Many on this thread seem to favor the idea that the doors are a distraction, and that the gate is under the “statue”.
Too obvious. Look at it this way, they’re faced with hundreds of doors, each leading to a dungeon filled with dangerous monsters and at the end of one is the gate. Lots of work. Before looking through any doors, anyone would first think “maybe there’s a shortcut” and look for somewhere or something that might be hiding it. The statue is the first place they’d check. I’m surprised it’s still there and that they didn’t destroy it while checking it out.
That would require some powerful magic, and there’s no way a wizard of Xykon’s level wouldn’t figure it out.
And powerful magic that Serini, a halfling rogue, would not have access to. Xykon’s a Sorcerer, not a Wizard, so he wouldn’t figure it out.
If they get to the last door and don’t find the gate, chances are they’ll change their approach. At least I would. Going through all the doors in some specific but unknown order would likely take longer than the universe has existed, even if it only took one second per door. So I’d switch to brute force. That is, I’d start tearing the entire tomb complex apart stone by stone.
Those must be some seriously bad-ass monsters if Xykon is gaining experience. His effective level is at least 25 and possibly higher than that - so these would be nearly 20 CR encounters? More? Wait, just how tough is Oona to survive in there?
Each door leads to a dungeon with multiple monsters. Like most dungeons, the first encounters are fairly low level and the level increases as you go deeper. It’s probably only the very deepest monsters that give Xykon XP.
Oona and her fellow bugbears have been going into various doors for a long time. At first they probably only went in for a single encounter and then retreated. But as they gain levels, they could go in for more. So she’s obviously a fairly high level bugbear by now. In company with Xykon and RC, she apparently can go all the way to the end, which she’s probably never been able to do before.
But Xykon is not a wizard. He’s a sorcerer. Moreover, he’s a sorcerer who always spurned learning about magic at all. That’s what his origin story was about, and that’s what his beatdown of Vaarsuvius re-established. He doesn’t care about anything beyond the raw power he can wield.
Surely the writing in this story is more sophisticated than that.
What I mean is that we didn’t have that scene where MitD was being asked to do something he didn’t want to do or he overheard something. As far as we’ve been shown, he does not in any way understand what his friends are doing, and they are still his friends.
Sure, he’s starting to question his loyalty to them, but to go from there to outright spy-like sabotage? Without us seeing him grow into a purely good aligned character? Without us seeing him making smaller tricks and such that no one noticed?
He’s still not got any reason to be fighting directly against them yet. He’s yet to show even a full understanding of what they’re even doing.
I still say that a sabotage without fully understanding what he’s doing makes more sense.
As you note, the writing is more sophisticated than that. We’ve seen other examples of a non-evil character failing to see that a character they like is evil (Elan with Nale and Tarquin, Durkon with Malack, Therkla with Kubota, the readers with Thag). People ignore the evidence that their friends have a different alignment.
The MITD may be in this stage right now. He’s friends with Xykon, Redcloak, and Oona and he’s also friends with O-Chul. So he wants to believe that all of his friends are fundamentally on the same side and he’s just prevented a misunderstanding from accidentally getting anyone hurt. But judging from past story lines, at some point the MITD is going to realize his friends are divided into fundamentally opposing sides and their differences can’t be reconciled - and he’ll have to choose which side he’s on. (In the past, the characters faced with this choice have rejected evil. It would be an interesting twist if Burlew has the MITD decide to side with his original “friends” and betray O-Chul.)
Therkla has always known that Kubota was evil. She just didn’t care, prior to Elan’s influence on her.
She knew it in a superficial way. But she thought she could get Kubota and Elan to comply with the way she thought things should be. She was a neutral thinking a good character and an evil character would cooperate and agree to accept a neutral situation. She failed to realize Elan and Kubota were each committed to their own alignment. So I think it’s fair to say she had a case of alignment blindness.
This IS that stage. He hangs out with Xykon & Redcloak. He also likes O-Chul and, by extension, the Order of the Stick. He doesn’t want to see any of his friends fight and keeping Xykon from the Gate is one way in his mind to accomplish that. Just like tricking Xykon to keep him from fighting Roy versus attacking Xykon from behind or something. It’s clumsy stuff like a kid hiding the car keys because if dad goes out to play golf, mom will get mad and they’ll fight. But no one expects even THAT much from MitD so he’s getting away with it.
If you look at the very last panel, the footprints are only in front of one door.
Yes, MitD has something unusual about its footprints. I think someone mentioned that came up in a previous strip.
I’m not SURE if you’re arguing that the implication is that the MitD didn’t paint multiple doors, but if you are, note the left-side panel in the second row from the bottom. You can see nine doors in that picture, only one of which has a red “X.”
In the final panel of the strip, the same array of doors is shown, and now FIVE of them are marked.
I think he’s remarking on the fact that:
- some of the newly marked doors are out of his reach
- no footprints by the other newly marked doors
and asking if we are sure it was the monster that marked them.
I’m well aware of that, thank you. My thought is that there may be some magic at work.
That fact tells us something about the Monster; it’s just not clear what.
I’m sure Berlew implies exactly the conclusion we’ve been reaching in this thread: that the MITD is subtly sabotaging Team Evil’s search for the ‘real’ dungeon/portal/gate/whatever.
However, wouldn’t it be a pretty cool defense (in abstract) if there were a) a bazillion doors (as we see here), and b) if you attempted to mark which doors you’d tested, the doors/walls or whatever you made a mark on would sabotage searchers by moving or replicating the marks that they made? Obviously keeping track on a paper map defeats this, but it occurred to me that perhaps the MITD really did only mark one door, and the doors replicated his efforts.
Anyway I’m not buying any of that: the MITD is doing the obfuscating. But it’d be pretty sneaky/cool the other way.
There’s a danger to the MITDs tactics. What if all the doors that he marks off as extras are all false doors? Then the MITD has actually helped team evil by shortening their search time.