> > You've missed my point -- which is that banishment, which
> > certainly happens, is the absolute worst punishment.
>
> Sure. But banishment is not primarily punitive in intent.
> You exile a person to remove him from the community - what
> happens to him outside is irrelevant. It just so happens
> that everything outside of the community is awful.
Both of these are fair points. I probably used slightly the wrong word when I said punitive, but I meant it to indicate that Daka Fal makes a judgment. In a lot of ways, he is really the guard of the afterlife. He's the judge of the dead in the same sense that a bouncer judges whether to let you into the club. (OK, it's a little deeper than that, but you know what I mean.) If you are a good enough Praxian to get into Eiritha's Bounty, he leads you there. If not, he takes you to the only place that you can end up if not admitted to an afterlife: the underworld. That's banishment in the sense of exile from your culture. It's also sort of punishment, but not in the modern sense of doing your time.
Praxians certainly see it as a bad thing for your spirit to get sent to Daka Fal's Cave. And it's certainly their hell. But I didn't mean to invoke Dante's Inferno or anything like it. Hell or the underworld is not a particularly Praxian place. It's full of every kind of horror: outlanders, monsters, chaos, evil people, and things Praxians have never encountered. Only Shamans can have much hope of returning from there.
To Julian's point that a culture should have some description of its hell, I would disagree for Praxians at least. The underworld in the otherworlds, to them, is like one of the many outlands in the mundane world. You don't need to know much about them because there's nothing good there. If you want to raid the Outlands,* you need to be prepared to survive there. If you want to raid the spirit outlands, you'd better be prepared (specifically, by bringing a shaman). Peter humorously made something like this point when he listed Praxians' hell as Dragon Pass, Teshnos, etc. Praxians may be outside the norm here.
*Note the implicit contradiction of wanting to raid someplace where there's nothing good!
Jeff also says:
> Waha does not provide moralistic framework but a path
> for survival in the Wastes.
I think you're making a distinction that Praxians would not recognize, not even what its basis is. The Way of Waha is the One True Way. You follow it because it is right. You know it is right because, if you fail to follow it, you die. Morals and survival merge into one big thing. There are very few temptations to stray from the Way of Waha because the negative consequences are so immediate and severe.
Chris Lemens
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