[Dragonlance/Faerun] Anyone here met any Cataclysm/Wall of the Faithless defenders?

[Mechalich]

In 5e, it is said that:

1. The servants of the gods come to collect the souls of the recently deceased and, if they are worthy, they are taken to their awaited afterlife in the deity's domain.
2. Souls that are unclaimed by the servants of the gods are judged by Kelemvor, who decides the fate of each one.

With I read as the opposite of your description. When a divinely-appointed outsider comes and says "You, you, you and you, with me", Kelemvor doesn't go "Nooo, this one is faithlesss, it is miiine!". Instead, it would be "Does nobody want that one? No? *sigh* Now what am I gonna do with you?".

Is that a change from previous editions? I thought it already worked that way.

That's definitely a change, but not one that necessarily impacts the Faithless and False. As Hamishpence posted up thread, in 2e and 3e souls go to the Fugue Plane, where they wait to be picked up by a deity or just wander around if they don't have one, but the Faithless and False go directly to the City of Judgment, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars, get immediately dealt with by the god of death. No in 5e the difference would be that Kelemvor decided to take action regarding the unclaimed souls on the Fugue Plane, not that anything necessarily changed with regard to the Faithless and False.

Somewhat ironically, in 1e FR, pre Time of Troubles, essentially all the deities, regardless of alignment, were just left standing around on the Fugue Plane because Ao hadn't been suitably explicit about the whole 'provide a theologically suitably afterlife for your worshippers' part of the cosmology, and consequently the only souls that were being judged were either Myrkul's own worshippers - who also went directly to the city - and the Faithless and False.

That Ao allowed such a state to persist for thousands of years, and only did something about it when Bane and Myrkul forced his hand by stealing the Tablets of Fate, is a really crass bit of absentee landlording on his part, honestly.

[Jason]

The Wall of the Faithless is a weird, and yes arguably ethically misaligned piece of the Faerunian cosmology, but it really sounds like a lot of people are transposing much broader objections to the idea of a post-death cosmic judgment by imperfect and dubiously moral entities that undergird the entire system onto this one really marginal concept.

Ding!
I don't suppose there are people who consciously think "I didn't really have a problem with souls being tormented in the Nine Hells or the Abyss for all eternity, but sticking all the atheists in a wall is the last straw that means I will never play this game," but that is how it appears.

In many ways its demonstrative that this thread has focused on the Wall of the Faithless, a largely trivial aspect of the Forgotten Realms, rather than the Cataclysm, a hugely consequential aspect of Dragonlance. The Cataclysm is clear a fundamental issue with Dragonlance for many people, and I suspect that most fans of the setting get by just by ignoring its ethical implications entirely (several of the characters in setting certainly take that approach) or just shrug it off in that Weis and Hickman actually aren't especially inspired world-builders. The Wall, by contrast, can be finessed into some level of acceptability for most.

Ding!
The Cataclysm really does have serious moral implications, but it's a fundamental part of the setting, to the point that just discarding it would be impossible.

[noob]

Ding!
I don't suppose there are people who consciously think "I didn't really have a problem with souls being tormented in the Nine Hells or the Abyss for all eternity, but sticking all the atheists in a wall is the last straw that means I will never play this game," but that is how it appears.

I do not like the abyss either and the whole "fugue plane people get kidnapped to the abyss" is bad thing too in my opinion.
Which is why I like more dnd gods that presents redemption as something great all the evil people should benefit from: those gods are trying to reduce the number of people who suffers from evil and also make them not be punished horribly.
Going into the abyss and kidnapping demons so that they do not have to suffer in the abyss is also a theme I like to put in my campaigns.

[Quertus]

This seems like there are multiple possible interpretations of the wall. Some that make the wall monstrous and others that don't. Why not choose the interpretation that lets the setting work, rather than the one that breaks it?

That their is some punishment for people who actively reject the gods seems logical, even if it's not nice. Its only when you can accidentally be faithless that it starts to be such a big problem.

So just use that interpretation.

you entirely missed the point.

The point is: this is an institutionally approved bad thing by the good gods.

See what I mean? its not that its a bad thing, its that its a bad thing and is somehow treated as something thats not bad, or that its somehow acceptable. its not.

Very much this.

The Wall of the Faithless - as it's been described to me, which does not match all of this thread, as even all of this thread does not match all of this thread - is plenty reason enough to murder all the FR gods and start over, IMO.

Ding!
I don't suppose there are people who consciously think "I didn't really have a problem with souls being tormented in the Nine Hells or the Abyss for all eternity, but sticking all the atheists in a wall is the last straw that means I will never play this game," but that is how it appears.

If you're playing D&D, you kinda buy into the notion that Hell happens. And that's... arguably cosmic justice. The Wall? Not so much.

Be "raised by wolves", you're in the wall. Bang! Not so fair now, is it?

[Saint-Just]

I do consider the Wall an example of hilarious over-the top villainy and at the same time knowledge of it would never prevent me from playing in Faurun even if no tweaks are applied. I still want to say that "most characters don't know about it" is orthogonal to question of morality of its existence, and there is a significant fraction of players who would not want their characters to unwittingly support something they consider evil.

However people here have used seemingly contradictory desriptions of it's second creation: it was not Ao's will but the consensus of other gods; if so how can we consider Good gods good - oh no, it's purely Kelemvor's decision what to do with the Faithless; next I want to know why Kelemvor has created the Wall again after deciding it was bad? I understand that different sourcebooks for different editions sometimes contain contradictory information (and novels even more so), but it seems that either there is no full and consistent description of the situation, or if there is one, it has not been presented so far.

