The Afterlife, and redemption, in D&D and other fantasy

[hamishspence]

First: this is a contentious issue. Please treat it as a "Play" topic rather than a "real life" topic: I don't want big morality arguments over it. Thank you.

How do you think afterlife issues should be done: what redemption opportunities should be allowed, which fantasy novels do it best, and what are the advantages or disadvantages of the Forgotten Realms system over the Greyhawk one?

From what I can see, there is very little chance for bad guys to change to good guys after death. Fiendish Codex II introduces the best opportunity: the Hellbred concept: "You are reincarnated to give you one last chance"

Terry Pratchett and Anne Rice both have a limited redemption concept: In Pratchett's Discworld one can be reincarnated, after repentance. In Anne Rice's "Memnoch The Devil" Hell is purgatorial, and one can progress to heaven once one's soul is matured through experience and understanding.

By contrast, in D&D, Hell makes bad guys into fiends, the Abyss also does, or sometimes bad guys are obliterated.
In the Realms, souls spend eternity with their god, or in the City of Judgement.
In the City of Judgement, False souls serve a apparently eternal sentence of punishment, and Faithless souls serve a painful, eventually lethal sentence.
In the Realms novel "Crucible: the Trial of Cyric the Mad" we see how and why Kelemvor instituted this system. There is a gleam of hope in the sentence of one villain, made to serve time as a rat "As long as any coin you ever gave in deceit is counted as money anywhere in Faerun, you will wander the streets of my city in that form" strongly implying the sentence is finite.

None of these systems seems designed to make bad guys better. I'd say the introduction of the Hellbred is a very good way to rectify this problem.

 

[Voadam]

The afterlife in standard D&D is not designed to redeem souls. Good souls go to heaven, bad souls go to hell. It is kept a little vague but usually you get turned into an outsider on the appropriate plane for your alignment. As an outsider you basically turn into an elemental of your alignment as a new outsider. You can theoretically change and there are fallen angels and risen demons, but they are incredibly rare.

So the default is that souls turn into outsiders and the wars of good and evil continue with eternal morality and ethics and station being determined to a large part on the mortal plane during mortal life.

 

[Shemeska]

I don't particularly care for the Hellbred to be honest. It seems too much in the vein of something better used in a cosmology in which a monolithic Good vs Evil dichotomy exists, something that doesn't truly exist in D&D's cosmology. The idea of redemption... the word itself has trappings of an objective, overwhelming good which is also a bit of a wierd fit for D&D, since evil souls aren't going to the lower planes for punishment or retribution for sins, they're going there to wallow in what their souls most resemble.

But.

That said, while in the general case the idea seems cliche to me, the potential still exists for evil souls to change from what they are. Mortal souls in the lower planes can evolve into different things either through their own action (the transition of larvae into Hordelings) or through outside action (the transformation into lemures in Baator), and they can go in directions at odds with where they end up. Mortal souls don't arrive anywhere in the planes in a purified form. Any random petitioner is still cluttered with flaws and bits of conflicting metaphysical essence at odds with the majority parts that drew them to whatever plane they're on. It's possible for will or circumstance to tip the scales one way or the other, even if dramatically different ways.

We have examples of fallen archons, fallen eladrin, etc alongside examples of risen baatezu and even risen yugoloths. If those living manifestations of alignments can change their colors, so to speak, that opens the door for petitioners to conceivably change. But keep in mind that most petitioners don't have many, or any, memories of their mortal life to work with. So a faint bit of regret might be there, but not perhaps the reason why a particular petitioner sitting on a sandbar in the acid shallows of Porphatys feels that way. Such change, call it redemption if you want, is going to be rare as all heck.

And of course souls/petitioners that worship specific gods and are claimed by members of a particular pantheon may be subject to specific rules that on a local level trump the overwhelming situation in the universe of a whole. For example there's the particular brand of soul-hoarding fascism happily embraced by the Torillian pantheon. If you fail to worship them, or do so falsely, you do experience punishment regardless of alignment, because the gods on that world don't want their monopoly threatened. To such souls the fiends from a certain point of view offer a harsh brand of freedom from Kelemvor's idealistic slavery of mortals that didn't dance to his deific fellows' tune. Redemption exists under the laws of the Faerunian gods, but it only will happen by their rules, under their system. But the redemption of Torillian souls has more to do with being claimed by one god versus another rather than a personal change involving their own essence, their own inner being, by their own will and determination.

