Recommended Viewing

So you may have noticed the list to your immediate right with the header above. What this essentially is a list of cool places on the wide web that I have perused or discovered. I'm sharing them with you because I'm just that nice.

Without further ado, position one!

The Order of the Stick.

Okay, geeks in the audience, raise your hand. Yes, you in the back. The one with the 'I rolled a natural 20 on your mom' T-Shirt. Don't think I can't see you.

While the Dungeons & Dragons explosion naturally passed over my little country, there are certain fantasy conventions that are definitely exploitable for humor/story potential. One of these is the 'party', or band of merrie adventurers, rife with cliches and with trouble around every corner. Reliable, sturdy, and definitely overused.

The OOTS began for me as a passably entertaining gag-a-strip webcomic, telling the tale of a troupe of adventurers as they battled their way through a dungeon. It made me laugh with its simple, well-crafted humor. Loaded with references to pop-culture (the female rogue, upon losing her top, laments the wardrobe malfunction) Dungeons & Dragons lore and rules ('Damnit! I missed!' 'No no, remember you get +1 to hit against goblins.' 'Oh yeah. [Goblin is thwacked by invisible hammer]) and even an Evil Overlord with a Plan for World Domination™, it was a jolly fun read.

But then something happened over the course of time, as the strip went on. It took the characters out of the isolated dungeon setting and put them in the world above. At a stroke this a) doubled the availability of potential jokes b) put in new characters.

And what characters.

As the comic progressed into the 300s (!!!) I realized that it had transformed from a simple hack&slash adventure to something with depth and Big Ideas. As time went on, the ideas got bigger and bigger, and the last few weeks have left me feverishly refreshing the page around update time, waiting for a new strip. This little D&D joke comic has turned out to be a marvelous piece of storytelling and humanism.

Of course, it's still really, really funny.

On the same website is also published the (not as earth-shatteringly fantastic) comic known as Erfworld. While certainly entertaining in its own right, it's like the bonus feature on a DVD. OOTS is the A-side, and worth every moment.