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

[Hussar]

/snip




Sure things change when new material is published, but nothing moves. No matter how many games you play, the "official" state of the world is exactly like it was before. Arguing what can or can't happen in the Realms based purely on published material is ridiculous, because by that standard the only thing that can ever happen in the Realms is whatever gets published. It's sterile and dead.

The problem is, I don't play in your game and you don't play in mine. What happens in your game stays in your game. And, no one is ever argued differently.

However, you also don't get to apply what happens in your game to the baseline presented in the books. Since the discussion here is based on what's actually presented in the setting, not what is presented in someone's home game, you're punching at shadows.

For example, I say that you cannot move the Fugue plane. Nothing will move it. Now, in my home game, that would be 100% true. It's my game after all and whatever I can get my players on board with goes. Heck, I could say that gods cannot be killed. Again, my game, my rules. However, since you don't play in my game, none of that actually applies. In FR canon, gods can and have been killed (albeit with varying degrees of "killed" ). Arguing that they can never be killed specifically violates canon which clearly states that they can be.

It's not about being right or wrong. It's about discussing what actually is true in the setting. Not what's true around a specific table. According to FR canon, killing Kelemvor would have zero effect on the Fugue Plane. AFAIK, there are no existing artifacts or spells that could actually move a plane of existence. Not that you couldn't add one of course. I played in a very excellent Planescape game where metaphysical chains were being gated in from the Abyss to drag a portion of another plane down into the Abyss. Cool. Very, very cool idea.

But, completely non-canon.

Since the whole point of this little discussion is about why the Wall of the Faithless exists in FR, we have to justify its existence using canon. If we go beyond canon, then, any reason at all can be used. The Wall exists because Ao says it does. End of discussion. However, that argument isn't based on any existing canon and I'm basically just making stuff up. Perfectly acceptable in a home game, but, rather irrelevant for the purposes of this conversation.

According to FR canon lore, the Wall exists. As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather come up for reasons why that is, rather than try to argue that it shouldn't exist at all. Are there reasonable reasons for its existence? Again, as far as I'm concerned, yes, there is. It's believable, it's consistent and it adds a unique twist to Forgotten Realms that doesn't exist in other settings. Exactly what setting lore should do. If I wanted to use the baseline D&D afterlife in FR, I certainly could, but, to me, that waters down FR. Makes FR less unique and takes away from the feel of FR. FR with the Wall presents a setting where faith in something is very important. Doesn't matter what you have faith in, just that you have faith in something.

There's lots of settings where that isn't true. A character in Greyhawk that has no faith and denies the gods, AFAIK, goes to whatever alignment plane he's supposed to go after death. A character in Mystara can actually ascend to godhood, but, the afterlife is generally not terribly well detailed. A thief in Mystara can believe whatever he or she likes and it really makes little difference. The faith of a character in Ravenloft is completely unimportant. I don't recall Ravenloft even having an afterlife although I could certainly be wrong. It makes no sense for a character to have faith in a higher power or pantheon in Dark Sun. Why would they? There are no gods, everyone dies and goes to the Grey. Good, bad, indifferent, it doesn't matter.

The Wall and the Fugue Plane set FR apart from other settings. Which, IMNSHO, is precisely what canon elements should do.

 

[Saeviomagy]

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.

My assumption on your meaning was that a lack of fugue plane and wall would cause the gods to cease to exist due to lack of worship, which I don't think is true even if you assume that all information about the afterlife is posted on billboards scattered around Faerun, and the gods continue being jerks to their own worshippers.

I think you are saying that you've actually got some other rationale for why the lack of fugue plane and wall would cause them to be destroyed. I don't think that's anything beyond conjecture though.

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?

AO is about as consistently written as the hulk. On the one hand he's a god of gods, and he doesn't like people being aware of him. On the other hand it's apparently a commonly known legend that he created shar and selune.
It's just a side result of being a prime target for writers along with an unquantified level of power.

