Adventurers! is a webcomic by Mark Shallow, who later created Antihero For Hire (there's a crossover... of sorts). It began as a series of console RPG jokes connected only by the presence of the main characters, but gradually developed a storyline that culminated with a massive battle against the Final Boss.The storyline is now finished and the comic no longer updates. http://adventurers.keenspot.com/ is the place to get your Archive Binge.The Tabletop RPGConsole, also an Affectionate Parody of CRPGs and their tropes, uses Adventurers! strips for some of its illustrations.
This webcomic provides examples (almost always Lampshaded or Parodied) of the following tropes:
Aborted Arc: Nate Wars, among a several recurring comics during the first 100 strips.
Comes up again near the end when Cody suggests he might have been able to join the team if they didn't have nine characters already. Since there's only one named Optional Party Member, this suggests Cody and Drecker are Mutually Exclusive Party Members as well.
Art Evolution: The art does improve over time, although it is still very amateurish.
Artificial Stupidity / A.I. Roulette: Eternion falls victim to this, despite the Eternals being exempt from many laws that most of the other characters must obey.
Big Bad: Two of them: Khrima and Eternion, both of whom correspond to different kinds of RPG villains. (Khrima is an Evil Overlord, and Eternion is an evil Physical God.)
Bigger Bad: Eternion starts off as one, but soon starts taking a more active role in the plot.
Bowdlerise: An early joke is that Drecker, hard-bitten thief that he is, finds himself able to swear only in cutlery once he joins the party. This extends to everyone else (except Eternion) and becomes a Running Gag; when Khrima's about to go through a lot of pain in the Final Battle, he says "Oh utensil."
Breaking the Fourth Wall: Not a heavily used trope, but there is one notable example. Final Boss Khrima uses an attack spell with an animation so over-the-top, it doesn't just include an Earth-Shattering Kaboom, it actually cracks the Adventurers! game disc, requiring Karn to tell the "player" how to replace the disc with a backup copy.
In an earlier strip, one of the main characters plays Boggle with the bad guy and spots "gorilla". Several strips later, the bad guy spots the same word as he plays Boggle with one of his minions.
Caps: After strip number 999, every subsequent strip was also numbered 999.
Call Back: In an early strip, the party defeated a micrognat and it dropped a piano. During the final battle against Khrima, Karashi threw the piano at him.
Cerebus Syndrome: Though, notably, even after the plot picked up there would be periods where they went back to complete "gag a day" strips, justified as taking time off from the plot to level grind.
Character Development: A few nice bits. Karn is frustrated, but he never did have much patience for anything that didn't involve hitting things with swords.
A couple times earlier, Karn tries to actively demonstrate Character Development by being angsty or apathetic, but both times is called out on it - particularly since his personality doesn't really mesh. He also dreams of getting amnesia.
Chekhov's Gun: In an early comic, a monster inexplicably drops a piano upon defeat. Later, during the final battle, Karashi ends up throwing this piano at the final boss. And it's apparently his greatest weakness.
Played straight with Argent. Inverted in this strip, in which a character is conspicuously introduced and then never seen again.
This actually happens with several characters early on, mostly because the series hadn't switched from its gag-a-day nature. Later on, many characters were merged into the story line, but many of the less defined ones didn't make the cut.
Most of the summons seen in the comic return when Ardam summons Pantheon is just one example.
Another silly one comes up late in the comic. Early on, Ardam fights one-on-one with an evil wizard named Whizrom, who begins melting/evaporating after he's defeated. Both of them notice that Whizrom is taking an awfully long time to finish disappearing (which Ardam lampshades), and hundreds of episodes later we see him again, still evaporating and going about his business normally. And later still, he appears in the final dungeon, after being frozen into the shape of a sphere.
Curb-Stomp Battle: After much epic adventuring, the party has finally managed to confront Eternion, one of the two Big Bads, and drag him into an RPG battle. The result?"Well, that was easy." Subverted: Ardam had a Relife Ring equipped.
In Lumi's job description, evidently. "Didn't they teach you anything at your church? Next thing you'll tell me they didn't tell you how to properly get kidnapped."