About Lower Planes: they have two qualities which distinguish them from the Wall: first, depending on who you ask they are either mostly natural because you get evil conditions from evil souls (more Planescape-ish view) or at least are run and maintained solely by Evil Gods/Archfiends/whatever, while the Wall has not been there for significant chunk of history (so it's not indispensable), has been disposed with and erected again (going back to the second paragraph it seems it was not merely Kelemvor looked at the new state of affairs and said "screw it, I like the old way more"). Second, Lower Planes are seen mostly as a punishment for harmful deeds (even if it's a vastly disproportional one), mostly ones which are considered harmful IRL or closely parallels them. Even being False, much less Faithless is really hard to interpret as a harmful deed (at least as far as ethos of this forum goes).

[Keltest]

Theres a certain amount of "What did you expect to happen?" in the existence of the Wall. If you reject the idea of worship at all, and reject the gods, theyll reject you right back. You dont get to go to an appropriate afterlife, because you told the managers to shove off when they invited you in. But they have to do something with the Faithless souls, otherwise theyll just wander around for all eternity at best, or possibly eventually collapse into some sort of plane of anti-divinity if enough of them accumulate (which would be bad even if youre a Faithless, because the gods manage reality). So the Wall is basically the garbage disposal of the afterlife, cleaning out the buildup of unprocessable gunk that would otherwise be clinging to the system and causing problems.

[noob]

Theres a certain amount of "What did you expect to happen?" in the existence of the Wall. If you reject the idea of worship at all, and reject the gods, theyll reject you right back. You dont get to go to an appropriate afterlife, because you told the managers to shove off when they invited you in. But they have to do something with the Faithless souls, otherwise theyll just wander around for all eternity at best, or possibly eventually collapse into some sort of plane of anti-divinity if enough of them accumulate (which would be bad even if youre a Faithless, because the gods manage reality). So the Wall is basically the garbage disposal of the afterlife, cleaning out the buildup of unprocessable gunk that would otherwise be clinging to the system and causing problems.

The gods does not manage reality in the forgotten realms.
The proof is that when they were sent to the world where they started to behave like evil sadists rather than focus on reality things kept running as ever.
Unless you are telling me the gods were finding time to kill each other, betray their friends and manage reality while being as vulnerable as mortals.
Also if they were managing reality why would they kill and backstab each other at the risk of suddenly exploding the reality they are sitting on?
If they were in charge of reality the times of troubles proves that they should never had been because they were too much irresponsible.

There is two things that runs based on two gods: the weave runs on the current god of magic but magic is possible without the weave(it is just a lot more complicated to do so without exploding).
And the afterlife is managed by the current god of the dead.

So if the mortals killed all the gods except the god of the afterlife and told it "we keep a watch on you so that you judge the souls fairly" this setting would be a better place (minus the fact magic would be a bit more complicated to use)

Furthermore kelemvor rewarding and punishing faithless and false souls did prove that you did not need a wall to store faithless and false souls.

[Friv]

Ding!
I don't suppose there are people who consciously think "I didn't really have a problem with souls being tormented in the Nine Hells or the Abyss for all eternity, but sticking all the atheists in a wall is the last straw that means I will never play this game," but that is how it appears.

Speaking as someone who is not a fan of the Wall, I'm not generally a fan of any eternal torment, but D&D gods aren't all good. The fact that people who dedicate themselves to evil fall under the purview of evil gods, who then do evil to them, makes sense. It's a terrible thing, and it's a thing that you can fight against, and presumably people have to be pretty bad to get there because even if you're mildly evil, if you're supporting a neutral god you end up in their domains.

The Wall is a bigger problem largely because it's saying "if you're not part of the general umbrella, the most Evil gods get to claim you, and no one seems to have a problem with that." As noted, "the Wall as a thing that the God of Death did as a scheme, which could then be torn down as the end of a campaign or otherwise opposed by the Gods of Good", is a much different thing than "the Wall as a thing that all of the elder Gods require to exist because people need to be punished into worshipping them." One is fine; it's a dark element, but one that only reflects on the evil beings of the setting. The other makes the Neutral and even Good gods complicit.

I would love if there were skirmishes along the Wall as the CG and CE outsiders fought to grab souls. I would love if Torm sent champions to tear down sections of it when the God of Death is distracted. There's a lot of cool story potential there, all of which is slashed away by "but you can't do anything about it because Reasons."

Ding!
The Cataclysm really does have serious moral implications, but it's a fundamental part of the setting, to the point that just discarding it would be impossible.

For Dragonlance, the Cataclysm itself is less of a problem than how it's presented. You can leave it in, and say "this was the major screw-up of the Good Gods, and they turned away from the world out of guilt and shame" rather than "the Gods of Good were the primary instigators and they turned away because people were angry at them and they got mad back."

Let the Cataclysm be the culmination of Takhisis's first set of evil plans, proof that it's possible for her to win. She swayed the Neutral Gods to her side, and it was seven against three; the best the gods of Good could do was try to offer a chance for salvation, which failed when Soth switched sides. The Balance doesn't exist because Good destroys everything if left alone, it exists because when things get tilted there's no reason to play nice and the gods of Evil will destroy everything.

