The witch spell Threefold Aspect lets her turn into a younger version of herself (maiden or mother) for 24 hours. She also has a 32 charisma. Between that and a +26 bluff skill she probably doesn't have any trouble finding lovers who don't recognize her as the universe's scariest grandma.
And the universe is a big place, she can surely find people who are into that too.
She can also outright regain her youth after consuming the life essence of those daughters she's deemed failures (which is pretty much all of them but Tashanna).
Nearly all of her daughters being blue-eyed blondes when she's a brunette indicates that Dear Grandmother has pretty specific tastes, though.
It's in a weight class where it could kill a demigod if it prepared appropriately.
Trying to "force" the servitude of something that strong is an insane gamble that can blow up in your face any time.
Willing service involves an actual god or something approaching that level of absolute might (as demonstrated by Kazavon, great wyrm dragons that become religious zealots can be terrifying).
A great wyrm red dragon is king of all it can survey, and they can probably reach the upper atmosphere when flying.
But kings will still accept friends and allies.
It won't bow down to you, but if you aren't competing with it and you share similar passions and you're strong enough that it would have to risk its life to fight you, you may well be able to make an agreement to start splitting the world between you.
I'm still playing (and running) 1st Edition; I don't think my group's going to move on to 2E until someone else volunteers to run a 2E game.
(Like we're still going through Paizo's APs. I completed running Hell's Rebels about 2 weeks ago and am starting running Strange Aeons once I'm over the nasty cold I came down with. I'm also currently playing in Skull & Shackles.)
@Blaphers Considering that their flee condition is "under 50 HP", they are way more likely to be taken from "I'm fine" to outright dead than to be beat up just enough to trigger their retreat.
Also, keep in mind that demons don't promote up from lower demons, but rather spontaneously arise from the correct larvae.
You can meet a balor that's only a day old, it's just fantastically unlikely.
Balors that actually have been around for millennia should probably be upgraded in some way, rather than being the "generic" type you see in the Bestiary.
Fanaticism is a pretty simple answer - as paragons of ruthless, violent, evil, many high end outsiders are simply willing to fight to the death for their cause, whatever it may be.
It's also worth keeping in mind that mortals who can actually fight high level outsiders are relatively rare.
A balor that's losing to a planetar will recognize that it's facing a peer, accept that things are going south, and retreat. After all, it knows that while the balor is technically stronger, a planetar is no push-over at all.
A balor that's losing to a group of mortal heroes may well be in denial about the entire thing right until its explosive death, because humans are 1 to 5 HD prey that it kills en masse with blasphemy, not things that can shrugs off all its attacks and slice it to ribbons.
High end Fey probably have the same issue - a sort of blind spot when it comes to realizing "oh, this mortal can actually take me down."
Dragons less so, since dragons usually get to experience being relatively weak hatchlings and whatnot, and so usually develop a much finer tuned sense of danger.
Of course, there's also always the issue that was brought up much earlier - damage spikes from a well-coordinated or lucky party means an outsider or dragon or whatever might go from being completely fine to dead in a single round.
Which is why we tend to not talk much about it in print, cause the idea that pets are just cosmic energy that gets recycled over and over and over until there's nothing left tends to do just that... depress people.
Feel free to adjust as you wish for your game!
Separate post for the separate question -
does anything prevent a dog or cat or spider or dinosaur from reincarnating as something intelligent for their next time through?
Low-int/no-int/premature mortals getting fast tracked for reincarnation makes a lot of sense when you consider that even fruit flies have souls...
Which is why we tend to not talk much about it in print, cause the idea that pets are just cosmic energy that gets recycled over and over and over until there's nothing left tends to do just that... depress people.
Feel free to adjust as you wish for your game!
That's also what happens to dead children in this setting, isn't it? Reincarnate and try again?
a 100 year or so old cult to Dagon that has disguised itself as a church to Gozreh. Most of the townfolk don't actually know better, reflected by the town's general alignment being CN instead of CE. One of the earlier events will be the party confronting and exposing the Dagon cultists.
They then learn that the Dagon cultists are long-term allies with a Skum settlement in the nearby bay that also worshiped Dagon. However, the party will then learn that the skum had been recently subjugated by Mi-Go, who in turned forced the surviving skum to convert to Shub-Niggurath, and the skum high priest was sincere enough that he's getting spells now.
IIRC, James Jacobs has commented that if Wake of the Watcher was made today, they probably would've replaced the Skum with Deep Ones, based on how unusually religious this colony is.
