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Thread: Hell or annihilation
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2019-07-12, 10:43 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
⚣ Tanuki in the Playground. ⚣
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2019-07-12, 10:47 AM (ISO 8601)
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2019-07-12, 10:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
Last edited by MaxiDuRaritry; 2019-07-12 at 11:09 AM.
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2019-07-12, 11:10 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
I've checked both Dungeon Magazine and Dragon Magazine, 149, pag 96, but I found nothing.
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2019-07-12, 11:13 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
I can only offer my personal opinion on the matter, but I would choose Hell over Annihilation. While existence lasts, there is always a chance for something. Annihilation is final and this one does not embrace it.
Last edited by Eldonauran; 2019-07-12 at 11:13 AM.
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2019-07-12, 11:13 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
There arent any stats. Its mentioned in the Time Marches On article at the top of page 97.
Golden apples are also mentioned in the blurb at the front of the magazine describing said article.
Sorry, am at work on mobile or would have elaboratedLast edited by unseenmage; 2019-07-12 at 11:15 AM.
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2019-07-12, 11:20 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
⚣ Tanuki in the Playground. ⚣
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2019-07-12, 11:34 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
True. I didn't really mean to pick holes, although I can see that I kind of ended up doing that. Confined to the Astral for all eternity is a special kind of self-imprisonment, though.
Oh, the "save point" trick? Yes, I've heard of that. So... you and everyone in the world knows that you're reliving the same time period over and over, right? Kind of an odd way to try and spend eternity - plus seems vulnerable to interruption, possibly.
Actually seems pretty similar to me - the premise is escaping Hell forever, so, you're bound for eternity: if while bound you aren't conscious, that's functionally oblivion. If you are conscious, then seems like it'd soon become torture...
Lots of ways for an unattended object to get messed with! Plus, as with binding, assuming you aren't conscious it's basically the same as oblivion anyway.
OK, these all seem like variations on a theme - originally "Astral Plane", but we can make that more accurately "Timeless Plane shenanigans".
Yep, good one... if Dragonwrought Kobold qualifies you to take the PrC. I believe there have been multiple threads arguing the toss.
No, I don't think that's an appropriate response. "Pun-pun" is simply an absurd thing to propose as a solution to a problem in a game meant to be played.
The Tarrasque's regeneration actually doesn't say anything about immortality or old age. Here's the SRD:
Originally Posted by SRD
The question is about how to become immortal. So, this is just a variation on "polymorph shenanigans", which are already mentioned.
My dude, Neraph have a maximum age listed of 250 years plus 2d100 years.
Yes, we had "become undead" already.
Increasing is different to decreasing; the effects of increasing age category are different to decreasing age category. I don't believe your argument is a fair one.
Yes, OK, if Thought Bottles are being allowed. Good catch.
I'm not familiar with this spell, where is it from?
Yes, I think I have that Dragon mag - even though it's supposed to be basically the only thing it does do, I'm not sure if it works.
Yes, we had Reincarnate already.
Yes, I mentioned Mind Switch shenanigans.
Magic Jar has a duration so I'm not sure how this works?
Yes, I mentioned "Polymorph shenanigans".
I don't have the sourcebook but I thought Devices were explicitly immobile and enormous.
This isn't immortality, just a very extended lifespan.
Acorn of Far Travel has a duration, and furthermore the benefits only extend to the spellcaster. Likewise, Aspect of the Wolf is personal-range.
OK, so, discounting the ones already covered I make this about 1-2 new ways for sure, and three to four that I don't understand or are maybes. I don't even know if we're at 12 ways, yet, let alone the 24+ or 36+ you'd expect from the "literally dozens" you claimed.
And this is your claim, so the burden of proof is on you.
I don't think your claim is correct.Last edited by Mr Adventurer; 2019-07-12 at 11:42 AM.
