False. Xykon did.
I’ll also quibble that V’s upgraded power was “complete”. It was ephemeral.
False. Xykon did.
I’ll also quibble that V’s upgraded power was “complete”. It was ephemeral.
Per Rich, it was complete in that Vaarsuvius had access to every school of magic.
Where’s the fun in that?
Who does he think he is? JK Rowlings?
Xykon had more power when he fought Vaarsuvious. But Vaarsuvius had already lost a substantial portion of his power at that point. At his original level, when he still had Haerta linked to him (who was “the most powerful of the three by a fair bit”) he may have had more power than Xykon.
And es problem in the fight with Xykon wasn’t a lack of raw power, anyway; it was that since e never earned it, e didn’t know how to use it effectively. Note that when e started falling back on es own old familiar standbyes like Explosive Runes, e started being effective again, even though a third-level spell is far less powerful than what Xykon’s slinging around.
No, JMS.
And poor Belkar didn’t even get to remember it.
I liked that whole “out of control” angle they played with Belkar after Roy’s death, really showing that Roy is the only one who can really handle him and channel his aggressive behavior in the right direction. (Not to mention, his forced character growth starting to turn into real character growth.)
So if Belkar’s character growth occurs after Roy’s death, than Roy was holding Belkar back, right?
Considering the scale of that Kickstarter campaign, that comparison is kinda apropos.
Of course, that’s not mutually exclusive with “making stuff up as he goes along” (cf. A Song of Ice and Fire).
The fact that they are characters in a webcomic based around a game that people play is an open secret.
Do you think most characters know or suspect that the the webcomic’s name is “The Order of the Stick”? Do you think Nale, for example, thinks it is called “The Amazing Adventures of Nale and the Linear Guild”, and that when he’s offscreen in the real comic, he thinks it is still following him? If they do know it is called “The Order of the Stick”, and that the members of that order are the main characters, do they just think by the end it’ll be a tragedy instead of a comedy?
Do my posts from a couple of days ago asking if Qarr has a hidden agenda make me looking amazingly prescient now?
The answer is “Yes”.
See Tarquin’s comments that stories never end, sometimes the storyteller just stops telling it. He doesn’t mind that the strip will end at a point where the so-called “good” guys temporarily have the upper hand, since he can just define his own “happy ending” to be whenever he reaches his personal peak.
Another question from the other thread: Any speculations of what Elan’s secret plan is?
We saw he thought of a “totally awesome idea” for a “Super Top Secret Plan” in 836.
Will it defeat Tarquin? “Yes! No! Sort of!”
He needed Durkon’s help for it. And we saw in the next strip that Durkon did help him although he looked confused about it.
Elan is going to manipulate Tarquin to throw in with Xykon, and then put himself into Xykon’s sights, compelling Tarquin to pick Xykon up and hurl him into the Rift.
I’ve already speculated that it’s going to go the opposite way.
There are two gates left. That virtually guarantees that we’re not going to see the final battle at Girard’s Gate. The final battle will be at Kraagar’s Gate, which means Girard’s Gate serves some other narrative purpose.
My theory? Burlew has put a lot of work into building up dramatic tension between the Order and the Linear Guild. Xykon and Redcloak have sort of vanished from the story, although we know they’re heading in the direction of Girard’s Gate. The current story arc is approaching two hundred strips so we should expect some major event to end the current book. I think it’s obvious: Xykon arriving at Girard’s Gate.
I think the current fighting we’re seeing between the Order and the Linear Guild is just a set-up. When Xykon arrives, both groups are going to realize he’s a much bigger threat than their opposite numbers are and this will force them at ally together against Xykon. The next book will be about how the combined Order of the Stick/Linear Guild work together to prevent Xykon from capturing Girard’s Gate.
Keeping the thread alive.
Topic from the other thread and the OOTS forum: was the Oracle telling the truth about Belkar’s death?
It’s been established that the Oracle always gives true answers to questions (albeit they’re sometimes incomprehensible until after the fact). But his prediction that Belkar would die within a year wasn’t given in answer to anyone’s question. He just threw it out there.
