Having been granted rulership over the city of Vanhoover, and confessed their feelings for each other, Lex Legis and Sonata Dusk have started a new life together. But the challenges of rulership, and a relationship, are more than they bargained for.
Lex had no intention of waiting for the creature to act on its anger.
Murmuring a rapid-fire chant as he waved tendrils of shadow, he unleashed a spell at the creature, firing a pitch-black ray of negative energy at it. The spell would suppress part of the creature’s life force, and while that probably wouldn’t be enough to kill it, it would weaken not only its vitality but its magical strength as well. If what he’d felt when he’d forced it out of Nosey was accurate, then that was an edge he was going to need. He watched as the beam lanced out directly at the thing’s center of mass…and then blinked out of existence just before making contact with it.
Although he didn’t have a physical body at the moment, Lex felt a shudder run through him as he realized what just happened. It’s the same as that dragon I fought, he knew. It has some sort of aura that passively resists spells! Which meant that, so long as he tried to use magic on it directly, he’d have to punch through the thing’s aura to have any chance of hurting it, even before taking into account that it would actively struggle against any hostile magic that reached it.
His odds of defeating this thing, Lex knew, had just shrunk dramatically.
“I think I’ll start,” mused the monster's middle head, “by showing you the difference between your strength and mine.” It gave Lex no time to process that, immediately flying toward him as soon as the words left its mouth. In an instant, it covered the distance between them, moving with incredible speed, and Lex felt its magical energy swirl around it again. He had just enough time to process that it was using the same dispelling magic that it had used to destroy his astral construct, and then the magic slammed into him. For an instant, he struggled to fight off the thing’s magic, but it was like a mountain had been dropped on him, and an instant later he was corporeal again, only barely managing to keep his hooves under him as he fell to the ground.
Nor did the thing’s magic stop there. While Lex’s dispelling spell had only ever been able to undo a single spell at a time, he felt this one keep going after it had undone the dark magic of his shadow-form. Once that was gone, it tore through the defensive spells he’d cast on himself, and Lex was helpless to stop it as he felt both his speed-enhancing spell and the luck-boosting spell he’d used on himself crumble away to nothing. Nor was it done then, knocking out one of the defensive enchantments he’d built into his body so long ago, causing the minor deflection field surrounding him to wink out. Only then did the creature’s dispelling magic come to an end.
Horrified at just how vulnerable he’d been rendered, Lex instinctively threw himself backward, but once again the monster was faster. The tongue from its middle head snaked outward with so much force that it was almost a blur, striking his left foreleg with enough force that the bone shattered under the blow, causing Lex to scream as agony radiated out from his now-broken leg. But the pain grew worse a moment later as the creature’s tongue, still moving with the arc of its swing, wrapped around the mangled limb and squeezed it tight before hoisting him into the air by it. “Pain, of course, is the next stage of your punishment,” the left head announced blithely, its voice as relaxed as though it were discussing the weather. “And by all means, feel free to keep screaming as much as you like.”
It was all Lex could do not to oblige the creature, the white-hot agony in his leg overwhelming his senses so completely that for a moment he could think of nothing else. It was only a lifetime’s worth of personal discipline, of training his thoughts to form in the manner that he wanted and maintaining that mental structure regardless of what happened, that allowed him to push it back, only barely regaining his control over himself. This is…nowhere near as bad…as conjuring all that food! he raged internally, remembering what had happened when his enhancement spell had gone wrong while he was creating food for everypony. Even so, the thoughts that filled his mind now were of retreat, of putting some distance between himself and this monster, if for no other reason than to make the pain stop. But Lex knew that it would make little difference if he did; with the thing’s speed and ability to use dispelling magic repeatedly, it would be on him again in moments.
Instead, he forced himself to go on the attack.
Pointing his right foreleg at the thing, Lex began to gesture, choking out the words to another spell. Knowing that a single mispronunciation or flawed gesticulation would cause the spell to fizzle, he focused everything he had on getting the spell right, fighting back against a renewed wave of pain as the thing squeezed his broken foreleg tighter. He knew there was no guarantee that this would work, that the spell might simply be negated, but there was no viable alternative. Besides, spell resistance wasn’t an all-powerful defense; the dragon had demonstrated that. He just had to keep attacking and hope that some of his magic would be able to force its way through.
A second later, he managed to complete his spell, and despite the torment emanating from his maimed limb, Lex managed a small smile as he swung his free foreleg around to point at the thing’s middle head, the one currently grabbing him. A microsecond later, the green ray of his disintegration spell shot forth. Lex had prepared this particular spell twice over, and although trying to pull in additional magic while simultaneously casting the spell and holding fast against the pain he was in had been too much, even the unenhanced version of the spell had considerable power. If he could just disintegrate the monster’s middle head, it would not only deal it significant damage, it would free him at the same time!
But just like last time, the spell fizzled out before it struck the creature.
Lex had barely registered that his last-ditch effort to fight back had failed when the thing’s other tongues snaked out. The right head’s gruesome organ wrapped around his neck, squeezing tightly and cutting off his air supply, as the left head’s tongue struck his right foreleg. Miraculously, the bone didn’t break this time, but that was small comfort as the creature entangled that limb as well, yanking it wide. “How truly impressive,” cooed the right head, its feminine voice filled with mockery.
“To persist with such futile struggles in the face of overwhelming evidence about how helpless you are is a rare level of stupidity,” laughed the middle head, bending his broken foreleg further in the wrong direction.
“Nosey gushed about your vaunted intelligence,” sneered the right head. “But it seems that she was sorely mistaken to hold you in such a high regard.”
“aLloW mE To bETteR iLLuStrATe tHE pOInT iN a WaY yoUR PuNy mINd CAn cOMprEHenD,” screeched the fang-filled orifice that composed the monster’s other end.
Lex only barely heard the words. The level of pain he was in had escalated, and with no air going to his lungs he could feel his consciousness starting to ebb. Dimly, he felt himself being dragged forward, and then the monster’s leech-like maw filled his vision. His eyes widening as he comprehended what was about to happen, Lex reactivated the minor deflection field around his body with a thought. The enchantment, being one that he’d woven into his person long ago, immediately sprang back into existence…but it might as well not have been there at all, the creature’s ring of fangs puckering before it yanked him closer. An instant later he spasmed as he felt its teeth sink deep into his belly. Instantly, the thing’s orifice contracted as it started to suck the blood from his wounds. A surge of panic filled Lex then, and his eyes glowed as he called on his horn’s dark magic to return him to shadow-form, knowing that attacking was no longer an option; he had to retreat immediately if he wanted to live.
“Oh no you don’t!” barked the creature’s middle head, its tongue unfolding from Lex’s broken leg and lashing towards his horn. Lex tilted his head back as much as he could to try and avoid the strike, and the whip-like blow crashed into him at the exact moment that his body turned immaterial. It wasn’t fast enough to connect, but just barely managed to cut the straps on his haversack and saddlebag before they could follow his body into incorporeality, letting them fall to the ground even as Lex’s now-insubstantial body slipped through the creature’s tongues.
Almost dizzy from the sudden cessation of pain, Lex only barely registered the loss. There was nothing among his belongings that could help him now anyway; the haversack contained a variety of mundane sundries, treatises that he’d written, and gems filled with spells that were useless in this situation. The saddlebag was even less useful, containing only the now-empty portable hole that he’d borrowed from Sonata. There was nothing helpful in either…either…
Suddenly, Lex knew how he could win.
