'Evil' in an urban setting and the ability to Detect

[Vaxalon]

Okay, well, in that case, the question starts to devolve onto matters of theology.

Is the cleric's god capable of giving the character a list of all the undead in the city, and where they are?  If the god in question is omniscient, then the answer is yes, but gods are not omniscient in all settings.

Is it in the god's interest to give the character the information?  Perhaps the act of mundanely hunting down the undead is a sacrament in and of itself, a ritual that is performed as an act of devotion.  For example, in many orders of monks in the Real World, labor in support of the monastery (whether that's weeding the garden or doing data-entry work) is, itself a prayerful sacrament.  The work is chosen as something mindless and repetitive to allow the monk to enter a state of divine communion, a kind of meditation.  Personally, I like this answer best for many such questions.

[M. J. Young]

I understand your distinction between "spell" and "invocation"; Multiverser calls the same distinction "arcane" and "holy" magic, and it is the difference between tapping supernatural power yourself versus asking a supernatural being to use it on your behalf. The lines get blurry in places (if you summon a djinn and ask it to do something, is that holy or arcane magic?), but the distinction works.

It's still the case that both use supernatural power, and so are more closely related to each other than either is to, say, martial arts or driving.

In any event, everything I said about "spells" applies equally to "invocations" or "magic skills" or "prayers" or any other means of accessing and applying supernatural power.

It's fine that you don't need those ideas; I'm sure someone will find them useful.

--M. J. Young

[Sydney Freedberg]

what does the spell actually detect? Here are some possible answers....

This is largely irrelevant at this point, but I couldn't resist adding one more "sure it works, but" to the list:
Sure, your spell detects undead. It lets you see them really well. In fact it lets you see every faint ghostly residue of the dead. So every time you cast in a city -- or a village -- or even an isolated farmhouse that's been lived in for a few generations -- you suddenly realize you are surrounded by forlornly whispering spectres, too weak to affect the world, let alone endanger anyone, but just strong enough to register on your necro-radar.
Which is a way of making the hunt for the vampires, zombies, and powerful hauntings a "needle in the haystack" quest through the false positives, but which also adds a lot of color. And maybe the remnant souls know something useful about the more powerful undead, if you can only get them to stop whispering about their lives on earth and wrangle real information out of them....

Probably not your campaign, but an idea I offer up for the heck of it.

[shaheddy]

what does the spell actually detect? Here are some possible answers....

I realize you wanted an in-game reason to get rid of the spell completely, but it might be interesting to have an existing, but very imperfect, version of detection instead. If you recall the motion sensors in the Alien movies (or in the AvP video game), you can see how partial information actually heightens fear. An examination of the mechanic may suggest some possibilities.

I believe in Dnd, for example, undead are powered by "negative energy", as opposed to "positive energy" for living creatures. One possibility is that these two are actually not distinguishable in most cases, but maybe there are situations when they are. For example, perhaps when a vampire is actively draining a victim, the interaction of the two types of energies are detectable.

Or maybe the interaction between positive and negative energy is always detectable, so that a detection spell could be simply a small release of positive energy, and then feeling any reaction that occurs when the two types of energy hit each other. This could have several secondary effects: it could cause fatigue in the caster, might be very imprecise (say, only tells you direction or proximity), could act as a sonar "ping" (so that the undead become aware of the caster and the detection attempt), and might even screw up living creatures in range. Also, this could be a good excuse to keep the range short - positive energy disperses quickly, or something like that.

This is my first post, and I just wanted to say that I love this forum!

[Dr. Velocity]

This issue really intrigued me, and I sympathize with wanting more than a metagame reasoning. I have to say that I fully support the explanation that the detect undead spell, if you wanted it, would detect everything remotely related, so you'd almost have to be stepping on their faces to find an "active" undead, as opposed to the countless intangible, harmless ones.

