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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lackhand" data-source="post: 3748744" data-attributes="member: 36160">I'm not sure I'm willing to grant your point, but if I *were* to grant your point...... what would we tell stories about? It's requisite that the Great Wheel have a place where Things That Go Bump In The Night live, and that it be big, and bad, and terrifying, so that a small band of 4-6 miscreants can Plane Shift in, grab the McGuffin of Orcus, and Shift out.As I understand it, the two ways that the canon Great Wheel could be made palatable to you is to, one, have some clearly potent individual to whom the fiends-and-their-home were anathema, or two, have the planes on which they lived be more clearly dens of pain, suffering, and torment.The problem with that is that this is a game; some degree of contradiction is almost inevitable.Even if I were to agree that the Great Wheel enforced relativism (in the sense that the OP is using it), it would have to enforce relativism in this sense, or else why hadn't the demons lost by the time the adventurers get to adventuring? Why can't they expect paratrooping angels to save them; the ultimate arbiter of goodness to judge on their side?Now, I don't agree that the design does enforce this sense of relativism. Sure, the deck is pretty evenly stacked, for the gamist reasons above, but that doesn't mean both sides are equally justified, equally nice, equally g/Good.Even though a CE soul can wind up a demon prince, and nobody's jabbing it with a pitchfork, we can make two arguments. The wimpier interpretation is that it never necessarily lost that which made it human; it has always and only done what it needed to in order to survive. By the time it makes überdemon, the "soul" is gone, replaced with steaming demonflesh. The memories and personality might survive, but it's eight feet tall, covered in tongues, and wants to do unmentionable things to everything good and pure -- and it can't be reasoned with, or converted, or saved (by the core, anyway.) -- it's a demon through and through; its "reward" was annihilation.Alternatively, the promoted soul never had that basic spark of human decency. In which case, it was always a CE demon-oriented soul; it was a demon on the Prime and a demon in the Abyss. It will never, ever know any sort of heav'nly joy, love, trust, or peace, and we need not inflict a punishment necessarily.Sometimes, the lack of a reward is enough.You're looking for more justification, btw, than you can reasonably expect in any manual (IMHO): that this may not be explicitly in the books is unsurprising, as most people would probably let it go with "the bad things live here" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />This is a great conversation!</blockquote>

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