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A handful of things are leaving me confused after the last few pages: Parson gets Charlie's claim for damages from Lilith shooting up his tower, and then he hits Parley...and then, I'm assuming the parley happened offscreen? And as part of it, somehow, Parson is now wearing a spiffy suit and is going to be a Charlescomm unit? But in that case, why shoot up Parson and the Magic Kingdom? I thought that was Charlie's final card to prevent Parson from invading him through the Magic Kingdom -- he already said how ruinously expensive it would be, and how it would ruin his social channels. It doesn't seem characteristic of Charlie to somehow not tell the Archons to stand down until 5 seconds before Parson comes through the portal. In fact, if it wasn't for Marie delaying Parson, he would have been through the portal before Charlie had ever tried to call off the order.
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Jan 4, 2016 00:54
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I really don't like these last few updates. Why is Charlie so angry?? He's the one who hosed up and let his archons shoot up the Magic Kingdom, and he's to blame for owing so much to Gobwin Knob that Parson didn't have to join Charlescomm. Like, I understand if he was upset about it, but he should be upset about his own mistakes. It seems uncharacteristic for him to go into a blind rage like that. Even if he's about to assault the Magic Kingdom in response, it feels like he should be more depressed and resigned to throwing more good money after the bad, rather than livid and ordering scorched earth. Also, do we know what's wrong with the Arkendish?
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Jan 8, 2016 12:39
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sirtommygunn posted:Oh wow has Wanda finally learned the value in being proactive rather than just sitting around waiting for fate to hand you a victory and a punch in the gut? I'd be glad to never see another "but I read the prequel novellas this weekend, and it really makes you cut her a lot of slack on the Fate garbage.
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Jan 11, 2016 23:44
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Rand Brittain posted:"Oh, so it was Charlie's archons who did the croaking? And nobody saw them because they were veiled? And the shots were fired through the portal that nothing can pass through? Wow, that's super convincing! " This didn't occur to me until today's comic, but looking back, there were a bunch of random casters that were watching the bullets fly out of Charlie's portal, and saw Parson screaming, and saw all the GK units killed, and watched Marie have to cast some giant heal spell. (Including Milhouse in a magician's outfit.) Although honestly, it might not matter too much, because even if Wanda hadn't decrypted all the dead casters, the issue is that war is coming to the Magic Kingdom, and the idea of Charliecomm and Gobwin Knob fighting a battle there is already enough to make a lot of enemies. Spiderdrake posted:This scene REALLY needs to be over, but I think this is the end of the book. The pacing is getting really obnoxious. I read through Book 3 for the first time a couple weeks ago, and I didn't think it was an issue when you're reading it all together. I read Book 1 years ago, and stopped reading right afterwards because he couldn't get an artist and there were all these text updates that I didn't want to read. Getting to read through 5+ years of new content in a week or two was amazing -- I really wish this got more word-of-mouth, because this is one of the best webcomics I've ever read. One of my favorite novels, even. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 00:18
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Poison Mushroom posted:Book 2 felt a little weird when reading it at update speed, but it held together a lot better reading it all at once. I'm hoping this is going to be the same way, but at the same time, I'm not holding my breath. The composition has been pretty spotty in places. This page gets the comic treatment, but Parson changing sides happens in a single panel without so much as a visual effect? I read it through for the first time a couple weeks ago, and I never felt like the pacing was notably weird until I got caught up. That said, yeah, the last dozen pages or so have been odd - I'm really not sure why he didn't show us Parson and Charlie's parley in favor of several pages preparing to go through a portal. I do feel like there's a lot left to Book 3, though. Just the Portal Park battle is going to stretch on for another 20 pages at least, and then there's usually a sizable denouement to explore the world after the events of the climax.
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Jan 19, 2016 12:07
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 So there are a lot of Archons ready to join the fight. And dancefighting notwithstanding, it looks like getting shot = death for the most part -- I was wondering whether sufficient defense buffs would just let a bullet bounce off you.I'm not sure I like guns in Erfworld. This battle feels a lot different than Spacerock or Gobwin Knob. More deadly, more serious, and it seems relatively simple for the Archons to just blow Parson away if they'd all focus on him. Perfect Warlord or not, it seems like surviving a large gun-battle is as much luck as it is strategy.
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Feb 1, 2016 21:10
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Welp. I think the only way out here is through the Charliecomm portal. Or a deus ex machina of some sort. I was really hoping there would be other casters around that saw what had happened - I really didn't think it would turn into a full-scale war so fast. Oh, and guess who's body is still there?
