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<blockquote data-quote="John Dallman" data-source="post: 9089698" data-attributes="member: 6999616">We now know what happened, and a fair bit of why. The One True Church of Evil, a religion confined to Avalon, has been in possession of the essential principle of evil for over a year. They acquired it in an auction run by demons, and the price they offered was killing 15% of the world's population within a year. They failed to deliver on that, owing to annoying adventurers, but had retained control of the principle. It was incarnated in an illithid who was the chief priest of the religion. That was quite odd, because illithids are never seen in Avalon, except for that one. It was that chief priest who nailed Xalazar to the gate, because while he was a&nbsp; member of the church, he'd been attracting far too much attention. That was a fair point: investigating his activities has revealed a network of hidden temples. The chief priest's operatic villainy has also been attracting too much attention, to the point that a bunch of much higher-level adventurers showed up at one of the hidden temple sites, killed the guardians and witnessed the assassination of the chief priest by his juniors. They also captured a priest and an associated witch alive. The corpses of church members are normally unresponsive to Speak with Dead or raising, and that's still the case with the ones from this fight. The living captives are being kept unconscious under really high-quality medical attention while their memories are read in fine detail for years back. And yes, we're alert to the possibility the information in them might be planted false leads. The priest's mind has clearly been significantly modified, and he was, after all, serving an illithid for at least a few years.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="John Dallman, post: 9089698, member: 6999616"] We now know what happened, and a fair bit of why. The One True Church of Evil, a religion confined to Avalon, has been in possession of the essential principle of evil for over a year. They acquired it in an auction run by demons, and the price they offered was killing 15% of the world's population within a year. They failed to deliver on that, owing to annoying adventurers, but had retained control of the principle. It was incarnated in an illithid who was the chief priest of the religion. That was quite odd, because illithids are never seen in Avalon, except for that one. It was that chief priest who nailed Xalazar to the gate, because while he was a member of the church, he'd been attracting far too much attention. That was a fair point: investigating his activities has revealed a network of hidden temples. The chief priest's operatic villainy has [i]also[/i] been attracting too much attention, to the point that a bunch of much higher-level adventurers showed up at one of the hidden temple sites, killed the guardians and witnessed the assassination of the chief priest by his juniors. They also captured a priest and an associated witch [i]alive[/i]. The corpses of church members are normally unresponsive to Speak with Dead or raising, and that's still the case with the ones from this fight. The living captives are being kept unconscious under really high-quality medical attention while their memories are read in fine detail for years back. And yes, we're alert to the possibility the information in them might be planted false leads. The priest's mind has clearly been significantly modified, and he was, after all, serving an illithid for at least a few years. [/QUOTE]

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