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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 2451712" data-attributes="member: 3051">Hmm, the obvious problem with this is that if heroes of the past trapped thousands of worms, why would the heroes of the present be so singularly unable to trap the remaining two?  Were the heroes back then all so far into Epic levels?  Were they all proxies of gods, of a type that can't be done now that the world is alive?  Did it just take tens of thousands of them?  Or all of the above?Also, doesn't this conflict with the history you've already established?  The worms killed off the last living creature (whose cry attracted the gods), so if it wasn't the gods themselves who banished the worms, then where'd the heroes come from?  All the non-worms on the world were dead/undead.  Or was the seer who told the DoD that story just wrong?Finally, WHY would the gods choose to remake the world as "alive" following the defeat of the original worms?  It apparently didn't give it any defense against a resurgence of the worms, and in fact it makes it harder to defend against the worms since it prevents the gods from setting foot on Spira directly.Maybe it was just the only way they could do it.  The world had been damaged too much to rebuild in the normal way, so they had to imbue it with life.  (Thought: Is there any way of making it be that the world was directly bonded with a god?  Not many were around at that time, of course.)Maybe it had other benefits; for instance, maybe the humans before that point were absolutely reliant on the gods, but the living planet allowed them to be self-sufficient for all of their day-to-day things, a sort of twist on the whole Tree of Knowledge thing.  On a similar note, maybe that process of making it alive is what linked it to the outer planes, allowing the dead to pass on to an afterlife.Or, maybe it DID give the world an anti-worm defense, which Elder figured out a way around.  He was imprisoned for a LONG time, after all, I'm sure he spend some of it thinking.  In fact, maybe that very defense is what he's twisted to protect the eggs at the core of the world; the shield that was supposed to keep the worms out is now keeping anyone from getting to them.  Of course, the question of how the worms got through remains, but this is where you can tie in some ritual that'd require a worm to sacrifice himself if you want to dispose of Elder.----------Put it all together:The worms destroyed the links that connected Spira to the rest of the universe when they first arrived, so that no one would disrupt their feeding.  They then destroyed all of the people of the world, but their spirits were trapped on the dead world, powerless to do anything about the worms now rampaging across the surface.  The gods show up, and see this.  They imbue the spirits with a sizeable fraction of their own power, giving them the ability to fight the worms one final time.Hundreds of thousands of warrior ghosts, raised to Epic-level power by the gods, throw themselves at the worms on the surface of the dead world.  Most are destroyed before they can land a single blow, but their purpose isn't to WIN, they're just buying time while the spellcasters complete a ritual spell.  They hold, just long enough.The spell that's cast can simply be described as an outright rejection of That Which Should Not Be.  Everything on the world that shouldn't be there is affected; those that successfully resist are banished, those that fail are destroyed.  Elder and his mate manage to survive through sheer force of will and magical ability, but the rest are locked away.Once this is complete, the gods raise the world to life, to allow it to heal and to restore its connections to the planes.  This allows the spirits to pass on to the afterlife, and allows for the modern races to be created.Agar gets a vision.  An army of glowing spirits, futilely throwing themselves at an oncoming rush of worms.  Most spirits are batted aside without effort, but enough get through to impede the worms before being destroyed.  Just before the worms reach a circle of chanting spirits, a blinding white flash goes off that vaporizes the ones nearby, and yanks the rest off to their prison.I just like the idea of an army of undead saving the world; what would Malachite think?  And if you really wanted to, you could have the players try to track down one of the surviving spirits in his afterlife... of course, since they didn't worship the gods, the survivors wouldn't have gone to the usual places.This gives plenty of reasons why you couldn't repeat the ritual in the modern day.  For one, realize how many planar travelers pass through a world on a given day?  Anything that banished all non-natives would get rid of far more than two worms.  Gith monks, phoenixes bonded to souls, angels that protect old priests, mercanes who've set up shop in the Underdark... there's a lot of traffic between planes in the modern day, especially among the most powerful.Second, there simply isn't an army comparable to the spirits.  Now that they know what to watch for, no one could protect the spellcasters from Elder and his mate long enough.  (Corollary: if Elder and his mate die in the process of birthing their swarm, you COULD pull it off.)Finally, the gods had to give some of their power to the spirits... power they didn't get back from all the ones that were destroyed.  The gods are weaker now than they were then, and if they were to try that again, they'd weaken themselves even further.  Plus, some of the more evil gods would choose not to contribute, so that they could take over afterwards.  While the good gods care about Spira, they don't care THAT much.</blockquote>

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