I wouldn't give the thing witch levels; I'd give it extra outsider hit dice and perhaps the ability to cast spells as a witch, with it being able to learn new spells like it was still a witch's familiar - or, alternatively, it only knows the spells it had already learned at its mistress's death and is unable to learn more.
After all, many monsters never really improve beyond the state they've already attained; it could well make sense for this abomination to persist in a state that's been fixed since the moment of its creation.
I'd restrict the face to only being able to perform hexes; any real spellcasting needs to be done by the cat.
I've generally found over the years that just providing a monster with the class abilities that are interesting for it, using its monster-self to determine all the base numbers, to work better than trying to bolt an entire class onto a monster. The less moving parts, the easier the thing is to run as part of a major encounter. (Alternatively, few things are more embarrassing than just losing track of a key ability and not using it, inadvertently tanking the difficulty of the fight, because you're juggling too many balls at once.)
Though adding class levels can still make sense for creatures that are essentially just people with base hit dice and fancy racial abilities, like gnolls, many humanoidish fey, or dragonkin.
That is an excellent question, and my hunch is no, such a community wouldn't survive very long, whether due to extermination by outside forces or from self-destructing in service to their mad and uncaring gods.
It's not unusual for such persons to have infiltrated a community, possible even to its highest level, but it's rare indeed for the entire community to serve.
Nyarlathotep and Yog-Sothoth are probably the best candidates for Outer Gods a community could worship and still remain viable.
At least for mortals, anyways. The Mi-go I've seen in print usually worship Shub-Niggurath (and will force other races to convert or die), but the fungi critters are probably better adapted to such worship than us primates are.
I'd suggest advancing it to 5 or 6 HD and giving it more hexes, essentially making it a special result from Lesser Planar Ally.
Maybe the witch's face can cast the hexes as a bonus action 3/day or so, allowing the cat to pounce on someone who just got their AC zapped.
(IIRC, the three described servants for each god generally fit a Lesser Planar Ally at 6 HD or lower, a regular Planar Ally at 12 HD or lower, and a Greater Planar Ally at 18 HD or lower.)
I'd hope it would be similar to a rogue-lite, where you're expected to die but certain things you got done remain done. (The side-scroller Dead Cells is an excellent example of this, where death returns you to the beginning of the dungeon and strips you of your temporary upgrades (like stat bumps) but other power and upgrade unlocks permanently remain, increasing the odds you'll make it further on later runs and eventually allowing you to tackle the game at higher difficulty levels.)
Now the question will be if you only get 6 lives, or if some glitch gives you more than that...
Edit: Hell, they could take a page from PlaneScape: Torment and have puzzles where you have to die and leave it up to your clone to finish things in your place.
Kind of surprised they went through the entire trailer with no mention of Communists. The Computer is obsessed with Communists. (Unless more recent editions of the game dialed that back for whatever reason?)
looks to be setting up King Kong as a rival kaiju alpha to Godzilla, right down to other lesser kaiju actually migrating to Skull Island following Godzilla's victory over Ghidorah.
So Godzilla v. Kong may be a straight up war between kaiju factions. That'd be bad-ass.
It being an oracle curse, I'd expect it to go off from the caster's own spells - oracle curses are meant to be constant factors/nuisances.
An oracle curse that only goes off from enemy divine casters targeting you would be a pretty benign curse - depending on your campaign, it would be possible for that to go for long stretches of time without coming up.
For example, in Reign of Winter, I think you could make it all the way from Book 2 to the end of Book 5 without the curse ever triggering. Now, the final battle of Book 5 would almost certainly trigger it, but once that was done you'd be free and clear for the rest of the campaign.
it didn't go over very well so likely wouldn't sell well
Then there's the head-scratcher fact that a third-party publisher managed to make enough money to justify producing ten times the page count of that book in additional material. I mean, yeah, obviously we're not talking about tens of thousands of copies sold, but there's money being left on the table. Paizo's clearly just got ways to make more money for employee-hour expended.
Not to imply I'm in the market for a MA pocket book. My hardcover's doing just fine. Just pointing out that the mythic rule subset isn't exactly dead.
May just be a matter of scale - I can easily accept that something that sells well enough for a small 3rd party company is still a failure by Paizo's own metrics. (Or another way to put it. Paizo has 73 or so employees, while Legendary Games is about 10 people or so. So very thresholds for "success.")
