Mod Note:
Or, remember that real-world religion isn't an appropriate topic for these boards, and don't do this.
Dragonlance [Dragonlance/Faerun] Anyone here met any Cataclysm/Wall of the Faithless defenders?
Or, remember that real-world religion isn't an appropriate topic for these boards, and don't do this.
toucanbuzz
No rule is inviolate
Cataclysm
This is a complicated one dating to the rules of the universe when the cosmos was created. In briefest form, Balance between Good, Neutrality, and Evil is key to existence, but it's not the day-to-day moral "good" we think of when we help a neighbor fix a broken fence. Good gods gave life and animation to spirits, to experience existence, Neutrality gave them free will, and Evil sought to enslave spirits with things like need and hunger. However, Evil serves a purpose. Its conflicts can serve to make life stronger, more durable. Ultimately, if the pendulum swings too far in either direction, existence is in peril (and evil doesn't care a whole lot about balance, get what you can as you can).
So, in the days before the Cataclysm, in the name of "good" Istar was making the world a more peaceful place. War was eliminated through strength, but rather than kill ogres and other troublesome races, including elves, it hedged them into territories where they'd gradually just die out and fade away. The peaceful race - humans- would make things better when they were gone. Murder was being eliminated with mind reading of citizens. Slavery was justified in lieu of simply incarcerating criminals (have them do something useful). The more "good" that the world experienced, in this extreme form, the less actual Free Will creatures had. Absent conflict, they would become weak.
And, the Gods of Good believed enough in this potential imbalance that once weakened in this way, life would be extremely susceptible to Evil without conflict to harden it, and the pendulum might swing so hard to the other side that existence would fall out of balance.
So, the solution, pushed by the Dark Queen Takhisis herself and backed by all the Gods to save existence, was to drop the fiery mountain, to reboot life, and to force it back into hardship and conflict. It was cruel and horrific, on a day-to-day morality scale. But on a cosmic scale, it was a necessity. When Evil did come knocking and the Dark Queen resumed her wars, those who had been tempered by these times were strong enough to resist and overcome. She had calculated that this would weaken the world, that it would be ripe for the taking. But, the very Evil that sought to prey upon the world through its needs also hardened it.
So yeah, it's complicated.
This is a complicated one dating to the rules of the universe when the cosmos was created. In briefest form, Balance between Good, Neutrality, and Evil is key to existence, but it's not the day-to-day moral "good" we think of when we help a neighbor fix a broken fence. Good gods gave life and animation to spirits, to experience existence, Neutrality gave them free will, and Evil sought to enslave spirits with things like need and hunger. However, Evil serves a purpose. Its conflicts can serve to make life stronger, more durable. Ultimately, if the pendulum swings too far in either direction, existence is in peril (and evil doesn't care a whole lot about balance, get what you can as you can).
So, in the days before the Cataclysm, in the name of "good" Istar was making the world a more peaceful place. War was eliminated through strength, but rather than kill ogres and other troublesome races, including elves, it hedged them into territories where they'd gradually just die out and fade away. The peaceful race - humans- would make things better when they were gone. Murder was being eliminated with mind reading of citizens. Slavery was justified in lieu of simply incarcerating criminals (have them do something useful). The more "good" that the world experienced, in this extreme form, the less actual Free Will creatures had. Absent conflict, they would become weak.
And, the Gods of Good believed enough in this potential imbalance that once weakened in this way, life would be extremely susceptible to Evil without conflict to harden it, and the pendulum might swing so hard to the other side that existence would fall out of balance.
So, the solution, pushed by the Dark Queen Takhisis herself and backed by all the Gods to save existence, was to drop the fiery mountain, to reboot life, and to force it back into hardship and conflict. It was cruel and horrific, on a day-to-day morality scale. But on a cosmic scale, it was a necessity. When Evil did come knocking and the Dark Queen resumed her wars, those who had been tempered by these times were strong enough to resist and overcome. She had calculated that this would weaken the world, that it would be ripe for the taking. But, the very Evil that sought to prey upon the world through its needs also hardened it.
So yeah, it's complicated.
