I don't know. I kind of look at it like the Warlock. The class, as printed in the PHB, has a patron that is supposed to be chosen at character creation. There are a few times that I've talked to players of Warlocks and they have some off-the-wall answer for "Who is your patron?" "My past self", "My sister's dead cat", "Zzass Tham" (sp?) I mean, sometimes the warlock player doesn't even have one chosen.
Well, sure, and the fact that those don't really work from a setting perspective would be a problem for some DMs, if the campaign really spent any effort enforcing the setting. But it doesn't, and the rules only care that you chose one of the general categories (Fiend, Fey, etc.), so you can effectively ignore this in play. It doesn't actually make the game any better to do this, and actually hurts immersion for folks who otherwise might be interested in the setting, but given how hard it is sometimes just to get people to agree on the same interpretation of a feat's text, the campaign probably rightly assumes that trying to keep everyone on the same page for the setting is going to end up being more work than it's worth.
A Favored Soul seems like a demi-god, from the Greek and Norse myths. The offspring of a pairing between a god and a mortal. Sometimes, the demi-god doesn't know who their godly parent is and maybe part of their character background is wanting to find out who that is. But maybe they don't want to know, for fear that it's someone they have grown up to dislike (Lolth, possible ... or the god of Oozes).
That's certainly one interpretation. But you don't have to do this only with the Favored Soul -- I've got a cleric who believes she's been gifted by all the Faerunian gods and thus carries the appropriate holy symbols to pay homage to them when she casts her spells, but the only one she ends up using to cast her spells that require a divine focus/material component is the symbol of Cyric, because she doesn't realize she's a Chosen of Cyric.
The difference is, in a dedicated campaign, you can use that info to inform the character and add depth to the campaign. For instance, in an Age of Worms game I'm running using 3.5 rules, there are two different characters who believe they are worshippers of Ehlonna, and neither of them is correct -- one is actually the daughter of Olidamarra (which is why I let her take the Chaos Devotion feat even though she's not Chaotic in alignment) and the other is actually 'sponsored' by Wastri.
In Organized Play, though, you only get to pursue your character's backstory on your own time, not during actual play of published adventures (unless your backstory is so generic that it could apply in almost any adventure). Some people do it anyway, because they enjoy it, but a good number don't, and the campaign staff wants to focus their limited resources on things that will benefit the campaign as a whole or at least the largest proportion of players.
Some modules do a better job of this than others as well -- a number of Season 1 adventures had backstory call-outs that could be recognized by folks who'd played through the old Pool of Radiance Gold Box games, while Season 2's pair of adventures in the Monastery of the Yellow Rose gave a good opportunity for a motivated DM to present campaign history and backstory to interested players. But it's hard to make a character with the idea that you're going to tie into some established lore unless you already know the campaign deals with the lore in some way. Maybe you'll get lucky and Season 8 will present a short series dealing with Helm's role in the Time of Troubles or with the God of Guardians faith's influence on first contact in Mastica, but since a sizable portion of the playerbase doesn't really care about that, the odds aren't great. Even if you do get lucky, once those couple of adventures are done, your connection to the campaign pretty much ends, and you're back to pursuing your backstory goals on your own. Even fairly basic ideals/goals listed in the Player's Handbook (such as "I seek a legendary scroll that is said to grant enlightenment to any who reads it") don't get handled in AL adventures. It is what it is.
From what I understand of FR lore, every character should have a deity chosen, otherwise they go into the wall at the city of death when they die, right? Or they get absorbed into nothingness? How many AL characters right now have no deity listed and therefore should not be eligible to be raised if they die outright?
It's a bit more complicated than that, as noted by
this 70+ page thread about the Wall in a different forum on the site, but yeah, if the campaign staff wanted to enforce the setting, they could do this, just as they currently enforce that characters who are level 1-4 who die without choosing a faction can't use Faction Charity to return from the dead (though a player can technically choose a faction for his character posthumously, if he wants to, which is harder to justify for a deity).
But given that a number of folks don't like the idea of the Wall to begin with, and that it opens up some serious potential for abuse (DM doesn't like your character? Well, sorry buddy, but you didn't worship Lathander with sufficient fervor to allow him to claim your soul -- welcome to perma-death), and it makes sense that the campaign staff would de-emphasize this particular element of the setting.
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Pauper
