Hell vs. Baator

sciborg2's picture

I was musing over the fact that Baator is the place for souls of a particular alignment, rather than that of those of the "wrong" faith. In terms of creating an interesting scenario, what if god such as Phlotus started grabbing souls of unbelievers and torturing them in his realm because they refuse the truth of his existence?

I think this could be, if handled well by players and DM, a very interesting scenario. By doing this in Mechanus, he would need to balance out the number of souls of opposing alignments to keep his realm from slipping. He would also, given the risk of a mass slide of the realm out of Mechanus and thus out of the gear system, draw the attention of beings such as Primus and the gear/clockwork spirits.

Jem
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The place of atheism and

The place of atheism and monotheism in Planescape has inspired quite a few threads over the years, to the extent that the subjects are now, I believe, dead threads. However, if you search the site for "atheism" and "monotheism" or "atheist" and "monotheist" you should find several threads that might spark ideas for your setting along these lines.

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In large part, the nature of

In large part, the nature of "faithless" depends on the pantheon rather than the laws of the Planes. In Toril, the Faithless go to the Gray Waste (assuming one still attaches the Planescape cosmology to Toril), where I believe they were used as bricks for the wall surrounding the City of the Dead under Myrkul's and Cyric's reigns. I am not certain what the ultimate fate for the faithless is under Kelemvor, but I believe it is not the wall anymore.

For Earth, and three of its most prominent religions, Baator is the most likely place "faithless" go. Baator is a rather unabashed clone of Dante's Inferno in many respects (and Celestia his Paradiso -- neither of these are exact copies but there's a clear parallel), so it serves to stand that nonbelievers would go to Baator in death. It's a little more difficult to qualify on Earth than Toril, however. On Toril, at least, everyone's deities do exist and everyone knows it, and when you die, you go to your god's realm, regardless of alignment, as long as you do not blaspheme your god. On Earth, there is no such universally accepted truth, so the above is based on an assumption that Judeo-Christian mythology is correct. If Hindu mythology or Hellenistic mythology or any number of other beliefs is the correct one, then that mythology would dictate what happens to faithless souls.

Simply put, it is very possible for a god to capture faithless souls and torment them in the afterlife. However, I do not believe that the gods can simply take any petitioner souls they wish. I would say it is largely dependent on the individual mortal's beliefs and the beliefs of those around him. An experienced planar need not worship or even believe in a deity to go to Elysium when he passes on. He only needs to be a good person. The worship is irrelevant. On the other hand, a prime from Toril that dies without faith would have ended up in Myrkul's or Cyric's wall. So, Phlotus could indeed claim souls for his own, but only if they were on the relevant Prime or involved with his pantheon somehow.

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sciborg2's picture
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Thanks for the comments! I

Thanks for the comments!

I wanted to avoid dealing to heavily into RL religions so as not to offend. I picked Phlotus because he is the kind of god that would try and pull something like this. I agree that he shouldn't be able to capture any souls he wishes, but perhaps if he was the only god or the dominant god in a world he would have choicer pickings.

This isn't necessarily limited to a god though. In some sense this is what the Harmonium tried to do with their camps in Arcadia though that was supposedly more about reform. The line between punishment and rehabilitation, whether mortal or divine, opens up even more possibilities for a campaign.

Monotheistic campaigns are interesting but honestly not for me. I might run part of an adventure in a world where there is one god but it removes some of the fun for me without the Manichean conflict of D&D.

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One way in which a god might

One way in which a god might be able to collect souls opposed to his alignment is if those souls in life defined themselves not by attachment to another alignment or religion, but by opposition to that god's views in particular. If one doesn't care about "doing evil" in general, but has a personal hate-on for a particular god's believers and clergy and philosophy, a pantheon might collectively agree that that soul could be taken and punished by a particular good god, perhaps with the possibility of ultimately cleansing him or releasing him to an afterlife more suited to his alignment after a prescribed length of time.

(Which leads to the interesting scenario that someone who wasn't motivated so much by doing good in general, as by destroying and negating the works of some particular evil deity, might have the pantheon require that deity to host that soul in a state of paradise within his evil domain! From such a vantage, the soul might be able to continue his holy war, protected from retaliation, in the afterlife, until he seeks rest or becomes corrupted by his environment.)

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Pholtus might indeed want to

Pholtus might indeed want to torture those who don't worship him in Hell (or maybe the Abyss, etc...), but if the unlucky sod was the worshiper of another deity, enough of that and the other god(s) are gonna take notice and put an end to it. After all, they benefit from each petitioner gained, so why would they let some other power start stealing them, even to punish (and the good deities might even object to the punishment of good-aligned berks that didn't worship a deity... after all, they're still good!) There is some question as to whether the actions of Pholtus's worshipers on Oerth (persecuting other faiths and spellcasters, etc.) are actually the will of Pholtus, or just their own idea. (Similar arguments rage in the real world, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms...)

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