Level 7: #60
Chapter: Comic, Level 7 — Circus Minimus
Rusty & Co.
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A girallon in a tutu. And here I thought Level 6 brought us some strange monsters.
Stared at the garillon for a while, wondering why I kept picturing a bowler hat, shorts and suspenders, and hearing a wisp of a tune. Finally, the words came.
We’ve got a gorillon for sale
Killa Gorillan for sale
Won’t you buy him
Take him home and try him
Garillon for sale
Now how the heck did she do that? Did she sense a piranha-shaped disturbance in the Force, or did she recognize the smell of piranha from her previously-undisclosed years working aboard a river ferry in the Amazon?
More to the point, who do you suppose had the unenviable job of painting clown faces on all those fish?
Read back to http://rustyandco.com/comic/level-7-17/. When she took a pitchfork as her weapon, she was told it was a Trident of Warning. It allows you to detect aquatic predators within 680 feet, and some limited information about them (their type, numbers, and position).
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/magicWeapons.htm#tridentofWarning
continuity? in a series? I DON’T KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH THIS!!!
What you do, is rely on your intrepid fellow commenters. We will explain these things.
Be forewarned that sometimes they don’t even happen in the same story, as when Mimic was telling Roxy about the time he saved the universe by rapping.
Let us be just. He just told her it was magical. She was the one who imagined the powers.
And now we definitely know that it’s her, because the previous weapons could have just been her fighting skills making her look very good.
Ooops. Misphrased. Now we know that she makes the weapons magical, rather than she just thinks they are magical because she fights so well with them.
Many years ago, a player used this trick in a Fantasy Hero campaign I ran (I know he ripped off this idea from someplace, but there are just too many source-options to determine which it was). Then he spent the points to make the ability fully invisible – as in utterly undetectable.
That character was otherwise ineffective – but wowsers, did the NPCs and the other PCs in the group hate that guy. “Dammit, Wren, every damn town someone steals your weapon and we become colateral damage! It’s not funny!”
Incidentally, she wasn’t “told” it was a Trident of Warning; she simply announced this fact (and it has apparently become true, despite the fact that it’s actually a tetradent). The specific Chekhov’s Gun for this strip is 7-18, where she explicitly says – for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t read the DMG – that it detects “dangerous fishies and such”.
Her next weapon is going to be a magic feather than allows her to fly.
Meh, she can already jump good…
Or, you know, we have proof positive that clowns (killer;piranha;aquatic subtypes) are automatically evil ’cause her Detect Evil could have alerted her through such a thin -presumably wood- barrier.
Evil Clowns, I say! Or Maddie being her usual self in regards to ‘weaponry’, AKA a walking version of the Belt of Genre Swapping that only applies to handheld gardening tools. But I submit it could be due to the Clown racial subtype xD
I was thinking the same thing. I’m sure Maddie believes it’s a Trident of Warning, but this is hardly proof it IS one. I don’t know if piranha smell like EVIL but they definitely smell like FISH (and make noise under the floorboards, etc) and ol’ Madeline’s proven to have exceptional senses.
perception is based on wis, which she’d have a high stat in being a paladin and all.
She didn’t even notice she was fighting a giant sockpuppet, or that she was talking to a mirror. Wisdom is not one of her high stats.
Isn’t that pitchfork a Trident of Warning?
It isnt, or it shouldnt be.
But madeline has the power of belief.
Everything she is told will hold true for her.
Thus she learned from de feet.
Actually, she was not told it was a Trident of Warning. Just that it was a “powerful weapon”. She did it all by herself.
Cherry on the cake: from the little I gathered in my D&D years, a trident, warning or not, is not exactly high on the players’ wish list, outside of an underwater campaign. Especially when the previous weapon was a vorpal shovel – I mean, halberd. Here I was telling myself “right, a trident of warning. How useful that’s gonna be?”
I should have seen it coming…
Perhaps she has that thing, animal affinity? Or do only rangers get that?
Madaline waved the weapon around over her head, which everyone knows is how we tell if it’s magical.
@Helianthus. The one weapon my paladin had from almost the beginning was a Trident of Warning. This in a campaign where I think we got within shouting distance of a major body of water three times in the year and 1/2 I played before PCSing. I don’t think she used it, even as a weapon, more than twice, but it was a tangible symbol of her beginnings and she treasured it. Broke her heart when she had to trade it to some merfolk to go drag a couple of the party off the ocean floor. No big deal…except they were stone at the time and buried in the wreckage of our ship.
Just a note. This was in an AD&D campaign, based on a long running D&D campaign, that was constantly evolving as the different books came out. When the guy I was dating at the time introduced me to the campaign, the only book out was the Player Handbook. DMG came out a couple weeks after I started playing. I was playing first level characters in a party of eighth to twelfth level characters and it was a hoot. A group of rampant roleplayers is a great way to be introduced to gaming! I still tell stories of Erlendil the Demon Slayer (also Erlendil the Accursed), Kamchek the cleric with his color coded mules (potions were on the red one, scrolls on the blue), Deth the bard and her baby blue dragon Grisellda (baby dragons get too big to carry FAST and they can’t walk all that far without getting tired), and Blecka’s cleric with the phobia about giant bugs of any kind. He’d whale the tar out of them, hand off his weapon to his valet (noble birth) and trot off to the bushes to get sick.
A girallon. Wearing a tutu. …..Well this should be interesting.
With clown face paint. It’s a happy girallon.
Who was the unlucky (and now finger-less) bastard that had to paint all those piranas?!
I’m more curious how many of these circus derro got ripped in half trying to put a tutu and makeup on that Girallon.
“They do it when they’re small!”
“Ehh-h-h-h, it LOOKS fairly butch!”
Wait… aha, I think I see how they got this Girallon into a tutu. It’s been declawed. Look carefully at its fingertips – Girallons normally have claws about as long as your fingers which they use for ripping up anything that presents itself as either prey or a threat. This one’s got neatly-clipped nails.
‘Course, I’m willing to bet its slam attacks are almost as nasty as the claws of your average Girallon, but at least it can’t rend!
Perhaps Maddie is a variant Paladin who can roll randomly on the magic items table whenever she picks up an improvised weapon, and thenceforth that improvised weapon behaves – for her and her alone – exactly as if it were the weapon it rolls itself as?
That would definitely be worth giving up the Paladin’s Mount.
Since the previous arc, I’ve been of the firm belief that Maddie is a half-ork. Not orc, ork.
That would explain the red boots*.
*For those who don’t know about WH40K: orks think red objects go faster.
Re: giving up the Paladin’s mount for something more often useful in an underground dungeon
There already are a few official rules on the topic. In the Player Handbook II (D&D 3.5), it is possible to give up on the mount to get instead the ability “smiting charge” – extra damages if you combine a charge and a smite. Plus, if your charge misses, you don’t expend your smite.
Pathfinder (that is, the beta version) proposes a “Divine bond”, which can take the form either of a mount, or of a angel enhancing your weapon, either as straight +1, +2…, or as a mix of +1’s and other special enhancements, like “holy”, “keen”… (sounds familiar? No “vorpal” or “warning” in the initial list, but if you ask your DM nicely…). However, it is limited to 1 min/lvl.
Keeping in mind that this is a webcomic, not a rule-abiding gaming session with a DM trying to keep things balanced, that Madeline seems to have is a form of the Guardian Angel version. A whole flock of them, maybe. Her weapon seems permanently enhanced – at least as long as she has it in her hands.
That, or she is a half-efreet and she unconsciously cast “limited wish” a few times every day…
Didn’t the Joker patent those?
Spider monkey