: There is no contradiction. AFAIK, an avatara is any
: powerful sorceror in the Myth world, not just a good
: one. According to GURPS (and as implied by Myth II),
: One becomes a Shade voluntarily.
Well I'llbedamned, you're right. I thought the Myth II manual talked about this, but there are many characters missing in that section, including Shades. GURPS takes the implication a bit further, so we don't need to go into detail or use its resources any more than Myth II itself.
Oh, actually, no, the Avatara are only The Nine. It even says that in TFL, oddly enough. (I am, however, willing to believe that "avatara" is different from "Avatara", the capitalized for the Nine guys, the lowercase for a powerful, potentially Light archmage. :-)
Oh wait, no. Actually, TFL says that Shades are "The reanimated corpses of undead sorcerers". But since there is no information in Myth II which directly contradicts this, why did Forrest and Sili so strongly promote this change of look at the Shades? If Shades are as the common conception goes, of powerful sorcerers who wish to become Dark, then the TFL and Myth II version are completely contradictory.
Ah, here we are. More specifically, or less, Shades are just "the reanimated corpses of powerful sorcerers". So, those could be any sorcerers, not just Avatara.
That brings us to Myth II. Who is Turquine then? He's the only Shade where we get to here about his transformation, although just implicatively. According to the flavor text that describes him, he was an evil archmage. "He agreed to endure the indescribable tortures of the Fallen that he might have his revenge" seems a bit too much like he went directly from living evil-dude to Shade by transformation by the Fallen. How can this be explained? Perhaps he was a special case, and so some Shades might have been turned from the Light in life and then willingly Shadified.
I'd like some more information, if anyone has it
