Quote Originally Posted by Meditation View Post
The fact that civilization in D&D-land isn't utterly obsessed with the afterlife and immortality is patently absurd, especially since even "good" souls suffer fates worse than death in many cases. The upside of this oversight is that addressing it can lead to some really interesting homebrew settings.
Quote Originally Posted by Venger View Post
it literally is, though. the afterlife is an observable part of the natural world, and churches are the prevailing forces in most communities.
It literally isn’t, though. You may have confused some pronouns here — I’m not sure. “It” is civilization. Characters in-universe do not express significant concern about the afterlife in a reasonable or ational way. Pretty much everyone would conclude that becoming a blade of grass or a wild animal in Elysium is horrific, especially as a reward for being “good” (which is itself irrational because the alignments do not represent moral poles but eldritch forces of horror) and since people have a suite of reliable, mechanical means to engineer their long-term survival, they would just do that. Churches being important in communities in D&D-land is nearly irrelevant (I don’t know if the previous poster meant the church-reference to be a parallel to the real world). There is no real-world equivalent, even within religious institutions, to a person who can reliably move souls around, and that person, and his or her profession, would be the most important one around. And it wouldn’t necessarily be all or even majority clerics, either: as described in this very thread, there are lots of super-powers which impact this issue. These powers would be organized, syncratized, and employed in a manner that maximized the self-control and “lifespan” of at least the elites. I mean, we’re casually doing that right now. This says nothing about how the relationship between the gods and mortals would be in many cases out-and-out hostile, which, in turn, might well lead many gods to give mortals less of a raw deal, especially if mortals can trivially escape-hatch the process.