Though as a teen I read D&D novels in which the mages lived forever due to their magical might, I have yet to find a rulebook with such a spell. No worries, I don't call myself a DM for nothing; I'll just create the spell. Hm let's say it should be a 6-9th level with a costly component...ok perfect! Now any high-level wiz/sor can live forever. Wait...if they live forever, even NPC casters will slowly accumulate levels...eventually epic levels. So why are the majority of cities/nations ruled by regular old Fighter kings? I understand that there are mages like Elminster who are irritated by people and have no interest in ruling them but still...if mages have had the potential to extend their lifespans since the gods taught the first mage his first cantrip, eventually there should be enough immortal power-hungry spell-slingers to dominate every nation on any globe.
Just wanted to know what I'm not seeing about this aspect of fantasy gaming.
Ten Possible Reasons
1. Most fantasy settings use arcanists sparingly.
2. Most wizards are too busy trying to research your spell before they die so they don't have time to rule.
3. In many fantasy settings arcanists are more interested in preserving the balance than ruling nations.
4. Fighters (who probably have more testosterone than most people) are more driven to excel in their society.
5. Many fantasy societies revere martial accomplishments over magical ones (their powers are more easily understood by the common man).
6. Anyone can train to become a fighter, or a rogue, but wizards tend to be overly bookish and sorcerers are often considered X-men-style mutants for their gifts. Since they are both harder to relate to by the common man they are seen as less trustworthy rulers.
7. Who wants to rule a bunch of people who hate and fear you?
8. You mean elves don't rule the world already?
9. Many ubermages go on to become deities.
10. Those who want to become gods generally remain quiet about their ambitions for obvious reasons.
and (I lied)...
11. Why be the target on the throne when you can stand behind it?
GGG
Your #11 was actually my first thought.
My thinking was "who says they don't?” meaning the immortal, power-hungry, spell-slingers do dominate every nation on every globe, but they are so subtle in their manipulations that the fighter kings you mention are only pawns in their game. (e.g. Mephistopheles)
However, keep in mind the universe is balanced, and ...
Do not forget those bleeping super-heros!! Even if a mage has the magical ability to live forever, there is always a super-hero out there ready to stop him, possibly even kill him; depending upon how 'live forever' is defined -- i.e. does that just mean not dying of old age and disease, etc? In most cases the super hero can find some rule of magic/forces-of-reality to counter the original life granting magic. By "stopping him", I mean the super-hero has the mage thrown into the void to float around forever, or tricked and locked in a box that can never be opened again (that kind of thing.) Effectively ending their life.
With all of the adventure seeking PC’s running around a would be live-forever, world ruling mage may never quite make it to an unshakable seat of power before he is defeated. (This may be why the paizo rag “Undefeated” was stopped.)
Interestingly, even if a person has the remarkably small chance of 0.00001 per year of being stopped/killed that still only gives him an expected lifetime of 100,000 years. Think about it, after even a few tens of thousands of years, maybe less, he would go berserk due to sheer boredom.
So, I believe there are many mages *trying* to live forever and rule the multi-verse, but there are just as many brave adventurers out there trying to stop them. And, the ones that do succeed probably crack up in a fair amount of time.
What do you get when you add up all the integers (an infinite number of numbers)? A big fat ZERO!! ( and balance is achieved. )
All those things make sense, especially about the many heroes (or simply other power-hungry folks unable to wield magic)willing to risk their lives to end a witch-king's.
Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved has a rare, high-level spell called "Immortality." If you allow such a spell into your campaign world and follow the game logic through to its end, the acquisition of such a spell would be the probable goal of many if not most of the world's powerful creatures and individuals. Furthermore, the world's most powerful creatures and individuals would actually be immortal, and would have had an influence/impact on the campaign world for perhaps thousands of years. In other words, the world the player characters are born into has literally been shaped by a small group of powerful immortals. Which I think is a very cool idea. And one I'm using in my homebrew.
I'm a fan of immortality, both as a plot device and a general fantasy cliche. That being said, they are a lot of practical considerations to being both immortal and a mage.
