OOTS: Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales / Rich Burlew

The Order of the Stick: Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales by Rich Burlew. 112 p.

OOTS is a fabulous, long-running, unfortunately rather slow-moving webcomic involving a band of adventurers--the titular Order of the Stick--trying to save the world while achieving some personal goals along the way. The strips in this book are not in continuity with the online comic; they were published in Dragon magazine before it become defunct, and Burlew added a lot of extra stuff not available elsewhere to make a decently long book. I enjoy the plot-driven online comics more, but this volume is great fun, with much of it being specifically focused on mocking D&D game rules and conventions. We do get some callbacks to the in-continuity strips, too. ("He's invisible!")

The vampiric half-dragon half-troll lycanthropic fiendish snail is a thing of particular beauty. ("Lycanthropic? What do you change into, then?" "A slightly hairier snail. Not the point right now.")