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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8120610" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Well "everything" is a bit much, I don't expect DMs to know the last names of merchants, or their family ties, but I do think that if you have a merchant quarter burn down, you need to know who started the fire. You correctly, I think, labeled this as Chekhov's Gun. The Wall exists, and if it never comes up in play, it may as well not exist. But, the moment it comes into play, it has the potential to be something that is going to Matter. And the Cataclysm is a perfect counter-example to this. What happened with the Cataclysm? A giant flaming mountain fell on some people because of the Gods actions. Why did they do it? Well, they give us a few reasons, a bit of a mix and a match, but at the end of the day it is agreed that the gods felt that those individuals did something worth punishing. I personally like the version where the Religious Leader tried to summon one of the Gods. That is an act of hubris I can see causing Divine Wrath. But, what about the Wall? Well, it isn't a one time thing. It is a constant punishment. And it didn't start at the start of creation, it was explicitly created by Myrkul, who became a god around -3,700 DR. And why did he create it? We are told it was to punish the people who did not worship the gods. But, unlike with the Cataclysm, where we could see this single moment, there are a lot of problems that start cropping up. Kelemvor is now the god of the Dead. It is within his power to destroy the wall. We are told he doesn't, because the other gods would stop him from doing it. But, Corellon Larethian, the creator of Elvish souls existed as far back as -14,000 DR, nearly ten thousand years before Myykul. Why did he allow Myrkul, this new upstart, to create a way to destroy Elvish souls? We don't know. Why did the even older gods, because we now the planet existed at least as far back as -37,000 DR, not stop him? We don't know. And we know they could have, because the evil and neutral gods of Today can stop Kelemvor from tearing it down. And, one thing we have been told is that maybe AO wants the wall, to punish mortals who don't worship the gods. But, there is a small problem with that. AO changed the universe to make mortal worship neccessary to the Gods existence as a punishment to the Gods. So, we have AO making it so that if the Gods ignore their worshippers, they are punished by a loss of power. But, if the worshipers don't worship... they are destroyed for all time by the Wall... on AO's decree? Thereby circumventing the requirement that the Gods actually need to pay attention to their followers, because all the Gods need to do know is say that if you don't worship them you are destroyed utterly, and then they can go back to ignoring them. Which is where we come back full circle to people claiming that "we don't know the true reason". That the Wall wasn't created to punish non-worshippers, it serves some other purpose... but we aren't told what that purpose is. If there is another purpose, we as the DM need to be told. We need to know that there is a second purpose. But as it stands, we are just assuming there has to be a second purpose, because the reasoning we have been given makes no sense.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sure, and I don't want to sound like I'm against improvisational stuff. I do that sort of thing all the time, but in a homebrew game, I still know the answer as the DM. I might not have written it yet, but I am still the one who knows the answer when the players crack open that door and start going where they should not go. And, like I said, The Mourning in Eberron is a mystery. No one knows why it happened, and there is no official answer. It is meant to be filled in by the DM, and I'm fine with that. But, the Wall of the Faithless is not like that. We have an answer. The wall was built to punish those who did not worship the Gods. The problem is, that answer causes so many problems, that we have to step in and say "oh no, that isn't the real reason. " Well, if there is a real reason, we need to know what it is. If there isn't a second reason, then we have this laundry list of problems. I think what is comes down to is, presentation. The Wall is presented to us in such a way to break the setting. The more you dig into it, the more ridiculous it becomes. But, something like the Mourning is explicitly part of the setting, and there are many possible answers, all of which make sense within the setting, and all of them dealing with different themes you might want to explore. One works with the setting, the other against it.</blockquote>

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