Point 1: There's a big difference to between being ageless than being truly immortal. I mean, to grow as a powerful mage you need to face challenges to gain XP to level-up, as well to create items and fuel powerful magic like Wish. You also need adventure to find you new spells, collect cool items, gain exotic allies, tinker with powerful sites, and do things like eating magical fruit that might be poisonous, might grant power, or might just grant digestive problems (or some combination of all three).
That's dangerous work. In DnD, there are worse things than death. Petrification, various forms of soul-binding, mind-control, or magical imprisonment, being turned into the spawn of some undead creature, or simply buried alive are just a few of the more popular ways in which an immortal mage might meet his end or a fate worse than death. Even if every mage in the world was ageless, mishaps during a regular mage's working day is going to keep the overall mage population pretty low.
Point 2: Enemies. Somebody always wants to bring low the powerful and/or subjugate the weak, even if the weak and powerful were minding their own business at the time. A mage might have vast magical powers, but the day that someone with more magical power wants the Fire Jewel of Tasserant that he's been keeping as a paperweight, you have a conflict that can kill or incapacitate an immortal.
On the flipside, the day the peons in the town below your tower figure out that people who build towers are rich and tend to store treasure or other valuables inside those towers, they will be spending their slow afternoons trying to figure out a way to slip poison into your drink or a dagger into your back the next time you hit town for supplies or a quiet beer.
Ageless and immortal mages can easily die due to weak enemies in large numbers and just as easily to more powerful enemies roaming the universe.
Point 3: Retirement Having attained some form of immortality, a mage might decide that Point 1 and Point 2 involve him not enjoying his golden years much. There is very little stopping an immortal from laying low, not spending XP on spells or items, and just generally kicking back and enjoying life and hoping that he avoids the attention of his betters and lessers. In effect, he stays the same level forever, never gaining more power but never getting into situations where he might get his immortality tested. In general, guys like these don’t affect the world at all, and become dead in all ways but the breathing way.
----
In effect, immortal mages are not a threat to a fantasy world. Their influence is no larger than any other important personages like kings or religious leaders, except that they will draw more enemy fire due to the fact that they can upset the ambitious and inspire more fear and hate from the uninitiated.
PS. DnD doesn’t need a straight Immortality Spell. The Core books have over a dozen forms of immortality, and even more if you count the numerous accessories.
The Gods themselves might take a hand in that question. In the old basic D&D game, the longevity potion had no chance of failure, but it is stated somewhere (I think the Dawn of Emperors Box) that the Immortals (as the Gods were called there) took a dim view on anyone prolonging his/her live with this magic overmuch. A century or two perhaps, thats ok, but more is trying to use a shortcut on immortality, and the gods will intervene. Same would go for an immortality spell.
As a god, I would resent the upstart competition, too. Even is he ist "only" immortal to start with, what step is next ? Godhood is the next logical step. Can you say Vecna or Iuz (or Kyuss)? So the gods will intervene if a mortal oversteps his bounds this way.
Stefan
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Just in case you have not already, check out H.P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward .
You will be happy!!
Though as a teen I read D&D novels in which the mages lived forever due to their magical might ...
Can you by chance give any titles?
Though as a teen I read D&D novels in which the mages lived forever due to their magical might, I have yet to find a rulebook with such a spell. No worries, I don't call myself a DM for nothing; I'll just create the spell. Hm let's say it should be a 6-9th level with a costly component...ok perfect! Now any high-level wiz/sor can live forever. Wait...if they live forever, even NPC casters will slowly accumulate levels...eventually epic levels. So why are the majority of cities/nations ruled by regular old Fighter kings?
Because they don't. Practically all evil nations are outright magocracies/theocracies. As about good and neutral nations, they are the ones that lucked out to live near archmages who just aren't interested in day-to-day administration. These archmages still can do whatever the hell they want, but their wants do not happen to include stomping muggles.
The only exceptions are low-level settings, and settings like Eberron, where there is a mighty conspiration of monsterlords, that is not interested in direct control, and tends to zap lesser conspirations for its own inscrutable reasons, whenever they become too active. So the kingdom of men can exist without being taken over by Lords of the Dust or something in a single night. Sometimes, that mega-conspiracy
decides that it doesn't feel like intervening, and a continent gets overrun by whatever spellcasting thingies happened to be locally strongest.
EDIT: Also, magical bigshots already tend to be de-facto immortal, in the sense of indefinite lifespan.
