“If you have a time machine, why not just go back and kill Austin Powers when he’s sitting on the crapper or something?”
“How about – no, Scott, okay?”
“Why not use your knowledge of the future to play the stock market? We could make trillions!”
“Why make trillions when we could make – billions?”
“Uh, a trillion is more than a billion, numb-nuts.”
“Awright, zip it.”
“You know, you can’t even…”
“Zip it.”
(“I have a gun. In my room. You give me five seconds, I’ll get it, I’ll come back down here, BOOM, I’ll blow their brains out!”)
(“Scott, you just don’t – get it, do ya? Ya don’t.”)
In general, I agree. However, it is possible to have an entire party that is suicidally dysfunctional. As long as everyone agrees that that’s how it’s going to be before play starts, it can be fun, especially if it’s a side campaign. The players get to try all the wacky things their serious characters wouldn’t, and the GM gets entertaining hijinks.
Bizarrely, the one campaign I’ve run like that, the PCs proved to be effectively bulletproof. The front-line fighter was actively suicidal, the cleric was an evangelical masochist who liked being injured, and the whole party turned down healing as much as possible (because the cleric made it incredibly painful). They had incredible luck with the dice, however, and repeatedly survived frenzied direct assaults on superior forces.
Deliberately fucking with the mission tends to have bad interpersonal consequences in D&D games. Have had more than one gaming group dissolve in fire and blood when one person decided to have their character actively sabotage the campaign by play ‘stupid’. In one game it was the wife of the GM. That didn’t end well at all. In another game it was the only person at the table seemingly capable of role-playing and decision-making (I was GM in that one). When he decided to play his halfling as very child-like, while the other players stared vacantly when faced with decisions, it pretty much ended the game and the group.
Things that are funny in entertainment (comics, TV shows) rarely work that way in real life.
Not sure we can give you the clairvoyant hat for that, if it is. I read that one as you predicting Nale doesn’t leave the palace alive, much less command a fourth LG attack on the OOTS (with Tarquin and Malack as supporting players, yet).
Didn’t we have a discussion a page or two back about how Burlew hates the concept of True Resurrection and especially its impact as a narrative device?
Assuming the Alive/Death Nale reward was intentional in its implication that Tarquin would have res’d a dead Nale, we could assume that the priest doing it would have been Malack. And boy, that would have been a fun conversation.
But with Malack gone, I wonder if Tarquin has another priest at his disposal who is of sufficient level to cast a Resurrection. With his significant resources, I’m sure he could scrounge one up but the Dead-Roy plot made it clear that capable clerics are pretty thin on the ground.
Edit: It occurs to me that, done quickly enough, a lower level Raise Dead would suffice. Provided Tarquin has Nale’s intact corpse and not just dagger blood or goatee clippings or something.
I wasn’t trying to say that you thought that’s what was going to happen next. Just that you (or whoever wrote it, I’d have to check) elegantly laid out the mechanics for how it’d work. I was mentioning True Rez because it would allow Tarq to annihilate Nale’s corpse, while still allowing him to secretly bring him back. If that’s what he wanted to do. The 25k disparity in rewards may be a red herring, but with an author like this, little things in the background tend to mean a lot. Like the Elf homelands being on the same longitude as Girard’s pyramid, so that lunchtime was the same for both. FWIW, I don’t think even Malack could have used regular Resurrection on Nale, absent a scroll. We never saw Malack use a 7th level spell before. 13 levels of Cleric, with his Vampire and Lizardman adjustment would make his ECL even more ridiculous. Raise Dead could work though, as Jophiel noted.
But I don’t think any of that’s going to happen. Instead, I think we’ll see a bit of the LE or CE afterlife. Not much, because I think it’ll be hideously unpleasant, but enough to demonstrate that Nale and the rest of the Linear guys aren’t coming back. Not sure if Sabine will choose to remain with him, petition the Directors to change him into an Incubus—one of the more interesting suggestions from the OOTS Forums—or be rejected by Nale at the end. Since she works for Lee, the LE afterlife should be available for her to visit, Blood War or not. Or Nale could be sent to the CE afterlife. Or NE. Hard to tell.
Of course, she could stick around and try to kill Tarquin out of revenge. I do think we’ll eventually get some payoff to the subplot of where her true loyalties are. Just not sure whether it’ll be in the next couple of strips or in the next book.
