Irregular Webcomic! #17

2011-11-18 Rerun commentary: It's the first strip of the Space theme! Now that we have four established Fantasy characters, it was time to shake things up and transplant them to a science fiction setting. The conceit is that it's the same four players (who we never see) switching genres and starting a science fiction game. In reality, this is almost precisely what was happening - my gaming group had fantasy and space campaigns, with the same players playing different characters.

In the comic we haven't learnt anything at all about these Space characters yet (including their names), but I can let you know now that in my own real life games Serron was played by the same player as Kyros, Iki Piki was played by Mordekai's player, Paris was Alvissa, and Spanners... well actually Spanners was played by a fifth player - not the same person who played Lambert.

The guy who played Lambert played a different character in our space campaign, by the name of Lycroft, who was Serron's nephew, and who never appears in Irregular Webcomic! And the guy who played Spanners in our space game played Draak (yet to be introduced in the comic) in our fantasy game.

That's reality though. Within the comic, the conceit is that these are the same four players as Lambert, Mordekai, Alvissa, and Kyros. The mapping is never made explicit though, and as the themes progress the conceit of them being roleplaying games slowly gets pushed way, way into the background along the way, giving each of the characters their own lives and distinct personalities.

The other bit of non-reality in this comic is that in real life we never used LEGO figures for the space characters. We had the painted gaming miniatures (which appear later) right from the beginning of our campaign. I had them at the time I wrote this comic, but decided that using LEGO figures first would make a good gag. So I spent several strips deliberately establishing the Space guys as LEGO figures, only to pull them away a bit later with the gag about replacing them with gaming miniatures. Yes, even at this early stage, I was planning ahead for plotting purposes.