Redesigning From the Shadows - part II

[alhoon]

Likewise, if Azalin (who's in Ravenloft and in Avernus and casting the spell in 735) does something that prevents Ravenloft from ever forming, he will have created a paradox. He will NOT have found a magical way to exit the Demiplane somehow. He will be trapped in the Demiplane for half of the reversions in time, and the other half he'll presumably be back in Knurl on Oerth.

More importantly, he'll be trapped in time. He'll never progress beyond 735 because that's when the paradox occurs in both timelines.

Interesting theory. However I don't think that paradoxes were so severe in 2nd edition chronomancy.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

It doesn't matter whether or not such a paradox is a genuine threat, only whether Azalin believes that it is. Chronomancy is one of those unfamiliar branches of magic which he's barred from acquiring knowledge about, so even if he'd met a chronomancer who'd told him the facts, the information would most likely go in one ear and out the other.

As it's Azalin's motivations that are being discussed, not what really might happen if he had Strahd retroactively assassinated, the lich-king's wariness of altering the past doesn't need to be based in game-mechanics to affect his decisions. He's operating with imperfect knowledge, and he knows it, so avoiding a possible paradox seems like his only safe course of action.

[HuManBing]

Of course, you as DM have final say, but for my money characterizing time travel analysis as "chronomancy" and thus a forbidden school of magic is, in my opinion, a disservice to Azalin and also to chronological analysis in general.

It's mostly logic, such that a 21st century non-arcane non-spellcaster like me can sit down and think it through. If some 21st century gamers choose not to think it through, it doesn't immediately relegate it to some arcane corner where Azalin can't touch it. (Is chronomancy listed in the list of things he can't do? Given that he does in fact do a lot of time alterations, it's not entirely fair to say he's somehow barred from casting spells tied to it. See From the Shadows, Roots of Evil, and King of the Dead for examples.)

Just as a purely critical commentary, take into account that From the Shadows actually melds almost perfectly from a time travel analytical viewpoint. I suspect Bruce Nesmith may have either researched or consulted with science fiction or speculative fiction thinkers before he wrote this adventure. He avoids many common pitfalls that other stories, movies, and adventures hit. (E.g. Terminator.) Such care might possibly occur from good luck, but I like to give writers the benefit of the doubt when a happy coincidence like this happens.

(Note that Roots of Evil has a similar time travel issue which, from an analytical viewpoint, is much much messier than From the Shadows, with potentially much worse aftershocks.)

Azalin does not send matter back in time, which is a big paradox. He only sends the non-material "consciousness" of the PCs. This avoids a massive problem with time travel, namely that matter from the future universe is eliminated and injected into the past universe.

Azalin does not ask the PCs to bring the holy symbols back to his current time frame. This would remove matter from the past universe and inject it into the current universe. Instead he asks them to move the objects around in the past time frame, which does not violate any issues of conserving matter.

Azalin also picks a very good target to manipulate past events. He picks the wedding of Sergei, where everybody died anyway. So the future aftershocks are likely to be very limited if not negligible. Everybody ends up the same after his meddling as they did before he did - they die (by Strahd's hand in the adventure, although later novels suggest Dilisnya had an effect as well).

For more discussion about time travel in a commoner-friendly format (and I include myself in the definition of "commoner", so I can attest!) please visit http://www.mjyoung.net/time/

There's a variety of interesting analysis going on there about films, books, and other media that deal with time travel, and it's a good read too.

Bottom line: You don't have to justify taking something away from Azalin in your campaign. The best justification is "I don't think it would work well with the game" and that's perfectly within a DM's sphere to say. I don't want to leave anybody with the impression that what I say here is the only feasible interpretation.

But if you're going to criticize the logic behind it, and thus possibly influence other DMs or readers, be aware that the inverse effect may occur, that what I say here may appear to be a completely infeasible interpretation. (And if that's the case, I'm happy to hear compelling critiques... but they do have to be compelling.)

[alhoon]

Hmmm... I think you're right.
Since I don't play as Azalin's curse that he can't learn new magic, I didn't make use of such concepts actually.
IMC Azalin's curse is that he can't bring Irik back as the "true leader and heir" he craves most. Oh, and he can't advance a level.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

FWIW, I actually have no problem with Azalin's chain of reasoning in your scenario, HMB. His conclusions and concerns are logical, as you say: the kind of thing you don't need to be a genius, or a wizard of any stripe, to figure out.