I'll be very, very surprised if that ever happens - Mythic Adventures didn't sell well enough to warrant a second printing (which means, among other things, that there's never been an official errata for the thing). I can't see Paizo burning the money for a pocket edition of a product that under-performed.
Huh, those are neat. Would it make sense for the Azi to make the jump to 2E to return if a Ahriman AP ever occurs? Or would you be more interested in all-new critters?
The azis' connection to Ahriman and the Divs does seem to make them much more... specialized?... than the Linnorms are.
I still love the description of Linnorms as being the hillbilly axe-murderers of the dragon world.
I remember thinking back when I first say their stat blocks in Mythic Realms that a fight between the two would've been really close, and probably would've come down to the die rolls.
I'd kind of assumed afterwards that Arazni's defeat as a mortal might've resulted from genuine bad luck.
It doesn't help that TB's statblock gave him NPC gear instead of PC gear+, like one would expect from an ancient lich king who actually had infinite money.
But yeah, he was L20/R10 to Arazni's L20/R8. She had proper gear (exceptional resources) and he didn't, so they might've actually been the same CR of 26 or so.
They're examples of what happens when a dragon isn't immune to its own breath weapon.
The dudes are walking bioweapon factories.
You can't cure their diseases because they aren't catching it from elsewhere; they're literally producing it from their own bodies. So even if you manage to be boss enough to pass the DC 27 caster level check to land a cure disease spell on the dragon, it's going to be immediately re-exposed to all of the contagions it passively produces.
They also have negative energy affinity, so a heal spell would just hurt them without fixing anything.
To "cure" themselves they'd need some power that granted constant disease immunity or suppression, like the antipaladin's plaguebringer power.
Which means a periapt of health would hypothetically do it, though I'd say a taniver wearing one loses access to both its breath weapon and the disease rider on its natural attacks.
If it's set up like Chronicles of the Righteous and the Books of the Damned, then six of the demigods will be illustrated - 4 demigods per 2 page spread, with one illustration per spread.
I suspect it'll deliver on the monsters, though - Pathfinder's planar monsters are bonkers.
Galt with its endless witch hunts for dissidents and soul-trapping guillotines would be a pretty horrible place to live, and would not be a safe place to visit.
Hell, Galt probably mirrors living as a commoner in drow society - your entire survival hinges on the powerful ignoring you.
Irrisen and Geb would be horrible places to be commoners in but relatively okay for foreign visitors, as long as you don't stir up trouble.
Razmiran or the Worldwound are also bad - horrible to live in unless you successfully join the ruling party, and dangerous to visit.
I like the FATE system (and have played in 2 Dresden Files campaigns and ran a 3rd one, with the plan to return to it again some day), as it's super easy to design critters and powers and whatnot in it.
The player Aspects system is definitely one of the hardest things for me, though - I'm not good at improvisation, and even after running a Dresden game for over 6 months I never got a hang of it - I had everyone's aspects on a sheet and I still almost never remembered to compel. (I wound up going with a partial refresh rule instead - the entire party recovering a point whem they cleared some mid-session objective.) The other GMs didn't have better luck with that.
Compels grant a player a fate point in exchange for causing some sort of disadvantage or derail for the player or party. Like the person getting pulled into a haunted mirror as Haladir described above. I.e., here's a fate point for a complication related to your character. (Another way to put it is that the GM gives you a Fate Point in exchange for messing with your character.)
The Aspect Trio+ is worked out collectively - especially in Dresdan Files, where the PCs are encouraged to incorporate each other into their back stories.
If it helps, think of the High Concept as your effective character class (like Werebear Vampire Hunter, to use one of my own characters as an example), the Trouble as your bane (ex. The Bear Hungers), and other aspects as double-edged swords. To continue the example, my character had "F*** You I'm a Bear" as an aspect that he could Tap to represent his combat prowess and power, and that the GM could Compel to represent his constantly simmering rage.
The High Concept is mostly or fully positive, the Trouble is purely negative, and other aspects should be usable both ways.
Aspects can be tapped to get bonuses on rolls or allow rerolls, or they can be tapped to break the rules in some way with the GM's permission. (Using another character as an example - she was a spellcaster with an aspect of Miracles Come at a Price, and I occasionally tapped it to perform some otherwise rule-breaking magical feat (like re-actively shielding the entire party) in exchange for, say, an immediate physical consequence.)
It's a neat system, but yeah, some aspects of it are much trickier than others.
In addition to what Bjørn Røyrvik linked, keep in mind Eastern concepts of the afterlife, which generally treat your mortal life as baggage that needs to be shed, and should be shed.
