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In Which Korvosans Rally & The Dead Envy The Living
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You infer from context and from snippets of muttered monologue that she wants to make plans to periodically be inside an antimagic field, and should maybe modify memory herself immediately on exiting so the entity reading her mind and sometimes controlling her actions doesn't know what she's doing in there.

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...Is there a spell to modify one's memory?

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Knowledge (arcana).

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39.

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It's a bard-spell only. If you found a bard that could cast it, though, you could forever after emulate it with limited wish.

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Hm. Now isn't that something to feel a pang of hope about and never ever think on again!

"Hello there, small blue wizard! Are you enjoying my antimagic effect?"

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She startles and stammers and says 'oh is this your field I guess it is um you charged for rooms in the mansions I guess the Abadaran thing would be to pay you for letting me use your field but actually I'm not Abadaran and actually I'm mad at you and think you might um ANYWAY how is your day going?'

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It's had its peaks and troughs! How has yours been?

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Um, likewise peaky and troughy, though, she did level up, um, twice, which was cool.

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Oh, and what circle are you now?

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First, still, but she's getting close to second. She can feel it.

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Ah, to be first-circle again, excited to learn spells out of library books~. 

Oh, but there's no library here, now, is there? And it'd be monstrous to make a newly second-circle wizard make do with whatever spells they can scavenge! So if you do make second-circle, bother brother Togomor about it; he's not so tight-fisted about sharing spells as your Acadamae masters! 

Now, he does have a word of advice for her, from one wizard to another. 

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...O...kay...? What's the advice?

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Kill yourself. 

Right now, in this antimagic field.

You don't have a clone, right? And if they try to raise you, you can just refuse the call. :)

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...Togomor thinks but elects not say. 

Instead he'll say something trite like that one of the most important skills a wizard can cultivate is comfort with cognitive dissonance. He thinks it helps you level up!

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...I'll take that under advisement...?

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While the people work, wild rumors fly.

Melyia is ostensibly a cousin of Glorio's from the Chellish side of the family. The burgeoning consensus is that she's actually a Vudrani monster that Lord Arkona picked up in a visit to that country. Or perhaps an ancestor of his, and she's been bound to the secretive family's service. Or the Arkonas are all fiends - it'd certainly explain some things!

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Ileosa nee Arvanxi is thinking about Hell.

Specifically, how to avoid it - she's not a total rube.

Lawful Evil is the most effective alignment because only Lawful efforts scale, and Good and Neutral are defined as how far you deviate from optimal play. 

And it is easy to let one's positive disposition towards Asmodeanism - which brings security to war-torn nations and sets rulers above men and which yokes the masses together so they can create great works and which is on a personal level the most effective way to get the things you want - it's easy to let one's positive disposition towards Asmodeanism slosh around carelessly and muddy one's terror and loathing of Hell. 

Other people make that mistake.

Not her, though, or at least not since she was, like, thirteen.

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As an antidote to whatever nonsense they teach in Wescrani churches these days, Aberian Arvanxi sat his daughter down in front of a scrying mirror and showed her the new arrivals in Avernus, and the very old.

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So!

If you prefer not to be on the receiving end of Hell's worst ministrations, here are your options as Ileosa knows them, with attendant benefits and costs, in order from the most to least viable.

 

1. Be so incredibly loyal to Hell or spectacularly wicked that Hell rewards you in order to incentivize evil behavior in others.

Pros: Presumably you kind of wanted to do this anyway.

Cons: It doesn't fucking work. People will tell you that this works. They are lying, and actually it doesn't. Probably throughout history this has worked for exactly enough people for you to hope that it will work for you, while not working for enough people that it actually includes you.

2. Bargain in advance for Hell not to break you utterly.

Pros: You can combine this with other options. 

Cons: Where to start. So, for starters, many people think that they're competent to pull this off. Fewer actually swing it! And then obviously Hell isn't going to pay for anything that they wouldn't get either way, so you've got to have something you can offer. And then at the end of it all, "not break you utterly" is kind of a low bar, don't you think?

3. Become undead.

Pros: Well, it's better than dying.

Cons: All forms of undeath have their own drawbacks, and there's the public relations angle, and it messes with your personality, and Hell gets you in the end. Still, you could get centuries this way. Ileosa makes sure to enjoy sunny days, because she's been operating for years on the assumption that she's probably going to get vampirized eventually.

4. Get your soul destroyed.

Pros: Better than Hell if you don't negotiate your treatment.

Cons: You get your fucking soul destroyed.

5. Get Axis by worshiping a LN god or Norgorber. 

If a follower of Gorum or Calistira was evil in ways that the deity approved, then yes, those followers do go to the appropriate deity's realm on Elysium. If they were evil in ways that were inappropriate, they'll probably go to the Abyss instead. As for who gets to decide what's appropriate or not... that's pretty much left to Pharasma (perhaps with some consultation with the other deity in question).

- creative director James Jacobs

Pros: Popular understanding is that if you're the follower of a god and follow Their strictures and see the world the way They see it, you go to Their divine domain when you die. It's commonly assumed that you have to be within an alignment step of Them, but maybe it's just that it's rare for someone to be aligned enough with one and not within an alignment step.

Cons: Being a devout Abadaran or Norgorberite isn't necessarily easier or less restrictive than making LN the normal way, though, at least if you're not a half-fiend or chromatic dragon or something else that's even more innately Evil than humans are. And while clerics know that they're approved of by their god because otherwise they wouldn't be clerics, non-clerics have no easy way of telling. And the final judgement is made in the Boneyard, by someone who doesn't like it when you try and cheat the system. And it conflicts with pre-negotiating accommodations in Hell.

6. Have an alignment other than LE.

Pros: Ehhhhh.

Cons: It's really hard, and who knows whether it'll even work for you. Your life will be less pleasant in the meantime, and probably shorter. You're letting down your family. You're letting down your country. You're letting down your celebrity crush Queen Abrogail Thrune the Second. The alignment you can see with spells isn't a guarantee of which afterlife you'll get. They have a whole court system for deciding that. And trusting your fate to the courts conflicts with pre-negotiating accommodations in Hell. And none of the afterlives are as fun as being alive on the Prime Material. 

7. Find some way to live forever.

Pros: She knows it's been done before. And she wants it more than anything.

Cons: Mostly it's been done before by, like, powerful wizards. She doesn't know the secret - or a secret - to immortality, not yet. But she's young yet, and maybe she can find one in time...

8. Reincarnate, apparently??

Pros: None of the afterlives seem as much fun as being alive on the Prime Material. Unless you have to live some sort of ascetic lifestyle to reincarnate, in which case Axis is probably more fun.

Cons: ???

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Spill the beans, Arkona?

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Alright, story time!

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Without frills, if you can; keep in mind that we're on a clock.

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AT THE BEGINNING OF TIME, ALL WAS DARKNESS. THEN - THERE WAS LIGHT! This was the first day.

And after the first day, came the second day. 

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...

 

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