It's just that, from what I recall of the Chronomancy rules in 2E, they weren't as logical as what you're describing -- they were meant to facilitate game play, not emulate science fiction or explore the bounds of theoretical physics -- and the counterintuitive aspects of those rules are what Azalin wouldn't find easy to deduce, IMO. Even if he did guess them, he couldn't be sure what would happen, and as an immortal lich, playing it safe with things that actually could destroy him retroactively is just common sense.

Once again, I guess I just can't help but take to heart that old example of how Azalin would forget new information about the Elemental Planes, if he read about it. I don't see it as a disservice to Azalin to interpret his curse as stringently as when it was originally presented; if anything, I find it more stimulating to dream up justifications for his plots that I intend to run, without expanding the scope of his abilities. (If Azalin IMC can't use chronomancy, then how did he achieve the PCs' journey in RoE? A minion's spell? If so, what's that minion been up to, since? A magical item from the Black Vault? If so, is it still there? What else can it do?) I portray him as someone who's learned to think his way around a severe limitation, yet resents the need for such resourcefulness (because he knows using new magic could solve his problems so easily).

But that's a matter of personal taste, not something anyone else needs to emulate or object to. YMMV; I just wanted to point out that, for DMs who do interpret his curse stingently, there's a simpler rationale for why he wouldn't risk messing with past history.

[HuManBing]

:slaps head:

Wait, you mean there was a Chronomancy subschool of magic in 2E?

Okay, now your post makes a lot more sense. I was unaware of the Chronomancy rules and I thought you were drawing an arbitrary circle around what Azalin knows and what he doesn't, and throwing "anything to do with time travel" into the latter circle.

Certainly if there's an actual school of magic that's "after-arising" (like elemental magic and wild magic), then it's strongly supported that he doesn't know it - I would be quite happy to accept that.

So this ultimately boils down to how you, the DM, want to deal with time travel in your campaign. If it requires Chronomancy rules to work, then Azalin would have to use "carefully worded Wishes" to get around it because it's way outside his ken.

If it can be done through logical extrapolation and very careful planning, then it's accessible to Azalin... but he'd probably still need a Wish or a complicated specialist spell to express the logical parameters involved.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Yes, Chronomancy was a distinct branch of magic in 2E, comparable to Wild magic or Elementalism, with its own set of strictly chronomancer-exclusive spells. It wasn't an especially popular idea, and it came in as a one-shot supplement during the last gasps of the 2E product line, which is probably why you hadn't heard of it. In 3E terms, it'd probably convert to a new base class a la Tome of Magic, rather than a prestige class.

FWIW, I'm not sure even a whole bunch of Wishes could let Azalin do what he did in RoE/FtS, if the Chronomancy subschool is off-limits to him. The 3E Wish spell doesn't allow for duplication of high-level prohibited spells, even for regular wizards with no mental block to worry about, so pulling off the equivalent of chronomantic spells like Timereaver wouldn't work. But he could've gotten his bony mitts on one of those enchanted timepieces from Forged of Darkness, and jury-rigged something to achieve the effect he needed, using vassaliches as research proxies.


If you're interested, BTW, you might find a cheap copy of the old 2E Chronomancer supplement on eBay. I believe there's a third-party d20 product that pursues a similar concept, but I've no idea how true to the original it is, or how good.

[The Giamarga]

HMB I've pm-ed you some links that i found on the net.

Have you read Roger Moore's Chronomancy and the Multiverse ?

While the 2E Chronomancer is oop it is still available for under $10 on ebay or for $4 as a pdf on paizo. Also there have been several conversions to 3E:

Here is a free one on the Inzeladun site that contains conversions of the 2E Chronomancer character kits and short descriptions of most of the 2E Chronomancy spells. It is quite close to the 2E rules, which made Chronmancy a school of special spells iirc.

There are two different d20 products detailing Chronomancy though I'm not sure if any of them build on the 2E material or present a new take.

Here's another free one on the dicefreaks blackops boards (link) which was not inspired by the 2E source book.


Also I do not think that the 2E Chronomancy rules would actually have to convert to a new base class, but rather to some feats and spells for a wizard to take. Also there certainly are different ways to use chronomancy, divine magic or psionics for example.

[alhoon]

Even if he did guess them, he couldn't be sure what would happen, and as an immortal lich, playing it safe with things that actually could destroy him retroactively is just common sense.

Tell that to those people in Il Aluk... oh, wait. He blew it up, speading himself over Darkon's resonance like peanut butter.

