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ultrafilter posted:The oracle said that Durkon would return home posthumously. That's been fulfilled. You're thinking of belkar, maybe. And his would be a great time for a hero's death for him saving durkon...
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Sep 11, 2020 21:40
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sebmojo posted:You're thinking of belkar, maybe. And his would be a great time for a hero's death for him saving durkon... Right, right, that was it.
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Sep 11, 2020 21:40
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I know things are definitely gonna go to poo poo and probably subsequently to a deus ex machina or the Order showing up, but I'm choosing to assume things are still going according to Durkon's plan. He knew Redcloak and Xykon were working at cross-purposes, Thor told him what Redcloak was actually planning, and Durkon got him to admit as much. Xykon may well slow down long enough to listen, especially when he assesses that the dwarves are no threat. Team Evil versus Team Dwarfs is a no contest, but team clerics versus Xykon is a much more interesting encounter, particularly with Oona and the MitD's loyalties being up in the air. Also noticing that Minrah's dinky little hammer is drawn flat in every panel, while Durkon's Hammer of Thunderbolts gets actual geometry. It's always been drawn that way, while it wouldn't make sense for most other weapons, but it's the first time I've spotted it.
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Sep 11, 2020 21:48
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Regalingualius posted:I’m guessing that Durkon and Minrah are pretty soundly defeated, but before Xykon can finish them off, O-Chul, Lirien, and/or whoever their captors are make their grand reentrance to distract him long enough for them to escape. Lien is the paladin who's with O-Chul. Lirian is the elf druid from the Order of the Scribble. Actually, thinking about this, I wonder if Lirian and/or Dorukan are going to show back up? Xykon has their souls trapped in a gem still, so if they could be broken out they would be a really useful source of exposition about the Snarl. I mean, I also think that the mysterious invisible paladin-captor is Serini, so she could also be a good source of exposition, but then she would also have a vested interest in freeing her friends' souls.
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Sep 11, 2020 21:48
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sebmojo posted:You're thinking of belkar, maybe. And his would be a great time for a hero's death for him saving durkon... And maybe reveal that he finally started taking his Tracking skills seriously and trailed the dwarves without their awareness?
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Sep 11, 2020 21:53
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I love it when someone gets turned into a skeleton for a panel. Great effect.
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Sep 11, 2020 21:57
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I don't know to what extent book spoilers are kosher, but we do also know that at some point during this book, Belkar is going to save Hinjo's life.
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Sep 11, 2020 21:57
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ultrafilter posted:The oracle said that Durkon would return home posthumously. That's been fulfilled. So far, Durkon has returned home three times after dying (two if you don't count Nokrud).
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Sep 11, 2020 21:58
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Before Belkar dies, he will betray Hinjo 3 times
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Sep 11, 2020 21:59
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:I don't know to what extent book spoilers are kosher, but we do also know that at some point during this book, Belkar is going to save Hinjo's life. He's done it already.
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Sep 11, 2020 22:01
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sebmojo posted:He's done it already. Spoilers for a book 3 bonus strip: He's done it once already, but the prophecy said he'd do it twice.
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Sep 11, 2020 22:16
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:I know things are definitely gonna go to poo poo and probably subsequently to a deus ex machina or the Order showing up, but I'm choosing to assume things are still going according to Durkon's plan. He knew ... William of Occam just screamed loudly enough to be heard down the centuries.
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Sep 11, 2020 22:37
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Oh right, thanks I forgot that
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Sep 11, 2020 22:46
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Ponsonby Britt posted:Lien is the paladin who's with O-Chul. Lirian is the elf druid from the Order of the Scribble. I don't believe the soul thing has ever been brought up in the main comic, and Rich has talked about not wanting people to be lost if they only read the main comic, so I think it would probably get introduced at some point during downtime if it's going to become super important.
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Sep 11, 2020 23:08
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John Wick of Dogs posted:I love it when someone gets turned into a skeleton for a panel. Great effect.
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Sep 11, 2020 23:43
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Remalle posted:
It would make for greater foreshadowing if he hadn't literally appeared in the panel below.
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Sep 11, 2020 23:45
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Absurd Alhazred posted:It would make for greater foreshadowing if he hadn't literally appeared in the panel below. I was viewing on a phone so I didn't see him till I scrolled down
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Sep 11, 2020 23:47
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John Wick of Dogs posted:I love it when someone gets turned into a skeleton for a panel. Great effect. Rich uses panels for timing really well. It's kind of like fast cuts in Hong Kong cinema.
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Sep 11, 2020 23:55
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I guess what I'm wondering is what will Xykon make of the fact that some clerics were attacking his cleric all on their own. Like it seems that they were isolated and not worrying about any kind of attack in general, and all of a sudden a cleric battle? It's not much of a leap to conclude that some kind of god-stuff is involved, but I don't know how much the fact that he doesn't exactly know the details of the spell weighs on his mind.