“Just make sure that, whatever you do, you never put that thing in my pack, and vice-versa,” warned Lex. “Layering extradimensional spaces on top of each other can put a severe strain on the dimensional fabric in the local area.” That had been what he had told Sonata back when Fireflower had given them the extradimensional receptacle that contained the dragon’s hoard. Although he’d tweaked the haversack to stabilize being taken into the small pocket dimension that he’d often conjured for them to sleep in, it took only a thought to undo that alteration as he grabbed it and the saddlebag in his telekinesis, allowing its original settings to snap back into place. He hurled himself backwards then, simultaneously thrusting both objects right in front of the creature’s ugly faces, the haversack’s main flap falling open. “How’s this for futile?!” he snarled, shoving the saddlebag containing the portable hole into the haversack.
Lex immediately lost his grip on the two objects as the haversack suddenly imploded, collapsing in on itself until it was nothing but a dot the size of a pinprick, hanging in the air. A moment later a cracking sound filled the air, as though a thousand boards were snapped in half all at once…and then it was like looking at a whirlpool in a funhouse mirror, as everything around the dot – the air, the ground, and the monster – suddenly distorted, swirling and folding in on themselves as they fell into it, a fierce wind picking up as the rent in space pulled everything toward itself. A shrill chorus of screams reached Lex’s ears as he saw the creature fall into the tiny dimensional rift, its body elongating and thinning as it was sucked into the hole and disappeared, and he had just enough time to feel a burst of hateful satisfaction before wondering what would happen if the tear in space was perman-
And then it was over.
The sudden silence as the wind died down was deafening. The pinprick-sized dot that had been the dimensional rip he’d caused was gone. So was the creature. And a fair amount of the ground near where it had been, for that matter.
Lex wasted an entire two seconds hoping that the creature had been torn apart by the planar fissure he’d caught it in, before turning his attention to more important things. “Nosey,” he called, floating toward where she was sprawled out on the ground, unmoving. “Nosey, if you can hear me, respond.” But no response came, and he hurried to reach her.
Her eyes were closed, and for a moment Lex feared the worst, but then he saw her chest rising and falling, a surge of relief going through him. She’s just unconscious, he realized, quickly looking her over for wounds. Other than a large number of bruises around her neck where the thing had choked her, the only thing he could see was a bump on her head, probably sustained in the fall she’d taken when the astral construct had been dispelled. Overall, her injuries seemed comparatively light.
But that’s no reason not to get her medical attention, he knew, looking at the distant camp. Knowing that she was too heavy for him to carry with his telekinesis, he braced himself as he returned to corporeal form. He immediately staggered, lifting his broken foreleg off the ground even as he felt blood rain down from the injuries on his abdomen. He was hurt far worse than she was, he knew, but he’d just have to bear with it until they made it back. He could still walk, so if he draped her over his back he-
“Extremely futile,” came a chorus of voices from behind him.
Then a tongue as sharp as a spear pierced his chest.
Lex fights with everything he has, and for a moment comes close to victory, only for his enemy to suddenly reappear!
Is there any hope left, or is this the end?
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Considering what the creature is, I guess removing it from this plane of existence is futile as it stated since it likely has the capability to return here under it's own power...or it just teleported to a safe distance. (I'm betting on the former since it hints at what the creature might have done to Cloudbank and the others while also explaining Severance's disappearance)
Turning into shadow to avoid fatal attacks is one thing but doing so to avoid dying from such a grievous wound is unlikely since even if the tongue had missed his heart, Lex would be unable to stay alive due to the creature's ability to dispel his shadow form and let him bleed out. The only chance Lex has now would be for some divine intervention but given who his patron goddess is,..Lex is truly in a bind here.
Plane Shift back from the Astral Plane followed by Greater Teleport, I suppose. Yeah, Lex is truly in trouble. Even if Severance miraculously shows up, I don't think it could turn the tide. Heck, Celestia and Luna themselves would probably get beaten by this creature. Unless Discord (who I would wager is statted up like a Protean Lord) stops by, I can't imagine anything that would keep Lex alive.
OK, now that is just purely sadistic. thats teh sort of level difference I like to use when playing console games, level grinding to the point where I one shot mobs with my weakest weapon and can grind bosses into defeat without bothering with the combos. Why? Because I dont care about the fight, I want to see the game.
But especially because no game ever allows you to use the stuff you can get hold of, they always cap out.
They really nerfed the hole in a hole effect as well?
Well, Im out of ideas, apart from the thing rips Lex apart, then feeds on the rest of the camp, so if theres a way out, Id really love to see it, then wonder just how stupidly DBZ overpowered the next thing would have to be and still have the planet remain intact?
8726835 It doesn't seem very likely that the Night Mare will come to Lex's aid, which means that - unless someone else suddenly swoops in - Lex is most likely on his own. Presuming that last strike wasn't fatal, well, I suppose he still has a chance, but at this point that seems more theoretical than anything else. He's badly injured, it seems almost impossible for him to hurt his enemy whereas it can negate his magic easily, and while we haven't seen it in the aftermath of Lex's last attempt to send it away, it seems likely that it's not hurt in the least. Given that, Lex looks to be completely outmatched.
Of course, that's not surprising, since he's a level 12 character facing a CR 16 monster. Worse, Lex was slightly underpowered for his level, due to not having the full amount of gear that he could, and not all of his listed abilities being brought into play for various reasons (mostly my not having all of the story's specifics in mind when I wrote his stat block). So really, the deck was stacked against him from the beginning.
But even so, it's not over until it's over...though it seems like that might be any minute now.
8726919 I've always been under the impression that Celestia and Luna were, in terms of character levels, in the high single-digits. Everyone wants to put them at demigod-level power due to their extreme age and their moving the sun and the moon around, but that never seemed right to me. In the d20 System, there are a LOT of creatures that are ageless and are still weak, and the ponies' own mythohistorical records say that the unicorns as a whole used to move the sun and the moon (and The Journal of the Two Sisters was never a reliable resource in its attempts to portray that as crippling the unicorns). Once you've shot down those arguments, there really isn't much to say that they're all that powerful, at least as the d20 System measures things. So yeah, I think they'd be pretty hard-pressed to deal with this thing.
Of course, Lex isn't doing much better at the moment.
8726977 That creature was absolutely being sadistic. In fact, that seems like a strong motivating factor with regard to everything it's done so far, as spreading misery seems to be its raison d'etre. So far, it's completed dominated the battle, and Lex has been seriously injured without dealing it so much as a scratch; his one victory was opening up a planar rift right in its face, and now that doesn't seem to have done much of anything.
But does that mean that there's truly no hope for victory now?
Well...that was a waste of a perfectly good dragon horde...
8728012 Actually, the portable hole was empty at the time. Remember, Lex dumped all of the coins from the bank back at the medical tent in chapter 202. But unto itself, yeah, it always sucks to lose a magic item.
8727712
maybe but you pretty much made them minor gods in your story. They can grant divine spells to their followers no ? They should be much more powerful
8728165 Strictly speaking, that was a development in the previous stories that David Silver wrote; I wouldn't have done that myself, but that's part-and-parcel of writing a sequel to someone else's fiction.
That said, granting low-level divine spells isn't necessarily something you need to be a god to do. The mythic ability divine source allows for you to do that as well, for instance. That's a 3rd-tier ability, which does require a certain degree of increased power, but not necessarily that much.
