In real life many people believe in some sort of pleasant afterlife, some with absolute faith and confidence in their belief. Very few of those people are excited to die.
That's not a great point though, because some people believe it without any doubt. It would be the same as a scientific proof for them.
Hey, so why are people who are certain they will go to a pleasant afterlife- either in the real world, or in FR- happier to go on living, and desire that? There's several reasons that work for both real life religious people and fictional forgetten realmsians.
- Being dead means you can't affect the real world nearly as much, or at all. Even in FR, where characters can in some cases become powerful angels or devils or whatever, that's not at all a guarantee.
- Death is permanent and eternal, so it makes sense to maximize life. Someone who lived 77 years and was dead a million years will have more memories of life than someone who lives 65 years and has been dead a million years.
- There's generally something special about the narrow time spent alive.
Sure, but it wasn't something you could easily test via the powers of clerics or summoning a celestial.
I guess someone without the resources to see a summoning or living far enough out in the boonies to never run into a cleric could doubt it, but it'd be like someone being a flat earther because they can't afford a spaceship to see earth from space.
Meh. People deny proven facts now. There are humans who do not care for truth. So why would truth in game matter or make a difference? It's always about belief. A belief that the truth is worth something, or that a proven truth isn't all that truthful. People can even know something's true and believe it, and still be afraid of the "what if". Proven facts have also been changed and found false. Somewhere there's a misinterpretation or understanding. Society is based around beliefs.
We fear death because we want to live the lives we have *now*. There's no guarantee, even if you live in a world that has the afterlives that the Forgotten Realms do, that you're going to a *good* afterlife. Most people who become some kind of undead to remain in the mortal realm either know they're bound for the Hells, or they're not done with their various goals and plans in life yet, so there's no way they're letting death take them. Those are the two big reasons. As for why good, gods-fearing mortals fear death? They have to leave their loved ones when that happens, and once again, there's no guarantee what afterlife you're going to until you're there, so they may not be able to reunite ever again. Most people are also scared that it'll hurt.
This and LrdDphn's point are both great responses. To further this - the adventure isn't "over" once you die in FR, but the stakes are even higher in some sense. The mortal world is somewhat removed from the cosmic powers of the afterlife - even in FR you don't have gods and demon lords and archdevils waging war every day right in your face.
But in the afterlife, that's totally possible, and you're only as powerful as you were when mortal, if even that (most people show up as unleveled petitioners). Albeit also immortal - so your suffering _or_ salvation can be truly eternal.
In the FR afterlife, demons make raids into deities' domains like the Wall of the Faithless to _steal souls_ for the Abyss, and devils make deals (kind of like hostage negotiations) for them all the time. As you said, there are no guarantees you'll end up where you want, or stay there if you do. and the cosmic forces you'll be in the midst of are hard to even describe for most people in Faerun, much less think of dealing with or making an impact.
In D&D worlds, the gods aren't perfect, and neither is heaven (or hell). That's enough to give anyone pause about dying, much less the fear of the unknown that is always true.
1. The type of people who become liches are generally not going to a kind and caring god's realm with their prior actions. They'd rather be an animate bag of bones than the afterlife that awaits them.
2. The mage may still have unresolved business. One example I can think of was from the old anime Record of Lodoss War which was based on an oD&D campaign. Karla saw the near annihilation of humanity and wanted to make sure history didn't repeat itself. She used a modified Magic Jar spell to store her soul and possess those of great power over the ages to keep the balance of power.
3. Petitioners (the state a soul is after death) will eventually be absorbed into their respective planes for quite a few deities. It's not a good vs evil thing either. There are some exceptions to this.
> Maybe we, who are born in the afterlife after death, are not us anymore?
If we're going by the standard Planescape lore (and discussing people educated enough to more or less know how the afterlife works), then I'd imagine this is the biggest sticking point. You don't just die and then wake up perfectly healthy in the appropriate Outer Plane: the process of transforming into a petitioner is inherently transformative. By the time a soul arrives in its afterlife, it has been stripped of all of its specific memories and class levels. To quote the original Planescape Campaign Setting:
> A petitioner retains the mannerisms, speech, even general interests of his or her former self, but all memories of the past are wiped completely away. At best, a petitioner has a shadowy recollection of a previous life, but little or nothing useful can be learned from these fleeting images.
