Goblins XVI: Corrupted to the Kore

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Would smite evil work on kin? If so, how bad would it likely hurt her considering the estimated levels and such?

I don't think Kore ever uses that, it tends to disagree with his obviously superior idea of who is and isn't evil.

[Kaptin Keen]

My bet: Kore can't swim.

[zimmerwald1915]

There will always be one Van Pelt!

Not if Kore finds football-tugging Evil. Then he'd have to exterminate the whole clan.

[Sylian]

But she was already a top contender for strongest main character considering that before being a wizard she is a lamia and that's CR 6 by itself. Remember, Kin started as large sized Str 18 with 9 Bab for a +17 grapple bonus minimum.

It has actually been implied that Kin has 9 Strength or less, unless I'm missing something (it is, of course, possible that "our" Kin is significantly stronger than scorpion Kin). Oh, and she's a Yuan-Ti, not a lamia.

[deuterio12]

It has actually been implied that Kin has 9 Strength or less, unless I'm missing something (it is, of course, possible that "our" Kin is significantly stronger than scorpion Kin). Oh, and she's a Yuan-Ti, not a lamia.

Ah, thank you for pointing it out (although her tail seems to have large reach).

A Yuan-Ti half-blood would still be CR 5 Str 15 and 7 Bab.

Case in point she can snap a human soldier's neck like a twig no problem. Using only her hands.

[awa]

as a low ranking warrior he could have had as low as 1 hp, and the comic does not always follow the games rules

[deuterio12]

The point is that Kin clearly already had good physical strength and combat ability (Bab). Snapping a person's neck in just one move without hesitation isn't something a Str 9 untrained person could do.

More in particular remember she was sent in a quest to find jade teapot in the first place, and she didn't have any spellcasting before so clearly she already had some significant combat ability to hope to survive in the road by herself.

[danielxcutter]

Perhaps it was 9 Str before racial modifiers?

[Draconi Redfir]

maybe her tail has different ability scores then her humanoid body?

[Gift Jeraff]

New comic is up.

[John Cribati]

I can't whait for Goblins Animated so inknow what the neck I'm even looking at.

[LoneStarNorth]

I can't whait for Goblins Animated so inknow what the neck I'm even looking at.

Spoiler: Current page interpreted

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Kore gets knocked over by Kin's lightning bolt.
Beat panel.
Kore uses his special lever shield to stand up, as seen here.
Kore readies his crossbows.
Kore sees that Kin is seemingly gone.
He turns.
He sees one of the wall runes change colour, indicating Kin has slithered past it, keeping low so the mist conceals her.
Kore turns the other way, as Kin has circled all the way around him.

[Nettlekid]

Looks like Kore collapsed on the ground, doing his winch thing to pull himself back to his feet, crossbows out to gun down Kin, but he sees only a long empty hallway, then the color-changing panels next to him start turning green and he whips around to look at them. So I guess Kin is trying to sneak away under the IME fog, but her position is being broadcasted by the panels. Either that or that's what Kore will think and she's stationary but sending something that also emits her IME color along the hallway to trick him. I didn't notice it two pages ago but I did here, that her little paper dragon Parchment is pressed against one of the panels. So at some point Kin is going to drag Kore down to the end of the hallway, leaving it full of only her IME, and then when he's about to strike at her Parchment will fly off the panel and let Kin's IME touch it to turn them all green and make Kore fall. So we have that to look forward to sometime in 2019.

EDIT: Deftly ninjaed.

[Vinyadan]

Wait, this is a complete page?

Anyway, about Goblins Animated:



I'm not clear if it's a prop to use as base when designing the 3d item for the series, or a reward.

[Anteros]

No offense to Thunt, but I have so very little faith that he'll ever get that project off the ground that I can't muster any interest in it. We'll get like a pilot episode...maybe 2...and then 10 years of updates about how things were way more expensive and complicated than he expected and the rest of the series is right around the corner.

