Author Topic: Evil druids  (Read 9814 times)

Offline JohnnyMayHymn

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #20 on: November 07, 2011, 10:05:43 PM »
...You have the Death favoring druids, who see the decay in nature. Much rarer than the Life favoring, most of these really go in the next category. Unseelie fey aligned or so.

You have the Great Cycle druids, who see it all as parts of a great process. Sometimes certain areas need pruning, or the cycle needs help getting back in balance. ...
So these guys might be ok with undead as long as you plant flowers in your zombies?
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Offline divinedragonslayer

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #21 on: November 07, 2011, 10:13:31 PM »
You know the idea of of plant undead gives me an idea for a template.

Also to say that there are two forms of druids just a generalization. I'm just referring to how one would judge if they'd support destroying other parts of nature to stop the spread of the urban environment.
« Last Edit: November 07, 2011, 10:24:54 PM by divinedragonslayer »
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Offline veekie

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #22 on: November 08, 2011, 03:33:03 AM »
...You have the Death favoring druids, who see the decay in nature. Much rarer than the Life favoring, most of these really go in the next category. Unseelie fey aligned or so.

You have the Great Cycle druids, who see it all as parts of a great process. Sometimes certain areas need pruning, or the cycle needs help getting back in balance. ...
So these guys might be ok with undead as long as you plant flowers in your zombies?
Less undead, more dying actually. Eternal type undeath(like liches, ghosts and skeletons) violates that, since they are the antithesis of decay in general(on top of the growth of life). Predatory, and particularly predatory and infectious undead would be cool. Its like a disease agent.

Planting flowers on top would rather defeat the point, they after all, want things to fall apart.

Though on the other hand plantlife based 'undead', with animate plants, fungi and vermin dragging a corpse around for a structural framework...
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Offline weenog

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #23 on: November 08, 2011, 06:37:26 AM »
I think the difficulty of finding an answer lies in the question being wrong.  You can't kill nature, so whether or not you're justified in doing it is a pointless thing to consider.  Death is part of nature, and not just in the process and moment of dying sense.  Things that are lifeless, always have been, and always will be, are also parts of nature.  Asteroid regolith, sterile and barren as it is, is natural.

I think a more appropriate pair of questions for the druids is "If human(oid) intervention is an unnatural abomination, and only human intervention can arrest it, are we justified in acting to prevent others from acting?  If so, which method involves the least intervention on our part, to achieve the most profound and lasting restriction effect on everyone else?"
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Offline veekie

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #24 on: November 08, 2011, 08:27:27 AM »
Well certainly if you consider nature as a thing. Nature as an object can only be altered from one of its states to another. Whether the alteration is appropriate now, theres the question. At what point is a state change unnatural? When theres a mind behind it? Or when the change becomes mono-directional.

If you consider nature as the process, you get a rather different set. Nature as the processes of life and decay in tandem, would then care more that the wheel of life and death keeps turning, and with variation to make it resilient. A lot of what people consider nature tend to be cyclical processes, the turning of the seasons, the water cycle, the cycle of birth, growth, decay and death, even the food chain.
This approach lets you distinguish between the elemental and natural processes. Element(air, fire, earth, water, life and death) are primal, but they tend to be static and are used by the cycle, but not inherently part of it.
So in this perspective, one cycle(civilization) is causing a multitude of other cycles(the environments in the displaced areas) to stop, while itself imbalanced and unsustainable. Therefore, you exert influence to break that cycle, while others can still recover, rather than ending in a terminal state.

If you consider nature as the combined relationships of all things in nature, then you have the balance factor to consider. Like the above, individual things all within nature, but the health of the whole overrides the health of the component.
Everything is edible. Just that there are things only edible once per lifetime.
It's a god-eat-god world.

Procrastination is the thief of time; Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves; The vast concerns of an eternal scene.