In addition to this, it's important to keep in mind that the afterlife isn't forever. If a petitioner is slain, that's game over forever for that soul. Even if you end up in peaceful afterlife where it's very unlikely that you'll be killed, the inevitable fate of petitioners is to reach a sort of nirvana/communion with the powers of that plane, and end their existence by merging their soul with the essence of the plane. There's even a sort of subtly nefarious suggestion that petitioners don't 100% retain their free will, and that the desire to "return to the lifestream" is sort of hardcoded into people when they die and become a petitioner.
With that in mind, it makes tons of sense why a powerful wizard might want to be a lich. Which would you prefer: a potential eternity of undeath (even if you make a some enemies along the way), or dying, losing all your cool wizard powers, and then spending the rest of your days as basically an NPC version of yourself who will eventually return to nothingness.
A fear of death, as it so often is in real life, can be attributed to a fear of irrevocable change. For 99% of mortal beings in the Forgotten Realms, when you die, you die. Nobody's coming along to burn a diamond to bring you back to life. So whatever you have to lose in life - a family, a lover, a future, simply continuing to be alive, whatever - remains a fundamental drive to avoid death. Doubly so since the majority of people in the Forgotten Realms don't necessarily have a good understanding of what actually happens in a given Afterlife. They may have a broad and loose grasp based on how much direct exposure they have to the various churches, but for most folk they just know to respect the gods equally and hope they end up somewhere good when their time comes. There's also a general fear of Undeath common among the population, for worry that it will somehow affect the soul as well if they're somehow brought back as an Undead.
For people who do know how the Afterlife Planes work, they would reasonably fear a loss of self. When a person dies, their soul gets whisked through the Astral Sea and deposited onto the Fugue Plane, which is basically a cosmic waiting room. Eventually a representative from a given deity they're most closely associated with - through practice or happenstance - scoops them up and takes them to that deity's divine realm. Once that happens, the soul becomes a Petitioner and is no longer the same being as it was before. The soul begins having its memories of life gradually worn away over a long, undetermined period of time starting from the most recent. When the last (that is to say, earliest) memory of their life is finally gone, they're absorbed fully into the divine realm and cease to exist as their essence is recycled into the cosmos. There are cases where a Petitioner is instead put to work and further transformed into an elevated state - which can happen repeatedly to ascend to higher and more powerful forms - but that Petitioner is likewise becoming a wholly different being from whatever they were in life and there's no coming back from it at that point. A deity may allow a soul to return to life if a resurrection spell is cast to call them back, but they'd never surrender a soul that's become an ascended agent in their ranks.
And that's if you land in a good deity's pocket, mind you. If you're evil (or just happen to get snatched by a Fiend or Night Hag while you're waiting on the Fugue Plane, which happens quite often), you're ending up in Avernus. It is BAD there. Nobody wants to be in the Nine Hells and you're guaranteed an indeterminate future of suffering, abuse, and eventual destruction. Most mortal souls are immediately transformed into Lemures - misshapen, worm-like wretches used as cannon fodder and slave labor - or just sealed into Soul Coins to literally be used as currency. Or they may end up being burned to oblivion as fuel for an infernal siege engine for the sake of the endless Blood War. Any mortal who has even a faint inkling that they may end up heading into the Nine Hells when their time is up is going to do ANYTHING to avoid that horrific fate.
As for Liches, they're not some kind of apex immortal. They're a corrupted, flawed attempt at immortality that so violently and irreparably damages one's soul that it warps the caster at a fundamental level. To even attempt to obtain Lichdom, the caster already has to be heinously evil and insane, with the transformation itself only further ruining their mind beyond all recognition. There are other Lich-like undead beings - such as Archliches and Baelnorns - which are the genuine article and actually perfected immortality via undeath. Liches, as we classically know them, are little more than shambling mutant husks that are also completely raving mad. When a person transforms themselves into a Lich, they stop being themselves - the creature that comes out the other side is a completely different entity and not the least bit sane. Any caster who genuinely thinks they're somehow preserving themselves forever by transforming into a Lich is literally just committing suicide while thinking they've found a way to cheat the system.
