Yep, 2012. I have the patch from the Kickstarter clipped to a rack next to my computer.
“I participated!”
I don’t think I got the patch, and I long ago used up the notepad, but I still have Roy guarding the grocery list on my fridge.
Heck, I still have a few of the stickers left. Belkar and Mr. Scruffy are on my phone case, and the rest of the Order are scattered around my computer desk. Roy is guarding the grocery list on the fridge as well. That was a fun set of stretch rewards.
I, too, have Roy guarding my grocery list. 
I’ve recently backed him on Patreon, and the one real benefit of doing that is I get an email when a new strip is posted. (The “rewards” are pretty much, “feel good about supporting this artist”.)
A wise lesson for him to have learned, after the kickstarter.
(I think I still have the stickers around somewhere, but I’m not much of a stickering person)
Neat. I hadn’t considered what the spacing of the doors implied for the layout of the dungeons, before Roy brought it up. I wonder if there is some type of divination magic that can act upon the recent physical proximity of the Go stone to the paladins? Or if it’s just meant to reassure the Order, “Yup. They were there at some point.”
Do you mean the That stone?
Look at Belkar, tracking stuff. As opposed to before.
He’s grown quite a lot. Not just morally.
I guess the party has leveled at least once since Azure City (Elan picked Neutralize Poison as a spell) so Belkar might have actually put a point into Survival. Although I realize that, at this point, AD&D 3.5e is just a suggestion of a framework for the strip and characters gonna do what characters gonna do for story purposes.
He was at least passably competent at tracking in the aftermath of the Battle of Azure City, enough so to spot Monster-San’s tracks as “really weird” and to rule out the possibility that they were goblin tracks.
I realized it when we first saw all the doors, but never bothered to bring it up. I figured either 75% or more of the doors were duds or the dungeons were mostly in the 4th dimension. More likely that Burlew just didn’t consider the implications of having all the doors together like that. Didn’t think it was worth a conversation, though, since that would be the inevitable conclusion. Someone on the GitP forum probably brought it up and Burlew saw it there, hence Roy’s comment. I don’t read that forum much anymore.
They do tend to go off in the weeds on this or That (LOL) issue. Usually alignment related. Which usually bores the shit out of me to read. The less Burlew gives them to talk about, the more up their own navels the commentariat discussion tends to go. I only recently restarted participating there, and only because I had a few questions about the plot.
I think Belkar has always been capable of tracking. He just didn’t care enough to do it.
He joined the group because he was looking for a place to hide out from the law. Beyond picking up some occasional loot and getting a chance to kill people, he didn’t care whether or not the group succeeded in its goals. So he didn’t bother to use his skills for a purpose he wasn’t interested in.
Back when the strip was more “by the books” Belkar makes clear that he has zero ranks in Survival and we know that he also has a very low Wisdom score (both from that strip and early on when V cast Owl’s Wisdom on him so he could use a cure wounds scroll).
He was probably less mechanically capable of tracking at that point than Roy (who at least has a decent Wisdom score).
But at the start he was the world’s best tracker under 4 feet tall.
This. It seems almost inevitable that the strip discussions devolved into an alignment argument, so I largely stopped reading those unless there was something in the strip I didn’t understand. Occasionally, there’d be another thread that seemed interesting, but even those seem to get rarer and rarer.
Huh. That was the first thing I thought when I saw all the doors, and I wondered what Burlew was going to do with that. I still do.
I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s a good point. Having a possession or garment of the target gives a bonus to scrying.
Edit - although, how long has it been since O’chul left Gobbotopia? Is he still cloistered?