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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joshua Randall" data-source="post: 9563730" data-attributes="member: 7737">Commentary:Landor also had WIS 3, confirmed. Or maybe INT 3 depending upon which of those two ability scores you believe governs planning.With more up-to-date information, let's review.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Landor, already an archmage, founds the College of Arcane Sciences.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Beldon and Thayne separately arrive to study magic with Landor.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Landor delves into the ruins of Ancient Bhukod and recovers the Sceptre of Power and other unspecified magic items. He shows them to Thayne.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Thayne warns Landor that Beldon is evil. Landor ignores the warning.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Beldon makes pacts with demons and gets powerful enough to kick Thayne and Landor out of the college. (Or Thayne had already left after Landor ignored him — sources differ.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Landor, despite wielding the sceptre that can absorb magic from anything or anyone, and despite personal might greater than the gods, is helpless to combat Beldon.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">If Beldon gets his hands on the Sceptre of Bhukod, he'll have unlimited powuhhhhh and be able to spread his unspecified evil far and wide!</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">To prevent Beldon from getting the Sceptre, it must be hidden away somewhere Beldon can never find it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Landor stops off at Perth's druid grove and leaves his spellbooks there.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Landor and Rufyl sneak back into the tower, go into Landor's room, write a bunch of scrolls, make contact with a crypt thing, convince it to guard the sceptre, get teleported to the crypts, and leave the sceptre there, directly beneath the tower where Beldon now resides. Whew! Good thing Landor found a hiding place far away from Beldon’s demon-powered evil.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Landor then peaces out of this plane of existence while Rufyl goes off to wherever familiars go when their master doesn't need them.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">For a decade-and-a-half, Rufyl chills in null-space while Thayne and Perth chill at the grove. They allow Landor’s wife Marla and son Carr to grow up in poverty on the run from Archcleric Oram (remember him?) and potentially under threat from Beldon.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">From the perspective of Landor prior to his ceasing-to-exist: If all goes as planned, and despite the pointless lies from Thayne and Dalris, Carr will find Landor's letter, summon Rufyl, have Rufyl convince the crypt thing to transport Carr to the crypt, get the sceptre, and then take the sceptre to the… druid… grove.</li> </ol>FACEPALM.Landor's death could have been avoided if he simply stayed at the druid grove with Marla and Carr, where his spellbooks and the Sceptre of Power were both safe. Or "safe" in scare quotes. Because even though Landor had to sacrifice his own existence to hide the sceptre in the crypt with a thing, Landor's instructions to Carr are to relocate the sceptre from a hiding place that is impossible to get to without the crypt thing's permission to the druid grove that anyone can get to by normal means.This is a Mobius strip of bad plotting.I wonder if the originally intended plot of the book avoided some of the nonsense? The confusion around where the sceptre is hidden, who knows what, the characters' ages, people who get mentioned and then dropped -- all feel like symptoms of rewrites plus the constraints of the Choose Your Own Adventure format.---Dalris isn't the only PC in this game who "got really lucky" with her "random" dice rolls. Landor, when he originally cast Find Familiar, must have rolled a 15 on his d20 to get a pseudodragon. Further reading informs us that "special familiars are entitled to a saving throw versus magic when summoned by the spell, and if they succeed, they will ignore the spell, and NO familiar will be available that year to the caster" (emphasis in the original).I'm too lazy to look up the pseudodragon's save vs. magic, but suffice it to say that's another die roll that had to "luckily" go Landor's way for him to end up with Rufyl as his familiar.We can also deduce that Landor was "chaotic good, neutral, or neutral good" because otherwise he'd have had a brownie (lawful neutral or lawful good) or a quasit (chaotic evil or "neutral chaotic") or an imp (lawful evil or neutral evil) as a familiar.</blockquote>

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