D&D 5E [Forgotten Realms] The Wall of the Faithless

[Shasarak]

I found this old quote from a reply by Ed Greenwood back in 2007. I hope it's of some use to the discussion.

Well that answers that question: Souls always do this, unless they dont (as per DMs table rules).

 

[I'm A Banana]

In the Realms, the souls of the departed arrive at the Fugue.

The souls are routed to the Fugue, not directly to Kelemvor.

Absent Kelemvor, a soul not destined to be claimed by a Realms deity would linger there until another deity assumed the role of judge of the dead.

The unstated presumption here is that the Fugue Plane is not a creation of the gods, but that it is a simple physical feature of the Realms due to...some other unstated reason.

But FR history would dispute this. Ao is credited with creating the physical space of the realms - the "universe" in 3e, the "crystal sphere" in 2e - and from there, light and dark and the earth (Selune, Shar, and Chauntea). If it is a property of Faerun, then it is something Ao put in place. But it seems like it is not even that simple. The earliest presentation of the Realms (1e boxed set, if I'm not mistaken) has this to say:

There are those in the realms who reject the power of these self-claimed "deities," or choose to follow none of these gods as their own. The failure of the sky to fall upon the heads of these individuals indicates this is as good a course as pledging one's allegiance to a faith or deity.
...
Player Characters are not limited to professing a belief in any particular Power, or offering worship to any of them (except clerics, which draw their powers from such veneration).

So the Fugue Plane doesn't seem to be a simple matter of it always being present in Faerun. Indeed, the first mention of the Fugue Plane is in Faiths & Avatars, so it seems to be related to the Time of Troubles and Kelemvor's takeover of Myrkul's dominions. At some point, it must've been created (and it must've been a pretty big deal, since there were apparently faithless people running around on Faerun just fine before then).

 

[Xvartslayer]

Disturbingly well put.

I personally like the idea of the good gods rising up against Ao, because he's always seemed like a jerk to me. Maybe there is a campaign idea in that...

The Time of Troubles. The are even some modules to go along with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Troubles_(Forgotten_Realms)

This is also when my group stopped implementing Realm's lore in our game. The transition to 2e was, in my opinion, ludicrous.

 

[Alzrius]

OK, I can accept that for most arguments. Fair enough. However, it seems pretty apparent that he chose to use the whole "Planescape" arrangement with the single exception of how souls are handled in the afterlife.

Well, it does agree with the default in that souls go to the realms of the gods they worshipped; it's just those souls that didn't worship a god for whom the results differ.

And since there doesn't appear to be an in-game or in-story explanation for why Forgotten Realms differs from other campaign settings (most notably Greyhawk), wouldn't the most reasonable assumption be that the Forgotten Realms was modified out-of-story at the design level?

I think that really depends on how you look at it. The idea of having "local conditions" (in terms of geographic, crystal sphere, or even planar areas) that can change how things work - even for major metaphysical aspects like how the afterlife functions - is understood to be part of the overall cosmology, including from an in-character point of view. Everyone who dies on Athas (the world of the Dark Sun campaign setting), for example goes to the Gray, without exception (short of undeath). This "each crystal sphere is different" notation is obliquely made in Planescape's The Complete Planewalker's Handbook.

Amusingly enough, this sort of thing gets directly spotlighted in the Forgotten Realms novel The Ring of Winter, where a wizard who worships Mystra dies while in Chult. He fails the "puzzle" that Chultans are given in the afterlife, which means that he becomes a ghost...but he was still a Faithful worshipper of Mystra. The result of this is that he literally ping-pongs back and forth from Mystra's afterlife to being a ghost in the mortal world, apparently while Mystra and Ubtao (the head of the Chultan pantheon) are trying to work out how to deal with the bureaucratic issues involved.

That said, looking at the Fugue plane of the Realms can be interpreted in a couple ways - Either it is the result of Kelemvor's divine influence, presumably with the tacit approval of the rest of the pantheon, or it is a natural destination of the Realms' souls due perhaps to planar connections and influence, similar to how souls of Athas are sent to the Gray. I've not read a lot of the FR material to know if either of these interpretations is actually specified.

I went back and looked around for the earliest mentions of the Fugue Plane and the Wall that I could find. It turns out that they were first mentioned (that I was able to establish) in chapter 14 of the novel Waterdeep (the last book of the Avatar Trilogy, set during the Time of Troubles) where Midnight encounters both while trying to retrieve one of the Tablets of Fate from Myrkul's realm. In there, we're told that all souls initially go to the "demi-plane" that is the Fugue Plane and wait for their gods to collect them, and that the Faithless are put into the Wall around Myrkul's realm.

That book came out in 1989, which is only two years after the Forgotten Realms formally debuted (e.g. the original boxed set...and, for that matter, the first novel, Darkwalker on Moonshae). Also, Ed Greenwood was one of the authors of the Avatar Trilogy, for what it's worth.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

The Time of Troubles. The are even some modules to go along with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Troubles_(Forgotten_Realms)

This is also when my group stopped implementing Realm's lore in our game. The transition to 2e was, in my opinion, ludicrous.

