T w e n t y S i d e d
Shamus Says:
I just want to note that the above date is a lie, a relic left over from the 2007 run. The comic will continue according to the established pace.
The original plan was for this campaign to be three acts:
I. It Begins
II. It Gets Worse
III. It Ends Badly
We broke from this later. What I’d wanted to do was complete this story, and then move on to some completely different genre with the same characters. Maybe they’d play Star Wars. Or a vampire game. (Which would be a goldmine now that Twilight has come out and created a rift in Vampire fandom.) What we were looking forward to was showing the same characters in different styles and settings. Some campaigns would end early, or simply grind to a halt at some player / GM impass.
But I thought the series should start with a proper three-act arc.
Shawn Says:
See you on Monday.
Top 64 Videogames
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
PC Hardware is Toast
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
Quakecon 2012 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
So, in hindsight … why is the town burning? Did the zombies bring torches?
Maybe some of the villagers tried to fight back by burning the zombies, and one thing led to another?
Ye olde towns were notoriously flammable.
A combination of only having fire for cooking and lighting, and making most of your buildings out of wood, reeds, and other flammable materials.
So really, it might only take someone with a candle or latern falling over to start the flame war.
Yeeeep. Up until fairly recently (like, the early 20th century when fire prevention ordinances and properly trained fire brigades started to be rigidly enforced), fires can and did wipe entire towns off the map, and often these fires were started by relatively innocuous causes like somebody just knocking a candle over.
See: The Great Chicago Fire
There’s also a reason few buildings in central London are more than 350 years old.
The pyromancer zombie is famous in seven countries for its destructive power and tendency to appear whenever a GM is annoyed
Liechtenstein, Andorra, Vatican, Luxembourg, Trinidad and Tobago, Gibraltar, and Tuvalu, but hey, it counts!
And if white smoke rises, the new pope is a zombie.
He’ll eat your brain, but save your soul.
For dessert, that is.
One of the zombies volunteered to be covered in oil, set alight, and then just ran around bumping into things.
…you know what? I might put that in a D&D campiang one day. Get the necromancer to cast Immunity to Fire damage on it first, give it the ability to run, and you’ve got a really unique problem for the party to deal with.
If RTS games taught me anything it is that buildings when assaulted with force of any sort tend to eventually catch on fire.
If you punch it enough, it will catch fire and then suddenly burn down into a perfectly flat surface.
Clearly it’s a Zombie Inferno.
Haven’t you learned history through video games like I did? Medieval buildings caught on fire automatically if hit a certain number of times.
In all of zombie fiction, the mere existince of a zombie plague seems to suddenly make cities light on fire or explosions happen. Sometimes this can be logically explained as “people in a panic starting fire by accident during violent encounters or on purpose to try to hurt zombies” and sometimes it truly appears to be “if something bad happens, the city responds with the pathetic fallacy and catches fire spontaneously to reflect the circumstances.”
Looking on the bright side, the roasted ham and bacon will be amazing.
If only there were any bacon to begin with.
Whaddya mean? They’ve got the pigs, they’ve got the fire…all they need to do is get the zombies out of the way.
Or maybe they could invite the zombies to the BBQ…
I meant there was no bacon in town before the heroes’ triumphant return. I didn’t assume anyone would take the time off to butcher the pigs and roast bacon while the town is still a) on fire and b) under siege by an undead horde.
I assumed there would only be bacon if the villagers had had the pigs before being slaughtered. The heroes, after all, brought live pigs, not pigs prepared for consumption…
For fun: I almost mistyped twice: “horse” instead of “horde”, “pugs” instead of “pigs”. I liked the idea of switching these words out, actually.
I am curious how a quick pig fetch was going to lead to repelling zombies or if it was just a new quest timing out.
In a competently-run game, the pig quest would have been a quick, easy encounter/dungeon crawl to give the players a ‘warm up’ to feel out how the players and characters handle in combat, both individually and as a group (In Order of the Stick’s “On the Origin of PCs”, this mid-level party’s first encounter is against a handful of kobolds. Through badly-planned readied actions, the party practically blows itself up, and the kobolds die of laughter at the incompetence). Once the players get the easy run out of the way, they return and the plot kicks off with the zombie attack.
I do find it curious because this still shows a surprising degree of flexibility from Casey (well, surprising FOR Casey), I’d half expect the zombies to camp outside of town for a week waiting for the party to come back. Maybe they pissed him off enough to break him out of following the script.
Ooooor alternately this was all according to the script, including the “if only” line and the reality of it is that they’d always come back to the burning village…
I actually think the zombies weren’t part of the DM’s original plan – I think he added them just to say “F*** YOU” to the players for ruining his dungeon…
It’s also possible that they were always going to be attacking the town whenever the party got back, but the GM decided to blame it on them wasting time.
Based upon the caption, I’m guessing he was going to have the zombies attack anyway, just not until after they had arrived. Congratulations, you’ve left the rails. Now pay the consequences.
Casey should have made them zombie goblins, got more use out of his miniatures.
Just say that Deuse Bajj deliberately raised the specific goblins from the pig cave because he knew they’d have beef with the players.
Well, magic +1 swords aren’t flammable right? And the owner certainly will not object to the party taking it now. Seems like a clear win for these kinds of players…
OMG giving the DMotR treatment to the Twilight movies would be AMAZING.
Also, The Hunger Games.