[Keltest]

The gods does not manage reality in the forgotten realms.
The proof is that when they were sent to the world where they started to behave like evil sadists rather than focus on reality things kept running as ever.
Unless you are telling me the gods were finding time to kill each other, betray their friends and manage reality while being as vulnerable as mortals.
Also if they were managing reality why would they kill and backstab each other at the risk of suddenly exploding the reality they are sitting on?
If they were in charge of reality the times of troubles proves that they should never had been because they were too much irresponsible.

They didnt call it the time of troubles just because the gods had avatars. Things were actively going awry without the gods to manage them. It wasnt immediate catastrophic failure like when Mystra was murdered during the Spellplague, but people were absolutely seeing effects all over Toril.

[GrayDeath]

Let the Cataclysm be the culmination of Takhisis's first set of evil plans, proof that it's possible for her to win. She swayed the Neutral Gods to her side, and it was seven against three; the best the gods of Good could do was try to offer a chance for salvation, which failed when Soth switched sides. The Balance doesn't exist because Good destroys everything if left alone, it exists because when things get tilted there's no reason to play nice and the gods of Evil will destroy everything.

Thats how I handled it the 2 times I GMèd in Dragonlance.

But seeing one of the Groups was quite of the Evil kind, they actually tried to REPEAT the Cataclysm to make it totally clear to anyone that the only way to prosper was to join Team Evil.

Sadkly the campaign ended due to the main problem of all University Games: Students moving/having no time left.

[Millstone85]

That's definitely a change, but not one that necessarily impacts the Faithless and False. As Hamishpence posted up thread, in 2e and 3e souls go to the Fugue Plane, where they wait to be picked up by a deity or just wander around if they don't have one, but the Faithless and False go directly to the City of Judgment, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars, get immediately dealt with by the god of death. No in 5e the difference would be that Kelemvor decided to take action regarding the unclaimed souls on the Fugue Plane, not that anything necessarily changed with regard to the Faithless and False.

Here is the entire 5e description of the Fugue Plane:

Most humans believe the souls of the recently deceased are spirited away to the Fugue Plane, where they wander the great City of Judgment, often unaware they are dead. The servants of the gods come to collect such souls and, if they are worthy, they are taken to their awaited afterlife in the deity's domain. Occasionally, the faithful are sent back to be reborn into the world to finish work that was left undone.

Souls that are unclaimed by the servants of the gods are judged by Kelemvor, who decides the fate of each one. Some are charged with serving as guides for other lost souls, while others are transformed into squirming larvae and cast into the dust. The truly false and faithless are mortared into the Wall of the Faithless, the great barrier that bounds the City of the Dead, where their souls slowly dissolve and begin to become part of the stuff of the Wall itself.

Now, this might be an artifact of extreme summarization, but it seems the Wall comes late in the process.

Or perhaps they just decided to let it all very vague. That would be very 5e.

[Saint-Just]

Theres a certain amount of "What did you expect to happen?" in the existence of the Wall. If you reject the idea of worship at all, and reject the gods, theyll reject you right back. You dont get to go to an appropriate afterlife, because you told the managers to shove off when they invited you in. But they have to do something with the Faithless souls, otherwise theyll just wander around for all eternity at best, or possibly eventually collapse into some sort of plane of anti-divinity if enough of them accumulate (which would be bad even if youre a Faithless, because the gods manage reality). So the Wall is basically the garbage disposal of the afterlife, cleaning out the buildup of unprocessable gunk that would otherwise be clinging to the system and causing problems.

Again, other D&D settings mange this reasonably ok (including settings which had at least some amount of crossover\plane-hopping adventures with Faerun or at least Faerunians) - you get where you are bound with or without gods. Even if for some reason Faerun do not have this mechanism (doubtful - what was the state of affairs before Myrkul?), do you really consider the idea "you did nothing for me so I will do nothing for you" reasonably compatible with the Goodness of Good gods (meanwhile Evil has no qualms and captures or tricks souls so they come to the Lower Plains even with the Wall).

As an aside: your two similes seems to be going in a way that really few on this forum, I think, would be willing to support. "You" (I mean someone Faithless) tell managers to show off when they invite you in and because of that "you" are garbage. Not a garbage-like person, but garbage which require compacting and storage, lest "you" pollute something. Deeeefinitely nothing wrong with that.

[Keltest]

Again, other D&D settings mange this reasonably ok (including settings which had at least some amount of crossover\plane-hopping adventures with Faerun or at least Faerunians) - you get where you are bound with or without gods. Even if for some reason Faerun do not have this mechanism (doubtful - what was the state of affairs before Myrkul?), do you really consider the idea "you did nothing for me so I will do nothing for you" reasonably compatible with the Goodness of Good gods (meanwhile Evil has no qualms and captures or tricks souls so they come to the Lower Plains even with the Wall).

As an aside: your two similes seems to be going in a way that really few on this forum, I think, would be willing to support. "You" (I mean someone Faithless) tell managers to show off when they invite you in and because of that "you" are garbage. Not a garbage-like person, but garbage which require compacting and storage, lest "you" pollute something. Deeeefinitely nothing wrong with that.

I mean, its the entire afterlife system, right? Your soul goes to an afterlife where over time it is eventually transformed into "pure" essence of whatever afterlife you go to and you outright merge with the plane. Even the good alignments result in basically the same process happening as the wall of the faithless, theyre just nicer about it. Its just a question of where you go after your soul dissolves.