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Sep 12, 2020 00:12
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Ooh, what if Redcloak reveals the overly-generalized truth that the two of them were parlaying on behalf of their gods... And Xykon gets pissed at him because he figures that if the gods are trying to negotiate with them now, then that means that they’ve practically already won from his perspective? Basically, why go to the extraordinary effort of finding and binding the last Gate to them when they apparently already have the gods backed against the wall and willing to make concessions to him?
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Sep 12, 2020 01:25
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Kerning Chameleon posted:I'm impressed with with how quickly we degenerated from "okay, it's risky but let's see how it goes it could win big!" to "okay, wow, Durkon really screwed the pooch this time, what an awful plan." reignofevil posted:Plus he's just the kind of guy who'd play along, be very reasonable about listening, come to a fine agreement about where and when the party could meet him for a face to face talk to hash things out, conclude the sending spell, then he'd order Xykon onto the necrodragon and set out to turn the order into hamburger meat. I didn't even think they should cast a sending!
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Sep 12, 2020 02:12
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What if the order already defeated Xykon off-screen and this is an illusion created by Vaarsuvius/Elan?
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Sep 12, 2020 04:20
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Personally, I’m a huge fan of the theory that the party is still trapped in a Draketooth mega-illusion. Teaming up with gods to save the multiverse? Pfft. They’re all wigged out in a pyramid’s basement in a desert.
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Sep 12, 2020 05:49
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This doesn’t look good
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Sep 12, 2020 08:51
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It feels like deadass a decade since Xykon has been front and center in this strip.
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Sep 12, 2020 12:16
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SKULL.GIF posted:Snarl breaking through like in the desert. Nah, can't be. Besides being repetitive this is the last Gate so that would trigger instant end-of-world wouldn't it?
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Sep 12, 2020 20:41
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SuperKlaus posted:Nah, can't be. Besides being repetitive this is the last Gate so that would trigger instant end-of-world wouldn't it?
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Sep 12, 2020 21:42
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PMush Perfect posted:We've been lead to believe it would, but Rich has gone on record as saying that anything drawn in crayon is in-universe story, not things that for sure actually happened. That's yet to actually come up. Lends more credence to the theory that all crayon drawings are either outright falsehoods or stories so distorted by time and retellings that they might as well be outright falsehoods.
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Sep 12, 2020 22:00
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Yeah, it’s a gun on the mantelpiece that’s yet to be fired, so it’s pretty obvious that it’s going to be a Big Deal in the last book.
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Sep 12, 2020 22:05
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SuperKlaus posted:Nah, can't be. Besides being repetitive this is the last Gate so that would trigger instant end-of-world wouldn't it? During the Godsmoot, or at some point, I dont recall when, the Gods said they would have a period of time before the Snarl noticed, after the last gate was blown. Something like 5-15 minutes or there abouts.
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Sep 12, 2020 22:32
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paradoxGentleman posted:
So has Redcloak.
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Sep 13, 2020 07:24
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I read Good Deeds Gone Unpunished this weekend. It was really nice to read 160 pages of OotS without waiting two weeks and change between each. Good stuff too, I wonder if Zhou survived the events of the siege of Azure City. Hope she will at least show up in the background of a scene in the Azure Islands', since she did have knack for surviving. Anyways, I think the Therkla story is the one that will stick with me the longest, which surprised me since I didn't really like her character in the main comic. Other than this, Origin of the PCs and Start of Darkness, is there any book made up entirely/mostly of new comics?
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Sep 13, 2020 16:57
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ZearothK posted:Other than this, Origin of the PCs and Start of Darkness, is there any book made up entirely/mostly of new comics? Snips, Snaps, and Dragon Tales only contains extra strips (most of which cannot be considered canonical).
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Sep 13, 2020 17:07
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There's Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales which has a few new stories and a bunch of comics that never appeared on the web. I don't even know if that's in print, though.
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Sep 13, 2020 17:08
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Thanks! And yeah, I just checked and it isn't available in digital format and the only place that sells it is sold out, oh well, at least it is not really part of the continuity, so I don't really feel that invested in collecting it.
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Sep 13, 2020 17:14
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There's also Uncivil Servant (12 pages) and Haleo and Julelan (25) on Gumroad. Only the first one is a part of the continuity, second is a story made up by Elan (though still pretty good).
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Sep 13, 2020 19:34
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I was disappointed to find that Dim Sun wasn't out yet when I last remembered to go and check, but, eh, it's a huge undertaking when everything else is considered.
