Wow, Little Nemo. Thank you so much. That was an incredible amount of work.
It’s unfortunate that while I was reading it I went to check the reference on Strip 588, saw the new one was up, and now I want to throw up from the tension twisting up my innards.
All the humans and elves in the caves appear to be dead, and when Haley pulled the cart up that passage, she came out in the same place Redcloak and the other monsters are facing now, so I assume Redcloak and his group now see the phylactery-havers, which is making me feel even worse. I haven’t felt this freaked out since the dragon and Vaarsuvius, or maybe even since Haley and Belkar went to retrieve Roy’s body and met the Creature in the Darkness…
On the one hand, I feel sorry for the people of Azure City. What little hope they had has now been snatched away.
OTOH, the elves were a bunch of annoying pricks who got what’s coming to them. No-one should underestimate Redcloak - if Xykon weren’t around, he’d be a perfectly decent Evil Overlord all by himself. He certainly has the brains and raw power for it.
But as my links s to 523 and 524 showed, that’s exactly how he portrayed it the first time we saw that big central chamber of the Resistance – Haley is pulling the cart from left to right up a passage that looks identical to the one Thanh and Co. are walking in now, and on the next page she comes out in the lower right corner of the big central chamber, facing right-to-left now and still dragging the cart.
I certainly hope Redcloak is talking to someone else and facing the wrong direction, and that there’s still a chance for Thanh and Niu, at least, to get away … but it seems unlikely, confusing direction changes notwithstanding…
Honestly, at this point the best thing that could happen for Redcloak would be if Xykon were to disappear. The reason Redcloak needed Xykon was to secure the Gates. And the reason he needed the Gates was to blackmail the Gods into giving the goblin races a secure homeland.
And now ironically, Redcloak has achieved his goal as a step in the plan of trying to achieve his goal. Things would be great for him if everything would just stop now.
But Redcloak has set Xykon on a path that Xykon doesn’t want to get off. And Xykon’s going to insist they keep going. And worse yet it appears Redcloak has lost sight of where he’s trying to go. He’s so focused on following his Plan he doesn’t realize he no longer has a reason to.
I don’t recall anything about the physics, but Osmium makes frequent appearances in “stupid D&D spell combos” threads as a base ingredient for magic bombs. And not just mere nukes, I mean “throw twenty four thousand d6s against the hardness of the planet’s crust” type bombs.
Oh, and since nobody tackled this: in D&D weapons have four main characteristics: damage, damage type, threat range and crit modifier. So, for example Elan’s rapier would be 1d6, piercing, 18-20, x2
How it works is, whenever you hit a dude you roll one d20 for your attack which you add to your attack bonus. If the total exceeds the dude’s armour, you land a hit and do normal damage, in this case 1d6 (plus whatever modifiers you might have got on that).
However, if that unmodified attack roll is within crit range, you get to roll a second attack roll. If that roll also exceeds defense then you’ve scored a crit, in which case you apply your weapon’s crit mod to your base damage roll (in this case you’d roll 2d6).
So, long story short, a x3 crit from a two-handed weapon does a lot of gruesome damage in a short time. D&D doesn’t have a damage locator so the “to the jugular” is just for flavour.
Remember; it isn’t Redcloak’s Plan; it’s his god’s Plan. And one homeland that is of course not necessarily eternal isn’t what the Plan is really about; it’s about changing the divinely ordained rules of the OOTS world so that goblinoids are no longer merely XP fodder for PC races.
I don’t know. The Dark One said his goal was “to build a lasting goblinoid civilization” and “all we want is a fair distribution of land, so that humans and elves and dwarves do not control all of the livable territory while we scrape by in barren wilderness”.
When Jirix saw the Dark One in the afterlife, he was told he was needed for trade, logistics, diplomacy, and intrigue. And the Dark One’s message for Redcloak was “Don’t screw this up”. Redcloak assuming this message meant he wasn’t supposed to screw up the Plan. But maybe the message was that following the Plan was in danger of screwing up everything the goblins had already gained.