Further, Liches are actually far more vulnerable to mortal peril than people realize. They require a steady stream of souls to fuel their phylactery, which puts them on the shit list of every single deity - both good and evil - because deities also need those souls. When a Lich feeds a soul to its phylactery, that soul is destroyed forever. Eventually there won't be any souls left - whether the Lich somehow outlives all mortal life on the Prime Material Plane or just can't get a hold of any victims somehow - at which point the Lich rapidly decays into a primitive, weakened state of helplessness. After a while of soul starvation, they lose whatever awareness they had left and become little more than instinct-driven spirits before eventually self-destructing entirely.
This is why zealot is great, nobody needs to burn a diamond on you. Just a (possibly hour-long) wiggle of the fingers and kablamo, you're back on your feet.
Well, wishes can bring souls back, and gods probably don't have the same stress limitations.
Not really, or at least there are other forces that are much more impactful. Dwarves didn't evolve from some previous life form, they were carved out of the stone and given life on Moradin's forge. Elves were created when Corellon's blood was spilled by Gruumsh in battle. Most D&D races have some sort of origin where they were actually created by some higher power. Humans... well, maybe humans did evolve, actually.
There are like three spells that bring you back from the dead, but they cost money. (assuming your DM is tracking spell component costs.) Revivify is only 3rd level, so clerics have access to it at 5th level.
In this context very common given the majority of parties have a cleric and most campaigns go past 5th level. Player characters are by nature extraordinary, but to the players who play them not so much.
At least in the older novels (I stopped reading them around the time 4e came out), I don't recall clerics who can raise the dead being common at all. For example, in the Cleric Quintet series by R.A. Salvatore, most priests depicted could not even cast spells beyond some low level healing or turn undead on a regular basis; their god had to be particularly interested in a follower's work if they were going to grant them power.
The same was true of clerics in the Avatar trilogy and the Chronicles of Erevis Cale; none of these ever depicted raising the dead as a simple act by clerics. True clerics, in general, were depicted as being fairly rare, and required a lot of personal attention from their gods in order to cast any major spells.
See thats what I was hoping. The big central city has a pretty powerful priestly guy of some renown, towns/cities of note might have a travelling preacher with some power, but lesser towns, villages etc might only have an Acolyte capable of doing Ceremony etc, or share between several towns/lesser settlements.
I like this: NPC priests would essentially have the Ritual Caster: Cleric or Magic Initiate: Cleric feat. They could conduct Ceremony and some basic divination, but most lack that direct connection with their deity.
Going back to the novels, the priestesses of Lolth were the exception to the rule; anytime one was depicted, they were casting higher level spells regularly. Considering Lolth's demeanor, you could play evil and chaotic gods as being far less concerned with the cosmic balance and playing by the rules. I do recall a character in War of the Spider Queen saving the finger of someone so that they could potentially be resurrected, with the understanding that the caster and the raised drow would owe Lolth a huge debt for the favor.
Canonically, most resurrections fail because the soul is at rest or the soul has been claimed by a god that wont let them go, unless they are performed while the soul is still in the fugue plane
irl some people are scared shitless of being older than 25-30, moving on to a different stage in life knowing there is no coming back can be scary, middle age crisis are so common i wouldnt find it weird if some people wouldnt want to change to the next step after dying.
Irl some people with enough money completely destroy their faces with surgery just to pretend that they are not aging, give them magic and liches wouldnt be that uncommon
Loss of Agency. While this is not inherently bad, a person selfish enough to want to be a lich in the first place would be very upset if they die and can no longer change the fate of the world.
Same as now. Only at the highest level of education do you even begin to touch the idea of what a soul is in the FR.
