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

[MG.0]

Maintaining a consistent fictional world to create a shared sense of community between authors and fans. What else would it be for?

I maintain that this is not at all important for playing D&D, as evidenced by the fact most people play homebrew anyway. It is important for selling products, certainly. Some people seem to be arguing that anything that deviates from canon is somehow 'wrong'. That is just plain stupid.

Forgive me for quoting (well, paraphrasing) Princess Bride, but, "Canon. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."

Oh, I know what it means alright. I'm arguing its importance (or lack thereof) and role in D&D.

While fans can argue about what is canon and what is not, due to shared worlds like the Forgotten Realms often being riddled with inconsistencies, reboots, and such, you don't choose what is canon. It's not what's useful for your game, or what you like versus what you don't. It's the official "truth" or "history" of a fictional world, as delineated by its creators, in this case, WotC.

Which, as I said before, should have absolutely no bearing on anyone's D&D game. Canon is one possible (murky) truth out of an infinitude of possible truths. You can call it "official" if you like despite the inconsistencies, reboots, etc. but again, if it can't be modified for your own use, then it serves no purpose, and if it can be modified, then it isn't really canon anymore, is it.

When running your home D&D game, you should absolutely keep what you like and trash what you don't. But that's not you choosing what is canon and what isn't, that's you choosing to ignore canon and go your own way.

Certainly.

Well, okay, that's fine. Than why are you arguing about canon if you don't care to follow it?

If my statements above don't make my point clear, then nothing will.

 

[Celtavian]

What about this idea of an afterlife judgment for the faithless?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duat

Kelemvor weighs your soul against a weight equal to Tyr's severed hand. If your soul fails to measure up, you get cast onto the Wall of the Faithless regardless of your beliefs. Would a single gods idea of truth and justice serving as the means to determine a good soul from a bad be sufficient to determine who goes on the wall and who passes to paradise? Or perhaps this weight being used to determine if a faithless person who is good by Tyr's standards gets to pass to the goodly realms and reside in Tyr's or another goodly gods realm. I could see modifying the afterlife into some test like they have in Duat for the Faerunian pantheon that at least allows a good person to not end up as part of the wall.

 

[Irennan]

Since when is it a requirement that gods can't be killed? There are plenty of RW stories about gods being killed.

Yeah. And even then, the FR gods almost always (and I mean literally, just look at the current pantheon) find their way back into the living. Besides, in FR deities rarely are truly killed, as recent ''history'' examples show us.

 

[Mirtek]

What about this idea of an afterlife judgment for the faithless?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duat

Kelemvor weighs your soul against a weight equal to Tyr's severed hand. If your soul fails to measure up, you get cast onto the Wall of the Faithless regardless of your beliefs. Would a single gods idea of truth and justice serving as the means to determine a good soul from a bad be sufficient to determine who goes on the wall and who passes to paradise? Or perhaps this weight being used to determine if a faithless person who is good by Tyr's standards gets to pass to the goodly realms and reside in Tyr's or another goodly gods realm. I could see modifying the afterlife into some test like they have in Duat for the Faerunian pantheon that at least allows a good person to not end up as part of the wall.

And why should good persons get a better treatment than evil persons?

That would imply that good is some higher cosmic truth than evil, law or Chaos.

Why not weight everyone against the Bane's iron guantlet or something intangible like Cyric's lies?

Evil enough you get a pass and too good and it's into the wall with you.

The evil deities would like that

 

[sunshadow21]

What about this idea of an afterlife judgment for the faithless?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duat

Kelemvor weighs your soul against a weight equal to Tyr's severed hand. If your soul fails to measure up, you get cast onto the Wall of the Faithless regardless of your beliefs. Would a single gods idea of truth and justice serving as the means to determine a good soul from a bad be sufficient to determine who goes on the wall and who passes to paradise? Or perhaps this weight being used to determine if a faithless person who is good by Tyr's standards gets to pass to the goodly realms and reside in Tyr's or another goodly gods realm. I could see modifying the afterlife into some test like they have in Duat for the Faerunian pantheon that at least allows a good person to not end up as part of the wall.

