A different approach on evil afterlife

[Spore]

So I am dabbling in a bit of research on real life religion and their punishing afterlives or evil option for afterlives.

And I have come to the conclusion that the usual D&D logic of evil afterlife only somewhat works. Take Greyhawk. Where does a Chaotic Evil Pelor worshipper go? Aside from the obvious joke we all know, that they will serve as the righthand person of the Burning Hatred Pelor would they truly go to the Abyss? Would they be treated differently than an evil wizard in the service of Demon Lord Abraxas?

For the terms of this argument I am talking about a hypocritical person that does not follow their god's tenets but believe in them fervently (divine casters of said good deities aside). There has to be a "punishment" awaiting them, right? Conversely an evil wizard serving their demonic masters unto death, but failing them, would they also be rewarded? Or is the Abyss largely just a con game by demons to get more souls to fuel their ambitions? Even if this were true, I can simultaneously not believe so MANY people fall for it. Maybe not in a world where we do not know what lies beyond the veil.

But in a world with clerics with planeshift? With rampaging demons in the countryside? With demonic temples, druids who command nature? There must be quite a few who know. Maybe even people who want to stop this "wheel" of suffering? Maybe I am just brewing a very weird cult for my or anyone's game but the fact of polytheistic afterlives and multifacetted alignment planes sounds insane! Yes I realize this is just the generalized backdrop for an epic RPG, and yet I cannot think but wonder how such people would rank.

If a LE lawyer believing in the god of justice is sent to hell and a LN townsguard who "just followed orders" but believed in the LG god of justice and goodness? How do they rank? Are they food for the devils? Do they COMMAND devils? Do you apply BoED/BoVD rules where good souls are worth more for evil purposes? Or are they just punished for their evil deeds?

Would that not make the devils the good guys here?

[tyckspoon]

So I am dabbling in a bit of research on real life religion and their punishing afterlives or evil option for afterlives.

And I have come to the conclusion that the usual D&D logic of evil afterlife only somewhat works. Take Greyhawk. Where does a Chaotic Evil Pelor worshipper go? Aside from the obvious joke we all know, that they will serve as the righthand person of the Burning Hatred Pelor would they truly go to the Abyss? Would they be treated differently than an evil wizard in the service of Demon Lord Abraxas?

For the terms of this argument I am talking about a hypocritical person that does not follow their god's tenets but believe in them fervently (divine casters of said good deities aside). There has to be a "punishment" awaiting them, right? Conversely an evil wizard serving their demonic masters unto death, but failing them, would they also be rewarded? Or is the Abyss largely just a con game by demons to get more souls to fuel their ambitions? Even if this were true, I can simultaneously not believe so MANY people fall for it. Maybe not in a world where we do not know what lies beyond the veil.

But in a world with clerics with planeshift? With rampaging demons in the countryside? With demonic temples, druids who command nature? There must be quite a few who know. Maybe even people who want to stop this "wheel" of suffering? Maybe I am just brewing a very weird cult for my or anyone's game but the fact of polytheistic afterlives and multifacetted alignment planes sounds insane! Yes I realize this is just the generalized backdrop for an epic RPG, and yet I cannot think but wonder how such people would rank.

If a LE lawyer believing in the god of justice is sent to hell and a LN townsguard who "just followed orders" but believed in the LG god of justice and goodness? How do they rank? Are they food for the devils? Do they COMMAND devils? Do you apply BoED/BoVD rules where good souls are worth more for evil purposes? Or are they just punished for their evil deeds?

Would that not make the devils the good guys here?

I think you have a false premise to start, in that a person with such a dramatic alignment difference to the god they profess to 'believe in' cannot truly be a follower of that god - at best they can give lip service to the concepts, but if they attempted to actually live the tenets they profess in any real way, then they wouldn't be of Evil alignment any more. Such an individual would get rejected by whatever cosmological sorting mechanism exists and either sent on their way to the plane that actually best fits their alignment or possibly destroyed by the plane they incorrectly tried to assign themselves to because they are completely antithetical to the philosophy and energies of that plane/divine domain. You can't cheat your soul out of its proper destination by being an evil bastard your entire life and then claiming to be a follower of the God of Good, Light, and Puppies on your deathbed (well, mostly. If you can convince somebody you have legitimately changed and get them to cast an Atonement for you it might work - that's what that spell is for.)

It seems like you're kind of working around asking "why do people still be Evil when the Evil planes/afterlives demonstrably suck", tho? Which is.. well, why do people do anything that is empirically self-destructive and avoidable?

They might..
- be bad at long term thinking. Here and now, being Evil suits their needs and wants.
- They are aware of what actually happens to souls in the planes and don't believe that what happens to the lemure/mane/planar petitioner they will become actually counts as happening to Me, so may as well do what I want while I'm alive.
- They don't actually know how soul placement after death works - especially in a world without mass public communication and mandatory education 'basic facts' about the cosmology of the universe do not necessarily get distributed to every merchant and dirt-farmer.
- They know they go to a place that kinda sucks, but the material plane kinda sucks too unless you're on top, and they're convinced they're going to be on top.

[Ionathus]

Disclaimer: D&D cosmology is never not ridiculous and nothing will ever be set in stone, ever.

I have never thought about it too much for my own campaigns, but if you asked me to just regurgitate my best guess, it would be the following rules:


Mortal souls go to the afterlife associated with their alignment by default. I play Forgotten Realms so it's based off those (Pandemonium, Arcadia, Mt. Celestia, etc.)
If there's an afterlife or a divine power that they prefer, and they are accepted by it, they go there instead.
If they never worshipped a deity, they will either go to their closest-aligned plane or be chosen by a deity that feels the mortal exemplified their tenets.1
Evil gods and Demons/Devils...fight over all the Evil souls, I guess? That part has always been an open question for me, honestly.

That's about as much thought as I've ever put into it.


1. /rant The Wall of the Faithless is an embarrassingly bad bit of DM fiat introduced for the sole reason of forcing players to worship one of the early DMs' "totally cool you guys don't even get it" gods. All lore used to justify it retroactively (e.g. the gods started losing Soul Power, Kelemvor was forced to reinstate it, etc. etc.) is a sloppy wallpaper pasted over that fact.

[icefractal]

This isn't canon, just a take I've been considering for the next time I run a campaign where the afterlife is relevant -

You die, and your soul ends up in the astral sea. A pretty dangerous place, with its own predators, and even if you avoid them the gray emptiness will slowly disintegrate you. Immortal soul? Who the hell told you that? Naked souls are fragile, outside that fortress of flesh and bone you called a body when you had it. Even powerful outsiders are - in some ways - more vulnerable than a random schmuck with a real, material body.