And yes. I think a good god literally kidnapping a soul who had explicitly rejected them and what they offered for whatever reason to force them into an afterlife that they also actively rejected is kind of incompatible with good. Its not "I wont do anything for you" its "I cant do anything for you that you havent already turned down."

[Jason]

I mean, its the entire afterlife system, right? Your soul goes to an afterlife where over time it is eventually transformed into "pure" essence of whatever afterlife you go to and you outright merge with the plane. Even the good alignments result in basically the same process happening as the wall of the faithless, theyre just nicer about it. Its just a question of where you go after your soul dissolves.

Is that still the case in 5th edition?

EDIT: Asmodeus' entry in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide seems to say that souls will be active and conscious in their respective afterlifes forever.

The faithful of Asmodeus acknowledge that devils offer their worshipers a path that’s not for everyone — just as eternally basking in the light of Lathander or endlessly swinging a hammer in the mines of Moradin might not be for everyone.

[Keltest]

Is that still the case in 5th edition?

EDIT: Asmodeus' entry in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide seems to say that souls will be active and conscious in their respective afterlifes forever.

I suspect that they arent being literal for the sake of brevity. FR across editions is kind of tricky. Absent anything that explicitly contradicts older edition content, im inclined to go with setting inertia.

Besides which, if the souls dont actually do anything, one wonders why the evil gods would be particularly interested in them.

[Saint-Just]

I mean, its the entire afterlife system, right? Your soul goes to an afterlife where over time it is eventually transformed into "pure" essence of whatever afterlife you go to and you outright merge with the plane. Even the good alignments result in basically the same process happening as the wall of the faithless, theyre just nicer about it. Its just a question of where you go after your soul dissolves.

And yes. I think a good god literally kidnapping a soul who had explicitly rejected them and what they offered for whatever reason to force them into an afterlife that they also actively rejected is kind of incompatible with good. Its not "I wont do anything for you" its "I cant do anything for you that you havent already turned down."

I do not agree that it's just a question where your soul goes. At least regarding the physical world consensus (even beyond this forum) seems to be that in the long run we all end up dead (even radical futuristic propositions still offer "merely" absurdly unimaginably long run). Not a reason to ignore what happens between now and the end.

Your second paragraph is going dangerously close to IRL I think. I will answer this: has this person ever said (let's ignore even the possibility that they changed their opinion) "I do not want to go to Arborea (Mount Celestia etc*)", or Good gods are incapable of recognizing anything but worship of them as desire to go to any of the Upper planes? In the last case their notions of Good and Evil are mostly orthogonal to human notions of the same, you can may as well call those notions Blue and Orange (which may be a fun way to play and it is not necessary a cosmic horror, but it's not a default way of Good and Evil in D&D any redaction). Remember I was asking about appropriately aligned souls, not "whoever you can grab". And asking questions is not kidnapping.

If there is any constructive discussion to be had and not merely "Wall is Evil/Wall is Neutral (necessary, or just is like Dolruth)" people more knowledgeable than me need to pin down two pieces of information: why has Kelemvor recreated the Wall (contradictory explanations were provided ITT) and how the system functioned before Myrkul (no explanation ITT).

*I can understand LN gods never bending the rules, but CN leaving all the extra souls to demons and none of them trying to make some "acquisitions" themselves? A little bit weak IMO.

Besides which, if the souls dont actually do anything, one wonders why the evil gods would be particularly interested in them.

Maybe they power the plane without dissolving, power stations instead of batteries. Though it would lead to a weird balance where new influx is less and less meaningful in comparison to whatever is stored and breaking the status quo is more difficult with every passing year (unless population grows and grows for millenia which doesn't seem to be the case)

[Keltest]

Theoretically, to qualify as Faithless you do have to explicitly reject the whole thing, yes. You can totally say that Bane is just a powerful devil and not actually a god and legitimately believe that, and you wont be Faithless if you also follow Chauntea's faith and earnestly believe in her power and divinity, or even just dont explicitly reject it. And even if deep down you didnt believe in Chauntea's divinity either, but followed the rituals anyway, you would just be False, not Faithless (and even then theres an argument to be made against being False if you believed in the rituals and the ideals even without calling Chauntea a literal god).

Basically, its almost impossible to be Faithless by accident. Somebody brought up a "lived their lives raised by wolves" person earlier, but there are gods of wild animals and the wilderness too, so doing things because you were brought up by wolves and believe the wolf way of doing this is correct would still almost certainly be enough to get you to that god's afterlife.

[Lord Raziere]

Basically, its almost impossible to be Faithless by accident. Somebody brought up a "lived their lives raised by wolves" person earlier, but there are gods of wild animals and the wilderness too, so doing things because you were brought up by wolves and believe the wolf way of doing this is correct would still almost certainly be enough to get you to that god's afterlife.

But then how, are there enough people to make the wall in the first place? Seems like its a pretty pointless wall to build then. If there are so few atheists because of the prayer ethics involved then there is no actual threat of reality collapsing, therefore its superfluous for them to build on top of the already clear threat of what happens without their worship. If its that serious, wouldn't atheists already be punished in LIFE by people socially ostracizing them for being so foolish as to invite the literal destruction of the world? Isn't what happens without their worship a more effective stick than some wall? Especially a wall no one knows about?

Even looking at this in the context of "no payer to god means reality starts falling apart" it doesn't make sense.

[Jason]

"Almost no one qualifies" still means that a lot of people do end up there over sufficient lengths of time.