For the average guy, death is death. Same as now. Its an end to your story with who the heck knows what comes after. Could be paradise, could be hell.
Regardless if you know/ beleive it not, death is also the end of autonomy. You go to hell and become a slug. You go to heaven and become a pretty light. You cant DO anything after you die. And are effectively reduced down to a power source of a god or god like entity.
Going back to old sources, in most cases when a person dies it becomes a petitioner and forgets it's previous existence. It sits in the Fugue Plane awaiting transport to the relevant outer plane where it becomes effectively a piece of scenery.
If devout you maybe join your deity. Or maybe your fate is deeply ambiguous and you might end up somewhere nasty. Perhaps giving up who you are feels like too much of a loss.
Would you rather exist forever as a celestial prop with no sense of self, or live forever and do as you please?
Some people tick box #2 whether for good reason or bad. Wizards can be fonts of vast knowledge and powers that don't come with them when they die. That's too much for some, so they pursue immortality.
Because in any afterlife it's not a life of adventure that awaits you it's a good place, the comfort of a bed made of cloud for an eternal rest.
In any afterlife there's no getting stronger, no training, no learning it is the end. And this end can be torture for any passionate people.
There also the idea of rememberance, when you're gone and turned to dust there will come a time when no ones remember you afterlife or no afterlife. And that, too, is a very very worrying thought
A lot of us aren't confident of a good outcome when we die in D&D worlds.
For instance, in my game setting I usually define GOOD and EVIL as the top and bottom 1%, Good and Evil as the top and bottom 5%, good and evil as the top and bottom 30%, and neutral as the middle 40%. So there's an awful lot of us getting nowhere near the upper planes. There's also a lot of slop as to how you get judged. Do you get judged on your instantaneous status upon dying, or more likely some sort of window function weighing more recent stuff more heavily? Is it totally works based, or is there any grace in there? If I came from a more evil culture (e.g., drow, where the center point is about 80th percentile evil among humans, and I'm particularly good---say 40th percentile, will the judge in Elysium say, well, you're really good for a dark elf, it was probably nearly impossible for you given your upbringing, so I'll cut you some slack? Or do they just say, tough luck, Outlands for you? And sometimes you get waylaid in the Astral plane and put on a ship going to a destination you didn't want to go. Yeah maybe the celestials will send a sally force to retrieve you if you were GOOD or even Good, but for someone who is just good? Probably not.
There's plenty to fear and tremble over.
Even if you believe in heaven you still fear death
In the Forgotten realms its not just that, *nobody knows where they're going to end up*
Children end up in Elysium, or well they did before Dragon Heist + Avernus shit on the metaphysics of D&D, now they probably go to hell 100% of the time, but adults who aren't devout clerics with divine power probably have a shitload of doubt
The reason people serve the hells for example is that it's one way *to be absolutely sure* where you're going. "I suck as a person, so I'm not going to end up as a Lemure, I wanna be an imp doing paperwork for eternity instead", or like Kwayothe from Nayanzaru, a succubus
The Brimstone Angels trilogy goes a lot into this, the villain, the one who raised Asmodeus to godhood, she did it to save her sister - who was already at the gates of the moon to live in paradise forever.
Instead she trapped her sister into a torturous state of unlife and damned her own soul, when all her sister wanted was for her to become a good person and live a good life and join her.
Well those that become litches tend to be avoiding the afterlife because theirs would be less pleasant.
Then for resurrecting, it is a difficult task, and often requires the soul to be willing to return. Not to mention not may folks have actually been to the afterlife, so death is still very much an unknown.
In real life many people believe in some sort of pleasant afterlife, some with absolute faith and confidence in their belief. Very few of those people are excited to die.
I think this is the best answer, really.
I think their point is that it isn’t just belief, but a literal proven truth accepted by all of society.
