Afterlife system in DnD

[Guts]

Could someone explain to me the afterlife in dnd? I know it might not be the same as OOTS but OOTS' afterlives could be a parody of DnD's anyways.

Now I read on wikipedia that you go to the plane that matches your alignment. I also read a god that has the same alignment and lives on the plane can shape his section of the plane to a degree. So are those who have a strong devotion to a deity go to that deity's palne or subsection of a plane? I also read that dead souls become petioners, lose their memories gradually and all sorts of stuff happens to them. One of the planes said that some of its inhibitants turn into type of magicky animal (wth?) and dead souls that are in one of the hells can turn into the 'raw material' for forming devils and demons (i think theres a distiction between the two).

Anyways could someone pls explain the afterlife and what happens on each of the standard planes (and conditions and layers on each plane) and how gods, devils/demons and angelic crap come into play?

[Kreistor]

All of that is from the Planescape setting, and it's close enough to being correct that the differences don't matter.

There is no official DnD afterlife. The Planescape setting is one that a lot of people like and use, but it is no longer being supported.

So, I can answer a specific question, but not the general, "Can you explain the afterlife," one. You've got it right. People die, their souls automatically og to the correct Plane, they lose most if not all of their memories (so you can travel the Planes to find lost friends, but aren't assured that they can tell you who killed them), and then their souls persist on that Plane until something happens to cause them to be absorbed into it, at which point their afterlife is over.

[bluish_wolf]

Basically, it varies depending on setting.

I know in the Forgotten Realms setting, everyone goes to the Fugue plane, and your deity's servants come to rescue you if you are faithful enough.

[Tempest Fennac]

What exactly is the Fugue Plane like?

[Yodaman23]

The fugue plane is supposedly a large flat gray plane with one city, where the god of death lives. The city is walled off by a wall of souls that contains the faithless. Those that die wander the plane until an emissary of their god comes, judges them and takes them to the heaven of that god. Or Batezu find souls that want to become demons and take them to the hells.

[jamroar]

What exactly is the Fugue Plane like?

A bleak featureless expanse (except for Kelemvor's divine realm located there), possibly the most boring place in all of existence, with nothing but a bunch of dead guys without anything to do besides standing around saying "rez plz" or waiting around for their divine patrons to come pick them up to the afterlife. Those without divine patrons ... well, let's just say the Realms version of cosmology is decidedly harsh on impious and godless souls, compared to the Great Wheel.

[Tempest Fennac]

Thanks for telling me (I prefer the Great Wheel version personally).

[chibibar]

Generally if you are talking about a permanent setting type as in your character continues to adventure, it is really up to you. There are no true rules about it because some people might get offended by the "afterlife" so it is your own creation and how it would run.

Now if you are planning to have an adventure style, any plane books (2nd has a bunch of these) describe the different areas of planes people can be in. Are there maps? well, in theory these worlds are infinite. So you can pretty much make up anything as you go along :)

[Laurellien]

According to the Manual of the Planes/Planar Handbook, when a being dies, its soul lingers for a handful of rounds, and then, assuming that it isn't imprisoned by a spell or a death giant, it travels to the outer plane where its patron deity dwells, or the outer plane that best matches its outlook if it didn't have a strong devotion to a deity. Mostly, the soul just wanders as a petitioner, slowly becoming part of the plane and preventing resurrection. Certain planes have different effects on petitioners, e.g. Carceri has its petitioners incarcerated, Ysgard has its petitioners fight in glorious battles, wrestling and drinking, Boccob's petitioners in the outlands gaze over the shoulders of his researchers and pore over ancient texts, The worshippers of Lolth end up in the demonweb pits, caught in spider webs, watching the machinations of their goddess as she eats them one by one. A truly horrible end awaits the Lawful Evil souls, or those that sell their soul to a devil.
-Upon arrival in Baator they appear naked on a cliff of rock ledges.
-The ledge breaks off and floats along the river styx.
-Bearded devils piloting boats identify which soul shells were converted by the servants of which archfiend and take them away (unclaimed ones are fiercely contested for their value).
-The soul shell may be traded between archdukes of Hell.
-The soul is subjected to brutal and inhumane torture via a device known as a shriver. For countless years they writhe in agony until finally nothing remains of its former personality, it has been completely emptied of all of the divine energy that made it what it was, and this energy is harvested by the Lords of the Nine.
-The soul shell is thrown into a spawning pit where it becomes a lemure, and from there it has to be cunning, evil and lucky enough to get promoted along the infernal hierarchy, perhaps one day becoming an archduke itself.
-A soul whose first action is to repent on its arrival in Avernus, it suffers a different fate. It travels to Dis, and mournfully moans in sorrow at the crimes it committed, these soul shells produce a constant influx of energy for Dispater, and so are never traded or Shrived.
-If a person repents before they reach Avernus, then they are returned to life as a Hellbred. They are given one chance to atone, and they must do so by committing an epic act of good. As such, most are often exalted and/or paladins.

