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Thread: Fate of the Duegar
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2017-08-09, 01:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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Fate of the Duegar
What happens to Duergar when they die? Duergar are an evil dwarven subrace, but how does the "Death With Honour" thing affect them? Were they originally created alongside the dwarves, but still separately so they were exempted from the rules about dying with honour?* Did they make some pact with a dark power that exempted them from Hel? Or are they in the same boat as their dwarven kin, and they are merely aiming to die with evil honour?
*I'm now imagining the god that insisted that all the player races have a more powerful underground counterpart that's usually evil use some sort of wordplay to get out of surrendering their souls to Hel "Hey, the rules say that you get the souls of a 'major race'. The Duergar may be the same species, but they are a different race."
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2017-08-09, 01:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
Your whole premise is a bit off. There is no need to posit Duergars - there are Evil dwarves, and they don't all end in Hel. Therefore, there is a way to both be Evil and have honor, even if it is just amongst thieves. Or, as Rich put it, a politician assassinated due to their political views has died with honour. And we all know politicians are always evil (kidding!)
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2017-08-09, 01:42 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
The guy Haley bought weapons from for the Resistance looks like a Duergar:
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2017-08-09, 01:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
Agreed. And I'd say that if he gets killed by a goblin patrol while smuggling items into Gobbotopia, he'll have died with honour.
ETA: Mind you, we have no way of knowing if he is Evil. In general, I think we are well past the point were we could argue that an entire race in OotS is Evil to start with, which is what felt off about the OP.
GWLast edited by Grey_Wolf_c; 2017-08-09 at 01:52 PM.
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2017-08-09, 01:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
If a dwarf dies in battle his soul goes to the afterlife appropriate to his alignment. No reason to suppose evil dwarfs are any different.
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2017-08-09, 02:17 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
The Evil thing is a bit of a red herring for this discussion. I'm only really brought it up due to a comment Rich made in one of the commentaries about evil underground counterpart races (hence my joke about the deity that insisted every PC race have a more powerful underground counterpart). I was mainly asking if Duergar are considered Dwarves for the deal with Hel, or due to the massive differences between them and vanilla dwarves, and the fact that the word "race" was used when it's not the same as "species", are they considered a different race than the dwarves that Durkon belongs to?
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2017-08-09, 02:31 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
Have we confirmed that Duergar exist in OOTSworld? I know we've seen dark elves, but I don't think we've ever seen a confirmed Duergar or indeed heard them even mentioned. You'd think at some point in a thousand odd strips Durkon or someone would have brought it up by now.
At any rate, we would need Giant to tell us what their deal is, if they exist in OOTSworld at all. For all we know they are in another pantheon and are outside the pseudo-Norse pantheon altogether, and have a different afterlife altogether.
Respectfully,
Brian P."Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
-Valery Legasov in Chernobyl
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2017-08-09, 02:42 PM (ISO 8601)
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2017-08-09, 03:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
Good and Honorable are not synonyms. My favorite example is Captain Hook. Indisputably villainous, a pirate, in fact, yet with a great adherence to the idea to the idea of "Good Form."
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2017-08-09, 03:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
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2017-08-09, 03:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
-Valery Legasov in Chernobyl
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2017-08-09, 03:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
As far as I know we haven't had any debate that was significantly less than friendly - maybe it was just overlooked.
SwordsagedLast edited by hamishspence; 2017-08-09 at 03:44 PM.
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2017-08-09, 04:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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2017-08-09, 04:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
There are "deep gnomes" and "deep halflings" - neither of which are evil. The gnomes "svirfneblin" are grimmer, more distrustful and more morose than regular gnomes though (and, like duergar and drow, are considered more powerful than standard races and thus requiring a Level Adjustment - counting as a higher level character than hit dice alone would indicate.
Some splatbooks have "deep humans" as a variant too - Underdark, Races of Destiny. And Races of Faerun has "orogs" (deep orcs) which are more powerful than regular orcs.
The Giant did mention duergar once in OOTS context:
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...r#post19821213
Monsters are everywhere, especially in underground tunnels.
