zerxus, a paladin, having a philosophical and homoerotic out-of-body conversation with the lord of hell while his body in the real world is spasming as if suspended in religious ecstasy is something else. like I cannot stop thinking about it. gay people just do it different
Like I know it’s been said already that the Real Villain Of This Brennan-DM’d Campagin Is Late Stage Capitalism Yet Again but I am genuinely BOWLED OVER by how poorly thought out the Astral Leywright Interdimensional Funtimes plan is.
I mean
Leaving off the fact that we the audience know the apocalypse is kicking off in like two hours, just imagineif Vespin Chloras and the Calamity hadn’t/weren’t going to happen and this unhinged scheme actually got to play out.
It’s bad enough that the “heroes” of this miniseries are a literal oligarchy of six privileged dickheads running an entire government with no public oversight or accountability, but this plan was cooked up by literally threeof them. Three people! On their own! Have decided it’s a great idea to shift their entire city-state to other planes of reality!
I know they said the purpose of Avalir was exploration and research and knowledge but! This is not a research station! This is a city! You know! A place where civilians and kids live! Even if the world wasn’t about to end, what were they going to do when people started objecting to relocating their kids and families to other dimensions that may or may not even be HOSPITABLE to life from the Prime Material Plane!
They have no idea what’s out there! They’re doing this BECAUSE they have no idea what’s out there! And they’re just going to shift their floating mountain city-state full of kids and civilians into literal parts unknown!
It’s like if the Royal Society circa 1800 pointed to the city of London and said “guess what everybody, every single one of you is relocating to an exotic foreign locale! which exotic foreign locale? fuck if i know, we just spun a globe and picked at random! here’s hoping we don’t wind up at the bottom of the ocean!”
Jesus H fucking Christ the hubris on these people is glorious and even without Betrayer Gods gunning for humanity’s ass it’s still so clear that this could only ever end in tragedy.
I’m crying. I’m laughing. These people are fundamentally awful and selfish. i love them so much. I’m going to fiddle while they burn.
You are a level 14 abjuration wizard with 142 hit points and are responsible for making sure the technology that keeps your floating city in the air works. You are secretly fucking with said technology so you can transport your floating city to other planes. You believe that gods are not special and have said so out loud. Your changeling ex husband is the face of the city’s news and he is insufferable but also you kept his last name and still actively wear perfume that smells like the flowers at your wedding. You also have accidentally almost oneshotted a man with a high level fireball. Every day Laerryn Coramar-Seelie wakes up.
So there’s a lot of posts about Zerxus being a damn fool, and that’s fine. Some are mournful, some incredulous, and some don’t blame him.
I’ve also seen a post or two about Zerxus being more clear-eyed than he seems, being clever with his words, negotiating for himself and his son, maaaybe his city, as selfish and ambitious as the wizards around him - and that’s also fine.
But I wonder if there’s something in between the naivete and the cynicism. Remember that Zerxus is the one with the visions; he has seen the end. He’s the one who feels it coming. He’s the one who knows what it feels like to stand in the palm of a god, to feel small and useless in the face of certain doom. Zerxus, paladin of the people, First Knight of Avelir. Useless.
What does a good man do in the face of unavoidable, terrible fate?
I think maybe, he just tries.
“I know you took your pain out on us. Don’t you forget the kindness we’re capable of. We’re your children too.”
That doesn’t sound to me like a total lack of understanding of what Asmodeus is, but it doesn’t sound like an arrogant attempt at manipulation, either. It sounds like a desperate plea. What else would you say to a god, if you had once chance to speak to one, before they tried to wipe your people off the world? What words could you justify, knowing one day you would answer for them? That you would have to explain them to your husband, or your son, in the afterlife?
What could you do but try?
The best weapons Zerxus carries are his compassion and his conviction. He is a paladin. A fighter. He will not lay down his arms in the final hour. He cannot. Hopeless though it may seem, he’s giving it everything he has, the greatest strength he can muster.
Let it not be said that Zerxus didn’t try his damndest.
