Actually, it’s likelier to be teleportation circle, with interesting graphics: TC is a 5’ radius circle that teleports anyone who steps on it to a given location, lasting 10 minutes/level, whereas Gate is up to 20’ high but teleports you to a different plane and lasts up to 1 round/level, limited by concentration.
Yeah, without diviners, he couldn’t know where Nale is to teleport to him. I do suspect he knows most of what happened. The question is, did Tarquin foresee and approve of Malack’s death?
As Larry Borgia pointed out, it appears Tarquin hasn’t been doing any magical recon. If he had, he’d know there’s no longer any prize worth sending an army in for.
Just because they have gate doesn’t mean they’ve also learned True Resurrection. Although, you would think Tarquin would want them to.
The other question is: Tarquin would likely want to be rezzed, but Malack has clearly stated he would not. Would Tarquin honor that, or try to bring back the backwater shaman?
Also, you can have the army in the desert for quite some time, and then gate them back to home base the next day, so supplies aren’t a big deal. Not to mention Create Water is a 0 level spell, and Create Food and Water is a level 3 spell, so it’s not like those are huge problems for a spellcasting army.
OK, my bad, the twins are actually 21. Or more likely 22 now; that was a while ago.
And we don’t even know the class of Tarquin’s caster. If she’s a cleric and has access to Gate, then she also has access to True Resurrection (though Malack might still be outside of her time limit). On the other hand, if she’s a wizard or sorcerer (who also get Gate, and which is probably more likely given that the party already had a cleric), then she couldn’t have True Resurrection.
And that’s why I said “it appears” that way. It’s possible that Tarquin has some other motive for sending an army into the middle of the desert but I can’t imagine what it is at this point.
Perhaps he thinks he can control the rift now that the gate has been destroyed. He’s most likely wrong - Redcloak knows as much about the rifts as anyone and he couldn’t figure out how to use one for any worldly benefit.
Keep in mind, we’ve seen that Tarquin is very good but he’s not omniscient. He does make mistakes - generally by assuming other people are acting the way he would act in their situation.
I think it’s a gate. Visually, it matches the description of the gate spell almost perfectly, including the caster concentrating to hold it open in the last two panels. The only discrepancy is that Tarquin is using it to travel between two places on the same plane, instead of two different planes, which a strict reading of the spell description does not allow.
A teleport circle doesn’t create a rift in the air like that. It’s a literal circle drawn on the ground, and standing in it makes you disappear and reappear somewhere else. The person who created the circle doesn’t need to be concentrating to keep it active, or even to trigger the teleport.
I suspect that it’s meant to be a gate, and Rich is either ignoring the bit about it connecting two planes for dramatic convenience, or has decided that this is a special version of the spell that Tarquin commissioned for just this sort of purpose. It’s pretty well established at this point that Tarquin’s empire is kind of a go-to place for creating new magic spells, at least up until the point that Nale whacked Malack.
Not necessarily. The gate is gone, but the rift is still there. The nature and function of the rifts are largely unknown, but it’s not the sort of thing a ruler like Tarquin is going to allow to be left sitting around unsecured.
If a cleric is high enough level to cast gate, then he can cast true resurrection. Clerics don’t have to individually learn spells. They automatically have access to all the spells on the cleric spell list. Of course, that might be a wizard opening the gate for him, not a cleric. Even so, I think it’s a safe assumption that with Tarquin’s power and resources, he has access to any non-epic magic spell, including true resurrection.
However, as regards your second question, all of the spells that bring back dead people only work if the target is willing to return to life. Malack’s already specifically rejected an offer of being resurrected once, I doubt he’ll accept now. Particularly given that, as a high priest of Nergal, he’s probably got a pretty pimp setup in the afterlife. When I GM, I usually rule that spells like raise dead and resurrection almost never work - the vast majority of people who die don’t want to come back, unless there’s some pressing need or unfinished business in the living world that draws them back. Like preventing a lich from gaining control of a gate the could potentially destroy all of creation. Most people, however, are like Roy’s little brother, or Lord Shojo - perfectly happy in their designated afterlife, and in no rush to get back to the mortal plane.
In the setting I’m currently working on, there’s a minor spell to restore life to someone who has died within the last few minutes, before their soul departs. It will work without consent. All the major resurrection magic, however, automatically triggers an interview with Death, and the living must persuade him that they have a good reason to raise the person. If they do, he will present the petition to the shade of the deceased (provided they haven’t moved on from his domain), and allow them to return if they choose. The current Death is pretty easy-going, as long as you aren’t out for personal gain or harboring malicious intent toward the deceased, so he usually allows it.
I think that gate (or whatever it is) is how whatever group is going to Kraagor’s Tomb will get there, when it’s time for that to happen. Xykon and buds are already there, haste is needed.
Same thing that would happen if he case it before being turned into a vampire. The people he cast it on will be immune to death effect attacks and negative energy for a while. Being a vampire only changed his ability to spontaneously cast healing spells.
Heh. I love the interview idea. I decided that rez spells rarely worked during an urban campaign where the PCs had been working with the city government to reign in the excesses of the local thieves guild. The guild responded with a wave of assassinations targeting prominent NPCs who had been helping the party. The whole point was to leave the city government in shambles, forcing the PCs to take over and try to hold the city together. Except, by that point in the campaign, the cleric could cast raise dead three or four times a day, and they had enough spare cash floating around to bring the entire city council back from the dead three times over.
The book I was running the campaign out of did have one particularly nasty idea for dealing with the prevalence of resurrection magic - when the thieves killed someone, they’d insert a long, thin needle into the victims brain via the ear. Unless you knew to look for it and remove it before casting, raising the victim from the dead would result in a brief spasm of screaming agony followed almost immediately by another death. Unfortunately, I wanted the PCs to be present at the really important assassinations (in part to give them a chance, however slim, to prevent them), which meant the assassins didn’t usually have much time to rig the bodies before the PCs drove them off.
But what Redcloak knows now appears to be incorrect or at least incomplete – he knew nothing about a watery, apparently-life-bearing planet inside the rift. Tarquin would naturally want to control the area around the nearby rift and probably the rest of the rifts too, eventually, at least until he can determine exactly what kind of threat or opportunity they represent.
Back when V’s splices were being introduced, a lot of folks on the giantitp boards were trying to stat out just how powerful an epic spell Ganonron must have to “teleport vast armies to conjure world after world”, or Haerta to “casually end lives with but a thought”. I pointed out that those descriptions could just be Gate, and Finger of Death with the Silent and Still metamagic feats. Ninth-level spell slots are a lot more powerful than most people realize.
Creepily awesome. That reminds me of the scene in Roy’s “Hamlet” story at the end of Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales, where Hamlet-Roy is raised by the Durkon character after dying from Laerta-Miko’s poisoned blade, and he says “Wait, did you remember to cast Neutralize Poison before raising my body from the dead?” and Durkon says “Um … I dinnae prepare it today.” And Hamlet-Roy says “Rrrcgh!” as the poisoining-circles appear above him, his eyes turn to X’s, and he falls back over.
Or Tarquin just used a work around. He could have used a gate spell to move his army from Bleedingham to another plane (The Elemental Plane of Things Which Have No Effect on the Story) and now he’s using a second gate spell to move them from that other plane to Girard’s Gate.
Even with true resurrection, though, you can only resurrect somebody who’s been dead up to ten years per caster level, so depending how long ago he died, he might not be resurrectable.
Maybe you Dm’ed a bit differently than me, but if you wanted to build a new galaxy in my games, that would defiantly have been some seriously high epic level shit .
