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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ibrandul" data-source="post: 8114466" data-attributes="member: 6871736">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).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, [SPOILER]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[/SPOILER]. 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.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 . . .</blockquote>

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