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

[Alzrius]

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

Where is that established? In the source I quoted, it implies that, when Cyric places Gwydion in the Wall, he's deliberately defying what's supposed to happen to such souls.

The Prince of Lies turned his back on the armored god and walked slowly to his chair. "Af, Perdix, take Gwydion and stick him in the wall. Watch over him until I summon you again."

Silently Gwydion looked to Torm for aid, but the God of Duty shook his head. All the shade's hopes died. Head down, he let the denizens lead him away without a struggle.

As soon as the prisoner had left the room, Cyric waved a hand, idly dismissing Torm. "Go on, report his punishment to the Circle. I know perfectly well the wall is reserved for the Faithless. I put the worm there for one reason: I want you to know for the rest of eternity you made things worse for him by sticking your square jaw where it didn't belong."

"The law that governs-"

"My whim is law in the City of Strife," Cyric snapped. "You'd be well-served to remember that, especially since you are trespassing. If I happen to summon a few hundred pit fiends to escort you out..."

It goes on from there, but that's the salient part. The wall (apparently it's not supposed to be capitalized) is reserved for the Faithless alone, or at least it's supposed to be.

 

[I'm A Banana]

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.

That gets to what I was talking about in the OP with it being maybe a bigger problem for me because I'm a big religion nerd. If the Wall's going to introduce some "cryptomonotheism" (thanks for the neologism, [MENTION=6318]Faraer[/MENTION] !), that's all well and good, but the metaphysics and god-mortal relations should be consistent with that worldview. For instance, one of the things that makes belief a big deal in monotheism is because it is opposed by doubt - there are alternative beliefs in the world that seem like they might be reasonable. Punishment is reserved for those who reject the Eternal Truth and went with something else, something false, something dominant and easier but other.

There's a significant lack of alternatives to the worship of deities in FR, and almost no indication that the few that do exist are "false" in any way. The dragonborn give one rather anemic alternative (the minority view of an alien diaspora of dragon-people ain't exactly shaking empires), but their belief isn't wrong in the context of FR, it's just that...they get punished for it. It might be worth noting that the SCAG is the first time that the dragonborn and the Wall exist in the realms at the same time, so when the Wall first appeared, there wasn't even that. FR is in the D&D multiverse, which is fine with whatever you believe in general. There's nothing that the FR deities collectively have as a goal that is especially valuable or precious (they don't have a mission of salvation, they're not collectively fighting any forces of destruction or wickedness - heck, the Evil ones actively encourage destruction and wickedness). It seems like when Myrkul invented the Wall, it probably punished those people who, in the Grey Box, were just fine without a god, which is at least in character for Evil, but then it's persisted through the Time of Troubles and maybe through the Spellplague (4e doesn't mention the wall, so maybe it disappeared!) and now through the Sundering.

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.

Yeah, it really does. An eternal punishment for people not devoted to a god is really inconsistent with the way that gods and alignments are portrayed in the Realms and with how alignment is used in D&D. But it may be thanks to my background that this inconsistency glows particularly brightly to me.

 

[Shasarak]

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.

Even if you give them free salty peanuts to eat while they wait?

 

[psychophipps]

Even if you give them free salty peanuts to eat while they wait?

I could even offer to add free hookers and blow (kinda sounds like a devil temptation in the Fugue, huh?) and they still wouldn't do it, my friend.

 

[sunshadow21]

That gets to what I was talking about in the OP with it being maybe a bigger problem for me because I'm a big religion nerd. If the Wall's going to introduce some "cryptomonotheism" (thanks for the neologism, [MENTION=6318]Faraer[/MENTION] !), that's all well and good, but the metaphysics and god-mortal relations should be consistent with that worldview. For instance, one of the things that makes belief a big deal in monotheism is because it is opposed by doubt - there are alternative beliefs in the world that seem like they might be reasonable. Punishment is reserved for those who reject the Eternal Truth and went with something else, something false, something dominant and easier but other.

The thing is that the Wall is perfectly consistent with the rest of the post Time of Troubles setup. Gods and mortals have been tied together into a very active and very noticeable reciprocating relationship, and those that choose to defy that relationship, whether it be god or mortal, can quite legitimately be considered "faithless" and worthy of pretty severe punishment. Now when it first happened, there were probably still mortals that remembered the pre-Time of Troubles arrangement and resisted the new one vigourously. At this point, the only ones left that remember that old way are the gods, maybe a few dragons, and possibly a few liches. The gods by now would have resigned themselves to the new system and learned to work with it rather than fighting against it. Very few mortals would know of any other system, and would have little reason to actively fight it; those that still do aren't likely to get much sympathy from gods that probably don't like the system that much better, but are stuck with it anyways, at least for the next millenia or so until Ao finally decides to take a nap.

