Yes. Among other occasions, he says “bitch” in this strip.
Many game resources I’ve read over the years. Interestingly, Nergal does allow it. Leastwise, the 1e Deities and Demigods says he’ll resurrect powerful warriors to fight for him.
Indeed, but obviously not from Thor who being Good would not allow the summoning of a devil.
I skip a week or so and miss out on three updates. It’s cool that he’s going along at a nice clip, though.
Let us assume, that since he’s the thrall/spawn of a Cleric of Nergal, that his new source is Nergal. Or, at the very least, it was while he was under the complete control of said Cleric of Nergal.
It turns out alignment is 3 dimensional. There are the evil-good and chaos-order axes. Then there’s the dick-mensch spectrum. Menschood is correlated with goodness and wisdom, but imperfectly. Malack wasn’t a dick, though he was evil. Xykon is kind of a dick, though not as much of a dick as Miko Miyazaki was. O-Chul was a mensch. Nale is a total dick.
Nale did well to invite Durkon into his group. But he was oblivious to the fact that Durkon had ties to both of Nale’s enemies - Malack and Oots. Plus a newly conscious vampire might not be especially comfortable with sucking his old friends dry – though he might crave that, which is something else entirely. With a little more reticence, things could have gone Nale’s way. What a dick!
Durkon handled the situation reasonably well, with contemplation rather than wholly understandable angst.
Speaking of reticence, it seems that the drow speaks common as a second language. Is it fair to say that Z is a pretty stereotypical drow? That’s a real question: my only source of drow lore is wikipedia.
It’s funny, when Malack died everyone was saying how much Nale was underestimated and how clever he was, etc. I figured that Tarquin’s attitude would be “Well, if Malack couldn’t handle himself sucks to be him” provided the main mission was progressing.
But now Nale killed the party’s cleric, lost the use of the second (previously thrall) cleric, lost the gate, obviously won’t see the OotS destroyed and is probably about to get his ass kicked – for zero gain aside from his feud with Malack resolved. Win the battle, lose the war. Does he even know the location of the final Gate?
Roy knew where this gate supposedly was, and he mentioned Kraagor’s Tomb a couple of comics back, so I’m going to guess he knows where that tomb and the gate is. And I assume further that he found out both of those things from Shojo. And if so, Nale may have found out about the next one’s locale while in disguise as Elan at the same time Roy got that information from Shojo. We’ll see!
The thing I wonder is…
Durkon’s attack with the staff is clearly a surprise round. While I can see Nale gaining initiative (he has to have a better dex score than Durkon), I could see Durkon winning over Z. And Z doesn’t really have plot reasons to stick around, plus he’s incredibly wounded, and standing next to a martial cleric.
I can see Nale getting away for the bashing by his father. But Z? I think the Drow is toast.
It’s a little complicated. The drow are supposed to be an evil race.
But back in the late eighties, R.A. Salvatore wrote a trilogy of novels with a drow character, Drizzt Do’Urden. And Salvatore decided to have Drizzt be a rebel against his drow nature - he was a Good aligned character who often encountered problems because other people assumed he was a typically evil drow.
It was an interesting idea at the time but Drizzt became a popular character and many gamers began playing drow characters who were also good-aligned rebels. It became a cliche that most the drows you’d meet in a game were actually good characters. Burlew satirized this in the strip that introduced Zz’dtri.
Is it implied in this comic that Durkon is a higher level than Malack was? Malack couldn’t dispel Durkon’s Mass Death Ward, and Durkon mocked him, saying he should have spent more time adventuring (leveling up).
On an entirely different note, after I looked at Little Nemo’s link, I decided to read a few more strips from that era, and I stopped short when I got to Strip 78. It shows Roy’s dad flashing back to the murder of his master by then-flesh-bound Xykon.
Maybe this has been discussed before and I’ve missed it, but Is there any likelihood that Xykon is related by blood to Tarquin, Nale and Elan?
Or is that resemblance simply a function of Burlew having a less-developed drawing style that many years ago?
Rank speculation again: Durkon is now free. Durkon may be in deep shit shortly. Belkar was saved by Durkon and “straight up murdered for it”. might Belkar sacrifice himself to save Durkon in return shortly?
[/rank speculation]
Z is an evil drow who disguised himself as a Drizzt knock-off to pass as CG.
Malack was probably a higher effective character level than Durkon, but a lot of his levels are virtual levels from being a vampire and not Cleric levels.
I’m not sure how to parse that, so let’s turn that around, and get at what I was interested in: as a vampire is Durkon possibly higher level than Malack was as a vampire?
Almost certainly - getting vamped gave him 8 additional “adjusted” levels.
(while only increasing his CR by 2…because WOTC can’t do math. But what do you expect from a company that calls a horizontal line a probability curve?)
Yes. If Durkon had a higher cleric level than Malack, now that he’s a vampire his effective character level (an approximation of the power of the character) will be higher than Malack’s.
That’s not a failure to do math, that’s WotC deciding that some abilities are more significant over an entire adventuring career than they are in a single fight. For another example that isn’t taken into account by the rules: single use items versus multiple use items. To a PC, a Wand of Fireballs is worth more than a Scroll of Fireballs because he’s more likely to have time to use all 50 charges. To a one-off enemy, they’re worth about the same.
kaylasdad99, if Xykon is related to Elan’s family,
Start of Darkness gave no indication of that. In any event, he killed both his parents and probably zombified them, zombified his grandma (and may also have personally killed her), and there’s no indication that he had any siblings. If he did, they’d have to be in their 80s at minimum.
Xykon was a bit of a ladies’ man while alive, but we don’t hear of him siring children. So in any event, Xykon has no known living relatives.
Demanding props has a value of, as Miller would say, 0 ho.
Ya gots ta be strongah, my Israeli brothah.
I disagree: I think the two of them will go off together, escaping via Z’s Fly spell.
And, of course, barring an apostrophe, even the name is an anagram. 