The Order of the Stick

Seems like a missed opportunity for Beholders to (a) be giant eyes that (b) reproduce by budding and (c) are covered in tiny eyes attached by stalks, but for these three facts to be entirely unrelated to each other.

Imagine if after killing a Beholder you had to make sure to squish each eyestalk or they'd grow into multiple new ones

And the bugbears are harvesting these intelligent creatures that volunteered to die for—well, not for that.

This also means Serini is necessary for the Gate’s continued protection. There isn’t an ongoing magical effect summoning or generating replacement monsters, she has to actively go out and recruit them. Is there a plan in place for when she’s gone the way of the rest of her party?

Presumably Sunny would have taken over.

Monsters do reproduce, so it's possible the monsters will be self governing once Serini bites it. Which would probably be the ideal situation. I don't know if any monsters present will be able to recruit though, and Xykon is about to wipe out the entire community.

Touching and thought provoking comic.

I'm kind of iffy though on the reveal that (all?) the monsters Oona and co. have been killing are sapient. Granted, Oona previously was interested in feeding the Paladins to the MITD, but the previous presentation gave the impression that the Bugbears were doing pretty normal hunting. I even speculated that Serini might have been pleased at the thought of helping the Bugbears stave off starvation.

Is this another Malack situation where there's a shocking reveal that a character is super-evil?

Also, I found it nicely nuanced how Sunny is aware of the nature of her "spawn-parent" and that Serini killed them, but is not "monstrous" herself. Reminds me of how Kings of the Wyld and Bloody Rose similarly articulate the nuances of Always Chaotic Evil.

Edited by Hodor2 on Jun 26th 2023 at 1:30:13 AM

Malack is introduced making sacrifices to his super-evil death god.

Oona is introduced attacking the paladins without provokation, which she later says was to feed the corpses to the Mit D.

It's not that much of a twist is what I'm saying.

I don't disagree, but same vibe of "You know this character that you liked? It turns out that they are worse than Hitler."

That being said, I will also acknowledge that my impression of Bugbears as a group/Oona as a character is that they have some similar vibes as the Orc leaders in LOTR. And being murderous cannibals is definitely "on the menu" so to speak.

I mean, on that topic, note Belkar's line of '...I've made way bigger piles of monster corpses...' and so have all the rest of our heroes.

I'm surprised, though, that Serini hasn't attempted applying her monster-empathy to the bugbear clan itself, to convince them to leave Monster Hollow alone, if not help defend it. Oona would be receptive to such an argument, properly applied, and if Serini had made such a pitch, Oona would have mentioned it when she was expositing how her village sustains itself.

For all we know serini did just that and got turned down.

Makes me wonder if their clan leader is actively ambivalent to the world being in danger.

Also, the fact that these monsters are sapient is not necessarily something the Bugbears know.

That "You can talk to anything with the right magic." line definitely is implying there's a lot of monsters on the defensive here that one needs the right magic to talk to, after all.

But yes, Oona was introduced as perfectly willing to murder people to feed to her friend. It seems pretty clear how her morality works, to me? The wellbeing of people she cares about matters, and their happiness is worth even the steepest cost to people she doesn't care about.

Also, note that not all the monsters are necessarily human-grade sapient. Like Serini said, with the right magic you can talk to anything, including various animals and magical beasts that don't necessarily have an INT score above 2.

Edit:

Edited by Shinziril on Jun 26th 2023 at 4:27:13 AM

Frankly I'm not sure the sapient monster thing is the factor everyone seems to think it is. For all we know it's a Kevin & Kell deal where the predator/prey relationship exists even with an the creatures involved being sapient.

It could be Oona knows and does not care and/or the monsters themselves are "welp, Circle of Life" and leave it at that.

If anything, I'd bet "You can talk to anything with the right magic." is foreshadowing contact with the Snarl.

Edited by sgamer82 on Jun 26th 2023 at 2:40:18 AM

Serini is a good mom.

I've always struggled with how to DM things like Speak With Animals for the exact reason that assuming animals have the intelligence to engage in (a given level of) conversation feels like it has massive worldbuilding and ethical implications, wherever you happen to set that level.

At least Speak With Plants covers this by noting that the spell itself temporarily imbues the target with the intelligence to speak to you; SWA has no such wording.

Wait is Serinis closet a monster too or does Speak With Furniture exist? I know there's powers in fiction involving the "memories" contained within inanimate objects.

Technically, the monster she was talking to wasn't necessarily that intelligent if the speech it was making was being translated via magic. In the sense that your dog or something might be disappointed in itself if it screws up and feel apologetic, but that doesn't make it as intelligent as you.

If the thing you're talking to can understand you it doesn't need to understand anything particularly complex, which Serini notes she didn't bother telling them. "Guard this thing if someone comes looking for it or you'll die" doesn't require a great deal of intelligence. We mostly do that already without being able to speak to animals: We call them guard dogs.

Edited by Arha on Jun 26th 2023 at 7:04:54 AM

Serini at least doesn't have any issue with killing a monster hostile towards her. Note that she killed the Beholder that spawned Sunny after it attacked her.

God, it's a at this point, but I love how this strip handles monsters and DND conventions. This whole general exchange sums up as:

• Paladins: "Wait, how do you get monsters to help with something this important?"
• Serini: "I talk to them."
• Paladins: "Yes, but how do you explain such a important situation to them?"
• Serini: "I talk to them."
• Paladins: "Yes, but how do you get them to understand what's going-"
• Serini: "I talk to them."

And it really underscores what Rich tends to have to say about Always Chaotic Evil as a concept.

He makes it clear that monsters aren't all good, but the Paladins are clearly having trouble with the idea that monsters are even capable of comprehending something as simple as "we're all going to die unless we can defend this, who's with me," let alone volunteering to do so, and while their Fatal Flaw hasn't come up in literal years it's still a big of course moment that even the most sympathetic members of the Sapphire Guard would have that problem.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jun 26th 2023 at 10:25:24 AM

Serini does note that most of the monsters she tried this approach with don't listen to her and do try to kill her. She doesn't let this stop her from trying anyway.

what I'm hearing and what is alarmingly not being discussed then is that Serini fucking solo'd a beholder

Hey, I brought that up in the spoilered bit of my earlier post.

@KnownUnknown: I don't know—I'm not sure that it isn't reasonable to be surprised that such communication is possible—or more precisely, that such comprehension is possible. After all, there are presumably monsters with pretty low levels of intelligence.

And indeed, the strip affirms that most don't understand in detail. The error on the part of the paladins then is not that they think that monsters can't be spoken with, but rather that they held the false dilemma that either a being can understand the full situation, or can't understand at all.

(Well, they didn't initially expect that one could so talk with monsters—but again, that's perhaps not unreasonable given that such communication is presumably outside of their field of magic.)

And, as M84 noted above, they're actually largely correct in their assumption that most monsters would be unwilling to help even after being talked with; they're just wrong in expecting that it's all monsters, not most monsters.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jun 27th 2023 at 9:44:12 PM

x3 Serini is epic-level and has a very effective build to fight Beholders. She probably didn't even break a sweat.