It's not impossible, it just shouldn't be effective. (Try writing with a pen in your mouth, for example.) Non-proficiency penalty, secondary attack penalty, and only getting half-strength mod (or no Str mod at all) on damage would all be reasonable penalties for using such an inefficient tactic.
Actually making such a thing viable would be a good(?) use of custom feats.
An intelligent horse picking up a sword in its mouth and being good at fighting with it should be an immense and unwelcome shock to the person at the other end.
The Path of the Hellknight book has a Questing Hellknight trait to reflect members that are normally abroad rather than actively working in an Order's base.
Essentially, an Armiger or proper Hellknight that's part of an adventuring party or going solo is a field agent and representative of their Order.
At least some of the Orders (God-Claw, Torrent, Pike) are the result of members of other Orders striking out and their own and tackling a general type of mission that other Orders do not, and thus being recognized by the other Orders as the founder of a new Order dedicated to this new mission.
As long the half-orc's party's goals further the Order of the Nail's interests (and Nail's pretty adventurer friendly), they won't object to him staying with an adventuring party
There's absolutely a market for a Diablo mobile game.
A group of PC gamers who paid money to attend a gaming convention for a company best known for its PC games are not that market.
Blizzard probably could've debuted this at like E3 fine, but at Blizzcon?
"Do you guys not have phones?" indeed.
Though there's also the issue that Immortal isn't really a Blizzard game - it's being made by a third party company, and Blizzard's just providing art assets and the Diablo license.
(Lore-wise it's also kind of nonsensical, since Immortal is sticking the Nephalem characters into a time frame - 10 or so years before D3 starts - where a number of them were still in-training or just kids, like the wizard and the demon hunter.)
I didn't like Lords of Shadow at all, and never made it through the first game. It felt like a half-baked mash-up of God of War, Uncharted, Shadow of the Colossus, and other games that were popular at the time.
As I never made it through the first game, I pretty much ignored the second game. My general impression is I didn't miss much.
The 2D bridge game, Mirror of Fate, is a near miss - the first two stretches (Simon's and Alucard's sections) of the game actually feel like a proper Castlevania game (up to and including what was actually a really fun confrontation with Dracula), and then the third part (Teevor's section) was enough like Lords of Shadow (right down to QTE boss fights, including Dracula) that it soured the whole game for me. I completed it, but that killed its replay value for me. Which was a damn shame, because the first two parts were actually fun.
I think I bought Mirror of Fate for like $5 on a Steam sale, which felt about right after I was done.
Traditionally, Dracula resurrecting coincides with a generation skip. I think the interval is supposed to be every 100 years naturally, though an outside force can speed up the process (like in Symphony of the Night or Portrait of Ruin).
Dracula having to be confronted by the same Belmont or his close allies twice only seems to be happen under special circumstances (like in Simon's Quest and in Symphony of the Night).
Though the Soma Cruz games, Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow, got into Dracula being infected by an outside force (named Chaos in Aria of Sorrow), which is at least partly responsible for why he "resets" and goes back into "kill all humans" mode every time he comes back, even if he had an epiphany after a defeat (like in Symphony of the Night).
Season 2 felt... cheap? ... in some odd ways. (Like introducing an entire court of exotic vampires, and only giving two of them - Carmilla and Godbrand - names and voice actors.)
Yeah, the Leon Belmont stuff is from the 1st PS2 game, Lament of Innocence (which is chronologically the first adventure in the canon storyline), and the Forgemasters are from the 2nd PS2 game, Curse of Darkness. Hector's actually the player character in that game, IIRC. (I never played either. I liked Isaac so much more as a character in the show, though. Isaac's embrace of evil with no actual moral quandary was kind of refreshing.)
And Carmilla's the main villain of Castlevania: Bloodlines, again IIRC.
Looks like Godbrand was all-new for the show.
I thought season 2 was kind of dragging until we get to Ep. 7.
Ep 7!:
I love that all of the vampire court politics stuff got completely derailed by Trevor & co. making their move.
Combined with an orchestral version of Bloody Tears playing during the big brawl and the actual fight with Dracula, I felt Ep. 7 pretty much justified the entire season.
But I generally came out of season 2 feeling like it was mostly spent setting up a season 3.
A late answer, but monsters with class levels gain +4, +4, +2, +2, +0, -2 to their stats, distributed as the writer sees fit.
So the Brothers Three have those bonuses factored into their stats.