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Sep 13, 2020 21:08
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How Wonderful! posted:Trying something new can be fun and educational, and I think that even if someone is to say "I only care about this one thing, I'm happy with it, it suits my needs" there's still value in knowing what else is out there. I like tofu wings but having seitan wings once in awhile can give me a fresh perspective and new ideas. It doesn't mean I'm giving up on what I already like. Exploring and learning is just a nice and good thing. I have said I would do it, and I have done this. I GMed a game of The Sword, The Crown and The Unspeakable Power, from here on out SCUP. It's a PbtA game whose aim is to simulate "dark fantasy" settings with intrigue and struggles for power, a la Game of Thrones; it was published in 2018, when that particular well wasn't completely poisoned, so there's that. It takes many cues from Apocalypse World, to the point that several playbooks are direct ports of those: the Hardholder is now the Crown, the Chopper is now the Spur and so on. Before this, we had a session 0 sort of deal where we worked on the mythology of our setting and what was going on with it. The manual provides you with some tools to smooth this out, which is nice since freeform collaborative worldbuilding runs the risk of becoming pretty rambling and aimless. We ended up with a wizard aristocracy that in times past bound the great dragons (beings that are as much animals as they are natural disasters) with the help of the common people, but nowadays they don't contribute much and are basically just a ruling class controlling magic and oppressing the people. The game also makes you establish a faction that your character belongs to, and a couple of my players had some difficulty doing that. It worked out in the end but I needed to do some prompting; the Blach Hood (an assassin) wanted his faction to be an heretic cult that had a schism with the main religious body, but he was fearful of establishing too much about religion in the world. I solved the issue by asking "what's the one thing your cult believes in that's considered heretical?", he said "reincarnation" and I was like "yeah that makes sense with you being an assassin and all" and we were off to the races. They all ended up with factions opposed to the ruling class (even the Crown, who's the leader of criminal syindicate trying to go legit and turn itself into a metalwork union) in their own way, and so natural allies. I think the game kind of expects your group to have differing agendas, but I don't think this is going to be a problem. I used a lot of the tricks I know from my PbtA experience to good effect, especially giving the players a prompt and letting them give you something to work on, so I feel confident saying that if you have experience with these you'll feel right at home. The game does have some problems that maybe some extra playtesting before publication could've solved. Our Adept (magic hacker syphoning magic from the ziggurath that imprisons the Dragon of Volcanic Eruptions) had, as part of their starting equipment, a magic object that he decided was a mirror that he could use for divintation, and it had the following drawback: quote:It hates you (you must make a Persuade With Leverage roll against the object to make it comply, treating it like a named NPC that talks only to you). When it came time for this to come into play, we found ourselves at an impasse. How do you get leverage on a mirror? Do you threaten to break it? But that's a different move, Threaten With Force. What other leverage can you possibly get on something that only you can talk to? What's worse, here's how that move works: quote:When you Persuade With Leverage, tell your target what you want from them and what your leverage is and roll+Wily. For NPC targets: on a 10+, they will accept your offer and do/say what you want. On a 7–9, the MC picks one: See how all the 7-9 options depend greatly on what you're using for leverage? This really put me in a hard spot during the game, since there was no obvious leverage. In the end I made the executive decision that the mirror actually could talk to ther people, and it wanted to say something to an NPC friend of the Adept, who was already emotionally troubled at the time. Said NPC told the Adept that the mirror said that something horrible would happen to them if they shared what the mirror said, so now I have a juicy secret in my back pocket for future use, so at least I managed to eke that out of that whole situation. Honor is a score that represents basically your reputation. You get it from showing off how cool and competent you are, by ingratiating yourself to useful allies, by spreading infoormation that people are interested in etc., and you lose it by appearing weak in public or being rejected and repudiated publcially. You use it to call upon your faction or to impress someone with how important you are. The problem with that is that if your character, because of bad decisions or bad luck with the dice, is already kind of looking like a chump, having it repeated mechanically to you is probably not good for morale; I don't know if this would encourage a player to strive more to redeem themselves in the eyes of the people or if it would make them want to disengage with the whole mechanic. So there. This is my analysis of my experience with the game. I hope it's good enough.
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Sep 18, 2020 13:58
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paradoxGentleman posted:When it came time for this to come into play, we found ourselves at an impasse. How do you get leverage on a mirror? Do you threaten to break it? But that's a different move, Threaten With Force. What other leverage can you possibly get on something that only you can talk to? What's worse, here's how that move works: You could read the Lyonesse books from Jack Vance, there's a lot of examples of this kind of things. But in short, assume the magic item is magic (and has a personality of its own) because it's powered by a spirit that is imprisoned in the item. It wants to be freed. So breaking the mirror might actually be what it wants; however threatening to stick it in a chest and burry it somewhere deep in an abandoned mine that you collapse afterward so nobody will ever find it? Then you can promise to free it after it has served "its sentence". Come up with a unit of service (maybe some old currency with a cool name, like the talent). Haggle on how much of this unit is each use of the mirror's magic power. Have the mirror count down how much it still has to earn. Threaten to deduct points if what it shows is misleading.
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Sep 18, 2020 18:53
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paradoxGentleman posted:So there. This is my analysis of my experience with the game. I hope it's good enough.
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Sep 18, 2020 18:59
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