originally posted at https://comicalmomentum.tumblr.com/po...

There’s been a time skip I think? Also, a new character, the mother of ‘Fodderman’, one of the two adventurers sometimes hired by Lupiko.

Fodderman Yasui himself gets a DnD character sheet. And his mum is a healer who works at a ‘sea temple’, and her name is Yiriel Fodderman (the surname coming from her human husband Mikil Fodderman).

Fodderman and Redcloak are a gay couple which is cool! It’s definitely a good sign about this comic is that we’re getting LGB characters right from the start, and it’s treated as completely unremarkable, even if the Kinsey Scale is a really clunky way to introduce them.

Oh and, oh joy, fantasy racism tropes with fantasy elves as a stand-in for people of colour. And this time around we’re going with Posh Snobby Elves.

I said before that the DnD character sheets are probably 3.0 [I should have said: with some homebrew feats and spells] but actually thinking about it they are pretty much ‘DnD-ish’ rather than following the actual rules. For example, there doesn’t seem to be any reference to DnD’s class system, Fodderman’s skill bonuses are way below what a level 18 character has, and his spells are off multiple classes’ spell lists. The latter could possibly be wrangled by multiclassing or using some obscure/homebrew prestige class but he’d have a lot more spells in that case so yeah.

Anyway, Lupiko’s mother has been helping heal our protagonists from the whole mess with the cultists and the Jelly regaining their powers. Chou is all ‘I am a robot and I do not understand feelings’ and we learn the leader of the Impalists was Chou’s dad. Hence why they were invading Lupiko and Chou’s house.

Lupiko officially becomes Chou’s mum. Aww…

(…but the existence of that paperwork raises all sorts of questions!)

Redcloak Millian also gets a char sheet. Tidbit: Elves put the surname first.

…he’s given a 5.6 on the Kinsey Scale. The Kinsey Scale that’s already silly and is now expressed to two significant figures. what does it mean to be 0.1 more gay than someone

Redcloak’s got the Leadership feat. The Leadership feat is a way to give a player character command over others to adventure with them in a way that’s supposed to be (in principle, if not practice) balanced against other abilities. (I think it’s a very bad way of handling shared control over NPCs, and that if the players want to have NPCs who travel with the party, it should be treated separtely from the Feats mechanic but whatever!) Exactly which NPCs he’s commanding is unclear and also it might mean something different in the UJ universe.

And finally Chou’s learning witchcraft so that’s cool…

Six month time skip time!

There’s a weather event called a ‘shatterel storm’. It appears to involve a lot of triangles in the sky, but it’s not dangerous if you’re in the open… An AU strip gives a detailed and really cool explanation.

Poor Lupiko sure gets imperilled a lot doesn’t she? Fortunately Chou is able to invent rescue breaths. Even more fortunately, it works.

I like the little ongoing AU strips where KayWai and Uni are being gay together.

OK, so now we’re setting up for a kind of standard ‘religion vs science’ storyline I think. You can probably guess where JDR seems to stand: the witch religion means arbitrarily suppressing useful innovation Because Tradition. But yeah basically there’s ‘scientific’-looking explanations underlying broomsticks and probably a lot of other ‘magic’ besides.

these fuckin gay nerds oh my god also unsurprising confirmation that JDR played 2e DnD and knows what THAC0 is…

hmm, well, actually I thought it would be a standard boring science vs religion thing but that’s not it exactly, it’s going to be an x-risk thing instead?

helpful map of the locations of the events so far.

huh a version of the comic for bichromatic 3D glasses. Not convinced it has enough pixels to work…

tl;dr: the people on this worldplate are refugees from another one which got blown up by a “witch” v “alchemist” war. to prevent that happening again there’s a pact where witches get flight, plants, healing and social stuff, and alchemists get sailing, architecture, and any kind of scientific discovery whatsoever.

anyway Lupiko got kicked out of magic college for not toeing the line and then got home to find her mother had died that morning. holy shit this comic makes the poor girl suffer a lot :(

colour AU strip to celebrate #100… JDR’s pretty decent with colouring actually! also lol that’s what redcloak fights in?

I’m not sure if we’re still in Chapter 2 or if JDR just abandoned chapter numbers. Let’s assume we’re still in Chapter 2. See you on the next post!

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