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[Bauglir]

Yeah, simplest thing right now is that he is aware that it's not as simple as just casting the spell, is aware Roy doesn't know that, and has no intention of actually following through - but it does a damn good job of convincing Roy that he probably is still basically Durkon.

[DJ]

Wouldn't a cleric that's high enough level to cast Resurrection know a thing or two about vampires and souls, though? That's a pretty big of getting his cover blown just for the sake of making his cover a little bit deeper.

[Bauglir]

That is a good point - ultimately I'd say it probably relies on the setting. Resurrection is, what, a 5th level spell? We have no frame of reference for how hard it is to know how vampires work, but he may be making an educated gamble that the temple almost certainly has clerics who can do a resurrection, but is very unlikely to have clerics who know how vampires work. Whatever his plan for getting out of it is, I'd say it will likely convince Roy to give up on the idea entirely - which could be important enough down the line to be worth the risk.

Or he could be relying on something he knows about this specific town, pulled from Durkon's memories (or possibly it's secretly a temple of Hel or something) which we're not privy to just yet. This is a longshot, though.

He could always have rolled a natural 1 on a Wis check, though. Even Cleric Wisdom can get results under 10 on a bad enough roll.

[Lord Shonus]

The best theory I've seen is that Hel knows, and has told her High Priest, that the gnomes of Tinkertown have no clerics of high enough level to cast Ressurection (which is a fairly high-level spell, and the lower-level Raise Dead doesn't work on people that have been vamped or otherwise undeaded). Thus, the HpoH can continue to trick Roy into thinking that he's really Durkon, further marginalizing Belkar's attempts to convince him otherwise.

[Darvi]

The cast needs to learn that this is still a PnP-based webcomic, and not some sort of RP-VG :V

[Akura]

Resurrection is, what, a 5th level spell?

7th level. I think Roy might know about having to destroy the vampire before resurrecting it, since he shot down Belkar's suggestion of staking Durkulon for the duration of the trip, on account of him being useful and that he wouldn't consider it until a method of resurrection is right in front of them.

[IronyOwl]

Wouldn't a cleric that's high enough level to cast Resurrection know a thing or two about vampires and souls, though? That's a pretty big of getting his cover blown just for the sake of making his cover a little bit deeper.

This has been my more general gripe for ages. You'd figure if vampires are common enough for everybody to know about them and their obvious traits/weaknesses, it'd be reasonably well known just what they are.

That said, Durkon himself was among the ignorant, despite personally casting Resurrection on Roy a fair while ago. So apparently in this case the answer is "No" or "Not necessarily," unless Durkon's condition really is a unique case for some reason.

[Elephant Parade]

Wouldn't a cleric that's high enough level to cast Resurrection know a thing or two about vampires and souls, though? That's a pretty big of getting his cover blown just for the sake of making his cover a little bit deeper.

This has been my more general gripe for ages. You'd figure if vampires are common enough for everybody to know about them and their obvious traits/weaknesses, it'd be reasonably well known just what they are.

That said, Durkon himself was among the ignorant, despite personally casting Resurrection on Roy a fair while ago. So apparently in this case the answer is "No" or "Not necessarily," unless Durkon's condition really is a unique case for some reason.

Maybe this is a special case?

If I remember correctly, the other vampire said something about practically being a different person, meaning that he probably wasn't literally a different person, since he had no reason to lie.

[IronyOwl]

Maybe this is a special case?

If I remember correctly, the other vampire said something about practically being a different person, meaning that he probably wasn't literally a different person, since he had no reason to lie.

You'd think not, though his assertion that "who he was centuries ago" is different than who he is now, as though he'll lose his memories or personality or something, might counteract that.

Also in favor of special-case is that NegaDurkon didn't seem very good at being a person, whereas Snakey was. If that was the same kind of negative energy plane spirit as NegaDurkon, it's apparently one that had become either very accustomed to its new shell or was incredibly good at faking it for murderously long periods of time.


On the other hand, we have no idea why he'd be different, and there's Belkar's speech about how people don't change instantly. The former I guess could have something to do with the sunlight protection spell; that does seem like the kind of thing any spellcasting vampire would want and eventually be able to get, so maybe it's only possible through divine intervention which has some interesting connotations for vampiric spawn. I wouldn't tend to think he'd have done that knowingly or on purpose, owing to the previous issues with being pretty good at acting like a person and seeming to like Durkon a lot personally.

