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

[Celtavian]

Torm doesn't like it. He even appeared in person in Cyric's court when a soul Cyric was ready to put in the wall managed to mutter his name just to argue the souls case and why he should take the soul with him.

I could see Torm disliking The Wall.

 

[MG.0]

So saying, "The Greeks believed everyone was faithless" is kind of ridiculous.

*sigh* I wasn't saying that at all.

It was a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor suggesting that the Greeks were right and their gods are real, suggesting practically everyone on the planet today is faithless. Thus the remark that "Everyone's religion is someone's mythology and vice versa."

 

[Alzrius]

Torm doesn't like it. He even appeared in person in Cyric's court when a soul Cyric was ready to put in the wall managed to mutter his name just to argue the souls case and why he should take the soul with him.

That's not what happened. What happened was that Gwydion the Quick, the soul in question, was taken by Cyric for being False (as in, Gwydion worshipped Torm but did not live up to his ideals, having died while running from battle).

Gwydion protested his status, and Torm showed up to look into the matter (Gwydion's having said his name allowing Torm to enter Cyric's realm). The reason Torm did this was because he was aware that Cyric had impersonated him in order to encourage Gwydion to get into a fight that he couldn't win, and thus die before he'd proven his faith. Cyric flat-out acknowledged this, but pointed out that Gwydion had still died False, regardless of circumstances; Torm confirmed this by giving Gwydion a test of his faith (seeing if Gwydion could read the words on Torm's gauntlets, which he couldn't), and so had no choice but to admit that he had no claim on Gwydion's soul.

It was only at that point that Cyric elected to put Gwydion in the Wall, flat-out stating that he was doing so (since False do not usually go to the Wall) just to spite Torm for sticking his nose into the whole affair.

EDIT: To cite this, the above sequence of events is from the early chapters of Prince of Lies.

 

[I'm A Banana]

For example, even a devout believer in Ra is not guaranteed paradise in the Egyptian afterlife. They are all judged according to the feather because that is the method according to the priests. It wasn't even considered that you were faithless in their religion.

Because "faithless" has no meaning until you have a modern concept of "faith," which ancient polytheisms really didn't, because it's an invention of monotheism, which is part of why the Wall is CRAZY out of place in FR. There's no such historical thing as a "devout follower of Ra;" devoutness is an anachronistic concept when applied to ancient Egypt.

This disappears down the scholarly rabbit-hole real fast, and I ain't a paid and properly trained educator, so it'll be up to you to build on this (try her books as a starting point, especially A History of God and its chapters on how Judaism's concept of monotheism likely arises out of a more ancient polytheism including how Abraham and Ezekiel refined that concept; also interesting for different reasons: Alice K Turner's History of Hell). For our purposes here you might use this as a starting point: like in FR, a god or an afterlife in most ancient polytheism wasn't something you believed in, it's just something that exists.

Like a king or a spice vendor or a temple or a rock or a squirrel or a lamp.

It doesn't make sense to love Ra any more than it makes sense to love lamp. The priests of Ancient Egypt didn't sacrifice animals because they were showing their innermost conviction, they sacrificed animals like you pay taxes or like you give gifts - because you have to, or because you want to cement a social bond. You kill a cow not because of your inner beliefs, but because of what you think it will function as - a way to make the sun hear you when you ask it to allow rain to fall.

So someone not sacrificing a cow isn't about their orthodoxy, it's about their othopraxy. What they do, not what they have faith in.

The lamp doesn't care what you believe in, it cares what you do - your ritual of plugging it in and flipping a switch makes light. Don't do that ritual, and there won't be light. Do that ritual, and call that lamp ugly and stupid-looking and say that the world would be much better off without it, and still, there is light.

FR follows this pretty nicely most of the time - you sacrifice to Umberlee to avoid her wrath, you sacrifice to Chauntea to assure a good harvest. All reasonable things to do when your goddesses can control whether you live or die.

In the Real World, it was possible to not sacrifice to Ra and still have a good rain. Those who had a Ra-model of the cosmos didn't think this was a contradiction, they just imagined Ra must be pretty generous and that, of course, since back home they had priests of Ra making sacrifices, that Ra of course preferred their hometown to this place. That's why their society was probably beter than this barbaric hinterland! Presumably in FR, it's also possible to not sacrifice to Chauntea and have a good harvest - she's Good, she provides for folks, and of course she likes those who sacrifice to her better. Presumably, dragonborn farmers still can grow food.

The afterlife followed this model. It wasn't something you believed in, it was just something that simply was. So, of course, it couldn't judge you based on what you prayed to or believed in - there were atheist philosophers and foreigners who said it was really Helios up there and all those people still died. That's why the feather of Ma'at weighed order and chaos, not faith. You were a merchant who lived in Memphis and sacrificed to Helios? You were a farmer who never really bothered with the gods? You were a priest who thought Ra was a massive jerk for that drought a few years ago? You were one of those atheist philosophers, or maybe a remnant of a monotheistic sect? You were that hinterland barbarian? Doesn't matter. Did you support the social order? You're in. It doesn't matter if you know the truth of the world or not, as long as you are a "good person" (you support the social order), you're fine. Or at least as fine as anyone else (a lot of ancient polytheism had the afterlife as uniformly unpleasant unless you were some sort of special mythic character - or a warrior bound for Valhalla in the case of the Norse)

D&D in general follows this model pretty well - souls go to the plane matching your alignment if you didn't worship a deity. You're judged on order and chaos and on selfishness and altruism (by no particular entity, but by the multiverse itself) and you shuffle off to a place filled with souls who entirely agree with you about those things.

