The mission: kill Elminster!

[Jack the Reaper]

The following challenge has occupied my twisted mind for years, so now I decided to share it with you:

Elminster, Alustriel, Drizzt Do'urden, Wulfegar and Shandril- shortly, all those power-stuffed goodi-goods from the FR, add anyone else you wish - are drawm to Ravenloft.
How would you kill them?

They have all the magical power of the Realms. We have the powers of Ravenloft. What would you face them with? What darklords, villains, monsters, domains etc.? Of course, the more creative and horrifying way, the better: don't just slip a dagger between their ribs. Let them know some true horror before! Let them know that their so-wonderful powers mean nothing against the powers of Ravenloft! Use brain aginst brawn- don't just try to flood them with endless hordes of zombies (which I don't think will work anyway).

In short- bring me the head of Elminster! Your reward will be great!
Bruhahahahah!!!

[Isabella]

The respective authors sue the heck out of us and yank their characters out of Ravenloft.

[cure]

Elminster, why kill him, when you have a Vistana lass curse him for looking at her the wrong way?

("No Elminster, for the 66th time, Dispel Magic, even at level 35th and by the love Mystra, has no bearing whatsoever on Vistani curses. Repeat after me, category mistake.")

But if killing is your game, there is a gate in the Shadowrift that he might be directed to open, putting the darklord trapped within to some use for a change. Perhaps the Gentleman caller could cheer the old fellow on.

Having Vlad assassined by that Entreri fellow would be quite nice.

[brass]

There is always Azalin Rex.

"Who are you again?"

[Ail]

I can't help you with that, I met him in my last detour on the realms and he's my friend now
Sorry.

[HuManBing]

Most of their über powers come from a link to some deity in the Realms.

Dark Powers disrupt deities' connections from outside planes.

"Quail, Elminster. Where is thy god/lover/girlfriend now?"

[William Blackmoor]

Elminster, Alustriel, Drizzt Do'urden, Wulfegar and Shandril- shortly, all those power-stuffed goodi-goods from the FR, add anyone else you wish - are drawm to Ravenloft.

Face it, these characters have been drawn into something far worse than Ravenloft: The Realms of the 4th Ed.
As some of them seem to survive even that, there is no way you can kill them in Ravenloft...

Forgotten Realms Grey Box up to 3.5 forever!

[HuManBing]

Most of those characters suffer from something far worse than godly intervention.

They suffer from Mary Sue syndrome, being a poorly-disguised favorite of the authors because... well... they are the authors in alter-ego form.

Basically FR is a land where if you write the stuff, you get to make characters invincible, unkillable, omnipotent, and protected by the gods... which you yourself invented. Essentially a bad fanfic but blown up to ludicrous ego-stroking proportions.

[Ail]

Most of those characters suffer from something far worse than godly intervention.

They suffer from Mary Sue syndrome, being a poorly-disguised favorite of the authors because... well... they are the authors in alter-ego form.

Basically FR is a land where if you write the stuff, you get to make characters invincible, unkillable, omnipotent, and protected by the gods... which you yourself invented. Essentially a bad fanfic but blown up to ludicrous ego-stroking proportions.

I second that.

[DeepShadow of FoS]

Right, as opposed to Ravenloft, which is a land where if you write the stuff, you get to make Darklords invincible, unkillable, omnipotent, and protected by the Dark Powers... which you yourself invented.

So the difference is...in RL Elminster would be a Darklord, or at least very evil.

[Bluebomber4evr]

Right, as opposed to Ravenloft, which is a land where if you write the stuff, you get to make Darklords invincible, unkillable, omnipotent, and protected by the Dark Powers... which you yourself invented.

So the difference is...in RL Elminster would be a Darklord, or at least very evil.

Yeah, but at least the Darklords aren't Mary Sues

[HuManBing]

Right, as opposed to Ravenloft, which is a land where if you write the stuff, you get to make Darklords invincible, unkillable, omnipotent, and protected by the Dark Powers... which you yourself invented.

So the difference is...in RL Elminster would be a Darklord, or at least very evil.

Not quite.

The vast majority of Darklords are very clearly neither "invincible" nor "unkillable" nor "omnipotent". There are only a handful that qualify for any one of those categories, and in my opinion none which qualify for all three. (The mere presence of a curse immediately disqualifies them from "omnipotent", for example.) The one Darklord who appears to have near-omniscient powers, Azalin, still has a canonically listed method of elimination: destroy his phylactery and then destroy his corporeal form.

It is true that the FR untouchables also are not strictly speaking omnipotent (or possibly even the other two) but when you start looking at their level totals, they're so far above player power levels that they may as well be. Their CRs for 3rd ed. (the last edition I was familiar with) were well above Ravenloft Darklord CR levels, often with a double-digit margin.

So, equating Ravenloft Darklords with FR's untouchables is not persuasive. Even Ravenloft canon establishes several Darklord deaths, such as Bakholis and Gundar. Several Ravenloft adventures allow for Darklord deaths, such as Gabrielle Aderre and Yagno Petrovna (even if those endings are considered noncanon). Compare this to FR, where the storylines seem to twist out of shape in order to feature one of these darlings and yet have them emerge unscathed.

Greyhawk had similar problems in 1st Ed. AD&D, and appears to trip over them quite a bit in Vecna Lives!, but they seemed to have moved away from the everpresent superhero theme (Rary's assassination of key members of the Circle of Eight was an interesting step towards power de-escalation).

Ravenloft, properly done, avoids this altogether. Are the Dark Powers protecting the DLs because of darling-patron coddling? Or are they there as a cosmic Aesop's fable of punishment? Far more interesting than some demigod-level character who can't make up his mind between being a doddering village wiseman smoking a pipe on one hand, or an intercontinental sorcerous 007 type who saves the world and lays every other goddess he comes across.

[ewancummins]

Does any DM feel bound by decisions made by editors or authors at TSR/Wizards?

I certainly don't. The DM is in charge.

If you dislike some 'Mary Sue' NPCs, just ignore them/remove them from the FR history/kill 'em off. Getting rid of a few high level NPCs does not require much work, nor does it dramatically alter the setting.

Ravenloft's darklords are much, much more central to Ravenloft than NPCs like Elminster or Drizzt are to Realms. Elminster just lives in the Realms, but Ravenloft has formed around its darklords.

[HuManBing]

It's interesting, of all the campaign settings, Dragonlance struck me as the one most inflexibly tied to the fortunes of a central group of characters. The various novels kept progressing events, most with world-shattering effects. It was almost as though the novels were dictating the revisions to the setting. (Compare to the GC in Ravenloft, which returned the average citizen's lot largely unchanged, even down to the provincial interests of most domains.)

It had slipped my mind.

Forgotten Realms, sans Mary Sues, comes out as a generic miscellany of campaign settings. If DnD is your chosen rules system, then FR has a broad variety of cultures loosely based on Earthside civilizations, and a very broad selection of entirely fictitious settings too.

[Troile]

Elminster, Alustriel, Drizzt Do'urden, Wulfegar and Shandril- shortly, all those power-stuffed goodi-goods from the FR, add anyone else you wish - are drawm to Ravenloft.
How would you kill them?

2 easy ways.

Start the game at level 1000.

Or just make pun pun or the like.


The exercise is rather silly. The rules allow for infinite power because that's not the point.