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Deities & Demi-Gods is, in fact, the more or less definitive treatment of what happens after death in D&D.

AD&D assumes that the anima, that force which gives life and distinct existence to thinking beings, is one of two sorts: soul or spirit. Humans, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, and half-elves (those beings which can have a raise dead or resurrection spell cast upon them) all have souls; all other beings that worship deities have spirits.

The term “anima” didn’t catch on and the split between soul and spirit didn’t last much longer. (It’s somewhat present in the original Manual of the Planes (1987), but by the time Planescape (1994) rolled around in 2^nd Edition the terms “soul” and “spirit” were being used interchangeably.)

Upon death, both souls and spirits travel through the Astral Plane and are drawn towards either the plane associated with their alignment or the plane in which their chosen god resides. (If these are not the same thing, Deities & Demi-Gods and the Manual of the Planes are, at best, vague and contradictory about which one takes precedence. There are also other considerations to consider, like soul-selling contracts signed with devils.) In the 3^rd Edition Manual of the Planes (2001) this process became known as “drift” – the soul drifts towards their aligned Outer Plane.

Drift is not instantaneous. It takes days or weeks for the soul to arrive, and this is the reason raise dead can only work on the recently deceased for a period which increases as the cleric gains levels (1 day per level in 1^st Edition): the more powerful the cleric, the farther they can reach through the Astral Plane to pull back the dead soul.

The powerful resurrection spell, by contrast, can reach all the way to the Outer Planes and pluck the soul back from its “final” resting place. This can anger the gods from whom these souls are “stolen.” For example, there is a 20% chance that Anubis will force an offending cleric to perform a quest, a 1% chance that Tuoni will actually show up in person and forcibly claim the raised person’s soul, and so forth.

What is this journey actually like? According to Deities & Demi-Gods:

The road through the Astral Plane to their destination is clearly marked for the dead, but it is not free of peril. Some monsters roam the ethereal and astral planes at will, which is why burial chambers often include weapons, treasure, and even bodyguards to protect the soul on its journey.

To simplify this, you could perhaps say that souls drift through the Astral Plane in a state of quiescence, which is why characters returned to life with a raise dead spell have no memory of events after their death.  We could formalize this as:

• Souls take 3d10 days to drift from the Material Plane to the Outer Plane they are aligned with (either by their personal alignment or the god they keep faith with). Only souls still traveling through the Astral Plane can be affected by a raise dead
• Souls are not necessarily safe in their journey. Disturbed souls will be roused from their quiescence and able to defend themselves against Githyanki soul-marauders and similar threats with the equipment they carried with them in death and also any resources found in a properly sanctified burial chamber. (Let’s say a 1% chance of an adventurers’ soul being so accosted.)
• Once a soul arrives in the Outer Planes, it can only be returned to life by means of a resurrection Such an individual will carry back with them the memories of what they experienced in the Outer Planes.

If you wanted a more traditional “journey of the dead” to reach the afterlife, then you might have the spirits of the dead arrive through the soul-wells of the plane of Concordant Opposition (also known as the Outlands or Godslands). The soul’s drift will have carried them towards the soul-wells near or controlled by their intended plane of destination.

At some of these soul-wells, gods like Yen-Wang-Sheh catalog and sort the spirits, sending them to their final destinations. In other cases, the dead must continue their journey towards the afterlife (the Egyptian Book of the Dead was basically a how-to guide for this journey). Around others, fiends patrol, capturing the evil souls who emerge near the Abyss or Nine Hells or Grey Wastes and shepherding them to their final punishment.

You can imagine that some souls emerging through the soul-wells instead escape or find themselves diverted from their “intended” destination, perhaps traveling across the Outlands to the legendary city of Sigil or even fighting all the way back to the Material Plane. (If your group has suffered an unfortunate TPK, maybe they find themselves crawling out of an ill-used and little known soul-well, ready to begin the next chapter of their adventure.)

BEYOND THE FINAL FRONTIER

According to Deities & Demi-Gods, the key difference between a soul and a spirit is that the soul will remain in the Outer Planes for the rest of eternity, but a spirit will eventually be sent back to the Material Plane and reincarnated. This is rather difficult to square with other aspects of the cosmology, though, so it probably makes sense to follow the official product line’s lead here and just ignore it.

So what does happen to a soul when it arrives in the Outer Planes?

It’s reincarnated into an extraplanar entity.

We’ve seen this already with demons, devils, and archons. As Deities & Demi-Gods says, “The servants, functionaries, and minions of some deities (demons, devils, couatl, ki-rin, titans, and others) are actually spirits put into those forms for the purposes of the diety.”