More germane to this story, under the Eclipse rules taking Dominion (6 CP), Manipulation (6 CP), and Sphere of Influence (6 CP) allows for you to grant spells as well, and are comparatively cheap to acquire at 18 CP. Given that my write-up for Celestia and Thoth's write-up for Luna give both sisters Dominion, that means they'd just need to buy Manipulation and Sphere of Influence for 12 CP, easily affordable in a single level. So it's pretty easy to reconcile them as being comparatively weak and still able to grant spells (in Luna's case, since Celestia seems to have no particular desire to do that).
ok this battle sucks but some how i get the feeling this is not the big bade guy.
8728603 You've piqued my interest; what leads you to believe that?
Also, when you say "this battle sucks," do you mean that you don't like how I've written it, or that things are going badly for Lex?
8728842
i mean things are going badly in this battle.
and some how this feels like there is one more bigger badder Villon behind the hole ball of ugly.
8727712 I agree with your conclusion, but not your starting point, funnily enough. I'd wager Celestia and Luna are probably in the low to mid double digits in CR, mostly class levels, given their experience adventuring over time. Even if they could grant divine powers, pathfinder has lowered the bar on that significantly, these days an inanimate object that a few hundred people worship can just start handing out spells to priests, it's not that impressive.
What I do disagree with is the idea that the Journal of the Two Sisters is totally without merit. You're right that there are some contradictory notions with specific aspects of it, especially as canon has marched on certain points have been invalidated. But it is still the only reliable source we have for the lives of the sisters before they fought Discord, so it should be taken as at least a firm guideline for each detail that hasn't been contradicted. So the book might have which sister had which element wrong, but that doesn't invalidate all the other points.
The logic of sun-raising, alicorns and unicorns isn't really that hard to parse. By that rough power level, an alicorn is about as powerful as 6 unicorns, though Starswirl the Bearded was able to raise and lower the sun and moon on his own, albeit at great strain. That means alicorns are more powerful than unicorns in their magic, but nowhere near godlike. Heck, if Starlight Glimmer, Twilight Sparkle and Starswirl had been around at the same time, they could probably have raised the sun and moon on their own forever.
I mean, clearly the sun isn't a real sun, it's a tiny little orb a few miles wide. I've even heard the theory that it's just a magical artifact and "raising" it is just the magical equivalent of winding a watch.
Of course, Luna and Celestia do more than just raise the sun and moon without strain, which according to Starswirl any alicorn could do. They actually draw magic from the process to rejuvenate the drained unicorns, which is not expected from alicorns. It appears their special talent is drawing energy from the sun and moon when they raise it, which is also the most likely explanation for their immortality.
According to the book they also had numerous adventures wandering around untamed Equestria, I wouldn't be surprised if Celestia and Luna have 8-9 class levels in wizard or sorcerer or something by now and a couple of mythic tiers. (Though I also agree with your assertion that Celestia probably hasn't gained a level in like 900 years, living in that palace of hers). Spot them say +3 CR for being a race about as powerful as 6 unicorns, and they would each be around CR 12-14. Fairly powerful, but not divine, and this monster would crush either one of them in a fight.
Really, the key power is its ability to cast Greater Dispel Magic at will. Against a balanced party with some tanks to hammer it, overcome-able. Against a solo caster, Even if Lex had a CR 17 at this point I wouldn't bet on him.
8729003 Whew! Just making sure that was what you meant.
8729063 I'm going to respond to the points you raised separately, as there are several different issues here.
I completely agree with you regarding the devaluation of granting divine spells. It used to be that they came from an actual deity, or divine servants, with only the lowest levels of spells (1st and 2nd level, back when divine spells ranged from levels 1 through 7) being received from faith alone. Of course, this meant that as you earned higher-level spells, you were subject to ever greater levels of divine scrutiny and review. Your request for certain spells might be denied, for instance, and other spells that you hadn't asked for would be given to you instead (though ideally, this would be helpful in ways that you hadn't anticipated, as your deity would be able to better anticipate the trials you were going to go through). But a lot of players didn't like it that they didn't get to pick their own spells a la carte, and had to obey divine dictates besides, and so we saw changes creeping in.
Second Edition, for instance, made it possible (via PHBR3 The Complete Priest's Handbook) to worship a faith (i.e. a deity), a force, or a philosophy and gain the full complement of divine spells as you leveled up. This was a bit awkward to explain in terms of demigods and lesser gods not being able to grant the highest-level spells to their mortal servants (unless, maybe, you were on the same plane as them; that particular rule varied depending on where you looked), but could gain them from worshiping, say, an elemental force (a la Dark Sun clerics) or philosophies like "The Divinity of Mankind," which held that all humans had the innate potential to become gods (which was technically true in that any character could, in theory, undergo divine ascension...but that shouldn't have meant you could gain clerical spells from worshiping that idea).
By the time Third Edition roled around, the game quit with the fig leaf entirely, and declared that clerics didn't have to worship a deity, and so could pick their own domains and favored weapon if they didn't. Given that this offered more freedom of choice and less rationale for having to obey divine dictates and religious tenets, it's not surprising that this tended to be a popular option with players. As for where those divine spells were actually coming from, well...who cared? The in-game rationale for a lot of how things worked had been a secondary concern for years, and by now it was hand-waved with a vague "it's like arcane magic, I guess? Just make it up yourself." Naturally, Pathfinder took up that mantra when it became the successor to Third Edition and ran with it.
The irony here, of course, is that since anyone can apparently gain the full complement of clerical spells (or whatever other divine spell list they happen to use) from faith alone, that devalues the ability to grant those spells among the entities that can. Why bother taking the divine source mythic quality, when anyone who worships you can instead just switch their faith to literally anything else and keep gaining spells, all without you telling them what to do? Most people, after all, aren't going to work for something that they can get for free somewhere else. So yeah, the ability to grant divine spells has been comparatively devalued. About the only thing left is the organizational support that you can gain from joining an established religion, but most PCs don't want to put up with the strings those come with (particularly when the "support" aspect has been reduced to very little by wealth-by-level guidelines; nowadays it's pretty much only utilized via the faction rules, and those essentially function as an adjunct form of minor wealth...and aren't inherently religious in nature anyway).
That said...without getting into issues of how much experience Celestia and Luna "should" have gained, or what adventures they might or might not have had (we'll touch on that below), the fact is that d20/Pathfinder class levels are, in all honesty, a terrible way to represent their capabilities. Vancian spellcasting, for instance, simply doesn't track with what we've seen in the show for how unicorns (and alicorns) cast spells. Even putting aside issues of verbal and somatic components, magic is shown to be something that isn't "used up" when it's utilized, other than possibly some physical exertion that's involved. That's much closer to what we see superheroes use than traditional Pathfinder wizards and sorcerers. Some of the newer classes have unlimited-use magical abilities, but those don't fit the type of magic we see used in the show. (To be fair, I wrote up Celestia with Vancian spellcasting spell slots, but that's because I was writing her in the context of actually being able to use her in a "standard" d20 game; Thoth's writeup for Princess Luna, where she's using "Rune" magic (the name is just a placeholder; it doesn't actually involve runes) with the Superheroic World Template is much more accurate for what we see in the show.)
Although I haven't asked him directly, I don't think it's a coincidence that when David Silver initially wrote A Dangerous Sparkle - the story that set the stage for Lateral Movement - he made it so that, when Twilight went to Everglow, she was "converted" over to being a Pathfinder character, losing all of the abilities we'd seen her use in the show in the process. That's because converting fictional characters into an RPG is exceptionally difficult to do if the system in question mandates class levels, which are designed to segregate various powers as only being available at certain levels of certain classes. Hence why I prefer to use Eclipse: The Codex Persona, since it's 100% d20 compatible while not only eschewing character classes, but allowing for an unmatched degree of flexibility in what it offers. Yes, that requires that the player(s) and the GM actually make some judgment calls, rather than treating the system like a legal code to be manipulated, but that's a comparatively small price to pay, at least to me.
