First rule of D&D: Don’t piss off the DM* Second: Beware a chortling DM.
*That leads to the corollary of Don’t split the party.
Sometimes it does. Whether it’s because they have weaknesses that might be used to empower the enemy (a low Will save vs. Dominate Person, or a lack of flight vs. an Uber-tank Crusader), or just because you can put down enough indiscriminate carnage to solo the entire enemy army (like a Sandstorm-optimised Stormlord), sometimes it’s better to fight alone.
Except that he was optimizing to fight V, thus the turn to stone on Haley. If the plan is ambush the ranged damage and nullify them, while staying out of range of the melee, skip the Stoneskin and go with the spells that nullify the only one that can reach you, the wizard.
OK, so it was Elan’s crew who were scrying on the party back in 698. But how did they know they were there? Who, exactly, are they involved with?
Ninjaed!
It’s another corker. And Elan uses his brain for once!
IIRC, at the end of the V-gets-ultimate-power-and-destroys-thousands-of-dragons arc, the Three Fiends are shown to have the Linear Guild as backup. So it’s likely they’re working for Evil, Inc.
That was, again, really genre-savvy of Elan. I love this device; that Elan can predict and understand what’s going on because he understand the that his universe runs on laws of dramatics. It’s fun both as a satirical way to make fun of cheesy plots and a creative way to have a character interact with a world. Great stuff.
I love how Elan is reaching around the door to hand over the sword.
The only problem is that Elan is not in a typical story. If he was in a run-of-the-mill fantasy epic, he’d own it because the author would probably be following all of the usual cliches. But Burlew often goes out of his way to defy the cliches. So Elan is probably going to get caught out one day when he expects some dramatically logical thing to happen and it doesn’t.
Things of that sort have happened; “Awww, man. I didn’t know I was gonna be the girl!”. And when they first fought Xykon he blew up the dungeon, apparently because the evil mastermind’s lair blowing up is what is supposed to happen. Although he seems to be getting better.
“last week you’re hundreds of miles away in the middle of the desert.”
And yet somehow it seems like so much more than a week since the were in the desert.
Well, we know Roy was arrested less than a week ago, probably less than 5 days, since the fight he’s in is a “special mid-week” bout. And Nale was scrying on the group as they left the wrong location of the gate heading for this town. So a week seems plausible.
Zz’dtri, actually. I believe the color of the scrying magic was the same as the color of the Z-person’s magic in the recent duel strips.
I’m still not sure about that. The scrying sensor was pointed at Mr. Scruffy, not any of the humanoids of the party, which means that the scryer was either looking for Scruffy specifically, or at the location where Scruffy happened to be sitting. If it were one of Nale’s team doing the scrying, it would make much more sense to make Elan or Roy the object of the spell, and Nale would have no reason to be interested in that one particular spot of the vast desert. It makes more sense that the scryer would be someone associated with Girard or Serini, who were just notified about the trap going off, as everyone had assumed prior to this strip. Which probably means that Girard’s organization is leakier than he’d like to think, and that word has gotten from them to Nale (possibly from whomever won the bet, on their celebratory shopping trip).
Burlew does seem to be pretty consistent about having the various colors for magic effects match their caster. I don’t think, for example, we’ve ever seen any pink spell effects from a caster other than V. He might have used blue as a catch all for any caster from Azure City, but other than that, the similarity in colors between the drow caster’s spells, and the scrying eye in the desert seems to be a pretty big hint.
I meant “someone from Nale’s group” earlier. Sure, Z-person. Whom we didn’t know was still an active force until lately, so that makes the green scrying-eye a pretty good foreshadowing.
The advantage of scrying on Mr Scruffy is that he isn’t likely to have any protective devices or spells in effect, whereas the rest of them, being high-level adventurers, might.
But how would they know about Mr Scruffy in the first place? More logically, they were scrying on the location, and Mr Scruffy just happened to be the one who saw the sensor.