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New comic is up.
I did not expect that O.o
That's, uh. That's a lot of worlds.
That destroy-the-world solution is looking a bit more reasonable, considering what happened to the first ones. I wonder if the gods did it to any of the previous worlds, or were they all eaten by the Snarl?
That's ... overwhelming.
Ho. Ly. #$(*
I've rarely been left speechless by a comic, but this is right up there.
I was expecting that the Order's world wasn't the second one, seeing as during the crayon retelling of the Snarl's creation, there was something about "We agreed to have a medieval European world this time" or something.
That's a lot more worlds than I expected, however.
A LOT more.
Ah. Well. Uh... crap.
Golly. I did not see that coming.
Just how old are the Gods?
Shocking, but what’s the point in showing Durkon this graveyard?
Oh, that's, um, not encouraging. Hopefully this isn't the story of losing another one.
Getting eaten by the Snarl isn't a happy ending, right Elan?
I don't think I've ever been hit so hard by a visual panel before. Amazing job.
I wonder if those gravestones wouldn't represent all the campaign worlds that have been abandonned over the years once the GM and players got bored and started playing a different game.
Ohhh fuuu......
OK, I did expect another 2-3 worlds, but that?
........speechless.
Edit: And first time on first Page?
So why isn't hel is the most powerfull goddess already, if that many worlds died, and their dwarfs feeding her? Is this the first iteration of dwarfs?
The gods made a monument to each one. They really do care after all.
Wow. Double wow... Triple wow with whipped cream and a cherry on the top.
WOW...
WOOOOW....
WOOOOOOOOW!!!
:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:
Bravo, Giant! This one blew my mind completely.
If it wasn't for the page where Durkon overwhelmed the vampire this might have been my most favourite page in the entirety of OotS.
Actually, it's still a pretty good contender.
Thor being so blatantly Chaotic Good is great.
The graveyard is heartbreaking but also amazing.
If all these worlds were destroyed, wouldn't the addition of the dwarves' souls to Hel from the current one be a drop in the bucket? How could they possibly be enough to make a difference? That is, I mean, if the Dwarven honor arrangement applied only to the current world.
Wow. That is a LOT of broken prisons.
I wonder if this is the first world with Gates blocking the rifts...
Presumably the Dark One has not yet participated in creating a world, or he wouldn't have needed Rat and Tiamat to tell him about the Snarl.
And the Snarl is one heck of an escape artist...
Thanks, Giant!
Rich said that new souls provide more power than old souls. If you want to do the math to figure out the required decay rate of a soul, be my guest. If you get a result that shows the power Hel gets from destroying the current world is less than the other gods all have, you'll need to re-check your math until it agrees with how Rich has said his afterlife works.
I can understand why so many of the gods were willing to destroy the world now, and honestly, I can't blame them.
Huh.
I guess maybe this both explains why some of the gods are more cavalier about destroying this world, and why others want to keep giving the mortals a chance. (1184 years has to be a record, yeah?)
I also wonder if we're going to find out that some of the gods simply want to give up if this one doesn't work out. (Despite what some of them said about rebuilding a new one.) Could this be the Last World?
...And we now have a new contender, if not outright winner, for most shocking moment in the comic.
That literally made my jaw drop.
Nice!
So did they eventually decide to start nesting the worlds to slow the Snarl's escape, or is something else going on with the world in the rift?
I'm guessing the elf and dwarf ascended deities are also unique to this world. Raising the question - what's made this world so different from the past ones?
So is the deific version of that monty python skit?
"We built a world. It sank into the swamp. So we built another one! That sank into the swamp. So we built another one! That one burned down, fell over and then sank into the swamp! But the four-quintillionth one stayed up! And that's the world you mortals will inherit one day."
Holy...
I feel a sense of... AGE. A time abyss. those are millions and millions of years of worlds. Of people forgotten, whose lives mattered nothing. It's huge. How old are the gods anyway?
Woah. Their chances seem a bit slimmer now!
PS I was reading on my phone in landscape and the scrolling... and scrolling... and scrolling was awesome :D
It's not clear if The Bet wasn't made just before the making of current world.
Also, It seems the monuments are to honor worlds and souls devoured by the Snarl, so no souls for Hel.
And now I start to think if The Bet and Durkon's prophecy aren't. It made me remember American Gods, those who have read it will know why...Spoiler: Possible Spoiler about American Gods, by Neil Gailmanpart of a big Odin&Loki Con Act to try to solve the Snarl Problem once and for all
I think Hel only gets the dwarf souls if the gods destroyed the planet voluntarily(which we haven’t been given any indication that has happened yet). If the snarl escapes, everyone’s souls are destroyed.
...oh my.
