Which is only to the DPs' benefit if you assume they're shopping for quantity, not quality. Yes, the Grand Conjunction appears to have extended their influence -- temporarily -- across a certain fraction of the Material Plane, at least until it's short-circuited by the PCs' actions. But is this really consistent with their goals, as embodied by the demiplane as we know it ... the claustrophobic, eclectic, tiny demiplane?HuManBing wrote:Same response as before. Why do you think this is an episode of "playing the DPs for suckers"? Look at the outcome in Roots of Evil. The Dark Powers are vastly benefitted by Azalin's actions. Their dominion expands to touch on every Prime Material plane in existence, even Prime Material Barovia, in whichever forgotten corner of the AD&D multiverse it lies. Now everybody in existence has to deal with fear, horror, and madness checks. Undead everywhere get a bonus to resist turning attempts. And so on, and so forth.
If Azalin's suckered them into anything, it seems they profit handsomely from it. And in any case I scratch my head over your proposal that he's doing something they've not intended or somehow crept up on them.
I don't think it's accurate to say that the Dark Powers are simply out to expand their territory, or at least (if that is their goal) that they're ready to try it. There are billions of potential darklords scattered across the multiverse -- it's a fantasy game-cosmos; it's crawling with Big Bad Evil Guys! -- yet only a miniscule fraction of them actually get taken up by the Mists and given domains. This isn't consistent with the notion that the DPs want to expand the scope of their control; if anything, it may indicate just the opposite: that they pick and choose their candidates with extreme care, excluding most villains they come across. Beings out to expand their power over an entire uniiverse aren't likely to restrict the initial scope of their ambitions to a mere handful of baddies, or lock them up in domains you can practically spit across.
Also, your own proposed scheme to bring the DPs into conflict with Andral implicitly suggests that, if the Dark Powers tried to usurp the mandate of deities to dictate what morals and ethics apply to mortals outside the demiplane, those deities would promptly smack them for their temerity. (Don't think they couldn't do it, either: Vecna fought the DPs to a standstill in the end, and he was just one deity.) If Andral can face them down over the fate of a single mortal who's holding a couple of his trinkets, why would every deity in the cosmos not do exactly the same thing, if the DPs tried to spread their dominion beyond their little construct in the Ethereal? Just because some self-important Vistana crackpot tells them they can't? Either you're assuming the gods aren't strong enough to defy the DPs -- in which case, Andral's protection can't possibly suffice to overturn the rules of Ravenloft anyway, and there's no contradiction and no "reinsert universe and reboot" glitch -- or they are strong enough, and there's no way they'd sit back and let the Dark Powers overturn those very definitions of morality which define right and wrong -- and hence, their own spiritual positions and power-bases -- throughout the rest of the multiverse.
Finally -- and here's the real rub, IMO -- the Grand Conjuction is, after all, ultimately a failure. The darklords don't get to escape. Azalin doesn't get to 'win' his struggle against his tormentors. And the Dark Powers don't get to rule the universe! Why not? Because the Big A made a mistake in his plotting. If the Dark Powers really wanted the GC to work, wouldn't they have found a way to ensure Azalin didn't foul it up? They know how he thinks, and they know precisely how to poke the guy so he'll jump the way they want him to! So why would they let the lich foul up Hyskosa's Hexad, if they wanted him to succeed rather than botch it and end up feeling like a chump?
Yes, the RLPHB does imply -- belatedly -- that the DPs have some interest in extending their influence beyond Ravenloft, in its comments on "Masques" and the idea they may be spreading. But given the fact that "Masque of the Jade Dragon" never materialized, that hypothesis doesn't have any overt support in the product lines. And the Red Death is generally understood to have been kicked out by the other Dark Powers, which means that its influence over Gothic Earth is not something that the collective DPs instigated or endorsed, or at least not directly. So a few lines of product cross-promotion in one book don't constitute much proof that the DPs' ambitions are as straightforward as you say.
) IMC, DPs are the masters of their own Demiplane, and their power levels outside the Demiplane are vast as well.
Still, once we start bringing metagame arguments into the picture, it kind of detracts from the challenge of finding an in-game rationale for particular models of the Dark Powers' nature or intentions. We already have a perfectly good OOC model for that, in the RLDMG sidebar that names them as a plot device.
