It seems that the situation is being set up to come up as a tie between the various pantheons and their gods, wherein it will all come down to a single vote to sway the choice in one direction or another.
And it seems that only gods who have a representative actually physically present at this location get to vote.
So it’s possible that one small god with very few followers could suddenly appear at the last possible moment and make the choice that saves or dooms the world.
Now, what very small god with very few followers do we know that would fit that bill? Cue the banjomusic!
Those thralls have no protection, legal or otherwise, from the other high priests. If they had legal protection, then Durkula would have been breaking the rules by vamping them. And they’re out of high level spells, although I suppose they could cast Protection from Good on themselves. That wouldn’t help if attacked by a neutral priest. If they enter the fight, I expect them to be dusted in short order.
Why does everyone keep bringing up the possibility that Banjo will get to vote. It’s virtually impossible that he’ll get involved at all.
Firstly, he’s not a member of the Northern Pantheon. But if he were, he wouldn’t even be a demigod. His status would be something more like semi-demi-hemi-quasi-godling-in-training. In other words, way too low a level to be allowed to vote.
Secondly, from a storytelling point of view, Banjo is strictly comic relief. This is way too serious an arc for that. Now some people may be suggesting it as a joke, but if so, they’ve run it into the ground long ago. On the GitP forum, “Banjo voting” has come up at least a dozen times in almost every strip discussion since about #992. Enough already.
Don’t think they can. Hel seems unaware of Roy’s jumping off the gallery in the last panel.
Word of Giant is that they don’t generally meet each other. Godsmoots are the only neutral ground they have.
The gods CAN see the mortal realm, but they have to be specifically looking. They aren’t omniscient, and can miss a lot if they aren’t paying attention.
People have been focusing on the battle between Roy and Durkula-over at OOTS people keep quoting D&D rules, wondering if a fighter with a strong anti-undead build can successfully take on a high level cleric and all of his tricks…
When the real battle is going to be between Durkula and Durkon. I mean the fate of Durkon’s entire race is at stake-you don’t think that he will find a way to significantly affect the outcome?
But didn’t Durkula vamp them back when they weren’t servants of a patron deity? So if – like Durkula – they became servants of Hel upon getting vamped, then it’s as the Sacred Knight of the Expository Aside said: “The cathedral is considered neutral ground for the servants of all of the gods. He’ll be perfectly safe from the other clerics, even though he’s a wretched undead horror.”
Used to be, they weren’t servants of a god, and so they weren’t perfectly safe from other clerics. Now they are, so they are.
Back to falling damage. How many hit points will Roy lose from jumping of the balcony? Also, I say experienced fighters should definitely be able to jump off of balconies and maybe 5 story buildings. Mountains are another matter.
But if you jump (rather than just fall) the first 10’ is considered nonlethal damage and apparently you can make a Jump or Tumble check to avoid the first 10’ worth altogether and convert the second 10’ to nonlethal damage. But I don’t think we have reason to believe that Roy is skilled in Jump or Tumble.
The balcony looks to be about 30’ high, scaling off the humans near it and assuming them to be ~6’. So anywhere from 2-12 points of damage plus another 1d6 of nonlethal, I think (rounding up on the 30’ height).
Is “aiding and abetting” the same as taking up arms? Depends on how legalistic you want to get and, if there’s one thing a room full of high clerics probably love, it’s legalism. I tend to agree though that we probably won’t see Roy heavily aided by the other clerics for narrative reasons.
Interesting. Can you elaborate? I had the old FR rule book but never really played it as a setting. The shittiest thing about it was what happened to your soul 300 years after you died?
I expect he/she/it is referring to the whole business with the Wall of the Faithless, a highly contentious bit of FR lore. I’ll try and summarize :
In the beginning, Ao made the multiverse and the various people in it. Then Ao fucked off, never to be heard from again. The sentient people started believing in stuff, which in turn created their various gods out of thin air and gave them humongous powers to shape the multiverse to their whims. The gods need belief and prayer to exist, therefore the greatest threat to them is atheism.
Therefore they set up the universe thus : if you die and you believed in anything (not necessarily a god, either - deeply held beliefs in this or that philosophical concept counts) your soul goes to the afterlife related to that anything to eventually become part of the fabric of that afterlife and/or be reborn, for ever. If you’re a non-believer however, your soul is shunted to the gods’ special Fuck You Place where it is turned into a brick of the Wall. There your soul will not die or be reborn, ever, but you’ll slowly lose more and more of yourself and go thoroughly insane in the process. And nobody has a problem with this, not even the more benevolent gods.
So why is it contentious ? Well, some actually religious/Christian players tend to get butthurt at the notion of god(s) as parasites on mankind ; the notion that humans created gods rather than the other way around ; and of course the whole Absentee Ao thing. And some atheist players feel like they’re being shat on from a great height by Word of Dev. Both sides, being polarized IRL as you might have heard ;), love nothing more than to needle the other with what amounts to “yeah well that’s how the setting is, ha ha, Deal With It”.
Thanks for the bit of FR lore. I’m sure that came up in the novels about the gods being made mortal and all but that was forever ago and I don’t remember especially liking them anyway.
You would think that true atheists would be in short supply in a world where you have divine magic, angels & demons, plane travelling, etc. I could see just not really caring about divine matters (like Roy, but he still went to heaven) but actual disbelief seems, well, unbelievable. Maybe you don’t care much for the gods but their existence as beings of great power and control over their sphere of influence seems hard to deny.
Well, admittedly atheism isn’t the right way to put it, as you say the gods are a fact of life in FR. It’s more of a “No gods nor masters !” kind of thing, those who actively refuse to worship any god (or cause) for one reason or another - or even just don’t care one way or the other. In the FR, Roy’s kind of people are fucked.
If you’re really interested and like video game RPGs, Neverwinter Nights 2’s epic expansion Mask of the Betrayer is all about it. It’s also a very, very good piece of story-driven gaming.
Depends on what they mean by “servants of a god”. I suspect that the rules define this as the attendant High Priests and representatives plus their bodyguards. After all, those are the only ones (except for the neutral hosts) that are supposed to be inside the building.
The Stone Creeders were the neutral hosts before being vamped. Does being vamped change their status? Undoubtedly something that’s never come up before so there’s probably not a rule about it. In the absence of such a rule, they are probably still considered to be the neutral hosts, and so subject to attack. But I doubt if anyone’s attacked the hosts before or there probably would be a rule against it.
If the world doesn’t get destroyed by the gods, I expect there’ll be a number of additional rules in place for the next Godsmoot.
I suspect “servants of a god” means – servants of a god.
It’s not that being vamped, in and of itself, changes their status. It’s that, when Durkon-Who-Worships-Thor got vamped, Durkula-The-Servant-Of-Hel showed up, which I figure means – well, look, if the We-Worship-Elemental-Earth types stayed Worship-Elemental-Earth types upon getting vamped, then, sure, no problem; but if they’ve been replaced by servants of Hel, then I kinda sorta gotta figure they fit the “servants of all the gods” clause as much as anyone else there.
But if they’re Hel-worshipers now, then they aren’t allowed at the Moot at all. Only the High Priest of each deity, plus their two bodyguards, are allowed in. Remember, when Durkon was introduced as a cleric of Thor, the response was that he’d have to wait outside, since Thor’s high priest was already there. Likewise, since Hel’s high priest is already there, any other Hel priests would have to wait outside.
