Life on the Fourth Floor

A wild Amy appears! Long-time readers will know that Charlotte and her roommate and frenemy Amy have a rather strained relationship. For those of you who are new here, let me catch you up.

This strip is part of an ongoing storyline that begins here. Should take about five or ten minutes for you to get up to speed.

One of the advantages to playing a retroclone game like Labyrinth Lord is that things are a little unfamiliar. Even experienced players don’t have firm footing, because monsters will have different powers and stats, things they could do in first edition D&D that got tweaked in later versions. It makes things terrifying and unpredictable and really cuts down on metagaming.

One of the things I found refreshing as a fledgling Labyrinth Lord was the scant descriptions of monsters. There is no description in the rules for what an imp looks like, so I described an imp as I imagined it would look. My players walked into a room and saw a blue monkey-like creature with bat wings, horns and sharp claws. It had a stinger on the end of its tail filled with deadly poison and could make itself invisible at will. Because they were in a library, it started throwing books at them. Even after they killed it, they had no idea what it was. Two experienced players who had been roleplaying for years, had almost certainly faced an imp before, had no idea what they were up against, had no idea its tail was venomous until one of them was stung. To this day they bring it up and ask me “Just what the heck was that?” The characters didn’t know, so why would they?

Your players might already know how to stop a troll from regenerating, but when they’re playing Labyrinth Lord it’s never business as usual. What do you think a troll should look like? Now’s your chance to show them something they’ve never seen. And then when it starts regenerating, then they can start trying to figure out just what the heck it is.

This comic was possible thanks to our generous patron, Dice Fall Podcast! Check out the site: http://www.dicefallpodcast.com/. If you would like to become a patron head over to https://www.patreon.com/LifeontheFourthFloor.