The marks on the faces also look similar to the marks on the wall - which, especially on the back wall near the Order, look suspiciously like writing.
It could be supposed to be cracks in the plaster, but it’s awfully regular.
Not in fantasy they’re not.
They’re almost certainly magical sigils. Check out Durokan’s sigils in panel 5 of this comic. Not meaning that I think Durokan killed them, but that all of that (the stuff on their faces and the stuff on the walls) is magical writing.
Scarabs eat both dung and carrion, according to Wiki.
Dragon marks? This ain’t Eberron, pal.
If it was the Familicide, then Penelope’s baby would be affected, and through the baby, Penelope herself. And she did indeed die right around then, of “mysterious circumstances”, and both Tarquin and Nale have disavowed credit for it…
Ugly. Very, very ugly.
Checking back, it appears that Draketooth’s magic colour is light purple. The eye that appeared was green, so ergo it wasn’t Draketooth.
I’m still in the “illusion” camp. What better way to communicate a master of illusions than to fool the readers themselves?
Ooh, that would be very, very bad. I was skeptical about the familicide being the cause until I read this post. Now I’m fully behind the theory.
A piece of evidence from the GITP forums that I found nifty was that Familicide was cast around lunchtime. The Elven lands are in the same ballpark timezone as the Windy Canyon. And note the title of yesterday’s strip…
Even if it’s not Familicide, V will certainly consider the possibility that it was. I can see V confessing this Roy and the gang, in unintentional earshot of Tarquin, in best bedroom farce tradition. (Maybe Girard too, depending if the statute is actually him and/or that he’s got the pyramid scryed for sound.) And then shit will get real.
A theory from the forums that I like goes as follows: Familicide gets cast. It snuffs a small percentage of G’s troupe. He’s already paranoid, and informed of the previous Gates’ going Boom! plus his fake gate going off. He then casts this elaborate illusion, meant to fool whoever’s hunting him that their spells worked, he’s already dead, and therefore, the Gate’s undefended. Have light loot around in case the visitors aren’t the people who cast F. If they are, the hunters go to the “Gate” which is another fake, and is a trapped killing ground.
Sorry, I can’t get behind it at all unless someone can explain how Girard Draketooth is part black dragon. And aren’t all black dragons evil in alignment? I never saw anything that suggested any members of the Order of the Scribble were evil.
“Boom?”
I thought Gates went KRACKAKOOOM!!!
Same way Tieflings (the fruit of a union between a devil/demon and a mortal ; or one who’s had such union somewhere in their family tree) can be non-Evil or even Good, and Aasimar (same, but switch “deva” for “devil”) can be Evil. If the blood is diluted enough, all bets are off.
So where’s the evidence? Rich is pretty good about foreshadowing, so it seems pretty unlikely that he’d pull something like this out of thin air.
We’ve seen that Draketooth fought with Soon who, despite his arrogance, was lawful good. That obviously doesn’t prove Draketooth was evil but it could foreshadow the possibility.
I had the impression that Girard butted heads with Soon because he was chaotic, not because he was evil.
But both the mark on Girard’s face and his name had people speculating long before that he had some dragon (of unspecified color) in his family tree. And Rich couldn’t really have hinted that it was part black dragon, because everything we know about Girard, Vaarsuvius knows, and it wouldn’t have worked for em to realize that the Familicide might hit him.
Miko and Roy fought plenty despite their common alignment.
That would be the part where I said it doesn’t prove anything.
But there is the possibility that a character who we’ve seen fighting good characters, lying to the members of his party, planting lethal traps, and stealing children might be evil.
Enor (the big winged bounty hunter guy) is half blue dragon. Blue dragons are “Always lawful evil”, yet Enor was True Neutral by word of the strip’s author. Having a dragon parent doesn’t mean you have to share the dragon’s alignment.
By my math, it has been 12-14 days from the Familicide to this strip. Penelope’s death also appears to have happened about the same time as the Familicide was cast. It’s way to much to be coincidence IMHO.
I was figuring they were scars.