Also, Atrosia's been attacked by frost giants led by a centaur, so it's not that unreasonable to assume that the inhabitants are on alert, with whatever that may entail.
Probably also of note that is that Asmodeus generally advances his cause in the mortal realm as doing a whole "stability through honorable tyranny" thing - his religion is pretty well tailored towards making him look like a reasonable option for the common (if somewhat desperate) person.
But then, in the Outer Planes, beyond the perception of most mortals lies Hell - an entire nigh-infinite dimension that has been molded to Asmodeus's whims and stands as a monument as his absolute hatred of mortals and free will.
(Asmodeus is also the only god who can realistically claim an entire Outer Plane as his divine realm, and so shape that entire Outer Plane to suit his whims. Every other god living in Hell does so with his permission. (Though evicting a fellow true god like Dahak would probably be difficult, even for Asmodeus.) Even Pharasma only controls most of the Boneyard, not all of it.)
Hell is the closest thing to Asmodeus's real face, and represents what he really wants for the universe.
Asmodeus is completely bugf%&~ evil, dedicated to an eternal crusade to conquer the cosmos and crush everyone else in it, masquerading as affable evil.
She has some sonic attack that does up to 20d6 damage if you answer a question wrong. And if you (not unreasonably) call her a psycho for doing this she perminately makes you blind and mute. What a hero!
At this point, you're a group of possibly actual quasi-deities being auditioned to go fight a demon lord in his own realm. Wimps, cowards, and fools need not apply =P
As to most evil god of the setting, I'm going to go with Asmodeus.
Asmodeus thinks all mortals in general deserve to be tortured for eternity simply for the sin of existing.
If we're lucky, we may be permitted to work for him and help him torture others after a couple thousand years.
Gunn getting fired over decade year old horrible jokes was simply odd, since Disney had to have known about them when it hired him (Gunn's entire shtick before Disney hired him was being a tasteless provocateur), and Gunn put out a statement apologizing for his garbage back when Disney first hired him.
Disney literally fired him in a knee-jerk reaction to being reminded of information they already knew and had already addressed, making Disney look like idiots. (It also means Disney potentially wrecked GotG 3 based on a report from one of the morons responsible for PizzaGate.)
Though if I understand correctly, the firing came from the corporate leadership - a decision handed out from above the movie division. Perhaps Gunn never would have been hired in the first place if info about his past Twitter stupidity had made it high enough up the Disney corporate ladder?
I think it's fair to say that when it is someone's job to watch movies, they are not going to be impressed by a movie that is merely "not that bad."
If anything, I suspect what critics hate most is sitting through a mediocre movie. A truly bad movie at least gives them something interesting to write about.
I'd actually use Vigliv as the patron. In part because she's Baba Yaga's actual patron, and in part because I just don't see Dear Grandmother, in her relentless misanthropy, actually becoming a patron herself.
(In my campaign I actually did use Vigliv as the witch's patron, and had her essentially send visions by hijacking the witch's Harrow deck at the start of each book.)
I'm pretty sure the answer to this is "until they die by violence."
They're spirits made flesh, and even the weakest of them have fast healing, while the rest have some level of regeneration.
My general rule of thumb is that anything with fast healing or regeneration can live pretty much forever, as they possess bodies that don't wear down.
Edit: That and many of the oni leaders from the Jade Regent AP are really, really old - sometimes well over a 1,000 years old, if not older (it's been years since I played through the AP at this point, so my memory can be bit fuzzy as to the fine details).
Geb would be a fundamentally different person if he'd sought lichdom. (Though yes, he'd still be a greater threat - ghost Geb can't actually leave the kingdom, lich Geb easily could. Ghost Geb had to send graveknights to steal Arazni's corpse; lich Geb could've just shown up in person and annihilated the entire Knights of Ozem, turning all of them into graveknights and not just the four idiots who tried to challenge him.)
Geb killed himself because he felt his life had no further meaning without his rival - and then returned as a ghost because he wasn't sure Nex was truly dead. The entire reason he's a ghost now is because he thought he was done, and then realized he never saw the body. (That might've been an awkward moment in the Boneyard. Pity whatever psychopomp tried to stop the mythic necromancer from leaving.)
If instead he'd retained his ambitions and became a lich, I imagine he would've finished the job of conquering the kingdom of Nex, and then quite possibly would've kept pushing northwards to take his revenge on Osirion, the kingdom that had exiled him in the first place.