But then there's this Wall...

 

[Faraer]

Because "faithless" has no meaning until you have a modern concept of "faith," which ancient polytheisms really didn't, because it's an invention of monotheism, which is part of why the Wall is CRAZY out of place in FR.

I think this is basically right. I never delved into exactly how the Wall of the Faithless got added to the published Realms, but it also contradicts the fundamental point that people in Faerûn don't know what happens after death -- all they have to go on is what the priests tell them and occasional anecdotes. The Wall, like the 3E emphasis on patron gods, seems to be part of a cryptomonotheism that crept into certain Realms sources and that is happily absent from Elminster's Forgotten Realms and largely from the Sword Coast Campaign Guide. Ed has added clarifications about the Wall in his usual make-everything-fit way, but it's not part of my conception of the Realms.

 

[Shasarak]

Because the conceit has always been that all those crazy ideas of our ancient ancestors turned out to be real as in "surprise, the gods are real and they are managing all things". That is the foundation of fictional creations from Tolkien to the Forgotten Realms. Why wouldn't world creators create religions that mirror the real world however imperfectly, including unpleasant things like The Wall of the Faithless? Even to good gods, faithlessness is a bad thing. I guess it seems to me that people in this thread don't like the idea that faithlessness is considered evil in and of itself even by good gods. It seems some in this thread including the OP want the designers to remove this idea from the game to suit their personal sensibilities.

Yes we could use the crazy dieas of our ancestors and on the other hand we could use completely new crazy ideas. That is the beauty of making stuff up yourself.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Okay, so I worked my way through all 33 pages of this. It was an interesting conversation until about page 20.

I do like that this bit of lore came up, I've never heard about it before now.

One of my first thoughts when I was reading about the Wall was "what is on the other side?" after all, walls are designed either to keep things in or keep things out. If it was a defensive fortification though using the "Faithless"
who would have no incentive to help protect whatever it is didn't seem like the best plan. I was thinking of ways to alter it to fit my homebrew world, because as a writer I feel I need to homebrew my settings, when I ran across post #92 by JohnLynch and his awesome "Last Wall" idea, which I won't steal completely (because my homebrew involves a multi-pantheon idea which would make his wall of honor idea a bit strange, still incredible though) but my idea will look very very similiar I think.

And I'm not just throwing things into the world "just because" a Wall to act as a defensive fortification helps solve two or three different problems in my homebrew, I just need to figure out which one it will work best against.

I guess in closing. I appreciate this thread giving me a cool idea to help make my homebrew better, but all this discussion of human psychology and real world religions and justice seems a little circular. Unless you're planning a petition to change the Realms official lore then the Wall exists because it hasn't been retconned away yet, and no amount of hand wringing and arguing is going to change that fact until the official lore changes.

 

[Alzrius]

Because "faithless" has no meaning until you have a modern concept of "faith," which ancient polytheisms really didn't, because it's an invention of monotheism, which is part of why the Wall is CRAZY out of place in FR.

This seems to imply that because something happened a certain way in the real world, it therefore needs to have happened that way in a fantasy world, or it's "CRAZY out of place." I personally don't think that follows.

Yes, in the real world the transition from orthopraxy to orthodoxy went hand-in-hand with the transition from polytheism to monotheism. Yes, if we compare historical Earth religions to the religions of the Realms, then there's no particular match for having polytheistic faiths where each individual deity has Catholic Church-levels of individual detail for their religious functions and beliefs. But quite frankly, so what? Fidelity to reality has never been the watchword for good fantasy, or good role-playing for that matter.

The real question here is if the game world functions according to internal logic and consistency. Quite frankly, I think that it does, at least with regards to the Wall of the Faithless. Your mileage may vary.

 

[psychophipps]

In the ancient Greek, "faith" and "trust" are the same word, for the Christian theology wonks.
As for a few other comments, if you don't trust that it will work, why in the name of the gods would you be tossing good money and other material goods at the religious places for good fortune? One thing that is huge boon in FR is that the gods are pretty much *right there*. People see them working in their daily lives in obvious ways.
As for the people that are honking about how evil the "good" gods are to allow the wall to be the way it is, all I can say is what I've learned after 20 years in customer service...you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

 

[Mirtek]

I do like that this bit of lore came up, I've never heard about it before now.

That's because it's homebrew. The wall is just the wall around the city of the dead. Outside is the open fugue plane where the souls arrive and inside is the city where they are judged. The souls pass the wall through the city gate to go before Kelemvor's throne.

(since False do not usually go to the Wall)

However it's also not that unheard of for them to end there. While all faithless go to the wall, for the false the wall is one of the many punishments that potentiall await them. Most get a different judgment, but a few end up in the wall just the same as the faithless