M.L. Martin
Adventurer
No idea. It happened very early on--you can find the 'Kingpriest offended the gods by demanding things' take in DL5 Dragons of Mystery, and it's pretty well-established by the second and third novel. Traces of 'the Kingpriest tried to summon the gods' show up in DL12 Dragons of Faith and Tales of the Lance (which pulled in a lot of sketchy and speculative material from early DL), but it wasn't until Hickman put the original Dragonlance pitch up several years ago that it became clear.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
I think an awful lot of it is just down to people making broad assumptions about what's "okay" without either thinking it through, or having even the light philosophical basis to say "Wait, this seems kind of messed-up", instead just leaning into their own cultural biases.
Combine that a lot of different writers with different takes messing with stuff, again a lot of them without being terribly interested in the ideas, or really thinking them through, and you get a mess like the Wall of the Faithless. The Cataclysm seems to be similar but just with one or two writers turning their own perfectly reasonable idea into a bizarre and hard-to-take one.
Flamestrike
Legend
Athiests dont go to Heaven or Hell and instead get non existence after death.
Which is what they believe isn't it?
Thars a better fate than servants of most evil Gods. Heck even most other Goodly afterlifes probably get a bit boring after a while. A life of eternal battle on Ysgard is gonna get tiring after the first few centuries
Which is what they believe isn't it?
Thars a better fate than servants of most evil Gods. Heck even most other Goodly afterlifes probably get a bit boring after a while. A life of eternal battle on Ysgard is gonna get tiring after the first few centuries
M.L. Martin
Adventurer
More and more, I think Mentzer Basic had the right idea when it said "The D&D game does not deal with the religious or ethical beliefs of characters in the game."
As a fan of FR and a quasi-atheist*, I really like the Wall of the Faithless.
*(explanation deleted due to Mod Note to avoid discussing real-world religions).
Real-world coercive faith? That's grim and vile. But D&D isn't the real world. As you say, "faith" must necessarily mean something very different in FR than in our world.
If you see FR primarily as a "milquetoast default fantasy setting" then I can see a really good argument that it should minimize or eliminate the grim and vile elements so as to become as inoffensive as possible. And yeah, that does seem to be how WotC is currently using the setting.
But I want there to be weird and WTF elements and even some grim and vile elements in my fantasy worlds. In my view, FR actually has quite a lot of those elements, partly because as a huge, canon-bloated setting, it just has quite a lot of elements full stop. Where I think we disagree is our evaluation of whether having grim and vile elements is a flaw or a feature in a fantasy world.
The greates pro-atheism fantasy series ever written, His Dark Materials,
. The difference, of course, is that HDM explicitly and polemically tags that as grim and vile, and FR doesn't. Personally, I don't have a problem with either approach, and I also don't think that explicitly signaling something like this as grim and vile is or should be necessary.
So long as we're appealing to Greenwood's own opinions, though, I'll point out that he has repeatedly stated a preference for leaving "the truth" about cosmic and religious matters much more indeterminate than the official canon does. He has often championed an approach where every published story and supplement is potentially wrong about some things in an "unreliable narrator" sort of way, and where various religions offer incompatible teachings the truth of which is only revealed if and when it becomes directly relevant to a given campaign.
But yeah, that's not how the TSR/WotC publications have usually treated matters.
For example, let me tell you about my current character.
No, wait! Don't leave!
I'm playing an out-of-shape, middle-aged Baldurian nobleman who plotted to murder his parents and then abandoned the scheme after a religious epiphany brought about by his beloved wife's death. His wife was "faithless"—one of the rare but not unheard-of Faerûnian atheists to deny the existence of any gods, believing instead in something that in modern terms would be called a "conspiracy theory": that all the priests and clerics of all the clergies are really just arcane magic-users who long ago invented the concept of deities to hoax the populace into obeying them, paying tithes, and so on. Magic is real, she claimed, but deities are not, nor is any afterlife.
My character, like most Faerûnians, believed in the pantheon and paid homage to them but, having never encountered any real personal suffering (and having ignored the suffering of others, as most wealthy Baldurians do), had never taken death and the afterlife all that seriously. (Think of all the going-through-the-motions religious believers in our own world who do really believe their faith's dogma but don't think all that often about it or its implications, or try all that hard to reconcile it with their daily lives).