It's interesting to me how much a player's opposition to world-shaking setting changes seems to depend on when they were initially exposed to the setting. In my case, for instance, my first two FR products were the grey box and the (rather limited in content) 2e Forgotten Realms Adventures hardback. And the Time of Troubles was actually in process when I was being introduced to the games, through the Forgotten Realms and AD&D comic lines. So the Time of Troubles is acceptable to me and part of the Realms because it more or less exactly coincides with my introduction. If I had gotten into the grey box significantly before any of that happened, I quite likely wouldn't have accepted it.

I wonder how far that carries forward to players introduced at other times.

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

* Does anyone know when the Fugue Plane even made its debut? Was it pre-3e?

As I understand it, the Fugue Plane is not present in Ed Greenwood's home Realms campaign.

I don't remember reading about it before Advanced Dungeons & Dragons hit the store shelves, and it's older than 3E, so I'm going with 2nd Edition.

Well that answers that question: Souls always do this, unless they don't (as per DMs table rules).

You can lead a horse to water...

 

[Irennan]

It's interesting to me how much a player's opposition to world-shaking setting changes seems to depend on when they were initially exposed to the setting. In my case, for instance, my first two FR products were the grey box and the (rather limited in content) 2e Forgotten Realms Adventures hardback. And the Time of Troubles was actually in process when I was being introduced to the games, through the Forgotten Realms and AD&D comic lines. So the Time of Troubles is acceptable to me and part of the Realms because it more or less exactly coincides with my introduction. If I had gotten into the grey box significantly before any of that happened, I quite likely wouldn't have accepted it.

I wonder how far that carries forward to players introduced at other times.

My introduction to the Realms was the end of 4e. However, I ignore most RSEs and plots with deities acting like they were 5 years old kids with super powers squabbling over a toy, including the ToT (even though I still use Kelemvor as the judge of the dead).

I still use things like the return of Shade, or the elves taking Myth Drannor back (even though not quite as it happened in canon).

 

[Xvartslayer]

I think you might have addressed a big part of the disagreements in this thread.

You are absolutely correct in my case. I dislike the characters of Kelemvor, Midnight and Cyric. Or even worse, I found them uninteresting and tedious as mortal characters, let alone as gods. It felt like making Hank from Accounting and your weird sister-in-law with food issues into deities.

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

The entry for Asmodeus in the SCAG (p.24) is practically an expansion of the Afterlife section on page 20; it spends three paragraphs talking about the Fugue Plane and the whole of the entry describes forms of worship aimed at avoiding punishment in the afterlife for transgressions against one's faith by praying to Asmodeus for a reprieve.

 

[Hussar]

It does. If a person was living their life following or fairly closing following what a Deities tenets are. Then that god claims them in the Fugue Plane. Even if they never actually worshiped that god as long as they did not go out of their way to reject that one. You also don't need to pick a patron god. If a normal farmer in the realms normally pays respect to multiple gods, but follows the tenets of one more then the others or holds more respect for a certain one. Then they would be claimed by that one in the end.

Faithless are those who reject the deities, while False are those who who picked a patron god then intentionally betrayed them. (The false are not bound to the wall but are punished depending on the severity of their crime.)

I think this right here bears repeating. It's not simply that everyone who doesn't choose a good that goes to the Wall. You have to deliberately reject the deities. You have to betray a god. There are no "masses of martyrs" being stuffed in the Wall.

The unstated presumption here is that the Fugue Plane is not a creation of the gods, but that it is a simple physical feature of the Realms due to...some other unstated reason.

But FR history would dispute this. Ao is credited with creating the physical space of the realms - the "universe" in 3e, the "crystal sphere" in 2e - and from there, light and dark and the earth (Selune, Shar, and Chauntea). If it is a property of Faerun, then it is something Ao put in place. But it seems like it is not even that simple. The earliest presentation of the Realms (1e boxed set, if I'm not mistaken) has this to say:



So the Fugue Plane doesn't seem to be a simple matter of it always being present in Faerun. Indeed, the first mention of the Fugue Plane is in Faiths & Avatars, so it seems to be related to the Time of Troubles and Kelemvor's takeover of Myrkul's dominions. At some point, it must've been created (and it must've been a pretty big deal, since there were apparently faithless people running around on Faerun just fine before then).

Since there are mentions of the Fugue Plane as early as 1989, I'm going to go on a limb and say that it has enough traction to "always be there". It's not like stuff hasn't been added to the Realms after the original Grey Box that hasn't always been there. It's not like there were no Hordes before the Hordes supplement after all.

Sure, the 5e DMG presents a generic afterlife. It does not apply to the specific here. Arguing that because it doesn't appear in the Grey Box means that it had to be created later doesn't really fly.