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Feb 20, 2016 00:18
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I don't get the joke. 
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Mar 2, 2016 02:03
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Oh, for gently caress's sake. I've seen that thing before. I thought the extent of it was that the guy looked like a TF2 Engineer. As for plot, it DID get the Arkenpliers and a rifle back to Gobwin Knob.
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Mar 2, 2016 03:17
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Ytlaya posted:I don't really mind. It has been established that 1. the Thinkamancers as a whole are a very significant power within the Magic Kingdom (actually possibly the greatest single, unified power) and 2. most of them care very strongly about making sure Parson is around to defeat Charlie. That's why it didn't feel like a deus ex machina to me -- it's not only the Thinkamancers, the Hippiemancers are also invested in Parson and Gobwin Knob, and they also have a no-fighting spell that we've even seen used before. And if that many random casters have heard about the fight and joined the battle, you have to expect the pro-GK casters to hear about it and get involved as well. I was actually surprised at how brutal their losses were before help arrived. And I think they hosed over the Gobwin Knob troops just fine with lightning bolts. They killed Marie, almost all the troops, and quite a few Decrypted casters, and had Parson fleeing with the unconscious bodies of the other main characters on his shoulders. I also have to imagine that, like the way unled troops have no initiative and throw themselves into any fight, most of the free casters aren't super crafty battle wizards, and so they really aren't comfortable enough in a fight to think up cool strategies with their non-blasty spells.
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Mar 5, 2016 07:43
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And see? Not a deus ex machina. Aside from a couple moments of disorientation, Parson ended up doing exactly what he was planning on doing pre-collide-a-scope. It turns out that waiting for enough discussion "to fill a library" before you act means you might be acting much too late to make any difference.
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Mar 7, 2016 21:15
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Reene posted:I understand the current scenario was set up and foreshadowed to allow the Great Minds to intervene in the way they did, I just wish he'd found a less hamfisted way to do it I guess. I'm really not sure what you guys are complaining about. The effect of the Great Minds' interference was precisely 0. Parson says "grab the wounded and run through a random portal to surrender." Then he picks up Jack and Maggie, the Collide-a-scope hits, and he runs through a random portal to surrender. All they accomplished was giving everyone a few seconds of nausea, and I suppose Parson may have picked a different portal, but again, he was choosing a portal at random to begin with, and the Great Minds unleashed their spell specifically to STOP him from going through a random portal and away from their influence. They might as well have just saved the juice, for all the good it did them. I can understand if the Thinkamancers had stopped everything as soon as the free casters started attacking and it looked like Gobwin Knob was in trouble, but GK took severe losses and was already in full retreat by the time they did anything. A real hamfisted deus ex machina would have had them intervene right away, and Gobwin Knob would have won the battle and gained an army of Decrypted casters. Toraen posted:Given that the end result of the spell put Parson in a hostile territory, I think that whoever's foolamancy they used wasn't exactly top-tier (if someone like Jack were in the link Parson could probably have been directed subtly to a better portal). Since we never heard them discuss changing his escape portal in the reams of Thinkamancer debate, and given that the end result of the spell was Parson going to a hostile kingdom, I think Occam's Razor tells us that the spell didn't magically affect his choice of portal at all, except through random perspective shifts. The only thing it might have done was keep any spells from hitting Parson for the few seconds it took him to retreat, but I don't think anyone really thought Parson was going to get killed by a blast from a random caster, anyway. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Mar 11, 2016 |
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Mar 11, 2016 13:04
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New one is up, a little late. I'm not sure what it means for Stanley to be choosing a new Chief Warlord and Caster already. I suppose Transylvito isn't going to trade Parson back so easily, but they're broke as gently caress, last we saw, so I wouldn't think they'd have much choice but to accept some of Stanley's new money. We still haven't had any conclusion to Ansom's diplomatic mission to Jetstone, I don't think, so he should be coming back to GK in the next couple turns, so I don't know why he wouldn't be the obvious Chief Warlord even if Parson wasn't coming back right away. It also suggests that Wanda and the other Magic Kingdom survivors are being held by hostile free casters, despite seeing Janis and the Thinkamancers showing up last issue. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Mar 14, 2016 |
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Mar 14, 2016 21:35
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I'm not sure I like where we're heading, here. I read the prequel chapters, and while there was implied torture, it also made it seem like Haffaton was a strange, creepy sort of outlier that didn't reflect how the normal sides would be run, because Olive was such a maniac. It kinda puts me off to hear Caesar discuss his planned interrogation techniques so casually, let alone the fact that the King endorses the literal psychopath Doller's horror movie approach to the prisoners - high ranking prisoners, too. I guess it makes sense given the universe, as most units don't seem to feel as much pain as we do, and expect to heal all but the most grievous wounds as soon as the next turn starts. Still, between that and the fact that multiple sides now have real world rifles and millions of extra Schmuckers, I wonder if we're going to see a big tonal shift by the time the next book begins -- they have the money and equipment now to begin waging the equivalent of World War II, versus the much smaller-scale medieval battles that Erfworld has always known.
