This post has the following content warnings:
Lucy attempts to solve post-Razmir Ustalav
Next Post »
+ Show First Post
Total: 1094
Posts Per Page:
Permalink

She picks him up gently and carefully and places him on a comfortable crevice between spires. 

She will pick up the wolf much more carefully, since it doesn’t like her.

Does anyone else want to come along?

Permalink

Nope! Everyone else is adjusting to the new situation where they're all alive again. Count Tiriac is the main one who goes on adventures, and he has a different household when he's off in Absalom where he has his town house.

Permalink

Then her legs will start doing doing an odd dance-like movement, and she rises into the air. Once she gets above the castle walls, she starts zooming off towards Lastwall.

Permalink

"Now, then," he says, once he and his wolf are settled, "are there any other questions I can answer for you?"

Permalink

“What kind of magic is there here, besides the kind that gods give clerics? I think I got the impression that all the walking dead people were something else, but I don’t know what. I want to know as much as possible about stuff in the plane shift category.”

Permalink

" - The world is extremely large and I am almost certainly missing something," he says. "The three main categories are the innate magical abilities of supernatural beings such as yourself, which cannot be learned by mortals, and then divine and arcane magic. Divine magic is usually from the gods, but there are people who get it from lesser beings - powerful spirits, say, or the world itself. I have... a little magic like that, if I concentrate and think of how it feels in the forest and all the life around me, but I have never studied it."

"And there is arcane magic, which is the magic of - people who study magic. Divine magic is given by the source in - crystalized? form; arcane magic is woven into this form by exceptional skill or unique talent. For some people it is a matter of learning and study, for some it is in the blood; others make deals with powerful beings for the knowledge of how to use it."

"Undead can be made through divine or arcane or innate magic, but Good gods rarely give spells to raise undead, and Pharasma never does. But if you are a very powerful wizard, someone who has studied magic, and you fear your next life, there are ways to remove your soul - this damages it and you, and all known means involve sentient sacrifice - and hide it to become a spirit possessing your body, impossible to permanently harm by anyone who cannot find your soul."

"These are the people who would not want to be returned to life. Because then they could die."

Permalink

“Hmm. That specific thing doesn’t happen where I’m from, but I won’t say I haven’t seen people make terrible life choices for, longevity, and power, and other things.”

She’s silent for a moment.

”I…could do something to make them more dead rather than less,” she admits reluctantly. “I don’t like making people more dead rather than less, but if they’ll still be magic, and really mad…I’m not, actually, stupid. It’s probably a better idea. But it wouldn’t be able to distinguish between dead people who are causing problems and dead people who aren’t.”

Permalink

"If you make them more alive, they will then be possible to make more dead individually, which is chief objection to you. Also that you will help their undead slaves."

He pauses. "I would guess there are... ten to forty liches in Ustalav? And thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of other undead. Liches are dangerous because they are very gifted necromancers of the fifth to ninth circle, not because there are very many of them."

Permalink

“Wow, yikes. How—the guys at your place weren’t exactly uniformly okay, you weren’t okay, how bad do you think it is, in the armies—“

Permalink

"That bad."

"Or worse."

"I think most of the Evil ones prefer it to their afterlives."

Permalink

“How hard is it to change alignment?”

Permalink

"You must do Good on the scale of the Evil you have done - more than a third of the people do roughly as much Good as they do Evil and so are Neutral - though there is a trial, and it takes mitigating circumstances and the true desire to change into account. There is also a spell, but it is very expensive and so beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest, and if you do not then act your new alignment it will swiftly revert." He plans to buy one at Lastwall while he's there.

Permalink

"Why is it expensive? Is a it very difficult arcane spell?"

Permalink

"Divine, of the fifth circle, and requires expensive material components to cast - many spells do, resurrection for instance."

Permalink

"What kind of expensive material components?"

Permalink

"Valuable incenses, I believe? Other spells call for gemstones, commonly diamonds."

Permalink

"...Well, if the incense is expensive because the recipe calls for rare plants, or something, I can do something about that. Diamonds I can definitely do something about." 

Permalink

"They sell it premixed in the Absalom markets," he says quietly. "I've never inquired about it."

"... If you can make diamonds cheaply and want to supply Lastwall and the churches of the Good gods, then that is a... fundamental and extraordinary shift beyond what mythic heroes and demigods usually cause? And Cheliax will probably attempt to destroy or kidnap you within the twenty-four hours after they learn about it."

Permalink

"I don't actually object to being somewhere I can do that kind of good but I won't pretend it's not a rude wake-up call, being a big fish in a little pond and then swimming out into the ocean," she grumbles. 

Permalink

"You have my sympathies," he says.

And - "the main use for diamonds is resurrection spells, and after that restoration spells - healing more complicated than physical injury, and some of the most powerful and dangerous arcane magic." 

Permalink

"Well, I can't be everywhere at once, and the consent mechanism built into the divine resurrection spells is a good thing," she says philosophically. "What kind of powerful and dangerous arcane magic?"

Permalink

"Wish," he says, "can do anything, does what you say not what you want, and apparently what you say is usually to produce a crater dozens of miles wide and sometimes destroy your soul. There are safe words to teleport anyone anywhere in the known universe to you, enhance your mental or physical abilities, and replicate weaker spells. There is exactly one wizard on the continent who can cast it and I don't know if there are any others on the planet." The last time he checked he came up empty, but that was generations ago.

Permalink

 

 

 

"Okay, I've read my share of stories where poorly-worded wishes go wrong, but usually the way they go wrong isn't an explosion." 

Permalink

"We're used to it."

Permalink

"I want to know why it happens, and I want to know if making a wish in my native language makes a difference, but it doesn't sound like there is any safe way to test it." 

She sounds personally aggrieved by this. 

Total: 1094
Posts Per Page: