The Great Wheel and The Afterlife
Aug 17, 2018 17:02:26 GMT -6
Post by Marr965 on Aug 17, 2018 17:02:26 GMT -6
So, because musings on the afterlife have occured, I decided to make this thread, primarily so that discussion of whatever happens when those folks in the Great Wheel who have souls lose those souls can occur.
Personal musings
The Strange Aeons clause
Personal musings
shazbest
Okay I know I've been asking a lot of weird questions, but I got another one. Is there any writing on what actually happens when you die in DtD? Like, your soul goes to the Raven Queen, and she sometimes lets souls go? Is there an afterlife? Do different gods get a say in what happens to souls dedicated to them? When people come back from the dead, do they remember everything or what?
Marr965
It's somewhere between what happens in 40k, what happens in D&D and what happens in Exalted, to my understanding.
In 40k, your soul, which is your personal conduit to the Warp, disengages from your body when you die, and usually dissolves into pure Immaterial energy.
Sometimes, it gets eaten by a daemon or other Warp-entity.
40k's Slaanesh is notable for eating the souls of every Eldar, Craftworld, Exodite, Dark or otherwise, if they die without a soulstone.
The reason that the Golden Skeleton is fed psykers is because he eats their souls to help him maintain the Astronomicon.
In D&D, when you die, your soul again disengages from your body, and is sent to whichever afterlife is fitting for your race/alignment.
If you're Lawful Good, you go to the Lawful Good afterlife plane.
If you're Chaotic Evil, bam, Chaotic Evil afterlife plane.
Ditto for all the other 9 combinations.
Certain races may or may not believe in a different afterlife.
If they do, that may or may not affect whether they actually do go to a different afterlife.
Finally, Exalted.
When you die in Exalted, what's supposed to happen is that your soul disengages from your body, spends some time in the Underworld to cleanse it of the memories of Life, then gets shoved into a different body, ready to begin the cycle again.
This is not entirely incompatible with the 40k version, as 40k souls are basically scraps of Warp-energy that happen to have taken a specific, person's-soul-shaped form and attached themselves to a body.
A similar thing happens to the Exalt souls (which get grafted onto the newly-Exalted Celestial Exalts when they Exalt), because there's a thing/concept/process somewhere in/alongside/outside Creation (called Lytek's Cabinet) that cleanses Exalt souls of the collected memories of their past lives and then send them round for another go.
...unfortunately, Lytek's Cabinet is not foolproof, so the occassional Exalt soul "slips through the system", so to speak.
When the Primordial War happened, and the Primordials either got killed (which shouldn't be possible, thanks to what I call the Strange Aeons clause[note below to explain what I mean]) or mutilated and imprisoned, this... kinda fucked up the underworld.
So now, the souls of the dead very rarely make it past the "disengages from your body and enters the Underworld" stage of the process.
Complicating this is the fact that even ordinary mortals in Exalted actually have two souls, the hun soul and the po soul.
I'm not entirely clear on which is which, but one is roughly equivalent to the id and the other to the ego.
Problem is, only one actually ends up going to the underworld.
The other hangs around the body, and if the body is mutilated, desecrated or otherwise treated with disrespect, will manifest as a hungry ghost, which will be sapient for about 3 days in order to take revenge, then basically descend into animalistic fury at just about everything.
So, to sum up.
My personal thinking on death and the soul in DtD.
When you die, your soul disengages from the body.
It enters the Warp, where, unless you're unlucky, the Raven Queen will find it and pick it up.
The Raven Queen will go up to whichever god you happen to be aligned with and say "here, I found one of yours".
Because this interaction, having happened approximately eleventy-billion quadrillion times per year ever since the Great Wheel came into existence, is now extremely formalized and ritualized, the god roughly says "oh, thanks, you keep it for now".
The Raven Queen then sticks it into the appropriate bit of her own personal slice of the deep Warp, where it experiences an afterlife which returns it to a blank slate, ready to be stuck into another body.
Once this has happened, she again takes it to the relevant god and says "here, this is one of yours".
Again, extreme formalization and ritualization require the reaction "uh, no it's not, look at it, it doesn't believe in anything".
The Raven Queen then goes "oh, so it doesn't. Better let it work out what it believes in", and takes it to wherever new souls appear in the Warp, hands it over in yet another extremely formalized and ritualized interaction that no-one is ever supposed to acknowledge exists, then buggers off so that no-one who isn't supposed to know about it doesn't know she's there.
Of course, the Syrneth somehow managed to circumvent this process, which ol' Queenie is extremely mad about.
And Wraiths, Vampires, Harrowed and other undead Exalts have their own oddnesses.
And then there are those who worship the Raven Queen, which she may, in fact, actually consume, because eventually even things constructed of pure Warp-stuff will wear out.
Chosen... may also have odd things happen to them.
Bear in mind, though: that's my personal thinking.
That's not necessarily what happens in the Great Wheel someone else runs.
All that we're actually told is that your soul enters the Warp when you die, somehow ends up in the clutches of the Raven Queen, and she will eventually decide to let some or all of the souls of the dead be reborn into new bodies.(edited)
The exact details of what goes on between those steps, and how those steps happen, is up to whoever's running the game - if the SM decides that they need fleshing out at all.
