My take on the Bone Garden's back-story...
The Bone Garden is a subterranean cemetery for the Elves of Kantele that was a truly peaceful place. Being an Elven village that was until recently quite unwelcoming to non-Elven races, is fair to assume that the entrances were well-hidden so they could not be defiled by the said non-Elven races, and the Drow.
For reasons unknown, Evil Santa took on the form of an undead necromancer, possibly a lich, one year, and animated a number of the corpses that had been buried down there and had not yet decomposed enough to have their bones harvested. Because of the emergency of having undead Elves as well as Drow threatening Kantele, they opened their doors to outside races for the first time, and revealed the location of the Bone Garden so the natives could receive assistance against the undead scourge.
When Necro Claus was finally vanquished, the Elves felt they could conceal the entrances to their sacred cemetery once again, but some form of necromancy still lingers in the Bone Garden, possibly carried on by another necromancer. Therefore, the Elves had to open their Bone Garden to the outside again so the necromancy can be fought and the animated corpses returned to rest, hopefully permanently.
This is where the role-play conflict occurs, because the role of Pacifists is to bring peace to Nightmist and to the undead abominations of the realm. Because of this, they often spend long periods in the most evil of dungeons, bringing peace to those who have fallen from grace and to the tortured souls that suffer in the afterlife. Very few places are off-limits to Pacifists; such places tend to be the scenes of genocide (Abandoned Tomb), pointless and thoughtless bloodshed (Coliseum, Crazy Pete), and places where the evil is very well-organised and not undead (Dvergar Stronghold (if the Dvergar are evil), but
not the Underground Barracks, since the organised evil there is very much undead).
But those aside, some Pacifists are brave enough to venture into Harabec Dungeon to bring peace to undead tormentors, tortured prisoners and even the torturers themselves - there are souls that can be saved there, so the Pacifists try. Similarly with the Pyramid of the 3rd Moon... despite the evil that resonates through the stone and animates the Ibis Statues, the presence of the suffering souls of slaves, and the tormented and twisted soul of Ganymede, is enough for Pacifists to brave the challenges to assist one of their own.
I'll say this again... considering how everything else is set up in the realm, banning them from the Bone Garden makes no sense, and the presence of death, hostility and pain is all the more reason for a Pacifist to enter in the hope they can pacify those essences.
As for the limitations in crit numbers, the Bone Garden isn't very spacious, although it does get awkward when parties run into each other and cannot move... as my understanding goes, crossroads do not have those limitations, so you can use those spaces as passing places.
ADDENDUM: You can't throw away role-play for the sake of game mechanics. Why must Pacifists be banned from all new areas? Is it punishment for the damage to the economy many years back? The Museum was fixed and there were no problems on that front since then. Greater Pact was made self-cast to prevent its abuse in disabling crits, and that solved that problem. But to continuously discriminate against them is a grudge. And then again, I suggested that they be shut off of parts of the Drow city in Tirantek because 1) the evil is well-organised and not undead, and 2) they were being abused to bypass the kill-to-pass monsters and the challenges in order to act as checkers and to collect Drow Journals, yet Trevayne refused to close the area off to them. Why? Because a small handful of players had already been using them for the abusive purpose for too long now? That comes across as nothing short of hypocrisy, not to mention a couple of other deep suspicions that I rather keep to myself for now.
Edited by Crane, 17 December 2008 - 01:32 AM.