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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mlund" data-source="post: 6692212" data-attributes="member: 50304">Sure, your ignorant backwater peasants surely don't have any real knowledge of the existence of anything further away than the neighboring duchy and may not believe in snow or pineapples depending on where he lives. That's not the issue at hand. The cultural elite to which adventurers migrate are a completely different story.Moreover, it isn't like you have to come across a first-hand observer. Wizards and other arcane researchers have a tendency to investigate claims and write books. Magic can actually find departed souls in the afterlife and even drag them back to the material plane on a temporary or permanent basis. Again, you could deny these recorded experiments and expert findings as fraudulent, but that's not ignorance - it's delusional conspiracy theory.Peasants are lucky to be literate. They also lack any sort of educated basis for much skepticism of clergy that can heal mortal injuries etc. in the name of these supposed "gods."That's not a rational argument. That's like saying "there's no scientific proof" of the Higgs-Boson because you didn't get to see the operation of the Large Hadron Colider and the reports of the people who conducted the experiments are "hearsay." It's a complete misunderstanding of the entire concept of scientific proof. If Mage A can go Plane Shift a group of observers to the outer planes and find a particular departed soul and Mage B can reproduce the experiment and results then Bob's your uncle.And there are, in fact, spells in D&D that compel those who speak to speak only the truth to the best of their knowledge. They could still be delusional or ignorant, but their not deliberating fabricating the claims and stories you interrogate them about.The underlying point here is that most claims about the afterlife are verifiable by third-party magicians, and those experiments, while rare, are simple to document.Of course, that does depend on the setting. It's fine to create a setting where piercing the veil, as it were, is impossible even by mortal magical means. It's just not the case with the Realms or Greyhawk or the default D&D rules.Marty Lund</blockquote>

Verification