So are you doomed to stay there, slowly disintegrating? No - you've got three options.
First, if you followed a god and kept at least basic devotion to them, you'll feel a magnetic pull you can follow to that god's realm. If you had a late-in-life change of heart and are no longer in said god's favor, you might be refused entry though. For particularly favored champions, the god may send angels to personally escort you there. Life in a god's realm is sort of true immortality, in that your soul will eventually merge into the god rather than dissipate.

Second, there are the shanty towns. Places where a bunch of like-minded souls formed a community. With enough people to impose their will on it, the astral can become less formless in an area, which slows down the soul-ablation, and is protected from most of the astral predators. This is where alignment / ethos comes in - wandering in search of such a place, you'll be drawn to those with similar outlooks. So someone who's helpful and altruistic will show up and have neighbors greet them, explain how the afterlike works, help them get set up. Whereas someone who's a sadistic killer will show up and have the others say "fresh meat!" This isn't true immortality, although you last a lot longer than just wandering alone.

Third, there's the wall. Somebody in the distant past built it, and now it stands as a beacon in the astral sea, easy for anyone to find their way to. The wall is made of numerous small rooms, like a meditation cell at a monastery, and when a soul enters one they'll be protected from the disintegrating effects of the astral as well as any predators. Except now they have to live their afterlife in a small room, able to send messages to the others in the wall but never see anyone face to face. This is theoretically true immortality, but in practice most people get tired of "living" this way and leave back into the astral sea.

Hell is not a god-realm, it's technically just a very well established astral shanty town, run by devils. Nobody is naturally drawn to hell, but devil-contracts will put a hook in your soul that pulls you there on death unless removed somehow. Also, devils will send out raiding parties to collect stray souls, another reason wandering the astral is dangerous. The reason they want souls is to stabilize the astral so they can have a nice solid city, which they accomplish by slavery. They torture souls until said souls are willing to focus entirely on "there is a table here, it has a blue tablecloth and a bowl of fruit on it, the fruit is two apples and an orange" for eternity rather than be tortured again. There are a few non-devil "citizens" of Hell who can just live there as the devils do rather than be the furniture - exclusively people who had something major to offer the devils while alive and made a good deal.

Demons don't give a **** about souls. They come from outside the universe and don't consider anything in it "real", nor do they need soul-energy to survive or to shape the astral. The Abyss isn't something they built, it's the wound in the universe that allowed them to enter.

[Jophiel]

They might..
- be bad at long term thinking. Here and now, being Evil suits their needs and wants.

I'll also add that people are notoriously bad at risk assessment when it comes to short term rewards. The prisons are full of people who figured they'd just find a way out if they got caught (or never considered getting caught in the first place). How many times have you read a story about someone getting arrested or bankrupted and wondered how they thought they were going to avoid that outcome? Or we have the age-old "I'll recant on my deathbed, good enough" philosophy.

Especially if you let just enough high-powered evil dudes become awesome demon commanders, you'll have an army of schmucks convinced that they'll totally be a demon commander when they die and not lemure-ingrediants.


This isn't canon, just a take I've been considering for the next time I run a campaign where the afterlife is relevant

This sounds very familiar to the setting for the old World of Darkness Wraith: the Oblivion TTRPG. If that wasn't part of your inspiration, it might be worth looking into for inspiration should the time ever come.

[Spore]

My point is more about how evil afterlives are not used as a warning and a place of punishment for evil, but rather as a "hey this is my kinda shi(f)t" for evil guys which is entirely weird. Of course there is a power imbalance, but some people wish for that kinda "hell on earth" even in the prime material. And for some people it is enough that others suffer even if they are not the top dogs.

I am more asking about how you would see a world where any good god would have a proper "punishment plane" to send evildoers to so they can repent in the afterlife. Because I can absolutely see Pelor (outside the meme) sending people to the Nine Hells to burn in eternal hellfire for a few millenia so they can see the wrongdoings of their actions. And I can - in an attempt of world building - also see devils contracting the HECK out of Pelor to forfeit any and all souls that are not perfectly purely repentant, effectively making his evil worshippers about 99% powering the Nine Hells.

Because even if they all eventually repent, it is all simple economics. If 100 souls repent each year, but hell gets 1000 sinner souls each year, it is always a net win for the devils.

[Anymage]

Two things to remember are that gods in your average D&D setting are more likely to obviously intervene than we're used to, and that there are multiple churches (and consequently less power bound up in the hands of one monolithic Church). So a hypocrite following Pelor would find themselves cut off from divine access, and if they developed any level of influence some of Pelor's actual faithful would stop by to sort things out. Someone who mistakenly believed that Pelor actually stood for kicking puppies would be much more likely to find the church of puppy-kicking to begin with, and if it was an honest mistake Pelor would be likely to send some sort of signal that the believer was rather off track.

As for why people would choose to be evil? I'm partial to the idea that the lower planes are not set up as a punishment by anybody. (Again, heaven as a reward and hell as a punishment tend to be tied to the idea of one monotheistic god. Which is very much not the case in your average D&D setting.) Look at pre-growth Belkar; he likes stabbing and abusing people, and as a relatively high level adventurer he'd prefer a setting where it was okay to stab and abuse other people because he'd expect to be able to inflict abuse far more often than he'd be abused. The abyss is likely full of people like that, even if many of them find out afterwards that they were only the big fish in very small ponds and that the scale has changed dramatically. Baator is similarly likely full of people who thought they were clever legalists and manipulators who would thrive in high stakes, cutthroat dealings. Some people will win in these settings, some will indeed win big, and there are a lot of people who think that'll happen to them.

Divine domains are most likely similar. They feel suitable and right to people who were attracted to the religion in life, even if those outside think it's bonkers and even if the deceased might not be happy becoming the low man on the totem pole. As for those who fall outside a religion (or pact with some sort of outsider or other), my personal guess is that they're just left somewhere on the plane. Good planes are likely pleasant if a little lonely (since most inhabitants of good planes go to a god's domain), while evil planes throw you right into the high stakes world of having to establish your place among any fiends present.

Blatant hypocrites might just be sent to whatever plane, or they might be spent to a special punishment place. Gods most likely would collectively not want random mortals speaking for them without express permission, and would very likely be okay with an extra special punishment in order to discourage that.

