#WHAT HAPPENED AT THIS DANG PARTY SHE STARTED GOING TO AT THE END OF 57?!?!?!

[coconut530]

BELLTOWER BONANZA

[regularlyfe]

you know, every once and a while I really get to thinking about the big plot details of the TAZ Balance arc and Lucretia’s whole thing really fucks me up.

Don’t get me wrong, I adore her, and no one is their best self in truly desperate situations, let alone something like what she was going through, but so many of the choices she made...

Like I’m not even going to cover the whole mind wipe thing because what happened to Davenport is literally my worst nightmare with not even a shred of hyperbole, I’m just gonna focus rn on the whole “cutting the planar system off from the Prime Material plane,” because that alone is a whole mountain plus some.

So like the details of her plan, if I recall correctly, were that she would cast an abjuration spell, powered by the Light of Creation, around the whole of the Prime Material plane in order to shield the Light from the Hunger’s scouts, and eventually starve the Hunger out.

That’s a fantastic plan if there aren’t any consequences, like all the logic is sound. You don’t have to figure out how to kill the giant vore monster, you don’t have to dump a bunch of incredibly powerful, incredibly dangerous, and guaranteed to be used artifacts on some unsuspecting inhabitants, it’s just a waiting game, and then you’re done.

But like immediately the consequences were recognized and pointed out. The bonds between the Prime Material plane and the rest of the planar system would be severed, and all the planes would starve, wasting away and dying.

The inhabitants of 12 planes of reality would die.

Now I know that DnD universes tend to be smaller in population than our particular world, but even if we reduce the population of each entire plane to that of a single planet, say earth-scale, that is a LOT of lifeforms.

Ignoring the current, generous, estimation of 8 billion humans, there are estimates ranging between 8.7 million to of 11.3 million with a few going upwards of a billion and to scales of a trillion in accounting for deep water microbial life in numbers of species.

So let’s be generous and assume a biodiversity count at around 10 million species, getting rid of the microbes and adding some of the magical creatures.

Did you know the online world atlas estimates about 900 million dogs exist on the planet today? 7.8 billion humans exist in our world. 1.5 billion cows. 2 million rats in New York City alone, and that’s 784 sq km out of all flat land on the planet being 148.94 million sq km. Mice, squirrels, and bats are considered to be on the same scale as the rats.

But let’s continue to ere on the conservative side here and go with the average population per species be somewhere around raccoon level. In North America, the estimated raccoon population is between 5 and 10 million, and the global population is estimated to be around 20 million and rising.

So let’s go with 15 million. Again, trying to be conservative with our numbers.

These assumptions brought together, we are saying each plane - note that the Prime Material plane encompasses and entire universe - only has one, sparsely inhabited, earth-sized planet’s (or equivalent) worth of population. And that population is broken down to approximately 10 million species with 15 million members per species.

Now a lot of this is incredibly hand-wavy and vague - I am definitely not an ecologist - but I feel like for estimating a fantasy planar system’s population while giving the Director the benefit of the doubt by assuming low, this has at least some grounding.

So we have 12 planes, with 10,000,000 species each, and 15,000,000 members per species.

This would ultimately be 12*10,000,000*15,000,000 lifeforms.

1,800,000,000,000,000 lifeforms.

1.8 million billion lifeforms.

Numbers like these tend to make more sense when translated into into terms of time, so say, if each lifeform equated a single second, then that would be over 57 million years.

And this is a generous estimate.

This is a possible number of lives that could be lost if Lucretia had succeeded in putting her plan into action.

**And, I just want to say as a quick aside here, I forgot about the ethereal plane, which a checked to make sure it did in fact have inhabitants (it does), which bumped this from 11 to 12 planes. That was an increase of 150,000,000,000,000 lifeforms, or ~4,700,000 years - remembering that each second of those years is a life - from the time translation. It’s hard to see that significance when the majority of the characters in a number are 0, so I just wanted to make that clear.

