Well there’s one lingering question answered. It looks like the interaction of BBEG’s resurrection scroll with Demon Queen’s hell portal has caused a full-on body swap episode! No doubt our resident catgirl and demon lord will discover it’s not so easy to walk a mile in one another’s hit dice. If I know my tropes, they’ll learn to appreciate each other’s unique challenges, then become better friends for the misadventure. Either that or the planar cosmology will collapse.

Character development is all well and good, but the present storyline brings certain canonicity issues to the table. I mean, I was under the impression that demons were souls. How can you body swap with that sort of entity? And how is a mortal supposed to suddenly fill a vacant seat at the cosmic entity table? Wouldn’t all the world’s demon-worship energy still get directed towards the original Demon Queen, now imprisoned Naruto-style in Magus’s frail catfolk form? And that’s to say nothing of the “gee, they must be idiots” followers of this pretender. Surely that adorable white spider demon can sense the change in its mistress? I mean, how could you hope to string along an entire layer of the Abyss (some of whom are hyper-intelligent) with fast-talking skills consisting of the word “AAAAAAAAH”?

When you’ve got such an unconventional plotline running through your campaign, some or all of these questions might bother you. And if noodling with the answers is fun for you, then be my guest. Noodle away. Internal consistency and plausible explanations are generally good things. But every once in a while, I think it’s OK to stuff a sock in your inner setting purist.

Just think about the rational scientist character from every movie ever. “That’s impossible!” they mutter, removing their glasses and staring slack-jawed at the thing that just friggin’ happened. And in that moment, the resurrected character or fresh-minted superhero or evil twin doesn’t say, “Oh, my bad. I guess I’m stretching plausibility here.” They get on with it, turning the tide of the fight, punching the villain, or quipping at their goody two-shoes twins.

What I’m saying is that, if you really need that plausible explanation, you can always post-hoc that jank. Your players will likely go along with your setting without fuss. And if they do pause to ponder, they will probably guess at explanations themselves. When that happens you can always pull the old GM trick: “You guessed right! That’s exactly what I’d planned all along!” But regardless of which way it shakes out, my bottom line is this. When you’ve got a balls-out crazy pants story to tell, that nagging sense of this-couldn’t-happen-in-the-official-setting will only hold you back. Deal with that internal censor on your own time. Do the cool thing now. The rest will follow after.

Question of the day then! When did you decide to make a major break from official canon? Did you change the cosmology with one of your own invention? Get rid of alignment? Nuke the afterlife? Tell us all about your most drastic setting changes, slaughtered sacred cows, and dramatic breaks from tradition down in the comments!

 

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