Vampire, i believe.
Two, actually: Curly and the high priestess still at the Godsmoot.
She might not be counting Curly, since she’s running away.
The Frontarch (high priestess) is stuck at the Godsmoot until this vote is done. She can’t do anything until then. So Hel is obviously only counting Curly, who is still a free agent.
But Loki is right; it’s time for Hel to call it quits on this caper. It’s not going anywhere. Even if Curly was the one who dominated that last councilor who hasn’t voted yet, they can undominate him before the meeting resumes.
Though it looks like Hel’s watching Curly in the scrying pool in the last panel. It’d be nice if Hilgya would just Flame Strike her into oblivion already, but leaving a vampire around to cause death and destruction works too. Besides, it gives the Durkon extended family something to do besides piling onto the Mechane with the Order and going to the Tomb.
Re Song of Freedom, I’d think it would be just fine on a petrification effect, were it not for that silly ‘only-reverses-5th level spells-and-below’ thing. Then again, does it work to unstone people who’ve run across a basilisk or the like? I guess from reading you guys that it does. And Finagle’s point about there probably being a few S-t-F scrolls in the first aid kit is a good one.
Dtilque, how do you think the Snarl issue will be resolved, if not by the purple quiddity plot point? We’ve been told the Snarl is the embodiment of the Gods’ arguing with each other. I can’t see an outcome where the Gods all agree to never argue with each other again, so is the solution to just make another prison for the Snarl? Or is there some method of combing out or untangling the Snarl? I’ve not read BRIF yet; does Burlew give anymore info about the world in the rift?
I have no idea what the solution to the Snarl will be. It just seems to me that persuading RedCloak to basically drop the Big Plan that he’s so committed to will not work. After all, he did
kill his own brother
to maintain it. So now some enemies are going to change his mind? Doesn’t seem probable.
There’s also the fact that the gods (Thor and Odin) do not know all the facts. They’re unaware of the planet inside the rifts. That’s an indication that their plans may not happen as they wish.
No he doesn’t give any more info about it there. At least nothing that’s not in one of the on-line strips.
Well, there is my theory that one of the Gods of the East is still alive, unbeknownst to the other gods and even to himself, but let’s not get into that again.
Why is Curly repeating ‘Not again’ over and over?
Did I miss some traumatic backstory?
Per the GITP forums, which jogged my memory, she had to run away from the first ambush of the Order, where V Forcecaged the entire party, and then she had to run away from Durkula getting his ass kicked. Now Durkon’s extended family is beating on her team again.
Plus it’s been a very short time since she was vampirized to begin with. It’s been a bitch of a day.
FWIW, I am on Team Alessan with regards to the MITD. I think it fits better than any of the other suggestions. A Protean? Really? Just call it a shoggoth already…
I forget which one of you called RedCloak ‘the personification of the Sunk Cost Fallacy’, but I agree. He could turn away from the Plan, but then Right Eye, and abandoning Gobbotopia, would have been for nothing.
I, likewise, am on Team Alessan.
I have become so completely sold on the idea that I’m basically willing to say that if Burlew chooses differently, it is Burlew who is wrong.
If he were to have that realization, though, he’d have to confront Xykon. And that has real problems. Shoot at Xykon and if you miss, he just might decide that all goblins everywhere needed to die. And he has the means by which to achieve such things.
What’s confusing about Break Enchantment is that there are two different ways that it’s superior to Dispel Magic. The first is that Dispel Magic only removes ongoing magic: It’s therefore useless against petrification (such as from Flesh to Stone), because there, the magic only happens at the moment of transformation, and afterwards you’re left with a nonmagical statue, with nothing to dispel. But Break Enchantment can explicitly reverse even instantaneous effects.
The second limitation of Dispel Magic is that there are some spells, like Bestow Curse, that do have a continuing magical effect, but which explicitly state that Dispel Magic won’t work on them. Break Enchantment also works on those, provided that the spell is low enough in level.
The limitation on spell level doesn’t apply to Flesh to Stone, for the same reason that Dispel Magic doesn’t work on it in the first place: There is no ongoing spell to dispel. There’s no difference between a statue made by Flesh to Stone, a statue made by a cockatrice, a statue made by a basilisk, or a statue made by Prismatic Spray: All of them are nonmagical statues that used to be creatures, and the specific magical effect that produced them (including its spell level or even whether it was a spell) is irrelevant, because that magic is now gone.
Oh, and I still say that Thor’s plan isn’t an abandonment of Redcloak’s plan; it’s its fulfillment. Redcloak’s plan is to put enough power in the hands of the Dark One that the other gods will be forced to recognize him and deal with him as an equal. Thor recognizes that the Dark One has enough power that he wants to deal with him as an equal. The only surprising thing to Redcloak is that the Plan succeeded much more quickly than expected.
Or at least, that should be the only surprising thing to Redcloak. As others have pointed out, he does not have a strong history of thinking rationally about The Plan.
A random thought occurred to me; where is Durkon’s soul right now? Is being turned into stone a form of death, in which case his soul has made another trip to the afterlife? Or is he in a form of suspended animation and his soul is trapped in his stone body?
Suspended animation, at least in OOTS world.
spoiler for Snips Snails and Dragon Tales.
There’s a Durkon story where he encounters a medusa. He persuades her to take a job in a clinic. She turns terminally ill patients to stone, in the hopes that future developments in clerical magic will be able to cure them. Metaphorically like cryogenic freezing of dead bodies, but with more chance of success. The implication is that no time passes for the patients while in stone form.
Xykon once talked about how evil beings needed to avoid being punished in the afterlife. This seems like another possibility. As an emergency measure, an evil wizard could carry a magic item that would turn him into stone as he was dying. Being in suspended animation might not be great but it beats eternal damnation.
That said, what happens if the stone body is damaged? Does it still hold the person’s soul if you break off a limb? How about breaking off their head? Or grinding it up into gravel? At some point, does the person die for real?
My guess is that it may be a fulfillment of Redcloak’s plan, but not of the Dark One’s plan. I’d be surprised if the DO’s real objective isn’t basically the same as Hel’s: become the supreme god over all the others. The only difference is Hel was just going for supremacy over the Northern pantheon, while the DO wants it over all three. Now he may have told Redcloak something different, but that’s just to get a young, idealistic cleric to enthusiastically work towards fulfillment.
A stray thought that came to me: If the gods ever wanted to give the goblins a level field, but didn’t want to give up land of their followers, they could raise up a new continent somewhere, say to the east of the main continent, and decree that this new land belongs to goblinoid races.
spoiler for Snips Snails and Dragon Tales.
In the story mentioned above, the medusa’s victims (before she takes her new job) actually *are *broken down into gravel. It is explicitly stated that they are still alive.
Also:
Celia didn’t know how long she’d been transmuted.
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0070.html
Haley was stoned in the middle of a sentence, and resumed the sentence when the enchantment was broken.
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0789.html
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0815.html
It seems that no time at all passes for the person in stone form.
(spoiler cut 'cause the tag does not work in a quoted post)
Please tell methe medusa’s name was Alcor.
From the Flesh to Stone description:
If you busted a person into gravel, you’re going to want to track all the pieces and have a way to reassemble it before reversing the effect. That said, it doesn’t specify a point where reversal is impossible. Which make for an interesting question: one if I took one small piece and reversed it – can I still reverse the rest later or is the person dead now?