Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 146 - The Afterlife

Episode Date: October 16, 2022

In this episode, we discuss the published lore in 5e and Pathfinder about what happens after characters pass away.   A fellow podcaster and DM, Thorin McGee from the 3 Wise DMs podcast passed away this week, please consider donating to the GoFundMe set up to benefit his widow.     #DnD #DungeonsAndDragons #Pathfinder #3WiseDMs #ThorinMcGee   Resources: https://www.gofundme.com/f/thorin-mcgees-legacy-and-wife-fund http://3wisedms.com   Pathfinder https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/life-and-death/   5e Dungeon Inn - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEZHK6DlgGw https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Afterlife https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kazgpEz2u2U https://www.flutesloot.com/5e-afterlife-lore-and-analysis/ https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/story-lore/80013-how-death-and-afterlife-work-in-dnd-lore https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/jhf2hu/what_is_the_afterlife_like_in_dnd_5e/

Thank you everyone for tuning in to the Taking20 Podcast, episode 146, all about the afterlife. Before I start this week's episode, I want to take a minute to celebrate the life of a fellow DM and podcaster, Thorin McGee. Thorin was one of the founders of the Three Wise DMs podcast, which I've mentioned a few times because it contains great information, great perspectives, and strives to do the same thing this podcast does, introduce the hobby to newer DMs and players, and make all of us better at what we do. It's with an extremely heavy heart I learned that Thorin passed away this week, leaving behind two fellow podcasters, Tony and Dave, a grieving wife, and a shocked and stunned audience.

I listen to a fair few podcasts each week, but Three Wise DMs is always a must-listen. Thorin truly lived up to the title of the podcast with wise advice for DMs and players, new and old alike. for DMs and players, new and old alike. We started our podcasts at almost the same time and exchanged a fair few emails about episode topics and podcasting in general. While I never had the privilege of meeting him in person, in every interaction we had, he was kind, interested in passing on what he had learned, and wanted to see the hobby grow.

In other words, everything you could want in a DM. A GoFundMe has been set up for his widow, and I would like to ask that if you are so blessed and so inclined, please consider making a donation. A link has been provided in the episode description. But wherever you are, please raise a glass and roll a d20 for Thorin this week. Players, celebrate your DMs and DMs embrace your players. Our time here is so short. Let's follow Thorin's lead and try to make everyone's lives a little brighter. Depending on your perspective, it seems either fitting or an unfortunate coincidence that months ago I had planned this week's topic to be the afterlife. Thorin, someday I look forward to shaking your hand and sitting at your table

on the big convention in the sky, rolling up a character and being a lucky player in one of your adventures. That sounds like an amazing afterlife to me. Now on with our episode. This episode, and as a matter of fact this podcast, does not advocate for one particular religion or another. That's not why I'm here. I'm a firm believer that faith and belief is a very personal matter. I have mine, you likely have yours. And as long as your beliefs don't include causing harm and spreading hate towards others, I have no problem with whatever you want to believe.

I think faith should be more of a comforting shield than a dividing sword. If you dive deep enough into nearly any game system's religious systems, you will almost guarantee to find similarities and inspirations from real-world religions here on Earth, both past and present. At least one of these religions may contain something, a tenet, a practice, a belief that you don't agree with. I understand and I see you. All I ask is that you remember one thing. This is a game. None of what's being represented in the game as religion and 5e or Pathfinder is intended to be real, nor is it meant to convert you to worship Lathander, the Faerun god of birth and renewal on Tuesday nights. The whole reason I wanted to talk about this topic

is because sometimes characters die because of a roleplay choice, planning, tactics, or just bad luck with the dice. And what happens next can be the basis of good roleplaying and great adventures. It goes without saying that adventuring is a dangerous life. Being willing and sometimes eager to leave the comforts of a traditional life to arm yourself and venture into the unknown and forgotten places of the world is, for lack of a better term, an aberrant way of thinking. Each step in the Icewind Dale, the mana wastes, the lost caves of the Windworn Hills, or the sunken castle of Cairnstock could be your last. There are traps,

unstable buildings, monsters with pointy teeth, lost areas of arcane concentration waiting for hapless explorers. With apologies to Seth McFarlane, there are a million ways to die in every direction, not just the West. I might do an episode on adventurer backgrounds at some point in the future because, from our perspective on the relatively safe planet Earth, you would have to be certifiably insane or desperate to willingly become an adventurer and put yourself in that much in harm's way. So if death is a possible outcome for our characters, a probable outcome for our characters, the great question is, what happens after? Because of the lore that's available for them, for the most part

I'm going to stick to the largest canonical worlds in the game systems, Galarian in Pathfinder and Faerun in 5e. Most commonly I jump to cover 5e first because it's the most popular gaming system out there, but to mix things up and to keep you on your toes, I'm going to talk about Paizo's Pathfinder system first. A lot of my knowledge for Pathfinder comes talk about Paizo's Pathfinder system first. A lot of my knowledge for Pathfinder comes from various Paizo books, the Core Rulebook, Planar Adventurers, and the Plane Hopper's Handbook, just to name a few. But I want to call attention to one specific book I used a lot this week, The Great Beyond, A Guide to the Multiverse.

