: Yeah, most people have equated The Watcher with Bahl'al
: for quite a while. For one thing, The Watcher is the
: first mage known to have used Thrall, way back in the
: Wind Age. For another, Bahl'al is male, classified as
: an Ancient Evil in the prerelease info, and the guy
: who destroyed Tyr. That pretty much clinches him as
: The Watcher.
yup, i was around playing TFL, but I wasn't even aware of forums and plugins and the whole community aspect. i still get depressed that I wasn't, when i could have been with just a few clicks
: If you clicked on Napoleon, wouldn't it make sense to see
: a flavor about Waterloo? Spectacular failures--like
: the world's greatest necromancer spending nine days
: underwater looking for the world's most powerful spell
: in his field in--are still story-worthy.
very true, but Bahl'al has nothing to do with thrall as you believe, so, why would he be in half of the thrall's flavors? your theory is that he didn't discover the unlife dream which means he might have no connection at all to thrall. if you're right, then why have a completely unrelated failure in their text? they should have put a failure about some big thrall army that was Thwarted, and not Bahl'al's failure, which had nothing to do with them.
: There's a particular story this is meant to echo, I
: think: Gilgamesh's search for eternal life. He finally
: learned that a plant conferring immortality grows at
: the bottom of the ocean, and managed to go down and
: find it--but before he could eat it a snake did, which
: is why they shed their skin instead of dying and are
: immortal (according to the story).
: Anyway, I think there's a definite literary link here of
: "Super-powerful dude's greatest quest is to gain
: control of an underwater artifact conferring a new
: kind of life, and he fails."
this is a very good arguement. but I have to point this out: when bungie wrote Myth, they made a list of things not to include in the game, like cliches, "coming of age heroes", etc. Also in this list was obvious story arc references to anything in literature, because they wanted to be Original. and they were original, the only thing taken from literature are some names, not whole story arcs. which leads me to believe that thought your comparison does make much sense, it isn't likely to be true.
I think, for myth, it's : "Super-powerful evil dude's greatest quest is to gain control of an underwater artifact conferring a new kind of life, and he succeeds completely, resulting in the creation of armies and the eventual fall of Mazzarin, the greatest Light hero of the past.
: External definitions aside, both "Unlife" and
: "Undeath" are used in Myth, so I think it's
: likely that they don't mean precisely the same thing.
: That is, a Dream of Unlife does something more than
: just make Undead. It...uh...makes Unliving beings. Or
: it makes a *whole lot* of Undead. Or something. :-)
WOw! what you said above has lead to me a whole new line of thought (revelation i was talking about in title):
a difference between UnDead and UnLife!
I believe that the only way one can make anything with the above two is with the dream of unlife.
First, Bahl'al finally discovers it. He quickly figures out how to use it to animate corpses into literal puppet armies. then Balor comes along and binds him, learns the dream, and shares it with some OR all of the other Fallen.
(In no particular order) Shiver discovers how to make UnLife with the dream of unlife, and not just Undead puppets. So she uses it to give a kind of life back to the Ghasts, which then become Wights, which explains perfectly why they feel pain. Then soulblighter takes Still Living dark human minions and removes their soul using the very same unlife dream, and experiments with souls removal until he gets it right.
Balor takes the dream of unlife and uses it on the corpses of some still living warriors, the Myrmidons, who feel and think just like wights do, but More, because they didn't really die, just had the dream casted into them when they still were alive.
: Remember also that most known Myth Dreams don't have an
: effect which is completely unique; they're just more
: powerful in some way than ordinary spells, or have
: added special qualities.
: There are regular mind control spells like whatever the
: Head uses (and what the Deceiver seems to use to
: "influence" people without completely taking
: them over), and then there's the Binding Dream.
: There are regular immobilizing spells, and then there's
: the Confinement Dream.
: There are regular blowing-crap-up spells, and then
: there's the Dispersal Dream.
: And so forth. So it would make sense that the Dream of
: Unlife is a super-powered version of some more
: ordinary necromantic spells.
that's very possible, just right now im debating against the existence of those lesser necromantic spells.
: Well, we don't know how long he had to convert all those
: guys. But even so, the difference here is merely
: quantitative--exactly the same effect, but used to get
: more peeople at once, or in a shorter amount of time,
: or at a longer range, some such. That's much easier to
: buy than a qualitative difference, I think.
i still think that quality=quantity when it comes to Dreams, wouldnt you want to blow up More people with a dispersal dream? or convert more guys? in this sense, they appear to me to be the same thing
: We do have a good example with the Dispersal Dream.
: Employed by two very distinct parties--Alric and
: Shades--it's had a lot of time to mutate, yet the two
: versions differ only in the accompanying special
: effects (GURPS suggests that these may be a function
: of the caster's personality or "aura.") That
: implies that Dreams can't be made to vary that much.
it can imply that, but perhaps it is implying that dreams can be altered. and who knows if the FX in the game don't have some value unknown to us, but evident in the Myth world?
: Furthermore, Dreams are usually wielded only by extremely
: powerful mages--Shade-level or above--yet even
: low-level human mages can be taught to make Ghasts by
: Soulblighter.
hmm that's true, but for all we know the Baron knows some things we do not give him any credit for. he could be a mage but i agree he isn't an archmage.
: At the same time (as others have pointed
: out in this thread), creators of one type of undead
: may be completely unable to create a different type,
: whereas you'd expect that after you'd mastered at
: least one version of a Dream, it'd be comparatively
: easy to get the other versions down.
they may have been unable at first, but soon learned anyway because Balor passed the secrets around like fruitcakes! why wouldnt he; the more Fallen who know all the secrets, the bigger the armies and more chances of Dark succeeding.
-Welly