Belkar's speech troubles me, though, because it feels a bit like an author rant to me. It wouldn't surprise me if that was one of the original or major reasons why he felt the need to split off Person and VampirePerson into two entirely separate entities. Though at this point it might be worth mentioning that I don't like or respect Rich much, so maybe that's just not giving him the benefit of the doubt.

[Lord Shonus]

This is not a special case. All vampires work this way.

There is absolutely zero difference between Malack and Durkon's vampirizations, with the sole exception that Hel made the spirit sitting in Durkon's head while Nergal made the one that was sitting in Malack's. Hel is able to put that spirit into Durkon's body because of the physical vampirization process that Malack enacts on Durkon's corpse, which opens a door to Negative Energy and traps Durkon's spirit inside it. Which would also be true of any other vampire created from a person who fell under the Northern Pantheon's domain, though she wouldn't take a personal interest in just any person because they wouldn't be a powerful cleric.

Hel does not have rightful dominion over Durkon's soul as part of her normal assignment of dishonored souls, however, because Durkon did in fact die in battle. She got involved because she is also, separately, the Northern deity of undeath, and one of her "duties" is making the evil spirits for all Northern vampires. The vampirization process basically jammed up the normal disposition of Durkon's soul by trapping it inside the undead body. Where Durkon's actual soul ends up will not be determined until/unless it is freed. It's a like a naturally occurring Trap the Soul spell.

Nothing that happens with vampires in this comic can be extrapolated to work similarly with other undead. All types of undead work differently, that's why they are different types in the first place. Xykon is still Xykon.

All of Malack's dialogue regarding who he is/was should be viewed through the lens of me not wanting to spoil the scene from #946. Some of what he says is metaphorical and all of it is deliberately ambiguous, because I was consciously trying to make you think one thing while another thing was actually true. As a rule of thumb, it is not in my interest to lock down the metaphysics of things if I don't have to, so don't expect that I will have characters exposition How Things Work just to clear up your confusion.

Likewise, any assumptions that characters in the comic know or understand the details of how this process occurs on a detailed internal level should be thrown out the window. They don't. Being a vampire is super-rare; being returned to life after being a vampire so you can share the logistics of how it worked from your point of view in such a way that it entered a general body of knowledge that people would have learned about in the course of their education is simply not something that has ever occurred.

I'm sure there are more byzantine arguments going around that I'm missing, but really, this isn't as complicated as most of you are making it. There is only one way that vampirization works, and it overrides the natural order of things, including where souls go. That's why everyone says things like, "That's against the natural order of things!" about it. However, Hel is not breaking the rules of vampirization itself at all.

[IronyOwl]

So portions of the dialogue only make sense from a retroactive author's perspective, he has no idea how anything in his own comic works unless he absolutely needs to and even then he's not going to explain it, and vampires are common/famous enough for everyone to know what they are and how they work but also rare/mysterious enough that nobody knows how they work internally, except for that they "go against the natural order of things" even though the reasons why are the things nobody knows about.

Nice to see my faith in The Giant was, at the least, not totally misplaced.

[Lord Shonus]

The rules the Giant is using for Vampirism are almost as old as the comic is, being published in Libris Mortis in 2004. Nothing in the comic has contradicted it in any way, and the very speech you criticize as "making sense only from a retroactive author's perspective" was figured out by a large portion of the fanbase within minutes of the strip being posted. In other words, I call bullshit on your criticism.

[IronyOwl]

Those "rules" are labeled as a theory and never mentioned or implied again anywhere else, even when explicitly talking about undead motivations/outlooks or player characters becoming undead. And in fact, he is contradicting them, since the "good souls trapped in evil body" option explicitly mentions said soul being slowly perverted to evil by its new guest, which doesn't seem to be happening here at all. The book also says nothing whatsoever about vampirism (or undead in general) being so incredibly rare that nobody knows anything about it even if they've got +~20 to Knowledge: Religion.

Not that it matters a whole lot, since if he's using it in his world he gets to take flak for it being dumb, official or not.

As for the speech, I don't doubt a lot of people figured out a lot of things, and I don't doubt most of them were wrong. But we don't really need to consider how obvious it was to various portions of the fanbase, because we have his own words that it doesn't make sense unless you consider what he was trying to do. If it made perfect sense, he wouldn't have to adjust our expectations to the proper perspective for understanding his artistic intent, because it'd make perfect sense. You could look back and say "Oh! I get it. That makes sense." Instead, on looking back you "should... view [it] through the lens of me not wanting to spoil the scene from #946."

[My Name is Immaterial]

Rich is awesome.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Just egotistical grandstanding from where I'm standing. You don't have to go to twitter every time you do something moral.