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2019-07-12, 11:40 AM (ISO 8601)
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2019-07-12, 12:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
There's some key factors we're not considering here that cause Hell's arithmetic to make a lot more sense in most D&D settings:
SpoilerHell's economy: Hell is ultimately set up to value quantity over quality. Yes, they want the powerful souls of very high-level characters if they can get them. But they're fine making deals with and corrupting less consequential mortals, like NPCs (commoners, experts, aristocrats, warriors), whose souls are just as useful, especially in bulk. The vast majority of these folks are what the FC2 passage is referring to - they have no clear picture of the afterlife, i.e. few to no ranks in Religion or Planes, low Int/Wis due to standard array, few metaphysical concerns that outweigh putting bread on their tables etc. Which leads us to:
D&D settlements and populations: Someone performed a great analysis of average 3.5 populations using the DMG population tables. From that analysis we can see that in a typical kingdom, you end up with roughly 70% of your population living outside of large towns, 85% outside of cities. That's roughly millions of people in rural areas and hundreds of thousands in urban centers - a world that would look foreign to us today, but one that is ripe for diabolic influence. This is compounded by:
Clerics are spread thin: Especially the Good ones who know the score and are trying to save people; the DMG Web Enhancement that breaks down city demographics further into districts gives us a rough sense of what percentage of a city's population are clerics, paladins, and adepts. These divine servants are woefully outnumbered even in an urban environment, and a good portion of those are either neutral or evil themselves and thus don't really care where their followers' souls end up as long as they further their deities' agenda while alive. And again, that's in a city where you can reliably find and train such classes - in a rural environment, you're lucky if you get a hedgewoman or shaman to tend to the spiritual needs of the people, and Good-aligned divine messengers are even more diluted. Probably less popular too - when the evil ones are preaching things like personal wealth and hedonism, while the boring squares are preaching how we need to share with each other and sacrifice, it's tough to see the majority signing up for the latter and giving the former a wide berth. And even in settlements where you've got a goodly messenger, you've probably got a fiend targeting that place eventually in order to score a win (unless the heroes intervene in time.)
TL;DR it's easy to see why FC2's statement, that most simply don't know or don't take it seriously, makes sense. And that's the kind of crapsack world you really need for heroism to be as important as it is.
For starters, that's indeed how it works. Most forget their lives, some don't.
But second and more importantly, the way you describe it doesn't really change anything. If you lose everything from your life except the lawful evil stuff, then either (a) you do become a different person because you've lost everything else, or (b) there never was anything else, and so you as a devil is going to be pretty identical to you as a LE mortal; you were practically a devil when you were alive, just less red andhornyhorned.Plague Doctor by Crimmy
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2019-07-12, 12:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
I think it's actually likely that you'll find the "good message" from celestial servants having surprising grip on rural areas, because they also preach the word of "not raiding and pillaging." And it actually is more optimal to cooperate than raid and pillage as long as all parties stick to it, so the teachings, when held to, lead to happier, more prosperous rural areas.
But yes, there will always be bad apples eager to take the left hand path to wealth and power.
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2019-07-12, 12:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
Plague Doctor by Crimmy
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2019-07-12, 12:58 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
I am vastly amused by the notion of a game where a twist included was that the Pact Primeval was not as in his favor as he thought, but only because there was an even more obscure hyper-intelligent Good entity who was playing a much, much longer game than Azzy gave him credit for.
Maybe even Pelor, and all the "burning hate" evidence is going to be cleaned up and shown to be part of a genuine masterstroke for Good around the same time Azzy learns he's been had.
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2019-07-12, 01:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
Not sure this one counts as the previous categories or not, but since the original question sort of asks whether or not the person considers their soul or their persona to be 'them', there are options such as Mind Seed into a vessel with a different alignment than yours, then have your original soul consigned to oblivion. If someone believes philosophically that the persona is what they associate with their identity, whereas the cosmology and associates the soul with identity, this would be a way to take advantage in that philosophical gap and skip out on the bill as it were.
It's kind of 'mind swap shenanigans' but I sorta think it deserves a special mention since, why stop at one? You could make a thousand 'you's, and survive by virtue of replicating faster than your copies can possibly be consigned to the hells.