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Apr 9, 2016 18:48
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Why is Jed so lonely if he's got a raging party full of elves happening in his head? e: So where is this book headed, exactly? I got the feeling the battle in the Magic Kingdom was the climax, but everything that's happened since then seems like they're plowing right through to the next storyline, and I'm at a loss for where the next logical conclusion would be. I suppose Parson and friends returning home as Transylvitian allies, and GK breaking Wanda out of the Dirtamansion? Still, the last bunch of updates since the end of the battle keep making me feel like they're wasting time, like the story can't really progress until Parson and Wanda get back, and it feels like there's little chance that they DON'T make it back, because they're too important to the story. I really should just stop reading this day-to-day and come back in a month or two. I wonder if it'll feel like it hangs together better when read all at once. I felt the same way about Book 3 pre-MK battle after reading it all at once, and I remember people grumbling in the thread about how the plot seemed a bit disjointed then, too. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Jun 20, 2016 |
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Jun 20, 2016 13:13
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Otherkinsey Scale posted:202 I don't even understand what's going on. They made an army man to break into a bank (does Erfworld even have banks?) and steal a wrench out of a safety deposit box - I thought maybe this was the Arkenwrench, but I'm pretty sure its just what Claude and Ivan use to undo their bindings. Who are the people in the bed, and where is that bed, because it doesn't seem to be the one in Claude's room. And who is the filthy little flunkie? I guess the gist of it is "Claude and Ivan escape the magic kingdom," though.
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Oct 14, 2016 13:24
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NihilCredo posted:
Why does that conflict with his duty, though? It doesn't seem like a terrible idea to reunite Wanda with the Arkenpliers as soon as she's repatriated. There might be some argument about keeping them safe, but it seems like it would be easier and safer to just present that as a necessary facet of the jailbreak.
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Nov 13, 2016 00:50
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forgot about that.
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Where did FAQ get guns from? Obvious answer is Charlie, but did we ever get a hint of it before?
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Nov 16, 2016 21:05
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nimby posted:It can't decide if it wants to be a comic, a book or a graphic novel. They said they would be sticking to the update schedule and donations per on-time update, they just said that they were going to be missing one last week because of the holiday, and I would expect another missed comic or two around Christmas. He specifically says that he likes the built-in accountability of their donation system, though, which forces them to keep to a regular schedule, and that it wasn't going to be changing. As far as the story goes, I maintain that this would be much less painful to read when it's all done, but yeah, it does feel like they're spinning their wheels a little too much here. The MK battle seemed to be the climax of this "book", and all this unrelated afterward seems like it could have waited until the MK trial and denouement.
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Nov 30, 2016 14:11
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Onmi posted:This uh... felt like we learned a lot and simultaneously did nothing but walk into a room. Well, I agree with the second half of your statement.
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Jan 24, 2017 12:57
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Update: what the gently caress is that?
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Feb 4, 2017 03:57
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Donkringel posted:New update gave a lot to chew one. The biggest piece was actually Robs update excuse in the forums. Eh, the other webcomic I read is Order of the Stick, so by that measure Erfworld updates like a clock. The point of his donation mechanics is to keep the comic running regularly, and to that end it works just fine, and I'm not too concerned about an update slightly after midnight. I do want him to keep the quality up and not feel compelled to ship whatever he's got because it's 10pm, and if he got burned by the site going down at the last minute, I can understand how he can't afford to randomly take that kind of financial hit -- it's their only source of income now. I mean, he could have just run a normal Kickstarter or something and have all the money and no impetus to keep updating regularly, so I tend to cut him some slack if he has to bend the mechanics a tiny bit when he has an unforeseen issue. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Mar 4, 2017 |
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Mar 4, 2017 19:48
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Yeah, I mean, this guy missed 1 or 2 updates over the Christmas break and was an hour late with this last one, otherwise he's been steadily doing 2 per week for at least the 6 months+ that I've been reading the regular updates. I know the comic had issues in the past, but sheesh, I think he's been pretty steady for a while now.
