I get why you’d say that from context, but personally, I hear Slim Whitman 
I’d cut Roy some slack - he just lost his oldest and closest friend in the Order, someone who he considered his moral compass. Add that to the resentment he must feel toward Belkar for living while Durkon died, and a healthy dollop of survivor’s guilt, and he can’t be blamed for being a bit snippy.
Nah, it’s still a ruse. It’s just a ruse that’s gotten so good, that it’s fooling Belkar too.
What’s the difference?
Anyway, bear in mind that the so-called “ruse” was the brainchild of Lord Shojo (or a reasonable facsimile thereof). And if there’s one thing we know about Loird Shojo, is that he always lies and he always has an angle. Tricking an evil character into actually becoming good (or at least neutral) by convincing him to *pretend *to be good fits his MO.
Damn straight. There’s a reasonable case that the smartest, most subtle character in the whole series is Shojo. That or Tarquin. The smarts to run a nation must run deep.
In that universe at least. Not so sure about this one.
That’s one possibility. Lord Shojo may have somehow spoke to Belkar from the afterlife.
But Shojo was after all dead and we’d seen he resisted coming back, so there’s a good argument to be made he wasn’t really there. And what would it mean if that was the case?
Maybe Belkar was lying there helpless and about to be killed and he had a subconscious epiphany. Pissing everyone off was causing him more trouble than it was worth but he didn’t want to admit it to himself. So his subconscious invented the image of Shojo to convince Belkar in a way his conscious mind could accept.
If so, then it wasn’t Shojo tricking Belkar into changing his ways. It was Belkar tricking himself into changing his ways.
Well, it was a custom spell, created and cast at Shojo’s bequest. It’s still plausible that he might have put some sort of message, or imprint of his personality, or something into it, so in that sense, it was Shojo speaking to Belkar.
Which is possible. But while I don’t know that much D&D, it would have had to be one Epic spell. It was not only able to carry on a conversation but it could discuss the meaning of life and persuade somebody to change the way they had been living.
But that’s beside the point. I’m not insisting that Shojo was a figment of Belkar’s imagination, just suggesting it’s a possibility.
Speak With Dead is only a 3rd level spell. While it has some serious restrictions, that means that a spell like you described may only need to be 7-9th level (except for the fact that it apparently has unlimited duration, but we’ll call artistic license on that one).
I have a sense that the effect was built into the Mark of Justice, and was called up opportunistically.
But the question is who was Belkar speaking with? “Shojo” raised three possibilities.
- It was Shojo himself speaking from the afterlife.
- It was an effect of the spell. Essentially a pre-recorded message.
- It was a figment of Belkar’s imagination.
And there’s another unmentioned possibility:
- It was somebody else pretending to be Shojo.
That’s too implausible to be worth considering. The only other person in the room was the Cleric of Loki, and besides, the only people who know enough about Belkar and would care enough to have that conversation are Shojo and Belkar.
Eh. Creating sentience in D&D isn’t all that hard to do. For comparison’s sake, Awaken is a fifth level druid spell that permanently grants an animal human-level intelligence. In theory, a character as low as sixth level could create some of the intelligent magic items given as examples in some of the source books.
Except that Burlew has used impersonation and concealed identities several times in the story. It’s hard to argue implausibility after the first five or ten times.
And Belkar’s part of a team that’s trying to save the universe. Literally everyone has an interest in what he’s doing.
Sometimes a spiritual vision is just a spiritual vision.
How many people in the story at the time:
-Know who Belkar is
-Don’t hate him
Actually, I was going to list more things, but I think that really expresses it succinctly.
Although now that you mention it, it is a little odd just how few people know about the Order of the Stick (in the story). As you say, they’re on a team that’s trying to save the universe. You think that would have been publicized at some point. But except for Eugene, Shojo (who’s dead anyway), the remnants of the Sapphire Guard, the Linear Guild, Redcloak, Hinjo’s elf allies, Celia, the IFCC, and maybe Tarquin, no-one knows who they are and what they are doing. That’s, what, a couple dozen individuals?
Keep in mind that these are only the characters we’ve seen. I wasn’t joking when I said everyone in the universe is involved in Belkar’s quest, even if they may not be aware of it. He is, quite literally, one of the most important people in the universe. So when we speculate who might be taking an interest in Belkar’s progress, the sky’s the limit. Although the sky actually isn’t the limit because we’ve also seen various celestial beings helping out.
And Burlew is telling a story here not a history. He’s going to tell it in the most entertaining way not the most direct way. That means sometimes he’s going to hold stuff back from us so he can reveal it at a later more dramatic moment.
Publicize the existence of an entity that not only can destroy the world, but wants to? And that one of the people that is working to keep the world from being destroyed is a murderous psychopath who is only doing so because it keeps his cat alive, and it gives him the opportunity to kill everyone personally. Don’t think that would go over so well.
Besides, the entire point of the gates was to keep the Snarl secret. You don’t think Tarquin has his own plans for them nowt that he knows they exist? And there are thousands of others just like him and Xykon all over thh world that would jump at the chance to get control of the gates.
Heh. Mr Scruffy had purple swirley eyes, too.