It kind of looks like the elf’s guard turned his head all the way around, like Linda Blair did in the Exorcist.
Got it in one.
I was just trying to figure out why there’s a big button in front of him. I thought it was some kind of Kickstarter-related in-joke.
Yup, that is his back. He’s looking way over his left shoulder. I couldn’t imagine why it’s drawn that way, but it looks very intentional. You can see that the armor he wears has three tails in the front and two in the back.
The crew seem to be getting a bit cranky. Dun dun DUUUUUUUUUNNN!!!
Individual XP tallies are the worst, I don’t blame them for getting cranky.
I meant the ship’s crew, who seems to be chafing at being ordered around by Bandana in the service of someone else’s quest rather than devoting their efforts to more profitable endeavors.
panel 1: Psteve’s psister?
Well, it’s nice to see that Roy isn’t completely boneheaded in his opinions on Durkon.
Well the fact is Roy’s gut is smarter than Belkar’s. And I can see Roy’s problem. He’s choosing between,
a) Durkula is Durkon, just a little darker.
and
b) Durkula is a wholly corrupted Durkon, who is fake acting like a team player when in fact… well, what?
Does the D&D world have any precedent for the sort of captured-soul horror that Durkon inhabits? If so, I’m guessing it’s something that only V would be familiar with. Methinks Haley has the best chance of intuiting something off with Durkon, but Rich has wisely kept them apart.
Also jokes aside, Roy got at least a little XP during the day, right? For solid roleplaying? Hrmm.
I dunno. I think of all the other members of the group, Durkon is probably the one Hailey is least close to. And that includes Belkar - Hailey might not like Belkar, but she spent all that time with him when the party was split and she understands him.
Rich’s interpretation of vampirism is not in any way inconsistent with the game rules. The game rules say that the vampire has access to all of the original person’s memories and abilities, which the High Priest of Hel does. They do not ever say that the vampire is the same person.
Personally, I like the way Burlew is handling it, because I’m really not a fan of any mechanic which changes a person’s alignment against their will. You can change their behavior with spells like Dominate or the like, but the underlying person is still in there trying to get out (with varying degrees of success, depending on the means of control). It works a lot better than the assumption that the real Durkon would just completely change his worldview.
And no, I’m not a fan of the Helm of Opposite Alignment, either.
I like this interpretation because it makes Vampires truly horrific, as opposed someone receiving a list of extra pwers.
I was just wondering about the extent to which team Oots had the necessary imagination to suss what’s going on. I see that Magic Jar was around in the 2nd edition. Necromancy isn’t V’s field, though of course she may have heard of it. I’m guessing it isn’t a common thing though.
I don’t think it’s really a common thing, no ; but heretofore I somehow hadn’t considered how truly horrific that spell really is. And I play a *Pathfinder *character whose main draw and shtick is that she can Magic Jar undead beings more or less at whim - whether they’re sentient or not.
(Gravewalker archetype of the Witch, BTW. She’s not evil, either. She simply has a very utilitarian approach to corpses, check your breathing privilege, don’t necroshame.)
I’ve seen this version of vampirism occasionally used in a horror novel. The idea is that the vampire is not the person who died. That person died but is trapped inside the body and can’t go to their afterlife. The vampire is some outside entity (usually a demon) that inhabited the body when it died and has control of both the body and the mind of the dead person. By this logic, killing a vampire isn’t killing the person. That person’s already dead. All you’re doing by killing the vampire is setting the dead person free.
I think the opposite way is much more disturbing. There’s a lot of ways a person can be killed and replaced by a duplicate. It’s already very nearly happened with Elan and Nale, except that Elan didn’t get killed. The idea that a vampire can take a person and twist them into a warped and evil version of themselves is something I find terrifying on a far more fundamental level - it threatens my central notion of myself as a person. I think it’s also more horrifying if you’re being stalked and attacked by your spouse/child/parent/best friend, who now hates you, than to be stalked and attacked by something that just happens to look a lot like them.
That was how they played it in Buffy, I think, though they were a little vague about what exactly it meant. It allowed Buffy to slay vampires without violating her “no killing humans” rule.
Buffy’s vampires were a little bit of both I think. On the one hand you had a demon crashing inside your body with you still in there. On the other hand, your “soul” (undefined, but functionally one’s conscience and notion of right/wrong) left the building.
So you’re still you, but the worst possible version of you that’s constantly given pointers by a purely evil being.