And then he later made sure that not only did Roy hear it a second time but he also arranged things “accidentally” so Roy would retain the knowledge. Seriously? The Oracle just made a mistake? We had just seen how he makes arrangements to be raised from the dead and to set up revenge months in advance. Does it really seem plausible he accidentally sent Roy away using the one method that would bypass the memory wipe? It seems much more likely that the Oracle intentionally arranged things so that Roy would remember the warning about Belkar’s death while thinking he had put one over on the Oracle.
So let’s say the Oracle looked into the future and saw that Xykon and Redcloak were going to defeat the Order and as a result the universe would be destroyed. And he also saw that this resulted from the Order kicking Belkar out of the group and him not being present at some critical moment.
The Oracle obviously doesn’t want to be wiped from existence along with the rest of the universe. He decided he needed to convince the Order to let Belkar stay in the group, regardless of how irresponsible he acted. And he saw that if Roy and Haley believed Belkar was going to die in a few months, they’d be willing to tolerate him for that long. So the Oracle lied and told them Belkar was going to die.
On what might be a related not, Burlew writes commentaries in his books. Like the Oracle, he usually concludes with information about upcoming events in the story. In his most recent book, he wrote:
Now, the first part is obviously a joke, giving a “prophecy” that consists of a list of vague and trivial events. And maybe it’s just a joke. But maybe there’s another level. Maybe Burlew hid a really critical event in the list by making it sound like it was just something trivial.
Have we seen anyone drinking a beverage in the last couple hundred strips? Yes, we have.
It just seems like part of a short throwaway sequence. But as I’ve noted, Burlew loves to plant seeds like this, that he brings back hundreds of strips later. And note what Belkar says to Elan about the drink - “It will change your life.”
That’s npt a beverage, it’s a spice, presumably a powder.
However we have seen someone drink a beverage.
This. When Vaarsuvius faced Xykon, even after losing the first soul bind, she had much more “raw arcane power” than Xykon. Of course, the problem was that that power was shackled to Vaarsuvius’s lame mid-level ass. If Vaarsuvius was an actual epic-level wizard rather than a 15th level wizard with friends in low places, she would have cast Time Stop without interruption. A couple of Delayed Blast Fireballs would kill Redcloak and Jirix (since V couldn’t know that Xykon was immune to fire). Xykon looked pretty beat up by the end of the fight; without Redcloak’s advice, V could have kicked his ass. Xykon wouldn’t have heard the soul binds saying that Energy Drain effected them; he’d just see that the elf is unaffected, and would assume that V had Death Ward on. So he’d try a different spell, which would buy V enough rounds to kill Xykon. Xykon won by fighting smart, not through any sort of excess of magic.
Of course, had V actually been using that 18 base Int of hers, she would have wiped the floor with Xykon: Ask Durkon to cast Death Ward before teleporting, taking a few rounds to divine some information about Xykon’s defenses (since V has stated that her new powers can pierce the Cloister), etc.
Yeah, V thought she was just gonna walk in there and stick her foot up Xykon’s ass. She wasn’t fighting intelligently at all; she was mad with power. It seemed to her like she could do absolutely anything. Instead, she only succeeded in giving Xykon and Redcloak a kick in their complacency. (Although, I suppose if you think about it, she was very indirectly responsible for Tsukiko’s death, considering that the attack forced the villains to remain in Gobbotopia until finding the phylactery-- where before, they really could have left anytime they wanted to, but for Redcloak torturing O-Chul for shits and giggles.)
On the subject of The Oracle and whether he lied about Belkar’s death: I suppose it’s possible. Someone on the GITP forums who’s played games that Burlew has GMed has said, “When someone in one of his games says something, all you know for a fact is that they said something.” He’s not necessarily acting as the Exposition Fairy, or even telling the truth.
And The Oracle is obviously against Xykon, since he deliberately went on vacation from the Sunken Valley at the same time Xykon would arrive. So, yeah… the idea that The Oracle lied about Belkar’s death to give the Order their own kick in their complacency might not be far from the truth. At least the way I see it.