Also attempted with Karashi on two occasions. Both times she freed herself. One time she actually managed to free herself and make it back to camp before the rest of the party realized she had been kidnapped at all.
Easter Egg: Karn goes to great lengths to find one.
Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Including such elements as "Tastes Like Orange Tang", "Doesn't Taste Like Orange Tang", and "Peanuts".
Enemy Mine: Played straight and later subverted when the less-evil Khrima realizes Eternion's trying to force him into one with the heroes, as part of his gambit to secure the role of Final Boss.
Equipment Spoiler: Invoked when Karn panics on discovering a shop that sells a weapon no one in the party uses in case they missed a secret character. They meet and recruit the user of said weapons later.
Evil Chancellor: Parodied - the chancellor wasn't evil and the monster impersonating him had a cold.
Evil Counterpart: Most of the good guys have one - Ardam vs. Wizrom, Drecker vs. Rio, Karashi vs. Mizuna, Gildward vs. Dirlend, even Chookie vs. Blanc...
Drecker: And the platforms weren't really floating? Cheap.
Flock of Wolves: One of Khirma's plans was to capture all the party members and replace them with robot duplicates, then have the robot duplicates strike when they least suspect it. There are four major flaws with this:
One: The robot duplicates don't look like the people they're supposed to look like.
Two: The plan involves capturing them all. Why would they need to bother doing anything else if they've all been captured?
Three: If he'd captured and replaced them all, then the robots would be attacking each other.
Four: Why would they make a robot duplicate of Evil Killer Death Spybot 5000? He already works for them.
Frickin' Laser Beams: Khrima demands that his engineers put lasers on everything, even ballistic missiles. He later fires one of them for inventing a weapon better than lasers.
Gainax Ending: "This is going to cause message board debates for years."
Game Breaker: In-Universe. All of Karn's ultimate abilities. Although Khrima's final form actually blocks one of them.
Half-Human Hybrid: Despite looking completely human, Karn is quarter-Skyrian, as revealed via painfully straight As You Know; his father is half-Skyrian. The green hair probably should have been a giveaway, but.... Also, Karashi and her sister are half-dwarf. They get their looks from their father.
Eternion's Grief Impulse wouldn't work on anyone he couldn't kill in a single turn anyway, but he uses it because he enjoys the cruelty of it regardless.
Khrima also has one that hits the entire party, but due to an abundance of healing options they weren't particularly intimidated.
Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Parodied twice - once when a villain places a chair in the party's path and Karn doesn't comprehend the notion of stepping over it, and again when he performs a jumping attack on an enemy in battle, but then declares a small obstacle too high to pass.
Meaningful Name: The city of Doomdia, and the Bystandrians. Arguably, Gildward, whose name is a composite of "Gilbert" and "Edward", the Japanese and English names for the Spoony Bard in Final Fantasy IV.
No Sneak Attacks: Parodied multiple times. On one occasion, one monster persuades another to attack the party in their sleep... only to discover their tent is electrified.
The villain uses his orbital satellite to cut his sandwich.
In another story arc, Khrima plots to steal a magic water-generating crystal, which provides the only source of water for a city, to use in his office water cooler. Mizuna then says that, once they have it, it would be better to ransom it back to the city in exchange for its inhabitants becoming his servants. Khrima agrees that her idea is better. Then, in the process of stealing it, the two of them discover what the people who live in the city areactuallylike - and into the water cooler it goes.
Show Within a Show: In addition to Khrima's daytime TV and various other shows, the entire comic turned out to be a Show Within a Show - or more accurately, Game Within A Comic - in the final comic, where it's revealed Wrench of Antihero For Hire has been playing it the whole time.
Parodied/Deconstructed when Ardam had to fight a Duel Boss fight against Whizrom. Whizrom was completely immune to Ardam's magic - but being a squishy wizard himself, he was vulnerable to Ardam's usually useless physical attack.
Unknown Rival: Khrima is annoyed that Eternion seems to be taking over the role of Big Bad. Eternion, for his part, considers Khrima a mere puny mortal of no particular consequence.
is the place to get your Archive Binge.The Tabletop RPG Console, also an Affectionate Parody of CRPGs and their tropes, uses Adventurers! strips for some of its illustrations.
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