He couldn't even handle creating a card game. He can't even meet simple obligations of drawing one page of art per week despite numerous promises that he would. Aren't we still waiting on a Tempts Fate that he took the money for as well? He couldn't draw one page of art in something like 5 years after being paid to do so?

An actual TV show with real voice actors and animation? The only way that thing ever gets off the ground is if someone else basically takes it over for him and does everything for him. At which point we're left with only the blind hope that people won't just take his money and run. Again. The only things that are going to come out of this project is more delayed comic updates, angry fans, and Thunt being upset with himself when he can't meet his goals...until he gets distracted by the next shiny project.

All of which is very strange, because he seems to actually care deeply about meeting his obligations.

[Ibrinar]

I don't know much about the project but that seems to be based on some false assumptions. It is not a solo project of his and the people involved are apparentl decently well known so probably won't run.

[Draconi Redfir]

No offense to Thunt, but I have so very little faith that he'll ever get that project off the ground that I can't muster any interest in it. We'll get like a pilot episode...maybe 2...and then 10 years of updates about how things were way more expensive and complicated than he expected and the rest of the series is right around the corner.

He couldn't even handle creating a card game. He can't even meet simple obligations of drawing one page of art per week despite numerous promises that he would. Aren't we still waiting on a Tempts Fate that he took the money for as well? He couldn't draw one page of art in something like 5 years after being paid to do so?

An actual TV show with real voice actors and animation? The only way that thing ever gets off the ground is if someone else basically takes it over for him and does everything for him. At which point we're left with only the blind hope that people won't just take his money and run. Again. The only things that are going to come out of this project is more delayed comic updates, angry fans, and Thunt being upset with himself when he can't meet his goals...until he gets distracted by the next shiny project.

All of which is very strange, because he seems to actually care deeply about meeting his obligations.

Probably a good thing that Thunt isn't in charge of the project at all then. Phil Lamarr and... i think Mat King? Are. Thunt is just the one with the IP they're using.

and also he can and did handle making the card game. the whole thing is functionally done, it just needs some additional testing for balance and bugs, and then some thoughts on shipping. all the cards themselves have actually been made and in fact exist.

[Vinyadan]

I personally don't expect the series to take off, but it's for different reasons. The pilot is only step #1. Then they'll need a studio to found them, and pour millions into it. But Goblins is unfit for children and probably only would interest a small portion of adults. So it's a difficult investment to make.

[Anteros]

I'm sure the card game will come out...eventually. I have to give props to Thunt for sticking to his word and actually producing that. I doubt the product will meet the quality level that was promised, given the lack of funding for it...and it certainly won't meet any reasonable time frame expectations...but at least it's coming out.

That said, there's approximately a 0% chance that an animated series ever gets off the ground. Even if someone else is in charge of the project, they're still going to be relying on Thunt for story and art direction. This is the man who has averaged only slightly more than one comic page a month for the last 5 years. It took him 5 years to half draw a Tempts Fate for the last time he had a fundraiser. Throw in health issues (both mental and physical) and this project simply is never going to materialize in any meaningful way.

I wish the man all the best in his personal and professional life, and I hope I'm wrong...but I severely doubt that I am.

[Draconi Redfir]

IThis is the man who has averaged only slightly more than one comic page a month for the last 5 years.

Today (For patrons at least. it'll be public on the 2nd.), March 19th, March 12th, Febuary 26th, Febuary 18th.


Those were his last five updates, the most time between them has been the 26th to the 12th, which was about two weeks. So this statement is already false.

It took him 5 years to half draw a Tempts Fate for the last time he had a fundraiser.

Honestly i think by this point it's time to just get over it. Maybe it wasn't what you wanted, but you did get something. Even then Tempts fate isn't a product he's selling, it's a reward for donations, something he does as a "thank you" to giving him a couple of dollars when he needs it. What you are doing is charity, what he's doing is just saying "thank you" in a creative way. You are under no obligation to give him your money, and he's under no obligation to thank you for it. **** happens, stuff changes. Best bet is to just move on and deal with it.

