The Order of the Stick

I like the order becoming competent. They've had the character development required to earn it.

Yes, but you can be 100% certain that all vampires are evil, so Holy Smite would have been a better option if that were available.

edited 17th Apr '18 6:32:08 PM by Clarste

Sunburst would have been the best option had it been available but, as previously discussed extensively, V probably doesn't have the spell.

If she could cast it, then that, right there, was the time to drop Sunburst. That the Chaos Hammer was even utilized at all implies we aren't seeing the vampire nuke.

Did they not specialise in Evocation? Is Sunburst an evocation spell?

What was V's goals as a combatant when choosing specialisation? To defeat other spellcasters? To defeat many non-spellcasters? To adventure? To invent?

I never get tired of seeing heroes make villains go "dafuq?"

I mean, the reason we can say for certain that V doesn't have Sunburst right now is because it's an 8th level spell, and therefore would've been lost to the energy drain V got hit with awhile back.

edited 17th Apr '18 8:09:40 PM by Gilphon

I feel like the new clerics are being more useful than Durkon ever was, save for using sound damage to shatter trees that one time.

True. Holy Smite would be ideal. Though that would require Loki to command the Good domain.

Durkon used a lot of healing on them. Nothing fancy, but extremely useful. Also, were he alive, he could probably cast Holy Smite in this situation.

Umm, excuse you all for forgetting Durkon’s sneakiest (and therefore most awesome) moment.

My favorite part of that scene is in the next page where Belkar can't be manipulated by Nale's suggestion spell due to being deafened as well. "It's not a bug, it's a feature."

That scene is a clear indication of the OOTS starts being actually competent and plan ahead. Greg could possibly predict that. The foreshadowing of him failing to understand Character Development is coming into fruition now.

Is anyone else amused by how munchkin-y Greg's Symbol of Death was? I can just imagine a real player saying "My Symbol of Death takes the form of a long string of runes that runs up the walls and ceiling to wrap around the room."

I think that's actually supposed to be multiple Symbols of Death.

Which is awkward within the context of the rules because it's hard to imagine those giraffes having enough HP to saturate multiple instances of a 150-HP limit killspell. But the authorial intent of the scene is clear and narrative trumps rules.

Symbol of Death is an 8th level spell, so unless some of the others Vamps are level 15+, there's no way it could've been cast more than twice. And even two castings would be a pretty poor strategic decision.

So all in all, it's more likely to be a single munchkined out casting of the thing.

So I was looking through Start of Darkness and I noticed that Righteye notes that he managed to save his daughter, but has no idea what her life is like. Think she might ever come back up, or it just a thing so that everything wasn't total shit for Righteye?

I feel a bit weird spoilering that, but experience has taught me what I think shouldn't be a spoiler at this point is still treated as such by some people, and I don't want to deal with that.

I think bonus material should be spoilered here, as well as on the main site.

By the way, is Haleo and Julelan part of a buyable bonus book, or is it yet Kickstarter-only?

I don't think it should be spoiler tagged. It's been out for ages and is widely available. It's no more a spoiler than that Shojo dies or that Elan and Haley hook up.

And by 'it' I mean Start of Darkness as a whole.

edited 25th Apr '18 12:47:04 AM by Arha

Widely available, but not on the site like the rest of the comic is. I'd at least spoiler tag anything plot specific but not worry about general events or anything brought up in the comic itself since

Haleo and Julelan isn't available in print yet, but you can purchase the PDF through Gumroad for $1.

As for Right-Eye's daughter, I sure wouldn't rule out seeing her again. The last arc saw the return of Zz'dtri and Julio Scoundrel, and this arc brought back Hilgya. A lot of people speculated on the return of the latter two, and a lot more people were convinced it would never happen until it did. So betting against the bus coming back hasn't been a winning move so far

edited 25th Apr '18 2:43:28 PM by Tyoria

True, but those were characters that had been seen in the online comic.

Those were all people who appeared in the webcomic, though. My understanding is that Start of Darkness was written to be supplementary - that character couldn’t be presented as a bus coming back, and would be introduced as though appearing for the first time.

I don't see why not. Things in the supplementary material have been reference fairly often.

Correct me if I'm wrong (haven't read SOD), but the big argument against her appearing is that she was born a long time ago, and I think goblins typically have short life spans as it is, right?

I'm not clear on the internal chronology. Was SOD set like 100 years ago or more in the way of a couple of decades?