Offline divinedragonslayer

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #25 on: November 08, 2011, 09:00:26 AM »
My definition of nature includes the most primal of elements the cycle of life and death, day and night, creation and decay. But another equally important piece of nature is the web of life which sustains itself. Thus the urban ecosystem which would swallow natural lands for the cities. This increases if you believe that this cycle is further disrupted by destruction of brushlands and forests to create farmlands.
« Last Edit: November 08, 2011, 09:09:32 AM by divinedragonslayer »
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Offline veekie

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #26 on: November 08, 2011, 09:05:25 AM »
That depends on the gods and their role in nature then. Bombing it all to crap and then rebuilding is a time honored Nature tradition though. Ice Ages are even relatively gentle on this scale of things. They are gradual enough that natural adaptation can take place, and when its all over the twice enforced adaptations would provide variety and richness in life.

There was a theory somewhere. Evolution depends on two things.
You need a boom, to generate a rich population where odd traits can be available within the population.
You need a bust, to cull large amounts of the population so that successful odd traits can become the norm.
Everything is edible. Just that there are things only edible once per lifetime.
It's a god-eat-god world.

Procrastination is the thief of time; Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves; The vast concerns of an eternal scene.

Offline divinedragonslayer

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #27 on: November 08, 2011, 09:13:13 AM »
I was thinking that the ice age would be brought in by magical means thus happening all at once, but either way I can see most non-good druids supporting the actions. Especially if it's brought on slow enough that normally arctic animals could expand into new territories.
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Offline veekie

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #28 on: November 08, 2011, 09:24:15 AM »
Well, even magic takes time after all. Technically you could probably use Control Weather to alter key weather systems, shutting down natural heat pumps etc by breaking up regular weather and deploying Fimbulwinter at crucial hotspots.
This has the benefit of taking relatively less effort than banging it out in one fell swoop, since you only need a group of high level druids on shift duty, and its less easily disrupted by a band of heroes, since again , the druids only need to be present for a few hours each day.
Everything is edible. Just that there are things only edible once per lifetime.
It's a god-eat-god world.

Procrastination is the thief of time; Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves; The vast concerns of an eternal scene.

Offline divinedragonslayer

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #29 on: November 08, 2011, 09:33:33 AM »
Which is probably what happened. I'm going with that idea thank you for all who've helped me.
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Offline RobbyPants

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #30 on: November 11, 2011, 10:09:57 AM »
My question is would a druid be able to rationalize sacrificing a part of nature if you will to destroy the threat of civilization overtaking nature? Granted they'd probably create small pockets hidden away from the world where those parts of nature are asleep.
People can rationalize anything. Take the Old Testament flood story: you basically have a destroy everything to save eight scenario.

Also, depending on how the druids set up the catastrophe, they could do it in a way that a lot of nature is spared along with a lot of humans, but the civilization is destroyed. At that point, it's up to the druids whether or not they let the humans pick up the pieces and try to behave, or go in and wipe them out while they're weak with more precise attacks. Either way, nature could bounce back relatively unscathed in a short period of time.
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Offline divinedragonslayer

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #31 on: November 11, 2011, 08:08:32 PM »
And I agree with you about rationalizing things. But I'm thinking that the original druids who bring on the disaster don't mean to destroy everything unnatural, but their descendants corrupt the teachings of their ancestors.
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Offline veekie

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #32 on: November 12, 2011, 04:54:45 AM »
That works as well as any, possibly legends of the great cleansing in the past get corrupted and passed down.
Everything is edible. Just that there are things only edible once per lifetime.
It's a god-eat-god world.

Procrastination is the thief of time; Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves; The vast concerns of an eternal scene.

Offline divinedragonslayer

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #33 on: November 12, 2011, 08:19:01 AM »
By the way this may be a bit off topic, but for disrupting the climate I'm really thinking the druids used major icehearts. (Frostburn, pg. 110) While uldra are supposed to be the ones creating them I'm not sure why druids couldn't procure them from the servants of Iborighu or those who have found a way to create them by other means.
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Offline RobbyPants

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #34 on: November 12, 2011, 09:21:34 AM »
I've got this idea for a game. Basically a group of evil druids use magic to destroy civilization which is threatening to consume nature as it stands. Now I realize by them summoning a global catastrophe would kill a lot of nature in the process.
I forgot to ask earlier: are you talking about one civilization or all of them? Basically, how wide spread is this "cleansing" supposed to be?
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Offline divinedragonslayer

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Re: Evil druids
« Reply #35 on: November 13, 2011, 07:40:07 AM »
Global
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