As for NOT having a spell, the metagame reason *could* conceivably be translated into the game world as a matter of "Balance", sort of like the Force - where even though the god and the church might be rabidly anti-undead, being a god, he would realize and recognize that the church's ability to find undead and possibly wipe them out with relative ease would violate any number of cosmically incomprehensible-to-man laws, as well as present the potential that the church might place its members in TOO much danger or become obsessed past the normal 'rabid' anti-undead level, and forget about helping the sick and such - it would be too great a distraction. Or worse, the church might use the spell to find and experiment with undead and begin to dabble in control and necromancy - thus it is better to withhold the spell entirely, rather than risk corruption of the church.

[Vaxalon]

Indeed...

Perhaps that's the way to go.  The invocation exists, but along with it comes the power to not only detect but also control and create undead as well, which the church does not want to put in the hands of anyone who isn't at the most trusted levels of the hierarchy... so there may be someone back at headquarters who can say, "Our divinations have picked out undead activity in the Brewer's quarter of the city" as a plot hook, but he's too important to risk actually going out to hunt it down.

[Paganini]

Seems to me that in a "hunt the undead" game, some kind of detection ability would be absolutely required. Imagine that your PCs are submarines navigating the dark depths of the sea of humanity. There's nothing more intensely focused on the "hunt" motif than submarine warfare. "Detection spells" in submarine warfare don't defeat this motif, they heighten it.

You've got two kinds of seonsory systems: active, and passive.

Passive works all the time, but it only detects the enemy when he's actively using his powers. So if the vampires want to lay low, they can. They can blend with society, not being detectable by the hunters.

Active sends out a detecting agent that always locates and identifies the undead, but it gives away the existence and position of the detecting PC. Plus, it attracts the undead. So if you use it, you're likely to get swamped by whatever undead are in the area.

You seeing all the interesting interplays and ballances this opens up? The PCs can try to sucker the vampires into using their powers and giving themselves away. The vampires can do the same to the PCs. Etc. etc. It also works for a reverse game, where the PCs are hunted by the vampires.

One other interesting idea, the "Active Range" ability could be a simple spell that anyone can learn, but the passive ability is an innate psychic empathy (or something) so people with the passive ability are really rare.

This would mean a couple of things: That vampires aren't too worried about using their abilities, since passive detectors are rare. It would also mean that passive detectors would be huge vampire targets, and valuable, sought-after additions to a "hunting" team.

[contracycle]

Active sends out a detecting agent that always locates and identifies the undead, but it gives away the existence and position of the detecting PC. Plus, it attracts the undead. So if you use it, you're likely to get swamped by whatever undead are in the area.

For a fantasy setting, perhaps something like the True Name of the detector is revealed in the process of detection.  Or some other really basic bit of psychic identity that would make you vulnerable to hostile action remotely.

This could be exploited further, perhaps this is so dangerous that the seekers often use new recruits to perform this detection, so that their experienced people are not exposed/risked and because this is an irreversible declartion of allegiance by the new recruits.

[swdevlin]

You've got two kinds of seonsory systems: active, and passive.

Excellent ideas. Having something of that nature would indeed keep the hunt flavour to the game. It would be different, but workable for me and could be a good compromise.

I would be worried about players being a little too quick on the trigger, but a couple of really bad encounters, and perhaps making up a few new characters, would solve that problem. :-)

[MisterPoppet]

I'm still wondering.... What system is this?

-MisterPoppet-

[swdevlin]

I'm still wondering.... What system is this?

My question was born out of world design issues, not rule set issues. However, to answer your question, the system is called SQRT. It is a rule set of my own design.

[GB Steve]

In our game, monotheistic D&D, detect alignment would show evil for active devil worshippers, good for those recently shriven who had not yet sinned and neutral (or nothing) for everyone else.

This worked very well, especially as evil was defined by an action rather than just a colour that the target was painted. In regular D&D, if it's green, it's evil is a pretty good rule.