Deathlords Are Overpowered

In lieu of typing up some long thing that boils down to "A lot of stupid crap has built up around the Deathlords since the 1e corebook, and you should ignore most of it," I'll just say a lot of stupid crap has built up around the Deathlords since the 1e corebook, and you should ignore most of it.

Yes, they can betray the Neverborn, because that's within the set of behaviors characters that occupy their niche in the setting should be able to engage in. If the rules say they can't, the rules were written wrong. The Deathlords are the thirteen dark scheming would-be rulers of a weird gothic fantasy setting that exists parallel to the normal mythic pulp fantasy setting of Creation.

(Underworld needs to be re-written so it's a weird gothic fantasy setting that exists parallel to the normal mythic pulp fantasy setting of Creation, consisting of all the non-modern stuff from Wraith and all the gothic fantasy tropes that don't quite fit perfectly into Creation proper.)

They're thirteen tragic, puissant, horrible rulers caught in the memory of their past glory. They should scheme and plot and fight to hold temporal power over the Underworld instead of doing the job the Neverborn set them to do, which was doom the world. They should actually be bad at, and disinterested in, their assigned task. If you read their writeups in the 1e Abyssals book, it's clear they were. The Lion and the Princess moped; the Eye and the Lover fucked around; and Dowager and the Bishop pursued insane, doomed schemes; the Mask blew his wad early and tipped the setting off to the Deathlords' existence; the Walker did something generically mysterious; and the Bodhissatva actually ran a nation for PCs to run around in and have Underworld-themed adventures. Not a single one of them looked like an actual credible threat to the setting, unless you, the ST, wanted to single one out as the center of your campaign's plot. All the rest of them do is waste resources in order to exercise temporal power over the Underworld, in pathetic attempts to recapture the glory of their past.

(Deathlords need to be restatted so they need to waste huge resources in order to exercise temporal power over the Underworld instead of just each being able to solo the whole thing like they can right now.)

Clearly this is not what the Neverborn want them to do.

If Resonance fucks this up, then maybe they shouldn't be statted as uber-Abyssals with a Resonance track. Just make 'em powerful ghosts with a bunch of custom Arcanoi.

(Arcanoi need to be re-written from the ground up.)

What I am advocating here is a back-to-basics approach to the way the setting works — first you figure out what role a given NPC was clearly written to fill in the narrative tapestry of the game, and then you figure out how best to represent that through setting elements. The Deathlords have been grossly mishandled, rendered basically unable to fulfill the purpose they were inserted into the setting to fulfill. It doesn't matter whether Essence 10 + a Resonance track dictates they can or can't do X. That's putting the cart before the horse.

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