Thanks so much, it means a lot to artists to hear this kind of thing :)
It's going to be hectic in the next few months, so I may be a bit sporadic, but everything will be back to normal by the end of October, and I should be able to knuckle down and focus on drawing a lot more!
Heraldry be like that sometimes.
Generally speaking, this is something that an experienced GM can handle in session zero. An important part of session zero is establishing expectations for the style of game to be played: Things like "are the player characters friends?" "Is PvP encouraged or discouraged?" "Do I as a DM want the characters to stick together?" etc etc.
Generally when running DnD, I request of my players to design characters who:
Fundamentally, most DnD games are the story of a group of friends going on adventures together. If your DnD game is the story of a group of friends going on adventures, then it's extremely beneficial for your players to build characters who will be friends, and who will go on adventures. Together.
It's going well, I think. We're on top of it. I'm not panicking.
There's a Konsi in the invitation art. I'll colour her in so y'all can spot her.
I like that kind of thing in a lot of settings, especially more philosophical or metaphorical settings.
DnD always feels to me like it's a world where the metaphysics are defined by the players having an hour long argument at the table about "what RAW says", while people look up rules in books. Back in my 3.5 days, someone would manage to find a ruling in an obscure 3rd party book, in 4th edition, you'd find some hard definition in the source material. In 5th edition, someone will find a tweet from Crawford, and the table will agree it's stupid and decide the opposite is always true.
For my experiences in D&D, the question of "whether x counts as y" is a definition that sticks to the universe itself - there aren't many examples of metaphysics in D&D where the answer varies by intent. (I'm sure there are some though!)
Caveat: As with everything I say about D&D rules and definitions, this is not advice, just how I think of things, and the objective correct answer is always "whatever works at your table."
Konsi did once break the plot of an adventure wide open by having the right detection magic running, for entirely unrelated reasons. Just realized the plot-twist 10 sessions early...
Oh yes, although with roleplaying setting metaphysics, it's probably good to define this to be true if you're using it in your game. (To make sure it interacts with the rules correctly and has the right keywords etc etc.)
For example if you cast "detect poison" do you detect bottles of alcohol, or a hidden wine cellar, etc etc. If your DM has never considered whether or not alcohol is a poison it probably wouldn't occur to them to mention it, but if they have then they might!
While I have not drawn a comic of it, I can say that Konsi would have previously provided Razira permission to pick her up, for any reason whatsoever. (Also she's secretly enjoying herself here.)
Ah, I've been super busy with planning a wedding! The Konsi is continuing though, just slooow...
I also recently transferred all my notes from my 10 year old, completely full, notebook to a new one, and... I think I might have enough plans for about 100 Konsi comics... (There are 11 plotlines I have ideas for.) Here's a picture of what my new ideas notebook looks like.
This part of the notebook is for generic comic ideas - the ones I draw in the in-between weeks, so there's no worry of plot spoilers in this image. My notebook is a constant companion, and ideas for jokes go into it whenever they come to me. Some are fully formed and ready to go, some are half-formed and need workshopping before I could make a comic out of them. Some of them are probably so bad I'll never use them, but sometimes seeing the note at a later date inspires a new idea.
Sorry it's been so long, I've been rather busy and have had less time to draw (I'm planning/prepping a wedding.) - I hope to get back on the wagon again though.
Anyway, here's a bonus Konsi.
“Alcohol is a mild poison” has been a house rule within my extended roleplaying circles for a long time. It fits well into almost any setting or metaphysics, and allows you to do interesting things with intoxication.
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I didn't hear no initiative roll!
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I'll be back posting comics soon, I promise, but this older one is topical enough to post.
But what if one of these sidequests has a good reward?
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It's not easy, having a divine mission.
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Konsi doesn't make the rules, she's gotta use those slots.
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This one isn't much of a joke, it's instead providing opportunity for some upcoming character exposition.
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I'm always cleaning up murder scenes... they all say that they want the gore gone.
Okay, jokes are done, continue with your day.
Both of the guards have a handle. If the guard that always lies pulls his handle, then the minecart will divert to the second track. If both guards pull their handle, the prisoners will be released. One of the handles is covered by a wooden box, where half of the wooden planks of the original box have been replaced by new ones cut from a tree that fell when nobody was around. If guard A is taller than guard B, are we getting paid for this quest?
I'm dumber faster
The villains in question were running a business at a street faire in Waterdeep. We had pegged their group as suspicious in general, and figured this was some kind of cover to pass on covert messages or meet with other villains that we were tracking. Wanting to get an opportunity to get a good look at them, and stake them out to see who they were meeting, we showed up and spent some time hanging around keeping an eye on their activities. (They had not met us and we had no reason to think they would suspect us of foul play.)
After a couple of hours of not much happening, we started passing shifts around keeping an eye on them, and Konsi went on a walk around the stalls at the faire, where some gnomes from the temple of Gond were making candyfloss with some kind of contraption. Faelys has a massive sweet tooth, and Konsi (who was magically disguised as a gnome so as not to cause concern in the streets of Waterdeep) figured it'd be really cool to learn to make candyfloss, so she asked the gnomes how the machine worked. They refused to tell her, but she was determined to figure it out, so she watched them operate the machine for a while to try and learn what she could about it.
As a part of this investigation, she cast detect magic, to see if the machine was in any way magical (it wasn't, it was purely mechanical) - so, a little despondant, she returned to the group staking out the villains, only to discover that all of them had magical illusion auras - as they were all wearing magical disguise amulets.