[tyckspoon]

I am more asking about how you would see a world where any good god would have a proper "punishment plane" to send evildoers to so they can repent in the afterlife. Because I can absolutely see Pelor (outside the meme) sending people to the Nine Hells to burn in eternal hellfire for a few millenia so they can see the wrongdoings of their actions. And I can - in an attempt of world building - also see devils contracting the HECK out of Pelor to forfeit any and all souls that are not perfectly purely repentant, effectively making his evil worshippers about 99% powering the Nine Hells.


Oh. You're basically suggesting an alternate cosmology, then, because this would require that the good god(s) was/were actually responsible for the 'bad' planes, and that there are such a thing as 'evil followers' of good gods (or that the world is fundamentally monotheistic and that the hypothetical Pelor here considers everybody to be his followers because there aren't any other actual options.) Which is not true of any common D&D cosmology that I'm aware of - there isn't any one single god that orders the planes or was responsible for creating them (in most cosmologies the planes are bigger than the gods, and their existence and how they work is beyond the influence of any single god outside of that god's specifically claimed home domain. Which is usually just a smaller section of a larger plane.)

..so I think if you're looking for discussion here you may need to more clearly state your assumptions about the situation you wish to talk about?

[Kish]

I think you have a false premise to start, in that a person with such a dramatic alignment difference to the god they profess to 'believe in' cannot truly be a follower of that god - at best they can give lip service to the concepts, but if they attempted to actually live the tenets they profess in any real way, then they wouldn't be of Evil alignment any more.
Yes, this. A "worshiper of Iomedae" who promotes and makes excuses for slavery goes straight to Hell, where possibly one or more devils will take sadistic glee in informing them that Iomedae reserves a level of contempt for them greater than what she feels for the average worshiper of Asmodeus.



I am more asking about how you would see a world where any good god would have a proper "punishment plane" to send evildoers to so they can repent in the afterlife. Because I can absolutely see Pelor (outside the meme) sending people to the Nine Hells to burn in eternal hellfire for a few millenia so they can see the wrongdoings of their actions. And I can - in an attempt of world building - also see devils contracting the HECK out of Pelor to forfeit any and all souls that are not perfectly purely repentant, effectively making his evil worshippers about 99% powering the Nine Hells.

Because even if they all eventually repent, it is all simple economics. If 100 souls repent each year, but hell gets 1000 sinner souls each year, it is always a net win for the devils.
Wha?

"I assume, outside the meme, that Pelor is both monstrously evil and imbecilically stupid."

You know what alignment a deity who thinks there's no daylight between "perfectly purely repentant" and "deserves torture" is? Hint: It doesn't end in "good" or "neutral."

[NichG]

The (generic) D&D cosmology reads more to me as a 'hell is other people' kind of thing. The lower planes aren't there to punish people or get them to repent or reform them. They're there because some souls are jerks, and the cosmic sorting algorithm puts similar souls together, so jerks get to spend eternity with other jerks. Then gods, outsiders, etc come along on top of that underlying thing to try to gain some kind of advantage or make some sort of little domains on top of that substructure, but the substructure isn't fundamentally just there to make that convenient. A deity might choose to intervene and arrange souls differently than the cosmic sorting algorithm would, but the planar geography doesn't exist for their sake so even if a given deity might hold with using torture to reform a soul, that doesn't mean that sticking that soul in the naturally formed planar torture pits will actually achieve that goal of reforming them.

A particular deity might have a policy to take up any soul that has promised itself to them even if that soul goes against the deity's teachings and then implement whatever measures on that soul in their own divine realm as they see fit. But it wouldn't be a universal, consistent thing across all deities and souls. Some deities might just say 'I don't want that one, I'm tossing it back', some deities might just destroy the souls that petition them but fail to live up to their standards. Some deities might take such souls and try to find a place for them where their misaligned attitudes won't cause harm or will actually turn into benefits for the divine realm - overzealously paranoid militants of the god of mercy end up becoming teddy bear soldiers guarding the creche of infant souls, etc.

[Vahnavoi]

Talking about the great wheel in full detail is beyond the scope of this forum, but there is one important thing about it that people regularly fail to get:

Descriptive moral relativism exists in it alongside with objective morality or some other form of moral realism.

Hell, Abyss, etc. are punishments from the viewpoint of non-Evil folks who at least partially believe in Good gods (etc.). They see an awful endpoint and their behaviour is motivated by trying to stay away from it. Ascribing intentionality to the process is how they mythologize this, but it isn't necessarily part of the universe (though see below).

The kind of people who actually go to Hell, Abyss, etc., instead already believe reality works like that infernal place. For example, a demonic person does not believe in Mt. Celestia as a thing that can exist or be desireable the way it is described; instead, they believe the entire universe already works like the Abyss, with the strong exploiting the weak for selfish gain. So called "good" gods just have better propaganda. Upon entering the Abyss, this kind of person does not think they are being punished or that they should repent, they fundamentally don't believe they did anything wrong. They at most shout "I told you so!" before being devoured or enslaved by a greater evil. From the viewpoint of a non-Evil person, this will look hopelessly deluded or like extreme inability to learn from mistakes, but to the actual person undergoing it, it just confirms what they already think.

As for how this relates to hypocritical servants of gods? The long and short of it is that a person just can't be that much of a hypocrite and still maintain relations with a god. If the aforementioned person tried to go to see Pelor on Mt. Celestia, they would be stopped by an angel with a flaming sword and told to go away. The person might kick, curse and scream, but it would ultimately not come as any kind of surprise to them - after all, regardless of what kind of lies they told to others or themselves in life, they believe the way of the world is that the strong exploit the weak for selfish gain. Well, Pelor and his angel are stronger than them, so of course those jerks would kick them out if it suits their whims. It's just how it works.

Now, could you have a version of the great wheel where there is, in fact, some central figure, some personification of the force that sorts people into their rightful afterlives? Yes. The great wheel adopts great many real mythological entities you could use for that purpose, such as Anubis and King Yama. Ultimately, addition of such a figure changes little. Fundamentally this sorting is about what a person truly believes in their heart of hearts, and considering the outcomes as rewards or punishments is an outsider looking in, seeking to ascribe intention. The aforementioned demonic person would still not be swayed by the punishment, because they would see the "punishment" of being sent to the Abyss as just another example of the strong stomping on the weak; they would not think of it as "justice" because they don't believe in any such thing.

[Anonymouswizard]

This is why I prefer the godless settings, despite the afterlives tending towards the ****ty. Well, one of the reasons, and my personal favourite does have a god, but Izrador's not going to waste power creating a new afterlife when he needs every last scrap to return to heaven and continue his war.

Yeah, thinking about it Midnight is kind of the complete opposite of the question. There's no reward or punishment because the only god around doesn't care beyond souls being a potential source of servants.

