Can’t get to the SRD for the spell question; maybe some other Doper can pull it up to see. Normally, spell durations do not end if the caster is knocked unconscious, so it’s probably still in effect.
As to Belkar: three of the kickstarter prizes purchased were for Rich to do backstories on a character of the buyer’s choice. Belkar was chosen for one, so there may one day be a pdf explaining why he is the murderous git that he is. (also: backstories for Therkla and Cliffport Police Dept.)
Burlew has intentionally never shown Belkar’s history. He wrote that obviously Belkar must have had a terrible childhood to have grown up into such an evil adult and if he showed that childhood, it would kill the humor. (Although as Lightray noted, Burlew has agreed to write one early about Belkar’s past as part of the Kickstarter drive.)
In terms of creating Belkar as a psychopath, Burlew also did that for the story. There’s nothing in the game system that prohibits halflings from being violent and evil but, as you noted, players expect them to be peaceful and good. So Burlew was defying a stereotype. In addition he figured there was humor potential in putting that violence in a little character.
I checked the SRD entry for Dominate spells. I don’t see anything to indicated that the caster losing consciousness even grants a new saving throw, let alone breaks the effect. The most relevant lines appear to be:
“Once you have given a dominated creature a command, it continues to attempt to carry out that command to the exclusion of all other activities except those necessary for day-to-day survival (such as sleeping, eating, and so forth).”
"If you don’t spend at least 1 round concentrating on the spell each day, the subject receives a new saving throw to throw off the domination. "
If V is unconscious long enough for a full day to pass from the last round spent concentrating on the spell, the kobold will get a new saving throw. That’s about it. Otherwise, he’ll keep following whatever order V last issued (which appears to be along the lines of “follow the party and carry whatever someone hands you”) until the spell wears off.
One of Roy’s big flaws is assuming things. He’s intelligent but he makes mistakes by thinking he’s got something figured out when he really doesn’t.
In this case, he assumed the archon was talking about Belkar and never gave the warning any thought after that.
I’m also surprised that Roy has never raised the issue of the two mages he saw spliced to Vaarsuvius. You’d think at some point he’d have discussed them with Vaarsuvius; telling Vaarsuvius that they didn’t pass on Roy’s warning and asking about the possibility of Vaarsuvius contracting other mages to augment his powers.
Well, Roy himself said that he doesn’t have perfect recall of everything he experienced/witnessed when he was dead.
Although that might refer only to the time that he spent with his family members on the Mountain.
Okay, wow. I completely missed that bottom row of panels when I read it the first time.
It’s also a gaming stereotype that there’s one guy in the group who doesn’t care about the plot at all but just wants to go kill things.
Nowadays, at least in my groups, that’s “The Belkar of the Party”.
With some groups, the stereotype is that there’s one guy in the group who cares about the plot and characters rather than just having fun killing and looting.
That guy is “The Sara of the Party”.
I just reread that strip, and I noticed something else: Roy asks Eugene to scry on Xykon and warn him if Xykon leaves Azure City. We know that Xykon has left Azure City at least twice since then (704 and 833). As far as we know, Eugene has not notified Roy about this.
Is it because Xykon is under the immediate effect of Cloister while in Azure City and the lingering effect of the same during his little jaunts out? Does this mean that we’re looking at at least five weeks from strip 532 (assuming that Xykon hasn’t recasted since then) before Eugene can scry on Xykon again and notify Roy of his departure?
Eugene has been using an epic scrying pool–he can see through the Cloister effect with it. He should also have been able to watch Xykon in the Astral, building his fortress.
As for why he hasn’t notified Roy–remember that Eugene is ultimately selfish; all he cares about in the current situation is Xykon’s destruction. As long as the phylactery was lost, that was impossible–even if Roy could have gotten the party to Xykon’s fortress and given him a beatdown away from his allies, he would just have regenerated. Since it wouldn’t further Eugene’s goals, he may not have seen any reason to tell Roy about it. Worse, if he wasn’t watching when Redcloak pulled the switcheroo, he may believe the real phylactery is in the fortress and end up sending the Order off on a wild goose chase.
Roy’s Archon, in the strip that Malleus, Incus, Stapes! linked to, says “If she’s alive and on the mortal plane, we should be able to see her.”
Xykon in the Astral is neither of those.
I think it goes beyond mere indifference. Eugene actually wants Roy to fail. He spent his entire life arguing his father and his son about the superiority of magic over combat. (And it went both ways. For a large part of the story, Roy was trying to kill Xykon just to prove his father wrong rather than due to any higher motive.)
Roy eventually got over this and realized the struggle was over more important stakes than a father-son conflict. But Eugene hasn’t done that. He still feels the important issue is proving he’s right that magic is more powerful than combat. If Roy beats Xykon, Eugene would be forced to admit he had been wrong all his life. So he’d rather see Xykon win than see him beaten by non-magical means.
On the other hand, Eugene says he can scry on “people”. Xykon is undead, but he’s still a person. Also, “mortal plane” is not necessarily the same thing as “prime material plane”; plenty of mortal creatures live in the Astral. Even at that, I doubt that Roy’s Archon is describing limits on the scrying pool; it seems unlikely to me that the official View From Above is restricted to living people on the Prime. You probably can’t use it to peek into the gods’ bedrooms and maybe the lower planes, but I imagine it can handle the Astral just fine.
If there’s any plane that I wouldn’t call a mortal plane, it’s the one where even mortals do not age until they leave.
That’s something I never really thought about…relative time factors. If someone on the Prime scried the Astral, would everything just look like a still photo because time runs soooo slooooowwwwwlllllllllyyyyyy there? And if you went the other direction, scrying the Prime from the Astral, would everything just be an indiscriminate blur because everything is moving so quickly?
Time isn’t actually moving at different speeds; it’s just easy to lose track of it in the afterlife.
Astral plane <> afterlife
Yep. If the rules for the Astral are the same in 3.5 as they were in Original Recipe, time in the Astral moves at a ratio of 1:5000 in relation to the Prime Material. Natural healing doesn’t work at all (unless you spend a LOOOONG time there) because of the relative difference, and for the practical purposes of a party of PCs traveling through the Astral to get to an outer plane, you never get hungry or thirsty even if you spend subjective weeks in transit.