Your difficulty doesn't seem to be with the Wall, but with how the gods have been treated officially in general.

No, my difficulty is with the moral fallout from the existence of the wall.

Incidentally, participating in this thread is actually helping me understand a lot more about the realms lore surrounding it. Which is good because it's giving me some great campaign-long plotlines.

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.

I don't think the issue with the wall is anything about power at all. It WAS put up by a greater god. It WAS taken out of service by a different greater god in the same role, and now it's back up again. It seems to be well within the power of the god of death to do whatever he feels like with it, because they regularly do so.

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.

I think it's hard to conclusively say that the FR gods are without power compared with gods of other settings. Other gods either can't or won't directly interfere with the world most of the time, while the FR gods seem free to. Other gods can't/don't do things like selectively deny magic to arcane casters at whim or alter the afterlife.

 

[Celtavian]

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.

The idea being represented in the FR is more one of sinning or doing something the gods don't allow. That is quite a common idea even in polytheism.

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.

I'm aware of this. That's why I admit faithlessness maybe isn't the best word. Offending the gods was a very real idea in polytheism and it certainly didn't have a great deal to do with what modern people might consider good and evil.

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

And if the lamps says, "You will choose one of us to worship or you will end up on this wall." The person doesn't argue with the lamp. He does it. Let's say you appeared in the FR and started arguing this concept, the common man would think you were nuts and tell you, "You better pick a god to live with buddy or you're going to end up screwed."

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.

They all have faith in the gods in polytheism. It wasn't even a question. They sacrificed because the gods told them to without asking the question, "Is this good?". It was good because the gods said it was good. You are applying a modern idea of being allowed to not choose a god as in not follow the rules which the FR deities consider faithless. It is no different than failing to sacrifice and ending up in the mouth of a monster having your soul destroyed because you didn't pass the test of the feather.

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.

How is this different in the FR? Don't choose a deity, end up on the wall. How is that concept different? Your soul is still judged. You can still be judged false for not following your deities rules. This is the agreement and lesson of the gods. If you lived in ancient Egypt and the gods said choose one of us to follow or this happens, they would do it, not argue whether it was good or evil. To use your analogy, the lamp said this is how it works and you do it or the lamp is angry.

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.

And this is the afterlife model of the FR. The penalty for not choosing a patron deity is you go to the wall of the faithless. How is that different than doing something that makes you fail the feather test or offends the gods and getting cast into an unpleasant afterlife? You've read Greek myth. You could be the nicest person in the world and say one thing that offends Aphrodite, boom, you're a gorgon. You could live a great life in the Viking world helping people, but die by drowning and end up in Hel's afterlife.

What the gods manage in the real world is irrelevant to their afterlife requirements. You still sacrifice to the appropriate god to get something like good crops. Good crops might happen anyway. But if you want to have an afterlife not on a wall, you pick a patron.

This fits fine with the FR because they are not a united pantheon like the Egyptians or Greeks. They area very divided pantheon, even the gods of good, that require individual worship. Why does this idea of a punishment for not choosing a patron deity in a pantheon system like FR cause you such a problem? I cannot think of a single reason other than it does not suit your idea of goodness. Then again I doubt the Greek or Egyptian idea of goodness would have suited you either. It wouldn't have mattered to them because if the Egyptian or Greek gods decided it was so, you would have no say in the matter.

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)

Yes. Uniformly unpleasant regardless of how "good" you were. Why is the FR Wall of the Faithless not similar? Why is the requirement to choose a patron deity in a pantheon system like FR not a good way to mirror how their system works? They are not a unified pantheon. Polytheism had punishments where good and evil were decided by the gods. So you want the FR to somehow come up with a single idea of good and then have the gods adhere to it in essence changing the pact they have right now. You basically want them to change the rules.

Don't sell me on this idea that the Wall of the Faithless is any different than the feather test which could well include not paying proper respect to the gods (as a whole) as part of this test and ending up eaten by a monster for failure.