The thing of it is, I don't see The Journal of the Two Sisters as having ever been reliable. It simply got too many things wrong, both in terms of details and of internal consistency. "Better than nothing," ceases - to my mind - to be useful at that point. Since the narrative it presents is all of a piece, knocking down major (if not foundational) aspects of it means that the rest becomes unreliable by extension. If 50% of a particular work has been demonstrably shown to be non-canon, then there's no longer any presumption that the other 50% (which remains unmentioned by the source material) still is. That's especially true when that remaining 50% has problems of internal logic that don't hold up to even mild scrutiny. Given that the show has gone on to make the Journal even more non-canon than it already was, that seems like the best tack to take.
The problem with "1 alicorn = 6 unicorns" theory is that there are numerous qualifiers and special circumstances that make that far less than certain. For example, it ignores that Celestia and Luna have cutie marks related to their moving the sun and the moon, and we know that cutie marks provide additional degree of aptitude for their particular task (otherwise, Starlight's switching the Royal Sisters cutie marks in A Royal Problem would have been meaningless). It also sits oddly with the idea that "Twilight plus the other alicorns' magic is roughly equal (in terms of overall force) to Tirek having magic from everypony (or at least a lot of ponies) plus Discord." After all, if one alicorn was roughly equal to six unicorns, well, Tirek absorbed the magic of a lot more than twenty-four ponies that we saw, and that was before he nabbed Discord's magic as well. But Twilight was able to fight him to a standstill in terms of sheer magical might.
That said, I may need to double-check, but I seem to recall that Star-Swirl couldn't move the sun or the moon on his own; trying is what, according to it, made him so aged.
The princesses are strong, compared to normal ponies. But the issue is that the overall difference in power isn't linear, much in the same way that d20 aficionados refer to wizards as being quadratic. Moreover, we know that "alicorn magic" is a discrete thing unto itself, and not simply a designation of "any magic that an alicorn uses." That's why comparisons saying that alicorn-Twilight and Starlight Glimmer were almost equal, due to their fight in The Cutie Re-Mark - Part 2 never sat well with me. Twilight said, in Twilight's Kingdom - Part 2:
Which makes it clear that there's a large degree of power that Twilight is only barely beginning to tap. Given that being flooded with alicorn magic in that episode didn't give her any new powers (notwithstanding moving the sun and the moon, though that might have just been supercharged telekinesis), but rather made her existing powers so much stronger, it's likely that Thoth was right when he wrote that alicorn magic was basically a heaping helping of metamagic. Twilight didn't use any of that when she fought Starlight, facing her essentially the same way she would have as a unicorn (notwithstanding using her wings), rather than bringing her greater degree of force to bear. As it stands, we've basically only seen her potentially use her alicorn magic on her own when she grabbed her friends in Castle Mane-ia and all of the eponymous families in The Hooffields and McColts. If we presume that the princesses have large degrees of metamagic that they can use at will, it nicely solves the issue of making them a LOT stronger than even a large number of other ponies without giving them levels into the stratosphere.
There's clearly something different from how physics works in our world - and it's not just there, since meteorology and biology are also casually violating what we've seen in the real world even before you take magic into account - but the exact "what" and "how" of it are anyone's guess.
Again, I find that to be a poor explanation, which is part-and-parcel of the Journal trying to explain things without thinking through the ramifications of what it's presenting. If Celestia and Luna could draw power from the sun and moon the restore drained ponies, then Tirek shouldn't have been much of a threat, since they'd be replenishing the ponies he drained every twelve hours or so. In fact, Tirek would have been better off just sitting back and letting them do so, since then he could drain those ponies over and over again, rather than draining the Royal Sisters themselves and metaphorically slaying the geese that laid golden eggs. Given that no one presumed that would be an option, it seems easier to say that wasn't the case rather than everyone involved being incredibly stupid(er than what we saw).
I don't disagree with your results; I came to similar conclusions (as you noted), since we don't see them using magic beyond - in d20 terms - spell level 4 or 5, and their alicorn race is clearly worth a few levels. I just prefer to use Eclipse to merge those in a way that's more artful than what normal class levels can do (that is, their base race can complement their spellcasting ability, rather than being a drag on it the way high ECL races are for spellcasters in normal d20). If you take that away, then the levels you've assigned them would almost perfectly match what I linked to before...which, as you noted, wouldn't be very helpful against a belier devil.
Yeah, that's going to be rather difficult to overcome. The question now is if Lex can find a way to beat the odds.
8729853 That's a great history of divine casting. I remember when there were really complicated formulas for what outer plane you could gain what spell level of when clerics travelled the planes. Looking at what Pathfinder has said, the source of divine magic is kind of defined as "belief." This section on idols is actually pretty good at translating various forms of worship into divine power, or ego, and then calculating divine spells these idols can hand out. For example, it looks like 200 people can gin up enough power to let the idol hand out 1st level spellcasting. Weirdly though, independent oracles of concepts exist, and can cast high level divine spells. I think I've heard it explained that those people are actually just somehow turning their personal belief into divine magic, which kind of sounds like they are deluded then.
The Journal has been confirmed in a few cases, such as the idea that Starswirl the Bearded was a tutor for Celestia and Luna. I would consider it something like the Iliad. There really was a Trojan war, and the Iliad can give us a starting point on the city states that participated in it, even though Achilles was a myth.
Yeah, Eclipse sounds pretty awesome. I already found Pathfinder to be one of the most complicated rules sets there is, and it took me years to master it. I doubt I could handle learning another significant system, but I do admire the complex characters you build with it. I've even seen some other people stat up superheroes with it.
I'd check that. I don't recall that in the Journal. Also, according to the Pony of Shadows in the S7 Finale, Twilight is "almost as strong" as Twilight. Not saying I believe him, just saying he said that.
Every single other part of the show sits oddly with this idea, which is why I think the idea is flawed. Besides the fact that if it was true Celestia and Luna really would deserve CR 28 Demigod status, it assumes that Tirek, who forcibly ripped magic from diverse sets of ponies, seems to have expended a huge amount of energy turning himself young, strong and gigantic, and only seems to use that power in basic blasts and shields, is getting the same efficiency of stolen power that Twilight gains from being willingly gifted her magic by 3 other alicorns, after she is shown using their special talents. I think it's more likely that Twilight is getting several orders of magnitude more efficient use of the magic she has gained that Tirek has.
That's assuming they can do it to an unlimited degree, can efficiently distribute the magic, and allow Tirek to eventually become practically omnipotent anyway. Presumably within a day or two Tirek would just force them to pour their power directly into him at point of contact, and no magic would go to the ponies around them.
Everyone involved in that episode was incredibly stupid, but I doubt we want to retread that ground again or we could be here for days. Suffice it to say that Tirek has huge trust issues, and doesn't seem smart enough to sustainably lay off the alicorns in hopes they rejuvenate everyone's powers. Every single villain alive if they were not stupid would leave the Regal Sisters alone for the simple idea that someone's got to raise the sun tomorrow if you want to live on a functioning planet. But no one does that. Tirek doesn't demand sustainable tribute of magical power, he drains every single pony to the point where civilization would have collapsed, the population would have declined and eventually Tirek would be left alone in a blasted world, because he's a greedy idiot.