SpoilerIt's like all the Ace Rimmers but reversed
I wonder why they even bothered having a speech portion during the Godsmoot? They must have had a conversation like that who knows how many times already.
So, is this going to be a fold-out page in the printed version? :smallcool:
It also makes for some interesting theories about what the Snarl has done with the other worlds. There are clearly others inside the rift. Maybe the Snarl hasn't been "eating" them so much as "collecting"?
I...ah...wow. Yeah, consider my jaw dropped. Did not see that coming.
What that tells me is that this isn't something they can fix by putting up a new world again. At best, that'd be a temporary solution. What they need is a way to untangle the Snarl once and for all. Someth...
How long are the odds on "The Dark One is actually the Snarl"?
Well, I just laughed maniacally in the break room and got a bunch of stares. I wonder if Rich thanks Odin for the copy/paste tool. Beautiful.
I can personally attest that you can have the same argument many times and still try again each time.
Also, maybe the gods don't always vote the same so those speeches still hold weight. I'd be surprised if Loki was the defender of the world every single time, for instance.
Given that the souls were destroyed, that would seem to suggest that they were not sufficiently prepared to remake the world on their own. Which really makes Loki's argument that they have enough time to end the world and fix things anyway sound hollow, come to think of it.
If I had to guess whats different on this world, I would say the gates. This is the first time anyone has actually successfully plugged the gaps, to any meaningful degree.
I think gods need a world populated by mortals because they need prayers and souls to sustain themselves. They have to keep making new worlds to survive
Because the power from dead souls don't last forever. All those dead worlds are like dead batteries. If you have 2 live batteries and hel has 3 live batteries, that's 50% more. it doesn't matter than both have thousands of spent batteries.
EDIT: assumign the gods managed to pull the plug on time and save the souls there. if they were eaten by the snarl, then they would not matter anyway
Holy <bleep>.
That is horrifying.
Could be that mortals becoming deities was a newer rule they implemented, possibly after losing several more gods (or even pantheons).
If that's not the case, it could mean the Dark One ascended from another world and that's why the details of his mortal days are unknown. Or perhaps he never was an ascended mortal and is instead the sole survivor of a purple aura pantheon. Though him apparently being ignorant of the other 4 Gates makes it seem likely he is indeed from the current world.
Wow, so the Snarl has devoured that many worlds. :smalleek:
"Time for gaps to form" probably increases with each new world - 4 years for the first, 1100-odd for the latest. Maybe more, if there's a big gap between "creation" and "start of calendar".
I’ll add to this and say this means the gods have never voted on the fate of the world before, since every destroyed world has been ended by the snarl and not by the gods. It’s possible that the world building process was an iterative one that the gods improved on each time and slowly increased the lifespan each time but I don’t think this is the case. I feel like most of those worlds didn’t last long at all and eventually they got lucky and created a world where the gates were created and this world has existed substantially longer than any previous one. This the decision to end the first successful world voluntarily carries the same weight we thought it did originally. No one knows how many more tries it will take to reestablish another successful world.
Oh... wow...
Uh... I can just imagine the guilt that the good deities must be feeling if Thor's words about Marduk weeping and his own comments about 'we couldn't play nice' were true.
SpoilerSo... no worlds before this one ever had ascended deities?
Or is it that without any souls to sustain them, the ascended gods die out when a world ends?
....Redcloak and the Dark One's obsession with 'The Plan' may well end up not with goblinoid ascension but goblinoid *genocide.*
They probably have to act all together to unmake the world without the Snarl escaping. And they have to follow the rules, and they are split nearly 50/50 on the issue. And the Gates may be a new thing.
Some of the graves appear bigger than graves "in front" of them. Assuming this is not an error I ownder why a world would get a bigger graves than another? More people on it? Its souls were nommed by the Snarl rather than killed by the Gods?
Oh.
Oh no.
That is not good.
it seems the rifts are just a thing that will always happen as long as the Snarl is around, and that the world will always erode, and they had to get better and better at designing the world. The Gates were something that could perhaps finally break that cycle and make sure the rifts didn't grow anymore. this also explains the debate Loki and Heimdall had and why Heimdall said it with such resignation while Loki said it as if this has happened so many times before. because it has happened, like millions of times it seems.
question is, does Redcloak know this? does HE know how many times it has happened?? does he even think its an important detail? because Redcloak is the one manipulating Xykon, so he is the bad guy who'd know the most.
either way, it seems that the Gods recreating the world-prison doesn't seem to be a permanent solution. We're just going to end up right back where we started, hopefully with a longer timeframe between rifts but.....doesn't change the fact that its going to keep happening. Hm.
Oh. My. Gods and Goddesses.
That's taking Gardens of Stone to near infinite levels.