But he could've gotten his bony mitts on one of those enchanted timepieces from Forged of Darkness, and jury-rigged something to achieve the effect he needed, using vassaliches as research proxies.

Jury-riging something that affects time also needs understandment of magics out of Azalin's perview IMO.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Hence, the research proxies.

And a lich would have far more cause to be wary of erasing its own existence from history than of blowing up its physical body, the latter being a lot easier to replace.

[alhoon]

And yet... it was not. Azalin shattered his concience too. A pity he hasn't forseen that.

This just exemplifies what he have said before: He may think but not know for sure in such things. He spent a decade on the Grim Harvest, tested the infernal machine creating Death etc. But still... he blew himself appart mentaly as well as physically, taking Il Aluk with him.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Which brings us back to where we started: Azalin is sufficiently ingenius to either circumvent or avoid any threat that he can anticipate, be it by virtue of his knowledge or rational deduction. It's when emotional or counterintuitive factors are also at work -- things his brilliance tends not to factor into the equation quite so accurately -- that his plans acquire their nasty habit of going kablooie.

[HuManBing]

For what it's worth, I'd be extremely wary of using the Death Trilogy of adventures as any sort of canon as far as estimating Azalin's (or indeed any other NPC's) abilities.

The trilogy was among the Ravenloft products I enjoyed the least, being poorly written and poorly edited. Even these could have been forgiven if it was at least well-designed, and it wasn't that either.

(To be fair to it, there were some excellent ideas in it that could make for a truly amazing adventure trilogy... had the 99% perspiration work of editing, writing, and revising been better. I chalk this up to problems with TSR's disintegration rather than lack of talent, so I don't mean any insult to the authors. The artwork was pretty bad, though - no amount of spin will ever erase my revulsion at "a few bones here and there" making for good incidental artwork.)

Of course we go to the DnD table with the Grim Harvest we have, not the Grim Harvest we wish we had...

The mechanics behind the hourglass artifact are never satisfactorily explained. The game is a clear example of railroading - the PCs can't even affect the outcome of Azalin's plot! A better way of pitching that might have been to require a lengthy conversion process to make Azalin's consciousness into a demilich. Say a few weeks or months, spent channelling negative planar energy into his consciousness so he finally gains enough dark power to become a demilich (something that most liches take centuries or millennia to acquire).

This would allow the PCs to realize what's going on, and allow them an adventure detour to do something like "pee in the rice cooker" (a Chinese term meaning to spoil things for everybody else). Say Azalin needs a certain amount of negative planar energy and has arraigned his legions of high-level undead to wait so he can suck them dry. If the PCs go and assassinate the highest level undead before the machine takes them, their negative energy dissipates harmlessly, reducing the amount of energy he gets. [This is a neat inverse of Styrix's Rift Spanner machine, which runs similarly on positive planar energy leeched from the living.]

Alternatively they could destroy the machinery that powers the process, though that would probably mean their own deaths. Just purely arbitrarily, I'd say there might be "batteries" that store the life force, "focuses" that blast them into Azalin's chamber, and then a "transmitter" that projects Azalin's consciousness through a planar rift once he's a demilich. Disrupting one or all of these would result in the exact chain of events as per canon - Azalin does not become a demilich, and he remains dispersed and impotent around the demiplane.

Yes, yes, these are house rules. I'm just jamming a few ideas around. Don't mind me.

Logically, this brings up a few other questions that an enterprising DM probably ought to answer (or at least fudge constructively). Why would Azalin be any different from any other lich? Why would he be able to short circuit this lengthy process to become a demilich?

For a start, some liches probably don't want to become demiliches. True, it's a liberation of sorts, and the demilich form is very powerful, but liches may be loth to relinquish their mortal shells out of some ties to the material plane. Less sentimentally, perhaps liches, like Azalin, have plans that they still want to complete in the prime material plane and they've sunk too many costs into them to abandon them.

The second theory has a lot to recommend it. Azalin allows Darkon to decay slightly (or at least, saunter gently towards entropy) in the years before his intended transformation. Most obvious among these is the fact that he ignores the growing threat from Tavelia, the renegade Kargat vampiress, who clearly intends to supplant him in power. This is clearly in keeping with a man who has other things on his mind and doesn't intend to be around because he'll be gone. (Think a corporate CEO who allows the company to atrophy because he knows when the unflattering quarterly report comes out, he'll already be on a jet to assume his new CEO post at the competing firm.)