[Tempest Fennac]

Thanks for telling me. What exactly does a shriver look like, and how does it torture the souls who end up inside it?

[Tirian]

The fugue plane is supposedly a large flat gray plane with one city, where the god of death lives. The city is walled off by a wall of souls that contains the faithless. Those that die wander the plane until an emissary of their god comes, judges them and takes them to the heaven of that god. Or Batezu find souls that want to become demons and take them to the hells.

Oh, now that is a good system. It's like a polytheistic application of The Great Divorce, except that there the bland gray city _is_ Hell (although if you choose to leave you would call it Purgatory).

[Nerd-o-rama]

Actually, it's the wall that's hell, and the plain that's purgatory. I don't thing dead people hang around in the city, unless they go in to beg Kelemvor for a favor.

And of course, there's actual hells where you go through a semi-eternity of torment with the "hope" of becoming an evil outsider. That's what the devils bribe newly arrived souls with, anyway. "Oh yeah, we'll torture you some, but someday you could be a pit fiend! And really, you're probably going to hell anyway. Why not speed things up? This way, you don't have to deal with your crazy-ass deity."

Just to throw it in: Eberron campaign setting: everyone goes to the same plane (Dollurh) which acts like Hades from Greek myth, gradually losing your memory and identity until you fade away completely, unless rescued physically or with resurrection magic. Some souls are supposedly imprisoned on the material plane by the Keeper (an evil god of avarice and death) apparently at random. Faiths other than the ubiquitous Church of the Sovereign Host hold slightly different ideas: worshippers of the Silver Flame believe their souls join the gestalt consciousness of the Silver Flame after death, some people believe in reincarnation rather than oblivion after their stay on Dollurh, and the Blood of Vol is more concerned than anything with not dying in the first place.

[Dorizzit]

One fairly interesting campaign setting, the relatively obscure Ghostwalk, has many themes relating to death and dying. Anyway, in that the afterlife is basically an archipelago, and people are essentially just shades unless their body is put through a gate to the afterlife on the material plane. Material objects can be created at will, but then just fade away.

[Chronos]

-The soul shell is thrown into a spawning pit where it becomes a lemure, and from there it has to be cunning, evil and lucky enough to get promoted along the infernal hierarchy, perhaps one day becoming an archduke itself.

And how exactly can a lemure be cunning? They're mindless.

Or is that just one of the ways that the devils twist the rules to guarantee perpetual imprisonment for the souls?

[EoNhOeKnOwS]

Regarding the lemures being mindless, I would say either plain luck for the lemure, such as being sent to multiple wars and battles (for years even) and somehow surviving each battle or literally being struck by a moment of mayhaps tactical brilliance and being noticed (pretty much DM gets to be creative). While it doesn't explain how this lemure did it, the archduke (leader) of the first layer of Batoor (in dnd 3.5) was a lemure and achieved archduke rank.

