***A little 3rd Edition teasing today.It was noted in 3e that a cat was CR 1/4 while a human commoner was somewhere around CR 1/3. Which meant, all things being equal, a house cat could kick the crap out of a grown human being. Okay, the game only referred to "cats", which meant it could just as easily refer to feral cats living in the mean alleys of Waterdeep and not necessarily the contemporary domesticated and pampered Mr. Whiskers. Even then, the average medieval tabby kept as a pet was likely a skilled mouser and trained killing machine.
***The "bag o' rats" is one of the sillier ways some D&D players try and mess with the reality of their game world. I don't know of anyone who actually used a bag of rats, and personally consider it more of a "thought experiment", but you never know what a player will try.The bag works like this: the PC has a power that triggers off the death of an enemy. They kill something and a power triggers. Like a raging charge or extra attack or some other bonus. So, the cheap solution is to just carry a bag of rats and kill one whenever you need the power to activate.
***Vecna is a classic D&D villain.Not being a major D&D lore junkie, I'm uncertain if the artifacts attributed to him came first, or the evil plots and story. I believe it was quite late in the game's early history before he appeared in an adventure, but that doesn't mean he wasn't huge in a homegame or the magazines. Vecna is most famous for his artifacts. The Hand of Vecna and the Eye of Vecna. The cool hook behind them was that they could replace missing body parts. You can imagine them being introduced to the game after an evil DM removed a hand from a player, oinly to have it replaced with an evil magic item. Although, there is the cool dilemma of finding the item first and then having to do some self-surgery to use the artifact. Amusingly, the day after I drew this comic I ran my Ravenloft homegame, and removed a PC's eye. Fate?
***I would just like to say, on my initial pencil sketching, the cow's head looked awesome. It was a great cow. It's cow mamma would have been proud. Somewhere when inking and tweaking I lost all the awesome. The body was always poorly proportioned and I didn't notice until looking at the much smaller picture.
***When I first started doing the comic, one of my first ideas was fighters casting spells. It was also requested quickly by Newbie DM who is more than a little responsible for my doing this strip.It's a tricky idea for a one-panel comic. Trying to represent a classical 1e fighter and a modern 4e fighter without multiple panels of dialogue. Depicting a "spell" without motion. 4th Edition fighters, at least the early ones, kinda do cast spells. Which bugged the crap out of me and really drove me away from the edition for a time. It's not the fact that fighters have powers, but that they have the same powers as wizards and clerics: the same number of powers, the same formatting, the same recharging, and the same usage, etc. Some people really dug the fighter powers, so it's a matter of personal taste...
