Dragonlance [Dragonlance/Faerun] Anyone here met any Cataclysm/Wall of the Faithless defenders?

[LuisCarlos17f]

My house rule is when the soul of a sentient being from the D&D is "destroyed" then the ultimate gate is the Heaven, Purgatory or the Hell. The true souls can't be destroyed.

And we shouldn't forget patron or tutelary deities, or ancestor cults. It is hard to be atheist in a fantasy world where you need a holy symbol of your patron deity on your door to avoid possible intrusions by undeads or another unholy creature.

Or do you want an afterlife as the one from Stephen King's "Revival"? (If my memory doesn't fail after this novel he accepted to be a believer).

 

[Azzy]

So... This begs the question (in the informal sense) of what happens to the souls of the peoples outside of Faerun? In Kara-Tur, for instance, there are religions and philosophies without proper gods (or gods at all). What happens to them?

 

[MoonSong]

So... This begs the question (in the informal sense) of what happens to the souls of the peoples outside of Faerun? In Kara-Tur, for instance, there are religions and philosophies without proper gods (or gods at all). What happens to them?

To the wall they go...

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Also the very planes themselves. Celestia will eventually "eat you" just as Tyr would

This just doubles down. The gods are evil. They choose what their domains are like. They made the planes.

 

[MoonSong]

This just doubles down. The gods are evil. They choose what their domains are like. They made the planes.

No, more like they took over a part of the planes and modified it to suit their needs (getting more powerful). Without the gods, souls would naturally go to the plane that closely matched their alignment. Toril has an absurd number of greater deities and it is because they took measures to exploit the souls for maximum prayer power, this takes the form of a protection racket. They created the wall to prevent souls from escaping to their rightful place in the afterlife, and then blackmail these souls to devote exclusively to a single deity or they join the wall.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Don't worry, if you feel too uncomfortable, you can change it in your games, and later a retcon about this by WotC.

In my story a pious soul was menaced to be eaten by barghests if she didn't reject her faith. Teorically according to the metagame her fail was devoured and she couldn't come back, her soul destroyed forever. Later a noble knight see a vision of this saint martyr as a spirit of pure and sacred light. This says she is now in a better place, the true Heaven, the final and ultimate fate for pure or redeemed souls. The undead rules who ruled an evil empire tried to destroy this faith, but the miracles linked with the relics of the saint martyrs were the proof the true soul couldn't be destroyed not even by the deities or achinfernals.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

No, more like they took over a part of the planes and modified it to suit their needs (getting more powerful). Without the gods, souls would naturally go to the plane that closely matched their alignment. Toril has an absurd number of greater deities and it is because they took measures to exploit the souls for maximum prayer power, this takes the form of a protection racket. They created the wall to prevent souls from escaping to their rightful place in the afterlife, and then blackmail these souls to devote exclusively to a single deity or they join the wall.

So, the gods are evil. Got it.

 

[Alzrius]

So... This begs the question (in the informal sense) of what happens to the souls of the peoples outside of Faerun? In Kara-Tur, for instance, there are religions and philosophies without proper gods (or gods at all). What happens to them?

I find the following passage, from the Player's Guide to Faerun (page 164), to be suggestive with regard to that:

The cosmology detailed in this chapter (and originally presented in the FORGOTTEN REALMS Campaign Setting) accounts for the homes of the deities in the Faerûnian pantheon, various nonhuman pantheons (dragon, giant, goblinoid, orc, drow, dwarven, elven, gnome, and halfling), and the Mulhorandi pantheon. Toril is also home to a number of additional faiths, and the gods of those faiths live in additional planes connected to Toril. Little is known in Faerûn about most of these planes, and the exact nature of their connection to Faerûn is rather mysterious.

Toril actually connects to several different Astral Planes, each one linking Toril’s Material Plane to the outer-planar homes of a different group of deities. These Astral Planes are based on the geographical areas of control held by the different pantheons. The Astral Plane known to characters in Faerûn leads to the planes of the Faerûnian pantheon, as well as the nonhuman pantheons (whose geographical area of control overlaps that of the Faerûnian deities) and the Mulhorandi pantheon. Characters in other areas can enter different Astral Planes with links to the Outer Planes inhabited by their own deities. Ao is thought to supervise the separate Astral Planes just as he adjudicates conflicts between the pantheons.

It then goes on to give overviews of the Zakharan planes, the Spirit World (of Kara-Tur), and the Maztican planes. The implication being that since those places had their own planar cosmologies, those who followed their gods weren't subject to the issue of whether or not they were False or Faithless.

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

 

[Dire Bare]

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

Dude. In your interpretation of the Wall of the Faithless . . . athiests don't simply get "nonexistence", they get millennia of horrific torture before being crushed out of existence. That isn't a better fate than those given over to the gods of evil, that is simply another horrific fate on par with being sent to Baator or one of the other lower planes.

There is no just and truly good person, or "god" that would allow such a thing to exist, if they had any power to end it.

I'd be okay with the concept in a campaign where the gods are right bastards and don't really care about "goodness" or about the welfare of mortals. But when they are supposed to be paragons of justice, light, yadda yadda . . . it's problematic.

 

[Dire Bare]

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.

Yes, it's not just the Cataclysm that is problematic, the entire Dragonlance cosmology is problematic. Although I loved the books, the basic mythological set-up of Krynn bothered me even in middle school.