Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post
Now, D&D is tricky in that some small portion of evil people, like 0.01% or something, actually manage to beat the system. While 99.99% of those who perish with the evil tag applied to their alignment are doomed to an extremely long period of abject misery and suffering as a Larva, Lemure, Manes, or other low-level denizen of the Lower Planes until they are ultimately destroyed in the Blood War, a lucky few manage to escape this fate and ascend the fiendish hierarchy.
Well, it's not like the Good afterlife is all that much better. Most Good people will spend their eternity as a celestial blade of grass or a heavenly doorknob or something. But more than that, even the low end of the fiendish hierarchy isn't necessarily a punishment. If you are a masochistic worshiper of the God of Pain, you presumably consider the eternity you spend in a pit full of flaming spikes to be the Good Ending.

What makes D&D really weird (to the point that even the authors sometimes lose the plot) is that it postulates that there are people who are in favor of things that are, in the real world, considered universally bad. In real life, no one is pro-terror. Even terrorists are doing what they do because they have some political or ideological goal they think it accomplishes. But in D&D, there is an actual God of Terror, whose goal (and that of his followers) is for there to be more terror in the world. Not because he thinks it's necessary to effect change, or even because it hurts some group he hates, but because he actually wants terror as a terminal value. The fact that his followers end up in an afterlife that is full of terror is no more a punishment than the fact that the followers of the God of Cooking end up in an afterlife that is full of food.