So the petitioners (people that died moments ago and didn't get resurrected), fall into the first layer of Batoor, Avernus, near the river Styx. These petitioners are made of flesh and blood and suffer, mayhaps more, than a non-dead person. They are collected and caged and brought to a facility in each layer (9 layers, 1 leader in each) so they are tortured (in even unimaginable ways) by chain devils (and other devil types do this too, mostly chain devils) or machines, there's even a spell that extracts this pain, which makes this viscous liquid used for magic and such, anywho, this released energy (like scaring the kids at night in Monsters, Inc.) is collected and this is how the archdukes gain magic (instead of a god granting them divine power), and so the archdukes dispense this divine energy to their minions. So the petitioners can be used as a higher currency than gold or platinum because they can trade the petitioners (and soul shells: the left over shell of a soul after its magic has been harvested) and gain extra divine magic (or minions if it's a soul shell traded) for the archdevil and so the devil that got that extra petitioner will get browny points towards becoming a stronger (higher rank) devil (obviously the soul shell gets less browny points, but every bit counts)

ALSO it's very rare that a petitioner that goes to Batoor isn't marked by a specific archduke (people are deceived by devils and so when this pact is struck the devil's archduke gains the soul of this mortal when it dies, the devils try to kill the mortal (make it look like an accident) to collect the soul faster. This "pact" (like sign a contract to gain power or wealth, or even supernatural power or the devil does a small and incremental favors for the mortal and now all of a sudden the mortal owes the devil his soul) will turn the mortal into lawful evil, even if his attitude isn't, because the act of getting favors and ultimately having to pay the favor back constitutes as a lawful evil act (or many small lawful evil acts) marking its soul now to the archduke. If a lawful evil person dies and isn't tied to a deity it will go to Batoor like a regular corrupted soul, except devils collecting their patron's souls can try to capture this "unmarked" soul - but so can all other patrons, so the affair can turn bloody and a 3rd party may snatch the unmarked petitioner while the others fight each other


The soul shells are collected, which are now mindless bumbling beings not knowing anything about themselves or that they are a self, but still well aware of the agony they suffered, and finally brought to the mentioned spawning bit (I believe it looks like a colossal maggot gaping mouth as a crater on the earth with goop inside the mouth with tiny maggots swimming in the goop) so the soul shells are tossed in, landing with a delicious splosh sort of sound, quickly dying and being eaten by the maggots, the resulting goop (thousands of soul shells are tossed in all the time) is expelled as a lemure, or many, and im not sure how it's expelled or if they're fished out by devils that are in charge of the task.

Devils are tyrants and law used to oppress lower beings/ranks is strength.

Demons are the essence of chaos and destruction, while a devil will cheat, bribe, even be fake friendly, to take over reality (which is their ultimate goal), demons will overrun reality and once they've taken every inch of reality, they'll turn on themselves

[EoNhOeKnOwS]

I would also like to add a bit about the Beastlands, When people die of this alignment/belief, they go to this plane and the environment of the plane causes the soul to be happily content (pretty much what it's believed were in life that lead it to be transported to this plane after death matches its happiness views) its calm and natury and animals live here, as well as half man half animals that exist in dnd, and hound archos and such. These souls start to take small traits of the plane and eventually turn into animals themselves, simply forgetting their "temporary" existence as a being that was alive. In turn, the plane and the deity gains divine energy.

So by deities getting worshippers to worship them, their souls go to their planes and when the soul finishes its full journey of life and existence, it melds onto the plane's reality and fuels it's cause and deity with divine magic, and I suppose this is how it works for most deities (demons and devils aren't gods so they gain divine magic in different ways than these)

[Nerd-o-rama]

Man I love it when I see a check mark on a thread I don't recognize and it's someone necromancy-ing a decade-old thread in which I almost literally started off with "well actually" while somehow thinking I was constructively contributing to the conversation. Why is it always the embarrassing threads...

[EoNhOeKnOwS]

Sure, I was thinking about the thread being so old, but this post comes up first or second when you search the internet for "afterlife dnd 3.5", there aren't many posts really dealing with what happens after an npc or pc dies, so these are my two cents for anyone recently searching for what happens in some places of the planes

[KorvinStarmast]

What exactly is the Fugue Plane like?

It's like this only with better visuals.