The problem with ranged attacks isn’t hitting, it’s that Durkula ignores the first 10 points of damage of each arrow. Which is all of it.
Only if they’re nonmagical. At this point, even Roy’s backup weapons should be magical. If he had any backup weapons, that is.
And really what self respecting high priest of Odin is going to have a mundane spear?
Which goes back again the quest to Resurrect Roy. Finding a cleric who could do it proved difficult (in fact, they never did find one) and Haley doubted there was a cleric in the world who could cast 9th level spells (min cleric lvl 17) – except perhaps Redcloak.
Narratively though, we’re essentially reading a D&D campaign and from a dramatic sense you would need to replace a lost high level cleric with a like-leveled healer for the party to have a chance at success. Which is what Tarquin was saying. In a sense, said healer wouldn’t exist until they were actually needed.
The way XP awards work in 3.5E is that if you place a low-level character in with high-level ones, the low-level character gets an increased share of the XP and so is power-levelled.
That’s not good enough. The weapon has to be both silver and magical.
Tarquin could be wrong or flat-out lying. After all, he had a vested interest in persuading Elan to abandon Roy and Durkon. My guess is they would be a lot harder to replace than that. Tarquin also said something like “when a party of high-level adventurers show up, I assume they’re all working together.” That presumes high-level adventurers showing up is a more singular event than his attempted persuasion of Elan might suggest.
Not wooden?
I thought silver was for werewolves.
Not wooden. Driving a wooden stake into a vampire’s heart completely incapacitates it, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Ah, right, I forgot that they needed silver, too. Still not a problem, especially with a bow: You get a +1 bow, and then you get a variety of arrows of different materials. It’s a lot easier than the “golf bag” problem of melee weapons.
Or starmetal apparently.
It may be your own preference, but it is also used in the comic. I stumbled upon it in my aforementioned reread. It’s how Durkon refers to V.
And, no, I can’t get V’s voice to not sound noticeably female. Normally I barely can hear the voice of characters, but the ones in this comic are really strong, with V’s being the strongest.
Well, that’s Durkon’s accent conveniently upholding V’s ambiguous gender. Not Durkon choosing to use a genderless pronoun. Note the apostrophes on both sides of the E.
I imagine Roy is doing enough damage that he doesn’t have to worry about the DR/10
I think Durkon refers to Vaarsuvius as “he”, but his accent elides the H. Not that that proves anything, because Durkon doesn’t know es gender, either. Heck, even Sabine can’t seem to make up her mind, and if there’s anyone in the strip who knows about humanoid sexuality, it’s her.
And most of the characters in the strip don’t have a strong “voice” to me, but oddly enough, V is one of the ones that does. And the voice I “hear” for V is just as gender-ambiguous as everything else about em.
(Incidentally, the other character for whom I hear a strong voice is Roy’s grandfather, who (to me) sounds very gruff and gravelly, sort of like he needs to clear his throat.)
One of those—notably, the one on the right—is for a contraction.
Og, why am I so picky about stuff like this? Sheesh.
That’s how Durkon pronounces “he.” He doesn’t have any problem with pronouncing female pronouns.
You know, I re-read the strips surrounding Durkon’s turning, and I think I found a plot hole.
Look at this strip here.
Malack turned Durkon because he wanted to “once again engage as peers” with Durkon. He also speaks about his desire for siblings and the seven brothers he had before he was turned.
If the souls of vampires are trapped and their bodies are just piloted by demons, none of Malack’s actions or motivations make sense.
From the first strip where we learn what’s really going on in Durkon’s head:
“But it’s really all the same to me. The sooner I absorb all your memories, the sooner I can stop talking to you. Usually, the process takes a few months, but it’s not a problem if you want to start your eternal dormancy earlier.”
So, my fanwank is that Malak, having been a vampire for centuries by the time we meet him, has not only absorbed all of the original Malak’s memories, but it’s been so long that he no longer really remembers where Malak-the-Lizardman ended, and Malak-the-evil-spirit began. From his vantage point hundreds of years later, they’ve blurred into essentially the same person.
Also, Durkon is a lawful good priest engaged in a quest of cosmic importance, and Malak was a backwater shaman of unknown alignment and religious affiliation. Who knows how the vampirization process works if you’re already an evil worshiper of a death god?
Kinda off-topic question here: In Panel 21, where Elan and Haley are having a goodbye grope, is it ever established what the tattoo on her back says?