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.

This is not how the FR works. You go The Fugue Plane regardless of alignment. There are you judged by Kelemvor. Only once you have been judged are you sent somewhere else. You can petition your deity to take you in.

But then there's this Wall...

You are too caught up in what the word "faithlessness" means rather than the entire concept of what the wall is for. It is the rules of the afterlife in the FR. No different than the idea of the Egyptian feather. The rules are clear. You know what you must do.

You keep bringing up that polytheism doesn't have faithlessness, which is true only to the degree that people wouldn't even contemplate this idea. They definitely have punishments for breaking the rules often referred to as sin or evil. Just as they have an idea of goodness or purity. It isn't solely a modern idea. If you break the rules even if you wouldn't judge them as good, then you might end up in a bad place. For example, let's say you failed to serve your master correctly in ancient Egypt. Your soul is weighed and you are judged a disobedient slave even though you have been extraordinarily good feeding other hungry slaves and doing right by your family, thus you are cast into the mouth of a monster to be eaten. Would you be offended by that and start say rebelling against the Egyptian gods so that you would end up eaten as well? Or would you be a more obedient slave?

The Wall of the Faithless is the same concept. It is considered wrong behavior to not pick a patron deity. You receive a punishment for it. Why? Because the pantheon isn't unified. This is the system they use to manage the afterlife because they don't generally have planes of a particular alignment that are protected without a deity. If you go hang on a Neutral Good plane in the FR afterlife without the protection of a god and his servants, then a group of demons can come grab you up.

Even in some forms of polytheism the afterworld was filled with monstrous creatures that if you didn't have the protection of the gods, they would eat you. Or other unpleasant things would happen if the gods didn't manage the dead.

How is this different conceptually as far as the general idea of it in the FR? There is a punishment for failing to pick a patron deity due to the structure of the plane. How is this different than say considering it an evil act not to properly serve your master as a slave? Or considering it evil to not have paid proper sacrifices to the gods? These were definitely sins in ancient polytheism that could get you sent to the wrong area if you failed to follow them. They were in essence considered sinful or evil acts.

It is not enough to just be good, you must be good or righteous in the way the gods require (or the one god in the Egyptian myth from whom the feather comes) to have a pleasant afterlife.

 

[Chaosmancer]

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.
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

Sorry, I wasn't specific. I'm aware the Last Wall is homebrewed. I was referring to learning about the Wall of the Faithless period, as I had never heard about it before. I'm glad I learned about it because it inspired ideas like the Last Wall which will benefit my homebrew.

 

[Celtavian]

I'm a Banana,

I have more time to write now. So let me see if I'm getting you right and you're understanding me.

I like that the FR has a very defined afterlife. I believe their system using a single plane to capture all souls and then having an impartial god judge whether they have properly followed their deity's rules to be interesting and increase verisimilitude. The FR is not a traditional Greek or Egyptian polytheistic pantheon system. It is a particular version of polytheism created for the FR that allows a very widespread pantheon of deities with very little association to manage the afterlife. It has very clear rules like having to choose a patron deity and prove to that patron deity you have been a worthy follower to enter their realm under their protection after death. It has a very clear system for dealing with False souls that fail to live up to their deity's rules. It has a very clear system for those that choose to not swear faith to a patron deity and end up on the Wall of the Faithless. It is all clearly spelled out. The reason I think it mirrors real world ancient religions is not because it perfectly matches ancient polytheism, but because it matches the concepts in ancient polytheism.

To me you seem to be attempting institute this idea that goodness exists outside the purview of what the gods deem good. I don't see that in ancient polytheism. Virtuous behavior could be anything from feeding the hungry or doing noble deeds to properly serving your king or properly sacrificing to the gods or donating to a temple. Failure to do either could cause you to end up in the bad place or suffering the bad fate. Yet I doubt most would consider it necessary to sacrifice to the gods to be good, yet the gods consider this good behavior and reward and punish those that fail to engage in the behavior. This is not at all solely a modern concept of faith. This has dated back thousands of years and is cross cultural whether you are citing ancient Judaism or the ancient Babylonians.

