Durkon staying dead would offer two things: A noble party sacrifice and a loss of party power. However, Belkar will likely already be filling the “party sacrifice” role and the Order just isn’t going to defeat Team Evil without a high level cleric. Sure, Hilgya could fill in, but then Dukon’s death is largely meaningless since it no longer fills either the sacrifice role or the loss of power role. He was just replaced by Murkon Lightninghammer. I don’t see that being how his legacy shakes out.
That’s not to say he won’t be doing stuff from now until 2021 when the strip gets around to resurrecting him.
Perhaps the gods and assorted other entities are all off in the tower waiting for the outcome of the vote. While Roy and company try to persuade the terrestrial forces not to end the world, Durkon and Minrah may have to tackle the celestial ones.
Durkon is showing a deeper sense of human(oid) nature, as well as some fine counseling skills. For some reason I find this more appealing storywise than garden variety heroism or self-sacrifice. Not that I have anything against the latter.
Durkon is showing his key stat: Wisdom. He’s giving her the truth she needs. She wasn’t up to the challenge, she knew it, and yet she threw herself at it anyway. Can’t get much more noble than that.
I wonder if Durkon will meet up with the gods and use that wisdom to convince them to hold off and block Hel’s schemes.
The only god Durkon has an in with is Thor, and he’s already on the save-the-world and oppose-Hel sides. Plus, there’s the “no backsies” rule. I suppose he could alert the pantheon to the whole Xykon-Snarl situation, including the new information from looking through Soon’s and Girard’s rifts, but narratively, they’re going to have their hands tied on that.
Xykon’s fortress seems to be a free-floating construct in the Astral Plane. Since the Astral Plane touches the other planes, I suppose the Afterlife Waiting Room could be in the Astral Plane but I didn’t really get that impression from the Roy strips. Plus I doubt Xykon would put his Super Fortress right where a bunch of devas and angels and stuff are going to be staring at it constantly.
Where is everyone right now? No devas, no archons, no nothing. Just Durkon, Minrah, and a tower in the distance. Eugene said that no one else was up there, when he last visited Roy. (“I’m bored and I wanna talk to somebody.”)
As a metaphysical question, I wonder if a deity could impose a Resurrection on someone within their domain. As in, Thor grants the power to his clerics on the Prime Material Plane, but what if he wanted to just zap someone back to life without a cleric asking for the favor? In modern faith, that would just be a miracle that someone came back to life but I guess most RPG worlds would require an appropriate cleric as a conduit for the god to affect the Prime Material Plane.
I’m not implying that would happen here, just musing.
I think that the gods are allowed to act directly in their own domains and relating to their own worshipers. They’re in Northern lands and Durkon is a worshiper of Thor, so it’s fair game. They only strictly need their clerics as intermediaries for matters in other lands, or affecting other worshipers.