And that, by the way - the fact that Asmodeus views humans as fundamentally different kinds of things from himself - is what Zerxus is failing to grasp, because Zerxus has fallen prey to the same hubris as the rest of his city.
The attitude of the mages of Avalir towards the gods is “they’re just like people, but with more power. what’s so special about that? we can make ourselves just as powerful, so what makes themso great?” and we can see, in their scorn, the dangers of that way of thinking.
Zerxusdoes not see things that differently from the wizards. He’s less scornful about it, but he’s still like “gods are basically just like people but bigger and more powerful.” He thinks of Asmodeus as a person like him, and extends to him the empathy of one person to another. “We’re your children,” he says, “we’re made of the same stuff,” and he believes this. He believes that Asmodeus can do better because he views him as a fellow person.
And he doesn’t understand that Asmodeus just, fundamentally does not see them that way.
I cannot get over Asmodeus’ clever use of his promise to Zerxus. Zerx was looking for a promise from Asmodeus not to harm humanity, for him to spare them in favor of harming those who had truly wronged him in the past, according to his story.
Asmodeus promised “I will never forget you.” He never said a word about what he would or would not do to humanity as a whole once he was free. He twisted Zerxus’ words to make it seem like he was listening to what Zerx wanted while really he’s just playing him.
I’ve been seeing quite a few interesting meta posts about Zerxus and Asmodeus, and how Zerxus’ actions towards Asmodeus are signs of equally deep compassion and arrogance in thinking he personally can fix the lord of the hells by being kind. But what I’m surprised not to have seen is discussion of how the same character trait can be either positive or negative depending on the narrative.
Because do you know who Zerxus reminds me of? Jester.
Jester knew the Gentleman was a liar and a crime lord and generally bad news. She knew Artagan had decieved not only her but all his followers about being a god. She knew Essek started a war. And despite having been hurt and risking being hurt again, she stood by all of them.
And she was right. Her unconditional love was part of the reason all three of these idiots came to grow some morals. The Gentleman stepped away from crime and got back together with Marion. She stood up to a literal god for Artie and he saved her from its wrath rather than selishly letting her share his punishment (thereby unkowingly also saving himself). Essek risked his life to fight Lucien and Trent by their side.
In the narrative of campaign 2, Jester made the right choice to extend trust to the untrustworthy. But Calamity is by definition a tragedy, and we all already know Zerxus is making a mistake for which the whole world will pay dearly. But he doesn’t know, can’t know, because no one knows what kind of narrative they are in until it has reached its end. We all must simply choose our actions and see what happens.
And this is a tragedy. Kidness or cruelty, compassion or evil, action or inaction, nothing can change that. Zerxus’ choice was kindness. And so, this time, kindness will be our downfall.
I feel like this is reflected well in campaign 1, specifically with the case of Clarota. The party treated him with kindness and healing, and were shocked and appalled when he turned against them in battle the moment his true desires were within reach. Matt basically said they would have needed a lot more time and effort to make him truly loyal to them.
The acts of kindness from Jester were continuous for a long time, and did gradually have an effect.
Zerxus has two small scenes of kindness - and it is kindness with a clear undertone of helping in return for future favours in the second case. He is not wrong in treating someone well, but his hubris shines through in that he thinks it will be enough to change the mind of a god.
So. Like. Beneath all the eloquence and gravitas and cleverness lent to him by Brennan’s brilliant portrayal.
Asmodeus’ tragic tale, in his own words, where he can give himself the most positive spin he wants (or where he can outright lie), is “I made a million ways for people to hurt each other and then no one liked me.”
If you look at things from the perspective of like… a storyteller, or a game designer, there’s a lot of sense to what he’s saying. Success rings hollow when failure is impossible, being good is less meaningful if it’s the only thing you can be, I get it. But uh. For the people of Exandria? The people who have to live with your decisions? It’s not a story. It’s not a game. And you cannot be surprised, or upset, when you create misery and the miserable people don’t like you.
