The goblin village becomes Xykon's army and The Monster in the Darkness, a mysterious creature gawked at in a circus is adopted as Xykon's secret weapon. Xykon's arrival puts that plan out the window.
Soon after, Xykon disappears and doesn't turn up until a few years later, after Redcloak decides to move in with his brothers new family and forget about the gates. Right-Eye leaves because he doesn't believe Xykon is safe around the low-level goblins. Over the next few years, Xykon and Redcloak look for leads on the whereabouts of the other gates but find nothing. Redcloak and Right-Eye soon realise they've turned Xykon into an extremely dangerous monster. Xykon kills Lirian, but as she dies she lets slip that there are other gates, so all is not lost when Redcloak accidentally destroys the one in the forest. The transformation is successful and the small force break out from the prison. As a skeleton, Xykon would be unaffected by the virus and get many new powers. However, Redcloak is unaffected by the virus due to the powers of his dead mentor's cloak, and hatches a plan to turn Xykon into an undead lich. Without his powers, Xykon is nothing, and is trapped in a prison beneath the ground a frail old man. Xykon and the goblins attack the forest, but are defeated by a virus created by Lirian which removes all the army's magic. The gate is in a forest inhabited by elves and lead by druid Lirian. He believes he is doing the bidding of The Dark One, the goblin god. Redcloak twists the facts slightly, making the Snarl sound more controllable than in actual fact. This entails an arcane caster (Xykon) and a divine caster (Redcloak) gaining control on the gate which contains The Snarl which they will use as their weapon to kill the gods who the goblins despise because of the lack of resources they gave sub-humanoids upon their creation. Redcloak and his brother manage to ally with Xykon and tell him of their plan for world domination. Xykon, flying over head sees the commotion and sets about laying waste to both human and lizard forces alike. Redcloak's small goblin army is about to lay seige to a castle occuppied by his human nemeses, the Sapphire Guard, when a horde of lizard savages attack first. It is as an old man that Xykon meets Redcloak, the goblin cleric that will become his accomplice. At some point many years later, he kills Fyron, tutor of Eugene Greenhilt who spent many years trying to avenge the death. In a rage he storms off, quickly ending up in the jail of a local town. Slightly later on, Xykon tries to become the Dark Master of a people living inside a volcano, but loses the position to sorceress Yydranna and game designer Keith Baker. He then goes on to kill his own parent with the animated corpses of the professor and his grandmother.
Xykon turns against the old man, killng him and taking the name he would be known as for the rest of the story. Xavion, who tells him of his sorceror powers and the potential of what they could become with training. He is seen maliciously heading off with his new zombie dog to kill birds.Īs a teenager, Xykon is visited by a mysterious wheelchair-bound Dr. But I don't think it's necessary for it to be explicitly Epic to be "really powerful." We're getting to the point where the difference between the high-level OOTS and the low-epic Order of the Scribble is mostly one of degrees anyway.In Start of Darkness, the prequel book set chronologically first in The Order of the Stick, Xykon is first seen as a young child discovering his necromantic powers when his dog Barky dies. And as a multi-class ranger/sorcerer, he would have gotten access to it later and he's not really the type to spend all his time studying (when he could be out "recruiting" his defensive team). I don't see Girard as having taken the Epic Spellcasting feat, simply because that was more Dorukan's shtick. This spell doesn't seem to have a hit point limit, but it does offer a possible means of escape through internal realization. My closest rules-based analogy was Microcosm, which is a 9th level psionic power. Hey, thanks for clarifying! Any chance we can get Word of Giant on the spell explicitly being Epic? I thought it was, but it's gotten a little heated for some reason.It's not Epic, it's simply a 9th-level illusion-since there aren't many 9th-level illusions in core, there's conceptual room for one that is pretty heavy-hitting that would still be way above anything Eugene ever tried.