They do make a persuasive case.
Rich never did go back and swap the colors to their correct speech balloons in 1317.
He hardly ever corrects art errors online . He’ll probably correct it for the print edition.
I kind of saw that coming, since Tarquin is indeed a “sort of regional player” whom Hell wouldn’t bother building such an ostentatious perch for.
OK, so based on that, I have some questions about the nature of Hell in OotS/D&D.
I had thought the Directors were very very senior in their organisation(s) indeed but it now appears that in fact they are in fact the ultimate authority/ies over Hell(s) and all things Evil?
If so, how did they get to be in charge? Who gave them their power or how did they acquire it? How do they relate to the Gods - I know they had to apologise to and negotiate with Tiamat after the whole familicide thing but does that mean they are more/equal to/lesser in authority? Do they fit into the same hierarchy as the Gods in any way?
There was mention of the Sin of Envy. Sins are fundamental moral laws laid down by a supernatural force. So is this just flowery language or is there in fact a supreme moral authority?
I mean, obviously as a game, the answer for D&D morality is that it more or less follows the modern Western morality of the playing/designing community but is there an in-game explanation for why certain behaviours are Good and certain Evil? Is there a Judge, a Weigher of Souls who determines where people end up, or is this inherent in the system? We’ve seen the archon rule on Roy, and we’ve seen Thor and Hel bicker over the fates of Dwarves, come to think of it, but this seemed to be an application of rules/principles. Do these come from the Gods? In the latter case yes, but that wasn’t so obvious in Roy’s case.
Also, find it interesting that Down There Sabine dresses what by her standards is modestly - yes, it’s a mini-skirt and an off the shoulder jumper, but it looks more like dressing for comfort than her usual get up. This of course refelctes the softening of both characters as we’re invited to feel pity/sympathy for them and their love vs the cruel demands of the Directors.
I think Dante would really appreciate the Throne of Jealousy.
I don’t think that’s the case. The gods would be the ultimate authority. There was a strip way back when with one of the Directors getting chewed out by Tiamat, for example. Tiamat rules her patch of the lower planes, not the Directors. I imagine, as you said, they are senior ranking management. References to “We own…” or “We have…” are more about the organization of the lower planes as a whole.
Whenever it gets almost complete, someone or something must come along and knock it down, so they have to start over. Sisyphus would appreciate that.
Fiends and gods are two different things, with gods generally being the more powerful class of being, although there can be some overlap at the outer edges - very powerful fiends can be the equivalent of very weak deities. Occasionally, a fiend might become powerful enough to make themselves into a full-fledged deity.
D&D cosmology varies a bit depending on the specific setting, and Rich is using a homebrew, so how the afterlife works is ultimately up to him, but the standard cycle is, a mortal dies, and their soul goes to the appropriate afterlife. They spend some time in the afterlife as basically the person they were in life (like we’re seeing in the comics now with Nale, or when Roy died and spent time in heaven with his family) but this isn’t permanent - over a long enough period, the souls gradually lose contact with their mortal identity, and are slowly refined into being outsiders themselves. How this process works depends on the plane’s alignment - In Heaven (Lawful Good) would have a long series of tests and challenges to demonstrate you’d earned advancement to the next stage of being. In the Abyss (Chaotic Evil), a demon grabs up a bunch of souls, sticks them in a pot, and cooks them until a new demon crawls out.
Newly created outsiders are usually the weakest of their type, but there’s avenues for them to gain power and become more powerful kinds of outsider. The process, again, varies depending on the sort of outsider they are, but fiends almost always advance by killing or overthrowing others of their kind.
Outsiders can also be directly created by a deity, or spontaneously arise from the raw material of their native planes.