[SaintRidley]

Today (For patrons at least. it'll be public on the 2nd.), March 19th, March 12th, Febuary 26th, Febuary 18th.


Those were his last five updates, the most time between them has been the 26th to the 12th, which was about two weeks. So this statement is already false.

You took the last month and decided its average is the same as the last 5 years. Not true.

This comic was posted 5 years ago today.

Between then and a year later Thunt published 54 comics.

From March 28, 2014-March 28, 2015 Thunt published 9 comics.

From March 28, 2015-March 28, 2016 Thunt published 35 comics

From March 28, 2016-March 28, 2017 Thunt published 26 comics

From March 28, 2017- today Thunt published 28 comics (including the patreon one to be published April 2)

His average over 5 years is about 2.5 comics per month. His average over the past 4 years is about 2 comics per month. Over the past three years is about 2.5 comics per month. Over the past two years is 2.25 comics per month. Over the last year is 2.33 comics per month.

So Thunt's average is definitely not slightly more than one comic per month, but it's also nowhere close to the 4 comics per month average presented by your very narrow data window.

But now the facts are there.

Note: this would have been infinitely easier if Thunt updated his archive or actually included links to all pages in the archive. Sometime in the last year he changed his url generation so it's no longer date based, so that's also going to make figuring this out for future years more difficult.

[tomaO2]

Honestly i think by this point it's time to just get over it. Maybe it wasn't what you wanted, but you did get something. Even then Tempts fate isn't a product he's selling, it's a reward for donations, something he does as a "thank you" to giving him a couple of dollars when he needs it. What you are doing is charity, what he's doing is just saying "thank you" in a creative way. You are under no obligation to give him your money, and he's under no obligation to thank you for it. **** happens, stuff changes. Best bet is to just move on and deal with it.

Come on now. Tempts Fate is less a reward and more like a hostage.

See this cute little goblin? Would you like him to live? Give me money or else he dies, and it will be an ugly death too. You've seen how Chief died right? You know this will be just as bad, so give me money, okay?

You are paying for the comic pages. It's a weird combination of patron, and a kickstarter.

It's like patreon because you are paying X amount of money for every update. There are goals, you need to reach them. So if the total goal is 2000 and there are 4 pages, then you pay 500+ per page.

It's also like a kickstarter because if you fail to get that 500+ then the project fails. Namely with Tempt's Fate dying. Now, it is true that the quality of the pages doesn't have to be good. Thunt putting in his best effort is not required, but that can be said for the normal comic pages too. Thunt need to keep putting more details in his art is just one of his traits.

Also, lets not forget that he created an entire Tempts Fate dungeon crawl game that was supposed to be funded, he took large amounts of money for it, and then dumped the project, to make a better version... that he also scrapped. So there is that too. I personally think it was the worst thing he did in his entire comic run, even if it doesn't get much attention. Thunt has a terrible record for meeting any goal he sets for himself, unless it's one of those 24 hour events, his chronically bad updating for most of the comic's run is just one aspect of that. I personally have an issue with holding him to the standards he sets for himself. He's the one that wanted to make Goblins his job, not a hobby.

Must be nice not to have to worry about doing what he, himself, says he's supposed to be doing for his employers. (fans)

[Vinyadan]

@TomaO2, was this the fanart you were talking about some time ago? Or is it something else which disappeared? http://goblinscomic.com/fan-art

From how you said it, it looked like there were comic series. However, I couldn't find those with the Wayback Machine. Do you remember how they were hosted?

Spoiler

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Okay, Thunt wants money for a Kickstarter, some people are worried about this. For new people to the comic, you might not be up to date on why this is so. Lucky for you, I have a refresher course.

