No. Time passes at the same speed on the Astral plane, you just don’t grow old and die there.
No. There is no time on the Astral plane (in 3.5).
D’oh! And here I thought I’d stumbled on something important!
I totally agree that failing to follow the agreement he made with Roy is very much in character for Eugene. I can see him arguing “Well, I said that you would be the first to know. I never said that I’d tell you right away.”
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I think it goes beyond mere indifference. Eugene actually wants Roy to fail. He spent his entire life arguing his father and his son about the superiority of magic over combat. (And it went both ways. For a large part of the story, Roy was trying to kill Xykon just to prove his father wrong rather than due to any higher motive.)
Roy eventually got over this and realized the struggle was over more important stakes than a father-son conflict. But Eugene hasn’t done that. He still feels the important issue is proving he’s right that magic is more powerful than combat. If Roy beats Xykon, Eugene would be forced to admit he had been wrong all his life. So he’d rather see Xykon win than see him beaten by non-magical means.
[/QUOTE]
Not sure I agree with this. Eugene is a selfish prick, but I think that he would rather that Roy succeed so he can get onto the mountain already. I’m sure that he would prefer that Xykon be defeated by a spellcaster, but he could easily handwave that Roy would never have succeeded without the help he received from countless casters throughout the series (including Eugene himself).
He’s dead so he’s got nothing but time. I think he’d rather wait a century or two for one of his magic-using descendants to do the job the “right way” than spend the rest of eternity knowing he was wrong.
But on the subject of Blood Oaths, how do they work exactly? Does it have to be a family member fulfilling the oath for it to free Eugene? Suppose Soon had succeeded in killing Xykon? Would Eugene have been freed because Xykon was dead or would he have been stuck for eternity because there was now no possibility of one of his family members killing Xykon?
And does it have to be a descendant of the original oath taker or just a family member? If somebody made the oath and then died childless would their closest relative be stuck with the oath?
No way is Eugene EVER getting on THAT mountain.
A wild prediction: whenever the Order does destroy Xykons body, they’ll wonder aloud about how long before he returns. Then Red Cloak will say, “Never,” pull out the real phylactery, and destroy it.
Hey, if Mahlhevik gets a chance, Eugene should…
Lunia being the base of Mt. Celestia, or the “1st Heaven” (of the “7 Heavens” of Old-School).
When interviewing Roy, the deva does mention that such interviews are standard procedure regardless of other circumstances.
So presumably, Eugene has already had his interview with the deva (who no doubt had some things to say about his ego and the way he treats his family), and that it was ultimately decided that he would be allowed into the Celestial Realm once the Blood Oath was fulfilled.
“A” Celestial realm maybe, no way is Eugene going to LG heaven.
We see Eugene’s post-mortem interview at the end of Start of Darkness.
Ah, I’ve read SoD but I completely forgot about that part. I’ll pick it up again tonight and read that part again. Thanks!
But, Burlew has chimed in on what Familicide does and does not do.
Gotta’ say, that spell is ridiculously overpowered, and for me, pretty immersion breaking. Even knowing ahead of time that Epic magic tended to be very broken. Didn’t someone at the GiDP forums calculate that the Spellcraft DC for Familicide had to be somewhere in the neighborhood of several hundred?
His defensiveness at being confronted with the implications of his idea is unfortunate too. He wouldn’t be the first fantasy/sci-fi author to drop a Big Idea into their work and not anticipate all of the implications or effects, though.
And even after reading his post, I’m still not sure whether Tarquin and all of Tarquin’s relatives would’ve been snuffed if Tarquin and Penelope had a kid.
Hopefully we can get on with the main plot soon.
It would be game-breaking, if OOTS were a game. It’s not. It’s fantasy literature, a genre with a long history of immensely powerful destructive spells.
Even IN a D&D game, if the DM makes a goof, just roll with it.
OK, that’s mostly less powerful than I had imagined it, though more powerful in some ways. And Rich does have a good point that this is a young world created already populated (meaning you can have individuals of a species who are literally not related at all), which would also limit the damage done.
This little detail:
makes it not quite as bad as I thought, so I’m cool with it.
I still think the Giant has made a mistake with his explanations. However I’m happy to pretend that the death toll, whatever it is, meshes with V’s interpretations of the spell. After all, the basic plot elements as we have seen (death of DTs and Penelope) fit fine within the realms of the non kill-everybody-in -the-world interpretation. If other deaths become important plotwise later I’m also happy to accept them becase of y’know waves hand
I think this is one of those cases where we can just say that a wizard did it.
I know that webcomics run over a long time in real life vs. story time, but it always seems shocking when someone actually points it out. I mean, two years?! Since only the assault on Xykon’s tower? That seems unbelievable.
Even more unbelievably, it’s actually been three years. Here’s the thread that part of the story was discussed. The day of the strip with the familicide was March 20th, 2009.