Another issue is why Azalin, of all liches, can accelerate his transformation so quickly. There are plenty of liches in other realms, but few who ever make the transformation, and all of them take millennia, megayears, or even aeons to accomplish it.

One possibility is that almost universally, liches are hated and shunned wherever they go by living creatures and civilization. Most liches are found in dungeons or remote areas because they cannot risk being found by civilized creatures who would quickly attempt to destroy them. This means they can remain a threat for almost indefinite periods of time. However, it also retards their researching abilities.

Azalin is a rare exception to this rule. He surrounds himself with people, and takes far greater pains than usual to fool them that he is alive. He even goes to the trouble of throwing masqued balls for them, offering them temptations that he himself is completely unable to enjoy (which include wine, women, and song, but probably also include more perverse things). It's entirely possible that Azalin has more live human innovators working under his command (whether they know about it or not) than almost any other lich in DnD canon.

Think of Azalin as a patron king, somewhat remote in his palace geographically, but still very much in the thick of things politically. Occasionally he may deign to do business with the toadying lord or baron, but by and large he is primarily interested in finding the diamond-in-the-rough spellcaster who can innovate, and whose talents can be bent to his aims. Armed with a network of these experts, Azalin can subsidize their research and reward them greatly, knowing that eventually they will die unless they become liches like him. (And those who do become liches usually do so under a vassalage arrangement.)

So even though Azalin is only a level 18 wizard lich, he has disproportionate purchasing power at his skeletal fingertips. Things that might take a single lich, working in solitude, several centuries to complete, may only take Azalin's streamlined research structure a few decades to achieve.

Depending on how much he knows about the demiplane, it may simply boil down to him building the magical equivalent of a Saturn VI rocket and launching himself into space with it. Of course, he might have to hope that the Dark Powers are in a good mood that day and let him out... (To which an appropriate analogy might be: if you were a kid and had spent the entire day shaking a cola can up and down until it had achieved explosive pressure, are you seriously telling me you wouldn't want to spray it at something just for laughs? )

The Dark Powers might let him out for a variety of reasons.

i. This reason is always valid if the DM wants: they're arbitrary. No more needs to be said.

ii. Possibly they've enjoyed his development into a really nasty demilich under their watch, and now it's time to let him go back and cause mayhem and destruction in the prime worlds again.

iii. Perhaps they can't stop him. This is arguably the most controversial one, requiring as it does a direct comparison of demiliches vs. dark powers and possibly even bringing the CR rating of gods into it as well. I do not have any comment on this save that it's DM prerogative.

There was going to be more but I'm sleepy. Maybe this should go into its own thread, as it's not really commenting on From the Shadows but on the Grim Harvest trilogy.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

FWIW, the fact that he works closely with so many living people might also help Azalin avoid slipping into a "time is on my side" mindset. By lich standards, he's actually quite young, and constant interaction with short-lived mortals most likely keeps him functioning -- plotting, ruling, launching new schemes and research projects -- at a pace which older, socially-isolated liches would consider hasty, if not reckless. Other liches can afford to stick their noses in some rare tome of arcane lore, and not look up again for ten, twenty, fifty years; Azalin's too much of a control-freak to leave his nation and underlings unwatched for long, so he stays actively engaged in the world rather than zoning out that way. Finding a quick-and-dirty way to attain demilichdom would be consistent with the breakneck (by lich standards) pace at which he gets things done.

VRGtL suggested that liches (or at least wizard-liches) typically try to kill one another when they meet up, and Azalin himself detests his own kind if they're not under his control. It could be that, in addition to hiding out from pesky adventurers and so on, liches who aren't the rulers of their own countries tend to remain in hiding so other liches can't attack them for their magical secrets. If their main rivalries are with other liches -- being who also operate on a slowed-down schedule -- that, too, would tend to make most of them less hurried in their habits than Azalin.


(BTW, that "pee in the rice cooker" phrase blows my mind. It's so gross, it's brilliant! )

[DocBeard]

The Dark Powers might let him out for a variety of reasons.

i. This reason is always valid if the DM wants: they're arbitrary. No more needs to be said.

In order to avoid Player Wage(Because there's nothing a player hates more than "That's just how it is. Suck it up."), you might wanna throw in an equally arbitrary reason.

Personally, I'd use, "By transforming into a demilich, Azalin has ceased being the Azalin the Dark Powers imprisoned. By altering his fundamental spiritual makeup, Azalin has essentially bought himself a second chance-and the risk of being trapped /again/, should his new career as a demilich prove interesting enough to the Dark Powers."