The information in the Manual of the Planes on the elemental plane of Fire is fairly minimal. Is there any more information available on the nature and character of the plane of Fire? I'm specifically interested in lore material compatible with the 3.5e-era model of the planes.
[RPG] Is there more lore on the Elemental Plane of Fire than what’s in the Manual of the Planes
dnd-3.5eloreplanes
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Noted in your forum thread, but the best descriptions of Acheron and Carceri that I have seen—based in, but not directly quoted from, actual text—are those by Jade Ripley (who goes by Lord_Gareth here and numerous other places, including GiantITP.com’s forums):
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Acheron has no architects. None of the Outer Planes do. [...]
Yes, Acheron looks a little Chaotic on the outside. You know what, from the outside Carceri looks a little lawful. But Acheron isn't chaotic. Acheron is battle without resolution, law without harmony, order without structure, misery without hope, death without glory, unity without individuality. Acheron is not a plane that hates you; indeed, it is Acheron's utter indifference to you that eventually kills you. Acheron is the grinding monotony of hopelessness, and it is the weary horror of cynicism so great that it consumes morality. The sergeant who grows weary of fighting corruption and embraces bribery goes to Acheron; the office drone who takes out his misery on others by providing them barriers to actual help goes to Acheron. It is the punishment for which there was no crime, the penalty without a violation, the monolithic crushing indifference of Law with no moral compass, of conflict without belief, of tyranny without vanity.
Acheron doesn't hate you.
It wants you to die anyway.
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Carceri, the Red Prison, is a plane of injustice. Carceri is a mockery of law and lawful thinking, seen through a lens of powerful and self-defeating malevolence. Carceri is full of vain struggle, wretched anguish, trapped rage, and a heady mix of hope and despair that drives its inhabitants mad. From the outside, Carceri looks lawful - it is a prison, after all - but the thing that separates Carceri from ordinary prisons is that no one is in charge, and despite delusions to the contrary no one can ever be in charge. Though the denizens of Carceri make some effort to separate 'prisoners' from people who 'just live there' (that is, who are not locked up in a specific prison complex, prison structure, or torment) the truth is that all being in Carceri are prisoners, trapped there by their own fear, hate, mistrust, paranoia, vices, greed, desires, and malice.
And, really, that's the thrust of Carceri. The Red Prison mocks you with hope, offering escape and giving only frustration and despair. Even if you leave, it drags you right back, proving that any escape is merely temporary. Its "wardens" cannot leave, and they cannot impose order on their prisoners any further than the reach of their weapons. Riots and murder abound, a seething mass of hate and frustration that shakes the bars and rattles the cages, echoing through the plane and mixing with the shrieks of pain and pleasure. Really, it's not the plane keeping you there, it's you.
It was always you. It's Carceri's greatest and cruelest irony. In the end, the reason you will never leave is that even if you were fit for society once, you never will be again. You can leave Carceri, but Carceri, it never leaves you.
As for Gehenna, the landscape is rather uniform: a constant slope, a constant rain of fire and rock, and a constant absence of much of anything else. It is a barren landscape, and that uniformity is fairly lawful.
But always remember that no one knows what Law and Chaos really mean. They’re nebulously defined, and their relationship to landscape in particular is not often discussed in the books—Acheron, Carceri, and Gehenna are those alignments because those are the alignments the authors gave it, and if those authors have ever explained their choices, I’m not aware of it. Even if they have, their considerations are going to be highly personal and idiosyncratic—because everyone’s definitions of Chaos and Law are. There is a reason no one ever published a Book of Unfettered Discord or Book of Perfect Dogma—no one can pin down Chaos and Law well enough to write it. It’s all “I know it when I see it,” except everyone keeps disagreeing on when they’ve seen it. So ultimately, it’s unsurprising that these realms don’t seem to match their alignments to you, because your conception of those alignments is yours and more-or-less yours alone. D&D has a conceit wherein these alignments are objective, universal truths—but the real world doesn’t.
The rules on this are not specific in D&D 5e, leaving it up to the DM.
There's no particular rule that says one needs an alignment to have a soul. In fact, Dungeon Master's Guide p.24, "Bringing Back the Dead", would imply that all living creatures have souls which depart upon death, as cited in the question:
When a creature dies, its soul departs its body, leaves the Material Plane, travels through the Astral Plane, and goes to abide on the plane where the creature's deity resides. If the creature didn't worship a deity, its soul departs to the plane corresponding to its alignment.
These are the only two rules in the books that specify where a soul goes after death: the plane of their deity, or the plane of their alignment.
However, according to Player's Handbook p. 122, "Alignment in the Multiverse", unaligned creatures do not have an alignment at all:
Most creatures that lack the capacity for rational thought do not have alignments—they are unaligned.
Assuming that frogs don't have a deity either, this means that there is no rule to cover this circumstance. All we know is from the first line of the "Bringing Back the Dead" quote:
- When a creature (including a frog) dies, its soul departs its body
- Its soul departs the Material Plane and travels through the Astral Plane
- No rule defines where an unaligned agnostic frog soul goes after this. It's up to the DM.
The spell description of raise dead (PHB p.270) states that it works on any dead creature (other than undead), which implies that frogs can be raised, suggesting that their souls go somewhere from where they can be recovered. Dungeon Master's Guide p.43, "Putting the Planes Together", suggests that most campaigns require a place where mortal spirits go, which would in general include unaligned creatures.
Lore from previous editions of the game
The Great Wheel cosmology is described in the D&D 3rd edition version of the Manual of the Planes. On p. 141, it asserts that some animals may go to the Wilderness of the Beastlands:
It is a domain of natural savagery and plenty. It is the forest eternal. It is where the most loyal animal companions go when they die.
Page 199 of this book asserts that while it's entirely up to the DM, by default any creature with Intelligence and Wisdom scores of 1 may become a petitioner, a soul inhabiting the Outer Planes. Animals are very specifically stated to qualify for petitioner status. This is partly because D&D 3e generally asserted that animals were True Neutral in alignment, rather than Unaligned.
Best Answer
You'll be wanting the 3rd Edition Planar Handbook, whose section on the City of Brass helps flesh out the Plane of Fire as well; the 2nd Edition sourcebook The Inner Planes; and the 2nd Edition Al-Qadim sourcebook Secrets of the Lamp (if you can find it). The 2nd Edition Planescape Monstrous Compendium III offers some notes on Fire wildlife such as the waiveras and scape, but the only new indigenous creature it introduces is the fire bat (other entries such as animentals, fundamentals and ruvoka pertain more broadly to all the Elemental Planes and may or may not be of use). If you want to poke around in it, the 2nd Edition Mystara Monstrous Compendium includes the helion and pyrophor, two more unusual denizens of the plane. Finally, there is a Planescape adventure (The Eternal Boundary) that takes a spin to the plane, but overall it's nothing you wouldn't get coverage of from other sources.
You may want to ask around on Planewalker for more information or check out the work they did on their 3.5 setting conversion; it includes a section detailing the Plane of Fire.