Alright! A battle with Richard stuck to a mast and Krunch tied to a deck. This is going to be very interesting. I loved the little banter between Benny and Krunch. I can just imagine him awkwardly trying to take care of his puking little girl. Aww...

I really like the Mongolian(?) archer he just amuses me. Is Sooba on the boat?

I didnt think of that but presume it to be so.

I sort of pictured Benny to be about twenty - yet Krunch says "not so long ago". Interesting, Interesting.

I think he was referring to seasickness.

I don't know... did she ever look sick?

hehe, "I dont feel like Im contributing to this battle as much as I could be..." yay

They look like the elves that took Gamlon, it also looks kinda like the same armor.

Keep in mind that parental figures have a different concept of time than us young folk. 20 years isn't very long to my mom and dad, but it takes up most of my life. To Krunch, it seems like only yesterday that Benny was just a little, projectile-vomiting baby.

They need to unstick richard, and he needs to pull out some more skeletons.

I have to agree, Krunch is probably in his 50s or even 60s. Benny's 20 years wouldn't be all that much to him. Of course, to a lot of parents, they always like to think of their children's infancy and "just the other day" regardless of how much time has acutally passed.

Wait is Cale fighting the King's Legion without complaint?

Did he forget who the good guys are again or did he stop caring?

(Personally I hope it is the former. Cale isn't Cale if he isn't being a naive do-gooder.)

The only exception to that is the Vuli.

Perhaps he is taking Kruch's advice and doing what he needs to do to survive.

O-kay.... The pirates are being attacked by a bunch of cloned gymnasts in tights? Do the Legion boys do synchronity-swimming, too?

Seriously, what's with the weird designer armor those Legionaries use? One-piece body armor that covers the front and balls but leaves the upper leg (where a big artery is) and the sides of the torso completely unprotected?? Or is that spandex? I mean, either don't use armor on a ship at all, or if you do, then use proper armor. Those helmets look spiffy (and uncomfortably similar to the Gamlonian helmets, or is it just me?), yes, but they don't protect the eyes at all; they cover the ears, though, weird design. Artistic license, I guess.

Why does the Legion want to catch pirates alive? They have a ballista, but don't even use it to target the ship's hull or set the sails on fire to put pressure on the pirates, instead they take risk to board? That puts them at a serious disadvantage. And what the heck are their weapons supposed to be? The metals claws, ok, they look intimidating, and apparently they leave the hands free for grasping, but what's that little stick thing with the blades supposed to be? Holding it in one hand while swinging on a rope kinda defeats the purpose of trying to keep your hands free for swinging and swimming.

Benny really should unpin Richard from the mast. Provided he will promise not to use fire spells. But his monk fighting powers would come in handy (as much as I dislike their existance otherwise).

More unidentified nonhuman races seen as part of the pirate crew. More blue sea elves or whatever they are... The black-haired blue pointy-eared guy with the thin mustache and pirate hat in panel 3 looks pretty pudgy, and he has neither the long pointy ears nor the elongated eyebrows that Cale and the other elves had so far. So maybe there are half-elf-half-human crossbreeds in LFG.

That guy with the tusks, light brown skin and leather cap in panel 3 looks vaguely like a D&D 3rd edition orc. Stoll's half-breed trolls in contrast had greenish-brown skin, small horns (at least Stoll had, the rest wore helmets or leather caps with larger artificials horns on them), 5 fingers, red eyes and round ears (one of the few races in LFG to have round ears).

Today's comic also has that guy with greenish-brown skin and straw hat, standing behind the asian-looking guy in panel three with a boy in hand, and possibly the same green guy (now without hat, so that we can see he has round ears and no horns or hair, but a tattoo) is one of the archers in the large panel a the bottom. He also has 5 fingers, so he can't be a male of Benny's race. Could be he is of whatever race provided one-half of the anchestry of Stoll's half-breed trolls. Cale first mistook Stoll's army for pure trolls, and claimed that trolls are known for their stupidity (although that could just have been Cale's prejudice speaking). But since Benny has pointy ears and 3 fingers and is definitely smart, we can assume that Benny's race is NOT called trolls within the LFG universe, even if Benny looks like a WoW troll, for all you WoW fans out there. *shrug*

On the other hand the Legion guys, they all look alike. All human (I assume). Aeloon was human, too, but he had some nonhumans in his ragtag gang. Aeloon looked more like a brigand himself, to tell the truth. This "King" and his Legion, I smell a human Empire with racist tendencies and pure-blood-human, all-other-races-must-be-subjugated ideology? If so they have their work cut out for them, seeing how many different races there are, and how large gnome and half-breed troll armies and bands of Vulii raiders are swarming all over the place. Odd that Cale spoke of the King's Legion as "Defenders of the Realm", which sounds rather too positive for what I've seen so far. Aeloon for example, he seemed pretty greedy and mean. Sure, the Legion rides dragons and has spiffy ships and spiffy white armor, but we're really seeing only one side of the equation here.



