Quote Originally Posted by Ancalagon View Post
Since when has that kept anyone around here from speculating?



I just put it there because I myself would be very careful to assume this spell exists and is always availble. Yes, it is core, but it also poses a big problem with how the story unfurls.
Rich can easily handwave anything away that is hin his way of the story. "Why is character X not doing Y to solve Z in a much better way" is easy to dismiss "because it needs to be this way for the story".
But Miracle is such an obvious choice to use in a very tight situation to just "move everything closer to where you like it" that it is a very critical thing in the hands of the evil people and I'd be easier to just make an exception here.

Miracle does not serve any real purpose to advance the story but CAN be a very problematic thing, so if it did not exist (or was available), it would not surprise me.
No matter what happens, I fear Rich nmight have to drop a word either in the comic or in the forum to "deal" in some way with the miracle-problem (Xykon is not such an issue as he has fixed spells). This also could be circumvented by simply having the spell not "available" at all times for all purposes.

I just wanted to express that with the footnote and what it contained (Miracle) was not on the list of assumptions at the beginning of the comic.
I'd like to add here that there already is a good reason why miracle might not exist in the OoTS universe. The Snarl. The whole idea was that existence was unmade because the gods fought too much and interfered with one another, tangling the threads of existence. The response was for the gods to evenly divide up existence and they make great efforts to prevent each other from interfering in their respective domains. Miracle, which is basically just a free pass for a god to intervene as directed by a cleric, could go directly against the celestial agreement not to interfere with other gods, and might be banned outright.

Obviously, that was rife speculation, but it's no unreasonable to suggest that the problems of celestial competition would keep miracle out of use.

Quote Originally Posted by Zevox View Post
Yes - and what you're missing is that calling spells are functionally identical to summoning ones. The two do the same thing: summon extraplanar beings to this plane of existence. The distinction between them is a minor one of game rules, dealing primarily with what happens to the creature if it's killed while on the plane it was summoned summoned to (for "summoning" spells it isn't, it's instead sent back to its home plane, for "calling " spells it is) and a few other minutia (i.e. creatures summoned via a "summoning" spell cannot use any spells or spell-like abilities they have to summon more creatures, ones summoned via a "calling" spell can).

Most likely the exception encompasses both. Rich almost certainly doesn't follow the rules closely enough to note the distinction.

...and actually, reading Celia's statement about it again, it doesn't even need that exception. She says that "You could cast them [the spell Cloister blocks] within the area, or even from inside the field to outside, but anyone on the outside of the boundary would get nothing but busy signals and error messages." So within the Cloister, all of those things work just fine, you just can't use them from the outside going in. And since Redcloak is within the Cloister, that means he can use any kind of spells just fine, and it won't inhibit him in the least. Which actually means that the exception for summoning wasn't even needed to begin with, since Dorukon could cast whatever spells he wanted from within the Cloister to bring others to him just from the way the spell is designed to begin with. I guess Rich overdid it when he made explanations for how Celia's summoning talisman managed to work in spite of the Cloister effect.

Zevox
I don't think calling spells and summoning spells are functionally identical. Yes, they both get something to you from elsewhere, but so do teleport and ethereal jaunt. I also don't think you could plane shift into a cloister. Summoning is a very short duration ongoing magical tie to the current plane, calling actually gets some other being physically present at your location.

Moreover, I do think Rich is well-informed enough of the rules to notice the difference. He might not care, but I'd rather give him credit and say that Celia is wrong/making an incomplete statement.

Also, I can't believe that summoning Lirian was really summoning. Even if Dorukan was leveled into the high 20s, 2-3 minutes is simply not enough time for the likely purposes that he brought Lirian into his dungeon. He almost surely needed a longer duration [calling] subschool spell.