The Directors are unique to Rich’s homebrew, so its hard to say precisely how they fit into the hierarchy of the afterlife. Usually, there’s a progression of increasingly strong types of fiend, with Pit Fiends and Balors being the top of their respective lawful and chaotic food chains. Above them, there’s a bunch of unique, named demon lords or dukes of hell. The Directors probably fit into this last category. Usually, these creatures have wildly different physiologies, so the Directors all being tall, skinny humanoids is a bit different, but polymorph is a thing, so who knows what they “really” look like? Since they’re fiends, they presumably acquired their power by tricking and murdering other fiends and stealing their power for themselves.
As for who arbitrates morality - who decides what’s a sin and what’s a virtue - that depends on the specific setting. In OotS, we’ve seen that its determined by a sort of conclave of the gods, who get together at the creation of the world and hammer out how the morality system will work this time around. Other D&D settings have an “overgod” that doesn’t deal directly with mortals or have clerics or worshippers. In others, it’s just an innate quality of the universe, same as gravity or magnetism.
Or it’s magically always half-finished.
Thank you, that clears a lot up.
It’s interesting that Sabine does seem to have some plan to spend a lot of time, if not eternity, with Nale which presumably doesn’t involve him becoming some quite different entity, but whether that’s a viable option I guess is unclear.
I also suppose, he says naively picking up stuff that must have been discussed to death ages ago, that given the interplay between planes Nale and Tarquin actually have/had a good idea of what their afterlife would be like, so Hell and the associated agony and subsequent hell match for glory or non existence were all at a minimum tolerable outcomes of their actions.
Right. The interesting thing is that while some dark gods reside in Hell, ruling over their own private hellish kingdoms, they don’t actually rule Hell itself - Hell is ruled by the archdevils, who have their own separate chain of command. It’s like that in all of the Outer Planes, I think. The gods may live there, but the “natives” (who were once mortals) actually run the place.
I think that anyone in Hell with any seniority at all knows about the Throne and its true purpose, and they all find it useful to lie about it to appropriate souls. And even if the Directors aren’t at the top of the lowerarchy, they probably are high enough to have personal claims on at least some souls, and it probably didn’t take much horse-dealing to ensure that Nale would be one of theirs (I mean, they even say that they bought him at a bargain price).
“Why would anyone be evil in a world where you had proof of a bad afterlife?” is a pretty common D&D question. I think the answers could often be:
- Some people are just kinda jerks and gravitate that way
- It’s probably not really that bad
- People are really bad at risk analysis or just avoiding thinking of consequences (think of times you’ve heard of someone embezzling money knowing full well the axe would fall)
- People assume they’ll be the ones to weasel out somehow
- Particularly powerful figures may assume they’ll just ascend to the ruling class in Hell (or related). No whips and rock hauling for them!
- Probably going there anyway, might as well really evil it up while there’s fun to be had (similar to Tarquin’s perspective on dictators getting overthrown)
As discussed, briefly, here:
In traditional Christian cosmology, Hell is envisioned as a place of punishment.
Why would the D&D Hell follow suit? Wouldn’t TPTB there praise the worst of the sinners and give them authentic thrones, and reward them with garish palaces in which to indulge in their most debased sins? Nale should have been rewarded with some spiffy perks, shouldn’t he? Are all “good” afterlife planes places of beatific peace, while all “evil” ones locations of pain and suffering? If so, are the neutral ones just kind of meh in that sense?
You’re only as valuable to the fiends as what you can provide right now. Maybe you did terrible things while alive but now you’re dead and just another pile of soul-material to melt into a basic level demonic slug or use as slave labor or torture for the fun of it. If you’re exceptionally skilled, maybe they’d make use of that and you’ll be better off because you can still provide something after your death. Aside from his knowledge of the Gates, Nale is just another soul of a dead mid-level adventurer and not anything a fiend would care about. Why waste time rewarding him for what he did last month? He can’t do anything for you now; toss him on the pile.
The evil places are full of pain and suffering because the beings running them enjoy other’s pain & suffering. Not as a moral punishment but because they’re manifestations of Evil.