I think Vampire also had a point in this issue. As you grow up, you learn to understand the world as it is around you. On that knowledge you try to affect your surroundings, for good or bad. Some manage to leave a footprint. However, as you age, taking in new ideas becomes harder and harder, and you start to calcify in your opinions and views of the world. Strange new customs crop up around you. The things you valued are seen as archaic and strange. People even start to speak differently, in merely a hundred years you will become completely outdated as a person. In the personal realm, this is even worse. You meet people, get friends, learn from teachers, you get enemies. You fall in love, and have children. With time, your children have children. Pretty soon, EVERYONE who ever mattered to you will be dead, and you don't even have anyone to talk about them with because everyone who lives was born far after they were dust. You great-grandchildren say they love you, and they sometimes listen to your stories, none of them understand what life was actually like.
Immortality, a fate worse than death.
Given all this, I actually find it somewhat hard to believe that an ageless wizard would spend the time and energy needed to run a nation, even behind the scenes. It's not just that the wizard is obsolete, it's mainly that the wizard considers the world alien and likely very tiresome. People will be people, and they never learn. They make the same earth-shattering mistakes that earlier generations made. They bicker and fight over trivialities, while missing the truly important questions. To be their king/queen? Most likely, no.
Further, the wizard who is driven to succeed in magic is motivated by some sort of curiosity. The best part of living forever, he would say, is that he has forever to learn about magic. He could turn the world upside down with the power he has, but as long as he could instead study more magic, that would be his choice.
Only a threat to what the ageless wizard truly values would merit action. A country that lets its priests decide to outlaw magic would have serious trouble on its hands. Some immortal wizards would take a proactive stance, and make sure no such development happened, accepting that they would have to play the political game to some degree along the way.
On the whole, I think the wizards who do choose to gain political influence and pursue temporal power would be the "normal human" wizards. Mortal and with all the attitudes that come from that fact, they would be as likely as a traditional fighter king to end up on the throne. Once you cross the line into immortality, and the future stretches out ahead of you, the old frenzy of activity will likely be replaced by other values and other views.
April? Oh, come on, there's been many examples of worse. =) Then again, epic level necromancy is cool.
The problem with this VtM attitude lies in the fact, that the world does not change around high-level characters, high-level characters change the world around them. For that matter, the only reason why humanity does not live in eternal stasis under immortal vampiric overlords in VtM is because the plot says so (discounting the crossover madness).
The problem of total alienation from normal society in DnD is not contingent on immortality. It happens to everyone who hits two-digit levels, simply because they are superhumanoids, who probably need an effort to remember what mortal frailties feel like. It is solved easily, though, by forming real attachments only to beings who are similarly powerful and, if you managed to free yourself from the threat of aging, long-lived/immortal. Unlike VtM, which assumes that all the venerable immortals are gigantic dicks, in DnD you can have silver dragons and sphinxes and whatever as companions. They are generally far more interesting to hang around than comparatively stupid and uncharismatic mundanes, too.
Finally, while the model of passive, non-intervening elder is relatively workable in VtM, where you maximize your chances of suriving to elderhood by avoiding risks as much as possible, because your power comes simply from age, DnD, on the opposite, rewards with power and immortality those beings, who are willing to take risks. Unless you take really proactive stance in life, and are willing to go forth and kick ass - and to do so even after you already are rich and famous - your cannot become an uber-wizard in the first place. So, relatively few immortals will be ever willing to retire peacefully. And even those who prefer not to disturb the status quo (because they have fulfilled their dreams already), will probably take up arms, whenever someone tries to screw with their favorite spots of the world (or the world as a whole). Again, this is roughly how things actually are in Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk.
April? Oh, come on, there's been many examples of worse. =) Then again, epic level necromancy is cool.
Well, the last post before the april 2010 one was february 2006, which makes it fairly epic :)
Seriously, I never really got why thread necromancy is so bad. Is it because "let sleeping dogs lie"? Is it because of some perceived injustice in that some people have aadvantage in the process? Is it because you don't want to get a 1500+ posts thread back into circulation?
Personally, I think a short thread about a fun topic is neat. I would see it as a service done to us by those who actually want to browse the OLD archives.
But yes, four years IS epic.