In my opinion, the problems aren't limited to the Wall. The entire Forgotten Realms cosmology is a big pile of poo. You can throw 3rd and 4th editions in there too. 5th is a bit better, but nothing beats the 1st/2nd edition stuff, when the people writing it actually tried to make some sense of things.
D&D 5E [Forgotten Realms] The Wall of the Faithless
- Thread starter I'm A Banana
- Start date
Thanks, I'll check it.
It does. Heck mortal spellcasters can use souls as components to power spells, deities can do so much more. Fiends work with more souls dragged down kicking and screaming than the relatively few cultists that come willingly
Now Ilmater might never misuse the saved souls this way, Cyric definately would.
If Ilmater gets to snatch souls that don't belong to him, so does Cyric. If Ilmater then wants to keep them safe that's his perogative, Cyric has better uses for them.
As long as both get to snatch unclaimed souls equally, Cyric doesn't care how Ilmater wastes them
And what in F&A contradicts On Hallowed Grounds on how deities generally use souls? The FR pantheon is also part of OHG.
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I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
This is D&D. Pretty much anywhere else you die, you go to one of the outer planes, which are, pointedly, not in the control of any particular deity. You have the option of going to a deity's realm, but if you're LG, you still go to Mount Celestia, even if you were an LG character who refused to worship deities or an LG character in a world where all the gods were dead and mortals were living in their abandoned metallic husks, or an LG character where the only god in your world is a massive sucking evil at the center of the world.
The FR pantheon, by being a subset of that cosmology, made an explicit choice to not allow that. They decided, no, if you're an LG character who refuses to worship deities (such as an honorable dragonborn who thinks that worshiping gods is for chumps and slaves), you get a rotten afterlife.
FR could get away with that if the only afterlives that existed were the domains of the FR deities, but that is not the case in FR.
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Hussar
Legend
A couple of thoughts:
1. FR as it's set up is extremely ... capitalist. There is an economy of worshippers, where having more worshippers makes you more powerful. It's very, very different than any real world mythologies. Zeus isn't king of the gods because he is worshipped the most, he's king of the gods because he's king of the gods. In FR, all gods are effectively in competition with each other over worshippers, thus, it's very much not in their interests to allow anyone to not worship. Non-worshippers are dead weight in the system. They contribute nothing to the gods whatsoever, so, after death, what's the point of doing anything else but throw them away? And, you don't want them wandering around, possibly dithering about whatever afterlife they happen to want to go to, more likely to be consumed by demons and thus strengthening demonkind.
From a god's point of view, a Wall of the Faithless makes a lot of sense. A faithless dies and his/her/its soul heads on up to be judged. Since it's not claimed by any god, it's debatable whether or not it would eventually make it to whatever alignment plane it should go to, on its own. These souls would be far more likely to be demon/devil fodder.
2. The Wall of the Faithless is absolutely abhorrent when you think a bit more about it. After all, what faith do babies exhibit? Considering infant mortality rates in a pre-industrial society, the Wall of the Faithless is mostly made up of dead babies. Yikes. Although, that does make a pretty interesting campaign hook.
1. FR as it's set up is extremely ... capitalist. There is an economy of worshippers, where having more worshippers makes you more powerful. It's very, very different than any real world mythologies. Zeus isn't king of the gods because he is worshipped the most, he's king of the gods because he's king of the gods. In FR, all gods are effectively in competition with each other over worshippers, thus, it's very much not in their interests to allow anyone to not worship. Non-worshippers are dead weight in the system. They contribute nothing to the gods whatsoever, so, after death, what's the point of doing anything else but throw them away? And, you don't want them wandering around, possibly dithering about whatever afterlife they happen to want to go to, more likely to be consumed by demons and thus strengthening demonkind.
From a god's point of view, a Wall of the Faithless makes a lot of sense. A faithless dies and his/her/its soul heads on up to be judged. Since it's not claimed by any god, it's debatable whether or not it would eventually make it to whatever alignment plane it should go to, on its own. These souls would be far more likely to be demon/devil fodder.
2. The Wall of the Faithless is absolutely abhorrent when you think a bit more about it. After all, what faith do babies exhibit? Considering infant mortality rates in a pre-industrial society, the Wall of the Faithless is mostly made up of dead babies. Yikes. Although, that does make a pretty interesting campaign hook.
Sword of Spirit
Legend
Absolutely. I was just about to bring this up. The way the FR deities (or should we blame it on Ao?) have things set up they are simply jerks compared to the multiversal default. Maybe the reason that Toril is overflowing with Greater Deities (seriously, compared to other worlds, they have way too many highest ranked deities) is because they are leeching extra power off of the worship of mortals via the threat of oblivion.
Yeah, some of the other worlds do similar crap.
The point though, is that in traditional D&D lore they don't have to. The pantheons are explicitly choosing to impose harsher rules on their worlds for some selfish reason.
