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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arkhandus" data-source="post: 3748819" data-attributes="member: 13966">And meanwhile, every soul that goes to the Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia becomes a Lantern Archon, who serves the greater good for some millenia while learning to perfect itself and develop into more powerful Archons, ascending the layers until they reach the peak of Mount Celestia and enter some unknown fate, but supposedly becoming one with the cosmic force of Lawful Good or realizing some ultimate truth or somesuch.  It may take them countless millenia to achieve that level of perfection, but it happens.The vast majority of demons and devils, except for the extremely rare handful that eventually become Archdukes or Demon Princes, just suffer and pass on their suffering to lesser fiends and mortals, for all eternity.The neutrals just continue toiling away on whatever neutral plane they wind up on.  Or they get devoured by raw chaos (I assume), if they wind up on Limbo, anyhoo.  They don't suffer.  They aren't rewarded.  They don't experience any happiness, generally.  They just exist.  Until their Outer Plane absorbs them or someone converts them into some kind of special outsider.Even in real-world mythologies and religions there tends to be someplace where the not-virtuous-enough and not-vile-enough dead souls go.  Purgatory, Hades, Helgard, etc.Also, evil people are sometimes evil specifically because they enjoy doing the things that other, more ethical people, say is evil.  Fiends in D&D may go around commiting evil acts, but don't forget that they're mostly active in their own planes (the Abyss, the Nine Hells, the Gray Waste, etc.).  That means that most of the time, the only other things for them to inflict evil on are each other.So they generally abuse the fellow fiends that are beneath them in the hierarchy (which was worked out by their peers viciously battling one another and backstabbing one another until someone came out on top and declared themselves a Demon Prince or Archduke or whatever).  All but the most powerful of fiends (like Orcus) have to endure torture for eons at the hands of their fellow rat-bastards.  And even those powerful ones have most likely suffered hundreds, thousands, or millions of years being tortured by other fiends before they struggled their way to the top.At which point their suffering is mostly ended, but then they're just much more prominant targets for other fiends who want to try and usurp their position (by destroying them).  And of course, targets for mortals and celestials and such who go into the Lower Planes specifically trying to eliminate a major fiendish threat.  So they may still eventually get what's coming to them, after their temporary reprieve as a Demon Prince/Archduke/Oinoloth/whatever.NOW, granted, there is no grand-high-judge-and-punisher of evil souls in D&D, but there's still the fact that evil souls wind up on the Lower Planes despite however much they may have tried to weasel their way into being trusted and liked by decent folk before their demise.  We don't know what causes them to go to those planes; we don't know if they formed as a result of evil mortal souls, or vice versa, or something else.We don't know, but the fact that life is so brutal on the Lower Planes and so very much, amazingly, profoundly nicer on the Upper Planes is probably a sign that something, somewhere, may be orchestrating it, or may have arranged it at the beginning to work that way.Goodly souls will inevitably be rewarded on the Upper Planes and enjoy the company of other nice folks and benevolent gods on the Upper Planes.  They will inevitably become part of the raw essence of Good on one of those planes, or just spend eternity in the presence of their patron deity.Evil souls.....well, mostly end up as fiends and go through eons of both suffering torture and inflicting torture, and one in a hundred thousand million billion trillion just might, maybe, just possibly, manage to be so devious and vicious and unspeakably evil as to struggle their way to the rank of an archfiend after a few eons, and then get at least a temporary reprieve.  But the archfiends tend to be rather brutally effective at beating down or destroying anyone who even seems like they might be beginning to claw their way up to usurping that position.</blockquote>

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