Chapter 69: The Best Laid Plans

[Scalenex]

I liked the punchline but this chapter left me disappointed.  I was hoping for some jokes involving Conan being brought from the brink of death.  First off it was really odd and easy to make fun of the various glyphs written on Conan's face.  Second off, there's a wealth of jokes you could theoretically do involving fighting incorporeal creatures when Valeria is fighting all the vaguely described imp-like things that try to take Conan.

[Matt Albrecht]

Thanks again for the feedback.

There were several reasons why I didn't put any comics around this part:

• I couldn't come up with any kind of reasonable explanation for why a wizard would be performing any kind of recovery ritual.  That, by itself, could span many comics just trying to get Sandra to get past the players' arguments, and I felt that the story was already dragging.
• My original scripts had skipped this part entirely, so I didn't have much planned for it.
• I couldn't come up with anything funny at the time.

That's not to say that nothing happened.  I've had plenty of places where stuff happened in game, but "off screen."  If you had some ideas for a script, I'd love to hear from you.

[Scalenex]

I have two potential jokes for a hypothetical Conan Ressurection Scenario.

First, you can have them ask how a wizard ressurects a cleric and you can try to explain through RPing that his character class is a cleric but his people refer to him as wizard (the word wizard is based off of wise and clerics use wisdom after all).  For an example of a similar joke consult Order of the Stick #209

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0209.html

Second, run with the Conan as dual class fighter/cleric.  He seriously regretted his choice of taking a level of cleric and is almost happy to lose a level being ressurected because now he can go back to be a fighter.  (I don't know if you lose levels being raised in first ed though)

I wish I had something for the horde of incorporeal demons because I am a big fan of Conan, but that scene strikes me as ueber-corny and it often makes me laugh, as opposed to when I laugh at great dialogue.  My favorite in the movie series is:

"I suppose nothing hurts you"
"Only pain"

Joke 2.5, the horde of incorporeal demon-like things comes because the wizard (whose actually) a cleric tried to cast a spell way above his casting level and has angered his god.

[Matt Albrecht]

I haven't been ignoring this.  I've added these to my "extras" section in my personal notes for the series.  I'll be thinking these over, and posting additional comments.

[Matt Albrecht]

I'm integrating some of these jokes into the main storyline of the comic.  Not quite as big as it could be, but a bit of a nod, at least.