Makes sense.
In our first 3.0 campaign (Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil), after being betrayed by yet another NPC, we came up with a solution: we proposed going around town and asking everyone their name. If the DM knew their name, we would murder them.
Never actually followed through, but it sure would have simplified the campaign.
Not the only one but probably the “major” one.
Hubris and failure to listen to subordinates is standard method of villains losing to heroes. But OOTS tends to subvert tropes like that - so any guess as to what the twist might be here?
There was also this one.
Hee hee, Durkula has no idea that Hilgya’s coming to get him!
He was certainly startled to learn that the Order had a cleric though. And his third-panel comment, “I was worried there for a minute,” made me wonder whether Greg* had picked up enough memories about Hilgya to suspect that she might be there. Although if that were the case, his minion’s descriptions of the Order’s new cleric, “She had fair skin, and yellow hair, and heavy armor. And a helmet!” are pretty much exactly what Hilgya looked like around strip 75 or so, and so shouldn’t have eased Greg*'s worries if he was worried that Hilgya was going to show up around Durkon’s level.
I wonder what specific relevance “following the [strict set of rules that govern the Council of Clans]” will have for the plot? Greg* seems to think it’ll make Team Vampire very hard to stop, if they shut down the Order before the Council meeting. I’m just wondering how?
I’m still eagerly anticipating Bloodfeast’s full-sized arrival in that tall banquet hall.
There’s a decent chance that the Dwarves are not Lawful Stupid, and a decent chance that Durkevil thinks they are. Durkon on his worst day may have believed that.
For those wondering about the name Greg*, see here, here, and here. From the first link: [INDENT][INDENT] The entity known variously as “Durkon”*, Greg, and formerly known as the High Priest of Hel is a vampire spirit created by the goddess of Death of the Northern Pantheon, Hel…
There is some difficulty with what name to use to refer to this character, a fact dealt with in the story as well.[3] …When his position as High Priest of Hel was known, he was mostly known by that title alone. But since he abdicated the position, the title is confusing as he technically is not currently the High Priest of Hel, and another vampire is. On the discussion boards, the Number of Character Appearances thread refers to him as “Durkon”*. The Class and Level Geekery thread refers to him as Greg. Both names are references to comic #1030, “Naming Names”. [/INDENT][/INDENT]
Wow. You beat me because I couldn’t find the thread. I went three pages, and it didn’t show up. I guess you got it moved to the front page while I was still looking.
After reading it, besides being annoyed at waiting 10 or so days for a fairly light-weight strip, I had the question What sequence had (Trapped) Durkon “pretend[ing] he was horrified while being secretly thrilled?” If none, then how does Greg know what that sensation is like? Has he been a vampire spirit in another host before?
Wow, what are the chances? I checked OOTS today, because it seemed like about the same amount of time as had passed between 1110 and 1111.
I get that Burlew has a lot on his plate, and that the strip doesn’t make money for him, as such, but the every other week publication schedule is a pain in the ass as a fan.
Mainly, as I’ve written here before, I just hope he has the whole plot for this thing written down somewhere, so we can all know how this thing ends, should, God Forbid, his legendarily terrible health finally end his writing career. Amazing fantasy epic all of the same, and I’m glad I’ve gotten to witness it.
Another question about this strip: What is Durkon trying to do here, with the employee orientation? Bore the vampire into ignoring or glossing over some detail on the wall or in the room of the memory that Durkon was showing him? If so, what would it be? Some explanation for runes on boxes in the freezer, that actually aren’t people’s lunches, but something else?
I think that’s just projection. Kind of like how sociopaths are convinced that everyone else is just faking empathy, and deep down are just as callous as they are, but don’t have the guts to show it.
Whenever I’m trying to find the strip I just put OOTS in the search box and it comes right up. Don’t even have to use the detailed search.
Best I can come up with (besides what Durkula assumed about status effects) is that, like the other “memory pranks,” it’s to discourage him from trying to get memories out of him. It may not actually cause those status affects, but the memory clearly is something that Durkula is not interested in. It’s clear that the memory fight is taking a toll on him, since he’s so frustrated that he even talks about it with others. And frustration begets sloppiness.
It’s possibly already helped, even. Last time he didn’t think to check with Durkon about any clerics who fit that description. If Durkon were less defiant, that would be the obvious thing to do. But he didn’t want to see yet another annoying memory.
Had Durkula actually asked for something, then I could think it was one of the things you mentioned. But, since he didn’t, I think it’s just to keep him from asking more questions in general.
That said, from a narrative perspective, there might be something useful in here. Maybe a lunch with a rune that hasn’t been thrown out will help? Maybe the very rich donors are important? Or maybe foreshadowing some celestial roaches? Sure, maybe it’s all for the joke, but maybe not.
If it were clearer to read the runes, maybe he’d have another easter egg on that wall? Something like his ‘These don’t mean anything’ cryptograms that he did for Darth V or other such.
As far as his frustration, and arrogance, since the vamps’ personalities are largely shaped by what their hosts feel on their worst day, I think there’s a bit of frustration on Durkon’s part over the years at how mind-boggling dumb and distractable a lot of the Order can be. Maybe part of him has always wondered how it would work if Durkon called the shots, and is exacerbated in the overwhelming arrogance and pride of Greg? I mean, he’d never give into it, dwarven duty and all that, plus it’s just never been his style.
But maybe that part of Durkon’s personality is going to have an affinity for what Hilgya and he might have done, had he not sent her back? We know she wants Durkon dead. What happens when she sees that he already is (I know she already knows that he is), and she sees what personality has flooded into its place? I think she knows that all vampires are basically a more urbane version of the spirits that animated the dead in Stephen King’s, “Pet Sematary”, or, from RedCloak’s own mouth, “they’re nothing but bits of skin and bone and dark energy, glued together by magic into the shape of a man.” But still.
All of which is to say, I’m really looking forward to everyone getting to see one another in this banquet hall. Which we should get to see sometime in April…
The strip has made him a LOT of money - over a million dollars - and OOTS products like the calendar and chapter books continue to sell well.
Last summer we got a good idea of how long it takes Burlew to draw a single strip. For 2 to 3 months, he concentrated on doing those to the exclusion of most other tasks. The time between strips during that period was 3 to 4 days. In fact, we can do better: in the first part of that period, the arc was a talk between gods (Hel and that other guy whose name I forget) and during that time, he churned them out about every 3 days. After the story went back to non-gods, it lengthened to about 4 days. Probably the main difference was that the god-arc had larger panels and thus only three rows of panels per page, while the usual strips have 4 rows of panels. So he works at a rate of one row of panels per day. (This is a slower rate than he did earlier in the strip, but every time there’s an art upgrade (and we’ve had, what, 3 of them?) there’s more detail so it takes longer to draw.)
So now he’s producing one every couple weeks or so, which means he’s spending about half his time on other tasks, such as the book he mentioned in a recent tweet.
I couldn’t post this on the GitP boards, because they frown on discussions of the update frequency. But here, we’re free of such constraints.
When did the vampire spirit become Greg?
Here, panel 7, last suggestion.
Quartz, that million dollars was gross, not net. Most of it went to the cost of printing up a whole bunch of books for backers.