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Mar 5, 2017 00:59
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I still couldn't say whether Wanda ends up dead at the end of all this.
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Mar 7, 2017 15:29
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I think now's a good time to hear more flashbacks about life back in Unaroyal. Or maybe there's another side that wants to weigh in?
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Apr 14, 2017 22:27
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:no, if she wanted to do that she could easily have done it without freeing georgia power and murdering her way through faq's leadership corps. she's here to fetch jillian because she foresaw wanda would be in trouble in the MK and has some plan to deal with it involving jillian. But Power would have been completely on-board with any plan to go save Wanda. So why kill her, then?
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May 17, 2017 04:43
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reignonyourparade posted:That's not really her belief system at all? She CAN do whatever and have things come to pass, but certainly not in a preordained way. Her whole "easy way and the hard way" spiel. That's not the point he was making, though -- stuff like the way she acted in this encounter with Charlie, which might seem like a silly degree of faith in your immortality or just plain fatalism in other people, was a fine way to play it, because no, the archons WEREN'T going to be able to kill her. Why settle for anything less than an equal share of Charlescomm?
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May 29, 2017 23:57
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Or some other random thing. I've been trying to put my finger on what I haven't liked about the last few story arcs, and it's that the comic is just completely unpredictable now. The original setup was Parson comes to this strange world and learns how to bend the rules to his advantage, but at this point enough has happened that the rules are basically meaningless and can be superseded at any time. There's a difference there from what Parson was doing -- I liked seeing him learn all these weird laws of Erf physics and figure out stuff like units being able to "move" if they fall from their flying mounts -- because he was using real-world logic to leave the rules in place but figure out how to exploit them, and you could imagine yourself being able to do the same thing if you looked around with a real-worlder's perspective. At this point, though, I feel like anyone can wave a hand and literally magic away the rules in a way that seems very deus ex machina. "Oh, we just carnyed that" or "We're in State 99 Thinkamancy so we can do whatever." It makes it a lot harder to get invested in the plot when they've spent so long establishing the way things work on Erfworld and then make the plot depend on characters that simply ignore all these mechanisms. I think the first instance I noticed was when Charlie ended Gobwin Knob's turn in the middle of the Spacerock battle. If he can do that, then you can't really play the Erfworld wargame with him. There's no way to prevent your turn from suddenly ending with half your forces moved up ready to be slaughtered.
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Jun 8, 2017 07:11
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Onmi posted:I mean that's kind of why Charlie is dangerous. He doesn't want to play the Erfworld game with anyone. He wants to be immortal, and that means perpetuating a cycle of war and blind loyalty. Well yeah, but I'm talking more about the direction of the plot. It's gone from Parson and friends coming up with exploits for the rules to a bunch of increasingly powerful deus ex machina ignoring the rules at will, and I think it's generally worse off for it. It used to feel more like the solutions were logical answers to the world around them, but at this point I feel like they could almost have a caster wave their hands and have Stanley, Jillian, and Charlie all drop dead at once because of special magic.
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Jun 8, 2017 18:00
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Kyte posted:I feel like you guys need to stop checking in so obsessively. Use an RSS feed or something, so the comics come to you instead. It's not "obsessive" to check a webcomic on the days they advertise as having new comics posted.
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Nov 8, 2017 13:34
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Kyte posted:I guess. I check Erfworld on Tuesday and Friday nights, and I read Order of the Stick whenever I see a new update in the thread here. Those are the only two I ever pay any attention to.  I'm actually kinda shocked there's so much more grumbling about late updates here than in the OOTS thread -- Erfworld pumps out at least one comic every week, even if they fall short of two occasionally. I feel like we're lucky to get two OOTS in a month. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Nov 8, 2017 |
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Nov 8, 2017 17:17
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So what is the deal with the cryptomining? Does it kick in every time you load up erfworld.com now? Does it go away as soon as you kill the tab?
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Feb 23, 2018 16:31
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Android Blues posted:No, it's entirely voluntary. It's a separate program you can download discretionarily. Oh well poo poo, that hardly seems like anything worth getting upset over. It sounds like its basically just another way to donate, then. In that case, both the "moral stance" objections and the ridiculous madposts and bannings from the author are even more stupid than typical internet slapfights.