It contains some of the information I'll discuss this week, and I would encourage you to give it a purchase if you're interested in knowing a lot more about the Pathfinder afterlife. It was written for 1E, but most of the 1E information is still canon as far as I know. Last week I mentioned the goddess Phrasma in the Pathfinder Pantheon. Phrasma is the oldest creature in creation, the Shepherd of the Dead. She is commonly depicted as an ashen-skinned woman in dark robes, white eyes, and holding an hourglass containing red sand. She is entirely neutral and an impartial judge of mortal souls from the material plane after they die. Her seat of judgment is in a land known as the Boneyard, sometimes called the Spirelands, which extends into the astral plane.

Now, when a mortal dies, their soul is untethered from their physical form and drifts out of the Material Plane into the Ethereal Plane, and, of course, moving inexorably towards the distant Astral Plane. Once there, it joins the flow of other mortal souls towards the Boneyard, called the River of Souls. Creatures called Psychopomps assist and protect souls along this journey, and protect the souls from those creatures who would attempt to feed on or steal one of these souls along its way. Psychopomps could be an episode all its own, by the way, because they're made from the souls of mortals that stayed neutral and sometimes serve as

advisors, judges, caretakers, explorers, guides, guards, and even soldiers when needed. Mortals returned to life often describe it as a feeling of being drawn upward toward a misty ribbon of light or being swept along in a crowd. Some remember seeing unfamiliar faces and conversing with strangers, accompanied by a sense of timelessness. The bodiless state of following death proves difficult for most mortals to comprehend, much less accurately report on. Now the boneyard where these souls are traveling to, sometimes referred to as Purgatory or the Spirelands, is a neutral plane where the souls of dead mortals from the material plane are judged by the goddess Phrasma, or one of her

courts set up for this purpose. It rests atop Phorasma's spire, jutting out from the outer plane of Axis and into the astral plane. The boneyard looks like a vast necropolis filled with countless courtyards, monuments, graves, and forums teeming with the souls of the dead awaiting judgment. Each of these courts is shaped and styled to correspond to one of the outer planes and is overseen and guarded by representatives from each of the gods. Every god that has worshippers, big and small, has a vested interest in making sure the judgment takes place impartially and is not interrupted in any way. Another god named Grotus hangs over the Boneyard like a waxing gibbous moon with a face. Legends say that he is the god of the end times, and he edges closer and closer to the

Boneyard with each orbit. It's said that when he reaches the Boneyard, all of creation will be destroyed in a massive apocalypse, consuming every creature and every plane of existence. massive apocalypse, consuming every creature and every plane of existence. To stave off this apocalypse, it's said that Phrasma feeds certain souls to Gerotus, specifically those of very angry atheists. He finds these souls repulsive, and it causes him to recoil backwards in his orbit, away from the spire. Once souls reach the Boneyard, they're assisted by psychopomps and emissaries from the various planes to reach the courts and make sure that they are judged in accordance with the choices that they made in life. Some souls reach the Boneyard with their final destination already decided. They could have made packs or deals with powerful beings in exchange for their souls, but that's a relatively small number.

for their souls, but that's a relatively small number. Most souls are judged by the deeds of their lives with their choices scrutinized and documented by Phrasmus' servants. Those with a clear faith and conviction in life because of a devotion to a specific deity or their alignment strongly matches a particular plane are sorted by the lower courts and are ushered through one of the countless gates sent to the plane of existence that most closely represents the god that they worshipped or their beliefs. Once they reach the plane, their eternal fate depends on aspects of that plane, which we will cover much more in depth in future episodes. Virtuous souls, in general, find their ways to good-aligned planes, while wicked souls, in general, are sent to evil planes of existence. In some cases, though, a soul's alignment radically differs from that of the

deity it worships. In such cases, Phrasma employs visions from the soul's mortal life to determine the greatest influences and agents of the opposing deities or planes, and sometimes those representatives will make arguments and present evidence as why the soul should be sent to their plane of existence. The gods or their greater agents then rule on the soul's proper destination, and then the soul is typically directed to either a deity's realm or a plane of like-minded individuals. As soon as this judgment is rendered, the soul becomes a petitioner and regains a physical body of some form. Many petitioners appear as humanoids or vague shapes with only general similarities to their mortal bodies. Some planes subject petitioners to more radical transformations, though,

