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In the vein that they view the Cataclysm that the gods sent to the mortal world for Istar's corruption as justified to some extent. Or believe that consigning antitheists and atheists to cosmic building blocks is a necessary evil for the greater good.

Dragonlance has been on my mind lately for various reasons, and between it and Forgotten Realms I notice that the tabletop social circles I notice certain acts of divine violence as a big dealbreaker for people who'd otherwise be interested in the settings. Or they like the settings but would either retcon or alter said aspects, or even cast the gods in a more antagonistic role.

But the number of Wall/Cataclysm defenders I know of can be counted on one hand. And I've been on quite the number of forums.

Has anyone here encountered such defenders? What was their reasoning?

One of these things is not like the others.

The Cataclysm is bound up in the extremely idiotic Rise and Fall of Istar, and the equally nonsensical Dragonlance take on alignment. The basic concept of a cataclysm sent by the gods to punish mankind is perfectly fine but the whys and wherefores of The Cataclysm make no sense and make no one look good.

The Wall of the Faithless is totally different IMO, but maybe that's because I had already soft-retconned it in my head.
As I understand it, in FR, you go to the afterlife of whatever god you followed in life. If you turn your back on all the gods, they'll turn their backs on you. Which leaves you with no prospects except wandering the Fugue Plane eternally until demons get you. Being a brick in the Wall is at least better than that.

The Cataclysm...don't see how that could be defended. Or even understood, really.

EDIT: Which isn't actually answering the question though, so no. Never met anyone defending the Cataclysm (or read any defences online).

But never even heard of the other thing, being less familiar with Forgotten Realms than with Dragonlance. Always been a fan of the latter, but dunno why...maybe cause it was big when I was young.

I don't think I've even met any Dragonlance defenders.

Who turns those souls into bricks? A specific god?

Well all the gods are real, there's GOOD and EVIL ones to reward GOOD and EVIL deeds, so there's really no reason to reject all of them.

Dragonlance is best thought of as a story like Bad Dudes or Combatribes, a vessel for the main dudes to fight an array of colorful badguys that are legal to kill. Any D&D take based around Balance or Neutrality is always dumb. On a tangent, I like Shin Megami Tensei's Neutral routes because they require you to fight all the extremists killing people. It's "Good" in D&D terms.

No. Even me as a Dragonlance fan thinks the Cataclysm as written is stupid. Don't care much about Forgotten Realms so can't comment on the Wall thing.

I'm not sure why Cataclysm needs defending. It's the exact sort of thing you can expect to happen when there is a need to punish a ruler whose regime is quickly devolving into the direction worse than what gods of card-carrying Evil usually established when they had their chances to run parts of the world, and the punishment has to be agreed upon unanimously by the comittee, one third of which are said gods of card-carrying Evil. And the clause, allowing the mortals to escape the calamity, inserted into the final text of the Cataclysm Preparation Agreement, has failed.

Not really knowledgeable about the Wall, because as it seems nearly all lore on it comes from one game I haven't played.

@FatR, that would be well and good if that's how it was presented, but the books all make the Cataclysm out to be a just and proportionate response that the Gods of Good stand wholeheartedly behind, to the point that when mortals turned away from the gods after the Cataclysm, the narrative made them out to be in the wrong.

Well if I were to revamp the Cataclysm and not change much of the Dragonlance present day plot...

The King-Priest causes the cataclysm with his lust for power, maybe some Evil gods egged him on and got in the way of the goodly gods intervening. The people think the Goodly goods did it and turn their back on them but it turns out the goodly gods lost a lot of power preventing the cataclysm from destroying the whole planet. Lord Soth was still a dumb mustache knight who's pettiness turned him into an awesome Death Knight for some reason and then it's like a tale of how selfish jerks like him get everyone else killed.

I've seen people justify the WotF as keeping out something terrible (the Far Realm?), so terrible deeds are justified to keep it in place. Which for the record is not a position I think is defensible. As to why it was put into the canon of the Forgotten Realms - the inside of some writers heads are terrible places too.

Just for clarification - the Wall of the Faithless is supposed to be a good thing and not just a badass fantasy setpiece for high-level characters?

From my understanding, the wall of the faithless is/was (I'm pretty sure they got rid of it, then brought it back, then got rid of it) supposed to be viewed as a 'good' thing because of Christian originating ideals. D&D has tried to meld the concept of a pantheon where each god is a god of X and monotheism, where most of the time you either believe in God or go to hell.

The wall of the Faithless is in theory there to answer the question of where those who don't believe in (or worship) "gods" go. They can't go to hell because hell has gods & is a member of team evil, but the writers didn't want to cast a lack of faith as a good thing, so they get crammed into a wall to go insane in for all of eternity.

Don't quote me on any of the above though. It's been a long time since I've read up on FR's and may be misremembering everything.

The Cataclysm is complete ass but like a lot of total ass ideas there is a kernel of what could be a good idea. I barely remember anything about the Wall, and thinking about I realize that even when I was a kid and liked Dragonlance, it was so hard to give a shit about the religious aspects of the big published settings.

I often fall back on using FR as the setting for games I run, just because you can point at maps and vaguely know what's there, you can tie adventures to a good number of villainous groups, and all that. But when I do, I either don't mention the Wall at all, or say "Oh, when I played NWN2 I tore souls free from it, it's no longer a deal, don't worry."