[Keltest]

"Almost no one qualifies" still means that a lot of people do end up there over sufficient lengths of time.

Exactly. The Realms population is pretty big, and theres umpteen billion years of history. Even if only one person dies Faithless a year, by the current year thats still a decent chunk of souls.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Second, Lower Planes are seen mostly as a punishment for harmful deeds (even if it's a vastly disproportional one), mostly ones which are considered harmful IRL or closely parallels them. Even being False, much less Faithless is really hard to interpret as a harmful deed (at least as far as ethos of this forum goes).

Speaking as someone who is not a fan of the Wall, I'm not generally a fan of any eternal torment, but D&D gods aren't all good. The fact that people who dedicate themselves to evil fall under the purview of evil gods, who then do evil to them, makes sense. It's a terrible thing, and it's a thing that you can fight against, and presumably people have to be pretty bad to get there because even if you're mildly evil, if you're supporting a neutral god you end up in their domains.

The thing one has to remember is that the Great Wheel is not like various real-world religions where good people are meant to be rewarded and evil people are meant to be punished. People who are Good are judged by Good gods, and are rewarded if they were sufficiently Good and faithful and punished otherwise; people who are Evil are judged by Evil gods, and are rewarded if they were sufficiently Evil and faithful and punished otherwise.

Bob the LG commoner who primarily worships Heironeous but doesn't go out of his way to help people and Joe the CE commoner who primarily worships Erythnul but doesn't go out of his way to kill people are both likely going to end up on the bottom rung of the afterlife ladder subject to the lowest servants of their respective gods, with their memories gone and no particular perks of note, because they were underwhelming worshipers in life. Sir Bob the Hospitaler who primarily worships Kord and dedicates his life to crusading against evil and Dark Lord Joe the Necromancer who primarily worships Hextor and dedicates his life to crushing kingdoms under the heels of his skeletal army are both likely going to end up "skipping the line" to end up as a higher-ranking eladrin or devil and having a favored position in the afterlife, retaining their memories and a good chunk of their powers in life, because they were devoted to their gods' cause and significantly advanced said cause.

While the Lower Planes are pretty harsh afterlives for those who get the short end of the stick, and would definitely be considered punishment for a non-Evil soul that got sent there, an Evil soul getting sent to an Evil plane is in large part a reward for them, not a punishment. An Evil person is likely to view getting "redeemed to Good" much like a Good person is likely to view "falling to Evil" for two reasons, first because they've proven themselves disloyal and/or wishy-washy to their patron and not only lose out on the rewards of their original patron but are unlikely to be rewarded as well by their new patron, and second because the promise of a given Good afterlife isn't likely to appeal to them at all compared to the Evil one, e.g. to an LE person who wants to work their way up the Baatorian hierarchy and lord it over people for eternity, spending eternity in Arcadia where you have to (ugh) cooperate with people and be nice to your neighbors and stuff sounds like torture.

This is why the Wall of the Faithless seems so bad by comparison: it is purely a punishment, regardless of alignment or behavior in life, with no redeeming features that could be seen as a reward to those of an appropriate mindset; heck, for CE Faithless, getting stolen by demons and taken to the Abyss could be seen as moving up in the (after)world! Just being stuck in the Fugue Plain forever would be better, because you might be bored out of your mind for eternity and rejected by all rewarding afterlives (which, comparatively speaking, is punishment enough) but at least you can chat with other Faithless and aren't being slowly and painfully dissolved by supernatural mold.

I mean, its the entire afterlife system, right? Your soul goes to an afterlife where over time it is eventually transformed into "pure" essence of whatever afterlife you go to and you outright merge with the plane. Even the good alignments result in basically the same process happening as the wall of the faithless, theyre just nicer about it. Its just a question of where you go after your soul dissolves.

EDIT: Asmodeus' entry in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide seems to say that souls will be active and conscious in their respective afterlifes forever.

Both of these are true, because what happens in the afterlife depends on whether you had a patron god (outside the Realms, of course) and whether you were a sufficiently good servant of said patron.

A creature who has no patron god goes to the Outer Plane best matching their alignment and worldview, while a creature with a patron god goes to their patron's divine realm, at which point they become a petitioner. Importantly, one can worship a god of a different alignment than one's own and so ending up in a god's divine realm doesn't necessarily mean just ending up a slightly smaller area of the plane one was headed for anyway.

Petitioners lose their memories of their past life by default, but (A) whether this is immediate, gradual, or delayed varies by setting and plane--souls on the Fugue Plain retain their memories indefinitely until they're picked up by servants of their god, for instance, and planes where petitioners are basically "their form in life, but with elf ears or metal skin or whatever" generally have them retain memories longer than ones where petitioners are turned into animals or floating balls of light--and (B) deities and planar lords can grab a creature's memory core out of the Astral Plane to completely restore a petitioner's memories; usually this is a reward granted by gods to their favored and/or powerful servants, but this is also what happens if e.g. you make a pact with a devil to incarnate as a full devil with your memories intact rather than ending up as a shade or lemure.

Once a creature becomes a petitioner, they reside on that plane for however long it takes for them to reach that plane's version of enlightenment (or however long it takes for the more powerful beings there to tire of their presence and service), at which point they merge with the plane. This can happen very quickly, such as a soul in Lathander's afterlife who was already closely in sync with their plane's essence and god's dogma, ended up as a blade of grass or a celestial animal basking blissfully and mindlessly in the Morninglord's glory, and didn't retain any memories from life, or it can happen very slowly or not at all, such as a petitioner on Ysgard or Acheron who ended up there because that's where their god's realm is but isn't particularly in sync with the plane's ethos and is perfectly happy to fight for eternity rather than philosophize.