Twilight got her flank handed to her by Starlight not because she wasn't tapping into her alicorn powers, but because she wasn't trained in combat. Actually, that's not quite true, if Twilight had been using her earth pony strength to grapple and punch and her wings to mess with the wind around Starlight that could have provided a big advantage. But Twilight just flew around blasting basic spells while Starlight demonstrated combat awareness. They even demonstrate this later in S6 by showing Twilight and Starlight having a cool duel/demo that shows they have been training and sparring together, where Twilight has significantly improved her combat magic.
The larger question of meta magic though, I have to go with your earlier answer: If we don't see something like that in the show, I can't believe it. If Celestia has all this meta-magic, maybe she couldn't use it against Chrysalis, or Tirek, or Sombra, but she sure could have used some kind of sun-magic on those evil clouds that kicked her and Luna's flanks in the S6 opener. On the other hand, given what we saw Twilight do to the Hooffields and McColts, I could see it just being a multiplier of existing magic, plus giving the magic of the other tribes.
What's that line? "He Never Learned How to Lose!"
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Oh, it wasn't that complicated. You just counted the number of planes between yourself and your deity and subtracted that from your effective caster level. Of course, when you and your deity were on various Outer Planes, you had to count the intervening planes around the Great Wheel (rather than just going through the Astral or the Outlands), and so could suffer a major loss of power if you went to a plane near-opposite of your deity's. The sole exception was on the Prime Material Plane, where you could function at full power regardless of your deity's home plane.
The kicker was that, in-game, this all worked that way because the various deities wanted it to work that way, since it cut down on divine wars across the Outer Planes, giving everyone a home field advantage, and kept the focus on the Prime Material Plane where they could farm for worshipers.
Huh, you know, I actually wasn't aware of this. So this looks like a category of sentient artifacts that have basically figured out a way to take mythic tiers, more or less. But yeah, this does inadvertently quantify the amount of worshipers necessary for granting spells of a particular level, albeit with the caveat that they can never apparently grant spell levels higher than 5th...or, strictly speaking, lose the ability to grant 0-level spells (since 1/4th of 0 is 0). That sits rather oddly next to clerics who don't identify any particular deity or other source of divine spells (oracles, however, flat-out say "Unlike a cleric, who draws her magic through devotion to a deity, oracles garner strength and power from many sources, namely those patron deities who support their ideals." So they're at least backed by actual gods). Still, the fact that the idol ability has the exact same name and overall function as the mythic tier ability makes the two rather awkward to compare. The entire thing just showcases a lack of strong internal consistency, which is sort of what happens when metagame concepts become more important than in-game concepts.
I wouldn't say that the Journal was "confirmed" in that regard. It wasn't published until after season four had ended, at which point the details about Star-Swirl's place in Equestria had been piling up. While the show hadn't explicitly stated that he was a mentor to Celestia and Luna, the fact that he was already teaching students "before the reign of Celestia" (Hearth's Warming Eve), was personally recognizable to Luna (Luna Eclipsed), and was apparently still in Equestria afterwards, since he befriended Scorpan (Twilight's Kingdom - Part 1) and banished the Sirens (Equestria Girls), as well as having been mentioned numerous times to be a magical genius who invented all sorts of spells (Luna Eclipsed again). While that's not an explicit statement regarding his relationship to the alicorn sisters, that's close enough that the book wasn't really breaking any new ground in that regard, so when they finally mentioned such a relationship directly in Shadow Play - Part 2, it isn't something that we can say was the Journal being vindicated.
Beyond that, there's still the previously-raised issues of the Journal being so completely wrong about so much else, and its original material not making much sense on its own. It's simply better, as a general rule, to ignore it altogether due to how unreliable it's been shown to be.
Well, I'd heartily recommend it if you ever have the time. For some real fun, download the book (it's free), and then look at some of the characters (MLP or not) on Thoth's blog (he's the co-author) and look up their listed abilities in the book. That's what worked best for me, in terms of understanding the system.
I have no problem believing that Twilight Sparkle is almost as powerful as Star-Swirl. After all, it's not like Twilight can move the sun or the moon on her own; we've only ever seen her do so when loaded up with the other alicorns' magic. There's nothing in the show to suggest that she'd be able to do that on her own simply by virtue of being an alicorn (another strike against the Journal, I'd say). Likewise, Cadance has never been presented in that light either, nor was it an issue when Flurry Heart's magic was running out of control. I don't think that it's a coincidence that Celestia and Luna also have cutie marks related to what they move; the implication is that they need them to do what they do (though apparently one is good enough to move the other, hence why Celestia could also move the moon when Nightmare Moon was banished).
As for what the Journal says about Star-Swirl's not being able to move the sun or the moon on his own, here's what the wiki summarizes it as:
Which strongly suggests that he failed to lower it.
It's important to remember what we're talking about here: we both agree that Celestia and Luna are considerably stronger than your average, run-of-the-mill pony, and yet aren't anywhere near the upper end of the d20 System's level of power. We're simply trying to figure out where they fall between those extremes. My point was that they're stronger than what six unicorns could do on their own, since even if you consider that one of them was Star-Swirl the Bearded, that's not very much.
Insofar as the whole "all the alicorns' magic being equal to Tirek draining everypony and Discord," the idea doesn't fit poorly with what we're told in the show, nor does it require them to skyrocket to the upper end of the d20 System's power scale. What we've seen is that Tirek is able to achieve progressively more power based on drawing from a very wide variety of minor sources (with Discord being one major source), whereas Twilight is powered up via three other major sources of magic. The end result is that they're both supercharged to the point where, after a brief battle, neither of them is able to decisively overpower the other. I don't recall anything in the show which necessarily contradicts that idea.
Or, much more simply, we can presume that the Journal is wrong (again), and hold that they can't use that particular ability at all, since there's nothing within the show to say that it exists. That saves us from having to figure out complicated loops of logic regarding who knew what and why they didn't go for much more complicated schemes about replenishing sources that could be drained continually. That fits better than "they gain magic when they move the sun and moon, presumably each and every time, but can't distribute it to the other ponies again for Tirek to drain because of unspecified reasons."
Leaving aside tactical issues of how to go about conquering Equestria (and let's be honest: it's really not that hard, hence why so many villains pulled it off before being conveniently overthrown by a last-minute, jury-rigged save. Discord, Queen Chrysalis, Tirek, and The Storm King basically all won before they got the rug yanked out from under them), it's far less of an assumption to say that the Journal's ill-considered implications are simply wrong than it is to say that the princesses could replenish everypony's magic and so could be used to set up a magic-farm that Tirek could have drained if only he'd thought of it. The former is far more simple, and elegant, than the latter, paticularly since the latter's source has a history of being incorrect.
That's leaving aside the fact that we know that you don't need to raise the sun over Equestria to have a functioning planet. Remember, when Twilight visited the timeline where Nightmare Moon was in charge (The Cutie Re-Mark - Part 2), Celestia had been sealed away for some time, and yet there was no drop in temperature that we saw. The Everfree Forest was still growing, it was full of timberwolves, and no one was cold or shivering. That episode completely got rid of the theory that the sun is used to regulate Equestria's temperature, which honestly isn't that much of a stretch, considering that weather itself is a phenomenon that has to be artificially manufactured anyway.
I disagree with your characterization, there. Twilight did not "get her flank handed to her" to by Starlight; the two of them fought to a stalemate, with neither of them able to overcome the other. Nor did Starlight manifest any sort of "combat awareness" that was greater than Twilight's; she got the drop on her with an ice-beam, but that was because she was expecting her. Twilight turned the tables on her the next time around, and then they fought an inconclusive battle. Likewise, the practice session they had (it wasn't a duel, nor sparring; Twilight just tested out Starlight's shield) in Every Little Thing She Does in no way showed any sort of "combat awareness" on Starlight's part, since they weren't in combat. Hence why they tested out "teleporting, multiple locations" and "transfiguration" along with shields.
