I was trying to figure out why the bird was wearing some kind of circlet in the sixth panel. Eventually I figured out those are its eyebrows.
Apparently me and everyone else is slacking off 868 was put up at some point 869 was put up this morning Hmm, I should have made two posts for double the likes...
Vampire Belkar. It's got to be Vampire. I'm betting there are too many good Vampire joke possibilities for him to pass up.
I gotta admit, I was not expecting that. Though it wouldn't be fair of Roy was the only one in the team who got to wander through another creature type category, right?
Probably LARP and Masquerade jokes too. ;-) Pretty much had to be a vampire really, as Wraith, Wight, Ghost, Zombie, Skeleton, etc. just wouldn't be funny for Belkar.
Yeah I presume the cleric dude is a vampire lizardman, in the D&D 3rd edition tradition of Vampire being a template that can be applied to any living creature.
The interesting thing is that if the Oracle's prediction is going to come true, this will be a permanent change to Belkar.
It's funny, but often such changes in D&D are harder to overcome than death, which ultimately is just a tax.
What I'm curious about is whether Belkar will be bound to obey his creator or not. Vampire lore isn't unanimous on that topic, though 3.5 D&D is clear that vampire spawn are enslaved until released by their master or until their master is killed. My current prognostication is that Belkar is bound, eventually gets freed with the death of his creator, and then turns down any clerical attempts to fix him because being a vamp is way too awesome. I mean, seriously, Belkar with the ability to turn to mist or dominate lesser minds or call up swarms of bats or energy drain? It sounds like a match made in hell.
Nah, in D&D if you don't like being undead you just have your party members chop off your head and resurrect the corpse. End of problem. Level drain on the other hand is a serious bitch ;-)
What I like about this is it completely reverses the nature of the Nale / cleric dude history. It wasn't Nale being an evil dick, it may have been Nale doing something good for once and saving a bunch of people.
I need a roll to disbelieve with "Nale doing something good" and "saving a bunch of people" under any circumstances beyond "by accident, and then being angry when he found out." Killing a bunch of vampires because they were competing with him for something, sure. Quite possibly that something was "setting orphans on fire" or "bulldozing rest homes for disabled kittens."
If he is, in fact, a vampire then it also means Vetarnias didn't kill his children with the anti-dragon spell.
I think Rasputin Jim is on to something, actually. Snotty elf-centricism and snotty French Canadian nationalism are pretty similar!
Goddammit. You know what's worse? Vetarnias is in my autocorrect on my iPad and made sure I spelled it correctly.
Doesn't this depend on when he was turned? No reason he couldn't have had children before he became a vamp.
