So I'm starting to right an arc set in the afterlife and I am wondering would you be able to find a community that is made up of souls of dead humaniods in the abyss?
I know this is possible in hell but the abyss works better in context of the larger campaign/meta plot that will have already been played prior to this arc
If you're the DM, then you can absolutely have a community located in the Abyss, where the souls of dead humanoids congregate... If you're asking in the more general sense of what D&D has typically stated for such things, it would be feasible but probably not common or likely. Based on my memory of such mechanics over the various D&D editions, I would say that you would normally find three types of souls within the Abyss:
Souls of creatures that were chaotically evil aligned would arrive in the Abyss and would become a type of demon, which would usually be something fairly low level like a dretch or mane.
Souls of worshippers of a particular deity with their realm in the Abyss would arrive in that realm and would have whatever form that deity wants their petitioners to have.
Miscellaneous souls that don't fit the above two concepts would probably be either larvae or something along the lines of what you're suggesting (i.e., unaltered humanoid souls).
Again, a lot of DM perogative in how you want to handle your cosmology and what exceptions to the case you may even want to have. With as chaotic as the Abyss can be, I certainly wouldn't be surprised that a community of non-demonic souls came together for mutual defense.
Cool so yeah the idea is that a small community/communities of people have ended up in the abyss and live together for "safety".
Some may have been sacrifices in life and have grown up in the abyss, some may have been captured, some are there purely by chance and others may have been worshippers but throught trauma have forgotten their former lives? There may even be young people there that are essentially scraps of broken souls that have merged to become a new being that is "born" in very rare cases.
would this all work?
I was going to have it so that most inhabitants just think that they are alive and just live in a very horrific messed up existence
Sure! A lot of the canonical material (at least pre-5E) viewed that the souls of the dead lost most if not all of their previous memories. They were petitioners of either a particular deity (who they then served in the afterlife in some fashion) or were more "free range" petitioners of the particular plane to which they were most morally/ethically aligned. Petitioners aligned to a plane versus a deity either work to achieve a higher status, such as becoming a celestial or fiend, or to ultimately merge with the plane itself.
It would certainly be possible to have somebody or something mess up the final destination of a soul... I could see many of the Demonlords attempting to muck up the natural order of things so that they gain more souls and power over time. The celestials of the Upper Planes wouldn't probably allow this on a major scale, since it's both evil and disrupts the natural cycle. Asmodeus and his devilish crew would probably step in as well, since it's breaking the laws (versus subverting them).
But I'm starting to digress and ramble a bit... The answer remains that all of your ideas not only can work for your specific campaign but they don't necessarily even deviate too far from previously established materials.
Under Planescape lore, the souls of chaotic evil beings arrived in the Abyss as Larva, the form all evil Petitioners take upon entering the lower planes (basically human-sized maggots with humanoid heads). In the Abyss, they're caught and sent before the Nalfeshnee, who decide to what to do with them based on the Nalfeshnee's whims. Typically, this means transforming them into Dretch, Rutterkin, or Manes, or eating them.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
As Javier_Phenagin notes, there's no "law" in 5e that I'm aware of as to how soul's and afterlives have to work. Prior editions may have some more skin in the game of how those things work, but for instance DitA introduction of "soul coins" (a currency made of souls that can be traded but also used as a consumable for certain Infernal technologies) was just thrown into the game as sort of Hell canon. So death and the afterlife can be as vague or defined as you want it.
Personally, a colony of lost souls in the Abyss wouldn't work in my game. Some souls in the Abyss stay intact and are re-incarnated as a lesser demon, few other souls are re-rendered as something greater or tied to their intact souls. Otherwise, in my game the Abyss is basically a wood chipper and mortal souls get turned to mulch. That is ,most souls are torn apart into much baser elements by the whirlwinds of the Abyss and reconstituted per various Abyssal powers' needs and arrangements. There's not a lot of breathing room outside that whirlwind for mortal souls.
That said, having a lost colony of souls might be cool if your Abyss has space for it. I'm sort of thinking of the Conor character from the old Buffy spinoff, Angel as a template for characters within it. Food for thought, it seems unlike Hell which is largely shaped by Asmodeus's grand designs, the Abyss is largely shaped by the will of various demon lords. I can't off the top of my head think of a particular Demon Lord that would entertain the idea of creating a hospitably place for your colony of lost souls, but that doesn't mean there isn't, or you could create a demon lord who is doing so. The bigger question would be, why? Maybe there's some point in keeping intact mortal souls in the Abyss for a demon lords short or long games.