In most settings I think it's officially closer to 'Baator has good PR'. The lower planes aren't exactly a punishment, but most people who realised they're going there will feel cheated they're now stuck at the bottom of the food chain. You thought you'd be able to work your way to being a mighty demon lord, but it's been three aeons and you're still just a footsoldier in the Blood War. But hey, at least you were vaguely expecting it unlike the other 999 souls in your unit.

[warty goblin]

Remember, just because it's what you want and is in accordance with your nature doesn't mean it's not a punishment. Be careful what you wish for is a very old story.

[Maat Mons]

I feel like, if all the jerks go to one place, they'll all be suffering from the greatest punishment of all, an eternity surrounded by jerks.

Edit: My original post didn't say "jerks." I didn't think the word I used was going to merit being completely converted to asterisks. I figured just the first 3 letters. Seeing 7 asterisks followed by an "s" made it look to me like something much more profane. I'm not sure exactly what the more profane word that would have occupied that space would be, but it honestly somehow seemed more offensive with the asterisks than with the word I actually wrote.

[Mastikator]

"Afterlife? Pfff. If I thought I had to go through a whole 'nother life I'd kill myself right now."

I prefer settings where the afterlife is unknown, where you can't just planeshift and meet your dead relatives, where death is a genuine mystery. Where stories of the afterlife are anecdotal and contradictory.

[Vahnavoi]

I play and have played games that entirely revolve around afterlives, and it's often a good way to bring various philosophical issues to the forefront. For many conceptions, modern people significantly overestimate the effect of knowing an afterlife exists, often due to underestimating how bloody weird modern technology makes their own lives. Being able to call the dead on the phone is only a mild bit more fantastic than being able to call anyone on the phone. Planeshift? Hah. In many mythologies, you could walk to the land of the dead. They were practically next-door neighbours. Having close relations with your next-door neighbours, now that's a fantasy beyond imagining for some city people. :smallamused:

[OldTrees1]

The best approach for D&D afterlife I have seen is:

The souls naturally migrate to where other generally like-minded souls go. This is a high level abstraction so there will still be a diversity of thought among the details, rationalizations, beliefs.
Outsiders on a plane are formed either from those souls, or are shaped by the high level abstraction of the general position of the population of that plane.
The new souls on a plane are initially rather helpless against the outsiders. In death someone like you has power over you. In some cases "power over you" is treated as a responsibility to care for you, while in other cases "power over you" is treated as a resource to exploit. This is not about reward or punishment, it is just about being on the other end of the power dynamic.
Some outsiders/deities desire to bypass the natural soul flow by laying claim to souls. If the soul and the outsider/deity agree, then the soul goes to a place the outsider/deity has power over them rather than a like-minded outsider. This primarily happens in cases where an outsider sees that "power over you" as a resource to be exploited and wants to also have that power over souls that are not like-minded.



That last point does mean sometimes a hypocritical believer of a deity ends up in that deity's clutches. But only if that deity has some reason for wanting power over the hypocritical believer. A deity that wants victims to torture might accept a hypocritical believer as another victim. On the other end of the spectrum a goddess of forgiveness and mercy might accept a hypocritical believer and feel responsible for their redemption. However usually hypocritical believers find out "their deity" did not accept them.

[gbaji]

Two things to remember are that gods in your average D&D setting are more likely to obviously intervene than we're used to, and that there are multiple churches (and consequently less power bound up in the hands of one monolithic Church). So a hypocrite following Pelor would find themselves cut off from divine access, and if they developed any level of influence some of Pelor's actual faithful would stop by to sort things out. Someone who mistakenly believed that Pelor actually stood for kicking puppies would be much more likely to find the church of puppy-kicking to begin with, and if it was an honest mistake Pelor would be likely to send some sort of signal that the believer was rather off track.

As for why people would choose to be evil? I'm partial to the idea that the lower planes are not set up as a punishment by anybody. (Again, heaven as a reward and hell as a punishment tend to be tied to the idea of one monotheistic god. Which is very much not the case in your average D&D setting.) Look at pre-growth Belkar; he likes stabbing and abusing people, and as a relatively high level adventurer he'd prefer a setting where it was okay to stab and abuse other people because he'd expect to be able to inflict abuse far more often than he'd be abused. The abyss is likely full of people like that, even if many of them find out afterwards that they were only the big fish in very small ponds and that the scale has changed dramatically. Baator is similarly likely full of people who thought they were clever legalists and manipulators who would thrive in high stakes, cutthroat dealings. Some people will win in these settings, some will indeed win big, and there are a lot of people who think that'll happen to them.

More or less this. I've never understood the traditional D&D afterlife schema, complete with planes of "punishment" for the evil. That makes sense in a cosmology with a single good deity rewarding people who are good, and punishing people who are evil. Makes zero sense in a cosmology with a balance of good/evil;law/chaos, and different afterlives for each. I suppose we could speculate as to why D&D did it this way, but said speculation would probably veer outside allowed topics.

From an in-game perspective though, if you have a balance of deities representing the different alignments, then *all* afterlives should be "rewards" for those who well represent their alignment and/or deity. Doubly so if we assume things like planeshifte/gate exist, so people living in the world actually know what the afterlives are like via fairly direct information. If the LG afterlife can generate a "hall of infinite one night stands" and a "hall where I always win the argument" or <whatever>, then the various evil afterlife planes can generate the "hall of infinite swindles that always go in your favor", or "hall of infinte backstab victims", or "hall of infinite bubbleheaded teens who break their heels while running the wrong way when I'm hunting them with a machete and a mask".

If we assume afterlives are about the dead playing out their greatest fantasies (based on their personality/alignment of course), then that's just what they should all be. Period. if the assumption (like in Rich's world), that over time, these things lose their interest, the dead "get it out of their system", etc, and they gradually lose interest in "physical/worldly" pleasures, they move on to more cerebral ones, then to purely spiritual ones, and then finally "merge" with the alignment itself.

That's if you have an alignment focused afterlife system in the first place. If it's just "dead spirits float around, and things happen", then that could be the case, and there's no specific good/bad outcome there at all. Add in a bit of "if you worshiped a deity, you may feel a pull to some area they created" and you can have some more "good" afterlives, but that's more about a reward from your deity for being a good follower than anything else (and perhaps the deities have use of spirits serving them on a higher plane as well).