 

[Wolfwood2]

I like Eberron.

Everybody's souls go to the same place, a dull grey plane where all the memories and emotions are slowly leached out until the soul completely fades away. How good or evil (or chaotic or lawful) you were in life has absolutely no effect on the afterlife.

Now of course there are true believers who think that in fact there's something else beyond that endless grey plane... but that's a matter of faith, not fact.

 

[nute]

I like Eberron's idea, with the plane of Dolurrh being the repository for dead souls. As long as a soul remains there, it can be accessed by spells such as speak with dead, true resurrection, etc. After it's faded and gone to "wherever they go", then that soul is out of reach of those spells, as far as we know. Since very few people in Eberron have ever reached the level to cast those kind of spells.

 

[werk]

I like Eberron.

Everybody's souls go to the same place, a dull grey plane where all the memories and emotions are slowly leached out until the soul completely fades away.

Yeah, that's called the grey wastes. Someone signed a very lucrative contract way back in early Eberron, but they are too dumb there to figure out the real cosmology and have the buyers' remorse.

I like the ideas about redemtion. How would a good soul that goes to heaven get a second chance to do evil? ...in the intrest of balance and all that.

 

[Shemeska]

How would a good soul that goes to heaven get a second chance to do evil? ...in the intrest of balance and all that.

Baalzebul the Lord of the 7th is the epitome of that, being a fallen archon and all, which means he was a mortal petitioner at some point since every archon that has ever existed originally spawned from a mortal soul.

I would expect that good petitioners might turn evil only if exposed to influences outside of their plane, or if they expanded their knowledge base to something broader than what they initially retained after their soul passed through the Astral. But certainly there's lots of room for stranger circumstances (getting memories back, retaining harsh memories from life that gnaw away at them, etc).

 

[Wombat]

The multiplanar aspect of D&D pretty much works against redemption.

If a Good-aligned character dies, that character goes to a Good-plane of some sort ... assuming they were good. But if they acted in an Evil manner, they might go to an Evil place. Conversely, an Evil-aligned character would go to an Evil-plane ... unless they were good? Would that then serve as a punishment for the Evil character? Or a redemption story? Wouldn't going to the Evil-plane be seen as "entering paradise" for an Evil-aligned person? Wouldn't such a venue be the "just reward" for acting in accordance with the dictates of your god(s) and alignment?

If there are actually Evil churched/cults, then they necessarily offer potential rewards in the afterlife to their followers; failure to meet these criteria would then send the souls ... where? To the same Evil-aligned plane, but as Demon/Devil Snax (r)?

Cosmology on this level gets very weird. This is probably why I dropped the whole alignment jag from my games.

 

[Cam Banks]

In Dragonlance, when you die you go join the Progression of Souls and head on out. Just before you pass through the Gate of Souls into the hereafter, of which nothing is known, Chemosh has the right to take your soul and toss it into the Abyss if no god has claimed you. If you align yourself with the principles of one of the other gods, you're set; in leaving, you send the power of that faith back to your deity, strengthening their influence in the world. Those souls who end up in the Abyss are doomed to exist there for eternity unless they can find a means of returning to Krynn, usually as some kind of undead or fiend, although from time to time they'll find redemption of their own and head on back into the Progression of Souls.

Some souls don't pass out of Krynn's universe at all, because their souls haven't learned or grown enough. These souls return, reborn into the world, and go through the cycle again.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[Charwoman Gene]

D&D Cosmologies generally have a norse/greek Afterlife bent. There is also a ridiculous (to me) amount of monotheistic instinct in the church structure. polytheists did not devote themselve to worship of only the god of war.

I prefer to handwave it my self, while putting in some hooks for a semi-judeochristian compatiblity.