After turn 20, your realm can summon an Avatar, an ultra-powerful being who really beefs up the armies he or she moves with. This summoning requires at least 1,500 gold, so save your gold pieces!

When you summon an Avatar, the Avatar appears in an insubstantial form at the community where it was summoned. You will receive an Avatar Design Sheet that turn. By filling in this sheet, you custom tailor your Avatar to strengthen his or her ratings in the abilities that are most important to you. The final strength of your Avatar depends upon the masses of mortals you have already brought under your sway at this point in the game. You get Avatar Points to strengthen the avatar for the hexagon your realm controls, the gold production from your communities, and the experience received by your realm character.

Return the Avatar Design Sheet to RSI with your Order Sheet. Your Avatar will solidify into its final form, ready to accept your orders on the same turn. (In a strictly role-playing sense, at this point in the game it is actually the Avatar who is giving the orders. Avatars tend to be rather touchy about who bosses who. But since it wouldn't be very much fun for us to start sending YOU commands, let's just say that you are a really persuasive mortal and that the Avatar chooses to follow your "suggestions" once summoned.)

Having an Avatar with a group of your armies gives you many benefits. An Avatar increases the movement of a group and improves the group's combat abilities. Since you customize the Avatar, you get to choose which of these abilities to emphasize.

The larger the community, the stronger the starting abilities of the Avatar summoned there (see Community Characteristics chart). For example, the abilities of an Avatar summoned in Waterdeep are 20% better than those of the same Avatar summoned in a city. Avatars can be summoned only at a community of a race appropriate to that Avatar (see Known Avatars).

For purposes of game balance, all Avatars are equal in the total of their ability scores (prior to modification by the type of the community they are summoned at, and before you add Avatar Points). Each Avatar is unique in the way its starting abilities are distributed. For example, one Avatar may move faster but be unable to suffer as many hits as another. Each Avatar in the game can be summoned by only one realm. How each Avatar differs from the others can be discovered by Research.

Avatars and Alliances: If two allies have Avatars of incompatible alignments, their alliance is automatically broken, just as if one of the allies had used an Oppose order. As long as the realms have the incompatible avatars, they will not be allowed to ally! Should one avatar die...