OgreBattle wrote:Who turns those souls into bricks? A specific god?

Originally it was Myrkul, the Neutral Evil god of the dead. Myrkul got everyone who didn't go to a specific afterlife by default because he's god of the dead. He just didn't give a crap, so created the Wall as a means to avoid dealing with them. He was Evil.

Then Myrkul was killed and replaced by Kelemvor. Kelemvor wanted to get rid of the Wall, and that would have been fine, except that Myrkul was killed during the Time of Troubles, when AO made all the gods mortal as because he was angry that they were too busy scheming to do their actual jobs. When the time of troubles was resolved, the gods let back into their realms, and the various mortals who killed gods elevated to take the positions of the dead ones, AO decreed that the gods's power would be directly tied to the number of worshippers they had in the hope that this rule would make them actually proactive and helpful to their followers, instead of focusing on petty god politics. This rule went over like a lead balloon.

So when Kelemvor decided that he'd tear down the wall and just let faithless souls enjoy a nice afterlife, all the gods were angry with him, both the good and the evil ones. They were concerned that Kelemvor giving a nice afterlife to the faithless would lead to a diminished of their own power, since no one would bother worshiping them if not for the threat of the Wall. Actually helping their followers seems to be too much work for any of them.

The Wall of the Faithless was always presented as an Evil thing devised by an Evil god because he was Evil. The Good Gods then decided to support it because they are petty assholes.

Is the wall suppoe to be expanding something or keeping something in or out? Otherwise it's like a trash pile of the faithless yeah?

now for the important question relevant to PC's... does the wall have HP and hardness to interact with?

It's just a trash-pile really. It doesn't exist to keep anything in or out, and if it isn't completely enclosing like a sphere, then at some point there's a "top" you can jolly well fly over. Given there were multiple battles fought over the wall (as in crusades to tear it down like Gorbachev, and opposing forces protecting it), it is safe to assume it isn't "arbitrarily hard" and could indeed be broken.

The Wall of the Faithless is a cosmic injustice, but I did want to use it in a campaign. I think, though, that my idea sounds better in concept than it would have been in execution.

Basically, the gods use the WotF as a defense against Pandorym - the god-slaying weapon from Elder Evils. But, in this conception, Pandorym is basically the bizarro-universe equivalent of something that exists in the regular world - the Spelljammer.

So, DnD space navy battles - which is not a thing DnD has ever really done well.

I never went anywhere with all of that. But I wanted to do a Macross knockoff once and wanted to share.

(In my vision, the Wall is basically built in the threshold of a portal. If you can have a door between worlds, you can build a wall in the doorway. But it would be floating in the phlogiston, not sitting on the ground in the underworld, because that's silly.)

You have to remember that FR and DL are oldschool settings where it would not be weird to stab the gods in the guts because they only have 86 HPs.

At some point, weird born-again Christian guys took over DnD and gods went from Conan-style monsters to unkillable Christian-style gods and people started designing elaborate afterlives and shit that followed Christian values.

The game is poorer for it.

So the Wall of the Faithless and the Cataclysm make sense in that all the gods are shits in old-school and you might stab any one of them.

Parts of the Dragonlance plot are explicit analogues to Mormon doctrine. Forgotten Realms was originally a setting where the "gods" are just big monsters with a cult and you can stab them to death, but Dragonlance was the tip of the spear of the weird polytheistic Christianity takeover.

SeekritLurker wrote: I never went anywhere with all of that. But I wanted to do a Macross knockoff once and wanted to share.

The massive galactic Zentraedi Maeltrandi space war with Earth being a seemingly insignificant spec but holding the power of culture is a neat angle for Performance skill characters

OgreBattle wrote:

SeekritLurker wrote: I never went anywhere with all of that. But I wanted to do a Macross knockoff once and wanted to share.

The massive galactic Zentraedi Maeltrandi space war with Earth being a seemingly insignificant spec but holding the power of culture is a neat angle for Performance skill characters

Well, that, and (because I first encountered Macross in the form of Robotech) encouraging the creation of cross-dressing commando bards.

I have in fact met a Cataclysm defender, and their defense was well, kinda nonsensical. Apparently destroying all of Istar and millions of people out of it was needed to balance the scales of removing an Evil-aligned country from the map. And the same reason is why Divine Healing was not a thing. Yes I know that makes no sense, but that was the argument they gave.

It's been a long time since I read the novels, but given slightly unreliable narrators, I think you could create a space in your head cannon that isn't quite so terrible.

If a giant space rock was heading toward Istar through no fault of the gods, but just via natural processes, and the power of gods is based on true faith, then it isn't that the gods punished mankind but that they were rendered powerless to save humanity from their own hubris.

In standard D&D, no god is omnipotent. Most of their abilities involve duplicating high level wizard/cleric spells. Both creating (and stopping) a meteor impact can easily exceed even the abilities of the gods. There are reasons that a powerful being might not want to admit that they simply couldn't do anything.

That is less terrible, true, but I don't think you can turn it into something decent without flat out ignoring lots of fluff, in which case you might just gloss over the Cataclysm anyway.

OTOH, if it wasn't divine, just something large out of space impacting the world (in the middle of it's most important city), well, I'm reminded that canonically Dragonlance exists in the Spelljammer universe.