like reconstitution into animalistic forms or script-covered humanoids or maggot-like larvae. The prevailing philosophical forces of the plane itself determine the particulars of this form, with indirect influence based on the soul's personality and experiences. Petitioner memories and personality are generally wiped clean, but there are exceptions. They arrive in their destination plane, and what happens there varies. On lawful planes, they tend to have orderly queues for entry and additional sorting as needed. Neutral planes tend to deposit arriving petitioners at the edge of the plane, and you're left to your own to find your way. Whereas chaotic planes, they will dump you anywhere they freaking want to,

and they'll leave you to deal with the planer inhabitants on your own. And good luck. But Jeremy, you may be asking, what about resurrection and other magics that bring characters back from the dead? The gods know which souls are and aren't done with life. For example, those that are called back to the material plane via magic. Those souls are not judged or transformed into petitioners, but they are made to wait. They sit in the Boneyard until resurrected, and Phrasma knows the character's fate,

so she unerringly knows whether a character will be brought back to the mortal realm. The souls of the neutral and unaffiliated dead may remain in the Boneyard, and sometimes are transformed in the lands beyond Phrasma Palace to become Aeons or Psychopomps. transformed in the lands beyond Phrasma Palace to become Aeons or Psychopomps. These strange creatures act like the goddesses' advisors and caretakers and explorers and guardians like I talked about earlier. They also serve as the bureaucracy of death. And in the unclaimed wilderness of the Boneyard, wolf-like packs of Aesobox patrol, protecting the restful dead from both mortal and outsider intruders who would

disturb them. Okay, at this point I'm going to shift over to 5e's afterlife, where despite the popularity of the system, there's just not as much material on it. Wizards of the Coast just kind of hand waves it, says it's setting dependent or homebrew your own, and that kind of feels like an oversight to me. Now if you open up the DMG on page 24, it says, when a creature dies, its soul departs the material plane, travels through the astral plane, and goes to abide on the plane where the creature's deity resides. If the creature didn't worship a deity, its soul departs to the plane corresponding to its alignment. Now the same general rules applied as a previous

Pathfinder section. The soul leaves the body, becoming a petitioner, there's that word again, and traverses the astral plane and goes somewhere else. Usually the plane of the creature's deity, or the one most aligned with his alignment. Aligned with his alignment? Good word choice, Jeremy. Next you're going to say that combatants take the initiative when they roll initiative and sneak when they sneak. As the petitioner travels through the astral plane, the memories and thoughts of the petitioner are absorbed by the plane itself. By the time the petitioner makes it to an outer plane, it's lost its memory and changed its personality and is, rules as written,

somewhat of a different entity to the one that died. Now this brings up a huge metaphysical question about are you the same being at this point and is the afterlife system fair with it stripping your memories and personality and I simply do not have time to dive into it. It's more of a metaphysical question anyway and here's where I'll throw you over to a video on that subject called Afterlife in D&D by TheDungeonN, who covers that topic in depth. I'll put a link down in the resources. Please go check out that video. Sometimes travelers to the astral plane, whether bodily or just in soul form, will experience the memories of someone or something else as they drift through the plane. Those were the thoughts that were stripped from another creature as they traveled the

plane, and you got to experience them much the same way as waiting in a swimming pool and suddenly hitting a warm spot. Yep, pee joke. That's the kind of elevated discourse you've come to expect with the Taking 20 podcast, and I promise that's not going to change anytime soon. Now, it's not known how long it takes petitioners to travel through the Astral Plane to get to their destination, but to the petitioner, it's effectively instantaneous, probably because they don't experience time the same way we do anymore.

Now, in the 5e campaign setting of Forgotten Realms, Kelimvor, the Lord of the Dead in the City of Judgment on the Fugue Plane, judges your soul and sends it to whichever outer plane is appropriate, which is very similar to Pathfinder's Phrasma. Or, here's where it's different, if you don't worship a god at all, your soul is cast into the Wall of the Faithless, where they will spend eons slowly and tortuously being transformed into being part of the Fugueue plane itself. There's no canonical explanation as to why atheists are made part of the fugue plane itself,

and there's some interesting conjecture that Kelimvor tried to implement a fairer system, but that led to good people cashing their chips in early at a very alarming rate so that they could get the good rewards before they could be tempted away from them by evil in the world. Also, people that were evil started to live life longer and longer, holding on to it as long as they possibly could, staving off that punishment that awaited them. For that reason, Kelimvor rebuilt the wall of the faithless and previous processes were reinstated. Kelemvor rebuilt the wall of the faithless, and previous processes were reinstated. However, in some 5e settings, strictly reading from the DMG, unlike Forgotten Realms and Pathfinder, there is no single judge or plane of aeons and psychopomps that determine where you should go.