Some of these entities closely resemble their mortal forms, like the einheriar of Valhalla and similar “eternal warriors” or those enjoying the changeless paradise of Elysium as a reward for their good deeds on the Material Plane. Others, of course, are completely transformed.

As we’ve seen, these servants, minions, and even the deities themselves can be slain in their home planes, in which case their souls are permanently lost and cannot be restored or raised by any means.

Thus we discover the fundamental soul cycle: The soul lives a mortal life on the Material Plane, then passes to the Outer Planes and lives a second life, which usually features the ability to ascend through many different forms. When that second life is complete (one way or another), the soul either comes to an end or passes on to some other form of existence utterly beyond our ken.

What about the other end of things? Where do souls come from in the first place?

Well, there are a few references to gods “creating” the souls of their worshippers. Moradin’s soul forge, for example, supposedly creates dwarven souls. But even if these tales are true, they don’t appear to be the primary source for the creation of new souls. Perhaps they are a wholly natural creation. Or perhaps the Inner Planes have been created as a vast engine specifically designed for the creation of mortal souls, funneling elemental, positive, and negative energy into the matrix formed through the procreation of mortal life.

Because if we read between the lines here, we can intuit (create) the great hidden truth of the multiverse: The gods are not in control.

THE SOUL ENGINE

Gods are, in fact, merely mortal souls which have ascended. They occupy the highest rungs of the hierarchy to which all beings of the Outer Planes belong, but they are still part of that hierarchy, not separate from it. This is rather brazenly understood in the lower planes – where lemures and larvae ascend to ever higher ranks of devils and demons – but it appears to be true in all of the other planes, too, even when its form is obscured in practice.

Once you understand this, it becomes clear that the economy of the Outer Planes are built entirely around the soul engine: Mortal souls pass from the Inner Planes, across the Astral Plane, and arrive in the Outer Planes. In the Outer Planes they drive towards primordial, ideological compass points — like shards of metal which have been “magnetized” towards those ideological poles by their actions in life.

As these mortal souls arrive in the Outer Planes, they are transformed into servitors or harvested for their power. Once again this is seen most clearly in the lower planes, where souls are transformed into the vast, endless armies of the Blood War and gods like Urdlen, the Crawler Below, eat the souls of its gnome followers when they arrive at its feet. But, once again, the same truth underlies the strength of the upper planes. What difference is there, really, between the devilish soul markets of the Sinking City of Minauros and the Exchequer of Souls in Yetsira the Heavenly City where the virtues of every archon are carefully weighed in a vast bureaucracy which controls the elevation and demotion of the heavenly ranks?

Souls are the labor and fuel of the Outer Planes. In some places they are literally the currency itself. They are the foundation of all immortal power.

Which means that the gods who control the flow of souls into the Outer Planes control that power.

From this, it follows that souls are not cosmologically drawn to dimensional coordinates because the planes are there; rather the planes are there because that’s where the souls are drawn.

Go far enough back in history and you’ll discover an epoch in which the Outer Planes were a primordial morass of demi-planes and proto-planes. As these planes (and the deities which controlled these planes) struggled for dominance, they warred one upon another.

How do you win a war? With soldiers.

And how do you get soldiers in the Outer Planes?

By controlling the soul-wells through which mortal souls are reincarnated.

Each of the eight major soul-well fields became the focal points for conflict. As the wars raged on, the winners slowly grew larger and more powerful. And as they grew, the nature of the conflict began to shift: Whereas previously there were a cluster of planes and powers primarily struggling over the Lawful Good soul-wells, another cluster of planes and powers struggling over the Lawful Evil soul-wells, and so forth, now some of the larger planes began launching assaults on more “distant” soul-wells.

This is, ultimately, why the major planes are aligned into layers today. This is not the result of some natural order: They are the result of planes and powers with like interests forming alliances of mutual interest against the other major powers of the cosmos.

Why layers? Well, each of the major planes is “aligned” with clusters of soul-wells that make up their base of power. Once upon a time, a soul-well could only “belong” to a single plane. By aligning into layers, however, the flow of souls could be directed through all of the aligned planes together. The soul-wells themselves are also the binding agent, which tends to weave them into the fabric of the planes themselves in disparate ways – thus, for example, souls flow into the Nine Hells via the Styx.

Mount Celestia, the Nine Hells, and Mechanus all claim to have been the first to master the cosmological complexities of aligning planes into layers, although some scholars suggest that it was based on lore first perfected by the baatorians, or possibly some antecedent civilization which gave rise to the baatorians.

The Averniad tells one tale from towards the end of this era of history, in which the final major planes were being aligned with one power or another and the Great Wheel as we know it was taking form.

Go to Part 3: On the Use of Souls