Cast[]
Transcript[]
- Panel 1
The panel shows Serini, Roy and Haley standing in front of a doorway into a chamber occupied by a Froghemoth, standing inside two red circles on the floor.
Roy: Whoa.
Roy: I guess that would be the first encounter, then?
Serini: Oh hey, it's the people with much longer legs who somehow still can't keep up with me.
- Panel 2
The panel shifts to Roy and Serini in the hallway, with Serini pointing through the doorway in front of her with her staff.
Serini: And to answer your question: No, that's not the first encounter.
Serini: That's a distraction, to focus your attention while you walk down this long nondescript hallway. That's why it's in full view the whole way.
- Panel 3
Serini turns to the wall to push a hidden button while Roy looks backwards. CLICK!
Serini: Halfway back, there was a trap with a 30-second activation delay. It'd be slamming walls shut to seal you off right about now, if I hadn't temporarily bypassed it.
Roy: ...Oh.
Roy: Then what?
Serini: Then the actual first encounter:
- Panel 4
A hidden door in the wall slides open, revealing a Disenchanter standing in two red circles on the floor. WHRRRTCH
Serini: Disenchanters! They'll suck the shine off your thingamajigs for good.
Roy: Excuse me?
Serini: They drain magic items, permanently. Totally unfair, it's great.
- Panel 5
The panel shifts to inside the secret passage, with Serini, Roy and Haley squeezing past the Disenchanter.
Serini: We just need to scooch past this one into a secret tunnel. Mind the trunk.
Serini: Anyway, six of them pop out from one side of the hall while a paragon Rust Monster jumps out the other.
- Panel 6
Serini enters a halfling-sized tunnel behind the Disenchanter, with Roy having to go down onto his hands to fit inside.
Serini: So when everyone's gear is getting wrecked left and right-
Serini: -a swarm of Fumblebees comes down out of the ceiling and starts draining Dexterity.
- Panel 7
Serini and Roy come out of the halfling-sized tunnel in the big room behind the Froghemoth from before, with the fighter standing up again with Haley behind him.
Roy: This...is the room we were just looking at.
Serini: Of course it is! Coming in any other way would've unfrozen the big guy, which is the second encounter.
- Panel 8
The panel shifts to behind Serini and Roy, showing two doors in front of them.
Serini: Now here we've got the door on the left, which has a pack of Knee-Stealers behind it-
Serini: -and the door on the right, which leads to a Blue Poet.
- Panel 9
The panel shifts back to a side view, with Mimi walking past Haley and Roy while Serini bonks the latter on the head with her staff. BONK!
Roy: I guess we'll take- Oww!
Serini: You'll take neither! We're going up to a secret hatch. Mimi, ladder us.
- Panel 10
Mimi turns herself into a ladder, with Roy and Elan climbing up while Haley stands on the opposite side of said ladder, with Belkar, Minrah and Durkon waiting behind Elan and the pets Bloodfeast and Mr. Scruffy sitting at Mimi's feet.
Elan: Wow, I feel really good about skipping all this stuff, don't you guys?
Belkar: I don't know, I think we could handle one lousy poet.
Haley: No, no, don't you know? The more banal the name for a monster, the more likely it is to be some eldritch abomination with the objectively wrong number of body parts.
- Panel 11
Realizing what she just said, Haley turns around to Sunny hovering behind her.
Haley: Uh, no offense.
Sunny: Nah, those guys have seven ears, creeps me right out.
D&D Context[]
- As Serini correctly tells Roy, Disenchanters are monsters who can drain the magic from magical items, rendering them mundane on a successful caster level check.
- Rust monsters are monsters who can corrode metal objects by touch, living on the resulting metal oxides. Usually are fairly low-level monsters, but this one has the Paragon template, which (among other things) gives it +15 to all Ability stats, a very high Armor Class and Spell Resistance, turning it into a veritable threat even for Epic level characters.
- Fumblebees are existing monsters (and a swarm covers its space with a layer of slippery grease, making their Dexterity damage even more dangerous), but Knee-Stealers and Blue Poets are made-up monsters.
- The green monster is a Froghemoth, a portmanteau of “frog” and “behemoth”, meaning “monstrous frog”. Its most iconic attack is to catch and swallow prey whole using its tongue.
Trivia[]
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