[Midnight] Defeating the Shadow

[Jürgen Hubert]

Destroying the mirrors is a pretty nasty choice, especially since they are normally erected within large communities. Yes, you can hurt the Shadow this way, but do you really want to kill off hundreds or thousands of people while doing so? Sure, many of them will die sooner or later under the influence of the Shadow anyway - but do you really want their deaths on your conscience?

 

[DaveMage]

Destroying the mirrors is a pretty nasty choice, especially since they are normally erected within large communities. Yes, you can hurt the Shadow this way, but do you really want to kill off hundreds or thousands of people while doing so? Sure, many of them will die sooner or later under the influence of the Shadow anyway - but do you really want their deaths on your conscience?

What an excellent conundrum!

 

[Ry]

But do you really want their deaths on your conscience?

Better than having their damnation on my conscience.

 

[grimwell]

...but do you really want their deaths on your conscience?

This would be the perfect setting for an 'evil' campaign. The Players can play evil characters, but not evil characters who belong to the Shadow. They are still rebels (the Shadow isn't their kind of evil, or they want to replace it). A great way to make a party of strange bedfellows who wouldn't normally work together. The greater evil gets them to work together long enough to do some damage. Then causing the death of many people in one stroke is just a small detail.

 

[Ry]

Wow... just had a great idea... or at least, I think it's great.

Rather than the mythology as described, have Izrador be the "God who should not have been" - and who took out the Norse pantheon. You can do all of this great "the world is ending, freezing rivers, burning forests" stuff... but the Giants and few surviving Asgardians know that something has gone terribly wrong. Just enough of the Norse gods survive in order to be able to bring about Ragnarök - and that's the one thing Izrador still fears.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Better than having their damnation on my conscience.

They are damned when you destroy that mirror, too - the spirits of the dead are trapped in this plane, remember? They might even come back soon as undead.

But if you hadn't destroyed the mirror, they might have lived for years or decades more, maybe even raised a new generation of children.


I mean, if I were in the situation, I'd probably smash the mirrors, too, if I knew what they were for. But it is not an easy choice to make, especially for good-aligned characters.

 

[Nyeshet]

I wonder how many "good" characters might eventually fall to evil (or at least non-Good) after seeing success after success result in little or no change. The desire to cause some change - a true and lasting change - might grow so great that the characters might fall into a "the ends justify the means" mindset - with the destruction, banishment, or at least reduction of the power of the Shadow and its minions being the "ends" rather than the freedom / aid of those subjugated (which might have been the original "ends" of the party). It could end up being an interesting group with an interesting future. They might succeed - only to realize after the fact that their success, their first great and lasting success, has caused more turmoil and trouble than the Shadow had caused . . . .

What if they succeed in somehow reducing the Shadow's power greatly, slay its major priests, champions, etc, create discord amongst its minions so that they fall amongst each other - decimating themselves, and finally manage to seal or otherwise contain (or at least reduce in power to such an extent that it is no longer as menacing or able to effect all that much) the Shadow. And then all those that died rise as hordes of undead: zombies, ghouls, wraiths, shadows, etc. The deities are still beyond reach, so Turning is arguably not available, and now the word is facing something akin to Dawn of the Dead or some such. Or perhaps the people do not return as zombies or wraiths but instead are still trapped ghosts. Suddenly most of the population on the world are dwarves, elves, or ghosts (mostly of humans or orcs, I imagine).

It could be interesting, I think . . . .

 

[Driddle]

I feel that the best approach to playing in the Midnight campaign is to recognize that there's a 99 percent likelihood of tragedy, but that 1 percent possibility of some small success is worth pushing on no matter the odds.

If a party -- the entire group, or majority of PCs -- should die or otherwise be unable to continue, it's a nice touch to start up another game arc five to ten years later. As the "newbies" gear up for their task, the DM has the opportunity to drop hints of the changes their heroic predecessors put in motion. Seemingly minor gains at the time that have grown in significance over time -- a refugee camp, for example, that was protected just long enough for the people to escape, and how those survivors took up the standard of hope to fight back and spread the spirit of heroism. Or how, even though the last group of PCs died in the effort, the artifact weapon they recovered was ultimately returned to its rightful heir, who now leads a small but growing opposition somewhere to the north.

 

[Slife]

Is the Shadow immune to the death-causing effects from destroying its mirrors?

If it isn't, that sounds like an end-of-Midnight campaign plotline.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Jurgen: IIRC, you may be mischaracterizing the effects of destroying the mirrors a bit. The only one that really goes nuclear in the way you're describing is the Grand Mirror, and that's in Theros Obsidia, where everyone is either an orc or a slave with an existence probably not much less miserable than that of the Fell. Yes, innocents may die in the destruction of a Black Mirror, but it's not quite such a massive carnage scenario as you're suggesting.

Slife: The Shadow is damaged by the destruction of the mirrors. Not the same as a death effect, but each mirror destroyed is a blow to the Shadow's power.