So a priest who says that a soul who doesn't pick a patron god is in danger of going to a "generic" afterlife and eventually fading away and a devil who says that a soul will stick around forever and so needs to choose their afterlife carefully are both correct and telling the truth...they're just leaving out some potentially-very-relevant details.

[awa]

Exactly. The Realms population is pretty big, and theres umpteen billion years of history. Even if only one person dies Faithless a year, by the current year thats still a decent chunk of souls.

not to mention that there seems to be a fairly large number of "crazy" people in fiction who do evil and or stupid things just because. So the fact that some of those "crazy" people might try and reject the gods as part of their "crazy" does not strike me as implausible at all.

[Lord Raziere]

Exactly. The Realms population is pretty big, and theres umpteen billion years of history. Even if only one person dies Faithless a year, by the current year thats still a decent chunk of souls.

Okay, but.....why?

Again, the whole destruction of the world thing seems a better stick than a being put into a wall, in the face of everything going pear-shaped when gods don't get their stuff, the wall is kind of an unnecessary thing on top of that. Either everyone worships them enough that its not actually needed or not enough people worships them and the apocalypse starts happening and thats reason enough to start worshipping them again.

so unless the gods are lying to people about the nature of the world on top of that...well it wouldn't surprise me, because this whole "gods need prayer to keep reality intact" thing? all news to me. before Mechalich's explanation I was under the impression that Forgotten Realms was just this campy generic fantasy setting from the 80's that you kind of just get books for by default because its a default setting for DnD so its like weird if you don't have it, and the books I have of it don't mention this kind of setting stuff at all. while the Drizzt books were always a bit vague on this sort of thing. not really focusing on the particulars.

[Friv]

But then how, are there enough people to make the wall in the first place? Seems like its a pretty pointless wall to build then. If there are so few atheists because of the prayer ethics involved then there is no actual threat of reality collapsing, therefore its superfluous for them to build on top of the already clear threat of what happens without their worship. If its that serious, wouldn't atheists already be punished in LIFE by people socially ostracizing them for being so foolish as to invite the literal destruction of the world? Isn't what happens without their worship a more effective stick than some wall? Especially a wall no one knows about?

Okay, so I thought I would do some math, here. The following assumes that all of these statements are true:

1) Souls in the Fugue Plain pretty much stick around until someone does something to them; they don't naturally dissolve into the substance of the Plain the way that souls that resonate with a god's domain do.
2) When Myrkul built the Wall, he did so by gathering up all of the Faithless currently in the Fugue Plain, so we're counting from the dawn of the Realms rather than just over the 1600 years or so that he was around.
3) While souls dissolve into the Wall, their substance remains a part of it, so the Wall only grows, and never shrinks.

The total population of the Forgotten Realms is about 68 million sentient beings; I'm going to cheat and assume that life expectancy is about 68 years (with short-lived races like orcs and goblins offsetting long-lived ones like elves and dwarves) because it makes the math much easier and says about a million people die per year.

The City of Judgement holds people for almost exactly ten days while gods collect them, then decides their fates. Almost everyone who dies ends up there, and the non-transient population is very small, so you're looking at a population of about 27,000 - this fits with the description of the city as a "tightly-packed metropolis" but might be a bit low, so let's add a few thousand permanent residents and bump it up to 30,000.

The Wall of the Faithless surrounds the City of Judgement quite closely. A tightly-packed city to a medieval eye could reach 10,000 to 20,000 people per square mile, so let's call the City two square miles. This means that the Wall of the Faithless is about six miles long. Pictures of it from Neverwinter Nights appear to show that it is no more than three stories tall, or about nine people mortared on top of each other. The average person is about three and a half feet wide, so we're looking at about one hundred thousand souls in the Wall, plus whatever demons have managed to steal over the last thousand years. Let's assume they're moderately capable but need to be sneaky, and round up to 120,000 souls placed in the Wall.

Now, if Myrkul has the full range of 35,000 years of Forgotten Realms history to draw on, that means that only roughly 3.5 people per year are Faithless, or a rate of roughly one person per 300,000. If souls in the Fugue Plain do dissolve, the number of Faithless needs to rise to match; if he only had 3,500 years to draw on, you're looking at about one person per 30,000.

But it's a good statistical starting point!

*EDIT* Wait, no, my numbers assume that the Wall is only one person deep, which it explicitly is not. People are only about a foot across; if the Wall is five feet deep, you need five times as many people, but the demons probably aren't grabbing five times as many, so let's say 525,000 people. That means that if Myrkul has 35,000 years to draw on, you get 15 people per year, or one in 66,666. If he only has 3,500 years you're looking at one in 6,666 people being Faithless, which seems high.

[JadedDM]

...because this whole "gods need prayer to keep reality intact" thing? all news to me.

It's a relatively new thing. After the Time of Troubles, Ao declared that from that point on, gods would draw their power from their followers directly, meaning if nobody believed in you, you'd basically cease to exist. This was meant as a punishment to the gods, for not doing enough to take care of their followers.

(At least, this is what I remember from reading the Avatar trilogy, which I haven't read in years, so I might be misremembering.)