Okay I know I've been asking a lot of weird questions, but I got another one. Is there any writing on what actually happens when you die in DtD? Like, your soul goes to the Raven Queen, and she sometimes lets souls go? Is there an afterlife? Do different gods get a say in what happens to souls dedicated to them? When people come back from the dead, do they remember everything or what?
Marr965
It's somewhere between what happens in 40k, what happens in D&D and what happens in Exalted, to my understanding.
In 40k, your soul, which is your personal conduit to the Warp, disengages from your body when you die, and usually dissolves into pure Immaterial energy.
Sometimes, it gets eaten by a daemon or other Warp-entity.
40k's Slaanesh is notable for eating the souls of every Eldar, Craftworld, Exodite, Dark or otherwise, if they die without a soulstone.
The reason that the Golden Skeleton is fed psykers is because he eats their souls to help him maintain the Astronomicon.
In D&D, when you die, your soul again disengages from your body, and is sent to whichever afterlife is fitting for your race/alignment.
If you're Lawful Good, you go to the Lawful Good afterlife plane.
If you're Chaotic Evil, bam, Chaotic Evil afterlife plane.
Ditto for all the other 9 combinations.
Certain races may or may not believe in a different afterlife.
If they do, that may or may not affect whether they actually do go to a different afterlife.
Finally, Exalted.
When you die in Exalted, what's supposed to happen is that your soul disengages from your body, spends some time in the Underworld to cleanse it of the memories of Life, then gets shoved into a different body, ready to begin the cycle again.
This is not entirely incompatible with the 40k version, as 40k souls are basically scraps of Warp-energy that happen to have taken a specific, person's-soul-shaped form and attached themselves to a body.
A similar thing happens to the Exalt souls (which get grafted onto the newly-Exalted Celestial Exalts when they Exalt), because there's a thing/concept/process somewhere in/alongside/outside Creation (called Lytek's Cabinet) that cleanses Exalt souls of the collected memories of their past lives and then send them round for another go.
...unfortunately, Lytek's Cabinet is not foolproof, so the occassional Exalt soul "slips through the system", so to speak.
When the Primordial War happened, and the Primordials either got killed (which shouldn't be possible, thanks to what I call the Strange Aeons clause[note below to explain what I mean]) or mutilated and imprisoned, this... kinda fucked up the underworld.
So now, the souls of the dead very rarely make it past the "disengages from your body and enters the Underworld" stage of the process.
Complicating this is the fact that even ordinary mortals in Exalted actually have two souls, the hun soul and the po soul.
I'm not entirely clear on which is which, but one is roughly equivalent to the id and the other to the ego.
Problem is, only one actually ends up going to the underworld.
The other hangs around the body, and if the body is mutilated, desecrated or otherwise treated with disrespect, will manifest as a hungry ghost, which will be sapient for about 3 days in order to take revenge, then basically descend into animalistic fury at just about everything.
So, to sum up.
My personal thinking on death and the soul in DtD.
When you die, your soul disengages from the body.
It enters the Warp, where, unless you're unlucky, the Raven Queen will find it and pick it up.
The Raven Queen will go up to whichever god you happen to be aligned with and say "here, I found one of yours".
Because this interaction, having happened approximately eleventy-billion quadrillion times per year ever since the Great Wheel came into existence, is now extremely formalized and ritualized, the god roughly says "oh, thanks, you keep it for now".
The Raven Queen then sticks it into the appropriate bit of her own personal slice of the deep Warp, where it experiences an afterlife which returns it to a blank slate, ready to be stuck into another body.
Once this has happened, she again takes it to the relevant god and says "here, this is one of yours".
Again, extreme formalization and ritualization require the reaction "uh, no it's not, look at it, it doesn't believe in anything".
The Raven Queen then goes "oh, so it doesn't. Better let it work out what it believes in", and takes it to wherever new souls appear in the Warp, hands it over in yet another extremely formalized and ritualized interaction that no-one is ever supposed to acknowledge exists, then buggers off so that no-one who isn't supposed to know about it doesn't know she's there.
Of course, the Syrneth somehow managed to circumvent this process, which ol' Queenie is extremely mad about.
And Wraiths, Vampires, Harrowed and other undead Exalts have their own oddnesses.
And then there are those who worship the Raven Queen, which she may, in fact, actually consume, because eventually even things constructed of pure Warp-stuff will wear out.
Chosen... may also have odd things happen to them.
Bear in mind, though: that's my personal thinking.
That's not necessarily what happens in the Great Wheel someone else runs.
All that we're actually told is that your soul enters the Warp when you die, somehow ends up in the clutches of the Raven Queen, and she will eventually decide to let some or all of the souls of the dead be reborn into new bodies.(edited)
The exact details of what goes on between those steps, and how those steps happen, is up to whoever's running the game - if the SM decides that they need fleshing out at all.
The Strange Aeons clause
H P Lovecraft has a lot to answer for, because he kinda shaped a good chunk of how one is "supposed" to do existential/cosmic horror. As part of that, he invented the following couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons, even death may die.