I want to say the Planescape lore 6th is pointing out, I think the larvae/maggot thing is going on in or moved to Hades in 5e. At least there's rules about larvae and stuff there in the DMG. But the planescape process is similar to the soul being just raw material for something else. My abyss works more virally and fractal-like and internally conflicting for an ordered process like Planescape's to ever take hold.
EDIT: you might want to move this thread over to Story & Lore. Lots of convos of this sort go on over there all the time.
EDIT 2: you also might want to look at Carceri and the Yugoloths (and the other planes staffed by Yugoloth mercenaries), I like the idea of that place and I could see a sort of penal colony set up as a "low security" prison kept for whatever reason. I could see some aspect of it being basically "bad soul colonial Australia" basically a place some souls dwell in and can make do on their own.
I can't off the top of my head think of a particular Demon Lord that would entertain the idea of creating a hospitably place for your colony of lost souls, but that doesn't mean there isn't, or you could create a demon lord who is doing so. The bigger question would be, why?
Mostly for the sake of a thought exercise (and to provide the OP some additional ideas), I could potentially see Fraz-Urb'luu doing such a thing. The demon lord "Prince of Lies" might want to a false sense of security among the [mostly] untainted souls that flock to this "safe haven" community within the Abyss. Not very hard nor out-of-line for Fraz-Urb'luu to create a false paradise where these souls congregate for safety.
Why does Fraz-Urb'luu do this? Perhaps, by offering this "safe haven" to others, he denies the soul energy that other demon lords would eventually harness and use. Or, perhaps, the community is one huge trap that will eventually feed him a multitude of souls before he resets the trap and starts the process all over again...
Under Planescape lore, the souls of chaotic evil beings arrived in the Abyss as Larva, the form all evil Petitioners take upon entering the lower planes (basically human-sized maggots with humanoid heads). In the Abyss, they're caught and sent before the Nalfeshnee, who decide to what to do with them based on the Nalfeshnee's whims. Typically, this means transforming them into Dretch, Rutterkin, or Manes, or eating them.
Yep, and maybe one particular nalfeshnee judge grew tired of fueling a balor's army or a demon lord's larder... So, they decided to set random souls free to roam the Abyss because they view it as a funny (and annoying) alternate option.
"Balor thinks he's so tough? Well, let's see how well he handles having some of his blood warriors go AWOL before they even get to him... Bwah-ha-ha!"
Some very good responses here, but I just want to add one thing: demons don't value souls the way devils do, so they're just as likely to attack and destroy petitioners as mortals.
I can't off the top of my head think of a particular Demon Lord that would entertain the idea of creating a hospitably place for your colony of lost souls, but that doesn't mean there isn't, or you could create a demon lord who is doing so. The bigger question would be, why?
Mostly for the sake of a thought exercise (and to provide the OP some additional ideas), I could potentially see Fraz-Urb'luu doing such a thing. The demon lord "Prince of Lies" might want to a false sense of security among the [mostly] untainted souls that flock to this "safe haven" community within the Abyss. Not very hard nor out-of-line for Fraz-Urb'luu to create a false paradise where these souls congregate for safety.
Why does Fraz-Urb'luu do this? Perhaps, by offering this "safe haven" to others, he denies the soul energy that other demon lords would eventually harness and use. Or, perhaps, the community is one huge trap that will eventually feed him a multitude of souls before he resets the trap and starts the process all over again...
Under Planescape lore, the souls of chaotic evil beings arrived in the Abyss as Larva, the form all evil Petitioners take upon entering the lower planes (basically human-sized maggots with humanoid heads). In the Abyss, they're caught and sent before the Nalfeshnee, who decide to what to do with them based on the Nalfeshnee's whims. Typically, this means transforming them into Dretch, Rutterkin, or Manes, or eating them.
Yep, and maybe one particular nalfeshnee judge grew tired of fueling a balor's army or a demon lord's larder... So, they decided to set random souls free to roam the Abyss because they view it as a funny (and annoying) alternate option.
"Balor thinks he's so tough? Well, let's see how well he handles having some of his blood warriors go AWOL before they even get to him... Bwah-ha-ha!"
That would be a very chaotic evil thing to do, yes. Nalfeshnee troll face!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I can't off the top of my head think of a particular Demon Lord that would entertain the idea of creating a hospitably place for your colony of lost souls, but that doesn't mean there isn't, or you could create a demon lord who is doing so. The bigger question would be, why?
Mostly for the sake of a thought exercise (and to provide the OP some additional ideas), I could potentially see Fraz-Urb'luu doing such a thing. The demon lord "Prince of Lies" might want to a false sense of security among the [mostly] untainted souls that flock to this "safe haven" community within the Abyss. Not very hard nor out-of-line for Fraz-Urb'luu to create a false paradise where these souls congregate for safety.