“My gifts were not received the way I had intended” you intended them to be bad. And they were. You wanted to make something bad, and make people live with it, and to have them be grateful to you. To praise and worship you, for all this bad you brought into their lives. And that was never a realistic expectation my dude.
Now I do recognize that he did not talk exclusively about the mortals and their reaction. That he dwelt as much or more on the other gods and how they responded. But it’s kind of the same thing. Like, later on they were hostile towards him, but at that juncture it seems like they just… weren’t on his side like he wanted and expected them to be. It seems like the response he was looking for was comfort, for validation, for them to tell him it was unfair or, best of all, for them to tell the mean mortals they were being unfair. To speak on his behalf and explain to all their followers, “Listen Asmodeus is a really great guy and I think his work is really underappreciated.” Which, also, not a realistic expectation.
I dunno it’s a similar vibe to shitty people making hurtful jokes and then playing the martyr when people push back against them. Just, you know, scaled up to the level of divinity.
I went to rewatch the IG story takeovers because hindsight can always be incredibly fun, and anyway I continue to be stupid for the Seelies.
When asked about his favorite PC, Sam says Loquatius has the strongest connection with Laerryn over anyone else at the table. When asked about how many NPCs she’ll be flirting with, Aabria says that she won’t be flirting with a single one.
It’s Quay’s “I love you” colliding with Laerryn’s “I won’t love another”. They loved each other but they didn’t know how to love each other or how to let the other know. And they’re both self-important arrogant mages in the twilight of the Age of Arcanum so they were never going to compromise on that front.
Their marriage imploded because they had such contrasting ways of showing their love that they convinced the other they didn’t love them enough, or at all.
You know, I’m pretty sure that the Calamity did such catastrophic damage that it permanently weakened the boundaries of the planes. We know the celestial solstice is tied to ley is tied to the boundaries of the planes; we know the Calamity, like a solstice, drastically reshaped the ley lines. But now we also know that once, the Betrayer Gods were sealed and could not lend their powers whereas post-Divergence, they can, despite being prevented from entering the plane by the Divine Gate (as can the Prime Deities). We also know that planar travel was apparently once much more difficult: while I’d allow for the difficulty of transporting an entire city, it seems like plane-hopping even on an individual level isn’t common (whereas a L14 wizard in the 800s PD could be doing so daily). However, we know that by some point not terribly far into the Calamity, transporting a significant portion of a city was sufficiently feasible that both Aeor and Syngorn managed it. I think it’s simply that the effort needed to cross the planar boundary suddenly became, though still difficult, much more within the realm of possible for mortal magic.
It’s possible Vespin Chloras’s actions struck the first blow not just in the Calamity but in weakening the planar boundaries (and probably fucking up some ley lines while he was at it), but the point is while the rest of the multiverse was not as affected as the prime material plane, the shockwaves appear to have still hit it.
Ok I know I’ve largely been like “there’s not going to be much in the way of remaining lore from this in later campaigns because everyone’s going to die and be forgotten in a war that kills a supermajority of the population and permanently scars most of the planet” BUT I did happen to look at the Ring of Mind Shielding and, well, wouldn’t it be funny if:
Have we talked the etymology of the EXU Calamity PC names yet?? Because BOY ARE NAMES IN THIS SEASON REAL INCH RESTING.
Patia ==> Hypatia, Greek for “highest, supreme”
Nydas ==> Nidus, Latin for “nest,” and then “a place where infection rests” . I think I also saw someone say that Nydas sounds like King Midas with the golden touch.
Zerxus ==> Xerxes, Greek for “hero among heroes”
Loquacious ==> Loquacious - Loqui, Latin for “to talk” and later “one who talks a lot”
Laerryn ==> Lauryn - Laurus, Latin for “bay leaf tree”, symbolic for “victory, fame and accomplishment”
Cerrit is a little more unclear. I was thinking Serit, and then Sero, which is Latin for “sowing, planting.”
Just know that there’s lots of latin in here, plus the greek tragedy of it all, and in general the hubris of empires full of an academic class with too much power who believed themselves to be close to gods.
ALT