Guild Wars 2

Hello all! Alright, I have a question. So, in the lore, when someone dies, one of two things happen: either they did enough heroic deeds for their soul to be released into the Mists, or their soul is trapped with their body forever. Am I missing something? Because this seems like, for most of the sentient creatures of Tyria, their souls are permanent trapped within their decaying bodies. (http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Hall_of_Heroes) This seems really rather harsh, and I’d like to believe that the good people of Tyria deserve a better fate than this.

Am I missing something???? Or is the lore conflicting? Because, as far as I can remember, I thought that some stories in Guild Wars 1 talked about ALL souls going into the mists? I’m really not familiar with any changes to death lore in GW2, but any clarification would be appreciated!

I believe most souls go into the underworld where Grenth reigns.

But isn’t Grenth only the human god of death and cold? Do all sentient creatures end up in the underworld? At least in GW1 I’ve never seen a non-human ghost there.

Edit: ok, newly dead souls only visit the underworld temporarily before going to their final destinations. What those destinations are I don’t know.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Underworld

Gonna preface this by saying we don’t have anything remotely comprehensive on how post-death works in Tyria. Consider everything from here on to be extrapolations based on fairly scant evidence.

@Aegrahm the lore does conflict, I’m afraid. The Prophecies manual is where the whole trapped in your body thing comes from, but our own personal experience in GW1 shows that it’s not true. As far as we can tell, a wide variety of human souls, quite possibly all of them, do go at least as far as the Underworld, where Grenth sorts (sorted?) them out into appropriate afterlives. The Nightfall manual, for what it’s worth, says that “Civilized humans know that when they die, their souls pass on into the Mists, the realm of the afterlife. Some spirits linger in this world, or find ways to walk back into the realm of flesh…” That last bit I believe refers to ghosts.

@Bunji As far as we’ve seen, only humans go to the Underworld. What happens to other races is a bigger mystery- we know from the ghosts we’ve seen that at least asura, norn, and charr (and jotun) have spirits, and we see in the Realm of Torment that in at least certain situations charr spirits can end up in a Mists-based afterlife, but we don’t know if that’s the norm or not. As for those races themselves, I believe norn are the only ones that we know specifically believe in an afterlife- asura, iirc, just believe they’re recycled by the Eternal Alchemy to some degree or another and leave it at that, and I can’t remember ever seeing a charr even address the subject.

Since the flame-legion almost resurrected their old leader and Magg said something about them getting the spirit from the mists, we can safely assume, that charr-souls also go somewhere into the mists. It wouldn’t surprise me if all souls go somewhere into the mists.

We just don’t know if all souls go through the same sorting-process or end up in the same places in the mists. Since we’ve never seen non-human souls in the underworld, maybe only human souls are sorted in the underworld and other races go somewhere else?

And what’s up with that trapped in your body thing? If the health-bar hits 0 the lore says you’re only defeated, but not dead(http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Death). That’s because the gods don’t interfere with the world directly anymore and resurrection has become almost impossible (the former resurrection shrines stopped working). So if you die in GW2 you die for good.

That excerpt comes from the Prophecies manual and seems to have been altered from the get go.

Most souls appear to go to typical afterlives for the race – e.g., The Underworld. Those who have regrets remain in the world of Tyria. Only the most heroic go to the Hall of Heroes.

That excerpt was likely one of the earlier drafts with only the Hall of Heroes as an afterlife.

@BunjiKugashira: “defeated” is merely mechanical. It’s not a lore thing, just like the health bar is mechanical. The PCs never die, and the whole thing about PCs/NPCs being unable to be resurrected is that Anet thought resurrection skills made plot deaths less impactful because “why don’t we just resurrect the NPCs?”