From a game play perspective, I actually much prefer games without a whole lot of detail about exactly what happens after you die. Let that be a mystery. When characters die, baring resurection (if that sort of thing exists), there should be no futher communication/interaction. They're dead. Move on. I find that this creates real costs for death in games, and keeps the focus on what the living characters are doing. Any interaction with the dead should be rare special things that the GM makes happen maybe as part of a special case scenario. It should not be something you do with a spell whenever you feel like it. I just find that having those things in a game cheapens the concepet of "death" in the first place. And as a bonus, it does mean you really don't have to worry about (or spend time explaining) what happens. No one really knows. Here's what your gods tell you. Could be true. Could be a giant lie. Doesn't really matter. Play the game in the land of the living.

[Vahnavoi]

From an in-game perspective though, if you have a balance of deities representing the different alignments, then *all* afterlives should be "rewards" for those who well represent their alignment and/or deity.

No. Alignments are not symmetric like that. They stand for different philosophies, some of which are in direct opposition over these matters.

I talked about the Abyss before, so I'll talk about Hell now, or whatever you would call a Lawful Evil afterlife. Lawful Evil is typified by sharp ingroup-outgroup distinction, where the better people have the right to do what they wish to the inferior people. The error in your line of thinking is that everyone who is Lawful Evil would think they are of the better people. This isn't the case. The real horror of a Lawful Evil society is that some of the so-called inferior people internalize their position and seek to do nothing to improve it, and even actively prevent others of their kind from improving it.

Or in other words: Hell is full of people who are being punished because they believe they deserve it. Hell doesn't have tavern of infinite one-night stands for everyone. It has that only for the better people; for the inferior people, it has tavern of infinitely licking boots, because you are scum who deserves to lick boots.

The balance of the great wheel is not that of Blue Team and Red Team trying to score the same goals under the same rules. Its balance point is the dynamic primal nature of archetypical Earth, the kind Druids try to protect. All the outer planes are increasingly extreme deviations from that. They may exert the same pull, but they are not symmetric, one angel does not weigh the same as one demon, this is why Celestia can be conceptualized as a mountain with a definite peak while the Abyss is conceptualized as spiraling pit with infinite layers.

[MonochromeTiger]

More or less this. I've never understood the traditional D&D afterlife schema, complete with planes of "punishment" for the evil. That makes sense in a cosmology with a single good deity rewarding people who are good, and punishing people who are evil. Makes zero sense in a cosmology with a balance of good/evil;law/chaos, and different afterlives for each. I suppose we could speculate as to why D&D did it this way, but said speculation would probably veer outside allowed topics.

Well, aside from the very obvious answer that goes into topics not allowed by the forum and the biases it instilled there are still some other reasons.

Mostly the answer is that D&D and most similar systems are very heavily weighted in favor of the assumption that you're playing a Good or Neutral aligned character. Evil characters are, and generally always have been, a fringe thing in the heroic fantasy D&D and Pathfinder and similar titles are marketed as even when they're at their darkest. Part of selling that mass produced heroic fantasy is the assumption that the bad things the player characters go out to fight will be punished beyond just getting stopped.

It isn't a concept that has anything to do with reasonable world building, it's about giving people a "you're the Hero" moment that doesn't also end in "but the bad guys you beat totally get their own private paradise just like you except Evil instead of Good." Then again that's also undermined by the weirdly common stance of "your soul is then used as fuel to make a Celestial that's actually a completely different person or melts into the terrain" which is all treated as a good thing instead of the small example of horror it should be.

If alignments were treated evenly then sure, people would realize a world where jumping between planes is possible means that support for Evil would pretty quickly die out when news gets out everyone is just getting tortured/exploited/eaten in the Evil afterlives and that the odds of being some special exception who gets any power are so low it's hilarious. Alignments aren't treated evenly though. Evil isn't just unpopular it's an option that if you put it on a character sheet will immediately spawn disputes and questions from people of "why would my character tolerate that in the party" or assumptions that whoever is playing the character will just be a casually backstabbing jerk or debates about alignment and how anything other than being a casually backstabbing jerk clearly isn't evil and should just be neutral instead.

Obviously when the option is unpopular and looked down on there's no money in it, the game devs and writers aren't going to lean into it or try to incentivize it or make it seem like an equal option. Instead Evil is the Bad Guy alignment, they aren't there for the vast majority of players to see as a choice to be measured, they're there as the designated enemy to vanquish; you can see some mileage out of Neutral antagonists occasionally but that's usually kept to stories that are "morally grey", and very rarely you might see a Good aligned antagonist but that's almost always a result of manipulation or written off as overly edgy.

Should Evil alignments' afterlives have just as much incentive as Good alignments? Yes, Neutral alignments should as well but half the time they're just the boring option, the games that cater to heroic fantasies assume you're going to be the unambiguous Good hero or at least some shade of edgy that can be broadly grouped under "rogue with a heart of gold."

At best you get some vague wording that hints that Evil afterlives give Evil characters a tiny chance to have a bit of power and people pretending that counts as "Evil has good PR" instead of it making no sense for Evil to even survive five weeks. At worst you get something like what Vahnavoi is talking about where one Angel is worth one hundred Demons, evil souls are literally worth less, and Evil is relevant only because places like the Abyss constantly spit out several times more monsters than souls they take in.

[Slipjig]

I think it's completely possible for Evil to exist, for several reasons, even in a universe where Plane Shift exists. First of all, we have TONS of example in real life of people choosing short-term gratification over long term good. Sure, eating nothing but fast food eventually leads to people being morbidly obese and thus having a lower quality of life, but obesity is still rampant in many countries because the food is cheap and convenient. Or people who live hand to mouth and have a negative net worth despite making decent money. In the same way, sure, serving Asmodeus means EVENTUAL misery in the Hells, but that's a problem for Future Evildoer. I'll admit that this doesn't really fit the, "Red Team Jersey" concept of Evil that some authors have conceived of in D&D.

There's also the question of what % of the population is evil enough to merit a trip to the Evil afterlife. There's no requirement that the populace be evenly split into thirds on the G/N/E axis. The fraction of people who spend their lives generating significantly more Weal than Woe is pretty small in most of the fiction.

Finally, there's also the possibility that evildoers think they'll avoid the eventual outcome of their actions. Maybe they think that their Evil patron actually loves them and they'll receive special treatment in the afterlife, or they think that they'll escape into unlife by achieving lichdom. Maybe they think that they've snuck some clever wording into the deal that they can use as an escape clause when the time comes (check out Witcher III: Hearts of Stone for a good example of this). I can imagine devils ACTIVELY SPREADING stories about clever mortals outsmarting devils and escaping their infernal contracts, purely to encourage more suckers who think they are clever to sign up.

