Minrah being the 7th, I would assume.
D’oh, of course :smack:
In the last panel, where the hell did Roy’s sword get to?
ETA Never mind. I can see the pommel peeking out from behind his beanie.
nm
Yay! Roy’s throwing shade!
Kind of a padding strip.
And yet, he’s still supportive of his family. His sister comes up with a big improvement on a standard spell, he’s proud of her. Even when it turns out that the improvement is highly situational.
As long as the thread was updated and the comic doesn’t have much meat to discuss, I’ll say that I’m missing the GitP forums and the other D&D haunts don’t really scratch the same itch. Get better (replaced) soon, forum servers!
I doubt it. It will probably be plot central that Julia can contact Roy. This sets up- important information for the book.
I think Burlew is poking fun at all of the fans who just spent a week speculating on whether or not Julia is dead.
But it’s a joke that won’t age well. From now on, everyone will read 1192 immediately after 1191.
This sort of thing seems useful even if it isn’t fixed up. Essentially you have a higher level spell that binds two people, and then that gives them an improved sending spell (no word limit) for a lower level cast. It seems like the sort of tradeoff that I could see being made in a game–I wouldn’t expect a strictly better sending spell to ever be created.
I actually wonder if this could be true in the Stickverse, too. She might figure out a way to attach it to other things that bind people together, but you still need a higher level spell first to get the benefits. Do the rules of that universe run not only on narrativium, but also game-ballancium?
That depends on just what sort of bond is needed. The bond she’s using right now is so strong that it keeps people out of their proper afterlife-- How many folks would be willing to accept that just to be able to Skype more easily?
In addition to letting the readers know/laughing at speculation that Julia was dead, doesn’t their conversation also remind the reader that very few entities are aware of what’s at stake? Julia’s casual selfishness about Roy possibly killing the lich and screwing up her school project, was jarring to read. Especially after a few hundred pages of saving the world.
A bit of reflection though, and it makes sense for her to be annoyed, when the lich has lasted all of this time and seemingly would last forever. And only now, just when she’s done a great job of creating a rather nifty spell, is Roy (from her perspective) bothering to get rid of the lich, and screw up all of her hard work.
Another thing, unrelated to their conversation, when last we saw Lien, O-Chul, and the Tomb, there were mountain ridges and a large bugbear village. I don’t see any of that in the far, establishing shots of the Mechane, and even though they’re a few miles away, shouldn’t we still see that?
I think her classwork would be screwed up regardless of Roy/Xykon. She said that she had to fix it before turning it in and was just using the current form as proof of concept. Presumably her instructors aren’t going to be interested in testing and grading a spell that does nothing for them unless they happen to have a Blood Oath-sworn relative around.
I suspect she won’t be able to fix it either. After all, this is just a senior project, so she’s not exactly a high level magical researcher. You’d think that many of those high level magical researchers have tried to come up with an improved Sending spell and all of them failed. Or at least didn’t distribute their results if they did succeed. I find that unlikely, so she’s very likely to also fail.
So what level will Julia be when she graduates?
A version of Sending that requires a lower spell-level slot and has no word limit, but only works in a very limited special case, probably isn’t a half-bad senior project. They can’t all be game-changing (literally) breakthroughs.
Sort of reminds me of the satellite project my grad school took on. The way everyone figured it, if we made a functional satellite consistent with the design constraints, delivered it to the launch company on time, and it blew up on launch, that was a 90% success. Which in fact turned out to be exactly what happened (though they did later build another one that successfully launched and completed its mission).