As for Twilight not using "earth pony strength" (which has always been presented in a rather iffy manner; the closest that it's ever been directly talked about was in Twilight's Kingdom - Part 2 where Princess Celestia says "Without their strength, they will not be able to tend the land." If we also include the "All About Alicorns" part of Baby Flurry Heart's Heartfelt Scrapbook "webisode," then Pinkie Pie also says "There are Earth ponies, who get their strength from the land," and "You use magic, you fly through the skies, and you're tied to the land." If we take this literally, it suggests some rather interesting things...perhaps, like Antaeus, earth ponies need to be touching the ground to maintain their strength) or "using her wings to mess with the wind around Starlight," (that's not really something we've seen any pegasi do, other than rushing past other ponies so fast that they're caught in the slipstream, and seems tactically doubtful anyway, since Starlight is moving herself telekinetically rather than aerodynamically, plus she can teleport), those advantages are questionable, at least in comparison to simply enhancing her attack magic directly.
The thing to remember is that we do see it in the show: it's only after Twilight becomes an alicorn that we see her using her telekinesis to grab a large number of ponies at once, in the aforementioned episode. Likewise, when she's supercharged with it when she fights Tirek, that's absolutely an improvement to her existing magic (again, notwithstanding moving the sun and moon), which is basically what metamagic is. I suspect that Celestia likewise was using it when she fought Chrysalis, it's just that Chrysalis was hopped up on an external power source that boosted her enough to edge out Celestia. As for Sombra and Tirek, well, we never saw her fight them, so we can't use those as examples one way or another. Likewise, attacking the weather in The Crystalling - Part 2 wouldn't really have required that, since that was an issue of buying time against a force they knew they couldn't keep contained for very long. It certainly doesn't disprove anything.
Let's hope this isn't where he learns that lesson.
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I rather disagree, based simply on your own paragraph, that's pretty complicated to me. And don't get me started on approaching the center of Concordant Opposition!
Yeah, Occult Realms has some really weird stuff. Occult Rituals are even more confusing.
We'll have to agree to disagree on that.
Ah, but that's the thing: Right now Tirek has absorbed the magic of millions of ponies, plus Discord, who has amply demonstrated powers that would put him at or above a CR 20 outsider. If Tirek was efficiently adding all that magical power to his own, he would be akin to a God, full stop, you could put him a ring with most of the Pathfinder deities and he would come out on top. My argument is that Tirek is only getting like a .001% power increase for each unit of power he absorbs, while Twilight gets maybe 50% of the power level added of 3 alicorns plus her own. If Tirek really was at a godly level, and absorbing millions of magical power levels should have put him there, then it follows Twilight must have been at a godly level too, which means the 4 alicorns magical powers put together equal say a CR 30 being. I reject this idea, hence the "Tirek is inefficient, plus spent a bunch of his magic on physically enhancing his body" idea I suggest instead.
Discord in the old days and Discord/Tirek sure. Chrysalis and the Storm King seized the capital in a blitzkrieg, but I feel its less than likely they had definitely won.
There's also the question of what it is that makes Luna and Celestia immortal then, since apparently it isn't just being an alicorn. Only the Journal has ever suggested an answer to that question.
I remember they teleported from a city into the wilderness, and we saw no actual civilian ponies, just servants of NMM. It's quite possible she was keeping the surrounding area warm with her magic, but that's no guarantee she could or would do it to the entire planet. It also raises the question of why Celestia would banish her own sister for a thousand years rather than just let her keep the moon up forever, if it's just an aesthetic choice.
Starlight was trying to fight to a stalemate, while Twilight was trying to stop her, Starlight succeeded where Twilight failed. If you watch it Starlight does not seem to be actively trying to incapacitate Twilight, whereas Twilight tries and fails to incapacitate Starlight many, many times. I'd call that a flank-kicking.
I'd call the end section where they both blasted each other with progressively stronger magical attacks against each other's shields sparring, until Starlight used a spell powerful enough that Twilight wanted to quit.
I've had this exact same thought! It would make a lot of sense thematically, though that scene in the Sombra alternate timelines where Pinkie and Maud smash a rock to bits in the air would be problematic.
Ah, my mistake, I think we agree on this point and were just using different terms. I was thinking of metamagic more as a different kind of magic, like the magic of affecting other types of magic, rather than just making magic much stronger, which is what you seem to be saying.
If he survives, I hope he the lesson he learns is about action economy and this:
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This is like how my friends all insist that THAC0 was a complicated mess, and I keep telling them "it's your THAC0 minus the other guy's AC equals the number you need to roll on a d20! It's not that hard!" Everyone seems to forget that it was introduced to make things easier.
I don't subscribe to the Campaign Setting or Player's Companion lines, so I miss a lot of things there. I do buy them intermittently, but mostly just on the occasional whim, so things like that tend to slip by me.
I don't agree to that.
There's a series of implicit assumptions here, regarding the number of ponies whose magic Tirek absorbed, Discord's CR (which is misleading, since CR includes everything: Hit Dice, BAB, feats, type-based abilities, etc. in addition to spellcasting/spell-like abilities), but the most egregious is that there's necessarily some sort of basic quantity of magic in each pony and that Tirek is necessarily only getting a fraction of it (because if he was getting all of it, he'd - again, necessarily - be a god). I'm honestly not sure where you're getting that idea, but it honestly doesn't seem to be a given.
For example, from a game standpoint we could very well say that Tirek was simply using an area-effect attack that was one-shotting the characters it hit (save or "die"), and what he gained in return was experience points. If that was the case, then absorbing more and more would have less and less effect, since it requires ever-higher degrees of XP to advance in levels. Since we don't know how many ponies Tirek "defeated" that way, and how much XP he got (slow progression, perhaps?), we could say that his level was almost anything, and it's all entirely plausible. After that, he gets hit with a rainbow-colored level-drain attack, and loses it all. That works just as well (if not better) than holding to presumptions of "he absorbed millions of ponies' magic, which would have made him a god, so he must only have been absorbing a small part of it with the rest being lost."
They still overcame the princesses rather decisively (the Storm King basically outsourced that part of the takeover, even), losing only because the B-team happened to pull off a come-from-behind plan that managed to work (against all logic).
I granted the premise that Celestia and Luna weren't immortal (that is, ageless) as part of being an alicorn - mostly to save on racial CP costs - but it's important to remember that take on things is due to nothing more than one tweet. If we can hold that secondary sources like the Journal of the Two Sisters, which are official, are still non-canon, then it's best not to presume that a single staff member's tweet - even if it is from Meghan McCarthy - is canon either.
Rewatching the scene, it's pretty clear that there's no issue of ambient temperatures even when Twilight and Spike are in the Everfree Forest. There's absolutely no mention of any sort of "keeping the surrounding area warm" on Nightmare Moon's part, and presuming that there is violates Occam's razor, which is an important rule to keep in mind when analyzing something for which all the facts aren't definitively known. If we're going to say "well, something else for which there's no evidence could be true because nothing says it's not," then there's little point in analyzing anything. Hence, we should make as few assumptions as possible.
Likewise, Celestia didn't banish her sister to the moon just for blotting out the sun, according to what we saw in Princess Twilight Sparkle - Part 2. While Celestia did urge Luna to lower the moon, Luna then transformed into Nightmare Moon, saying that her one royal duty was to destroy Celestia, and injured her in the ensuing fight. It was only then that Celestia used the Elements of Harmony to banish Nightmare Moon.
