Anywho, I liked the art on this one, especially the eagle. Holy shit there’s a Jell-o cube! (:P). Nice joke, *I* haven’t seen it anywhere else, so it was new to me.

I am a female nerdess, by the way. Not actually a D&D player, but the girlfriend of a D&D player. My best friend and I crash his house when they are having their sessions, and they refer to us as “groupies.” Good times, good times.

There was also a story in Dragon magazine that took the idea and ran with it, with teenagers in a fantastic world playing a game in which their characters were teens in a mundane world, and the confusion and suspicion this engendered in their elders…..I remember the cleric speaking darkly about “heresy” because the imaginary world did not have The Gods as an obvious and active presence.

That said, I don’t agree that it’s necessarily all that obvious a joke - it’s just that most people in a position to get the joke have probably met it before. I like your take on it here - I think it’s funny even though it’s not the first time I’ve seen the general idea.

Oh, and for Pete’s sake - there is a beholder but there is also a gelatinous cube. Last panel, bottom right corner, only part of it is visible and you can see through that. I didn’t see it at first either, but it’s there. Very well done - a gelatinous cube is SUPPOSED to be hard to see.

Now, how, I wonder, does someone who “only played it once” know so much about obscure monsters like the gelatinous cube and the beholder?

“NERDS!” indeed.

Lucius Alexander

House of the Palindromedary

Pete Says:
March 14th, 2008 at 9:26 am

If it were a gelatinous cube, that’s what it would be called, but it’s actually a beholder.

I see no beauty in its eye.

To the guy far up on the list: No. It was not anything to do with Harry Potter. I’d never even heard of Barry Trotter before. I just googled it. So, you know. Thanks for making me want to kill myself and everything.