On June 30, 2013, Thunt did a 24 hour drawing marathon to celebrate the successful finish of the "Goblins: Alternate Realities" kickstarter. It raised over 166k, far in excess of its original goal. On January 23, 2014 he announced that it should be out in June, 2014. The next update Thunt gave was on December 3, 2014, when he finally announced that the publisher that he trusted to create the game had taken the money and ran. While he certainly should have been keeping a better eye on Evertide Games, and he should have come out earlier to inform us of the problems, their failure to create the game is not his fault. Being tricked like this can happen to anyone. Likewise, he does not owe the backers this game. Thunt only owes us what he personally promises.

What Thunt has personally promised, however, is to give out copies of this game to all the backers. Thunt took on this responsibility, he didn't have to, but he did, and it would have been very much to his credit if he had managed to make good. Unfortunately, almost 3 years later, he has not delivered. This is hardly surprising. Thunt has always been completely unreliable when it comes to delivering on his promises. Recently, Thunt has promised to update once a week, and, even though money is on the line, through his Patreon account, he is unable to do this consistently. Long time readers would not be surprised at his inability, however, as he has consistently made promises that he can't keep. He's tried all sorts of things to get on a regular update schedule and nothing worked. He even did a massive rant about how he is "quitting" Goblins that was, I believe, partially about not getting into the trap of deadline promises, and breaking away from his bad old behaviors. Unfortunately, he seemingly can't help but get into the same sort of issues that he's always gone through.

A notable example of this is his failure to finish off Tempts Fate 11. To the best of my recollection, all Thunt needs to do is draw one additional page, and he just never got around to it, even though it's been a few years. Another, less known, but, in my mind, far more important, example is the original Tempts Fate 9.

The concept Thunt created for it remains one of the most fascinating mass online roleplays I have come across. The original idea was to have 100 or so players search around in a dungeon of Thunt's own creation. He had actual maps that you could move your character around. Furthermore, you could custom create your character, and a number of people gathered together to talk about it because the idea was just so exciting. One of these forum players even created her own webcomic featuring the characters that were created in the forum. Link: http://www.acyn.net/RSE_main.html Sadly, her work was never given a space in Thunt's webcomic, which seems to be a common theme. Thunt has deleted every fancomic that was ever featured on Goblins as well. There were a number of fun stories. No idea why he did that.

Tempts Fate 9 was a winner of an idea, and something he could probably pull off, but Thunt, once again, ended up biting off more than he could chew, when he decided that he wanted to alter it so that everyone to be able to play his game, instead of the 100 or so players that he could personally supervise. Interest in the game was higher than anticipated, and he wanted everyone that was interested to be able to join in. Him doing this wouldn't have been too big a deal, except for the fact that he made this decision AFTER the game had started. The money that was already raised was dumped into a new Tempts Fate instead. Tempts Fate 8.5, to be exact. After a while of fiddling around with ideas on how to automate things, which I am told eventually succeeded, Thunt decided that he didn't want to do this game after all, and dropped the project without so much as a by your leave.

Let me say this again, he took money, that was given for a specific project, and then never gave us what we paid for. He also never apologized. All he did was just shuttled the money over to Tempts Fate 8.5, which was billed as something to tide us over, and make it okay for him to keep our money that was given for something else, while we waited for the Tempts Fate 9, which never happened, at least, not in it's original form. In the end, he erased all references to his game, and made TF9 into a standard money raiser.

I think that covers everything.

Now, put this all together. He constantly misses the update targets he promises, even though he loses out on over 1000$ every time he doesn't deliver (and let's keep in mind that this money isn't just for him, he's got his colourist, Cheyenne Wright, that would like her share as well) he fails to deliver on handing over the card game he said he would, doesn't finish doing the short story that he got paid money to draw, and abandons a game project, the original TF9, that he personally promised to deliver, without even saying that he was getting rid of it. This isn't even mentioning the fact that he's prone to having mental breakdowns that causes him to just give up working for half a year or more. This is a guy that can't even put out Goblins: Book 3, and the story is on book 5, but we are somehow supposed to be confident he can make animated shorts?

