Judgement Light and Deeper Darkness

[Mrakvampire]

Hi, All!

I have a question regarding Inquisitor spell Judgement Light
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ultimateCombat/spells/judgmentLight.html #judgment-light

Let's assume that we are underground with deeper darkness spell active, so it's supernaturally dark. And there are some creatures that are hiding in this darkness (dark folk). Our Inquisitor casts this spell with Justice judgement active:

Quote:

Justice: Blue light erupts from the caster, revealing hidden and invisible creatures to all. The light outlines such creatures for 1 round per caster level, imposing a –20 penalty on Stealth checks on those creatures.

Does it mean that now everybody can see outlined creatures even in supernatural darkness? I'm a bit confused what 'light outlines' means.

[Mrakvampire]

any ideas?

[Ughbash]

My thoughts.

Judgement light is a 4th level spell with the light classifier.

Deeper Darkness is a 3rd level spell (unless heightened).

Everybody can see the hidden creatures, they are outlined in blue AND the Deeper Darkness is suppressed.

If Deeper Darkness was heightened to level 4, they would suppress each other, no outline but only normal darkness.

If Deeper Darkness was heightened to level 5 or higher, Judgement Light would fail.

[Claxon]

I'm going to disagree some with Ughbash.

Some important factors:
Judgement Light has a duration of Instantaneous. It lasts only a brief instant.
With the Justice Judgement active, the only effect it actually has is "Blu light erupts from the caster, revealing hidden and invisible creatures to all. The light outlines such creatures for 1 round per caster level, imposing a –20 penalty on Stealth checks on those creatures."

All it's doing is revealing hidden and invisible creature, by applying a -20 penalty to stealth checks. It doesn't even actually guarantee you'll see hidden creatures because their stealth could be so incredibly high the -20 penalty doesn't matter. The light created only lasts for an instant, and then you get a outline around hidden creatures.

The way I would run this:
The spell doesn't suppress deeper darkness. It will outline hidden and invisible creatures (creatures that were attempting to hide or be invisible at the time it was cast). But keep in mind being in the dark isn't necessarily hiding, they would need to be using stealth. Otherwise, they're just walking in the dark and you can't see them.

And this is my best case scenario to you.

The other scenario is that the creatures take a -20 to stealth, but you can't see the outline because of deeper darkness (because it isn't suppressed) and so it's unlikely to be at all helpful.