I wonder how “I don’t want anything from you!” Nale would react to Daddy calling his soul back from the Great Beyond anyway. Man, talk about your no-win situations.
Yep. It’s happened at least three times in this story alone (Roy’s little brother, Lord Shojo, and the Draketooth corpses. Four, if you want to count Therkla engaging in prior restraint).
Right. Stay dead just to spite Tarquin or allow yourself to be raised and know you’re only alive because Tarquin made you so (well, twice technically…)
My guess is Tarquin won’t try to raise Nale himself. What advantage would he get out of that?
Instead, I think he’ll make a bargain with Sabine. If she does what he asks, he’ll give her Nale’s remains and she can resurrect him. Nale would presumably agree to return if it was Sabine rather than Tarquin bringing him back.
And it wouldn’t surprise me if Tarquin also captured Nale’s soul when he killed him. That way he doesn’t have to worry about any stealth resurrections. And it gives him another lever. Sabine can do what Tarquin asks in exchange for Nale’s remains and then find she needs to make a second deal with him in exchange for Nale’s soul.
That seems the most likely way that Nale will show up in the strip, if only because it’s Burlew’s best opportunity so far to lay out how Hell(s) works in his cosmology. Some of the traditional assumptions about Hell kind of break when applied to a standard high fantasy world. Eternal punishment, for example. Take Tarquin: he’s a brilliant man, who’s spent his whole life scheming up ways to make himself wealthy, powerful, and comfortable. He can also, basically at a whim, walk right into Hell and have a nice chat with the folks who run it. Being able to see first hand exactly what happens to evil people after they die, why would someone as smart and self-interested as Tarquin choose to be evil? What possible equation could he be running in his head where, “spend eternity tormented by devils” is an acceptable outcome?
The only way it makes sense is if, in D&D worlds, Hell isn’t where evil people go to be punished, it’s where they go to be rewarded.
Anyway, I’ll bet Burlew’s spent at least as much time thinking about this as I have. If he wants to work his ideas about it into the comic, it’s probably going to be here.
As has been mentioned, if Tarquin tries to raise Nale and it works, it works because Nale has experienced some important character growth and is willing to accept Tarquin’s “charity”. If it doesn’t work, eh, he can put the wasted diamond on the Empire’s bill.
I was thinking the same thing about Hell and how it’d work in a world where people can come back and say “Wow, that sucked! Little dudes with pitchforks all over the place!”
But when you consider that most common people even in a high fantasy world don’t have the option of returning from the dead, there’s probably space to kick around the little guy while promising a cushy afterlife for the more powerful allies to your cause. Tarquin’s paid assassins might get thrown into the proverbial lake of fire, but Tarquin wouldn’t care provided that he’s taken care of. All the “Devil” (generic evil deity) needs to do is get people either convinced that they’re going to get a nice spot or convinced that they’re not bad enough to wind up in that plane.
I don’t believe you know who is trying to resurrect you. At least that is how I would rule if I was the DM. You just know someone is trying to. Of course, Sabine could just pop over, tell Nale she was about to start, go back and do it.
I think it is about power in hell. If you have power, it is a great place to be, if you don’t, it really really sucks as the powerful do what they want to you. And the newly dead don’t have any power, especially compared to demons and devils on their home planes. On the LE planes, there is an ordered progression to gain power, CE it is dog eat dog, and the NE some combination.
The thing to remember about the D&D afterlife (at least for most of its history, especially during the Planescape era) is that it’s all about alignment, not some set of cosmic scales. Alignment is a real power on the Outer Planes…it creates them, basically. Your life philosophy is what decides where you go after death…and those who were Lawful Evil, for example, will go to the Hells and they’ll find that fitting, since the Hells perfectly embody the alignment of Lawful Evil. There’s a definite and strict hierarchy of power, and it’s POSSIBLE (but very, very difficult) to climb that ladder. It’s the same with the other Outers…for instance, Mechanus (formerly Nirvana) is a perfectly ordered clockwork plane, embodying Lawful Neutrality. Limbo is a perfectly DISordered plane, where every portion of it that isn’t under a sentient individual’s mental control is a mixed-up mire of pure chaos.