While the line about picking a fight with a tree was intended for comedy, the point still remains that if you know for certain you will only get a good afterlife if you die with honor, you are far more likely to deliberately go seek out an enemy to fight—whether it's orcs, giants, drow, duergar, etc.—as soon as you know you're sick or getting old.Last edited by hamishspence; 2017-08-09 at 04:29 PM.
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2017-08-09, 04:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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2017-08-09, 04:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
Thanks, hamishpence!
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2017-08-09, 04:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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2017-08-09, 04:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
Okay, I'll take the Giant's comment as confirmation that Duergar do exist in this setting -- and that the smuggler, with the skin tone, is likely one such.
In which case, it seems likely a duergar getting into the afterlife just needs to die in battle. The old-school Vikings weren't nice people. You don't have to be good to die an honorable death in battle. So a good person who died of illness would wind up in Hel's domain while a Xykon who was killed in battle would enter Valhalla.
Respectfully,
Brian P."Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
-Valery Legasov in Chernobyl
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2017-08-09, 05:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
A Xykon-like duergar or dwarf who was killed in battle would go to one of the Chaotic Evil afterlives. He just wouldn't go to Hel.
Dishonourable death = dwarf goes to Hel
Honourable death = dwarf goes wherever they would have gone if the "bet" never existed
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2017-08-09, 08:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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2017-08-09, 08:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
.
-.____________________
./___________________()-------Ron Miel
|...___________________--------sits down
|..| |_________________()-------and starts
|..|/__________________--------singing
| ___________________()-------about gold
.
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2017-08-09, 10:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
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2017-08-10, 01:25 AM (ISO 8601)
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2017-08-10, 04:07 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
I imagine they borrowed it from Old Norse dvergar rather than from the Old English cognate (I'm surprised they altered the normative spelling; duergar is a perfectly kosher and authentic Old Norse spelling, but D&D clearly doesn't care about that kind of stuff). I would have accepted any of duergr, duergur or duerg as the singular form.
ungelic is us
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2017-08-10, 08:47 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
I don't know. Unlike a lich, a vampire clearly has hydrated, non-decaying flesh, which implies a lot of their bodily functions still work. Heck, Greg and Malack can still breathe, they just don't need to. I wouldn't count on a vampire getting pregnant (that much negative energy is probably bad for a baby), but without knowing how much their bodily functions have been replaced by negative energy (as opposed to supplemented by it, like with breathing), its possible they could still have children with living beings.
“Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”
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2017-08-10, 09:14 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
Interested in MitD? Join us in MitD's thread.There is a world of imagination
Deep in the corners of your mind
Where reality is an intruder
And myth and legend thrive
Ceterum autem censeo Hilgya malefica est
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2017-08-10, 09:20 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
“Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”
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2017-08-10, 09:27 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
Yes, of course, but that wasn't my point. I'm talking watsonian: these are creatures whose existence depends on magic. They are at their most essential an enchantment on a corpse. The lich enchantment is cast by the pre-lich person itself, while the vampiric one is carried in the bite. But they are still undead, which implies some kind of dark magic. If whomever designed vampires when world 2.0 was created (one of the death gods, I'd imagine) gave them the ability to reproduce not just via bite but also via fluid exchange, then they can. Otherwise, they can't. Biology doesn't need to come into it at all, because magic trumps it.
Grey WolfLast edited by Grey_Wolf_c; 2017-08-10 at 09:27 AM.
Interested in MitD? Join us in MitD's thread.There is a world of imagination
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Ceterum autem censeo Hilgya malefica est
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2017-08-10, 09:33 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
“Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”
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2017-08-10, 11:26 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fate of the Duegar
Well, Libris Mortis does suggest that's possible in "rare circumstances" after a vampire's "recently consumed a significant quantity of blood"...and the other noted possible source for half-vampires is if a pregnant creature survives a vampire's blood drain attack, in which case the child may be "tainted by vampirism" or something. In conclusion: Heck if I know what they were thinking.
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The Index of the Giant's Comments VI―Making Dogma from Zapped Bananas