I, for one, am happy to not see an orange dot floating next to V’s head for the next umpteen hundred pages regardless of what rule tweaking made it happen.
New comic. Really.
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0968.html
Sorry for the delay. This tablet sucks for cutting and pasting.
Well, two interesting things I get from this one.
[spoiler]First, that it’s both known and apparently normal that vampires are not controlled by their pre-death mortal souls. Which means that Durkon isn’t a special case there, and that it’s possible the party will stumble on that knowledge at some point.
And it also gives us a clue as to why Vamp-Durkon came up with the idea of going to various temples, he’s looking for info of some kind.[/spoiler]
Why spoiler tags?
I got the opposite impression, going by Durkevil’s eagerness to prevent the gnome cleric from bringing it up.
Or an artifact.
Yes; Giant specifically says in the forum thread that the scene wasn’t meant to show that clerics know, but that only one cleric knew.
Or other high-level clerics who could be potential threats.
It was right after the post with the link to the comic and I didn’t want to spoil anything for anyone who glanced down. A habit I have in threads like this one.
I was a little surprised at how easily Durkula dominated the cleric, who should have gotten a will negation. What’s more concerning is if Durkferatu is building up a squad of dominated clerics that will go on a rampage as soon as he leaves town.
Can vampires control their dominated subjects telepathically like that? As in Durkon didn’t tell the cleric how to end his statement, it was just “Zoop!” dominated then the cleric changes his remarks.
Yep, their domination ability works like Dominate Person, which allows them telepathic control of their subject. (well, if the subject speaks a language they speak. Otherwise they’re limited to basic commands)
One that is appreciated, at least by me.
Thought that might be the case but was thrown by times like this. I realize that Durkon saying it also lets the reader know what actually happened.
Well, the last thing Belkar did was question “What do you say to that?”, so it would be appropriate to have a verbal response. The real problem is the spell-description includes “Obviously self-destructive orders are not carried out.” but rule of funny.
I’m no expert on D&D or its rules, but I thought that
- That cleric had already been established as too low of a level to do what Roy needed
- Durkon by himself is a pretty high level Cleric
- The vampire ability gives, IIRC, an additional 5 levels to an already high level Durkon
Adding all that together means that Durkoff would be a completely overwhelming force to that entire temple.
More or less. The vampires dominate ability has a save DC of 10 + 1/2 the vamps hit dice* + their charisma modifier. Being a cleric, Durkon’s charisma was sleep ready probably decent, despite dwarves penalty to CHA, but vampires get another +4 on top of that. The save for Durkon’s dominate would probably be in the low 20s at the least. Assuming an 18 wisdom on the cleric, he’d have to at around 10th level just to have a 50/50 chance of making the save, and that guy looked like some sort of novitiate. Probably the guy in the temple everyone else makes fun of because he reads a lot of book.
He’d probably get on real well with Roy.
*hit dice are essentially levels for monsters. Being turned into a vamp doesn’t give you extra HD, so this would just be Durkon’s cleric levels, which are probably around 15 or so.
New Strip #969
Oh Belkar, you have to learn that alignment has consequences.
Although seriously, previously Belkar would have gone for it with the gnome girl. I wonder if the giant is portraying him as tending towards neutral, and Chekov’s amulet will be the thing that shows his change at some point in the future.
Am I the only one who thought the gnome was cute?