The image I initially had was not dissimilar to this and along the lines of Horus weighing one's heart against a feather. The comparison to the Egyptian view of the afterlife is quite strong.

 

[Phantarch]

I keep thinking of the scene in C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle when the group "transitions" to the afterlife. There's a group of dwarves who stubbornly refuse to believe and are fully convinced that they are still just sitting in a stable surrounded by horse manure.

I think it's quite possible that the Faithless are unable to transition because of their own minds rather than any sort of heavy-handedness by the gods. The trick to getting to an afterlife is believing that's where you will go. Essentially, you are trapping yourself on the Fugue Plane. As others have argued, it's problematic to just have a bunch of souls sitting around getting snatched up by demons, so the souls are put to use in the Wall.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm still waiting for I'm a Banana to show me all these religions that tolerated faithnlessness given he is a student of religion. And explain why faithlessness is not wrong in a world with gods. I've read a lot on mythology and religion. And the non-believer is nearly always a character that is punished for his faithlessness. Why should the Realms be different?

It was a while ago. Here's a referesher
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[sblock=Real World Digression]

Are there a lot of religions that have anything to say about the afterlife at all, but grant that unbelievers will be just fine in it?

Most non-theistic religions, and most polytheistic religions. In fact, the historical norm is to not really care about what one believed in - it was about the rules you followed. In the Tarterus example above, you don't see non-believers, you see major enemies of things the entire pantheon stands for. Samsara doesn't really care about your orthodoxy. In Norse paganism, what seems to have been important for a good afterlife is more how you die than in who you called "Lord.". In fact, one of the weird things about the Wall of the Faithless is that it's a pretty strongly evangelical Christian image (the unbelievers deserve to be punished) wedging itself in a polytheistic society (where being an unbeliever mostly just meant you were an outsider). You could believe in a flying spaghetti monster, but if you died a brave death on the battlefield in the context of Norse paganism, you'd go to Valhalla all the same.
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To that old nugget, I might add Ma'at is a legal principle, so you didn't have to believe in or worship Osiris/Anubis/Re/Horus/Amun/Whatever to be judged positively by that feather (and attempts to enforce an orthodoxy were not always met well), that staight vegetarians who happen to not be Jewish but who might be, say, Christian, Islamic, or even certain flavors of Hindu are gonna be pretty OK in Jewish eschatology (such as it is), that certain flavors of Greco-Roman paradise cared if you were "good" but didn't give a frig about if you thought Jupiter was a great guy or not, that there's about as many Christians and Jews in Janna as there are Muslims according to the Hadith, and probably MANY MORE pre-Islamic people, and that the current pope expects to see athiests in heaven with him.

Those all, to varying degrees, are DEFINITELY toleration of faithlessness. In fact, it's more typical to have a place for "virtuous pagans" than to exclude them. All unbelievers being punished for eternity is not a concept that has been common throughout history. Why would the Realms be different?
[/sblock]

In FR specifically, the gods are little more than magical people - no different than powerful archwizards or mighty dragons. You've got elves that are older than some of the gods floating around the setting, and Elminster has survived the death of DOZENS of them. Sometimes, they're literally magical people - human beings who underwent apotheosis. In a world such as that, there's no more reason to worship Azuth "because he's a god" than there is to worship your local beholder "because he's a frickin' beholder" (there might be MORE reason to worship the latter, if he's nearby!). All being a god in FR means is that you control some aspect of the world as a whole. That means you need to be dealt with, but it doesn't mean you deserve to be honored and respected and worshiped. Giving lip service to the gods or not really giving a frig about 'em or even going all "Rage at the Heavens" are all reasonable responses to these powerful entities, just as they are reasonable responses to, I dunno, Lord Neverember. What's so bad about not worshiping the gods that makes it different from not worshiping a pantheon made up of the Lord's Alliance? The Dragonborn are even canonically "What's so great about gods?" kinds of people. There's no real satisfying answer to the question they pose, unfortunately.