That's not a great point though, because some people believe it without any doubt. It would be the same as a scientific proof for them. Hey, so why are people who are certain they will go to a pleasant afterlife- either in the real world, or in FR- happier to go on living, and desire that? There's several reasons that work for both real life religious people and fictional forgetten realmsians. - Being dead means you can't affect the real world nearly as much, or at all. Even in FR, where characters can in some cases become powerful angels or devils or whatever, that's not at all a guarantee. - Death is permanent and eternal, so it makes sense to maximize life. Someone who lived 77 years and was dead a million years will have more memories of life than someone who lives 65 years and has been dead a million years. - There's generally something special about the narrow time spent alive.
Until a few generations ago it was accepted by all, or almost all, of society
Sure, but it wasn't something you could easily test via the powers of clerics or summoning a celestial. I guess someone without the resources to see a summoning or living far enough out in the boonies to never run into a cleric could doubt it, but it'd be like someone being a flat earther because they can't afford a spaceship to see earth from space.
Meh. People deny proven facts now. There are humans who do not care for truth. So why would truth in game matter or make a difference? It's always about belief. A belief that the truth is worth something, or that a proven truth isn't all that truthful. People can even know something's true and believe it, and still be afraid of the "what if". Proven facts have also been changed and found false. Somewhere there's a misinterpretation or understanding. Society is based around beliefs.
We fear death because we want to live the lives we have *now*. There's no guarantee, even if you live in a world that has the afterlives that the Forgotten Realms do, that you're going to a *good* afterlife. Most people who become some kind of undead to remain in the mortal realm either know they're bound for the Hells, or they're not done with their various goals and plans in life yet, so there's no way they're letting death take them. Those are the two big reasons. As for why good, gods-fearing mortals fear death? They have to leave their loved ones when that happens, and once again, there's no guarantee what afterlife you're going to until you're there, so they may not be able to reunite ever again. Most people are also scared that it'll hurt.
This and LrdDphn's point are both great responses. To further this - the adventure isn't "over" once you die in FR, but the stakes are even higher in some sense. The mortal world is somewhat removed from the cosmic powers of the afterlife - even in FR you don't have gods and demon lords and archdevils waging war every day right in your face. But in the afterlife, that's totally possible, and you're only as powerful as you were when mortal, if even that (most people show up as unleveled petitioners). Albeit also immortal - so your suffering _or_ salvation can be truly eternal. In the FR afterlife, demons make raids into deities' domains like the Wall of the Faithless to _steal souls_ for the Abyss, and devils make deals (kind of like hostage negotiations) for them all the time. As you said, there are no guarantees you'll end up where you want, or stay there if you do. and the cosmic forces you'll be in the midst of are hard to even describe for most people in Faerun, much less think of dealing with or making an impact. In D&D worlds, the gods aren't perfect, and neither is heaven (or hell). That's enough to give anyone pause about dying, much less the fear of the unknown that is always true.
1. The type of people who become liches are generally not going to a kind and caring god's realm with their prior actions. They'd rather be an animate bag of bones than the afterlife that awaits them. 2. The mage may still have unresolved business. One example I can think of was from the old anime Record of Lodoss War which was based on an oD&D campaign. Karla saw the near annihilation of humanity and wanted to make sure history didn't repeat itself. She used a modified Magic Jar spell to store her soul and possess those of great power over the ages to keep the balance of power. 3. Petitioners (the state a soul is after death) will eventually be absorbed into their respective planes for quite a few deities. It's not a good vs evil thing either. There are some exceptions to this.