He's on a ship full of wanted pirates, armed and armored, and accompanied by a homicidal undead warlock, a minotaur and a woman who owes a debt to commander Aeloon of the Legion. Under those circumstances, refusing to fight and trying to persuade the Legion boarding commando that you're an innocent bystander and on this ship purely by coincidence, oh and that you're not an evil Vulii but a noble High Elf, would be pretty suicidal, especially considering how badly Cale sucks at any form of bluffing. I mean, Cale seems to have a death wish at times, but even he is not that naive. And he has sworn to protect Benny.

There's a German phrase which describes this dilemma perfectly: "mitgefangen - mitgehangen" which basically means, when you're captured with a bunch of criminals, people will assume you're also guilty of the same crimes and you will get hanged alongside them.

Good to see that Cale did at least keep his Gamlonian scale-mail. Smart boy.

I'd like to think Benny would have freed Krunch and Richard but that there simply wasn't enough time. Then again, there was enough time for the Legion to get close enough to attack.

At least given that Sooba is a panther he should be able to swim. I'm not so sure if Krunch is. But I'm amazed that Krunch is still tied down and making no move to get himself untied. If I were him, I'd not want to be captured tied down lying on my back.

Yeah. And you know it's got to be torture for Richard when there are so many people to kill and he can't do anything about it.

Perhaps the pirates didn't want anyone else to share in the fun. No wait, they allowed Cale and his bow.

Perhaps Benny figured out that Richard is just as dangerous for his associates as for his enemies.

The problem with fight scenes is there not much to speculate about for us, in regard to plot points, so we have to wait for Monday.

Richard makes things go FWOOM, right? Reach back, make those wooden poles go FWOOM... FREE RICHARD!!!

Anyway, my first thought was "hey, they look like Vulii". Then I went back and saw that the helmets look similiar to the Gamlonian (Gamlonite? Gamlonese?) ones, not Vulii. Also, those Gamlon helmets had plenty of room for ears to pop out, these new ones are almost solid metal all the way around. Complete coincidence, or slight modification of the same helmet?

You realize that if Krunch keeps his mouth shut and stuff, though very doubtful, he could pass himself off as a prisoner or something, if they loose. And Krunch being free to think up a plan and enact it from the outside of wherever they are going to put the prisoners is a very useful Krunch. I don't understand not freeing Richard though, he would have taken them out before there was a need to worry about boarding.

I noticed a few pages back that the Bones has cannons. Now in simple logics, Cannons + Enemy ship = Kaboom. Much more effective than arrows.

Unless those cannon ports don't have any actual cannons behind them.

Darn it, wheres a Kraken when you need one

I love the dude falling into the water with the two arrows in his eyes (right above Cale's head). I also like the psudo-Wolverine claw things that the enemy have.

Very well drawn battle scene.

Who needs the Kraken when you have Richard? They really need to get him free. We've already seen that he can control his fire spells to the point that he doesn't catch the ship on fire. He managed to fwoom two pirate who were standing over Krunch without even touching Krunch.

They're also wielding dual sided kama's, which is odd for an army funded by the main government of the land, since kamas are usually farming tools..

how come they don't have armpit hair? o.O

I agree with Tobrian, what the hell do those Legion sailors think they're doing going into battle like that? They may as well have big red target signs on their armor.

The guy with the tusks actually looks like a money to me. o.o The top of his 'cap' is fluffy (indicating hair), the front seems wrinkled (like a forehead), and the sides are also fluffy (again, hair). I could be wrong, but that's what I see.

As for the guy with the straw hat--look closely, and you can see long pointed ears sticking out to the sides. I don't think he took off his hat and scarf (and sleeves, checking back), just to fight...the bald, tattooed guy is probably someone else.

My thoughts on Cale are: when he fought the Vulli, he did lose a small part of his innocence--still generally naive and all, though--and has learned to fight when the occasion calls for it. Our little Cale is growing up!

Krunch probably wants to say tied down. He said he doesn't like to get wet, and with all the commotion, it's a lot more likely to happen now, than before.

...And Richard is still on the mast for comical purposes. And so the battle doesn't end too quickly.

The Vulii and Gamlonian helmet were almost identical I think because either they had been one nation in the past, or the Vulii had simply stolen armor and swords off dead Gamlon soldiers.

