Kickstarter Updates

[Peelee]

I was saving up for calling it Utterly Contrived.

If you said that in Klingon it would have been utterly Worfed.

[Metastachydium]

For me the story peaked around War and XP and Dont Split the Party. BRITF was ok, Utterly Dwarfed was really unimpressive to me.

Spoiler: My reaction

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Utterly Dwarfed was far and away my favorite OOTS book. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Yours just happens to be wrong.

WaXP is where things started to really get good and DStP is massively underrated if you ask me. It's easily one of my favourite books. Perhaps the favourite, even. That said, BRitF is crazy strong and contains some of my absolute favourite strips of all time (most notably, Ritual Behavior and Temporary Weakness).

UD, in the meantime, is not bad at all(, even if I'm not terribly fond of stuff like the Dwarven Council sub-arc (which, on the flip side, gave us the Likeable Death Worm of whom I'm a great fan). Heck, some of it is just top quality. The whole Godsmoot sequence would belong there, as far as I'm concerned and To Remember Them By is an incredibly wel-delivered, heavy-hitting wham strip – easily the biggest of its kind in the whole comic so far and the next four strips or so never quite lose that momentum.

[Zarhan]

WaXP is where things started to really get good and DStP is massively underrated if you ask me. It's easily one of my favourite books. Perhaps the favourite, even. That said, BRitF is crazy strong and contains some of my absolute favourite strips of all time (most notably, Ritual Behavior and Temporary Weakness).

UD, in the meantime, is not bad at all(, even if I'm not terribly fond of stuff like the Dwarven Council sub-arc (which, on the flip side, gave us the Likeable Death Worm of whom I'm a great fan). Heck, some of it is just top quality. The whole Godsmoot sequence would belong there, as far as I'm concerned and To Remember Them By is an incredibly wel-delivered, heavy-hitting wham strip – easily the biggest of its kind in the whole comic so far and the next four strips or so never quite lose that momentum.

Agreeing with you there. After BRitF which was superb, the UD was quite a bit of letdown. Consider: In BTitF we get

• Major character developments for Elan, Haley, Vaarsuvius (and to a lesser extent Belkar, with the fake development becoming real)
• Elan/Nale backstory as part of the greater-scope plot
• Greater-scope focus does not deviate from search for Girard's gate - it's present there all the time
• Some insight into IFCC's scheming
• Rise and fall of the Linear guild

UD, on the other hand, is essentially filler from around 1016 to 1132. The important bits of UD are

• Continued character development for Belkar, some for Roy
• Closing of the minor loose end with Haley with Crystal & Bozzok
• The major exposition about the worlds that had gone before and the new purple quiddity
• Some information on why Durkon behaves as Durkon does (but he doesn't really fundamentally change, even though he says to Redcloak that he's trying to be more flexible)
• ...umm, that's it?

The only really important bit (in relation of the overall plot, with the gates and all that) is the exposition about quiddities. Of course it was a major WHAM when it came so it compensates a bit.

Durkon's backstory is...flashbacks. Yeah, they are sort of interesting, but there's the whole end of the world and all that looming, and it's not really even present in the book. Frankly, Roy could have just defeated Durkula at the Godsmoot, defeated Hel's scheme, Durkon would have gotten the briefing from Thor, a random cleric present would have done the resurrection, and they could have just skipped straight to the North Pole. Or possibly even earlier. Especially the canyon run was just...tedious.

Don't get me wrong - there's still lots of good stuff in there and all the puns with Death Worm made me chuckle at least, but most of the stuff about Durkon's extended family and dwarven politics is something that really would have belonged in a separate bonus book. It probably wouldn't be that big of a problem if BRitF hadn't been so strong. It's just that in previous book, Elan's past was quite masterfully worked in to the ongoing storyline, without having to yank the focus away to the ages past.

I'm glad that we are finally approaching the final showdown (even though we are stuck in a meeting for now).

[Eric the White]

I was saving up for calling it Utterly Contrived.

I couldn't disagree more. I loved how Durkons plan rolled out, both with the Vampire and with preventing the vote. So many moments of awesome.

[BrotherHanson]

This looks like a good thread to drop in and say THANK YOU to all the Kickstarter people from way back when. I didn't even know OOTS existed until a few years ago. After I read everything online I bought hardcopy books, and I gather that was only possible due to the Kickstarter. I'm glad there's a Patreon now so I can pay it forward some (https://www.patreon.com/oots/posts).