Given Roy’s interview before being allowed onto the mountain, I’m inclined to think alignment and the afterlife is not nearly so cut-and-dried as that.
Besides, change of clothes doesn’t mean squat. Everything V did with the Soul Splices was completely in character. That was simply what happens when you give V more power than V knows what to do with. As the demons said to Qarr (and I have no reason to think they’d lie among themselves), V was always in control of the Splice, but give them an excuse and they’ll behave badly. Just as someone can convince themselves they’re drunk if they think the non-alcoholic beverage they’re drinking is alcoholic or a hypochrondiac can convince themselves they have the latest deadly disease, V could convince…(crap, can’t evade the ambiguous gender here) Vself (ha!) that V was merely under the influence of evil beings, when in fact it was V’s will all along guiding the actions.
It’s possible that V’s deal with the devils will be weighed against all the good V’s done and V will be judged Neutral, but it’ll be a close thing.
Maybe. We don’t really know what the cosmic implications of V’s actions are. For all we know, the last half hour (that’s about all the time that’s elapsed, right?) is completely inconsequential. I also question that any Judgment actually exists, or if it does, it’s highly…negotiable, I guess. The whole scheme seems more like a giant mail sorter to me. What you write on the envelope is where the letter ends up.
No, it’s pretty clear that the Deva who interviewed Roy had broad discretion concerning which afterlife he found his eternal bliss in. She was heartbeats away from chucking him in a neutral afterlife at one point. Only his dedication to his cause and his character growth kept him in the lawful good mountain-thing.
Right, so I suppose, at best, it’s up to the arbiters of each individual plane…which raises more questions. How does a Neutral plane accomplish such judgment, when the alignment is at least partially predicated on non-judgment, or on flip-floppiness, or who knows what else? And if that’s so, then what force is responsible for Roy showing up at the Mountain at all?
And your example is evidence of the high degree of negotiability of the alignment system. Specifically, he rationalizes his way out of Judgment over Belkar, saying that he was trying to reform an evildoer. Uh huh. Sure. Even if technically true, it was a highly legalistic argument that the Deva bought.
I suppose what I was trying to say, in my usual “post something half-baked and go mull it over while mowing the lawn” style is that he showed up in front of the Mountain’s gates because he self-identifies as Lawful Good, IOW it’s what’s currently listed on his character sheet, or if you prefer, it’s what’s written on the envelope.
Obviously, given his negotiations with the Deva, this gives you a somewhat better than even shot of remaining there, if you can convince The Great DM In The Sky, and depending on what spin you can place upon your actions.
I’m not going to try to dig up links right now, but Stickworld started off with just the Gods of the North, South, and West, but the Elves (and Goblins) eventually elevated gods of their own, outside of those three original pantheons. And the place where Roy went is mostly referred to as Celestia, but Gary Gygax commented that back in his day, it was called the Seven Heavens.
The point I’m making is that even at the high end of expected HP for epic spellcasters, V could still end up doing enough HP damage to dust Xykon on his next turn. As in, while the rest of team Evil are standing around gloating.
Hell, it’s V. If he has a chance for one last spell before utter defeat, he’ll use it to mildly inconvenience his enemy for 1d10 days.
Nitpicking, but there were four original pantheons. The Gods of the East (Zeus and his crowd) were destroyed*, along with the original Stickworld, by the Snarl. The three surviving pantheons subdued the Snarl and built Stickworld2.0.
*Unless the recent theory mentioned here is correct and there’s a survivor.
Explosive Runes does 6d6 damage; it doesn’t scale with caster level. If it was an Empowered and Maximized, it does 3d6+36 damage, or about 47. If Xykon doesn’t have some serious levels on V here, that might finish him off. That would be thoroughly entertaining.
In rereading the comic, I ran across something that surprised me- Thog is part of the Linear Guild, but is he evil? He kills sometimes, but Elan gets him to co-operate pretty easily. I’m holding out hope that Thog will be coming back to assist the OotS.
So, I’m curious. Did this latest digression from “the plot moving forward” cause all the people who’ve been complaining about the sideplots of the past year+ to give up in disgust, or have they simply not realized that this bit with V means the Order is once again broken, and still will not be moving on to the next Gate?
‘Cause I’m likin’ this sideplot, too, but want to know how much whining to prepare for.
That might work if V were playing an earlier edition with Roy’s Archon. As is, the monsters get the same opportunity as PCs to save an ally in negative hp before death. V would need to do enough damage to bring Massive Death rules into play, otherwise Redcloak or Tsukiko get to use one of the many, many spontaneous inflict spells they’re capable of.