An animation is not easy to manage. Very few webcomics have managed to do this. I can't think of any that have, offhand. Now, does anyone really think Thunt can handle creating an animation of Goblins? Something that requires more work than any of these things? Take the example of "Megatokyo", which has another author constantly beset by missed deadlines. Piro promised a visual novel kickstarter and has never delivered that either. Another one is "Erfworld", and its visual novel kickstarter, that never happened. There were also efforts to have "Looking For Group" get animated. LFG did manage to come up with some extremely impressive musical animations. I believe there were two. Slaughter Your World (LINK: https://youtu.be/fcbazH6aE2g) and This Is War, but I'm pretty sure it failed in it's goal of using those two animations as a platform to create it's own animated series.

Anyone that donates money is probably throwing their money away, in my opinion, I don't care how good it looks, or who he's partnered with. Everything good about this project is saddled by a single whale sized albatross that goes by the name of Tarol Hunt.

[tomaO2]

@TomaO2, was this the fanart you were talking about some time ago? Or is it something else which disappeared? http://goblinscomic.com/fan-art

From how you said it, it looked like there were comic series. However, I couldn't find those with the Wayback Machine. Do you remember how they were hosted?

No. That's fan art. I'm talking about actual stories. I... think there was a seperate section where they were stored. Back in the day, Thunt would occasionally have actual guest comics from the fans posted instead of updates. Several of those stories, maybe most, were multiple pages long and had panels with dialogue. The images on your link are just random drawings of the characters.

I think Goblins server has changed since then. I have an exact link to where Temps Fate 9 used to be, cause I posted a link to it, back when it was originally announced (page is blank now). I'm positive the fan comics were still posted at that point.

Made a thread about it, here.
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...highlight=fate

The old website was called
http://goblinscomic.com/
Goblins website had the suffix change from com, to org. That could be the problem? It seems to work normally, whichever suffix I choose though. I'm sure I remember him talking about a new server or something though, and the art is VERY different for the main page than it used to be.

The author of the fan comic was Worst Case. She wrote two stories. I actually linked the first on in the post you quoted. She, unfortunately, never got her story hosted on Goblins. It's a long post, so you may have missed it. I'll put it down again, along with where she hosted the second one.

Risks and Side Effects http://www.acyn.net/RSE_main.html

Heimspiel http://forums.keenspot.com/viewtopic.php?f=134&t=111090

Second link doesn't seem to be working anymore.

[Draconi Redfir]

[FONT=Comic Sans MS]
See this cute little goblin? Would you like him to live? Give me money or else he dies, and it will be an ugly death too. You've seen how Chief died right? You know this will be just as bad, so give me money, okay?

Tempts Fate can't die if new pages are never made. So by not making new tempts fate pages, Thunt is Guaranteeing that Tempts Fate Lives! so hah!

[tomaO2]

Heh. True enough, although, technically, it's not making new pages that's the problem, it's new donations drives. For every donation drive that is successful, Temps gets to live. That is the main reward. If Thunt suddenly decided to draw a page where Temps died for no reason, that would surely cause mass outrage.

Temps Fate did actually have a small guest role in a short comic Thunt created, not related to a donation drive, where the Goblins cast were children. They had to do training and, Temps did it while wearing some things that could have killed him if he had gotten even slightly injured, thus showing off his risk taking personality. Thunt could do lots of pages like that, if he wanted, and no one would worry about the character dying.

[Kaptin Keen]

Spoiler: Update

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Hm. I was expecting both to fall. And water at the bottom, of course. Since Kore isn't going to die from this, I kinda still expect the water.

[guttering flame]

Spoiler: Update

Show

Hm. I was expecting both to fall. And water at the bottom, of course. Since Kore isn't going to die from this, I kinda still expect the water.

Spoiler

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He's on his way to hell. He'll get there first and ambush the others when they get there.

[Agi Hammerthief]

a minor inconvenience

[Neoriceisgood]

I had to reread the last 3 pages like 5 times and still didn't quite understand half of it.