To me, and correct me if I am wrong, you are looking for a way to circumvent the gods. You want to be able to be good, have a pleasant afterlife, without bothering to worship or pay proper respect to the gods. This most definitely is not a part of ancient polytheism. Insulting or disregarding the gods would bring down divine retribution on you no matter how good you are. If you went out and did good deeds and said, "I do these because I wish to be good. I care not what the gods think." This type of behavior would bring immense disfavor and likely some kind of punishment down upon you because as you said, the gods are like gravity, denying and thus insulting them is like jumping off a cliff and denying that you will fall.

I would find a game where you could as you seem to want to do deny the gods their worship unrealistic. It would make the gods impotent and pointless. That seems to be what you're pushing for in the FR given the way that pantheon is built. I see the Wall of the Faithless as an important part of ensuring worship for a very divided pantheon engaged in spiritual warfare on the planes. It would take away a lot of from the FR to have a generic idea of goodness that allowed PCs to circumvent the gods.

If you're not trying to circumvent having to worship the gods, then I guess I've misjudged what you're trying to do here. Even if they somehow removed the Wall of the Faithless, I would absolutely want something in place that ensured it was considered sinful and wrong to not give proper worship to the gods even if it was general widespread worship to the deities of good. For example, if you wanted to make a single unified paradise ruled by the gods of good where they had a system in place to determine if you were truly good, I'd be ok with that. That would set up the pantheons by alignment and make judgment a matter of acting in line with your alignment rather than a specific deity's rules. Though goodness would still require that you show proper respect for the gods that protect and nurture goodness in the world.

it is important that a D&D world incorporating gods ensure that the gods are potent and important. The way you do that is by punishing those that fail to acknowledge them in some manner. The Greek method was too heavy-handed for D&D. If a DM suddenly turned some upstart wizard into a statue because he claimed he was as strong as a god, that wouldn't fly too well with the player. Having the gods walking about visiting people's houses or showing up in battle would probably be too heavy handed as well. So the best method for D&D is definitely some consequence in the afterlife like The Wall of the Faithless or some kind of consignment to Hell or The Abyss or perhaps a purgatory-type place where the false followers or those with less serious transgressions can work off their debt. I definitely don't want some system that makes the gods inconsequential. If that ever happens, D&D might as well throw out deities.

 

[Hussar]

Two things, in my mind, separate FR afterlife from baseline D&D. The first is, there really is no notion of punishment/reward for the souls in the afterlife. If someone is a serial killer in life but not devoted to Bhaal, after he dies, he cools his heels in the Fugue Plane for a while before being sent on to Bhaal's plane. After all, the Lord of Murder would claim this soul, obviously. But, this soul isn't being punished for being a serial killer. I don't imagine Bhaal's afterlife would be puppies and rainbows, but, why would Bhaal punish this soul? This soul is doing exactly what Bhaal wants. This soul will likely be rewarded by Bhaal, precisely for being evil.

In standard D&D, that soul would go to the Abyss and be turned into a Larva and eventually become a demon to torment others and fight against the gods over souls. In FR, that soul is picked up by Team Bhaal, regardless of alignment, and is not particularly punished in any way. That soul is going to the afterlife best suited for that soul, not being denied in any meaningful way.

It goes even further than that. Which brings up my second point. Morality has very little to do with the afterlife in FR. Take another thought experiment. Two master craftsmen, one, a LG toy maker who gives cunning toys to children and orphans and is kind and good in every way. The second makes that psycho from those awful Saw movies look like an amateur. This guy creates horrible machines for torturing and killing puppies on a mass scale. He's as CE as it comes. As fate would have it, they both die on the same day.

