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

[Hussar]

There is a different level of acceptance when one is a very not-literal story (I understand some out there are biblical literalists), and the other is the literal history which your characters are experiencing the aftereffects of.

I‘d be squinting side eye at the player who sat down at a Dragonlance table saying they the player (not character) was repudiating the Cataclysm as not literal history of the setting.

To be fair though, the Flood is hardly the only "God hits the reset button" story in the Old Testament. To me, this is just old Testament style approach to D&D religion. To be fair though, most of my DL experience lies in the modules and in the first handful of novels. Mostly in the modules, where, as was mentioned before, the Cataclysm is linked to the idea that the Kingpriest was trying to magically summon a god to destroy all evil. The notion that the Kingpriest was good, IIRC, comes out in later novelizations, and I generally didn't read them.

 

[Mecheon]

It's not intended to be punishment.

Pretty clearly is, and per written stuff on it, its fairly clear cut on what it does. Live in the most desolate corner of Faerun, where the concept of a god never crossed your mind and gods have never walked? To the Wall with you! Too young to worship? Wall.

To quote Kaewyn the Dove on this: "They are mortared there, crushed together to suffer by archaic law. No matter how good, or pure, or unselfish they were - it matters only if they followed the proper rituals to a deity, any deity."

 

[QuentinGeorge]

It wasn't the Good gods. It was the entire pantheon that approved it.

The Good gods acquiesced under protest, and after sending several warnings and signs and also tried to stop it via Lord Soth (but he turned his back on them to murder his wife out of jealousy.)

Even then the Good gods took the truly Good souls to heaven.

It was perfectly in line with Evil gods and also the Neutral ones (things had gotten out of balance).

Yeah I think people are misreading it. The Cataclysm was the plan of the evil and neutral gods because they felt Paladine's group weren't reining in their followers. Paladine was the last to acquisece to the plan, in fact he seems way too lenient with the shenanigans going on, continually giving Istar second chances - he even sends "Messiah - the Lightbringer, but instead of people realising it was Cathan Twice-Born, they instead think Kingpriest Beldinas is the Lightbringer. He keeps granting spells to his favoured priests and even (it seems) Beldinas until the very end. I think Paladine sincerely believes that Beldinas will eventually repent.

Eventually Paladine is boxed in when Beldinas outright tries to command him, and then calls it in.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Exactly. It's Mormon theology butting heads with D&D alignment. Throw in a rapture and Pride as a deadly sin, and you've got the background of Dragonlance. That's why it feels clunky.

Actually the original Hickman conception is more Mormon than what it eventually became (cf Great Apostasy) and all. After the Kingpriest Trilogy and other material set in the era it appears the Istarian church was pretty righteous until the very end. Really only Kurnos and Beldinas were "corrupt" (and Beldinas was more a scared fanatic over his head than actually knowing he was doing the wrong thing. Kurnos was definitely corrupt, on the other hand).

 

[Dioltach]

Doesn't Fizban say, at the end of Spring Dawning, that the Cataclysm had been sent to prepare the world for Takhisis's coming?

 

[Azzy]

Yeah, when I (rarely) run a campain in the Realms, the whole wall thing is yeeted into the Sun. It's pretty disgusting.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Doesn't Fizban say, at the end of Spring Dawning, that the Cataclysm had been sent to prepare the world for Takhisis's coming?

I don't recall reading that, and I hope not, cos it's bonkers.

 

[Flamestrike]

Yeah I think people are misreading it. The Cataclysm was the plan of the evil and neutral gods because they felt Paladine's group weren't reining in their followers. Paladine was the last to acquisece to the plan, in fact he seems way too lenient with the shenanigans going on, continually giving Istar second chances - he even sends "Messiah - the Lightbringer, but instead of people realising it was Cathan Twice-Born, they instead think Kingpriest Beldinas is the Lightbringer. He keeps granting spells to his favoured priests and even (it seems) Beldinas until the very end. I think Paladine sincerely believes that Beldinas will eventually repent.

Eventually Paladine is boxed in when Beldinas outright tries to command him, and then calls it in.

He sent Soth on a mission to warn the Kingpriest as well and to stop the Cataclysm from occurring.

It was Soths decision to turn back and instead murder his wife and child that damned him.

 

[Flamestrike]

Pretty clearly is, and per written stuff on it, its fairly clear cut on what it does. Live in the most desolate corner of Faerun, where the concept of a god never crossed your mind and gods have never walked? To the Wall with you! Too young to worship? Wall.

Except it's not written as punishment. You go to the wall, and you eventually dissolve and cease existing.

That's not punishment when compared to most of the other afterlives. In fact that would likely actually draw people to atheism.

And people that have never heard of a God can still be accepted as being faithful to the ideals of a God and be accepted as a petitioner.

As for children, they go to where their parents are. Which sucks if your parents were Bhaalists or Cyricists.

I'd prefer it if they went to Chauntea instead. In my head-canon thats where they go.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I don't like any things about the canon afterlife, but I don't mind because I create my own worlds where the cosmology is different, for example the ultimate souls of the planes in the celestial planes aren't reincarnation neither becoming "pieces of atrezzo" but the ascension to the true Heaven. And the most of souls go to something like a purgatory for a painful but temporal penance until be purified.

My opinion is the faithless people in a fantasy world should be stranger than stateless citizens. Nobody would reject all the deities without a good reason knowing the punishment in the afterlife. When you miss family members who went away, your hope is to see them again in the other side. If you pay taxes because you fear king's men then worse the eternal fate in the afterlife.

In my game the faithless wall will be a barrier between Forgotten Realms and the demiplane of the dread. Then the wall will be broken, and most of those souls become free... partially, becoming something like a mixture of ectoplasmic bricks and the members of the Night Watch from "Games of Thrones", bricklayers and sentinels, in a dark domain suffering its own version of zombie apocalypse.