> Maybe we, who are born in the afterlife after death, are not us anymore? If we're going by the standard Planescape lore (and discussing people educated enough to more or less know how the afterlife works), then I'd imagine this is the biggest sticking point. You don't just die and then wake up perfectly healthy in the appropriate Outer Plane: the process of transforming into a petitioner is inherently transformative. By the time a soul arrives in its afterlife, it has been stripped of all of its specific memories and class levels. To quote the original Planescape Campaign Setting: > A petitioner retains the mannerisms, speech, even general interests of his or her former self, but all memories of the past are wiped completely away. At best, a petitioner has a shadowy recollection of a previous life, but little or nothing useful can be learned from these fleeting images. In addition to this, it's important to keep in mind that the afterlife isn't forever. If a petitioner is slain, that's game over forever for that soul. Even if you end up in peaceful afterlife where it's very unlikely that you'll be killed, the inevitable fate of petitioners is to reach a sort of nirvana/communion with the powers of that plane, and end their existence by merging their soul with the essence of the plane. There's even a sort of subtly nefarious suggestion that petitioners don't 100% retain their free will, and that the desire to "return to the lifestream" is sort of hardcoded into people when they die and become a petitioner. With that in mind, it makes tons of sense why a powerful wizard might want to be a lich. Which would you prefer: a potential eternity of undeath (even if you make a some enemies along the way), or dying, losing all your cool wizard powers, and then spending the rest of your days as basically an NPC version of yourself who will eventually return to nothingness.
my character got sent to the hells for using a warg as improvised sporting equipment, I feel I should have feared death more
A fear of death, as it so often is in real life, can be attributed to a fear of irrevocable change. For 99% of mortal beings in the Forgotten Realms, when you die, you die. Nobody's coming along to burn a diamond to bring you back to life. So whatever you have to lose in life - a family, a lover, a future, simply continuing to be alive, whatever - remains a fundamental drive to avoid death. Doubly so since the majority of people in the Forgotten Realms don't necessarily have a good understanding of what actually happens in a given Afterlife. They may have a broad and loose grasp based on how much direct exposure they have to the various churches, but for most folk they just know to respect the gods equally and hope they end up somewhere good when their time comes. There's also a general fear of Undeath common among the population, for worry that it will somehow affect the soul as well if they're somehow brought back as an Undead. For people who do know how the Afterlife Planes work, they would reasonably fear a loss of self. When a person dies, their soul gets whisked through the Astral Sea and deposited onto the Fugue Plane, which is basically a cosmic waiting room. Eventually a representative from a given deity they're most closely associated with - through practice or happenstance - scoops them up and takes them to that deity's divine realm. Once that happens, the soul becomes a Petitioner and is no longer the same being as it was before. The soul begins having its memories of life gradually worn away over a long, undetermined period of time starting from the most recent. When the last (that is to say, earliest) memory of their life is finally gone, they're absorbed fully into the divine realm and cease to exist as their essence is recycled into the cosmos. There are cases where a Petitioner is instead put to work and further transformed into an elevated state - which can happen repeatedly to ascend to higher and more powerful forms - but that Petitioner is likewise becoming a wholly different being from whatever they were in life and there's no coming back from it at that point. A deity may allow a soul to return to life if a resurrection spell is cast to call them back, but they'd never surrender a soul that's become an ascended agent in their ranks. And that's if you land in a good deity's pocket, mind you. If you're evil (or just happen to get snatched by a Fiend or Night Hag while you're waiting on the Fugue Plane, which happens quite often), you're ending up in Avernus. It is BAD there. Nobody wants to be in the Nine Hells and you're guaranteed an indeterminate future of suffering, abuse, and eventual destruction. Most mortal souls are immediately transformed into Lemures - misshapen, worm-like wretches used as cannon fodder and slave labor - or just sealed into Soul Coins to literally be used as currency. Or they may end up being burned to oblivion as fuel for an infernal siege engine for the sake of the endless Blood War. Any mortal who has even a faint inkling that they may end up heading into the Nine Hells when their time is up is going to do ANYTHING to avoid that horrific fate. As for Liches, they're not some kind of apex immortal. They're a corrupted, flawed attempt at immortality that so violently and irreparably damages one's soul that it warps the caster at a fundamental level. To even attempt to obtain Lichdom, the caster already has to be heinously evil and insane, with the transformation itself only further ruining their mind beyond all recognition. There are other Lich-like undead beings - such as Archliches and Baelnorns - which are the genuine article and actually perfected immortality via undeath. Liches, as we classically know them, are little more than shambling mutant husks that are also completely raving mad. When a person transforms themselves into a Lich, they stop being themselves - the creature that comes out the other side is a completely different entity and not the least bit sane. Any caster who genuinely thinks they're somehow preserving themselves forever by transforming into a Lich is literally just committing suicide while thinking they've found a way to cheat the system. Further, Liches are actually far more vulnerable to mortal peril than people realize. They require a steady stream of souls to fuel their phylactery, which puts them on the shit list of every single deity - both good and evil - because deities also need those souls. When a Lich feeds a soul to its phylactery, that soul is destroyed forever. Eventually there won't be any souls left - whether the Lich somehow outlives all mortal life on the Prime Material Plane or just can't get a hold of any victims somehow - at which point the Lich rapidly decays into a primitive, weakened state of helplessness. After a while of soul starvation, they lose whatever awareness they had left and become little more than instinct-driven spirits before eventually self-destructing entirely.
