Order of the Stick - Book 5 Discussion Thread

Cafe Society
5182

This is close, but some adjustments and nitpicks:

Vampires have a level adjustment of +8, not +6. Lizardmen have a level adjustment of +1, but they also have two hit dice. (A hit die is basically a level in being a monster. The difference between a level adjustment and a monstrous hit die is fidgety, and not really germane to this discussion.) So a vampire lizardman is already equivalent to an eleventh level character before you stack on any class levels.

However, I’m pretty sure Malack isn’t a lizardman, because lizardmen have legs, and Malack appears to have a single giant tail. The standard D&D monster that Malack most closely resembles is a yuan-ti halfblood. The yuan-ti are a very Robert E. Howard kind of monster - they’re a degenerate, pre-human civilization of snake-like reptiles who, eons ago, once enslaved the human race and did all sorts of hideous things to us, including interbreeding. The halfbloods are the descendents of those unions, and although usually humanoid, often have a variety of mutations, including a single tail in place of legs. (Malack’s albinism might be another mutation, assuming it’s not a side effect of the vampirism).

Yuan-ti start with seven hit dice, and have a level adjustment of +5. With the vampire level adjustment, this puts Malack at 20th level before he takes any cleric levels at all.

In theory, you can pile as many class levels as you want on top of that. We know that Malack has at least eleven - that’s the minimum level necessary to cast harm. But does he have more than eleven? Narratively speaking, I think it’s unlikely that Malack is significantly more powerful than Xykon. If he is, and the Order defeats him, going on to defeat Xykon is going to be anti-climactic. For a variety of reasons, a straight character level to character level comparison doesn’t necessarily tell you which is the more powerful character build, but I doubt that Malach’s character level is more than five levels higher than Xykon’s.

So, what level is Xykon? The estimate posted at the GitP forums suggests he’s a 27th level sorcerer. The lich template adds a +4 level adjustment on top of that, giving us a total of 31 effective character levels.

Which, coincidentally, is also the minimum character level for a vampiric yuan-ti cleric capable of casting harm. He might have a few more cleric levels than that, but if he’s much higher than fifteenth, I think he’d be in danger of eclipsing Xykon as the most dangerous enemy facing the Order.

I should add that the one major flaw in Malack being a yuan-ti is that the yuan-ti are one of the handful of monsters that are not included in the D&D open license.

5183

You can resurrect a vampire after you slay him - I’m not sure about resurrecting someone who is *going *to turn into a vampire, but hasn’t yet. If I were GM, I’d say it would work, but I don’t know if there’s an official rule on that.

5184

It wouldn’t take a cleric ex machina, just a scroll, which Haley or probably Elan could use. That’s a perfectly plausible thing for a party of that level to be carrying (along with a scroll or two of Remove Curse, Break Enchantment, Dispel Magic, Heal, etc.), just for the contingency that something happens to incapacitate the cleric.

5185

A scroll of resurrection costs more than 12,000 gold pieces. That’s a pretty hefty piece of loot for the party to pull out of hammerspace.

5186

That was why I was so surprised when it looked like Malack was a snake-person, not a lizardfolk. Because I remembered that the yuan-ti were on that list of never-open-sourced monsters. I even briefly wondered if Jones and Rodriguez were going to show up and rescue Durkon … but that seemed highly implausible at the current point in the story.

ETA: I just realized that in this strip, Malack actually says that Tiamat “prefers the kobolds to us lizardfolk.” So if he is, in fact, not a lizardfolk but a yuan-ti or some other kind of snake-person, he’s apparently been deliberately hiding that fact… right?

5187

I briefly entertained the idea of Jones and Rodriguez showing up and being killed by Malack, because he’s too powerful to be worried about a bunch of lawyers, and too plot central to be dismissed by a running gag like that.

5188

Or hey, what about vampire lawyers? The jokes practically write themselves!

5189

Haley’s bow is worth 98k GP, and Roy’s sword is probably somewhere in that neighborhood, too (it’s not clear just what the green glow effect is). And even cast by a caster, Resurrection still costs 10k in diamond dust, which they were quite content to blow on a random NPC Draketooth. Plus, of course, we’ve already been told that Durkon carries a scroll of it, which the heroes will presumably recover when they recover his body.

5190

I’m not saying its too expensive for the party to have, I’m saying it’s too expensive for the party to have without some previous set up in the comic. But if it’s been established that Durkon carries a scroll of resurrection on him, that’s a moot point.

5191

Where was that established?

5192

Figures. The one time I don’t check the SRD page…

Which is why I was still treating him as lizardfolk, despite the apparent lack of legs. I don’t have anything else handy to base it on. I suppose he could be some sort of generic snakeman, and the robes and lying about his species are a joke about hiding him from the lawyers. Oh, and yuan-ti halfbloods look mostly human. Malack would have to be a yuan-ti abomination, which are pretty much snakes with arms. (They have a +7 level adjustment, by the way.)

I think you’re substantially overestimating Malack’s power if you’re putting him anywhere near Xykon’s league. Yes, your postulated yuan-ti halfblood cleric would have to have an ECL of 31…but ECL is supposed to roughly represent how they stack up with characters of that level, and Malack got put on the ropes by a single 15th level character. Do you really think Durkon could have pushed Xykon that hard one-on-one, even with the Mass Death Ward–which was specifically designed for use against Xykon, and to which Xykon would not have the key?

If he’s a lizardman vamp, on the other hand, his ECL would be 22. Still epic, but much lower than Xykon, and plausibly within Durkon’s reach with good preparation. Maybe he’s a double amputee or something.

5193

I dunno. What’s the lowest level of cleric you can be to summon a deva?

And how many levels in the cult of Banjo can Elan move up in the next 24 hours?

5194

The page is loading slowly for me (I can only see the first row) but 878 is up.

5195

:frowning: Durkon

5196

[spoiler]Well, so much for having to wait three days…

What’s that purple stuff? Bite marks?

EDIT: And neat touch - his Holy Symbol turned black[/spoiler]

5197

Whelp, at least Durkon’s finally getting some character development.

What’s Malack’s blather about children vs siblings mean. He was going to vamp Belkar, calling him his child. Now he’s talking about vamping Durkon as a brother. Is vDurkon going to be a vdifferent kind of vampire than Count Belkular would have been? Or is this all dialog about how Belkar won’t be vamped at all, and why?

Also his armor.

5198

Wonder if this means he’s getting created with free will, like if Malack had vamp’d more HD than he could control? Sure doesn’t sound like the Durkon we know has made it through to this creature. I wonder if Durkferatu will speak with his original accent?

I wonder what the back story about his 7 siblings, and dining on their blood, “in that dim other life so long past,” means? And what else can that staff do? Does it julienne fries too?

Edit: ** kaylasdad**, since Devas are Angels, and have 12 HD, you need Planar Ally, a 6th Level spell, in order to call them. And then you have to do some bargaining, usually. See Lesser Planar Ally for more details.

5199

Out of interest, does the 12k cost of the scroll include the 10k cost of diamond dust already, or do you need to pay both?

5200

Well, “Count Durkula” might still be able to summon extraplanar entities, but I have my doubt’s they’ll be very angelic…

5201

Is Belkar, even though held and dominated, going to bear witness to Durkon’s "rebirth"or is he currently witless and won’t remember squat? Hell, that describes his day to day life, but you know what I mean.