Innistrad as a Campaign Setting

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Oct 18, 2016 1:17 am

That's a fair point, but going by the descriptions of types-

SRD wrote:An aberration has a bizarre anatomy, strange abilities, an alien mindset, or any combination of the three.
...
Monstrous humanoids are similar to humanoids, but with monstrous or animalistic features. They often have magical abilities as well.

I feel Monstrous Humanoid is fitting. Aberration would be good for Eldrazi, though.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Oct 18, 2016 9:13 am

Innistrad Vampires have weird lore bullshit about not technically being dead because one of the authors decided to write some sort of crazy rant about living souls being needed to be a Planeswalker. Other authors of course talk about shit like Vampire planeswalkers and Golem planeswalkers all the fucking time, so there is immense amounts of bullshit doublethink lore available to explain why and how all of these things can be true. Honestly, the deep end of the lore is just stupid and you should ignore it as much as possible. As soon as someone starts talking about life sparks and shit, just pretend they are making Charlie Brown noises and don't try to process those sounds into meaning.

Innistrad Vampires supposedly are biologically different from Zendikar vampires and that is why Sorin can be a Planeswalker but Drana and Kalitas are not Planeswalkers. And you know what? That is fucking retarded. Also, that lore will absolutely be dumped in the shit can if we ever get a third Zendikar block, because it is pretty much inconceivable to me that someone wouldn't write up a third version of Kalitas or Drana, and legendary creatures don't get an L5R style Experienced 2 without becoming Planeswalkers. And it doesn't matter right now because Innistrad vampire boosts are fully interactive with Zendikar and Dominaria vampires.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Oct 18, 2016 11:29 am

Ah, right. Only creatures with souls can be planeswalkers. Sorin Markov is a planeswalker vampire from Innistrad, and the reason Innistrad vampires are alchemical is because Sorin needs a soul to be a planeswalker.

Fun side note- Karn, the aforementioned golem planeswalker, was actually given a soul by Urza.

Rawbeard · Post by **Rawbeard** » Tue Oct 18, 2016 2:42 pm

Urza is the best dad a golem could hope for.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Oct 18, 2016 7:51 pm

I'm still sad that when whatever movie studio WotC went to in the 90s said they needed a "Mickey," a face of the product, they didn't just gesture at Urza. He was the angry nerd with a hot girlfriend protagonist we needed, but not the one we deserved.

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Thu Oct 20, 2016 12:42 am

Urza was the shit. Right up until Phyrexia.

GâtFromKI · Post by **GâtFromKI** » Fri Oct 21, 2016 10:16 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Innistrad Vampires have weird lore bullshit about not technically being dead because one of the authors decided to write some sort of crazy rant about living souls being needed to be a Planeswalker. Other authors of course talk about shit like Vampire planeswalkers and Golem planeswalkers all the fucking time, so there is immense amounts of bullshit doublethink lore available to explain why and how all of these things can be true.

Wow.

Nobody is able to define what a "living soul" is, but people need to create circonvoluted explanations why a vampire or a golem may have one ?

Look at this explanation: "Vampire and golem are animated by a living soul". Can anyone prove the contrary ? If not, it's an explanation as valid as any other - and simpler than many other.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Fri Oct 21, 2016 7:50 pm

Ya know, never mind, I misread something.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Oct 21, 2016 7:51 pm

GâtFromKI wrote: Wow.

Nobody is able to define what a "living soul" is, but people need to create circonvoluted explanations why a vampire or a golem may have one ?

Look at this explanation: "Vampire and golem are animated by a living soul". Can anyone prove the contrary ? If not, it's an explanation as valid as any other - and simpler than many other.

Pretty much exactly this. Magic has always been stronger with the leads than with the follow through. The implied story of many cards is actually pretty awesome. But when they go back and do the actual storytelling it often doesn't really measure up.

It's certainly gotten better than the days of Homelands, but that shit was a dumpster fire back in the day. They thought they were writing Lord of the Fucking Rings, but really they were writing filler level fanfiction. And while it's certainly better than that now, if you get out in the weeds in pretty much any of the settings things get kinda dumb.