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2019-07-12, 01:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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2019-07-12, 08:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
If anything, that's why I think this is a philosophical gap. What does it mean to a person in the game world to no longer be controlled by the same player? If someone sees their personality and memories as the entirety of the part of themself that matters to preserve, 'jumping souls' would be as possible as 'jumping bodies'.
Mind Seed that persona into a upper plane bound host, wipe the persona of the original (might need a friend to provide a Feeblemind, Programmed Amnesia, Mind Rape, etc here), and no part of the thing you consider to be 'you' ever need be tortured to oblivion. If you could forcibly Mind Seed someone into your previous host, this would be a way to forcibly condemn Good personae to eternal torture and give LG conniptions trying to figure out what is just and proper in that case.
It's inferior to most forms of D&D immortality, but interesting.Last edited by NichG; 2019-07-12 at 08:37 PM.
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2019-07-12, 09:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
A "new person" in the context of that they are capable of making their own decisions and forging their own destiny. Not a "new person" in the sense that they possess a completely different thought process, that would pretty much negate the function of the spell!
They may not make the exact choices the original does, or even face the same situations, but their approach to situations would likely be nearly identical. IE: If you're rational and scientific, the "other you" will be as well. At least until they've encountered enough situations to change that.
Also, @OP, if the choice was between ceasing to exist, and taking on some new form of existence, even if it's not "me" I'd take the new form of existence.Last edited by False God; 2019-07-12 at 10:01 PM.
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2019-07-13, 11:25 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
But guys! It's not simply "taking a new form of existence", it's going through indescribable torture untill the mind is totally destroyed.
Well, mabye I overestimated the average fear of pain.
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2019-07-14, 12:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
Shadow Sun Ninja capstone, plus a swiftly-applied Helm of Opposite Alignment (and possibly a quick quest to a lower plane) gives you no-strings-attached* vampire template (*excluding the previously mentioned attached strings).
Cancer Mage has access to an immortal form at its capstone at the expense of being either a voyeur or tediously, eternally bored (or both).
The fact that civilization in D&D-land isn't utterly obsessed with the afterlife and immortality is patently absurd, especially since even "good" souls suffer fates worse than death in many cases. The upside of this oversight is that addressing it can lead to some really interesting homebrew settings.
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2019-07-14, 12:36 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
If you went via helm, you'd still be an npc. having your friends free your soul does give you an LA-less vamp template, but you have to suffer through 10 levels of shadow sun ninja, so you're coming out behind.
The fact that civilization in D&D-land isn't utterly obsessed with the afterlife and immortality is patently absurd, especially since even "good" souls suffer fates worse than death in many cases. The upside of this oversight is that addressing it can lead to some really interesting homebrew settings.I've got a new fantasy TTRPG about running your own fencing school in a 3 musketeers pastiche setting. Book coming soon.
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2019-07-14, 08:21 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
As far as I familiar with Planescape settings, in some cases souls can end up not in generic hell, but in a "private" territory of a deity.
We are talking about really evil people. Those who commit really evil things, will surely catch an interest from someone among deities. They can't get redemption, but maybe they can convince a cleric of same evil alignment, to pray and ask some evil deity to give shelter. As long as it's still on the same lower plane, it shouldn't break any Multiverse laws.
Existence in the territory of a specific deity is still not much of a paradise, but still much less horrid then "standard" lower plane. In some cases, even just after rebirth petitioner will be tormentor and not one tormented.Last edited by Edreyn; 2019-07-14 at 08:22 AM.
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2019-07-14, 10:50 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
Pain and suffering is one of the few guarantees in existence. Some flee from it, others avoid it, and others simply accept it as it comes. Only the very strange actively seek out pain and suffering. Madness is never a guarantee, only a possible outcome. For all we know, it is those with such tenacity as to survive against all odds that are actually the ones to crawl into the higher ranks.
Simply giving up only results in one outcome. Any other outcome, regardless of how improbable, is made impossible by choosing to give up.Last edited by Eldonauran; 2019-07-14 at 10:50 AM.