Now the relics definitely had incredibly high death counts. I’d say it’s reasonable to argue that those counts would be comparable to the counts of our wars, and not to rehash any specifics, but out all pre-history, midieval, and modern wars the highest estimates remained in the tens of millions, no higher than 85 million deaths.

Of course, without saying, that is an utterly horrifying number of lives lost. But that versus not just one people’s lives lost, but the entirety of a set of world’s existence?

That’s a scale difference in the realm of 10s of million, specifically around 21,176,470 times larger in size.

I know the ethical dilemma of arguing the value of one life versus the value of many is an age old debate, but when it comes to person-scale war versus the destruction of not one but eleven universes?

Literally the choice to allow people to fight each other with absurdly dangerous magic versus allowing all of this planar system’s existence to waste to nothingness?

Which, mind you, the destruction of entire planar systems is exactly what the Hunger was doing. The crew of the Starblaster was trying to stop all that.

This is not just a mass extinction event, it’s the end of everything to this planar system, changing it in a way such that it will never produce any semblance of life again. Like in Cycle 82 when the Plane of Magic vivisected the Prime Material Plane, life in the whole system was destroyed, as the system no longer functioned in a way that could sustain anything more meaningful than shells of what had been before.

Like optimistically, the Hunger starves before the Planar System does, and minimal casualties occur. But the Hunger has the energy of Many, Many, Many more planar systems, just like, in it. Because who knows how long it had been consuming these things before the crew showed up.

So really, the best case is that the planar system changes, and everything designed to function in the previous flow of the system dies, the Hunger dies, and eventually life that can function in this new, changed system comes into being after, I don’t know, another universe, that jives with the new flow, is made within the Prime Material Plane?

I feel like this is a case of preferring an semi-unknown to a clear known.

Because the crew has seen powerful artifacts, citing a 5 wizards out of 7 party. And they have a solid grasp on the power levels of the Light, citing both the time spent with it to build the Starblaster and the entirety of the Stolen Century. So it’s pretty clear what the consequences of supercharging some enchanted artifacts with the Light and dropping them on some unsuspecting planet will be.

Especially if these artifacts are 100% definitely going to be used due to Craveability.

They had to have seen, and likely fairly up close, the kind of damage that heavy-hitting magical artifacts plus the Light of Creation can do in the previous century, just not in the precise configuration of the artificing plan sets up.

Where as they haven’t ever actively cut off a Prime Material Plane from the rest of the system. Sure, they had spent years studying planar systems as members of the IPRE and they had the whole century to observe planar systems in many configurations. Enough to develop an incredibly solid hypothesis of what would happen, but they never really saw something similar in action.

But 6 out of the 7 members of the crew were able to see the possible consequence of “The whole planar system would slowly, painfully starve to death in literally every way possible,” and decided “yeah, fuck that,” save for Lucretia.

And I know we can get attached to our own ideas, but when you see violent wars versus the collapse of all of this planar system’s existence?

Like don’t get me wrong, the relics were pretty dang bad, but to not even trust the crew so far as to try to persuade an adjustment of the relic plan once the damage started getting truly awful?

Just jumping straight to, “I guess I should erase all of their memories of the people closest to them, and dropping them in a world where they now have LITERALLY no one”?

I digress on the memory thing, I did say I was gonna keep that out of this post, but seriously.

If she couldn’t trust the crew as her family to agree with her that the relics were bad, and maybe they should try something else because it was tearing their family apart as much as it was tearing apart the world down below; couldn’t she at least trust them (and herself) as a committee of literally All of Existence’s foremost experts on planar systems, the Light of Creation, and the Hunger, and if 6 out of 7 experts can conclude the catastrophic end of ta planar system from severing the bonds between its planes, maybe she should consider it too?

Like, they didn’t write her off out of spite or a lack of faith in her magic ability. They just said that they’d rather some wars ravage a particular plane until maybe they could find something better instead of initiating total planar collapse.