NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Taraxia" data-source="post: 2964074" data-attributes="member: 42426">The ogre-mage wasn't a great master manipulator. Any monster with sorcerer levels, as people point out, could do as well or better. He has _charm person_, not _dominate person_ -- his lousy DC 14 charm spell is good for *single interactions* with people to bluff his way around in civilization, but you're not going to be able to create a whole history for your fake identity and make a claim to the throne of the kingdom on that and the ability to vanish in a puff of smoke. The ogre-mage would be a vampire if, like a vampire, there were something he could *do* once he snuck his way into your castle, like bite you and slowly turn you into another one of himself (while keeping you just as young and beautiful as you'd ever been). Instead, he can creep up on you in bed and... blast you into a frozen corpse. How evocative.The Japanese oni isn't meant to be a Bram-Stoker-like vampire figure, certainly. Oni roam the bounds of civilization unpredictably wreaking havoc and destruction wherever they go. (And where are you getting that this was the *flavor* of the original ogre-mage? As Mearls pointed out, you open up the MM and you see a picture of a big dude flying around with a greatsword, and you encounter these guys out in the wilderness with a bunch of regular ogres around them.)The ogre-mage was originally written to be a smarter, cleverer ogre. That's how it's pictured in illustrations, that's the reason it wanders with parties of ogres in random encounters, that's how people picture them. Have any fantasy novels actually had the new handsome prince turn out to be an ogre-mage? Is this a common trope within fantasy?</blockquote>

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