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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 1527758" data-attributes="member: 1210">The Simulacrum WarsThis is as good a place as any... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The Simulacrum Wars, eh?  OK... here's a quick attempt at an overview...The first one to figure out the trick was Marius, the chronomancer the high-level party has dealt with in both Agents of Chaos and To War Against Felenga.  A lot of the details of exactly what happened still aren't pinned down; I fill in the blanks as I need them a lot of the time.  (For instance, he may have been clued in to the trick by an empowered simulacrum from the future; who knows?)  Anyhow, in 3.0, empower spell would increase a simulacrum's power and a multi-empowered sim might even be more powerful than the creator.  Sims are normally under the complete control of their creators, so Marius thought he'd stumbled upon a brilliant way of making ultrapowerful, fully-controlled other selves.Unfortunately, a simulacrum becomes less and less controlled as it gains power.  If it becomes 100% as powerful as the caster (in terms of casting ability) it gains autonomy.  Unfortunately, Marius didn't realize this at first; and the first few uberMarii that he created hid the fact at first.  (I just noticed an interesting corollary to this ruling- a caster who gets level drained to no higher than the sim's hd will lose control of his simulacrum!)Once Marius realized what he'd done, he tried to destroy the sims he'd already created.  They escaped.Now a peculiar thing happened.  A sim has no capacity to grow in power or experience; but there's no reason one can't burn xp to the point where it's just 1 xp from losing a level.  So reasoning, I figured that a couple of the Marii could make new, even better Marii, and a series of jumps in Marius-power ensued.  Meanwhile, another of the simulacra, using a fairly convoluted plan, traveled around to a bunch of other powerful wizards to convince them to make multi-empowered simulacra themselves.  Let's call him Marius I.  First he made a simulacrum that was less powerful than himself- it posed as the real Marius (let's call this sim Marius II), and Marius I took the identity of a perfectly controlled multi-empowered sim of Marius II.  Marius II showed many powerful casters the trick and goaded several into trying it themselves (all while under the control of Marius I).  Soon there were ultra-powerful sims of a number of powerful casters all over; many Marii (since they seemed prone to use what xp reserves they had to increase their number) and at least one faux Estelias have been sighted (she was sighted in the Politics of Tirchond thread).  Also, we've seen a simulacrum of Arion the Archmage.  There are several others, but I don't think the pcs have run across any others.  (They've been away from where most of that action has been happening.)An important point is that not all the simulacra are allied; some are even opposed to each other.  There is definitely at least one major group that wants to destroy their creators (and in some cases, to take their places); there are also groups and individuals that want to protect and assist their progenitors (usually not the first-generation sims, these ones were usually spawned by other, empowered sims but they look back at their originator (by which I mean Marius, Arion, or whoever) with fondness.  There's also a group that has sprung up that wants to liberate the enslaved constructs and sims, and has developed a spell that gives such a thing free will from its controller.Hmmm... nothing else I can think of at the moment... various permutations of the Simulacrum Wars are percolating throughout the campaign (mostly unnoticed).</blockquote>

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