A Question about the Hells (and similar places)

[Theron_the_slim]

Hi people of the Internet,

I come to you with a somewhat small dilemma that turns out to be a more than slight annoyance in my world building as a DM (in the best way by the way, since I think searching answers for this makes for better rounded NPC´s, why I thought of getting a little bit help in the first place) .

(Sidenote: I basiclly run a forgotten realmish setting, with societies mostly a bit less developed than the Forgotten Realms, so more early middle ages, but I think my Question is also applicable to those setting I think, if not more so)

Okay, my Question: How do smart, evil, (non spellcasting) people justify their actions, if they know the hells exist?

I get it for people who maybe don´t know anything about it, some dude in a remote village who never saw a cleric cast a spell and really wants his neighbours fancy hat (so yeah, murdertime).
I somewhat get it for powerful spellcasters (or those who plan to become one), since they at least have a potential path to immortality and therefor can somewhat realisticly reason with them self that they don´t have to face those consequences after death. (becoming a Lich as the most obvious one)


But let´s say we have some dude in the middle to upper management of a thieves guild or even some lord really abusing his people. You know, or anyone that isn´t a stupid brute, but who acts deeply immoral for his personal gain and a more luxurious lifestyle (or pretty much anyone whos evil deeds do not include preventing the afterlife-punishment for those evil deeds and is smart/informed enough to consider the consequences of their actions).


Well that is pretty much the lense through I view almost all of my villains while building them.

I honestly never found anything close to a general rule why somebody would act like this, some logical, informed counterargument for (in this world) certain and maybe eternal damnation. If you find one, you can call me insanely impressed and for bureaucracy´s I also ask this question, even if I don´t really expect an answer.

What I found are some personal exceptions and setting based loopholes I like to employ. For me those are often a great way to build a new NPC or even a group of NPC´s according to those princibles, and those are the answers I am most interested in, since I found a few, but there surely are much more to be found.

I only would make up 3 general rules for potential answers.

1. No NPC with indifference to his fate (meaning no NPC who just wants something more than he would like to prevent his eternal suffering, this Includes NPC´s that act irrational because of there emotions etc ... it´s not that those are by default bad or something, but those are more dodging the question than answering it)
2. No Lich or servant of a dark god Situation Situation, so nobody who is (maybe even rightfully) convinced to don´t face hellish consequences.
3. No NPC´s that have been lied to in that matter (so nobody that thinks the hells aren´t a thing, nobody that thinks if he does x he won´t go to the lower planes)


So yeah, I am very curious what this comes up in this discussion, until then, bye.

[Fuzzy Logic]

Here is one idea of how such a person could rationalise acting in an evil way if they knew the bells existed and they would suffer forever upon death:
" So hell exists, and everyone evil ends up there. I want to do a lot of the things that would put me in hell, according to the rules I know to exist, this makes me Evil, with a capital E. I know Evil souls end up in hell, so I'm going there anyway, regardless of what I do. Therefore, I may as well murder/steal etc while I'm here, to get what I want. I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't, so I may as well enjoy the bit I get control over."

Another could be the idea of becoming a devil eventually when you do die. "Yeah it will suck while I'm a lemure, but eventually I'll be a pit fiend."

[Eldan]

Going strictly by standard D&D cosmology: many even evil people dont' end up in hell. If you dilligently worship a god, almost any god, you end up in their domain. And many evil gods don't punish their followers. So what your neutral evil middle management thief does is find a god who looks more or less benevolently on his type and sacrifices 20% of his profits to that god in exchange for a more pleasant afterlife.

More pragmatic people of the lawful evil bent may also think that Hell is cosmologically important: Hell exists to fight the Abyss, to prevent destructive chaos from swallowing the cosmos.

[Sorinth]

As mentioned above you don't necessarily go to Hell, you are just as likely to end up in the domain of some God.

However you don't have to consider fantasy, I mean there are plenty of people on Earth who 100% believed in Heaven/Hell and still did/do evil things. It's very easy for people to fool themselves into justifying their actions.

But in terms of world-building one option is to have some churches sell indulgences. So that middle management evil guy has setup a will where he donates 1000gp to church X, and in return he gets a comfy spot in one of the outer planes. Even good aligned diety's/churches would potentially consider such arrangements if they felt the money helped advance the church/gods aims.

Which actually opens up a great villain concept, a charlatan priests who sells fake indulgences.

[Millstone85]

This is a touchy subject, but it could be argued that the Nine Hells don't really do "damnation".

Lawful evil creatures, that (a) did not worship a dark god and (b) did not sell their soul to a devil, take a dive into the River Styx, where they are stripped of all memory and identity. Their soul then emerges from the Styx as a lemure, one of the lowest forms of devil, but it is not clear in what measure, if at all, the lemure can still be considered to be the person who died.

Meanwhile, and to paraphrase Paradise Lost, contracted souls might reason that they would rather rule in Baator than serve on Mount Celestia. Yes, they will be slaves at first, but the infernal ladder is there to be climbed.

[Anymage]

The best answer I've seen for this is that, in the D&D cosmology, hell isn't a place you get sent as punishment. The outer planes are a giant sorting system where you end up with other people with your broad moral and ethical outlook. (Broadly. Countless threads will attest to the fact that D&D alignment is a mess, but if we imagine that it works then the outer planes do too.)

If pre-growth Belkar were to die, he wouldn't get poked by pitchforks because he was being punished at the decree of some god. Rather, he'd be in a place where everybody else was as much of a miserable sadist as he was. Pre-growth B would probably think that he'd be good at clawing his way to the top of the heap and that he'd have a good amount of clout as the sexy shoeless god of war. How far up the chain he'd be able to stab before he hit someone bigger and harder than him in reality would remain to be seen. Similarly, a dickensian bureaucrat-villain would find himself in a place where everybody thought that anything goes so long as it can be legally justified, and how far his cleverness and legal expertise could actually carry him before he became someone else's sucker would remain to be seen.

So all it would take to give in to evil would be an overestimation of how well you'd do in a true dog-eat-dog world, and lots of people overestimate themselves like that. Throw in the occasional cultist who's sure that their evil god will have someplace nice in its domain for true believers, and you shouldn't want for villains.

[Imbalance]

"A tyrant will always find justification for his tyranny."
~ Aesop's Fables