D&D 5E (2024) The Price of a Soul (Lich Path problems)

DEFCON 1 said:

While WotC could do that... this is one of many things they just leave to individual DMs to decide for themselves in their own campaign worlds. Which I don't think is a bad thing. Most DMs should want and have final say on how their game worlds are and how they work. They don't need WotC's heavy hand "laying down the law" as it were.

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Giving us the Great Wheel, the Blood War and a ton of other, frankly, largely extraneous stuff while saying "you figure it out" on a core aspect of how a fantasy universe works feels like going about things the exact wrong way around.

Making up planes or other settings is fun for DMs. Figuring out how systems in the book work, or don't work, because there's no baseline even in-house, where the customers don't see it, is bananas.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

Giving us the Great Wheel, the Blood War and a ton of other, frankly, largely extraneous stuff while saying "you figure it out" on a core aspect of how a fantasy universe works feels like going about things the exact wrong way around.

Making up planes or other settings is fun for DMs. Figuring out how systems in the book work, or don't work, because there's no baseline even in-house, where the customers don't see it, is bananas.

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Time to bring back the Wall of the Faithless?!

Sign me up!

DEFCON 1 said:

While WotC could do that... this is one of many things they just leave to individual DMs to decide for themselves in their own campaign worlds.

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Except that's not what they are doing. They are saying this ability, available at fourth level (well before you actually become a lich), can only be stopped in certain ways, and those ways are extraordinarily inaccessible for a trivial benefit.

If they implement it as is, they are telling every DM how it works, and they are not leaving it up to individual tables.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

Giving us the Great Wheel, the Blood War and a ton of other, frankly, largely extraneous stuff while saying "you figure it out" on a core aspect of how a fantasy universe works feels like going about things the exact wrong way around.

Making up planes or other settings is fun for DMs. Figuring out how systems in the book work, or don't work, because there's no baseline even in-house, where the customers don't see it, is bananas.

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We actually know a lot about souls in 5E continuity. They come from the Positive Energy Plane, the Bastion of Unborn souls to be specific. Some settings have specific afterlives, like the Fugue Plane in the Forgotten Realms or Dolurrh in Eberron, but on a general level souls will drift through the Astral Plane to the plane that most befits their alignment, or default to Hades if the souls alignment is unclear. Atheists go straight to Asmodeus in Nessus for him to consume (confirmed in continuity by Chains of Asmodeus).

Nicholas Reed said:

We actually know a lot about souls in 5E continuity. They come from the Positive Energy Plane, the Bastion of Unborn souls to be specific. Some settings have specific afterlives, like the Fugue Plane in the Forgotten Realms or Dolurrh in Eberron, but on a general level souls will drift through the Astral Plane to the plane that most befits their alignment, or default to Hades if the souls alignment is unclear. Atheists go straight to Asmodeus in Nessus for him to consume (confirmed in continuity by Chains of Asmodeus).

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OK, and at what point does unlife interfere with the process? Is the soul visible leaving the body to people who can see in the Astral? Are people in the Astral able to see these souls traveling through there and interact with them? When someone is raised or resurrected, how does the afterlife feel about that? What impact does it have on the afterlife and its other inhabitants? Why are atheists going to Hell? Does every afterlife benefit from souls in the same way? If so, why do some gods oppose undeath and some don't seem to care, or actively encourage it? If they benefit in different ways, why and how?

Noting that souls move around the Great Wheel like playing pieces in Candyland isn't quite the same as having a real thought-out system.

(Also, Chains of Asmodeus is canoical-ish, but I wouldn't say a product by another company that only exists on DMs Guild is the final word on anything.)

Nicholas Reed said:

We actually know a lot about souls in 5E continuity. They come from the Positive Energy Plane, the Bastion of Unborn souls to be specific. Some settings have specific afterlives, like the Fugue Plane in the Forgotten Realms or Dolurrh in Eberron, but on a general level souls will drift through the Astral Plane to the plane that most befits their alignment, or default to Hades if the souls alignment is unclear. Atheists go straight to Asmodeus in Nessus for him to consume (confirmed in continuity by Chains of Asmodeus).

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Uh, wut

Where in the PHB or DMG is this?

I don't really think upping the spell level and material cost of resurrecting someone whom nobody is going to resurrect in either case is the evil part. I think the probable implication that you've robbed their soul of an eternal afterlife is the evil part (though depending on where the soul was bound to spend that afterlife you might be doing them a favor). But yes, there is basically no non-evil lich (I don't know, maybe Baelnorns are getting consentually donated souls or something, but the path available to adventurers is definitely evil).

Personally I'm not bothered by it being something that players can take at level 4 per se, but I really don't dig the natural implication of doing it in feats (and feat chains no less) that basically any character whose ultimate goal towards lichdom is going to acquire the basic dark knowledge of this path at exactly level 4. 5e in general is too ready to make everything a class ability or feat where you just abruptly have everything you need at a particular level up, rather than making you quest for stuff. 5.5 even went and made epic boons explicitly part of normal level up.

I was in a game where our necromancer wizard wanted to be a lich and succeeded. He had to work for it. It was his personal quest for the whole campaign. While I like the idea of phases of proto-lichdom (it would have been nice if he got to do some low level liching in the game, rather than just get it all as the epilogue) I just think you should get this sort of dark knowledge as a form of loot from making the right string of evil choices. Maybe in some campaigns it makes sense to get as early as level 4, probably in most it does not.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

OK, and at what point does unlife interfere with the process? Is the soul visible leaving the body to people who can see in the Astral? Are people in the Astral able to see these souls traveling through there and interact with them? When someone is raised or resurrected, how does the afterlife feel about that? What impact does it have on the afterlife and its other inhabitants? Why are atheists going to Hell? Does every afterlife benefit from souls in the same way? If so, why do some gods oppose undeath and some don't seem to care, or actively encourage it? If they benefit in different ways, why and how?

Noting that souls move around the Great Wheel like playing pieces in Candyland isn't quite the same as having a real thought-out system.

(Also, Chains of Asmodeus is canoical-ish, but I wouldn't say a product by another company that only exists on DMs Guild is the final word on anything.)

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1. Depends on the form of unlife.
2. Yes.
3. Yes to see, no to interact.
4. Depends on the deity.
5. It's just one less petitioner generally.
6. Ancient deal between the gods and Asmodeus.
7. No.
8. That can be broken down from various sources throughout D&Ds history, even only going back to 3E.

Chains of Asmodeus was done by a third party but published by WotC, just like Tyranny of Dragons, Princes of the Apocalypse, and Out of the Abyss.

bedir than said:

Uh, wut

Where in the PHB or DMG is this?

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Dungeon Master's Guide 2024 (the chapter on cosmology), Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, and Chains of Asmodeus are the primary 5E sources on the subject. Happy flavor text reading!

Nicholas Reed said:

Atheists go straight to Asmodeus in Nessus for him to consume (confirmed in continuity by Chains of Asmodeus).

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That originally came from the 2E Guide to Hell, but I'm surprised anyone would keep it in continuity a quarter-century later, after all the angst over Faerun's Wall of the Faithless. That's also the source that made Asmodeus one of the primal pre-divine entities of the cosmos, and I don't think that's been retained.

Interestingly, 4E made souls very difficult to trap/corrupt (according to Worlds & Monsters, so it appears there's been a radical shift in thinking if this new UA is representative.

(And there's a certain irony to talking about this on Holy Saturday, when the souls of the faithful departed were liberated from the Limbum Patrum and admitted to the Beatific Vision.)