Dorukans Gate

[Skull the Troll]

So I was re-reading from the beginning, and if the bad guys goal is to get possession of a gate in order to cast the ritual, why didn't they do that when they had Dorukans? I know Xykon didn't think that they could go through it until it was "unsealed" but given that that's not the true purpose of the ritual Redcloak could have just said that when they cast the ritual, the seal would break or some such.

[KorvinStarmast]

So I was re-reading from the beginning, and if the bad guys goal is to get possession of a gate in order to cast the ritual, why didn't they do that when they had Dorukans? I know Xykon didn't think that they could go through it until it was "unsealed" but given that that's not the true purpose of the ritual Redcloak could have just said that when they cast the ritual, the seal would break or some such. Nobody on team evil was pure of heart.

[Fyraltari]

So I was re-reading from the beginning, and if the bad guys goal is to get possession of a gate in order to cast the ritual, why didn't they do that when they had Dorukans? I know Xykon didn't think that they could go through it until it was "unsealed" but given that that's not the true purpose of the ritual Redcloak could have just said that when they cast the ritual, the seal would break or some such.

They never say they want to go through, they say they sent goblins through, to their deaths. Presumably Dorukan's spell also blocks the Ritual.

[DavidBV]

Well, mostly because the main plot was devised after all those strips were published.

Still there's reasonable consistency, with the rune requiring someone with a pure heart blocking access to the Gate.

[Skull the Troll]

Well, mostly because the main plot was devised after all those strips were published.

Still there's reasonable consistency, with the rune requiring someone with a pure heart blocking access to the Gate.

I guess what I was thinking was that they don't want the gate at all. The goal here (unknown to Xykon) is to cast a ritual that will allow the Dark One to move the gate to other planes as a threat to make the gods do what he wants. I suppose if they have to touch the gate to cast the ritual that would explain it, but really how hard would it be to go get a LG villager of something to open the gate for them.

[Metastachydium]

I guess what I was thinking was that they don't want the gate at all. The goal here (unknown to Xykon) is to cast a ritual that will allow the Dark One to move the gate to other planes as a threat to make the gods do what he wants. I suppose if they have to touch the gate to cast the ritual that would explain it, but really how hard would it be to go get a LG villager of something to open the gate for them.

They had no idea how the seal worked until after the episode with the Talisman gave Xykon the idea that it's a hostile alignment detector. They probably could have procured a sufficiently Good commoner, but they didn't know they need one.

[brian 333]

At that time the arcane half of the ritual had not been translated, so Xykon didn't know what to do. He was experimenting, and the seal, (gate,) was in his way.

[Roland Itiative]

I always assumed that the literal gate we see is not the Gate, just an extra layer of protection around it. So, they would have to defuse the protection before they had access to the Gate proper.

[Fyraltari]

At that time the arcane half of the ritual had not been translated, so Xykon didn't know what to do. He was experimenting, and the seal, (gate,) was in his way.
[Citation needed]

[brian 333]

Tsukiko didn't do the translation until just before she was devoured by her children in Gobbotopia.

[Morty]

Xykon didn't know what to do, but Redcloak did. At the time, Xykon was relying on Redcloak to know his way around the rituals. It's only later that he decided to dig into them himself.

[Fyraltari]

Tsukiko didn't do the translation until just before she was devoured by her children in Gobbotopia.

Tsukiko didn't translate anything. She studied the instructions that Redcloak had transmitted to Xykon because Xykon was looking for a way to do this without Redcloak and realized they didn't do what Redcloak calimed they did.

Xykon has had those instructions ever since he partnered with the goblin.

[Metastachydium]

Also, Redcloak sabotaging the Plan for months just so that he can hang out with Xykon would have been odd.

[Goblin_Priest]

It should not be extrapolated that Xykon was unable to cast his part of the ritual before Tsukiko came along. He didn't know exactly how it worked, what it would do, and what the other half was, which are all points I'm sure he wanted Tsukiko to work on, but it doesn't mean he was unable to actually carry it out.

It's like having a recipe for muffins that says, among other things, to use some "Arm & Hammer". You don't need to know what A&H is (sodium bicarbonate), or how it will interact with the recipe (leavening agent), in order to use it and make muffins with it.

[The Pilgrim]

There was a Seal zapping everybody who come close to the Gate. Therefore, Team Evil couldn't perform The Ritual without deactivating the Seal first, as otherwise the Zap would either kill them or, at the very least, make them fail a concentration check while casting (it takes weeks to perform the Ritual, they would roll a 1 sooner rather than later).

Xykon eventually figured out he needed someone of pure heart to disable the Seal. That's when he attempted to fool the Order into touching it.

[Potatopeelerkin]

It's like having a recipe for muffins that says, among other things, to use some "Arm & Hammer". You don't need to know what A&H is (sodium bicarbonate), or how it will interact with the recipe (leavening agent), in order to use it and make muffins with it.

I get what you're saying, but if I saw "Use some Arm & Hammer" in a recipe, I would assume it was telling me to hit the dough.

[Precure]

Redcloak was trying to buy time so he could dublicate Xykon's phylactery and replace it with the real one.

[Metastachydium]

Redcloak was trying to buy time so he could dublicate Xykon's phylactery and replace it with the real one.

No, he wasn't?
He was in this stupidly subservient phase of his life back then, and he was yet to not hate hobgoblins (including the craftsman who created the fake).

[Fyraltari]

No, he wasn't?
He was in this stupidly subservient phase of his life back then, and he was yet to not hate hobgoblins (including the craftsman who created the fake).

Which he hadn't hired to craft the double on account of not knowing the man even existed.

[BaronOfHell]

The only thing I think could be a nice inclusion is for Team Evil to acknowledge Dorukan's Gate had been destroyed. Everything else I find fit very well with Xykon's personality, from abandoning the gate as lost in stead of simply letting the monster take care of business to (ab)using the order who conveniently are present in stead of some random commoner to open the seal.

[Roland Itiative]

When Shojo explains the whole Gate situation to the Order, he makes it pretty clear that the magical defenses Dorukan put on his Gate are on top of the actual Gate. They made the Gates to seal the Rifts, then they split up the party, and then Dorukan started working on warding up his Gate with magic that only someone pure of heart can deactivate. Those were the spells Xykon was trying to undo, not the spells that formed the Gate.

Xykon wasn't trying to "unseal" the Gate in the sense of opening it to access the Rift, he was trying to unmake the defenses that disallowed him to interact with the Gate to begin with. The other Gates didn't have this extra layer of protection, because their defenses weren't planned by a Wizard. Xikon and Redcloak conquered the dungeon of Dorukan, but they never got past the innermost layers of the Gate defense mechanism, and thus they were stuck there, trying to undo them.

The deal with Tsukiko was not that Xykon wanted her to translate the Ritual so he could use it. He could already cast the arcane half, and wanted Tsukiko, who knew both arcane and divine magic, to reverse engineer the other half of the Ritual from the arcane half, because Redcloak never saw fit to give Xykon the half of the Ritual the lich can't cast (for very good reason). If Tsukiko was successful, Xykon would still be the one casting the arcane part of it, as was the plan all along, but he would have leverage to get rid of Redcloak once and for all and replace him with any divine caster of enough power (maybe Tsukiko herself, maybe someone else if she was dumb enough to give him the divine half instead of just commiting it to her own memory).