[Vahnavoi]

The bias towards player characters being good guys fighting the bad guys was intentional from 2nd edition AD&D onwards, because TSR wanted to expand their market towards children and this entailed some dubious forms of pandering to the usual suspects of that time.

By contrast, 1st Edition AD&D was for a more adult audience, the game and especially the great wheel cosmology was more heavily inspire by pulp horror and real myth, and Gygax had some spicy ideas of how game morality works in contrast to whatever was mainstream at the time.

Note that TSR was never good at enforcing their content guidelines, and some content authors disliked them from the get-go. That's why we still got Ravenloft and Dark Sun stuff during the 2nd edition era. In what I can best describe as historical irony, some of the TSR stuff is so spicy that WotC doesn't dare to sell their back catalog without disclaimers disowning chunks of the content.

WotC era 3rd edition D&D was made as a love song to the 2nd edition AD&D and inherited many of its faults. These are the historical reasons why some concepts of the great wheel seem at odds with post-2nd edition idea of what "heroic fantasy" is. Balance between good and evil is one of those things. Under 1st Edition rules, it's not given good or law can ever win, it might be the ideal Earth is actually the primordial nature idolized by True or Absolute Neutral of Druids, and all attempts to change this will eventually bring the pendulum swinging the other way. The implied setting owes as much to Howard and Lovecraft as it does to Tolkien.

[LibraryOgre]

For the terms of this argument I am talking about a hypocritical person that does not follow their god's tenets but believe in them fervently (divine casters of said good deities aside). There has to be a "punishment" awaiting them, right?

Here is your central problem.

There is no punishment in the afterlife of D&D for being evil. There is no reward for being good. Your destination in the afterlife is "Going to the plane to which you are most aligned", which, IMO, works out to "You go to the plane where the world works the way you always thought it did."

I go into this in more depth at my blog (https://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2013/07/corpses-and-caches.html), but a relevant excerpt:


Those who are Lawful Good go to a place where the rules are just and create happiness for people. Those who are chaotic evil go to a place where the strong inflict their will upon the weak, and the True Neutral go to a plane where neither good nor evil is embraced, nor law or chaos, but are instead part of a balance of forces affecting life.

The goal of the afterlife is to become wholly in tune with the alignment or deity in question; for a lawful person to purge themselves of whimsy, for a good person to give up spite, and for the chaotic to eschew a need to control any but themselves (and, sometimes, not even that). In some cases, this may result in unpleasantness or perceived punishment as the person adjusts to their plane. A Lawful and Good person finds that their base desires pale compared to community and service; a chaotic and evil person relearns that no good deed goes unpunished, and that everyone is always out for number one. From the point of view of someone holding that alignment, this is not only how the world should work, but also how they always suspected it did, deep down. That for all their veneer of civility, everyone is willing to sell their mother for a few gold. That the world would be a better place if everyone pitched in and did their part. If evil souls get tortured in this arrangement, it’s not because the Planes are sentencing them to punishment, but instead because they were not strong or capable enough to stop it.

[gbaji]

Or in other words: Hell is full of people who are being punished because they believe they deserve it. Hell doesn't have tavern of infinite one-night stands for everyone. It has that only for the better people; for the inferior people, it has tavern of infinitely licking boots, because you are scum who deserves to lick boots.

Except that this assumes an ethical system where those who do evil are really "good people" failing to be good, or "falling to evil". They do evil things, and feel bad about it on some level because the "prime deity" of that universe is "good" and fills them with a conscience that makes them feel "bad" for doing evil things.

That's simply not going to exist in a universe with a multitude of deities across the alignment spectrum. Doubly so when those deities are actually creating species that have "mostly X" in their alignment descriptions. While I suppose there would be some people who do evil because they just can't help themselves and feel bad about it, and thus feel they deserved to be punished in the afterlife, I would assume that most people would do evil because it's what they truely like to do, and they feel no remorse about it, and don't actually understand why those silly good people think otherwise.

And if we're playing the speculation game, there should also be evil people who keep doing good things because the situations keep coming up, and they may also feel "bad" for doing "good" (like it's not in their nature, but they just keep helping out the good guys for some reason). They might also find themselves in a good afterlife, in which all of the good things are punishment for them as well (just like good people being punished for doing evil, evil people should be punished for doing good). Such people might find themselves having to operate the "It's a small world" ride for the rest of the good souls for like all of eternity or something, with a constant smile plastered on their face, bringing joy to all the little boys and girls or something.


The balance of the great wheel is not that of Blue Team and Red Team trying to score the same goals under the same rules. Its balance point is the dynamic primal nature of archetypical Earth, the kind Druids try to protect. All the outer planes are increasingly extreme deviations from that. They may exert the same pull, but they are not symmetric, one angel does not weigh the same as one demon, this is why Celestia can be conceptualized as a mountain with a definite peak while the Abyss is conceptualized as spiraling pit with infinite layers.

Except that it kinda is exactly about teams trying to score points. Every bit of information we have about what motivates the gods, and why they seek worship tells us this. Why wouldn't the evil gods do everything they can to make their followers really want to follow them. There is no motivation for them to create afterlives that actually punish their own followers for following them. Evil is not dumb. And absent some sort of good "prime creator" deity, there's no reason why one set of alignments should punish their followers and the other reward them.

It's that way becuase that's how *our* morality works. But if we're to speculate about how a competely different moral/ethical system might work, to me that seems like a much more sensible way to do things.

Doing it the way you describe is like saying that the LG afterlife has the "hall where you win every argument", but 99% of the souls there are the ones telling the other guy that his argument is the right one. Or the "hall of infinite easy encounters", but most souls have to play the roll of the "easy encounters" and be defeated over and over. Sure. Maybe there are some who feel like their role is to be the one who loses the argument, or the fight, or licks the other guys boots, or get swindled instead of doing the swindling, and they might feel that this is what they deserve. But I don't think that's most people. Why accept this dynamic for the good afterlives, but assume it must work the other way around for the evil ones.

Not saying this is how things are, but how they actually should be. If the afterlives made sense and actually "worked" in the cosmology of the setting.

[Vahnavoi]

Except that this assumes an ethical system where those who do evil are really "good people" failing to be good, or "falling to evil". They do evil things, and feel bad about it on some level because the "prime deity" of that universe is "good" and fills them with a conscience that makes them feel "bad" for doing evil things.

My first post to this thread, as well as LibraryOgre's post immediately above yours, already explain why such assumption is not necessary. People are sorted to alignments, and to respective afterlives on the outer planes, by their beliefs and actions. No prime deity is required for people to have different actions and beliefs. Individual conscience, or lack thereof, does not need to be attributed to any divine agent. And even if you do attribute it to some agent, there can be as many different consciences as there are deities and corresponding outer planes.