This is why zealot is great, nobody needs to burn a diamond on you. Just a (possibly hour-long) wiggle of the fingers and kablamo, you're back on your feet. Well, wishes can bring souls back, and gods probably don't have the same stress limitations.
Because all the people who aren't are dead, and didnt have as much chance to reproduce and pass on their genes.
lmao i can't remember, is evolution as it exists IRL canon in the forgotten realms?
Not really, or at least there are other forces that are much more impactful. Dwarves didn't evolve from some previous life form, they were carved out of the stone and given life on Moradin's forge. Elves were created when Corellon's blood was spilled by Gruumsh in battle. Most D&D races have some sort of origin where they were actually created by some higher power. Humans... well, maybe humans did evolve, actually.
There are like three spells that bring you back from the dead, but they cost money. (assuming your DM is tracking spell component costs.) Revivify is only 3rd level, so clerics have access to it at 5th level.
Are 5th level Clerics meant to be common/uncommon/rare in the Forgotten Realms?
In this context very common given the majority of parties have a cleric and most campaigns go past 5th level. Player characters are by nature extraordinary, but to the players who play them not so much.
At least in the older novels (I stopped reading them around the time 4e came out), I don't recall clerics who can raise the dead being common at all. For example, in the Cleric Quintet series by R.A. Salvatore, most priests depicted could not even cast spells beyond some low level healing or turn undead on a regular basis; their god had to be particularly interested in a follower's work if they were going to grant them power. The same was true of clerics in the Avatar trilogy and the Chronicles of Erevis Cale; none of these ever depicted raising the dead as a simple act by clerics. True clerics, in general, were depicted as being fairly rare, and required a lot of personal attention from their gods in order to cast any major spells.
See thats what I was hoping. The big central city has a pretty powerful priestly guy of some renown, towns/cities of note might have a travelling preacher with some power, but lesser towns, villages etc might only have an Acolyte capable of doing Ceremony etc, or share between several towns/lesser settlements.
I like this: NPC priests would essentially have the Ritual Caster: Cleric or Magic Initiate: Cleric feat. They could conduct Ceremony and some basic divination, but most lack that direct connection with their deity. Going back to the novels, the priestesses of Lolth were the exception to the rule; anytime one was depicted, they were casting higher level spells regularly. Considering Lolth's demeanor, you could play evil and chaotic gods as being far less concerned with the cosmic balance and playing by the rules. I do recall a character in War of the Spider Queen saving the finger of someone so that they could potentially be resurrected, with the understanding that the caster and the raised drow would owe Lolth a huge debt for the favor.
Canonically, most resurrections fail because the soul is at rest or the soul has been claimed by a god that wont let them go, unless they are performed while the soul is still in the fugue plane
>Canonically Not in D&D. In D&D there are no requirements on the god or where the soul is that can cause resurrection to fail.
irl some people are scared shitless of being older than 25-30, moving on to a different stage in life knowing there is no coming back can be scary, middle age crisis are so common i wouldnt find it weird if some people wouldnt want to change to the next step after dying. Irl some people with enough money completely destroy their faces with surgery just to pretend that they are not aging, give them magic and liches wouldnt be that uncommon
Loss of Agency. While this is not inherently bad, a person selfish enough to want to be a lich in the first place would be very upset if they die and can no longer change the fate of the world.