I don't think these Legion sailors are elves, because what elf would willingly squeeze his delicate ears under a helmet like that? But yes the idea that the King's Legion (empire?) raided stuf from the remains of the old Gamlon nation (republic? empire?) just as people re-used whatever was still usable from the crumbling Roman Empire (weapons, knowledge, building stones) after its fall makes sense. Do we know definitely when before the present the Last Stand of the Gamlons took place?

{part 2}



They remind me of this guy:
http://www.true-magic.com/comic/view.php?id=12
http://www.true-magic.com/comic/view.php?id=44




From an artistic standpoint, yes. Nice choreography, dudes swinging on ropes etc.... From another standpoint, the Legion armor sucks.



Like I said, they're the King's Legion's proud All-Male Marine Counterinsurgency Ballet and Synchronized Swimming Team.

And really, who wants to see armpit hair on men in tights? On the high sea?

Remember, Roman upper-class men shaved all over, too, even their arms, or so I learned in school* (although they sometimes wore beards). Why? To better resemble marble statutes, or for hygiene reasons in the hot Italian summers, or to emphasize that only northern "barbarians" looked like hairy bears, take your pick.

(* the things you take away without wanting to from 8 years of Latin... oh dear)

[edited because sleepiness makes my English go all wonky....]

{part 3}



Thanks for naming them. So they're a traditional Chinese peasant/monk weapon? Hm... together with those claws, this could point into the direction of yet another hypothesis about this King's Legion/human empire. (Of course, Aeloon used a sword, so it's just a hypothesis without any real proof.)

What if the Vulii rose to great power after the fall of the Gamlon nation and conquered a few more lands, subjugating other races just like that poor chained-up minotaur we saw in Cale's adventure in the past? Including the human lands. The Vulii turned humans into slaves, forbidding all martial weapons. So the humans started fighting with farm implements and unarmed combat, they invented martial arts, which would explain where the martial arts D&D monk whose soul Richard allegedly ate came from.

The humans overthrew the Vulii overlords and drove them back into the forests, where they persists as bandits and cut-throats to this day. And the first human king then installed a policy of human-first conquest, seeing all non-human races as potential invaders/foes. Remember, Richard said everyone knows the "elves" are evil, but they don't seem to have a real empire or nation. Looks like the Vulii experiment of "unification" of all elven people didn'T work out as planned.

Or alternatively, Lar just likes to draw funky Asian weapons.

If we have to shave them, guys should have to shave them too.

Seriously, some guys look like they need a midget with a machete to go in there and do some manscaping...

That provides an interesting image...

Interesting and slightly nauseating.

Aellon doesnt really look like he belongs to this legion.

They probably have different uniforms for the Dragonriders than they do for the Navy.

Um I dont think thats armor, it looks like a leotard, good god thery're being borded by a gymnastics team!

hey, you ever been in a fight with a gymnast? they're crazy.

Yeah, they got that whole bendy thing going. Kinda like fighting an electrified octopus.

And if they know Martial Arts you're screwed...

I imagine that a gymnast who knows martial arts could probably kick his own a$$. Literally.

Wouldn't surprise me in the least, but I'd sell tickest so people could watch him do it.

I'll run the bookings. Him breaking something before knocking himself out pays off 30-1.

i seriously must say, if they don't get Richard off those spears pinning him to the mast, they will definitly lose the battle. i mean, come on! haven't you noticed the (dare i say) "good" luck our group has been getting?

personaly, i think Richard is the person doing damage. without him, it's just a healer, and tank, and a hunter who hates killing the bad guys.... Warlocks are known to do LOTS of damage, anyway.

especially when it comes down to impending doom...

I dunno, Gid and Cale look like they could do some serious damage if paired together. Krunch is tied down and due to his, erm, breed? Species? Well, because of who he is he may have trouble fighting on the boat due to hooves/large upper body weight, although by the looks of things (Cale, Gid and a whole ruddy pirate crew) they wont need Richard anyway

But I can just imagine the battle getting to a point where Richard just can't stand it anymore and frees himself, with most likely humorous results. Benny will turn around and there will be Richard with half of his torso missing, fwooshing the Legion.

Let's face it. When Richard wants to do something, he does it.

I've been waiting for a battle scene that might turn out at least a bit more difficult (but not fatal!) for the quartet, and I've thumbs up that this would be it with Richard and Krunch out... :D Excellent art, again.

Now since our friends don't much like either side in this battle why don't they let the pirates do most of the fighting and move in later in the battle to finish off the last of the empire's troops. They only need some of the pirates alive to man the ship. And besides this is obviously a disagreement between the blue lady and some tax collectors. Why else would she say that they are owed something? so sit back and enjoy the show

yes, warlocks are good for DPS... and Im half expecting to see half of Richardgetting the deck all bloody and fwooshing people too... I guess we'll find out in a few hours...