Why? A Faithless soul doesn't provide any power to you -- it's like having Cyric and Ilmater fight over a pile of dead car batteries.
--
Pauper
D&D 5E [Forgotten Realms] The Wall of the Faithless
- Thread starter I'm A Banana
- Start date
Why? A Faithless soul doesn't provide any power to you -- it's like having Cyric and Ilmater fight over a pile of dead car batteries.
--
Pauper
Kill Cthulhu
Obligatory link to counter-argument: Why Games Do Cthulhu Wrong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DyRxlvM9VM
--
Pauper
If devils and demons fight over souls no matter what their faith is, if souls in a divine Realm ultimately end up joining with the deity themselves, then it follows that souls have value no matter what they have been in life.
That isn't true just for Cthulhu, but for any entity that you want to use to create actually unsettling horror. However, as I said elsewhere, mine was a joke pointing out what a common player reaction would be. Also, if the premise of a game is that aberrations invade your world, then the whole mystery aspect is out of the picture. Those things are just weird creatures that mindlessly destroy stuff for whatever reason. It doesn't matter if you say that they are embodied insanity or entropy, the moment you get to fight them, they become cannon fodder. If you plan such an invasion, and then try to remove or limit player's agency by making them almost impossible to face, or by making sure that -as the video says- player's choices don't matter at the end, I guess that D&D isn't really the game for that, and that you have to warn the players about that. We're talking about a completely different kind of game.
Let's consider Tempus' outlook. I think a lot of people forget just how powerful the god of war is in this setting because he is rarely thought on. He considers every battle a prayer, regardless of if you directly venerate him or not. I imagine a lot of gods are like that, you might not have consciously made a choice to worship a god but your actions may give them claim to your soul in the afterlife. I think as a person in the FR, you'd have to go out of your way to be truly considered "Faithless". To continue the Tempus line of though, he's likely to claim you for the eternal battle on his plane if you battled overmuch in life.
That's different -- souls are currency in the Lower Realms because of what you can do with them, or to them. Fiends have a different view of the worth of a soul, because fiends don't get power from a soul's worship; they get power from what other fiends are willing to do to gain the soul.
To maintain the metaphor, a fiend would still find value in a dead car battery, because it can salvage the battery for useful materials or trade it to other fiends who'd do the same. If your cosmology is that the gods would do the same, that's fine, but that's not how things have been posited to work in the Realms.
--
Pauper
In my cosmology things aren't like that, and if you read my previous posts, I thought that it wasn't the case in FR either. However, is there any source that states the specifics of what ''part'' of a soul fiends use, and what ''part'' deities are interested in? Is it stated anywhere how a soul is made? What parts do souls have, or if they are a basic unit, and so on? This is a honest question, because if clear answers to it don't exist, then we are just throwing speculations around.
I'm not sure -- the video proposes that as soon as you posit the existence of a Far Realm, a place of inhuman power and alien strangeness that causes humans to go mad and change into monsters simply by experiencing it for an instant, then you've brought into the game the idea that human existence is tiny, fleeting, and ultimately doomed.
In D&D, of course, you get around the implications of the Far Realm by never actually using it in your game; if the PCs never directly encounter the Far Realm and instead only ever meet individual or small groups of monsters from there, then they can continue to live in blissful ignorance of the monstrous entities that dwell there. But as soon as the PCs decide they want to punch Cthulhu in the face? Time to break out the Sanity rules and make a quick refresher of the Call of Cthulhu RPG.
--
Pauper
Check out the AD&D supplement 'Faiths & Avatars' for the answer to your question.
As far as I'm aware, nothing published since then has contradicted that information.
--
Pauper
Yes, but as I said, once the genie is out the of the bottle, and you get a ''war between worlds'', those heralds of madness and insanity become just the next BBEG. They lose mistery, and you still feel empowered, because you get to defeat them, study them, know how they work.
And even if you point out that they are madness and therefore they don't behave accordingly to this reality's rule (and that for that reason no one will ever be able to understand their ways and how to truly defeat them), the moment they manage to exist in this reality and in nature, it means that they are indeed part of this world, and therefore they too must behave accordingly to rules. In this world ''Chaos'' has rules and is deterministic, madness also follows patterns and, since you're playing a game and are supposed to do something about the BBEG, you can learn about those aberrations and device something to contrast their influence.
I think that denying the players the chance of taking other routes and achieving nothing but survival can limit the fun: as I said, with an invasion, the ''mystery'' of the far Realms isn't really there anymore, or is diminished (same as with demonic invasions or having demon lords in your face. Paraphrasing the video, once an enitity becomes ''quantifiable'', has stats, and can be faced, the unsettling factor of the ''unknown'' kinda goes away), at this point better let the players take their chance at going further than mere survival.
Last edited:
Similar Threads
