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Thread: Fifty-five?
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2010-07-02, 04:10 AM (ISO 8601)
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Fifty-five?
In #732 Durkon says he is fifty-five years old. In my copy of No Cure For The Paladin Blues it syas on the introduction-page that he's thirty-nine. Has it really gone 16 years since NCFTPB took place? I find that reeeally hard to believe.
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2010-07-02, 04:11 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
Ages sometimes get retconned? I think V's age changed at one point as well.
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2010-07-02, 04:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
Or he made a mistake when talking to the guard...
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2010-07-02, 04:22 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
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2010-07-02, 04:34 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
Interesting; I hadn't remembered his age being mentioned in the intro for Paladin Blues. Nice catch there!
If it is in fact a retcon (or possibly a goof), then personally I would lean towards Durkon being closer to 55 than 39. It seems like in most fantasy worlds (including D&D) that the majority of dwarves are least middle-aged by the time they go adventuring; only a relatively small handful are still young (by dwarven standards) when they begin wandering the world. So if Durkon was only 39 at the time the Order ran into Miko, that would definitely put him on the young side for an adventuring dwarf, whereas 55 would be much closer to the "norm".
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2010-07-02, 04:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
Imo, that's a mistake Rich was made aware of and fixed it in the future. A Dwarf of 40 years is the same as a 15 year old human (we know it works that way in OotS, see the "20 years in diapers thing" elves). Seems a bit young for Durkon.
A dwarf of 55 would roughly correspond with a 20 year old human. That makes much more sense (and Durkon gets described as "young" in Origin of PCs, so that makes some sense).
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2010-07-02, 05:07 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
The post may be deleted by now, but Rich said on the forums that he made a mistake on Durkon's age in No Cure For The Paladin Blues.
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2010-07-02, 07:06 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
Agreed. The mistake is in NCftPB, not the current strip--since Durkon got kicked out of his homeland some 20-odd years ago, the age given in the printed book would imply Durkon was only maybe 20 himself when that happened; but a dwarf is still a child at that age, as the Giant realised later.
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2010-07-02, 08:09 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
Hm. So maybe, Durkon is intended to be the equivalent to 39 in human years. I've seen various fantasies putting dwarves only slightly longer-lived than humans.
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2010-07-02, 05:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
@Lira & factotum: Thanks for clearing that up! Much appreciated.
That's more or less what I was thinking as well. He has displayed -- both overtly and subtly -- a wisdom & experience beyond what you'd normally expect in a dwarf young enough to still be considered a "minor" among his own race.
True. However, since the strip is (more or less) based in the D&D 3.5 world, I think we can assume with a reasonable amount of certainty that dwarves in the OOTS-verse likely live for at least a couple centuries, if not longer.
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2010-07-02, 05:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
IIRC, he was listed as 54 in War & XPs, published 2 years ago. So, yeah, it was Paladin Blues that was retconned.
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2010-07-02, 05:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
Last edited by Shhalahr Windrider; 2010-07-02 at 05:41 PM.
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2010-07-02, 05:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
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2010-07-02, 06:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
I made a mistake during the production of NCFPB because I was rushing to write the character bios the day before the book was due at the printer, trying to get it printed in time for Origins that year. I thought I knew the dwarf age categories from memory, but I did not; I made Durkon way too young. I corrected it in the Adventure Game and WAXP, and I included it here just to make sure that it's clear.
Development-wise, Durkon is meant to be the dwarf equivalent of the rest of the Order: early to mid-20's. It's just that he's actually experienced twice as much life as that, and has a much higher Wisdom (that often mimics being older and more experienced).Rich Burlew
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2010-07-04, 07:42 AM (ISO 8601)
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2010-07-04, 08:05 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
Please write all sarcasm in blue text. All metaphors should be marked in red text and for any split infinitives, please use green. Thank you.
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2010-07-04, 09:36 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
Is NCFTPB going to have the age fixed in a future printing?
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2010-07-04, 04:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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2010-07-04, 04:31 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
Any other mistakes out there? A certain wizard in Cliffport murdered by a certain sorcerer and a certain son to said wizard we've never seen or heard of other than in this strip?
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2010-07-04, 06:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
On checking, V's age is given as "130?" in both NCftPB and W&XPs. Belkar just has question marks in both. Odd that Rich would give him an age in the board game and then go back to keeping it a mystery elsewhere.