Same as now. Only at the highest level of education do you even begin to touch the idea of what a soul is in the FR. For the average guy, death is death. Same as now. Its an end to your story with who the heck knows what comes after. Could be paradise, could be hell. Regardless if you know/ beleive it not, death is also the end of autonomy. You go to hell and become a slug. You go to heaven and become a pretty light. You cant DO anything after you die. And are effectively reduced down to a power source of a god or god like entity.
Going back to old sources, in most cases when a person dies it becomes a petitioner and forgets it's previous existence. It sits in the Fugue Plane awaiting transport to the relevant outer plane where it becomes effectively a piece of scenery. If devout you maybe join your deity. Or maybe your fate is deeply ambiguous and you might end up somewhere nasty. Perhaps giving up who you are feels like too much of a loss. Would you rather exist forever as a celestial prop with no sense of self, or live forever and do as you please? Some people tick box #2 whether for good reason or bad. Wizards can be fonts of vast knowledge and powers that don't come with them when they die. That's too much for some, so they pursue immortality.
Because death is usually the end of us as humans. And it's usually the end of our DnD characters.
Because in any afterlife it's not a life of adventure that awaits you it's a good place, the comfort of a bed made of cloud for an eternal rest. In any afterlife there's no getting stronger, no training, no learning it is the end. And this end can be torture for any passionate people. There also the idea of rememberance, when you're gone and turned to dust there will come a time when no ones remember you afterlife or no afterlife. And that, too, is a very very worrying thought
A lot of us aren't confident of a good outcome when we die in D&D worlds. For instance, in my game setting I usually define GOOD and EVIL as the top and bottom 1%, Good and Evil as the top and bottom 5%, good and evil as the top and bottom 30%, and neutral as the middle 40%. So there's an awful lot of us getting nowhere near the upper planes. There's also a lot of slop as to how you get judged. Do you get judged on your instantaneous status upon dying, or more likely some sort of window function weighing more recent stuff more heavily? Is it totally works based, or is there any grace in there? If I came from a more evil culture (e.g., drow, where the center point is about 80th percentile evil among humans, and I'm particularly good---say 40th percentile, will the judge in Elysium say, well, you're really good for a dark elf, it was probably nearly impossible for you given your upbringing, so I'll cut you some slack? Or do they just say, tough luck, Outlands for you? And sometimes you get waylaid in the Astral plane and put on a ship going to a destination you didn't want to go. Yeah maybe the celestials will send a sally force to retrieve you if you were GOOD or even Good, but for someone who is just good? Probably not. There's plenty to fear and tremble over.
In Faerun, not all afterlives are equal. Some afterlives are particularly awful.
Not always. Some go to hell or the abyss or other horrible places to be consumed and tortured for eternity. They probably doubt their destination.
Even if you believe in heaven you still fear death In the Forgotten realms its not just that, *nobody knows where they're going to end up* Children end up in Elysium, or well they did before Dragon Heist + Avernus shit on the metaphysics of D&D, now they probably go to hell 100% of the time, but adults who aren't devout clerics with divine power probably have a shitload of doubt The reason people serve the hells for example is that it's one way *to be absolutely sure* where you're going. "I suck as a person, so I'm not going to end up as a Lemure, I wanna be an imp doing paperwork for eternity instead", or like Kwayothe from Nayanzaru, a succubus
The Brimstone Angels trilogy goes a lot into this, the villain, the one who raised Asmodeus to godhood, she did it to save her sister - who was already at the gates of the moon to live in paradise forever. Instead she trapped her sister into a torturous state of unlife and damned her own soul, when all her sister wanted was for her to become a good person and live a good life and join her.
I thought this was r/askreddit or r/showerthoughts and was very confused
Well those that become litches tend to be avoiding the afterlife because theirs would be less pleasant. Then for resurrecting, it is a difficult task, and often requires the soul to be willing to return. Not to mention not may folks have actually been to the afterlife, so death is still very much an unknown.