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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5727364" data-attributes="member: 4937">The BBEG of my current campaign is simultaneously the most heroic and most villainous character I've created (at least IME).PCs KEEP OUT!!![spoiler]Keeropus is the first archmage on the coast of the sea of storms to be born in more than a century. He's from a somewhat oppressed minority in the region, the Tumesi, and he became fascinated with the heritage of his own people and became convinced that it was the Drestrian invaders and not his the native Tumesi who were the true bad guys - unlike the way the accepted histories portrayed it.  In studying the Tumesi heritage, he became obsessed with one of their obsessions, and that was achieving true immortality without dependence upon the gods.  (It may help to know that the old Tumesi empires were ruled by lich kings.)  In the process, he uncovered a large body of forgotten necromantic lore, and one of the things that the Tumesi lore masters were studying was the problem of why it was much easier for mortals to master control over negative elemental energy than positive elemental energy.  Obviously, control over positive elemental energy - that is to say life - is more desirable than mastery over death (however useful that be) because with control of life you could actually create rather than only mock and destroy.  What a true loremaster therefore aspired to was not necromancy, but vivamancy!  One of the more convincing conjectures of the Tumesi lore masters, at least to Keeropus, was that the Gods were blocking access to positive elemental energy, since spells that should have worked mysteriously didn't.  The Tumesi conjectured that the gods were doing so to ensure dependence upon them for acts of healing.  This outraged Keeropus, who threw in his lot with a radical sect of heretics called Kelternists, that believed that mankind would be better off without the gods and that, and that the gods could be slain if people could be convinced to stop believing in them.  Keeropus successful convinced that cultists that the key to this last trick would be to raise up men into the position of gods, able to provide healing and resurrection at will.  The people would then see how they had been tricked into accepting poor wages and poor scraps from the table and would abandon the gods.  Keeropus's plan is both elegant and complex.  Since he can't get access to the positive elemental plane directly (its blocked by some sort of magical barrier), he'll bring a portion of the positive elemental plane directly into the world.  This is something that the gods have done before, when they made the sun following the God's war.  Keeropus proposes therefore to make a new artificial sun, the strongest available source of positive elemental energy, under the control of man, and thereby ushering in a new age of perfect light, eternal life, free of disease and able to heal all injuries.   Making the sun is relatively trivial, albiet enormously expensive.  The real trick is igniting it.  How do you fill a sun with positive elemental energy when you can't control it in the first place?  The answer is that Keeropus knows that positive elemental energy is attracted to negative, and Keeropus has designed a negative energy accumulator of massive capacity.  When fully charged, it will rip through the viel to the astral plane where it will create an artificial stark - a lightning bolt between the negative and positive elemental planes.  The positive stark will be able ignite the new artificial sun, freeing mankind from the tyranny of the gods.  At least, that's the theory.  Keeropus has it all worked out, and nothing can go wrong... except possibly those meddlesome heroes that Keeropus knows the gods will raise up to thwart him.  But Keeropus is clever; far more clever than the simpletons chasing him, and he's confident he'll can win the race.   Keeropus is actually, in my mind, a rather tragically noble character with good intentions.  The world sucks, he knows it, and he wants to make a better one.  And, as a monotheist myself, I sympathize with his distaste for my pantheon of quarelsome petty Greek inspired dieties, who, as far as I'm concerned really aren't worth worshiping.  The problem is that he's willing to burn the world down to try to save it, and probably will.  He's also not nearly as clever as he thinks he is, as he has neglected to consider that he might not be the only one who wants to burn the world or that not everyone who says 'don't touch' is motivated by selfish reasons.[/spoiler]</blockquote>

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