That right there is what I call the "Strange Aeons clause", and it has two parts - if something is capable of existing unchanged basically forever, it can't be called dead or killed; if certain metaphysical concepts, star alignments or whatever other confluences happen to be just right, it's entirely possible that death may lose its grip on certain stuff.
The way this applies to the Primordials from Exalted is as follows:
The Primordials, as part of their nature, were eternal - that is, they should have been immune to death and to having their natures changed. They made Creation, because it seemed like a good idea at the time, then created the gods, basically making subcontractors so that they didn't have to constantly be doing everything that Creation required to keep it going. Finally, they made the mortal races, mostly so that they could hear themselves being praised all the time for making Creation. Exalted takes a pretty bleak view of humanity, to be honest: walking prayer-generators.
Unfortunately for (most of) the Primordials, the gods decided that they were sick of the power abuse that the Primordials got up to and rebelled. Or they would have, if the gods hadn't signed a magically binding contract with the Primordials that prevented the gods taking direct action against the Primordials.
Fortunately for the gods, two of the Primordials also decided they were sick of the rest of the Primordial's shit, and allied themselves with the gods: Gaia and Autochthon.
Because part of the nature of Primordials is "being able to make souls", Gaia decided that she would make some souls that could make mortals into demigods. These may or may not be Exalted's Elemental Dragons, but this specific act of creation is what lead to the Dragonblooded Exalted coming into existence. Because she made it hereditary, theoretically limitless numbers of Dragonblooded could exist. However, that also limited their power, because Creation could only take so much before it broke under the strain.
Autochthon took a different route. Autochthon also made some souls that could turn mortals into demigods, but he decided to make them be more like magic artefacts or metaphysical grafts than something inherent to a bloodline. This meant that the number of Celestial Exalts that could exist was much smaller, but that they could be commensurately much more powerful. Certain gods got a bunch of these Exalt souls handed out to them - the Unconquered Sun got 300 of them, Luna also got about that number, and the Five Maidens (who had various Destiny-, Fate- and samsara-related functions) got twenty each.
These souls were handed out to various mortals, who then got told by their divine patrons "yo, these Primordials are what's making the world awful, go and kill them for us because we're not allowed to". Despite the fact that it was literally impossible to kill the Primordials, the Solars, the Lunars, the Sidereals, the Dragonblooded and the various mortal armies, between them, somehow managed to actually succeed in killing some of the Primordials. However, because it was in fact impossible to end their lives, the dead Primordials got turned into the Neverborn, while those that survived got variously mutilated into the Yozi.
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons, even death may die.
That right there is what I call the "Strange Aeons clause", and it has two parts - if something is capable of existing unchanged basically forever, it can't be called dead or killed; if certain metaphysical concepts, star alignments or whatever other confluences happen to be just right, it's entirely possible that death may lose its grip on certain stuff.
The way this applies to the Primordials from Exalted is as follows:
The Primordials, as part of their nature, were eternal - that is, they should have been immune to death and to having their natures changed. They made Creation, because it seemed like a good idea at the time, then created the gods, basically making subcontractors so that they didn't have to constantly be doing everything that Creation required to keep it going. Finally, they made the mortal races, mostly so that they could hear themselves being praised all the time for making Creation. Exalted takes a pretty bleak view of humanity, to be honest: walking prayer-generators.
Unfortunately for (most of) the Primordials, the gods decided that they were sick of the power abuse that the Primordials got up to and rebelled. Or they would have, if the gods hadn't signed a magically binding contract with the Primordials that prevented the gods taking direct action against the Primordials.
Fortunately for the gods, two of the Primordials also decided they were sick of the rest of the Primordial's shit, and allied themselves with the gods: Gaia and Autochthon.
Because part of the nature of Primordials is "being able to make souls", Gaia decided that she would make some souls that could make mortals into demigods. These may or may not be Exalted's Elemental Dragons, but this specific act of creation is what lead to the Dragonblooded Exalted coming into existence. Because she made it hereditary, theoretically limitless numbers of Dragonblooded could exist. However, that also limited their power, because Creation could only take so much before it broke under the strain.
Autochthon took a different route. Autochthon also made some souls that could turn mortals into demigods, but he decided to make them be more like magic artefacts or metaphysical grafts than something inherent to a bloodline. This meant that the number of Celestial Exalts that could exist was much smaller, but that they could be commensurately much more powerful. Certain gods got a bunch of these Exalt souls handed out to them - the Unconquered Sun got 300 of them, Luna also got about that number, and the Five Maidens (who had various Destiny-, Fate- and samsara-related functions) got twenty each.
These souls were handed out to various mortals, who then got told by their divine patrons "yo, these Primordials are what's making the world awful, go and kill them for us because we're not allowed to". Despite the fact that it was literally impossible to kill the Primordials, the Solars, the Lunars, the Sidereals, the Dragonblooded and the various mortal armies, between them, somehow managed to actually succeed in killing some of the Primordials. However, because it was in fact impossible to end their lives, the dead Primordials got turned into the Neverborn, while those that survived got variously mutilated into the Yozi.