One of the rules of writing comedy (or whatever it is that I do) is that you shouldn't explain the joke. Explaining a joke is the surest route to killing said joke. However, I realize that not everyone reading this has been playing D&D since the late 70's, so... I'm about to explain the previous strip. God help me. :)
OK, here we go: back in 1975, Gary Gygax (the co-creator of D&D) created the quintessential adventuring party-killing story (or module) called The Tomb of Horrors. It was (and is) renowned for being fiendishly difficult and among the many traps and terrors in that module is the Green Devil Face. It looks much like the one seen in the last strip and many a soul has been disintegrated by climbing inside inside the devil's mouth because the mouth actually functions in a similar manner as a magical artifact called a Sphere of Annihilation. Anything that comes in contact with it is completely and utterly destroyed, except magic items (such as Franz' sword).
So, there you go. See you all next week!
~Rob
Dhur really is a sweet guy, deep inside.
Really deep. Somewhere down there. Maybe to the left. Extra points for somehow making him look like a sweet little boy when he’s genuinely happy.
OOTS referenced it when Gary Gagaxx died and they had an archon leading him through the heavens advising hi that he would probably want to avoid the area for characters who died without a saving throw, whereby Gygaxx chuckled and referred to this same specific trap in the module.
Never knew of it myself before that reference, but yeah, that’s what they mean by old school. And the no saving throw made it particularly vicious.
The problem with Tomb of Horrors is that it wasn’t simply dangerous, or even deadly. It was that there was no *logical* way of avoiding most of the traps. “Left or right?” No torch smoke drifting one way or the other, no sounds or smells, no light, no hints….*shrug* “Left.” “You die, no save, new character.” The deaths weren’t consequences, the vast majority of the time, they were just what happened. You may as well roll a die every round, and kill off a character if it comes up with an even number, or just drop a ceiling on them out of the blue and kill the whole party. The initial concept was to see just *how deadly* a module could be, but…so what? Any DM can be a jerk and just say “Everyone’s dead, new characters.”
They should have designed a “deadliest dungeon” that was very *risky*, but not random. And the players should have been rewarded. Any DM that forced/tricked a group to go through ToH should have been beaten to death with dice bags.
@Andor- And now Knights of the Dinner Table comes to mind, “No d4s! No d4s!