[awa]

Spoiler

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Okay, so I thought I would do some math, here. The following assumes that all of these statements are true:

1) Souls in the Fugue Plain pretty much stick around until someone does something to them; they don't naturally dissolve into the substance of the Plain the way that souls that resonate with a god's domain do.
2) When Myrkul built the Wall, he did so by gathering up all of the Faithless currently in the Fugue Plain, so we're counting from the dawn of the Realms rather than just over the 1600 years or so that he was around.
3) While souls dissolve into the Wall, their substance remains a part of it, so the Wall only grows, and never shrinks.

The total population of the Forgotten Realms is about 68 million sentient beings; I'm going to cheat and assume that life expectancy is about 68 years (with short-lived races like orcs and goblins offsetting long-lived ones like elves and dwarves) because it makes the math much easier and says about a million people die per year.

The City of Judgement holds people for almost exactly ten days while gods collect them, then decides their fates. Almost everyone who dies ends up there, and the non-transient population is very small, so you're looking at a population of about 27,000 - this fits with the description of the city as a "tightly-packed metropolis" but might be a bit low, so let's add a few thousand permanent residents and bump it up to 30,000.

The Wall of the Faithless surrounds the City of Judgement quite closely. A tightly-packed city to a medieval eye could reach 10,000 to 20,000 people per square mile, so let's call the City two square miles. This means that the Wall of the Faithless is about six miles long. Pictures of it from Neverwinter Nights appear to show that it is no more than three stories tall, or about nine people mortared on top of each other. The average person is about three and a half feet wide, so we're looking at about one hundred thousand souls in the Wall, plus whatever demons have managed to steal over the last thousand years. Let's assume they're moderately capable but need to be sneaky, and round up to 120,000 souls placed in the Wall.

Now, if Myrkul has the full range of 35,000 years of Forgotten Realms history to draw on, that means that only roughly 3.5 people per year are Faithless, or a rate of roughly one person per 300,000. If souls in the Fugue Plain do dissolve, the number of Faithless needs to rise to match; if he only had 3,500 years to draw on, you're looking at about one person per 30,000.

But it's a good statistical starting point!

*EDIT* Wait, no, my numbers assume that the Wall is only one person deep, which it explicitly is not. People are only about a foot across; if the Wall is five feet deep, you need five times as many people, but the demons probably aren't grabbing five times as many, so let's say 525,000 people. That means that if Myrkul has 35,000 years to draw on, you get 15 people per year, or one in 66,666. If he only has 3,500 years you're looking at one in 6,666 people being Faithless, which seems high.

that actually makes a really good indirect point against the wall, if I see an important wall in a planner environment, as important as this wall is supposed to be I want it to be BIG but three stories tall and a couple miles long, 5feet deep that's not impressive at all. But to get an impressive wall (aka a wall worth having) a lot more people need to be ending up in the wall.

Well great now you ruined it, I dont know that I can get behind a boring small wall of trapped souls, and I cant have it both ways either the wall is small and unimpressive or too many people are going into it to make sense.

In a different setting aka one that had existed millions or billions of years that would solve it as would if the population was much higher say by drawing from other planes, but as it is those calculations did more to sour me on the idea of the wall then anything else.

[Anymage]

Theres a certain amount of "What did you expect to happen?" in the existence of the Wall. If you reject the idea of worship at all, and reject the gods, theyll reject you right back. You dont get to go to an appropriate afterlife, because you told the managers to shove off when they invited you in. But they have to do something with the Faithless souls, otherwise theyll just wander around for all eternity at best, or possibly eventually collapse into some sort of plane of anti-divinity if enough of them accumulate (which would be bad even if youre a Faithless, because the gods manage reality). So the Wall is basically the garbage disposal of the afterlife, cleaning out the buildup of unprocessable gunk that would otherwise be clinging to the system and causing problems.

Is this "souls in the fugue plane stick around forever unless taken or actively broken down" thing canon? Because if this is the one plane where souls don't eventually merge into it, that would be two things. Odd, in that it's such an exception to the normal planar rules. And being such an oddity would make me wonder why it was written that way.

It's a relatively new thing. After the Time of Troubles, Ao declared that from that point on, gods would draw their power from their followers directly, meaning if nobody believed in you, you'd basically cease to exist. This was meant as a punishment to the gods, for not doing enough to take care of their followers.

(At least, this is what I remember from reading the Avatar trilogy, which I haven't read in years, so I might be misremembering.)

Didn't that also include the gods pressuring Kelemvor to put the wall back? They took their worshipers for granted until Ao made worshipers required. Instead of working to mend bridges with their followers, they instituted an "or else" threat. At least that's what I heard in some of the other wall threads.

At which point, that would be when good gods would speak up in horror. If they don't, I seriously question if they're actually good.

[Saint-Just]

Theoretically, to qualify as Faithless you do have to explicitly reject the whole thing, yes. You can totally say that Bane is just a powerful devil and not actually a god and legitimately believe that, and you wont be Faithless if you also follow Chauntea's faith and earnestly believe in her power and divinity, or even just dont explicitly reject it. And even if deep down you didnt believe in Chauntea's divinity either, but followed the rituals anyway, you would just be False, not Faithless (and even then theres an argument to be made against being False if you believed in the rituals and the ideals even without calling Chauntea a literal god).

Basically, its almost impossible to be Faithless by accident. Somebody brought up a "lived their lives raised by wolves" person earlier, but there are gods of wild animals and the wilderness too, so doing things because you were brought up by wolves and believe the wolf way of doing this is correct would still almost certainly be enough to get you to that god's afterlife.