Why does Fraz-Urb'luu do this? Perhaps, by offering this "safe haven" to others, he denies the soul energy that other demon lords would eventually harness and use. Or, perhaps, the community is one huge trap that will eventually feed him a multitude of souls before he resets the trap and starts the process all over again...
Yeah, I can see that. In my own game Fraz-Urb'luu is overdeveloped (really, the only Demon Lord I've bothered to develop in my game) to have space for something like that, at least in a way I'd want players to play in. But I think you're right F-U'l is definitely the most "game player of game players" in the Abyss and most likely to contend with systems as things to be countered. A soul colony that runs counter to "the way things are done" in the Abyss could fit his schemes and plays to the whole question my game has re: F-U'l: Is it actually speaking practicing to some higher ideal (a sort of enlightened nihilism) or is it simply crazy vain and basically the most toxic edge lord, "none of this amounts to much compared to me, even this stuff you call reality). It's probably a mix of both. At this point in discussions of F-U'l I encourage DM's to play his personality like Jesse Ventura's Man in Black in the classic X Files episode "Jose Chung's Tales from Outer Space". I even have part of one of his dialogues adapted and placed prominently in my notes and on my DM's screen, whenever 'facts' are called into question (and when that happens F-U'l or an emissary inevitably shows up), ""Your kind has yet to discover how neural networks create self consciousness, let alone how the mortal brain processes two dimensional retinal images into the three dimensional phenomenon known as perception. Yet YOU somehow _brazenly_ declare ... 'seeing is believing'?" All the Demon Lords are easily role played if you crib notes from professional wrestlers.
So I'm starting to right an arc set in the afterlife and I am wondering would you be able to find a community that is made up of souls of dead humaniods in the abyss?
I know this is possible in hell but the abyss works better in context of the larger campaign/meta plot that will have already been played prior to this arc
If you're the DM, then you can absolutely have a community located in the Abyss, where the souls of dead humanoids congregate... If you're asking in the more general sense of what D&D has typically stated for such things, it would be feasible but probably not common or likely. Based on my memory of such mechanics over the various D&D editions, I would say that you would normally find three types of souls within the Abyss:
Again, a lot of DM perogative in how you want to handle your cosmology and what exceptions to the case you may even want to have. With as chaotic as the Abyss can be, I certainly wouldn't be surprised that a community of non-demonic souls came together for mutual defense.
Cool so yeah the idea is that a small community/communities of people have ended up in the abyss and live together for "safety".
Some may have been sacrifices in life and have grown up in the abyss, some may have been captured, some are there purely by chance and others may have been worshippers but throught trauma have forgotten their former lives? There may even be young people there that are essentially scraps of broken souls that have merged to become a new being that is "born" in very rare cases.
would this all work?
I was going to have it so that most inhabitants just think that they are alive and just live in a very horrific messed up existence
Sure! A lot of the canonical material (at least pre-5E) viewed that the souls of the dead lost most if not all of their previous memories. They were petitioners of either a particular deity (who they then served in the afterlife in some fashion) or were more "free range" petitioners of the particular plane to which they were most morally/ethically aligned. Petitioners aligned to a plane versus a deity either work to achieve a higher status, such as becoming a celestial or fiend, or to ultimately merge with the plane itself.
It would certainly be possible to have somebody or something mess up the final destination of a soul... I could see many of the Demonlords attempting to muck up the natural order of things so that they gain more souls and power over time. The celestials of the Upper Planes wouldn't probably allow this on a major scale, since it's both evil and disrupts the natural cycle. Asmodeus and his devilish crew would probably step in as well, since it's breaking the laws (versus subverting them).
But I'm starting to digress and ramble a bit... The answer remains that all of your ideas not only can work for your specific campaign but they don't necessarily even deviate too far from previously established materials.
Thank you :)
Under Planescape lore, the souls of chaotic evil beings arrived in the Abyss as Larva, the form all evil Petitioners take upon entering the lower planes (basically human-sized maggots with humanoid heads). In the Abyss, they're caught and sent before the Nalfeshnee, who decide to what to do with them based on the Nalfeshnee's whims. Typically, this means transforming them into Dretch, Rutterkin, or Manes, or eating them.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
As Javier_Phenagin notes, there's no "law" in 5e that I'm aware of as to how soul's and afterlives have to work. Prior editions may have some more skin in the game of how those things work, but for instance DitA introduction of "soul coins" (a currency made of souls that can be traded but also used as a consumable for certain Infernal technologies) was just thrown into the game as sort of Hell canon. So death and the afterlife can be as vague or defined as you want it.
