Wednesday, December 8, 2004

Giant in the Playground's "Order of the Stick"

I found this great site this morning. It's a comic strip called "Order of the Stick" from the Web site www.giantitp.com. The comic artist, Rich Burlow, is a game writer and designer, and he is absolutely hilarious. It had me in hysterics! The characters are all straight from a role-playing game — the heroes include a rogue, a halfling ranger, and their battle-hardened leader Roy Greenhilt.

My favorite of strip was a spoof on those inane automated voicemail answering systems — you know, the ones with menu after menu of options that confuse and frustrate you every time your phone bill is wrong or you want to change your billing information with your insurance company. The minstrel, Elan the Bard, has been injured in the field of battle, so Durkon Thundershield the dwarven cleric decides to make an appeal to the Mighty Thor in an attempt to save him. But instead of the great and powerful Thor, he instead ends up with a recorded menu of choices at ThorPrayer®. He is trying to get a "Healing Miracle," but when the automated system asks him to enter the first three letters of the name of the miracle, H-E-A gets him the options of "Heathen Smiting" and "Heat Blisters." For each, he is asked to chant "one" if it is correct and chant "two" if it is not correct. The results are funny and twisted, but I won't give them away. Poor Elan … he was better off with the swords stuck in his spleen!

The page says that it is updated every Monday and Thursday. This one is definitely going into my bookmarks.