FINAL DAYS! -- The Awfully Cheerful Engine on Kickstarter! An action comedy RPG inspired by cheerful tabletop games of the 80s! With a foreword by Sandy 'Ghostbusters' Petersen, and VTT support!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shroompunk Warlord" data-source="post: 8259906" data-attributes="member: 6750908">I feel like there is a conceptual problem of calling different afterlives for different races "discriminatory" when, in D&D terms, beings of different races are very different kinds of beings altogether-- I mean, by all means it is perfectly reasonable to assume that a soul is a soul is a soul in D&D... but it's far from a given, when those races are canonically created differently, at different times, by different gods.I mean, perhaps human souls do go to the halls of their patron deities upon death-- as one assumes-- but maybe elf souls reincarnate endlessly because they cannot do otherwise, because what an elf calls their "soul" is not at all the same thing as a human soul.Maybe different human religions have different afterlives, even; maybe it is the humans of druidic cultures that reincarnate endlessly, while the humans of deific cultures proceed to "the afterlife". These cultures view each other with terrible pity, the latter seeing the former as trapped in the material plane, while the former see the latter as being stolen from the birth cycle.The Great Wheel that's been forcibly inserted into every pre-3.X D&D setting is fine, it is one perfectly okay way to categorize the spiritual elements of your setting... but it's a very specific way of doing things that isn't particularly compatible with any Earthlike religion and is especially poorly suited to worlds that assume multiple (generally correct) religious faiths. This is never more apparent than when trying to reconcile the Great Wheel's concept of alignment planes with the existence of multiple pantheons of gods, and racial pantheons that reside in the domains of their leaders.If you want it to make sense, you're going to have to build it, purposefully, from scratch. And the nature of the different kinds of humanoid souls is a design decision that you would have to make for yourself, purposefully, and build your cosmology around it.</blockquote>

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