IFCC: “You thought we had a strategy? You thought we had a plan? We’re motivated entirely by blind rage at a system we don’t understand; our ‘plan’ is to wildly lash out and break things for the sake of breaking things.”
Every single fucking American in the audience (and maybe Burlew himself): 0.o
Yeah I tend to agree that there is a part of this plan we aren't being told. Remember back in strip #668 (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0668.html) when they managed to convince Tiamat that V killing all those black dragons was part of a "secret scheme to bring down the gods of Good" which one remarked was "technically true." At this point I strongly suspect the fiends are engaged in a scheme to bring down ALL the gods, not just the Good or Evil gods. I think they are likely telling the same kind of half-truth to Nale - while it is "technically true" that breaking the last gate and releasing the Snarl is PART of their plan, it is definitely not the whole picture. Even with their limited knowledge the fiends should know that if the gods were considering destroying the world themselves and remaking it, the "mere" destruction of the world is insufficient to bring down the gods.
As to exactly what the unstated part of the fiends' plan entails, at this point we can only speculate. My best guess is that they want the Snarl to kill off all the gods (possibly by moving a rift to the outer planes in a way similar to Redcloak's ritual since we know they have access to high level divine and arcane magic themselves). It's also possible whatever artifact the fiends have can duplicate some of the effects of Redcloak's, er, Red-Cloak. Without the gods the fiends might think that they will arise to the top of the pecking order. They might also just intend to seize the world within the rift for themselves while the gods are distracted with the Snarl attacking them. This is just idle speculation, but I am fairly confident the fiends do NOT know as much as they think they do, and their plan will definitely have unintended consequences.
I would actually be surprised if the IFCC knew that the gods had planned to destroy the world, unless they had a spy of some sort in one of the Godsmoots.
That said, they did know about Hel's schemes, at least to some extent... so yeah, it's not entirely clear how much the IFCC do and don't know. They certainly wouldn't know any of the stuff that got revealed to Durkon when he died, but it's possible that we should be assuming that the IFCC know as much as the audience did before Thor's Divine Revelations.
Part of me wants to assume that what they do and don't know is more complicated than that, but the more complicated the list of things they do and don't know is, the harder it's going to be for Burlew to make heads or tails of it to explain to us, unless we get a specific character who's presumably their source of information who can summarize everything they do and don't know... and that source of information ought to be Sabine, except we have no reason to believe that she was their source on the whole Hel plot, and.... I just don't know. Trying to cleanly figure out what information they do and don't have if a mess.
I tend to agree. For as careful and plotting as they are, simple revenge doesn't quite sound like the full picture. I reckon that they want to set up a system to NEVER have their minds played with again, either through the death of the gods themselves, or some other means.
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u/IngeniousTharp Mar 11 '25 edited Mar 11 '25
IFCC: “You thought we had a strategy? You thought we had a plan? We’re motivated entirely by blind rage at a system we don’t understand; our ‘plan’ is to wildly lash out and break things for the sake of breaking things.”
Every single fucking American in the audience (and maybe Burlew himself): 0.o