Squire James said:
Finder could have very well been lying. Perhaps the banelich COULD enter Sigil, but Finder clearly didn't want him to. What better way to keep him out than to play on the banelich's own thought that he was a god? He could have also lied about the Spire's effect on undead, though my personal thought was that he was just guessing. Certainly HE wouldn't want to get too close to the Spire either!
Saying he is lying does bring his comment about undead going inanimate at the base of the Spire back into canonity. However, he then says "everything I just told him is common knowledge out here on the planes." which would suggest that he doesn't need to lie, the truth being much more fun.
You bring up some good points, but getting into a debate over this is moot. There is, simply put, no evidence one way or the other on whether or not Finder is lying. Nothing suggests he is, so I interpreted it to mean that he wasn't. When we start second-guessing the character's motivations with no direct (or even circumstantial) evidence to do so, we've gotten away from what's really there.
I doubt Jeff Grubb would get TOO many things wrong in Finder's Bane, given he had major parts in writing both Manuals of the Planes! If he does get something wrong, it would be something very subtle like something in Planescape that contradicts the Manual of the Planes. He's not without error, of course, but I doubt anyone's done a Realms/Spelljammer/Planescape (toss in Dragonlance in the sequel, complete with kender) crossover that was more true to the settings!
No arguement here. Those books were incredibly done. There were errors though, which just goes to show that anyone can get a few things wrong. For example: the bit about Finder saying undead go inanimate at the Spire, how Paladine appeared
inside the portal to Sigil to meet Emilo, how just because the banelich was undead it couldn't resurrect Bane (though the secondary reason, that it is Bane in part, does hold up), that Xvim looks like some sort of hair-covered monster (older products said he looked coldly handsome, not so beastial), how they saw a statue of Bane representing him from another crystal sphere (Bane was a single-sphere deity, this was set down in
On Hallowed Ground, and if he wasn't the Time of Troubles wouldn't have killed him it would have just cut his connection to Realmspace), how the Sensates were able to use magic to spy on the realms of the gods and still be in Sigil while they did that, and those are just errors in
Finder's Bane and
Tymora's Luck that I can recall off the top of my head.
In fact, Iyactu Xvim's defeats in the sequel probably figured heavily in his decision to give up his own identity and assume the mantle of Bane (which is what I believe happened). I'd say Finder is in real trouble with Bane as a personal enemy, but my impression is that Bane is not prejudiced. He hates everybody!
Xvim never made a "decision" to give up his own identity and become Bane again. He was always intended from the beginning to act as an egg, a shell carrying Bane's essence until the dead god could gestate and burst forth, reborn anew. Xvim only thought he was an independent, sentient being, and had no idea that he was just a vessel for the new incarnation of Bane. Both the
Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting and
Faiths & Pantheons make this very clear. Also, while Bane does hate everyone, I doubt he has any personal grudge against Finder, since Xvim's mentality was not his own. The list of the gods Bane hates is in listed in order in, iirc,
Faiths & Pantheons and, again iirc, Finder isn't even on there.
Besides, no D&D campaign ever has been totally self-consistent. So it's probably a bit of that, too.
