Rich Burlew

Dungeonscape reminds me in many ways of the film The Emperor's New Groove: it shares a great deal of art and text with its producers' other works, but they are executed in such a different voice that one wonders how it slipped past the managing editors. But perhaps one should expect Dungeonscape to take a radical approach to the mechanics of dungeoneering, considering one of the authors is Rich Burlew, creator of the D&D-riffing webcomic The Order of the Stick. Many gamers will divide a show more supplement's contents into "fluff" (flavorful description of the fantasy world) and "crunch" (the game rules that make it happen): what Bulmahn and Burlew have created here is technically 90% crunch, but with such clear purpose and utility that it seems 95% fluff. As they offer new rules for architecture, traps, monsters, and character classes, the authors simultaneously acknowledge the strange and arbitrary nature of "the dungeon" and celebrate it as the venue for D&D adventures. Where else could one get away with shark-filled acid pools? And what other book would so generously grant them? show less

This penultimate volume of OOTS is a lot of fun and has a bit of everything: split narrative lines among different groups, flashbacks, foreshadowing, self-referential jokes, author commentary, and all the silliness we've come to expect from these comics. I am glad that one particular plot point got resolved in this book, though, because—while important to the main plot—it was one of my least favorite things. (Also, the resolution for it was very nicely done.)

Order of the Stick may be the best webcomic I've ever read. This book did not debut on the web as individual comics, but was created as its own entity, giving it much more of a flow than the comics sometimes have. It's a great look at the two main villains of our piece and how they came to be.

The first story arc for Order of the Stick, collecting all of Dorukan's Dungeon strips. Initially, all of the humor is based off of making fun of D&D and role playing in general. The characters get more fleshed out (whilst still being stick-figures, heh) as the plot progresses, and slowly this web comic became one of the better stories in graphic format. Good intermediate-level adventuring fun:)
4 stars, and I appreciate all of the extra stuff that isn't online.