There was at least one other instance of Good-aligned ghosts in the OotS world: Land of the Rising ….
I believe Sabine is upset because Nale was killed, not because she wasn’t able to harvest his soul. It’s been established more than once that she’s genuinely in love with him, which is a fact that her bosses don’t seem to have grasped until now.
Hubris is going to get Tarquin in the end. He’s racking up a long list of enemies, most recently including Sabine. Any bets that she will join the OotS just so she can get a chance at killing Tarquin?
That’s why I specified “the basic D&D rules.”
I still think there’s a bit left to tell of Nale’s story, but that it’ll take place in the afterlife only. Maybe Nale shows up with Thog and everybody else at the very end of the story, but I doubt it.
Assuming Sabine wants to bring Nale back, she’s got three choices:
[ul]
[li]1) take a piece of Nale’s body and get somebody to cast ordinary Resurrection. The problem with that is there isn’t any piece left, other than maybe some blood on Tarq’s dagger.[/li][li]2) get someone to cast True Resurrection or some Wish/Miracle combo. Problem with that is the author’s on record saying that he hates the spell. Despite having characters in strip discuss its availability and who can cast it. And the wanted poster with the 25,000 GP difference between Nale alive and Nale dead. One interesting bit of speculation at the OOTS forums is for Sabine to try and team up with the only known 17th level cleric in Stickworld, RedCloak.[/li][li]3) get the Directors to make Nale some form of free-willed outsider. Why would they?[/li][/ul]
If she can’t get any of those to work, and Tarq doesn’t start manipulating her with the promise of Nale’s return with Chekhov’s Dagger, then one poster at OOTS mentioned how similar Sabine’s color palette is to that of Amun-Zora… Nifty, but I think the Ring of True Seeing would put the kibosh on any Sabine/shapeshifting scheme.
I wonder when he’s going to end the book already?
I’d just like to say how wonderful I found it that the Fiends’ plasma TV uses real plasma.
And corpuscles. And probably platelets.
I read Haley’s remarks as just being metahumor, being able to say that they’re in a strip. If the author hates the spell (esp. as a narrative device) and he’s writing the story, well that’s pretty much that.
25,000gp being indicative of the cost of True Res doesn’t make a ton of sense. I’m not saying that it’s not the cost difference but generally collecting a bounty requires some physical evidence that you deserve it. And that evidence is typically a body part which would in turn be sufficient for a garden variety resurrection spell (or even Raise Dead depending on the amount and condition of ‘evidence’ presented).
He also made the point of a supernaturally intelligent character going out of her way to make him un-resurrectable.
A cute detail I didn’t notice until someone on the OOTS forums pointed out; the psion who swears by the Babylonian goddess Ishtar quoted Hammurabi’s Code; “eye for an eye”.
No. While only a “small portion” of the body is necessary (just how small is never made clear, but a vial or even a drop of blood might be enough), it also must have been part of the body at the time of death.
And the Ghost-Martyrs weren’t technically undead-- They were something called Deathless, cribbed from the Eberron campaign setting (as Redcloak alluded to). They’re basically just like undead in every way except that they’re positive energy instead of negative, and usually good.
I think that at this point, Miko Miyazaki has a better chance of coming back from the dead than Nale.
I was just wondering how long we’ve been on the same in-comic day, so I went back digging through the thread. I see they entered the pyramid on 2-Feb-2012 (cite (well, they entered in #841, close enough) ), so it’s been “today” for at least 16 months!
Consider that each new comic is showing the goings-on of only about 60 seconds.
What was the purpose of Tarquin’s illusory army?
Dramatic tension, mostly.
ETA: illusory?
Sure. It’s a word.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that Sabine is going to be gunning for Tarquin now. And regardless of whether Tarquin’s dagger actually has Nale blood on it, “I can give you the dagger used to kill Nale and maybe you can bring him back with it” is a pretty powerful bargaining chip, even if it will never actually amount to anything.
I don’t think Nale will be coming back, but I do think that possibility will be brought up at some point. And Sabine is precisely the type of being to let that idea cloud her judgment.
Sure it’s a word. But what makes you think the army isn’t real?
That’s up there with “Have you told anyone else about this?” as far as bad omens go.
Well?
(It’s a word)
I don’t think Nale is coming back, but if he was, would “blood on the dagger” be good enough? He died several seconds after being stabbed, so any blood on the dagger was not “part of him when he died”, right?