That's simply not going to exist in a universe with a multitude of deities across the alignment spectrum. Doubly so when those deities are actually creating species that have "mostly X" in their alignment descriptions. While I suppose there would be some people who do evil because they just can't help themselves and feel bad about it, and thus feel they deserved to be punished in the afterlife, I would assume that most people would do evil because it's what they truely like to do, and they feel no remorse about it, and don't actually understand why those silly good people think otherwise.

You are accusing me of an assumption that isn't necessary, while making several of your own. The underlined part is the worst one. One basic tenet of the alignment system is that humans do not trend towards any one alignment, not even neutral. Because of that tenet, sweeping statements such as yours cannot be made. You can, at best, make it of some specific monster noted as usually or always evil, but existence of such creatures is never mutually exclusive with the sort of self-hating Lawful Evils I described.


And if we're playing the speculation game, there should also be evil people who keep doing good things because the situations keep coming up, and they may also feel "bad" for doing "good" (like it's not in their nature, but they just keep helping out the good guys for some reason). They might also find themselves in a good afterlife, in which all of the good things are punishment for them as well (just like good people being punished for doing evil, evil people should be punished for doing good). Such people might find themselves having to operate the "It's a small world" ride for the rest of the good souls for like all of eternity or something, with a constant smile plastered on their face, bringing joy to all the little boys and girls or something.

Uh, yes, people who think like that can exist. I just had no reason to talk about them because they wouldn't make a good example of Lawful Evil and it's hence dubious if they'd end up in Hell.


Except that it kinda is exactly about teams trying to score points. Every bit of information we have about what motivates the gods, and why they seek worship tells us this. Why wouldn't the evil gods do everything they can to make their followers really want to follow them. There is no motivation for them to create afterlives that actually punish their own followers for following them. Evil is not dumb. And absent some sort of good "prime creator" deity, there's no reason why one set of alignments should punish their followers and the other reward them.

Wrong. We have actual descriptions of the alignments, and in some cases individual deities, showing they do not believe in the same things and thus would have different ideas of rewards and punishments. Like, the way outer planes work, there is a place and a deity personifying the concept of "no-one deserves any rewards, ever, because I hate them and want them to die".


It's that way becuase that's how *our* morality works. But if we're to speculate about how a competely different moral/ethical system might work, to me that seems like a much more sensible way to do things.

The way alignment is supposed to work, for anything you think is sensible way to do things, there would be up to eight philosophies and eight corresponding afterlives that disagree, and at least one philosophy and one afterlife in full opposition to you. That is exactly why your argument, that every afterlife should be rewarding, cannot be true.


Doing it the way you describe is like saying that the LG afterlife has the "hall where you win every argument", but 99% of the souls there are the ones telling the other guy that his argument is the right one. Or the "hall of infinite easy encounters", but most souls have to play the roll of the "easy encounters" and be defeated over and over. Sure. Maybe there are some who feel like their role is to be the one who loses the argument, or the fight, or licks the other guys boots, or get swindled instead of doing the swindling, and they might feel that this is what they deserve. But I don't think that's most people. Why accept this dynamic for the good afterlives, but assume it must work the other way around for the evil ones.

Not saying this is how things are, but how they actually should be. If the afterlives made sense and actually "worked" in the cosmology of the setting.

Pay attention. I was describing Lawful Evil afterlife. And before that I described the Chaotic Evil one, which is even more different.

[tyckspoon]

Wrong. We have actual descriptions of the alignments, and in some cases individual deities, showing they do not believe in the same things and thus would have different ideas of rewards and punishments. Like, the way outer planes work, there is a place and a deity personifying the concept of "no-one deserves any rewards, ever, because I hate them and want them to die".


That's a pretty good summary of the Gray Wastes of Hades, which sap your color, then your emotion, then your existence into nothingness. Nobody's getting rewarded there and nobody is enjoying their time on the plane aside from possibly the native demon race that gets to watch souls waste away.

[Anymage]

Except that it kinda is exactly about teams trying to score points. Every bit of information we have about what motivates the gods, and why they seek worship tells us this. Why wouldn't the evil gods do everything they can to make their followers really want to follow them. There is no motivation for them to create afterlives that actually punish their own followers for following them. Evil is not dumb. And absent some sort of good "prime creator" deity, there's no reason why one set of alignments should punish their followers and the other reward them.

It's that way becuase that's how *our* morality works. But if we're to speculate about how a competely different moral/ethical system might work, to me that seems like a much more sensible way to do things.

If every god could promise their followers a paradise afterlife full of infinite riches and unending hookups with hot partners, there would indeed be a race to see who could offer the best paradise with the fewest stipulations. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that divine domains having finite size and deities having finite power in great wheel cosmologies means that the key feature of most afterlives is being surrounded by your coreligionists/people who agree with you. The afterlife of someone who believes in friendliness and neighborliness will be surrounded by kindly neighbors, while someone who believes that might makes right and that the strong should take what they want from the weak will be surrounded by similar people. Most people would prefer friendly neighbors over ones who will beat you up if they want something of yours, even evil people who are happiest beating up other people and taking their stuff, but being surrounded by people like yourself is more "natural consequence" than "divinely inflicted reward/punishment".

[Silly Name]

My point is more about how evil afterlives are not used as a warning and a place of punishment for evil, but rather as a "hey this is my kinda shi(f)t" for evil guys which is entirely weird. Of course there is a power imbalance, but some people wish for that kinda "hell on earth" even in the prime material. And for some people it is enough that others suffer even if they are not the top dogs.

I am more asking about how you would see a world where any good god would have a proper "punishment plane" to send evildoers to so they can repent in the afterlife. Because I can absolutely see Pelor (outside the meme) sending people to the Nine Hells to burn in eternal hellfire for a few millenia so they can see the wrongdoings of their actions. And I can - in an attempt of world building - also see devils contracting the HECK out of Pelor to forfeit any and all souls that are not perfectly purely repentant, effectively making his evil worshippers about 99% powering the Nine Hells.

Because even if they all eventually repent, it is all simple economics. If 100 souls repent each year, but hell gets 1000 sinner souls each year, it is always a net win for the devils.

My personal take is the following:

A mortal that is at least within one step of their deity's alignment will be sent to that deity's personal domain, where they may be judged before being let in, whereas other deities are happy to welcome any non-grossly philosophically divergent soul within their domain. For the vast majority of worshippers, this is an active reward, or at least seen positively.