In Dragonlance, soaking up a bunch of worship to juice the gods up doesn't even follow, since they have very few Greater Powers.
The gods of Greyhawk don't impose any of these extra threats on their worshipers, and they're doing just fine.
On Hallowed Grounds does indeed point out that Toril has an unusually high amount of greater powers for such a backwater world
Phantarch
First Post
I have to admit, the wall of the faithless has always bothered me in Forgotten Realms and isn't the metaphysical setup I prefer in a campaign setting typically. Going further, I'm not even a huge fan of the more basic D&D cosmology that is also part of the Realms of "You made it to your personal afterlife and are going to be absorbed and cease to exist anyway!". Basically, oblivion is all that awaits anyone in the long run, it's just how painful the transition is.
That being said, I think it's an unfair argument to say "It's D&D, so it has to be X". This logic doesn't hold. The many worlds linked by common planes is essentially a campaign setting of its own (Planescape). And plenty of D&D settings decide to do different things with cosmology and the afterlife, some drastically so, some with minor alterations. Eberron has Dolurrh, Darksun has the Grey, etc. The point is, each campaign setting sets up its own afterlife to create the tone for the specific world that is desired. So, the answer to "Why isn't the Forgotten Realms like Greyhawk?" is "It's the Forgotten Realms, not Greyhawk." Internally, it's not as if Ao said, "Hmmm, that Greyhawk looks nice, but I kind of want to screw with souls some more." Maybe that's what Ed Greenwood said, but that's an author's choice for story elements, so is a whole other argument. So, asking why the Forgotten Realms doesn't work like another campaign setting is the wrong question. The right questions are how and why the Forgotten Realms cosmology works the way it does (and then deciding if that works for you).
That being said, I think it's an unfair argument to say "It's D&D, so it has to be X". This logic doesn't hold. The many worlds linked by common planes is essentially a campaign setting of its own (Planescape). And plenty of D&D settings decide to do different things with cosmology and the afterlife, some drastically so, some with minor alterations. Eberron has Dolurrh, Darksun has the Grey, etc. The point is, each campaign setting sets up its own afterlife to create the tone for the specific world that is desired. So, the answer to "Why isn't the Forgotten Realms like Greyhawk?" is "It's the Forgotten Realms, not Greyhawk." Internally, it's not as if Ao said, "Hmmm, that Greyhawk looks nice, but I kind of want to screw with souls some more." Maybe that's what Ed Greenwood said, but that's an author's choice for story elements, so is a whole other argument. So, asking why the Forgotten Realms doesn't work like another campaign setting is the wrong question. The right questions are how and why the Forgotten Realms cosmology works the way it does (and then deciding if that works for you).
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Not every world works the same. But the important bit is that the idea of getting rewarded for good deeds without having to develop faith in a deity is the default. FR's gods chose to opt out of that for...some reason. And whatever reason there is, it is self-evidently not a Good (alignment-wise) reason: you're leading good and honorable souls to suffering and oblivion when it could be otherwise.
Phantarch said:
FR is part of the overall "D&D cosmology" in 5e, so its afterlife is only different where it chooses to be. And why the Good deities would choose to be like this is...kind of unfathomable to me.
Even if it were off on its own, it's certainly within Kelemvor's hypothetical power to tear down that wall and replace it with a more just system of judgement that, say, looks at a person's deeds and assigns them to a godly realm even if they didn't worship the deity, as an ally if not a servant. The fact that the pantheon seems to actively desire a more wicked and vile method of afterlife reassignment seems to fly in the face of the description of every supposedly Good deity the pantheon has.
Not entirely true. While Planescape certainly followed that model, not all settings do. Forgotten Realms is one of those settings that follow a different model. Dragonlance is another. No one knows what is up with Eberron, and I'm fairly sure that the outer planes are out of reach in Dark Sun.
Some times, people like treating the expanded D&D universe as if they were all existing side by side. You can hop from FR to Greyhawk to Nentir Vale to Eberron without problem. Planescape and Spelljammer encourage this. But the simple fact of the matter is that there are far too many conflicting details to ever really work together without handwaving huge portions of those settings away. So many people treat Planescape!D&D as if it was the absolute truth of every setting, but its not. Every setting needs to be looked at through its own lens and cosmology. There is no "subset" when we're dealing with a very specific game setting with its own specific cosmology. There's no shoehorning all the realms to fit one big one. There's a reason we have multiple cosmology options in the DMG - they don't all hold true.
In Forgotten Realms, souls go to the Fuege (spelling?) plane, where they await either pick up by their gods, or judgement by Kelemvor. No "go directly to plane-of-alignment, do not pass Go, do not collect 200g." We are talking about FR only, so it doesn't matter what other settings do. I don't care if you're a LG character in the FR setting - if you're a paladin of Sune (and, yes, they existed in 3e D&D), then you go to the CG aligned Brightwater plane (Sune's realm) upon death, even if you'd go to Mount Celestia in a Planescape game.
No, that very much IS the case in FR.
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