What was the gag with Belkar hesitating (or zoning out) at the threshold?
He was trying to obscure the Order’s tracks and scent into that particular dungeon. It doesn’t look like he finished the job.
EDIT: I wonder if they picked up the smoking rat’s head? I also don’t think they could have wiped away the scorching on the cave floor. No idea if that’ll clue Oona or Greyview into something having gone hinky, once Team Evil tracks the Order to and inside this particular door.
Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), the latest strip has just increased the speculation on the GitP forum about what the rune-trap does. The simplest (and I think most likely) is that there’s an always-on portal at the line of runes that takes anyone crossing it to a dungeon elsewhere. So if a party doesn’t spot the runes, they’ll never get to the gate. Disabling the runes lets one enter the real dungeon where the gate is. But of course it’s just the first step to getting to the gate. There will be further traps and puzzles to figure out. It wouldn’t be D&D without them.
A possibility that’s occurred to me.
It seems somewhat random if Serini just set up a bunch of doors with the gate behind one of them. One group seeking the gate might randomly find it on their first attempt while another might try a hundred doors before picking the right one. We’ve seen that Team Evil have made a number of tries without finding the right one.
So perhaps the doors do not just lead to random tunnels. Perhaps the traps behind each door are designed to read the group as it enters a tunnel for things such as alignment, levels, class, and party size and then adjust things so the group travels down a tunnel that’s appropriate for that particular group.
This might mean that if Serini didn’t want an evil being to gain access to the gate, she would have set the maze up so that any evil group entering would always be sent down a dead end tunnel. Team Evil would never have found the gate no matter how long they searched.
The Order, on the other hand, might be in a tunnel that actually leads to the gate. And if the tunnels are fixed while groups are in them, then Team Evil might be able to follow them into this tunnel which they would otherwise have not had access to.
The big question, of course, is: where is Serini? Is she still alive? Is she still involved with the Gate?
Maybe the runes alert her, personally - and she decides who gets through.
That is the thing I am noticing. Serini nominally said the was basing she defense of the last gate on the power of strength, i.e large monsters.
But it is becoming glaringly obvious that she understood the power of the team and blended skills. The monsters are part of it. Rogue deception is part of it. Magical arts are part of it. And I am sure the devotion of the paladins, and the harmony with nature of the druid will become important as well.
Team evil has succeeded so far by powering through like a raging bull, but will lose because this puzzle requires synergy :), and Xykon is not capable of that.
What druid?
It may be worth noting that the Order (and us) received this information via Shojo; a man who was not known for being a stickler for truth when he saw advantages in concealing something. And even if Shojo was accurately reporting what he knew, he was presumably only relaying what Soon knew. Shojo, for example, said that no gate keepers ever met again after the group broke up. But we’ve seen that wasn’t true; Dorukan and Lirian had an ongoing affair.
Another factor is that while Kraagor may have believed in the supremacy of physical strength, he didn’t actually build the gate. It was built by Serini, a rogue. So again, there might be a difference between what Serini Toormuch told people she was basing her defenses on and what she was actually basing her defenses on.
Lirian, never really explored except in flashback with Dorukan, as relationship, bom chicka bom bom.
Which would give (additional) significance to Belkar not being in the room before the trap was set.
That said, I’m not sure if having them be Good aligned would actually be a reason to give access to the Gate. The whole this is supposed to be secret from everyone. And even someone Good aligned could screw things up if they didn’t know what the Gate was.
What’s the most effective sense evil ability in the rules? Assuming a high level villain really wants such a check to come back “not evil” is it possible to use some other ability to fool the check?
Wasn’t that the whole deal with Miko trying to Detect Evil on Belkar, and Belkar hiding behind a sheet of lead he carried everywhere?
I’m sure there’s more high end Divination magic, but your comment reminded me of those fondly-remembered strips, way back when.
Belkar gave “no reading”, as opposed to “not evil”. I’d assume some kind of evilness trap as proposed above wouldn’t be satisfied by anithing other than “not evil”
Burlew’s well past having the rules of D&D do more than loosely guide the story at this point, (though if he’s not, it looks like V is 17th level now, and can therefore cast the highest 9th Level spells, like Wish, Disjunction, and our old friend Meteor Swarm.) but here’s the SRD entry for Detect Evil: Detect Evil :: d20srd.org
The two things that caught my eye reading it was that the spell took awhile to work, and that you could ‘overload the sensor’ (if a human had casted the spell, it would be so overwhelmed by the evil it detected that it could be stunned for a round) if the evil thing was strong enough in its evil. Both RC and Xykon are Evil enough to do that to a low level person trying to use the spell. I didn’t know it worked that way.
We’ve seen before, absolute bars on classes of entities being able to get near the Gates. Dorukan’s needed someone pure of heart, Lirian had her virus: why not an absolute bar on any Evil creature for this one? Maybe Serini got the idea from Dorukan, if she was already picking his brain about magical defense for the Tomb?
Which is what I think she was doing during its construction. She got along with most everyone, was the youngest of the group, so why not approach other members of the Scribble, one on one, for tips? Play on their egos as the seasoned Epic adventurers, and throw the kid a bone, whatever.
I’d forgotten about the pureness of heart on Dorokan’s gate, and to the degree I did remember it had filed it under TVTropes’s “Early Episode Weirdness” category; but yeah if Dorokan can do that, there’s no reason Serini can’t do something similar.
I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that Belkar, by not being in the room when it was activated, will be the only one that can save the group from a major trap that ensnares both the Stick and Team Evil, and that he dies in the process. This will be his “heroic sacrifice” that gets him sorta redeemed and into a nicer Afterlife. But that’s just me pulling things out of my posterior.
There’s also her part of the story in the prequel volume Start of Darkness (which covers, among other things, Team Evil’s attack on her Gate). Presumably any details from there that become relevant to the main storyline will be revealed in the online comics.
There’s an arms race between the spells (and other abilities) that allow something to be detected, and the spells (and other abilities) that block that detection, with multiple spells of progressively higher levels that defeat the lower-level spells. Restricting ourselves to non-epic spells, the level 8 Mind Blank is the top card in play here, but if we allow psionics, then the level 9 Metacognition beats even that. And of course, all bets are off when you get to epic spells/psionics.
Of course, there are also nonmagical means, like the Sense Motive and Bluff skills. There’s no inherent limit to how high you can get the bonus to a skill check, and the higher number wins. In practice, I think that the rules include more (and larger) bonuses for Bluff, but not everyone will have access to all of those bonuses.
And then there are entirely non-mechanical means. It could indeed be that Serini herself, or someone she trusts, has been watching the Order and Team Evil, and has been making decisions on her own about who ends up where.
How do you figure? I don’t know of any evidence for that, and V strikes me as the sort to immediately cast a 9th-level spell as soon as e’s able to, just because e can.
Especially the compulsion Xykon cast upon the MITD, to devour RedCloak should Redcloak ever betray Xykon. As an acolyte of Team Alessan, I think the MITD ignoring that compulsion—Gods can’t be mind-controlled—when the time comes, will show that the MITD has figured out who he is.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: If who goes where is decided by intelligent beings, then it’s likely that the mysterious figures who abducted Lien and O-Chul are them, or agents of them. They’ve got tough decisions to make, and need information to make them, and you can get more information from in-depth questioning than from passive observation.