Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

Nemni wrote:

Not completely true. Devils/Demons will seek out easy marks to gain souls from for their own monetary needs.

I suppose if you want to play a char that is an easy mark, then that's fine, though it begs the question why a demon/devil would part with their power for you. But if you want to play a char that actually got a somewhat decent deal, then I maintain that charisma makes sense.

Source of warlock power and mechanics are not explained in DND. It is basically "dark sorcerer". You got some power, but you don't know how you got it, except the source of the power is definitely bad news.

Based on other books, a mortal has no chance of getting warlock powers through a pact on their own. Meaning, the power will be granted through blood, through some sort of unusual pact inherited from an ancestor, or through some cult. A character that made a pact themselves, will be very quickly killed off so their soul can be collected faster.

In the end a warlock has a good reason to stay the hell away from fiends just so they don't tell the "power provider" where the warlock is.

The way I see it, a warlock is best treated as dark sorcerer, except that one day the source power may come (or even will come) after warlock's life or soul. And the fun part is that the warlock might not know who the source of power is.

Based on other books, a mortal has no chance of getting warlock powers through a pact on their own. Meaning, the power will be granted through blood, through some sort of unusual pact inherited from an ancestor, or through some cult. A character that made a pact themselves, will be very quickly killed off so their soul can be collected faster.

An exception would be the Pact Certain, a Faustian Pact where the individual swears his allegiance to one of the Nine Lords of Hell as well as gain his reward of power, money, magic items, pacts, etc. Their alignment becomes Lawful Evil no matter how they act. And devils will allow them to live as long as they serve faithfully on the material plane.

And thus, Mephistopheles can offer divine power, the spells hellfire and hellfire storm, and give warlocks a new tool to play with

blowuup wrote:

Based on other books, a mortal has no chance of getting warlock powers through a pact on their own. Meaning, the power will be granted through blood, through some sort of unusual pact inherited from an ancestor, or through some cult. A character that made a pact themselves, will be very quickly killed off so their soul can be collected faster.

An exception would be the Pact Certain, a Faustian Pact where the individual swears his allegiance to one of the Nine Lords of Hell as well as gain his reward of power, money, magic items, pacts, etc. Their alignment becomes Lawful Evil no matter how they act. And devils will allow them to live as long as they serve faithfully on the material plane.

And thus, Mephistopheles can offer divine power, the spells hellfire and hellfire storm, and give warlocks a new tool to play with

Interesting. It would seem there's a detail I overlooked. Apparently the Fiendish Codex II fails to state explicitly that there are 3 types of pacts (Faustian, Insidious and Certain), and not just two (Insidious and Certain, both beign subset of Faustian).

However, there's still a problem with rewards table on the next page.

For example, a level 20 character by selling soul to a devil can get a ... whopping 10800 xp, or a 1 point ability increase. Which is nowhere close to having a warlock power. (pages 23 or 24 of Fiendish Codex II). By the way for level 1 the xp reward is 600xp.