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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edena_of_Neith" data-source="post: 3574562" data-attributes="member: 2020">Holy mackeral.  A lot of posts since I was last here.  Let me go back to an earlier post.  I wanted to comment on something.    Would I give Lifeproof to all the elves across the world.  No.  That would totally destroy the campaign setting.  Would I even give Lifeproof to a small elven nation?  Well, I did:  Haldendreeva.  But there is giving, and then there is the part of your mind that shrieks:  Why did you do that?!  And in my case, that part won't shut up, and demands answers.  So I wrote a story backwards from that point (and other Haldendreevan concepts) until I got all the way back to Delrune, 100 years earlier.  I felt I just needed to do that, if for no other reason than my own satisfaction (or so stated that part of my mind screaming in protest about Lifeproofing the elves.)  Based on all the 1st and 2nd edition material I read (I can't cite specifics) it would be very difficult to Lifeproof thousands of people (even the Haldendreevan elves only Lifeproofed 3,000.)  Lifeproof requires a 10,000 gp gem, for each spell cast.  That's a gem worth half a ton of gold!  That's a pretty valuable gem (on Krynn, it'd be 10,000 steel.  On Athas, 10,000 coins of the realm, with the buying power of gold pieces.)  I can imagine a nation with the awesome might of the Suloise Imperium producing three thousand 10,000 gold piece jewels, given a few weeks.  Powerful Evermeet could do it in a few years.  Cormyr could do it given decades.  Qualinesti could do it, given a century or three.  Haldendreeva pulled off this stunt in only a few months, indicating that at that time they had power greater than the strength of the entire nation of Evermeet.  But it took that kind of might, that level of prodigal magic and skill, to do it.  And the elves had to gain that might somehow.  And so, the rest of the backstory.  Funny how one spell (one small rulesset) can cause you to think, and ponder, and end up writing a whole backstory.  Which, of course, alters the whole campaign world ... or helps create that world.  I advocate giving the elves abilities, extraordinary abilities, and supernatural abilities, for the purposes of flavor, character, and viability, yes.  But not Lifeproof.  No 1st level character is going to ever start out equipped with Lifeproof.  Not in my game.  Not unless we're rping in the Land of Oz or Land of Ev or the Gnome Kingdom (from the works of Frank Baum, where everyone was, in effect, Lifeproofed.)  I tried to write something about how switching Arwen for Glorfindel implied colossal changes in Tolkien's setting, colossal changes in it's history, and colossal changes in elven culture there.  The Lifeproof spell, if it exists, is sorta like Arwen replacing Glorfindel in Peter Jackson's film LOTR.  It's there (and she was there) for a reason.  And it's (or her) existence (presence) implies all sorts of things, which imply all sorts of other things, which demand answers, which define the setting (and usually, creating a king sized headache for the DM.)</blockquote>

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