And, thus, they face Kelemvor at the same time. Despite being completely opposite alignments and performing very, very different acts while mortal, Kelemvor judges them both exactly the same, and poof, off to Gond they both go. After all, Gond is a neutral god, his worshippers can be any alignment and he is the god of craftsmen and both these guys were genius craftsmen. Now, I imaging that Gond's afterlife might be somewhat sectioned off and keep these two apart, but, maybe not. Maybe they all become amoral in his realm. I dunno, nor do I care. The point is, both of them, despite not considering Gond as their patron gods, go to exactly the same afterlife.

Now, take it a step further. Imagine one of them actively denied the gods. He claimed that his genius was 100% of his own, the gods had nothing to do with it and furthermore, his genius is prof that the gods aren't really gods, but just fancy spirits who interfere too damn much. In FR, this guy is going to the Wall.

Does it matter which one? Would any of the gods actually care which one goes to the Wall? Considering that none of the gods in FR are particularly gods of alignment, but rather are typically gods OF something, why would it make the slightest difference what alignment the Faithless one was. He denied the gods. Despite all the evidence around him, he insisted that the gods weren't really gods. He denied that his abilities had any divine inspiration whatsoever. At that point, what difference does it make what alignment he is?

 

[steenan]

I really like the Wall of the Faithless. It is something that sets Forgotten Realms apart from other settings and shows how it works. It is very non-generic and flavorful.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how munch non-canonical is the way I see it. I have never considered it a punishment, just a solution to a logistic problem, designed by a lawful neutral deity.

Going to afterlife is not something a soul does by itself. Everybody who dies is stuck in the Kelemvor's plane, unless a deity comes to collect them. If you've been a dedicated follower, then your patron takes you. If not, there is nobody with any interest in taking care of you. And if you don't sell yourself to the devils, Kelemvor needs to do something with you. Turning you into a brick is a quick and simple solution.

 

[Eubani]

People need to remember also that after the Time of troubles deific power was largely dependent upon the number of worshipers and the strength of their faith. Also any stray souls tended to be snapped up by devils and demons. These two things in and of themselves make it important that as many souls as possible are made to worship them.

 

[FuelDrop]

I am going to quickly chip in and say that the WotF is, to my mind, pretty much a cosmic scale protection racket.

"Nice soul you've got there. Shame if anything happened to it..."

I also remember a bit of lore that says at one point the wall was abolished only to be reinstated by the demand of all the gods when people began to stop worshiping them. It would seem to me that a better solution would be, I don't know, to actually be worth worshiping? I mean it can't be that hard if the biblical god can do it without putting in a public appearance for thousands of years, having his holy book be a jumbled mess of contradictions, not granting his worshipers any supernatural powers, and possibly not even existing at all (jury's still out).

If he can get a massive following, how hard can it be when you can prove you exist and actively perform miracles through your priests on a daily basis?!?

Combine this with the stuff like the god of 'innovation' making stuff like gunpowder not work, enforcing medieval stasis for longer than it took us to go from barbarian tribes to the space shuttle, and I feel there is only one conclusion to be drawn about the FR pantheon:

They're a pack of bullies unworthy of even respect, let alone worship.
Of course my characters mostly don't see things that way. It requires an external perspective.

 

[Mirtek]

.In standard D&D, that soul would go to the Abyss and be turned into a Larva and eventually become a demon to torment others and fight against the gods over souls. In FR, that soul is picked up by Team Bhaal, regardless of alignment, and is not particularly punished in any way. That soul is going to the afterlife best suited for that soul, not being denied in any meaningful way.

In standard D&D if that guy was worshipper of Erythnul or Nerul it would also be picked by them and not go to the abyss regardless if alignmemt

And, thus, they face Kelemvor at the same time.

actually if both are gondians they don't face Kelemvor. The faithful are already collected on the open fugue plane and don't have to go to the city of the dead