I disagree that Starlight is not trying to incapacitate Twilight; we see Starlight fire a beam which Twilight flies around to dodge. Starlight wasn't fighting defensively; she was fighting to win, much like when she sealed Twilight within a block of ice. That she wasn't able to do so, since we see both of them panting and unable to keep fighting, strongly suggests that the two of them were at a stalemate, with neither able to gain any sort of victory.
Again, a quick review doesn't seem to follow with that. They did each raise shields, progressively stronger ones, before Starlight went overboard, but that's not sparring. By definition, sparring is fighting to try and defeat the other person in a mock-battle, and that wasn't what was happening there. They weren't even pretending to fight, but rather to test each other's defensive spells.
Yeah, the show is probably never going to give us any sort of straight answer on this aspect. Earth ponies will no doubt remain the least "special" ponies, at least in terms of what's obvious.
In AD&D 2E that was more the case, where "metamagic" was a philosophical category of actual spells that affected other spells (e.g. the squaring the circle spell), whereas in the d20 System it's a series of feats (rather than spells unto themselves) that increase the overall difficulty of spells by adding some additional effect onto them. The magic is "stronger" in terms of it requires a higher spell level to cast (mostly), since you're making the spell in question do more.
That was funny.
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Like grappling in pathfinder, don't knock it 'til you've tried it in 3.5.
I'm not sure how it's not a given. Every pony has some level of magic, they appear visibly drained and unable to use magic after Tirek absorbs it. It's referred to as "stealing" magic, and we see energy flow out of ponies and into Tirek. If one being had all the power of 30 million magical ponies, that being would be a god.
The XP analogy doesn't work because enemies don't really give up XP when they are defeated. Also you don't grow visibly younger and larger sucking in XP from someone. A better analogy, based on what we saw in the show, is that Tirek works like a Barghest or a Nabasu. He gains a Growth Point for every pony he absorbs, and transforms into a larger version of himself. Now, a Nabasu that had 10 million Growth Points would be some kind of god, that's why I work off the assumption that Tirek was only get like 1/10,000th of a growth point per pony, to strain the analogy.
She does keep Twilight busy for a bit so she can interfere with the race, but she's also laughing and grinning the entire time. Until that last time loop where Twilight talked her down, Starlight was winning decisively.
They're also testing their offensive spells, but you're right, it was just a practicing of their combat moves. And Twilight has noticeably improved.
Yup. I could see Twilight, as a consequence of being an alicorn, effectively has her spells Empowered/Maximized for free at all times.
Now I'm imagining Sonata actually singing this song to him later on.
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Well, insofar as Pathfinder is concerned, there's a flowchart for that. Though I'm sure there's a 3.5 version out there somewhere too.
Leaving aside that we don't know how many ponies Tirek drained, it's a presumption - rather than a given - that draining a certain number of ponies' magic would make him into a god (in d20 terms of the word). That's because there's no default understanding of exactly what, in game terms, Tirek was gaining, nor how it stacked with itself. There's absolutely no reason to presume that it's any sort of linear progression (it could be quadratic, exponential, or something else), wherein absorbing a set quantity of magic increases his personal power. That's why the XP idea can't be easily dismissed, since it fits the descriptive criteria for what we see happen (i.e. "defeats enemies, gets stronger as a direct result").
A nabasu is capped at 20 growth points, and a barghest is capped at 5; these aren't just technicalities with regard to your analogy, but rather showcase that such systems can have diminishing returns over time, which was the point I was making. The traditional definition of experience points is that they're a measurement of just that: experience, and so aren't a quantity that can be taken away or used up. But even if we leave aside that they could be expended in 3.5 while creating magic items and casting certain spells, they still represent a growth of a character's "life force" (for lack of a better term), in that a character with more XP (and thus, levels) could survive more negative levels than someone who couldn't, for example. From there, it's a small change to tie that to inherent magic, as an aspect of inherent life force, and all of a sudden the issue with Tirek isn't quite so easily dismissed.
To put it another way, there's no mechanical reason why what Tirek was doing couldn't necessarily be represented by the usual "defeat enemies, gain XP" rules. The only issue is one of flavor text, in terms of describing what's happening. This underlines the point I was making, which is that there's no inherent presumption about how much power Tirek is gaining from each individual pony. Saying "it must be this much," isn't a statement that has anything inherent in the show to back it up. There's no inarguable measurement of how much magic a given pony has.
If we're talking about strategic objectives, then yes. But in terms of measuring actual combat prowess, she wasn't any more adroit than Twilight, based on what we saw.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that statement; other than pushing Starlight, in her shield, back somewhat, there isn't much that's different. Even then, if you put a priority on that, I'd say that might just be her (Twilight) using her alicorn magic somewhat.
I really recommend reading Thoth's alicorn magic template. It's in Eclipse terms, but it's still very impressive:
Oh great, now you've got that idea in my head.
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I'm sure there is, and I'm sure it's even more complex than the Pathfinder chart.
It sure seems like he drained almost everyone in Equestria. At the very least, if Discord is teleporting Tirek around like this for several days and he seems to be able to absorb an area of ponies in seconds, it's reasonable to assume many thousands of ponies were absorbed.
We see him repeatedly perform the same ritual and seem to derive the same benefit from it. So yes, I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume the default progression is linear adding to his personal power, unless there is a strong alternate evidence to suggest it is logarithmic or some other means adding to his personal power.
In the game's defined areas, meant to create monsters that players can fight, not gods. But according to pathfinder lore, the 4 Greater Barghest goblin hero gods got their power by devouring everything around them, and Nocticula in Wrath of the Righteous became a demon lord by devouring power of those around her. That's not mechanically in the game just like the Starstone doesn't have stats to directly turn you into a god. If Tirek's magic had a function that would draw him to the lower planes when he got full, it would have happened, but he doesn't.
But XP is something fundamentally different than Growth Points or Level Draining or Soul Trapping or any of the other functions. It's supposed to mean lessons learned from each enemy defeated, and as you defeated enemies of similar challenge many times you learn less each time. Nothing is taken from enemies when XP is gained (they are defeated, but they don't directly forfeit a piece of themselves, you can even gain it from befriending an enemy.) That's why it has a logarithmic curve rather than a linear one.
You're right there is no direct number given on the number of thaums in the average pony. But we can see a wide variety of unicorns lifting at least small objects in their grasp, and this is treated as completely normal and unremarkable, which implies that almost all unicorns have however "much" magic is needed to routinely power these abilities. Similarly, Pegasi fly when they have magic, when their wings couldn't lift them, as they can't lift themselves when Tirek steals their magic. Most Pegasi have "enough" magic to lift the body of an adult Pegasi, minus the actual physical power of their limbs. There are reasonable assumptions we can make that almost all ponies have some amount of magic, based on the actions of everyday ponies, as well as Tirek going around stealing however much magic ponies have, which he must have felt was worth the effort to him.
I think the fact that she was levitating herself while fighting and forcing Twilight to fight on her terms suggests she is, but I think we will have to agree to disagree on this, just like in their combat training session.
I've read it before on your blog, and I think it's really well put together. I think +1 ECL is a little low, but that might just be my impression from Eclipse might be a little bit overpowered. I really don't want to get into an Eclipse debate though, just my personal experience that something that moddable can end up affecting the power curve. Not that it's not a great system for mature players!
I'm imagining Lex lying in a hospital healing up for a week after this, and Sonata just singing it over and over until he gets the message. BTW, I was thinking Sonata might just show up and throw a silence at this monster, but then I remembered his SLAs don't require verbal components. BOOOO!