Between your last post and this one the only post is mine, so I presume that you are answering to me.

Except you really don't.

I am of two minds whether to write another bunch of examples and parallels or just reiterate my questions.

Screw it, I'll do both

People here have posted quotes which seem to support your interpretations of Falsity and Faithlessnes. People also posted quotes which seem to contradict it. You are not obligated to make a consistent system out of the mess which a popular D&D setting that was described by many peoples decades apart truly is. But your interpretations are merely your interpretations, not something that any sane man would conclude having read every canonical book.

I agree that "raised by the wolves" is an extreme example, still, for that you do not provide which god would consider the wolf way as a worship of them, merely state that some surely exist. To be honest for more obscure gods even if you provide a name and a one-paragraph creed people will still argue that wolf way is\isn't a worship of them (as you noticed more mainstream gods' creeds elicited no unanimous agreement ). I find your pre-commitment to the idea that such god should exist more telling: you don't remember every name and creed (most people don't) but your idea of that setting is there is a god for everyone willing to worship. Except it's not an actual world, but fantasy books written by not too large amount of people, so there is nothing improbable in them having overlooked this or that niche (especially if you do not stretch definitions as far as you can but take them on the face value). I find idea of "gods will take in anyone they can" appealing but it's still one. possible. interpretation.

I also want to give a couple examples which should have been on their way to LG and N afterlives normally but are Faithless and False.

Faithless LG who declares "Good have no hands but our hands". May be even a paladin (would Faerun peculiarities override the general rule of nontheistic divine empowerement, or would it merely change the afterlife?). Fights the good fight, walks the good walk, in favor of niceness and community, the works. Pointedly refuses to worship any god (maybe because they are PC run by one of the forumites who have a beef with the Wall, maybe they are just odd). If anyone is Faithless they are. Unless you say that you cannot reach LG without praying to god(s) - again, heavy IRL baggage - they are a shoe-in for Celestia in any other setting. Wall for them. Good god can give them a lift but wouldn't (if you say god can't go to TL;DR).

False N who was really inspired in his youth by Gond. Made a formal pledge or whatnot (I assume that even if such things are not explicitly mentioned they should exist by the virtue of "like reality, unless noted" - unless you say that religious institutions make it purposefully hard to lock the worship to a particular god which seems to run contrary to gods needing worship). Tinkered (not in the sense of making things out of tin) with a few things trying to better the process of his craft. Actually invents something more-or-less useful but which needs significant amount of money to begin the process. Fails to convince anyone with money; tries to make it small-scale in his workshop, goes nowhere, loses money on that. Burns out, switches to more worldly ambitions like marrying a daughter of a more important guildsman and working extra-hard and extra-long while he's young and strong so in ten or twenty years he can have a significant business mostly running by itself. Mostly succeeds, lives long and prospers. Worships Gond with his words, nobody with his heart. Sits on the guild council which decides to stifle new invention in his trade because it upsets existing balance, votes in favor (let's say by offering inventor a cushy pension as long as nobody knows about their invention and by threatening to ruin their reputation if anybody finds out so inventor would have at least move from that city). Not that Evil, not really Good. False.



TL;DR

Why Kelemvor has recreated the Wall?

How the system has worked before Myrkul?

Bonus: do you consider refusing to worship a god\gods a harmful act deserving punishment?

<Lower Planes are not punishment it's what Evil people want>

I have seen a lot of disputes on this very forum, and seen long-standing members with significant D&D experience come on both sides of the issue and on third and fourth side too (e.g. "Evil people think they want Lower Planes but if they accurately knew what awaits them they would not want them, because most are horrifically tortured until they are either destroyed for soul power or transformed into a cannon fodder for the Blood War losing all memories and personality in the process and odds of instant promotion are infinitesimally low"). I gave up trying to make sense of it and not for the lack of trying.

not to mention that there seems to be a fairly large number of "crazy" people in fiction who do evil and or stupid things just because. So the fact that some of those "crazy" people might try and reject the gods as part of their "crazy" does not strike me as implausible at all.

Let me just state two options which that leads to: crazy people do not deserve to be punished for craziness but are punished? Gods are in-game Evil. Crazy people deserve to be punished and are punished accordingly? ___ ___ ___ ____ (filling in the blanks left as an exercise for the reader)

[awa]

Let me just state two options which that leads to: crazy people do not deserve to be punished for craziness but are punished? Gods are in-game Evil. Crazy people deserve to be punished and are punished accordingly? ___ ___ ___ ____ (filling in the blanks left as an exercise for the reader)

were not talking about people with mental illness that's different, we are talking about the fairly common fiction trope of the "crazy" person. Were talking about joker knock offs whose madness somehow makes them super-effective and efficient serial killers, were talking about the worshipers of lovecraftian evils who can somehow be "mad" enough to want to destroy the world but not so mad that it in anyway hinders their ability to run over-complicated conspiracies. Its the evil wizards who are creating horrible abominations in their labs so the pcs have something interesting to fight. Were talking about all those villains that are like this because the writer/ DM never bothered to give them a coherent motivation so just said oh hes "crazy".

Don't confuse the two they are very different

[Saint-Just]

Probably shouldn't have reacted the way I did, especially since I pretty much asked the same question in TL;DR only in less confrontational manner. The question as formulated in TL;DR still stands.