Fear Leads To . . .

My last post (which was locked because it touched on work issues) was about my fears and angst regarding the coming [dep]r[ec]ession. It ended:

Still, I can't shake the bad feelings.

This statement turned out to be false. Shortly after writing that, I looked over at the enw issue of Cerise, and their review of the webcomic Darths and Droids (darthsanddroids). Reading the webocmic shook the bad feelings right out.

It's a ripoff of inspired by DM of the Rings, which used screencaps to imagine Lord of the Rings as a role-playing campaign. Darths & Droids gives roughly the same treatment to Star Wars, but with a very different mental space.

DM of the Rings takes Tolkein's epic (specifically as retold by the Jackson movies) and applies it to Dungeons and Dragons, Third Edition. Lord of the Rings is often cited as a major influenc on D&D and thus fantasy role-playing in general, but the central conceit of the comic is that the sprawling epic is incredibly unsuited for a role-playing game like D&D. The Dungeon Master relentlessly railroads his players through the intricate plot he's prepared, a story that features little that his players would like to do.

Darths and Droids takes almost the opposite approach. It's central conceit is that the sprawling story of Star Wars makes no sense at all unless you imagine it coming from the minds of a fractious group of players and a GM struggling to keep up after tossing his plot out the window during the first scene. The strip takes its greatest pleasure from finding moments in the film that make absolutely no sense plotwise. These moments become challenges for the writers, and the plot of the strip works around them.

I recommend starting from the beginning. It starts out a bit slow, but when Jar Jar shows up, it quickly shifts into awesome.

And when you get to episode 50 (don't go there yet), prepare to have your mind blown.