Oh, I have absolutely no doubt. CMB and CMD helped a lot, but at the end of the day they only did so much.
Is it thousands or is it millions? How many ponies actually live in Equestria? If we go by what we saw during those episodes, there's no real way to judge how many individuals are drained or how much time Tirek spent gathering power (though it doesn't seem like a very long time at all).
Except he doesn't derive "the same" benefit from it relative to the number of ponies he drains. The amount by which he gains power seems to be independent of the number of ponies he actually steals magic from. Consider when he steals the magic of one unicorn versus almost a dozen unicorns versus Twilight's friends. Each time, he experiences some physical growth and presumably increased power in other areas, but the amount of gain doesn't seem to be related to the number of ponies drained; draining almost a dozen ponies is only slightly more growth-inducing than draining one, and draining Twilight's friends seems to induce more growth than that, despite their decreased numbers.
That's leaving aside the fact that, if he's draining thousands or millions of ponies off-screen, then we don't see much evidence for it in the way of continuing physical changes. Quite the opposite, most of Tirek's physical alterations seem to be limited to what we see on-screen, which would mean that there are a LOT of background ponies whose magic, upon being drained, isn't have any real effect at all on Tirek's physique.
Ironically, that actually works fairly well insofar as the "XP awards" theory goes, because it plays into the idea that the bar is set higher each time, and so more XP is needed to earn a comparable benefit. Likewise, since Twilight's friends are doubtlessly higher-level than some background NPCs, they're worth more XP and so allow Tirek to hit a higher level.
The Goblin Hero-Gods entry on the Pathfinder wiki don't say anything about that; simply that they accidentally created goblins when they spilled mortal blood (and that sounds like a creation myth, because today wounding mortals doesn't cause spontaneous goblin generation) and were once in the service of Asmodeus before Lamashtu brought them over to her side. Nocticula didn't "devour" those around her either; she seduced and murdered other demon lords - which causes a new island to grow in her Midnight Isles for unknown reasons (it might be a local area effect) - but there's nothing to suggest that she's actually consuming them and gaining power.
Of course, that's just an issue of lore for the Golarion setting (which is distinct from Pathfinder, it should be noted) anyway. It's not really related to the idea that Tirek is gaining power based around stealing magic from ponies, and doesn't undermine the idea of "the same effect can grant diminishing returns over time."
That's the default presumption, I'll certainly grant you, but the problem is that it doesn't work very well. Even if we leave aside that characters with a large amount of XP (i.e. higher-level characters) can survive being hit with, say, an enervation spell and not die - whereas a character with 0 XP (i.e. a 1st-level character) will always be slain by such a spell - it's still an issue of "you've slain a lot of monsters, and now your (say) Knowledge of engineering has increased." There's a narrative disconnect between how you gain XP and what the effect of it is, which is eased if you say that it's at least somewhat based around some sort of quasi-magical force. The old fall-back of "yeah, but it also represents background stuff you've been doing," doesn't entirely work either. Certainly, it doesn't explain why high-level characters can do things like swan dive off a 200-foot cliff (20d6 damage, average 70 points), into a river of lava (20d6 fire damage, average 70 points), and just climb out, all without any overt use of magic (i.e. no spells, magic items, spell-like abilities, or supernatural abilities are necessary to survive such a thing). At that point, the characters have - purely through their advanced accumulation of XP - gone beyond what's humanly possible.
Given that, is it really that difficult to entertain the idea that Tirek is just power-leveling himself through what's basically a sort of curse to shut down other ponies' magic?
Leaving aside that there is no unit of measurement called "thaums" in Pathfinder or My Little Pony (rather, that's from Discworld...and, apparently, the Kingkiller Chronicles), there's no reason in what you wrote why the accumulation of that magical energy would necessarily retain any sort of 1:1 ratio...or, for that matter, presuming that a 1:1 ratio compilation would somehow grant god-like power. In Pathfinder, that would be like saying that nine 1st-level spells are the equivalent of one 9th-level spell, which doesn't seem to track with the overall level of difference in power between spells of those levels.
If you look at The Practical Enchanter (a companion book to Eclipse, though it certainly stands on its own), there's an in-character principle called Lerandor's Rule, which states that a spell of a particular level is roughly twice as powerful ("powerful" is actually a bit of a misnomer, as each spell's level is a mixture of power and complexity of effect, but we'll go with it here) as a spell of the previous level, which tells us that spell level advancement is a binary logarithm. So two 0-level spells are worth a 1st-level spell, four 0-level spells make up a 2nd-level spell, eight 0-level spells make a 3rd-level spell, etc. That works far better when trying to compare lower-level effects to higher-level ones, rather than directly adding the levels of component spells, and sits well with the idea that power progression isn't linear where magic is concerned.
Starlight's ability to telekinetically lift herself - while using other magic - no less, is certainly impressive. Twilight doesn't seem to know that particular trick...but it's hard to say, since Twilight seems to be prone to forgetting her own abilities (such as not just teleporting herself across the ridge to escape the hydra in Feeling Pinkie Keen, or herself and Rarity away from Garble in Gauntlet of Fire, or out of her cage in the movie).
I've heard this before, and it always makes me sigh and shake my head, because it's based on a flawed premise. You're right that it does presume that the players and the GM are going to be mature and focus primarily on having fun - and not impinging on everyone else's fun - rather than trying to "win," but there's more to it than that. Eclipse is, unto itself, a toolkit. You're not supposed to just allow the players to use the entirety of what's in the book the same way that you would for Pathfinder. That's why page 197 is a checklist of options, with a note for what to draw if you're disallowing an option versus modifying it in some way. Thoth, the co-author, has stated flat out that allowing the players to use everything in the book without restriction is the same as allowing every single d20 book ever written - and all of the books that weren't written - into your campaign.
Eclipse has a flexibility that I don't believe any other d20 character-building supplement matches, due to the customizability of literally everything in the book. That customizability is why it can showcase Rainbow Dash as we see her in the show in d20 terms, despite that requiring her to break the sound barrier before she's hit puberty. But that customizability is meant to be tweaked, applying limits and restrictions and alterations that better reflect the game world in question, before play actually starts. The idea of "everything being in play" isn't one that's taken for granted; if the example builds seem that way, that's because they're example builds, and don't have to take into account any alterations made for an actual campaign.
Pathfinder operates under a different set of assumptions. It's presumed that every first-party product is allowed by default, and that players don't need to restrain themselves because the rules are going to do that for them. Admittedly, good rules will try to maintain game balance, but Pathfinder's community honestly seems to think that balance is entirely a rules issue, rather than it mostly taking place at the table rather than in the books.
Eclipse is only "unbalanced" if you approach it the same way you would Pathfinder, when it fact it's a different animal. It requires that the GM figure out how to take what's there and use it to represent the way the game world works, rather than simply administrating a finalized set of rules unto themselves. Doing so requires a lot more options to be put up front, with the knowledge that you won't use all of them at a particular time, anymore than you'd insist on using every allen wrench in your bag when fixing a bicycle.
Insofar as meta-character wisdom goes, everyone staying together is a good idea. But philosophically, Lex wants to stand between everyone else and danger. It's what he feels a ruler should do. Sonata, I suspect, would disagree, so there's probably going to be some words exchanged...if he survives this.
Its.
So a black hole not only doesn't kill the thing, it either just plane shifted it, and then it came back, or the monster stopped it, and then came back. Fuck that thing is annoying.
9217523
Doggone it. Fixed now.
Either way, the creature got the drop on Lex, since his "sure-kill" move turned out to be anything but.