Tell that to Baldor.
“When next [Durkon] returns home, he will bring death and destruction to us all.”
The man who’s getting killed at the end of #1084, he looks familiar. I don’t have access to my copy of The Origin of PCs at the moment-- was he in it?
He looks similar to High Priest Hurak, but it’s not him. If nothing else, Hurak passed away about four years ago.
This also fulfills the other prophecy about Durkon, which is that he would return home posthumously.
ETA: Speaking of Loki, I’m still expecting the return of Hilgya. It’s not much of a play by Loki (given that Durkula is not Durkon and thus doesn’t have the history with her) but it’s one of the few plays he could make.
This one made me applaud out loud for Durkon. Brilliantly played!
There’s a small grammar issue in panel 8. Very unlike Rich.
I’m going to go ahead and blame Durkon for it, trying to undermine Durkula at every opportunity.
I assume you mean using “it’s” instead of “its”. Second most common grammar error on the internet. (The most common (by couple orders of magnitude) is “your” instead of “you’re”.)
Another small win for dwarfkind.
That must have been some other good cleric undermining their own evil vampire spirit. Durkula was silent in that panel (he’s the one with the plain robes).
One must still wonder about Durkon’s own key-stone. Was it taken from him back when he was banished, or did it crumble to dust as soon as he was vampirized and Durkula “took” it, or did something else happen to it?
Durkon was pretty much hoisted out the door in his clothes with his armor and hammer tossed out after him. I suppose it’s possible that he just didn’t have the stone on him at the time.
I would guess Durkon’s keystone was taken when he was banished. They wouldn’t want him to return home via some back door.
But even if he still has it, perhaps his only works for the temple he’s from, which this one is probably not. The one Roy got was from the High Priestess of Odin and would presumably work at any temple. Those for lower level clerics may have restrictions.
Oops. Make that the High Priestess of Thor.
Which raises the question of what’s going on inside the heads of all those other vampires. They were clerics of the Creed of the Stone until a few hours ago (strip time). What are they now? Have they all become evil just by being turned into vampires? Did Hel put a controlling spirit inside all of them like she did in Durkon? Or are they all being controlled by Durkula the same way Malack dominated Durkula when he vampirized him? And if it’s the later, how does vampiric domination work in D&D?
I have been assuming that the “controlling spirit” is part of becoming a vampire, and is why vampires are always evil. But I do wonder where they all come from.
Well, when a daddy vampire loves a mommy victim very much, he bites her in a special way, and…
If you’re going to ask where the vampire souls come from, you might as well ask where the souls of babies come from. The answer is probably similar (though obviously twisted into wrongness, for vampires).
And I suspect that it’s a part of Hel’s “no living clerics” and “get the souls of dead dwarves” deal that any undead dwarven cleric is automatically a cleric of Hel. That seems to be what happened with Durkula, anyway, and Hel seems to imply that it would have happened for the first undead-with-class-levels of any sort of undead.
D&D vampirism doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Durkon and the vampire spirit are shown as separate and distinct entities. But, when Durkon was made a vampire, the vampire was a level 15 (or whatever) cleric right down to having Durkon’s previously prepared spells – summoning a couple devils with the Planar Ally spell he was going to use to protect the Gate with devas.
From this, you might even guess that it’s the corporal form of Durkon that’s a level 15 cleric and his soul or spirit is largely irrelevant. Which makes no sense theologically. But then, it would be equally ridiculous if a new vampire started at cleric level one and had to work its way up to its “old” cleric level.
No criticism of the comic intended – it’s just the way D&D works.
Much like Vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Your soul goes away (in Durkon’s case, gets tied up because it needs him) and you are inhabited by a demon.
I think it makes fine sense if spells and cleric levels are knowledge based, since they share the same brain, not just the same body. So Durkula knows the right way to invoke the spells, except Hel rather than Thor grants the power to those spells.
Right, Durkula is really good at channeling divine energies, because he’s a vampire based on a high-level cleric. But his own spirit is still relevant, because that spirit is a worshiper of Hel, not of Thor.
A lot of people over on the GiantITP forums criticized Burlew for deviating from the D&D rules for how vampires work, but he didn’t at all. The D&D rules say that a vampire has the same knowledge and abilities as the base creature before the template is applied, which Durkula does. But they don’t ever actually say that the vampire is the same entity as the base creature, and in fact it makes a lot more sense, from a story standpoint, if they’re not.
But if I’m recalling correctly, Hel sent the spirit to occupy Durkon when he became a vampire. It wasn’t just a random evil spirit that was created by the vampirism.
Yeah, pretty much a side effect of D&D throwing out the “divine” aspect of divinely granted magic and making it basically the same as arcane magic cast against your wisdom stat. Your spirit or soul has nothing to do with it and your neural patterns are essentially a cleric scroll that anyone could theoretically read and use.