FR pantheon, why would they go to that pantheon's afterlife?

There's a few considerations that are going to vary from person to person. How bad is it really? Like it sounds like suckage, but if it's being minorly annoyed forever, not too bad. A FR writer(the chick writing about dragonborn) suggests that at least some who would go there might see it as a grim but proud fate, befitting those who don't accept false gods who never cared about them anyway.

Who goes there, do you have to worship a god or merely acknowledge them or merely don't actively denounce all of them? If it's not the first it would be a pretty uncommon fate.

If it is unacceptable, who is to blame? Is it one of the pantheons or all of them? How would you go about solving this, maybe one of the other pantheons can help.

Do you dislike it enough to remove it from the setting, do you think the setting is less compelling without it?

If you don't like it, is it preferable to retcon it away, or have a high level campaign where it is stopped?

Lots of questions that will vary quite a bit. No point in arguing whose interpretation is correct, in one version it is a terrible injustice, in another an obscure footnote. It's lots of fun to have the characters in setting disagree, but when it comes to us. It literally depends on the author.

Hussar said:

Ok, that doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. You are saying that deeds count. Ok, is belief a deed or not? Note, you don't actually have to be devout. You just have to not deny the gods are gods. It is fair. There's no difference between, "You get to go to the best afterlife if you die in battle, but, live a good life but die in bed, and you don't" and "You get to go to the best afterlife if you choose a god as a patron". Again, it might be good as we understand it, but, it is eminently fair. Believe in the gods, go to a good afterlife. Refuse to accept the gods and go to oblivion. End of story.

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The issue arises because, unlike in monotheism, "being devoted to a/the God" is not equivalent to "being good." Being good is an entirely separate axis. In a campaign inspired by Viking Sagas, you wouldn't have D&D alignments (you might have a Courage stat instead, and the DM keeps you rolling against it to do bold and courageous things worthy of honor in the halls of Valhalla). What you're rewarded for in the afterlife shows what you care about as a culture. The Vikings didn't care about the D&D concept of good, and their afterlife shows it. They cared about bravery and glory, and their afterlife shows it. It would not be a setting of traditional heroic fantasy, it would be a setting of bold heroes, brave warriors, risk-takers, raiders, etc (like any setting based on Viking myth should be!).

In a world based on devotion to deities, you wouldn't have D&D alignment. You might have a Piety indicator instead, and the DM might use it to determine if the gods favor your character due to their pious nature (maybe something like giving EVERYONE a cleric's divine intervention, and you could affect it with sacrifices and the like). What you're rewarded for in the afterlife isn't being good, it's being pious, and that's what the setting cares about. It would not be a setting that really resembles FR (you'd have no dragonborn who mistrust the gods, you'd have a pantheon that was transcendent and not just squabbling magical beings, priests of evil gods would be steadfast allies), but it would be a setting of the religious.

In a world with D&D alignment, anything that prevents a Good character from having a Good afterlife is pretty much by definition abominable and cruel. D&D is a game of heroic fantasy (and FR especially so), so being a hero should be what the setting cares about. It's what FR normally seems to care about. It's what alignment encourages you to care about. But it's not what the Wall would have you care about.

Hussar said:

Those that fought and died against the Vikings wouldn't go to Valhalla. Or if they did it would be an awful shock to Early Christian Englishmen.

So those that deny the pantheon don't go to that pantheon's afterlife. So if someone denies the FR pantheon, why would they go to that pantheon's afterlife?

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If the Vikings were right and the afterlife was really and actually Valhalla (which was the case as far as the Vikings were concerned) those that fought bravely against the Vikings would go there. The Christian Englishmen would just be wrong, and that would be shown when they die and those that died in cowardice would be thrown to Hel and those that died in glory would be welcomed in Valhalla to feast with the warriors they just fought against. This would be like replacing Alignment with Courage - the setting cares about your bravery, not your Goodness. The Christians who are not Brave get no reward, those who are Brave get a reward even though they were wrong. They did the right thing.

By the same token, if the Christians were right (which was the case as far as they were concerned), those Vikings who realized that God was the source of all love and peace in existence in their moments of death would repent of their slaughter and be welcome in heaven as saved believers (if only in post-mortem). The Vikings would just be wrong, and they'd have good cause to convert (unlike an FR character, who is looking at a galaxy of deities who are only powerful magical beings, even in the Fugue). Because God's love conquers all, those truly contrite souls would now be Christians, welcome alongside their Christian brethren. Those who refused the source of all love and joy in the world would be freely choosing their torment away from all love and joy, even unto eternity if they were that hard-hearted about it. This would be like replacing Alignment with...maybe an "Embraced God" check-box - the Vikings who in death Embraced God get a reward even though they lived their lives in error. Those who did not have Embraced God written on their character sheet don't get their reward until they do.

If they were both right, then we're basically at a proto-Great Wheel, which FR could do, rewarding both for being virtuous or not according to their cultural tendencies, but doesn't do, instead sticking a monstrous thing between Good people and their just reward.