It's almost like the fundamental laws of the multiverse just make it happen. Like there's no single entity making gravity work in our universe, there isn't a judge or jury to determine where your soul spends eternity. It just kind of happens. The exception is that if you've promised your soul to a powerful creature like a patron or a god, in that case your soul will travel to the plane of your soul parent, guarantor, watcher, soul owner, whatever you want to call it. And they decide what to do with you at that point. They could reward you by allowing you to retain some of your identity and memories and maybe put you to work serving them in some way. Or you could become currency to be traded, bought, and sold. What happens at the destination plane varies from

plane to plane. Poss possibly becoming a larvae, maggot, or manes on the evil planes, or maybe something like a lantern archon on a good plane. But even on planes where your form remains somewhat intact, you still get a different physical body. In the official DMG, there is no canonical description as to what happens to unaligned souls when they die. I'm not talking about neutral creatures. They have an alignment, and there's a plane for that. I'm talking creatures that specifically have the unaligned trait. Are they obliterated? Reincarnated? Do they just get dumped into one of the neutral planes? It's unknown at this point. In that video from Dungeon Inn that I mentioned earlier,

it suggested that all such souls go to the Beastlands or Happy Hunting Grounds, and their logic for it is pretty sound. In 5e, all creatures have souls, even animals. So since something has to happen to souls when they die, it would make sense for unaligned animals, for example, to go to the Beastlands, which is the house of nature. Its inhabitants are given intelligence equivalent to humans and they can enjoy a limitless representation of everything nature has to offer. Regardless, once petitioners reach their eternal plane, over time they gradually become pure energy and absorbed into the plane and cease to be an individual anymore. Effectively, they become part of the plane itself. Older versions of D&D talk about souls creating new parts of the plane, becoming parts of rivers or woods or rocks or volcanoes or other features of

the plane. So after your ranger dies and goes to Arcadia, over millennia they go from enjoying the eternal hunt to becoming part of it by becoming part of a mile-tall tree, the voice of a shallow brook, or a moss-covered boulder, or maybe part of a cloud in the sky. No one knows how long this takes, and in my headcanon, it varies by soul. Maybe weaker souls are absorbed quicker, while more powerful souls take longer to become one of their plane of existence. Once that happens, though, the petitioner's individual identity is effectively lost, and in Jeremy's version of the 5e afterlife, at that point they can only be returned to life with a wish spell. A quick word about coming back from the dead, by the way.

Pathfinder and 5e have a number of spells to bring humanoids back from the great beyond. From the third level Revivify and 5e, both have raised dead, resurrection, true resurrection, and wish. The longer someone is dead, the more powerful the spell is required to bring them back. But one thing is consistent though. Resurrected creatures have to be willing to return. Now what I think is an interesting thought experiment is what we can infer what happens after you die and how long the steps take based on the magic required to bring them back. Maybe Revivify works because the soul takes at least a minute to depart the body once the body dies. Maybe Raise Dead works because it's strong enough to catch souls in the border ethereal or on the ethereal plane

and it takes 10 days for souls to cross that barrier. Maybe Resurrection works on corpses dead up to a century old because maybe that's how long it takes for a soul to be sorted and sent to its destination plane. True resurrection works on creatures dead up to 200 years and maybe that's how long it takes before the soul loses its individual identity and becomes part of the plane itself. And then finally, wish can theoretically be used to bring back souls

that have been dead any length of time. But as you can imagine, the cost and potential penalties tend to increase with each of these more powerful spells. Again, this isn't canon in any way, but it's a way that I've always sorted these different spells and why there are different levels of capability to bring someone back. Now you may be saying, Jeremy, there is nothing scary about this and we're 20 minutes in. I thought this was horror month. What the hell gives? Fair enough. Let's talk about those souls that become lost or cannot leave an area or a person because of some traumatic events surrounding their death. Maybe they met a grisly, violent, and unjust death and their soul just refuses to depart. They linger and fester,

lamenting their new state that prevents them from righting whatever is wrong, keeping them trapped on the material plane. Gradually, the soul becomes more and more corrupted, eventually becoming an incorporeal undead like a ghost, specter, or poltergeist. There are always stories about friendly ghosts that linger to help the living accomplish some task before moving on. These should be the exception, though, not the rule. The vast majority of incorporeal undead are either oblivious to the fact that they're dead, or have become hate-filled monstrosities that have a task unfinished. They're generally not interested in communicating with the living anymore.