Personally, a colony of lost souls in the Abyss wouldn't work in my game. Some souls in the Abyss stay intact and are re-incarnated as a lesser demon, few other souls are re-rendered as something greater or tied to their intact souls. Otherwise, in my game the Abyss is basically a wood chipper and mortal souls get turned to mulch. That is ,most souls are torn apart into much baser elements by the whirlwinds of the Abyss and reconstituted per various Abyssal powers' needs and arrangements. There's not a lot of breathing room outside that whirlwind for mortal souls.
That said, having a lost colony of souls might be cool if your Abyss has space for it. I'm sort of thinking of the Conor character from the old Buffy spinoff, Angel as a template for characters within it. Food for thought, it seems unlike Hell which is largely shaped by Asmodeus's grand designs, the Abyss is largely shaped by the will of various demon lords. I can't off the top of my head think of a particular Demon Lord that would entertain the idea of creating a hospitably place for your colony of lost souls, but that doesn't mean there isn't, or you could create a demon lord who is doing so. The bigger question would be, why? Maybe there's some point in keeping intact mortal souls in the Abyss for a demon lords short or long games.
I want to say the Planescape lore 6th is pointing out, I think the larvae/maggot thing is going on in or moved to Hades in 5e. At least there's rules about larvae and stuff there in the DMG. But the planescape process is similar to the soul being just raw material for something else. My abyss works more virally and fractal-like and internally conflicting for an ordered process like Planescape's to ever take hold.
EDIT: you might want to move this thread over to Story & Lore. Lots of convos of this sort go on over there all the time.
EDIT 2: you also might want to look at Carceri and the Yugoloths (and the other planes staffed by Yugoloth mercenaries), I like the idea of that place and I could see a sort of penal colony set up as a "low security" prison kept for whatever reason. I could see some aspect of it being basically "bad soul colonial Australia" basically a place some souls dwell in and can make do on their own.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Mostly for the sake of a thought exercise (and to provide the OP some additional ideas), I could potentially see Fraz-Urb'luu doing such a thing. The demon lord "Prince of Lies" might want to a false sense of security among the [mostly] untainted souls that flock to this "safe haven" community within the Abyss. Not very hard nor out-of-line for Fraz-Urb'luu to create a false paradise where these souls congregate for safety.
Why does Fraz-Urb'luu do this? Perhaps, by offering this "safe haven" to others, he denies the soul energy that other demon lords would eventually harness and use. Or, perhaps, the community is one huge trap that will eventually feed him a multitude of souls before he resets the trap and starts the process all over again...
Yep, and maybe one particular nalfeshnee judge grew tired of fueling a balor's army or a demon lord's larder... So, they decided to set random souls free to roam the Abyss because they view it as a funny (and annoying) alternate option.
"Balor thinks he's so tough? Well, let's see how well he handles having some of his blood warriors go AWOL before they even get to him... Bwah-ha-ha!"
Some very good responses here, but I just want to add one thing: demons don't value souls the way devils do, so they're just as likely to attack and destroy petitioners as mortals.
That would be a very chaotic evil thing to do, yes. Nalfeshnee troll face!
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Yeah, I can see that. In my own game Fraz-Urb'luu is overdeveloped (really, the only Demon Lord I've bothered to develop in my game) to have space for something like that, at least in a way I'd want players to play in. But I think you're right F-U'l is definitely the most "game player of game players" in the Abyss and most likely to contend with systems as things to be countered. A soul colony that runs counter to "the way things are done" in the Abyss could fit his schemes and plays to the whole question my game has re: F-U'l: Is it actually speaking practicing to some higher ideal (a sort of enlightened nihilism) or is it simply crazy vain and basically the most toxic edge lord, "none of this amounts to much compared to me, even this stuff you call reality). It's probably a mix of both. At this point in discussions of F-U'l I encourage DM's to play his personality like Jesse Ventura's Man in Black in the classic X Files episode "Jose Chung's Tales from Outer Space". I even have part of one of his dialogues adapted and placed prominently in my notes and on my DM's screen, whenever 'facts' are called into question (and when that happens F-U'l or an emissary inevitably shows up), ""Your kind has yet to discover how neural networks create self consciousness, let alone how the mortal brain processes two dimensional retinal images into the three dimensional phenomenon known as perception. Yet YOU somehow _brazenly_ declare ... 'seeing is believing'?" All the Demon Lords are easily role played if you crib notes from professional wrestlers.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.