When his wife died, he was overwhelmed by the conviction that her untimely death and her ultimate fate as a "brick" in the Wall without consciousness or individuality amounted to a personal punishment. Not a punishment of her—as someone else pointed out in this thread, your beliefs and acts in life determine your afterlife in FR, and if you don't believe in gods or an afterlife, then you simply fade slowly away within the Wall, which is more or less what you were expecting anyway. But rather, he sees it as a punishment of him for his own plot to murder his parents. One untimely death for another—or even one to prevent another, since he abandoned the murder plot as a result. (Kelemvorites rail against anyone dying "before their time," or persisting after it.) So he converted to Kelemvor's faith and has been administering last rites to the dying poor in a Lower City hospital, in a misguided attempt to atone for his planned miseeds.
Now, as it turns out, although he doesn't know it yet, his wife had deceived him for many years. She was secretly an evil god's cultist who used her proclamations of atheism as a front to explain why she never paid homage to any of the "good" gods. She has not ended up in the Wall, and my character will most likely be encountering her sooner rather than later; we're playing Descent into Avernus, and I'm pretty sure I know where my DM has put her soul.
So the Wall is actually central to my character's background. I don't think I would have come up with the guy if the Wall hadn't been a part of FR lore. And he's the most fun, most complex, most real character I've ever played.
You can put me down for a "Wall? Yum!" vote.
P.S. You mentioned the two other categories of Faithless—people whose patron deities are dead, or whose patron deities refuse to claim them. They too wind up in the Wall. Is this "fair" or "just"? Of course not. Ao has never really been portrayed as anything other than an naughty word, and even Kelemvor is portrayed as a deity who retains some of the indecisiveness and uncertainty that characterized his mortal self. The Wall wasn't a good or fair metaphysical thing to create or to retain, and I don't remember anything like a neutral narratorial voice ever affirming it as such. To me, though, that's all just more fodder for interesting stories.
By the way, for what it's worth, I'd guess 99% of FR players have no idea about any of this. I suppose some of those players would be shocked and dismayed to learn about it, and some would think it was interesting and weird and cool, and most, I'm guessing, wouldn't care and would just go on about their characters' business the same way they had before. Come to think of it, maybe there's more in common with real-world religion than I'd thought . . .
*(explanation deleted due to Mod Note to avoid discussing real-world religions).
Nor do I think there's anything wrong with having that in a fantasy world.
Real-world coercive faith? That's grim and vile. But D&D isn't the real world. As you say, "faith" must necessarily mean something very different in FR than in our world.
If you see FR primarily as a "milquetoast default fantasy setting" then I can see a really good argument that it should minimize or eliminate the grim and vile elements so as to become as inoffensive as possible. And yeah, that does seem to be how WotC is currently using the setting.
But I want there to be weird and WTF elements and even some grim and vile elements in my fantasy worlds. In my view, FR actually has quite a lot of those elements, partly because as a huge, canon-bloated setting, it just has quite a lot of elements full stop. Where I think we disagree is our evaluation of whether having grim and vile elements is a flaw or a feature in a fantasy world.
The greates pro-atheism fantasy series ever written, His Dark Materials,
has a grim and vile deity, albeit also an old and feeble one, at the heart of its cosmology, and thematically is all about coercive faith
Greenwood has written many FR novels, short stories, and sourcebooks over the past thirty-three years that mention Kelemvor.
So long as we're appealing to Greenwood's own opinions, though, I'll point out that he has repeatedly stated a preference for leaving "the truth" about cosmic and religious matters much more indeterminate than the official canon does. He has often championed an approach where every published story and supplement is potentially wrong about some things in an "unreliable narrator" sort of way, and where various religions offer incompatible teachings the truth of which is only revealed if and when it becomes directly relevant to a given campaign.
But yeah, that's not how the TSR/WotC publications have usually treated matters.
I definitely won't argue with the assertion that FR canon is a mess. It's the "terrible" part I disagree with. But I understand your point of view.
That reads like cover-your-ass language on TSR's part to me. I'm glad that characters' religious and ethical beliefs are sometimes central to modern games.
