Webcomic / By the Book

By the Book is a fantasy webcomic. After stumbling upon The Adventurers Handbook 3.5 a Goblin, a Kobold and an Orc decide to leave their dungeon and become mighty adventurers! They fail. Repeatedly and hilariously.

An action-comedy with a healthy dose of Fanservice By The Book is altogether a fun read for anyone into self-referential fantasy gaming webcomics.

Alternate site

Initially just heavy on fanservice, the comic has grown increasingly NSFW due to Tanuki gradually breaking free of his prison.It is now a sex comic. You have been warned.

Not to be confused with a quite different webcomic of the same name

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This webcomic contains examples of:

• Action Girl: There are plenty of female characters who can fight, but Vaznev takes the cake.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Yeshka snickers a little when Arjuna calls her "dog breath."
• A God Am I: He is, but his power is divided between several Plot Coupons.
• Amazonian Beauty: Multiple women in the series are quite muscular, and are nonetheless sexy for it.
• Annoying Arrows: "Ow".
• Asshole Victim: The first target of The Empire is a slave trader's corporate HQ.
• Being Tortured Makes You Evil: Something the villains are counting on.
• Bee People: Actual bees. Although they're secondary to regular people in bee suits, it seems.
• Big Bad: Several seems to be competing over the title.
• Breast Expansion: One of the first gags is that breast size is proportional to Charisma in females.
• Cast Herd: Quite a few. There's the original three Monster Adventurers and the conventional adventuring group they attached themselves to, the team Lord Darksoul sent to find them (who have a habit of getting lost in the multiverse)...
• Chainmail Bikini: Most of the female characters have pretty skimpy armor. If they even bother with armor, in a few cases it's just a Thong of Shielding. Though at one point a male character comes to regret his choice of sexy armor design.
• Creation Myth:
• Cryo-Prison: In the Patreon bonus comic "Space Adventure Yeshka".
• Cute Monster Girl: Practically half the cast.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Rath had a rough childhood.
• Deal with the Devil: Rath makes one with his former employer Lord Darksoul when in a life-or-death situation.
  • Gnoll king Flame Eye became a Dark Lord midway through the Goblin Wars by accepting the help of the other three.
• Defeat by Modesty: Averted by Arjuna and Yeshka.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Lord Darksoul after giving Ralleth the standard do not fail me schpeel, immediately does a 180 and starts telling him to bring a coat in case it gets cold.
• Fake Ultimate Hero: Sir Romulus Volk!
• Fanservice: Tons. And gradually being aimed at both genders.
• Fantastic Racism: Northern kobolds (rat people) and Southern kobolds (lizard people) hate each other.
  • Defied during the Gnoll Wars, Flame Eye was a Mountain gnoll (wolf) who brought a contingent of human Steam Knights to liberate the Savannah gnolls (hyenas).
• Fantasy Gun Control: Averted, but with the usual D&D restriction of being "exotic" weapons, which one character lampshades as unrealistic.
  • In fact Yeshka's a bit of a Gun Nut, according to her coworkers.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Justified, the mooks in question are huffing Faith, a Fantastic Inhalant.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Subverted. Yeshka (evil) smokes a clay pipe, and Venom (good) smokes cigars.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Rath. For a given level of "Hero" anyway.
• Hollywood Acid: Subverted. Venom's mace does acid damage. The acid in question is LSD.
• Honest John'sDealership: Hemesh
• I Call It "Vera": Yeshka's musket "War Bastard."
• It's Not Porn, It's Art: How the author justifies the huge amounts of fanservice showcased in the comic.
• Macguffin: The Galanesh stones
• Magical Seventh Son: The creatively named Septimus Volk turns out to be an example when he casts a very powerful magic missile shortly after writing up his character sheet.
• Male Gaze: So very much. Kazu and Yeshka are constant victims of it. Later females get their dues too.
  • There is an inordinate amount of either spandexed or entirely bare shapely backside.
• Mind Control: The Vermin Queen's specialty.
• Monster Adventurers
• Montage: Subverted, what looks like a montage is actually a very eventful corridor.
  Zeen: "I must have a word with the architect of this dungeon about pacing."
• Ms. Fanservice: Kazu wears a skintight Spy Catsuit that's in actual fact a size too small.
  • Yeshka wears a g string bikini.
  • One of Lord Darksoul's scientists is a cat lady who wears a long sleeved microshirt, a hat, and nothing else
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: The Road Wardens seem to be like that in general, much to Tamauran's dismay.
• Muggles Do It Better: An Eldritch Abomination boasts that it's immune to mortal weapons. Yeshka shoots it with a pistol and is able to force it back to the Folds in Reality by threatening it with a very big musket.
• Naked People Are Funny: An entire story arc is devoted to Kazu's Clothing Damage, among other things.
• Nipple and Dimed: 99% of the time, breasts are censored. Then we meet venom...
• Obviously Evil: Lord Darksoul.
• Odd Job Gods: Tanuki the god of stealth and cunning as well as lewd accidents and underwear theft.
• Old Master: Sir Raven.
• Overlord Jr.: Ralleth, although he does not get much preferential treatment.
• Powered Armor: Steam Knights wear an obscenely heavy steampunk version. Romulus Volk so far is the only one actually seen wearing his.
• Punny Name: Rath. He recognizes this.
• Recycled In Space: The "Space Adventure Yeshka" bonus comics on the artist's Patreon.
• Red Shirt: Parodied when a member of the city guard helping the heroes is shown wearing the classic Star Trek apparel in one panel.
• Robe and Wizard Hat: Zeen improvises with one of Olga's hankies and a giant mushroom.
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: To the point where one can alter their own physique by writing down numbers on a piece of paper.
• Scenery Censor: So very much. The arc where Venom is donning her armor in particular.
• Sensual Spandex: Kazu
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: Venom spends a long time getting into her armor, tells saucy tales about her, achem, "adventures", and outright obects to being censored.
• Slowly Slipping Into Evil: Played for Laughs.
• Square Race, Round Class: Rath the goblin fighter, and Kazu the orc rogue.
• Superpowered Evil Side: Thanks to Calicos, Rath has one that is powerful enough to smack godlings around. Unfortunately, it's tied to feelings of despair, it activated when he was dying and went away when he started to feel he might get some respect.
• The Old Gods: The Elder Gods dissipated themselves into the fabric of the universe after destroying and recreating it in one of their fights, according to Sir Raven. Galanesh refused to do that, so the others sealed his powers in crystal spheres.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: Gnolls were driven to evil because humans started enslaving them and the four Dark Lords were the only ones willing to help them.
• Thong of Shielding: Yeshka the Gnoll's thong clad backside provides a lot of the fanservice.
  • While nipples are off limits (mostly), booty is fair game.
• Vancian Magic: Zeen, being a low-level wizard, has some serious problems with this early on. Even falling asleep in the middle of a few encounters so he can get his spell slots back.
• Webcomic Time: "We've only been gone four days. (Anyone'd think we hadn't seen their ugly mugs in years)..."
• World of Buxom: Inverted, World of Thicc.

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