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Feb 23, 2018 18:08
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Rand Brittain posted:There aren't overwhelming odds; the molls can't actually harm Skyy without triggering treaty penalties. These molls were being ordered around by Bill, though, who was sending Charlie messages like "Getting the rifle back has got to be worth a few treaty penalties," so they were almost certainly trying to kill the two warlords. I dunno, I liked this update. I'm still of the mind that Balder's issue with plotting is a real thing, but seems much worse than it really is because of the nature of webcomic updates (and skipping webcomic updates) and how frustrating it is to get trickles of story every week that don't progress anything. Like, whenever Erfworld is finished and you can sit down and read the whole thing at your own pace, I think this section will definitely be dragging a little bit but not nearly as bad as people are complaining now. This update was good because it actually DOES threaten plot movement -- these two are actually reacting to Charlie and Bill's attempted coup and might show up in the next few pages with an incredibly powerful weapon to save Caesar or at least gently caress something up spectacularly. And we get a little bit of worldbuilding too, sure. Feel free to call me an idiot if these two are unceremoniously blown up offscreen in the next few pages instead.
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Feb 24, 2018 22:30
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Rand Brittain posted:Hm. Is that how it works? I don't think Bill can micromanage his dolls like that, unless he's actively putting a lot of effort into it, so I would assume they're just auto-piloting on whatever orders they were given. I don't know if it's ever been brought up in the actual books, but from this update he's telling Charlie he's gonna ambush the two warlords with his other golems, and then the warlords say they ran into a lot of golems all at once, so it's pretty clear Bill's able to round them all up and send them on an attack -- it'd be odd if they followed all his orders and then just didn't try to kill their targets. Plus, Bill's complaints to Charlie at the end are "I guess I don't understand guns," not "I guess I don't understand why my golems wouldn't attack them." Skyy just murdered them all with the rifle.
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Feb 25, 2018 17:52
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My theory is that the towers lead into the endgame that they've kinda hinted at here and there, where Parson and Charlie are playing with the idea of an Erfworld that can sustain itself without constant war. From Jed and Shirley, it seems like each tower feels that their side's ruler is the "hero" of the story and at least from Shirley harping on Charlie, tries to shape the ruler to be the hero and do the right thing. And the right thing, eventually, will be to let their guard down and work with their neighbors to end the war instead of treating every other side as a potential enemy.
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Mar 9, 2018 06:40
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Are the Great Minds a jab at MENSA? Or just Dunning-Kruger'd out the rear end? It's hard to say. They obviously DO have a lot of power that the other casters don't know about given the Collide-A-Scope and some of the other things we've seen, but we haven't had an in-depth look at the ruling councils for the other schools, either. I'd bet just about every type of magic has some sort of super secret hidden powers like the Great Minds. Except Hat Magicians.
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Apr 19, 2018 13:32
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Rand Brittain posted:So, today we get some really good news on the cancer front Oof. Great news really, but it sounds like she was misdiagnosed and they're talking about a lawsuit.
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Aug 10, 2018 00:27
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Cat Mattress posted:I didn't catch it, and I really don't feel like rereading it, so I'll just believe you guys that it was there. It was just a couple internal lines about how Caesar knew where the bats went, and what the bats were doing. It makes a lot of sense that you guys say they were disposing of the corpses, I assumed they were off doing some weird thing to help with the next unpredictable mechanics cheat.
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Oct 5, 2018 16:56
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Uuuurgh. And it's not like he can start the next book a few days later, either, there's just so much random poo poo going on right now, including the negotiation of a contract. I mean, I think at this point I'd prefer it if he DID, but it's not going to be very elegant. Yeah, this definitely went off the rails at some point, probably around the Magic Kingdom invasion. I don't know why he got bogged down in all this magic nonsense after spending several hundred pages showing us the rules to a fairly-standard wargame. I can't help but think of kids on the playground, shouting "I shot you with my gun" - "no, I'm wearing armor" - "Well, my gun can shoot missiles" - "My armor has missile defense lasers though" - to the point that there's no wargame system anymore, there's just a bunch of side characters producing unpredictable results that don't fit into the framework they've given us. It just seems like such an easily-spotted trap that he should have been able to avoid. There's almost certainly an end-result to this turn that he's plotted out in advance, but holy poo poo no one cares this much about the minutiae of how they get there. Wanda escapes the Dirtamancers, links up with Isaac, and then gets killed. Parson (and the other casters?) end up back in Gobwin Knob. All the towers come to life. Transylvito allies with GK or maybe disbands, I dunno. It's a lot of stuff, but it's not THAT complicated, and it could have been done with a fraction of the magic hand-waving and glimpses into random side characters' points of view.
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Oct 11, 2018 15:06
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