Mortals that didn't align themselves to a specific god, which is honestly the vast majority, will find their souls pulled towards the plane whose alignment and ideals they match, following the normal "rules" of those afterlives.

Evil souls that did not pledge themselves to a Devil, Demon or the like end up as Manes and Lemures - basically larvaes, spending millenias or even all of eternity in this wretched state. They are seen by the fiend themselves as failures, Evil and self-serving enough that their souls were pulled towards the lower planes but lacking the ambition and ability necessary to be truly deserving of ascension. This is the punishment for false worshippers of Good gods, imho.

However, if a mortal did pledge themselves to a fiend (preferably an unique one or an Archfiend), they will be put on a fast-track for fiendish promotion, climbing the ranks up to a point after only a brief stint at the bottom of the ladder.

[Beleriphon]

If a LE lawyer believing in the god of justice is sent to hell and a LN townsguard who "just followed orders" but believed in the LG god of justice and goodness? How do they rank? Are they food for the devils? Do they COMMAND devils? Do you apply BoED/BoVD rules where good souls are worth more for evil purposes? Or are they just punished for their evil deeds?

Would that not make the devils the good guys here?

Depends. Planescape posits that evil souls are used a trade good between the Devils. You're evil afterlife is being used a currency, at best they get turned into the lowest possible tier of devils: lemures. They are then forced to fight in the Blood War and maybe get promoted up the chain if they don't get completely squashed first, or eaten, or something worse.

[Grim Portent]

It's not inconceivable to have a setting where your god determines your afterlife regardless of your alignment. Indeed this is technically already the case with worshippers of gods going to their god's Divine Realm even if it's not in the plane that matches their alignment, provided the god wants them. If I were a Good deity and some people were evil but worshipping me, even if just to meet societal expectations, I'd rather take them to my realm and put them in a little box than let them go to the Hells, Abyss or Hades or whatever. There's just punishment and there's indifferent sadism, and letting souls go to the lower planes is more the latter than the former in my opinion.

Similarly if I were an Evil god and some good people were worshipping me to fit in with their society, I'd snap them up and put them on the bottom rung of my afterlife totem pole.

I wouldn't expect the Good version of hell to be all that horrible, though Good isn't exactly good a lot of the time. If some high priest of Pelor commits grave acts of Evil then him getting taken to Celestia by Pelor and put in the equivalent of a prison cell for the rest of time to ruminate on his mistakes, bereft of Pelor's grace and the beauty of the plane I would consider that a more appropriate end for the soul of a wicked false worshipper of a good deity than being taken to Hell and used to power the forces of Evil.

[King of Nowhere]

I am also of the opinion that a smart evil overlord will reward those who serve him well (an actual reward, not a "rewarded as a traitor deserves" or "outlived your usefulness" reward), because doing so encourages loialty and helps recruitment. Not doing so encourages your army to flee at the first chance. And the powers of the lower planes are smart.
Also, while the general populace may not think much of the afterlife, I am pretty sure a big bad wizard knows enough, and will certainly have some plan to avoid becoming a lemure.
So, evil afterlives must have some appeal to at least some people.


I once had the party travel the lower planes and meet a former villain they killed; the villain thanked them, as he was a lot happier in hell than he was alive. he then offered help to the party in exchange for some favors against a rival demon lord.

[Tanarii]

My personal take is the following:

A mortal that is at least within one step of their deity's alignment will be sent to that deity's personal domain, where they may be judged before being let in, whereas other deities are happy to welcome any non-grossly philosophically divergent soul within their domain. For the vast majority of worshippers, this is an active reward, or at least seen positively.

Mortals that didn't align themselves to a specific god, which is honestly the vast majority, will find their souls pulled towards the plane whose alignment and ideals they match, following the normal "rules" of those afterlives.

Evil souls that did not pledge themselves to a Devil, Demon or the like end up as Manes and Lemures - basically larvaes, spending millenias or even all of eternity in this wretched state. They are seen by the fiend themselves as failures, Evil and self-serving enough that their souls were pulled towards the lower planes but lacking the ambition and ability necessary to be truly deserving of ascension. This is the punishment for false worshippers of Good gods, imho.

However, if a mortal did pledge themselves to a fiend (preferably an unique one or an Archfiend), they will be put on a fast-track for fiendish promotion, climbing the ranks up to a point after only a brief stint at the bottom of the ladder.
This is certainly my understanding of D&D cosmology, when it actually applies to a setting. I also think either the OP is missing this part of lore, on top of trying to apply the D&D cosmology to an apparently monotheistic good deity.

Serving a specific deity in a non-pantheon Pantheon (a la Forgotten Realms) faithfully gets you into their domain if they approve of how you served, and you are rewarded by whatever afterlife the promised. Unless they pulled a fast one on their worshippers of course. Failing to make the cut means you default to your alignment's plane. This makes serving an evil deity far smarter than not, if you're already an evil bastard.

Cutting a deal with a Devil probably gets you exactly what you bargained for, although it probably won't be what you expected. :smallamused: Serving in a Devil or demon cult might get you a jump start on the normal process of service, although a Devil cult leader probably was smart enough to sign an infernal contract before he sold his lies to the rest of the fools.

Serving a strongly bound pantheon gets you whatever destination promised by the pantheon as a whole, based on their tenets. Good deities might very well send 'deserving' souls for time limited or eternal punishment in the domain of evil gods, but that'd be under the pantheon contract, so to speak. But active (and impactful) service to an evil deity in the pantheon specifically might get you into those same domains and actually rewarded. If the specifics were the nice guy eternal reward is still better than the not nice guy eternal service, your choices would be attempt to atone and hope you make the cut and suffer if you fail, or double down and accept the lesser but still not as horrible secondary prize.

Within the context of the OPs question: a monotheistic deity with strong tenets but who didn't want to let transgressors go to the default alignment plane probably have in their own domain both a place of reward and a place of punishment. Heck, any deity might if they wanted to let in some folks but punish them for a time before giving them their final reward.

[Witty Username]

At least for FR, the appeal of gods is that they protect from the devils and demons and Kelemvor/Myrkul.

Evil characters go to the lower planes as servants, not necessarily as their just punishment.

In less god heavy settings, the gods have a similar function. Worship works as a safety for the concerned. Service to a god overrides the final destination, hence evil gods. As FR pointed out, this makes good aligned gods unnecessary for the purposes of mortals, but one could argue that for good aligned characters the cause should be sufficient.

[Satinavian]

I am actually fine with "Dolurrh for everyone" and completely scratching all alignment related afterlives.