For example, let me tell you about my current character.
No, wait! Don't leave!
I'm playing an out-of-shape, middle-aged Baldurian nobleman who plotted to murder his parents and then abandoned the scheme after a religious epiphany brought about by his beloved wife's death. His wife was "faithless"—one of the rare but not unheard-of Faerûnian atheists to deny the existence of any gods, believing instead in something that in modern terms would be called a "conspiracy theory": that all the priests and clerics of all the clergies are really just arcane magic-users who long ago invented the concept of deities to hoax the populace into obeying them, paying tithes, and so on. Magic is real, she claimed, but deities are not, nor is any afterlife.
My character, like most Faerûnians, believed in the pantheon and paid homage to them but, having never encountered any real personal suffering (and having ignored the suffering of others, as most wealthy Baldurians do), had never taken death and the afterlife all that seriously. (Think of all the going-through-the-motions religious believers in our own world who do really believe their faith's dogma but don't think all that often about it or its implications, or try all that hard to reconcile it with their daily lives).
When his wife died, he was overwhelmed by the conviction that her untimely death and her ultimate fate as a "brick" in the Wall without consciousness or individuality amounted to a personal punishment. Not a punishment of her—as someone else pointed out in this thread, your beliefs and acts in life determine your afterlife in FR, and if you don't believe in gods or an afterlife, then you simply fade slowly away within the Wall, which is more or less what you were expecting anyway. But rather, he sees it as a punishment of him for his own plot to murder his parents. One untimely death for another—or even one to prevent another, since he abandoned the murder plot as a result. (Kelemvorites rail against anyone dying "before their time," or persisting after it.) So he converted to Kelemvor's faith and has been administering last rites to the dying poor in a Lower City hospital, in a misguided attempt to atone for his planned miseeds.
Now, as it turns out, although he doesn't know it yet, his wife had deceived him for many years. She was secretly an evil god's cultist who used her proclamations of atheism as a front to explain why she never paid homage to any of the "good" gods. She has not ended up in the Wall, and my character will most likely be encountering her sooner rather than later; we're playing Descent into Avernus, and I'm pretty sure I know where my DM has put her soul.
So the Wall is actually central to my character's background. I don't think I would have come up with the guy if the Wall hadn't been a part of FR lore. And he's the most fun, most complex, most real character I've ever played.
You can put me down for a "Wall? Yum!" vote.
P.S. You mentioned the two other categories of Faithless—people whose patron deities are dead, or whose patron deities refuse to claim them. They too wind up in the Wall. Is this "fair" or "just"? Of course not. Ao has never really been portrayed as anything other than an naughty word, and even Kelemvor is portrayed as a deity who retains some of the indecisiveness and uncertainty that characterized his mortal self. The Wall wasn't a good or fair metaphysical thing to create or to retain, and I don't remember anything like a neutral narratorial voice ever affirming it as such. To me, though, that's all just more fodder for interesting stories.
By the way, for what it's worth, I'd guess 99% of FR players have no idea about any of this. I suppose some of those players would be shocked and dismayed to learn about it, and some would think it was interesting and weird and cool, and most, I'm guessing, wouldn't care and would just go on about their characters' business the same way they had before. Come to think of it, maybe there's more in common with real-world religion than I'd thought . . .
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Atheism is irrelevant. The Wall of the Faithless is not made up of atheists (who would be a vanishingly small minority in FR); it's made up of people who did not choose a patron god.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
In terms of the general "Great Wheel" cosmology of AD&D 2E, this was established in On Hallowed Ground, though it clarified that "atheists" strictly meant those who believed in no afterlife whatsoever, and that death was the final, ultimate end.
However, what's often overlooked is that the Guide to Hell revealed that, in fact, rather than ceasing to exist, the souls of those who believed that only oblivion waited after death were sent to the very bottom of Hell, where Asmodeus slowly and painfully devoured them entirely.
Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.
wingsandsword
Legend
No, it isn't. That's a common misconception.
Forgotten Realms materials were very clear that if you didn't actively chose a patron god, you didn't end up among the Faithless. Instead, your soul would be picked up by a deity of appropriate alignment or relevant portfolio to the deceased.
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