Re-reading the final strip, it seems that Evil Durkon could use some lessons in Plot Narrative.
You NEVER say the incapacitated good guy is “Powerless to influence our plans” and “Is of no concern”. That’s exactly how you wind up getting defeated in the final moments before your victory!
I like the setup we have now. There’s no date stamp on strip updates for OOTS. When I first got into OOTS (over two years ago but still in book 5!), I could read along with this thread as I went through the comic. That becomes almost impossible when there’s no internal reference for when we start discussing the next strip.
I was thinking the same thing. Chekhov’s gun and all.
This is definitely a case of Chekov’s Dwarf. Probably in Book 7.
Jinx! One, two, three … you owe me a coke.
The text makes it quite clear that it is a fresh purpose-built Hel-spawned demon.
Oh, okay, that makes more sense, I suppose.
Especially since Hel called him “my serendipitous servant.”
Agreed that I think Evil Durkon is just, well, evil Durkon. Or rather whatever animating spirit inhabits the body of the sentient undead. We don’t know the full mechanics of what happens to your soul/spirit when you become an intelligent undead creature but it seemed pollyanna to assume that Durkon could just continue to act good and keep his same motivations while checking “Evil” on his alignment sheet as a technicality. Vampires are evil for a reason and a big part of that reason is the negative energy holding them together and keeping them undead. Unlike the “Hey, no worse than Belkar” remarks, Durkon is worse than Belkar because he has an actual malignant force driving him to do evil.
Evil Undead Durkon found a new deity from his pantheon (the one with the sphere of death in her portfolio) and she’s making full use of him.
Or I’m wrong and March 31st will start with a revelation that Durkon is possessed by demon-weevils or something. Who knows.
I’m not sure about that - he mentions having trouble doing Durkon’s accent. If he were just Durkon with his alignment knob tuned to “Evil,” he’d still speak the same way.
I’m thinking that the new plotline far away will be O-Chul and the lady paladin sent off to the north.
The actual question is whether the lore on vampires in-universe says that their will is compromised or taken over by these malignant forces… No member of the OOTS has commented on that, I will note, either way.
Isn’t that an oxymoron considering Roy’s speech?
I’m getting a big kick out of Roy’s really self aware assessment of their skills and abilities and lack of any plan they ever made having worked out.
Hmmm.
We have Hel stating that Malack “sired” the entity inhabiting Durkon’s body. That entity reported that Durkon’s “spirit” was still around, “struggling”, and providing that entity with Durkon’s memories.
Hel states that the Dwarves fall under her perview, and that entities “dark spirit” was “birthed” in her domain.
My guess is that vampire’s are created, and fall under, the “death god” of the appropriate pantheon of the victim. (Durkon was vamped in the western lands, but the Norse/northern pantheon still applies, I guess. Malack was from the western continent, so the Babylonian pantheon & underworld god, Nergal, got dibs in his case.)
I forget the D&D rules, if vamps were supposed to be an agent of (evil) dieties, or if they were some type of spirit entity from the negative energy plane. But anywho, this seems to show how magic can bring back the victim to life, restored: their soul wasn’t destroyed, nor has it moved on to some afterlife/heaven.
Malack referred to his normal/mortal pre-vamp self as a different person, too, IIRC.
I think it’s like the act of siring acts as a kind of “soul jar” spell within a person’s own body, and thus creates a “spirit vacuum” in the fleshy shell of the victim, that the appropriate Evil deity can then fill with a purpose-spawned fiend (somewhat analogous to how golems are …enspirited?) or more on point, like the origin story for vampires told in Anne rice’s books.
Why Hel? Well, I guess because The Rules state that dwarfs are her purview, so she was alerted somehow to Durkon’s siring.
I don’t get how people are asking how vampirism works in Order of the Stick. This is how it works. Rich just showed us. The questions only made sense before this strip.
The question that remains is why someone like V doesn’t know this, when (s)he arguably should.
Yeah, from what Hel just said, it appears that vampires in the OOTS-verse are not just “technically Evil” because of their alignment and because of their negative energy power source. They’re actually a horrific case of real evil, because the soul of the original creature is now trapped in an immortal body, under the complete control of a new soul. Given Durkon’s soul’s expression, it appears that it is a terribly painful experience (mentally and emotionally, at the very least, if not actually physically [or whatever the equivalent of physical pain is for a soul]). Every time a vampire is created, it is apparently an act even worse than the “Soul Bind” spell, since at least then the soul is just trapped in a gem, not actively being tortured or mind-raped.
Kinda weird that Burlew would choose to do it this way, since in the Q&A session he said thralls are not interesting characters to write. But Durkula is a thrall, only he’s the slave of a god instead of a white lizard. “Service is my sole purpose” sounds like a pretty thrally thing to say to me at least.
But Burlew has stuck pretty closely with the 3.5 Edition D&D rules. When he’s made up new stuff outside of those rules (like the Dashing Swordsman prestige class) he’s pointed out that he was doing so.