Aestrix Ramblings and Q & A

[Aestrix]

Nope! There are no baby gods that die alone without a chance, they always show up nearish to people.

Desecration materials tend to be too specific to show up with something immediately awful, like water. Maeverine's desecration material (salt) is about as close as desecration materials can get to abundant.

[DanielH]

We have seen satellite domains across planar boundaries, but obviously that can't happen without interplanar help. Do gods ever get intraplanar satellite domains? Is there a reason not to do that?

Guess which part of Incandescence I am rereading now.

[Aestrix]

Yep, also a thing that happens, though it's not as common as it could be. Some gods find it uncomfortable to be in pieces, scattered in multiple disconnected places.

[DanielH]

I am somewhat surpassed that Cyrille is a gender-neutral name, but a cursory Wikipedia search indicates it is.

It seems there are more biologically female Revans than male ones; is there a reason for that or is it just random chance (or a faulty observation)?

[Aestrix]

Random chance and probably my own internal biases, I tend to think of the Revan template in a male sense, so I probably overcompensate to try to keep it even. Cyrille in particular needed to be female due to plot.

Revans don't require a completely gender neutral name, as long as they can parse it as gender neutral enough for their own purposes.

[Kaylin]

Are there any rules or patterns to the names of Arabek gods? If I'm creating one as an instance of an existing template, how do I convert their name/name attractors into a god name?

[Aestrix]

It's sort of hard to explain my weird aesthetic for Arabek god names - it's less like there's a set of rules, and more like there's a vaguely consistent aesthetic sense. They're usually long and a little vowel heavy, with clear, strong syllables. Let me just get you a list of previous Arabek god names.

Raezenoth
Perinixu
Tisvetaia
Varkalosix
Cartalomir
Kirovalin
Isalian
Ealasiva
Viokai
Maeverine
Ellayania
Sivuari

[DanielH]

Is Adventurer!Veron from any setting in particular, or just a generic D&D-like place?

Also, at one point, he and Melian both agreed that each of a long list of potions was less useful than a healing potion. One of them was Protection from Evil. Why is that less useful? Especially given it also affords some mental protection (at least in many settings) and Sauron is an illusionist, I would expect it to be very useful.

[Aestrix]

He's from the Neverwinter Nights series, which is in itself set in the Forgotten Realms. I try to stay vaguely faithful to the games, and am less faithful to the setting but still make the attempt, but I focus more on what I find interesting. I don't think I'd want to write for, say, Elminster, for example.

He's not sure how well it interacts with a foreign magic system, can't really safely test it considering how it works, and doesn't think it scales as well as healing potions when dealing with such a large group of armies that primarily fight orcs. They'd be really great against evil Maiar, but how often do Maiar show up in a battle, and would the time invested by Melian in learning new potions be worth the loss of her time spent doing other things, like making healing potions? Especially when they have an adventurer who has proven he actually can go toe to toe with Sauron. Veron doesn't want to make everyone super reliant on him, but he would like to have some degree of specialization present. He'll probably recommend protection from evil as the second thing Melian should work on after healing potions, but right now it's not a guarantee. It might turn out to be a big fantastic waste of Melian's very precious time, so he's not prioritizing that first.

[DanielH]

Does that include the Forgotten Realms afterlife situation? I might prefer my soul be eaten by a sword owned by a relatively good person, over what the wiki seems to imply would happen to evil cultists.