They see the world through two lenses, the lens of history choosing to manifest locations and objects in the ethereal plane that are similar to what they remember, and the lens of the ethereal veil that shows them what they once were and likely can never be again. One trap I've seen new DMs fall into thinking is that ghosts only exist because of murder or betrayal, and it doesn't have to be anything momentous that creates a ghost.

Imagine there's an NPC named Lady DeWinter, and she passes on of natural causes. She was almost always seen wearing this pearl choker necklace that she inherited from her grandmother, who had inherited from her grandmother, and so forth. When she was alive, she cherished this necklace as being a physical representation of the strength of her forebears. She's unable to move on to the ever after because she wants to make sure the piece is properly cared for. However, since Lady de Winter had no surviving children, she passed the necklace on to her niece who valued it more for its sale value rather than any sort of emotional attachment. She pawns it at the local shop for coppers on the gold of its true value, and this sends the spirit

of Lady De Winter into a rage. It causes her to manifest this rage as an ethereal ghost attached to the choker. Okay, adventure seed created. The new owner of the choker asks the PCs to investigate some weird happenings around her house. It started a few months after coming into owner of the choker asks the pcs to investigate some weird happenings around her house it started a few months after coming into possession of the choker like wet messages on the wall saying not yours or an eerie face looking back from darkened corners maybe sounds of wailing coming from empty rooms and the like the characters gradually discover that the unusual events follow whomever happens to be wearing the choker until the inevitable showdown with the spirit of Lady De Winter,

who seeks to destroy the characters for interfering with her inscrutable machinations to get the choker back into the De Winter family. So that's what the afterlife looks like in 5e and Pathfinder lore. But what if you don't like that? Okay, homebrew your own with as many planes of existence as you would like. Base your afterlife of the world on, I don't know, Greek mythology, Egyptian, Hindu, Native American, or any other culture's view on afterlife.

It could be as simple as a toggle, heaven, hell, good, evil, lawful, chaotic, with a destination in the middle for the neutral masses. Or it could be only the most powerful of souls reach the afterlife, and everyone else reincarnate somewhere with no retention of their previous lives. Once people die, they could become part of the primal magic that powers the world. Or you could just hand wave the whole thing and say it doesn't matter, and never offer an in-world explanation for the game mechanics of Resurrection. So how can you use this information into your game? Well, number one,

death could be part of your character's background. A character's loved one could have passed on, and the character could get a glimpse into what the great beyond looks like because of it. So they strive to live their life more aligned with the passed-on loved one, hoping to reunite with them in the next world. You could also use it for role-playing flavor when a character dies and is returned to life at your table. What if your good character is only good because they received a glimpse of what would happen if they didn't reform? Maybe coming back changes the character's personality because they no longer identify as who they once were

because of this glimpse into what the afterlife is like. Death and the afterlife could be inspiration for your character's faith. A character might take great inspiration from their destined plane of existence for all of eternity. I mean, obviously, faith-based characters like clerics and paladins could definitely draw inspiration for that. But even think about rangers and fighters and bards taking inspiration from the characteristics of death and the afterlife and the outer planes of existence and maybe making that part of the character themselves.

And lastly, you can always let afterlife and worship influence your game world. For good or ill, many people would be worshiping one deity or another simply because of the promise of eternal reward or to escape eternal punishment. Have ceremonies for those who depart, whether it's similar to Earth-like with a solemn graveside service or maybe a New Orleans-style parade and party celebrating the recently departed. As I said earlier, it's either fortuitous or unfortunate that this was my planned topic this week. The afterlife is an extremely deep well of lore for the largest game systems out there. There's a lot to read, a lot to absorb, and

potentially bring to your table. Let aspects of your world's afterlife have a minor influence on your game world, and I bet you and your players would have fun doing it. Once again, I want to ask that you please consider giving to the Thorn McGee's Legacy and Wife GoFundMe. A link's been provided in the description of this episode. Also, I would encourage you to subscribe to the Three Wise DMs podcast. They're understandably on hiatus right now, but please give some of their back episodes a listen, and plus, listen when they come back. I'd be willing to bet that you'll be glad you did. Thank you all for listening, and everyone, please take care of each other out there. This has been episode 146, All About the Afterlife.

My name is Jeremy Shelley, and Thorin, this one was for you, brother. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2022. one was for you brother the taking 20 podcast is a publishing cube media production copyright 2022 references to game system content are copyright their respective publishers