Most of the objections so far seem to boil down to 2 issues. One is looking at the Wall in isolation of of the rest of the power structure as developed by canon, and the other is simply not liking the premise behind the post Time of Troubles power structure. The main problem occurring is that enough real life examples apply that people assume that all real life examples apply, and they don't. The FR definition of faith and "faithlessness" is different from real world historical views on those topics and also different from modern day views on those topics. The forces that created those concepts in the real world may be the same, but the world is different, and so how those forces play out and are ulitmately understood will be different. Within the context of the world of FR, it is quite possible, given the well defined relationship between mortal and god, to arrive at a definition of those two words that is internally consistent. Peasants may not understand the full context of the Wall and Fugue Plane, but they would most certainly understand the basics of the mortal-god interdependency and that mortals that choose to eschew that interdependency will not have a happy afterlife.

I guess I don't quite understand how simply removing the Wall and Fugue Plane fixes any of the difficulties. Simply letting the souls travel unimpeded to the outer Planes basically kills off the gods, as they will be losing most of their power source, and you end up with something akin to the Time of Troubles all over again; that's not somethings that's going to have any more internal logic than the Wall. I'm not going to say I would have come up with the Wall as a solution, but given the greater context it works better than most of the ideas I've seen in this thread to get around it. The only way to truly get rid of the Wall and associated lore without creating new problems is to act as though the Time of Troubles never happened to force the new conditions upon the world. Anything less than that is simply removing one potential problem for another.

 

[Mirtek]

Most of the objections so far seem to boil down to 2 issues. One is looking at the Wall in isolation of of the rest of the power structure as developed by canon, and the other is simply not liking the premise behind the post Time of Troubles power structure.

And one is the Wall pre-dating the ToT

Where is that established? In the source I quoted, it implies that, when Cyric places Gwydion in the Wall, he's deliberately defying what's supposed to happen to such souls.

I'll have to look it up. I think I recall the wall being listed as one of the many punishments that could await a false.

 

[sunshadow21]

And one is the Wall pre-dating the ToT.

I consider the whole transfer of power that let Myrkul become the god of the dead in the first place more or less in the same series of events as the ToT. Even if it wasn't officially part of it, it was along the same lines of destablizing what had up to that point been a reasonably stable arrangement that didn't require that Wall or most of the complex stuff that came after the destabilization.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Umm, no. I said that it's undeniable that the gods are gods in FR.

Which is irrelevant because when I said the gods are mortal, I was quoting dire bare. And your quote saying that gods die doesn't change that. You can't say "gods are above mortals" if gods can die. Gods are a subset of mortals if that is the case. Powerful mortals, to be sure, but still mortals.

I guess I don't quite understand how simply removing the Wall and Fugue Plane fixes any of the difficulties. Simply letting the souls travel unimpeded to the outer Planes basically kills off the gods.

This is rubbish. The gods are present and powerful beyond any non-god in the realms. If the earth can have nations worship people who are merely human rulers, and D&D realms of all kinds have various cultist groups worshiping all kinds of things, then the realms deities should be capable of inspiring much more than that.

 

[sunshadow21]

This is rubbish. The gods are present and powerful beyond any non-god in the realms. If the earth can have nations worship people who are merely human rulers, and D&D realms of all kinds have various cultist groups worshiping all kinds of things, then the realms deities should be capable of inspiring much more than that.

And yet, in all of the official literature, they can't seem to do so on a scale that allows them to transcend the need for the Fugue Plane and the Wall. You can certainly give them that level of power in a home game, but it doesn't offically exist. Doing so without being prepared to change other aspects of the FR lore is going to be tricky, though. If the gods are truly that powerful, why did they allow Ao to banish them and cause the Time of Troubles? Your difficulty doesn't seem to be with the Wall, but with how the gods have been treated officially in general. Trying to deal with the Wall while not addressing larger concerns about the gods, their power, and their relationship with both their mortal followers and the other gods is likely not going to get you very far; the Wall and the Fugue Plane are but a symptom of a much larger issue people seem to be having with the Realms in general, and have had to some degree since it first supplanted Greyhawk. I don't personally care for the world myself, but it does a well enough job for what it is designed to do; unfortunately for many on this thread, true internal consistency is not one of it's strengths, and never has been. The Wall and the official treatment of the gods is remarkably more consistent than some of the other parts of the world; the problem is that officially they simply are not as powerful as many on this thread want to make them. They argue like petty children, they have the power of cosmic petty children, which is to say, surprisingly little for their status and role; the fact that they are stronger than mortals means little when they don't stack up well against most of their peers throughout the multiverse.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

And one is the Wall pre-dating the ToT
I'll have to look it up. I think I recall the wall being listed as one of the many punishments that could await a false.

False are not to be put in the Wall. (The Time Cyric did so if I recall was when Cryic was still God of the Dead and was doing whatever the hell he wanted) Wall is supposed to be only for the Faithless.

False get a lot of punishments. The worst as far as I can tell is being turned into a Larva and thrown to Hades.