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2019-07-14, 12:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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2019-07-14, 12:51 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
It literally isn’t, though. You may have confused some pronouns here — I’m not sure. “It” is civilization. Characters in-universe do not express significant concern about the afterlife in a reasonable or ational way. Pretty much everyone would conclude that becoming a blade of grass or a wild animal in Elysium is horrific, especially as a reward for being “good” (which is itself irrational because the alignments do not represent moral poles but eldritch forces of horror) and since people have a suite of reliable, mechanical means to engineer their long-term survival, they would just do that. Churches being important in communities in D&D-land is nearly irrelevant (I don’t know if the previous poster meant the church-reference to be a parallel to the real world). There is no real-world equivalent, even within religious institutions, to a person who can reliably move souls around, and that person, and his or her profession, would be the most important one around. And it wouldn’t necessarily be all or even majority clerics, either: as described in this very thread, there are lots of super-powers which impact this issue. These powers would be organized, syncratized, and employed in a manner that maximized the self-control and “lifespan” of at least the elites. I mean, we’re casually doing that right now. This says nothing about how the relationship between the gods and mortals would be in many cases out-and-out hostile, which, in turn, might well lead many gods to give mortals less of a raw deal, especially if mortals can trivially escape-hatch the process.
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2019-07-14, 01:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
I mean, if we're going this route, it makes more sense for the gods to burn it all down before mortals manage to systematize things. The 0.05% of high-level mortals who are powerful enough to seize personal immortality are one thing, but if they figure out how to mass produce a convenient immortality trick that the average commoner could be given, and which would put said commoner beyond the long game of 'they'll die of violence or accident eventually', then the only guaranteed move left is to make sure as many souls as possible move on before some high level person decides not to pull up the ladder behind them. Or, I suppose, the gods could intentionally spread an easy but imperfect immortality method around to poison the well - if almost everyone has the chance to become a necropolitan, who would bother with the risks and delays of lichdom?
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2019-07-14, 04:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
Pain and suffering is one of the few guarantees in existence.
People endure mundane sufference like squallor, poverty, even hunger and moderate levels of violence.
People flee en masse when things like gruesome public executions and genocide happens, and Hell is that multiplied for a thousand.
There's a reason if even the Fiendish Codex says "it's a mysterie of multiverse that any person in his right mind would choose a LE alignment".Last edited by Conradine; 2019-07-14 at 04:43 PM.
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2019-07-14, 06:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
The real solution is to speak the name of Pazuzu three times immediately upon arriving in Hell before you are processed, thus summoning him and forcibly changing your alignment from Lawful Evil to Neutral Evil and preventing Hell from claiming you
Last edited by Bohandas; 2019-07-14 at 06:07 PM.
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2019-07-14, 08:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
Plague Doctor by Crimmy
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2019-07-14, 09:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
Honestly D&D's hell, as described in the books, doesn't seem all that extreme. Their punishments fall short of the breaking wheel and crucifixion, the intrusiveness of their security falls short of the TSA, and most of the people in charge worked their way up from the bottom legitimately (with the notable exceptions of Asmodeus and the Lord of Malebolge), or at least what passes for legitimately in hell.
Last edited by Bohandas; 2019-07-14 at 09:17 PM.
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2019-07-14, 09:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Hell or annihilation
I’d assume most would choose Hell. After all, while leaving any personality intact through lemurehood or skipping it is incredibly unlikely to make it through with ‘you’ remotely intact, it’s still a chance, which is much better than the 0% having your soul shredded does.
Don’t some souls get turned into larva (often used as currency), instead of a Lemure, as well? While not exactly aspirational, still seems a hair better than nothing.
And of course, there’s always a lifeline to hold out for possible resurrection/undeath giving you a second wind. Which ain’t gonna happen if you don’t have a soul to stubbornly stick around/cram back into your body.
Sure, the chances of any of these are pretty poor, damn near close to zero unless you’ve made plans for them ahead of time, but they’re at least worth a shot. After all, what you got to lose? The worst case scenario is the same for both options, one just contains the possibility of better ones.Avatar by TinyMushroom.