 

[MG.0]

Yeah. And even then, the FR gods almost always (and I mean literally, just look at the current pantheon) find their way back into the living. Besides, in FR deities rarely are truly killed, as recent ''history'' examples show us.

So do almost all soap opera characters. I guess they are gods too.

As someone else mentioned, this all boils down to useless semantics. They are "gods" for some definition of the word, but what is a god anyway? Saying that they are not in fact the ultimate arbiters of destiny, or that there are powers beyond them, or that they do not deserve anyone's worship because they are merely psychic parasites is EVERY BIT as valid an approach to gaming in the Realms as any other.

Not directing this at you specifically, but suggesting that this is a violation of canon and therefore somehow less "correct" is idiotic.

Every game in the Realms either extends beyond canon or breaks it. There is no other possibility. The funny thing about going beyond is that it can suddenly become breaking due to changes in interpretation or the publishing of new material. Holding back on customizing for fear of this is ludicrous...So what's the difference if you break existing canon? Answer: absolutely nothing. This is the basis of my argument that slavishly following canon as some sort of holy map to gameplay is equally ridiculous.

I tend to think of canon as a single interpretation of the gameworld no greater than any other single DM's interpretation. But it's actually less than that. It is an interpretation scotch-taped together by many authors over many years to serve the purpose of selling very different products. Meh.

 

[Irennan]

So do almost all soap opera characters. I guess they are gods too.

As someone else mentioned, this all boils down to useless semantics. They are "gods" for some definition of the word, but what is a god anyway? Saying that they are not in fact the ultimate arbiters of destiny, or that there are powers beyond them, or that they do not deserve anyone's worship because they are merely psychic parasites is EVERY BIT as valid an approach to gaming in the Realms as any other.

Not directing this at you specifically, but suggesting that this is a violation of canon and therefore somehow less "correct" is idiotic.

Every game in the Realms either extends beyond canon or breaks it. There is no other possibility. The funny thing about going beyond is that it can suddenly become breaking due to changes in interpretation or the publishing of new material. Holding back on customizing for fear of this is ludicrous...So what's the difference if you break existing canon? Answer: absolutely nothing. This is the basis of my argument that slavishly following canon as some sort of holy map to gameplay is equally ridiculous.

I tend to think of canon as a single interpretation of the gameworld no greater than any other single DM's interpretation. But it's actually less than that. It is an interpretation scotch-taped together by many authors over many years to serve the purpose of selling very different products. Meh.

It's obvious that DMs and players can do things as they please in their game. The difference is that the FR is a shared world, it exists as a common base for those who produce storylines that take place within the setting, including modules and adventures. Those authors must be on the same page to produce material: without this, there is no internal coherence. So, canon is not idiotic and is needed for a setting like the Realms.

Now, I don't think that people here meant to say that you are forced to follow canon when playing in your campaign (that would be, as you say, idiotic), but it has little relevance when it comes to the ''official'', published Realms.

 

[Dire Bare]

I maintain that this is not at all important for playing D&D, as evidenced by the fact most people play homebrew anyway. It is important for selling products, certainly. Some people seem to be arguing that anything that deviates from canon is somehow 'wrong'. That is just plain stupid.

Your earlier posts suggested, to me at least, that canon was something you (as an individual fan) had control over, that you could choose what was and what was not canon. Hence my response.

Was anybody in this thread claiming that not using canon (in part or in whole) is bad-wrong-fun? If so, I missed it.

But as both you and I have stated in our own posts, yes, DM's are free to use whatever level of canon they want in their games. It's part of the strength of D&D!

But, DM's choosing to go full canon is cool too, and not remotely stupid. Do we agree there?