Katapesh would've probably spared itself through simple immediate surrender - and kept its markets going by having a dedicated industry of abducting people and bringing back to Geb for conversion/feeding. Taking their slaving industry a step further.
Osirion was pretty powerful, so it might've held the line against Geb for quite some time.
If Osirion fell, he may then swing west and push all the way to the western coast of Garuand, claiming Thuvia and Rahadoum.
Depending on Geb's own ties to the Whispering Way, this could make him a natural ally to Tar Baphon when the younger super necromancer finally rose to claim Ustalav.
Possibly resulting in the Shining Crusade never happening, because if the Taldan Empire committed forces to fighting Tar Baphon, it would be vulnerable to a naval invasion from the Empire of Geb.
Which in turn would leave Tar-Baphon free to conquer northern Avistan at his leisure, letting him take Numeria, Sarkoris, the River Kingdoms, as much of Varisia as he wanted, etc. With Irrisen (and the looming specter of the universe's scariest grandma) and possibly Kyonin (I might be giving the elves too much credit - I'm not sure how strong they are, other than they're keeping Treerazer contained) being the only things able to hold him check.
Resulting in northern Avistan largely belonging to Tar-Baphon, southern Avistan belonging to Taldor, and northern and Eastern Garund belonging to Geb. Assuming Taldor doesn't fall apart under the strain of the situation and then getting conquered piecemeal by both undead empires.
Probably because monsters out of the Bestiaries are supposed to represent average specimens that can easily be picked up and run right out of the book.
A dragon having a full set of crafting feats and converting its entire hoard into a small number of powerful magic items (or an enormous number of minor items) is pretty much the exact opposite of that goal. (And also explosively increases the treasure value of the creature!)
Also, I'd say most dragons are neurotic enough about their treasure that the notion of sacrificing part of it fills them with existential dread.
A dragon wants an enormous pile of shinies. A dragon that converted its hoard into a +6 to all stats item would probably go a little nuts, even if the +6 to all stats item is objectively better than 30 million copper pieces.
That being said, making a dragon an item crafter could actually serve as a plot hook or setting dressing. For example, Yrax, Lord of the Howling Storm, is a white dragon who's gone through a lot of effort to create his own golems - and the PCs have to deal with the fruits of his labors while assaulting his fortress.
It's probably worth noting that Asmodeus actively focuses his efforts on conquering the Prime Material - but the Prime Material is infinite in scope, meaning the task itself is an infinite undertaking. (And of course a quite daunting task as well - only of the strongest of devils can stand against giants, dragons, krakens, high level mortals, etc.)
While the Night Queen Eisieth is actually really angry that Asmodeus spends so much resources on the Prime Material - she wants to overthrow Moloch, seize its authority, and devote all of those resources to conquering Heaven. (Which is also an infinite plane, and thus a different infinite undertaking. Even if Eisieth breached the gates, she'd need eternity to penetrate all the way to the summit.)
If you wanted a Blood War situation in Pathfinder, it'd probably involve Lamashtu and Asmodeus going into another "hot" phase against each other - Lamashtu might have a specific stretch of Hell she's trying claim (probably because of its tied to a specific creature that intrigues her, like the Barghest realm), while Asmodeus might want to "rescue" the enormous mortal population in Lamashtu's realm for relocation and re-education.
And yes, I do suspect that the entirety of Hell v. Lamashtu's realm is probably an even match-up. Lamashtu is bad, bad news.
The bottom line of any real war in the Outer Planes should relate to mortal souls, because that's what determines your realm's growth and longevity. Territory acquisition in of itself does nothing if you don't have the means to retain it.
(There's also the matter that lawful evil and chaotic evil souls need to go somewhere; if Hell or the Abyss was somehow destroyed, a new plane could well form to accommodate those souls.)
Seconded MMCJawa - the issue with Godzilla 2014 wasn't the focus on the humans; the issue was the focus on the wrong human. Mopey bomb technician dude wasn't remotely as interesting as his dad, and it made every scene involving him a complete drag. (And he even failed his damn mission at the end, and even worse, it didn't matter because the bomb was somehow airlifted away in time.)
Uh, one of the other Knights is an explicit atheist who, even after taking up the sword, still insists that the Big G is just a really powerful alien.
Amusingly enough, faith itself is completely irrelevant to taking up one of the swords. The real requirement is simply a righteous soul.
(Though Harry also identified a royal blood component to the whole thing - the Carpenter family are descendants of Charlemagne. Wonder is Butters is a descendant of Solomon.)
