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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 1163564" data-attributes="member: 3051">I've been thinking more about the Agar thing.  It's just too typical that he's the Chosen One, descendant of some great person, yadda yadda yadda.  What I'd love to see is it have nothing to do with HIM.  The marriage was arranged when he was a toddler, after all.  This is going to be a bit long.********The Devils and Demons think long-term.  Setting up plans that take centuries to come to fruition is nothing big to them.  These Devils decide they might eventually need to grab more of the Outlands, or attack Sigil, or who knows what.  They may not even know, they just plan for contingencies; they saw Divinations that said a time of great upheaval would be coming at around this point (Imbindarla's death), so they were setting up plans.  Of course their timing was off, but those divinations were hundreds of years old, and they didn't miss by much.  When the Modrons started marching early they figured it was all starting, and accelerated their plans (pushing for the marriage earlier than they had intended, among other things).So, they figure that having a village in the Outlands full of people friendly to their cause is a good thing, right?  Enter Agar's hometown.  It's picked as a target for "acquisition" for reasons of position, resources, etc., nothing to do with Agar individually.  If the Blood War spills over into the other planes (and Sigil) as a result of all the big disasters, they hoped to have a nice forward base already prepared.The first step in the acquisition was to get some influence in the town.  Since the Halflings here favor arranged marriages, they decide to find the richest, most powerful family in town that's gullible enough to agree to an arranged marriage without knowing the bride's family.  Enter Agar's idiot father; he's not the richest man in town, but he was fairly influential and extremely gullible.He agreed to an engagement to the daughter of a merchant family that had just arrived in town, after they offered to give him a cut of their business.  Over the years he's made a nice bit of money from this his share in this import/export business (not knowing that his business partners are actually fiends), which has given the fiends even more influence in the town.  Agar's father has also helped several other new arrivals (more Fiends) set up businesses in town, be elected to office, and so on.The culmination of this effort was to be the marriage to Agar.  In their original plan, he'd just have been a rich Halfling boy who wouldn't know the truth until he saw his kids were Half-Fiends.  By that point, they'd have their claws (figuratively) so deep into the town that it'd be impossible to get them out.What they didn't count on was his magical talent; it isn't very common in Halflings, after all, and casters of his level are even more rare.  It was bad enough when he was wandering the planes by himself; he kept increasing in power, even though he was going a bit nuts.  Then he joined the DoD, and who'd have thought he'd have as friends several living saints who chat with deities on a daily basis?So, the devils realized that there's zero chance of him making it through the wedding without realizing what the bride was.  Instead of allowing a public scene (err, brawl) at the wedding, they chose to tell him the truth beforehand, point out that he has no alternative thanks to the contract, and hope that he realizes it's in his family's best interests to play along.  It wasn't their original plan, it's just damage control.Although, I realized as I was writing this, it's too similar to what happened to Alix, and retreading old plotlines is bad.  But you get the basic idea: make the plot have nothing to do with Agar as an individual or his family line as a whole, make it just be that when he was a toddler, his family was simply the most convenient mark in a more widespread plan.  Besides, it was fun to write all that.</blockquote>

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