Basically what you're looking at is that the back end of the lore doesn't really face the kind of scrutiny that the game mechanics and card art do. So the fact that the storyline on Fate Reforged is "Sarkhan binned all the world development we did for Tarkir because he is an otherkin furry." is not really something that intrudes on people very much. Mostly people just say "Mothafuckin Siege Rhinos in this bitch!" And that's awesome.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Oct 21, 2016 8:21 pm

Honestly, you don't even need to get into souls, and I don't even bother to think of it in those terms. Only living creatures have Sparks. A Spark is some ephemeral magical essence which is required to become a planeswalker. Kind of like being a Luminary in After Sundown.

Karn is a construct, thus he didn't have a spark. In the latter events of the Weatherlight saga, a pair of powerful artifacts which were basically Urza's phylactery, were put inside him, and a big magical explosion happened, killing Urza and Gerrard, and transferring Urza's Spark to Karn, enabling him to become a Planeswalker, which he did when his new Spark ignited to save him from said explosion.

Undead can't have a Spark, because they're not alive. They wanted a Vampire planeswalker, probably because they knew Innistrad was coming up (but before they'd done much development on the set, as his name is slightly out of tone), but normally vampires can't have Sparks, because they are the animate dead. So they decided that vampires from Sorin's home plane, Innistrad, were living vampires to enable the character.

Eikre · Post by **Eikre** » Thu Dec 15, 2016 7:04 pm

The difference between a soul and a planeswalker spark is semantic and arbitrary. They're totally fictional vagaries that work exactly the way the author says that they do, and there is no objective yardstick to hold those definitions to because nobody in the real world has either of them in any measurable capacity.

Such declarations are worth no more or less than their emergent consequences in the stories you tell. If one of the consequences is "I need to write another five hundred words of workaround so I can justify the story I want to tell about Soran Markov" then the declaration is counterproductive horseshit.

People probably do not want a Drudge Skeleton or Myr planeswalker, but that's because those dudes lack agency, not heartbeats. Vampires have machinations, emotions, and sex appeal. That's the actual list of qualities that you need for the focus groups to sign off on your planeswalker status. So, whatever the definition of spark, or soul, or whatever, it's likely much more elegant that nobody with a personality be precluded from having one due to arbitrary criteria like "My body was, previously, an inanimate object."

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Dec 15, 2016 10:43 pm

Ok, bottom line, no soul bullshit- in the multiverse of Magic the Gathering, there is a magical marker on certain creatures known as the Spark. It is an inborn quantity that cannot be held by dead flesh, and doesn't occur in artificial creatures, though it can be given to an artificial creature by being placed in a special housing. The primary trait of the Spark is a special one-time interplanar respawn at death. Because the creature has already been transported to another plane once, they become a planeswalker, able to change planes at will, though not without effort, and it seems to be a skill that needs to be practiced and can get rusty.

That's the way it works. I would guess that undead can't have sparks because they just didn't have one in life. When you try to turn a Spak bearing creature into a vampire, their Spark ignites, and you end up very confused. However, it also seems that there is some randomness to whether sparks ignite, and if it doesn't, the Spark just dies with the body and isn't revived by the process of transformation into undead.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Dec 17, 2016 3:41 pm

Prak wrote:That's the way it works. I would guess that undead can't have sparks because they just didn't have one in life.

Which is simply dumb. If they wanted to have a zombie planeswalker or a ghost planeswalker, they'd just do that. Some fanboys would come up with complicated fanboy reasoning about it, but it doesn't actually matter. Ugin is a fucking spirit of a dragon and he is a planeswalker. Sorin is a vampire and he is a planeswalker. Karn is a golem and it is a planeswalker. Planeswalkers are, and always have been, simply whatever characters become multiplanar major characters. That's it. That's all it's ever been.

So getting lost in the weeds about redefining the parameters of vampirism for an entire plane to explain why you can have a vampire planeswalker is fucking stupid. The real reason you can have a vampire planeswalker is "because it is awesome" and any more explanation than that just makes things stupid.

-Username17