Damnation and Hellfire
I’ve been reading a lot about the planes lately. Most the Golarion/Pathfinder variants, as I wait for some PlaneScape books to hit Print on Demand over on the Dungeon Master’s Guild.
The fate of sinners has always troubled me in Dungeons & Dragons. What happens when people die? In Judeo-Christian mythology, people go to hell to be punished for their defiance of the all powerful god.
However, in a D&D world, evil gods are a thing. And have their own realms in the lower planes. Why would they not reward their worshippers and followers? Why doesn’t the Karkus, the dark god of death, reward his faithful to the same extent as the good gods? And if he doesn’t, why don’t raised followers spread the word that he’s a total tool and an eternity of torture awaits. Even the possibility of hell keeps people good in the real world. In a world where you can cast communion or gate and see for a fact what the afterlife is like, why wouldn’t everyone opt for chaotic good? The hand-wavy explanation is that evil gods lie and the spells are high level and thus rare. But then why wouldn’t the lawful gods – the literal embodiment of honesty – just open a few gates and reveal the truth?
There’s not a great solution for this because, deep in our heart of hearts, we want bad people to be punished for their sins in life. And it seems weird to have Hell be a place of paradise for evil people. And if you’re rewarded either way for your actions in life, why bother being good?
4th Edition tried to address this problem by making the fate of souls vague. People died and went somewhere, but the gods weren’t saying. Which is odd because the outer planes were still a thing. There was literally a heaven and hell, but they were no longer where people went when they died. Which was counterintuitive. But possibly a good starting place.
My quick-and-dirty answer basically boils down to “better to rule in hell, than serve in heaven”. Though it is indeed something that can benefit from some deep consideration on the GM’s part.
It might be apocryphal, but Word of Mouth when I was starting with D&D presented a resolution to this conundrum (The apocryphal bit: it was ‘canon’ in Faerun): All gods (good and evil) theoretically reward their devoted followers, so if you follow Karkus, the dark god of Death, and live fully devoted to the precepts of Karkus, he’ll take you in to his domain in the outer planes. Which might be in a lower plane, but shaped according to the will of Karkus, so it will be the most Karkus-y place possible and one sufficiently devoted to Karkus will probably enjoy it. Eventually the dead souls reach one sort of transcendence or another. What happens to “The individual” is unclear — good or evil, maybe it merges with the god in question, maybe it just stops, but at least some of the *energy* is absorbed into the outer plane in question, providing the genesis of the lowest sort of outsider, like a Larva. You might find some generic lost souls: they were forsaken by their god (Perhaps because they failed to be a faithful worshipper), or shanghaied by fiends, or the victim or some cosmic accounting error, or of insufficient faith (Which I KNOW leads to a different fate than just lost soul in Faerun). They might be on any plane — a chaotic good follower of a lawful god could be sent to Ysgard or Arborea. Naturally that kind of fate is worse if you were naughty.
Yah…something that bothers me on occasion is if someone is moderately Evil for good reasons (consumed by vengeance, bad upbringing, etc) and could conceivably be redeemed, if they don’t turn Good or Neutral by the time they die, they go to hell/abyss.
But if you have a fully-Evil, unrepentant, complete-bastard of a someone who gleefully worships an Evil god and commits atrocities in their name, they get taken away to a place that’s nice for them by that evil god instead.
You have a situation where the complete monsters are rewarded and the merely corrupted are victims for eternity.
Let’s put it like this: why are there people using drugs in the real world, if everyone knows drugs bring but a little enjoyment followed by a lot of misery, illnesses, addiction, and some of those can kill users outright?
Because there are people who don’t really care for their well being even in this life. So it should be no surprise if in a fictional world there are people who don’t care for the consequences of their actions, especially if those consequences will affect them only after they cease to breathe.