This has been discussed several times, most recently here. I refuse to believe it's a mistake though, because if that's the case it's one of the most glaringly boneheaded mistakes possible. Rich has always shown himself to pay much more attention to detail than that.Please write all sarcasm in blue text. All metaphors should be marked in red text and for any split infinitives, please use green. Thank you.
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2010-07-04, 07:16 PM (ISO 8601)
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2010-07-04, 07:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
And here I thought the Giant was perfect. The pedestal, she is broken.
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2010-07-04, 08:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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2010-07-04, 08:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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2010-07-04, 09:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
Oh, really?
Considering that Rich did have Roy mention Fyron's son over three hundred strips after the one you linked, after Start of Darkness had come out and any retcons he made would have been made, I doubt it's a mistake*, though the fact that said son has never appeared onstage is certainly odd.
*At least, a mistake made by Rich. It may have been a mistake made by Roy or by Eugene.Last edited by Kish; 2010-07-04 at 09:10 PM.
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2010-07-04, 09:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
Given the oddity of Roy being the only one to mention Fyron's son (Eugene never did, and the flashback to Fyron's death has no son present), and the seeming pointlessness of making that addition to the story, it's easy to see why people would think of it as a goof. But I would be surprised if Rich made the exact same goof twice.
Though maybe Fyron's son has some hidden plot significance that will be revealed in a future strip. Hard to imagine what it would be, but Rich is a lot more creative that I am.Last edited by Red XIV; 2010-07-04 at 09:15 PM.
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2010-07-04, 09:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
As said in a previous thread I lost the link to: Durkon: The Baby of the Team?: Durkon's age was misappropriated when the introduction was made, primarily before the 3rd Edition sourcebooks were read.
Originally Posted by Adam Savage
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2010-07-04, 09:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
It's pretty certain that Eugene never spoke of Fyron's son to Roy, so the mistake would have to be on Roy's part. Which would be perfectly understandable if this were real life, but rather awkward as a story device. I'm perhaps even less inclined to believe that Rich deliberately made Roy get the story wrong than that Rich made the mistake himself. In fiction, characters don't make mistakes like that unless there's a very good reason for it.
Please write all sarcasm in blue text. All metaphors should be marked in red text and for any split infinitives, please use green. Thank you.
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2010-07-04, 10:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
There's never any pointlessness to adding depth to a character, as a writer you never know what'll be important or not later on.
i don't have SOD, but given the fact that Fyron's son doesn't appear in the flashbacks to Fyron's Death and Eugene didn't mention him it leaves a few choices.
He didn't exist at all(as i said this could be debated to no end with the minimal information we're given)
He's in some other part of the building alive and encounters Xykon on his way out.
He's in some other part of the building dead and Fyron doesn't know it yet and Xykon for some reason doesn't rub it in his face(possibly not knowing that it was Fyron's son).
or; Xykon hunted down Fyron's son to complete the set
i don't recall the exact reasons why Xykon killed Fyron(its late here dun wanna think) but it's possible that if Fyron was hunted down by Xykon, it's not too much of a stretch that he ran into his son at some point.
eeh...it's sort of tough for a dead character to have significance; then again in a world with D&D stuff death is somewhat temporary and isn't always an impediment.
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2010-07-04, 11:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Fifty-five?
Eugene's set-up for the story makes it unlikely the son was in the building at all. He arrived with a takeaway meal for the two of them (as he apparently often did) to find Fyron and Xykon mid-standoff, and as he entered he was calling his master's name, not any others.
This just after a montage of scenes throughout Eugene's time with Fyron, too, with narration talking of the father-son relationship they had. If Fyron already HAD a son, that would rather complicate matters, or else they would all be one happy family. I can't believe that Eugene and Fyron could be that close and yet the son's death doesn't warrant a mention.
There was no hunting down. Xykon took a tour of Fyron's museum, saw a crown that he thought looked totally badass, and returned that night to steal it. He didn't even necessarily intend to kill its owner; he just wanted the crown.Last edited by Nimrod's Son; 2010-07-04 at 11:28 PM.
Please write all sarcasm in blue text. All metaphors should be marked in red text and for any split infinitives, please use green. Thank you.