Many a gaming group knows the frustration of not being able to get everyone together on a regular basis. Often, the solution involves splitting the party; some PCs engage in the adventure at hand, while others are missing on other errands. This seems to be a feel that the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons comic was going for. In “The Spirit of Myrrth,” our centaur friend Timoth was notably absent (as was Agrivar). Now, in “Catspaw,” he’s back but the rest of the group, save his buddy Onyx, are out.

Onyx the Generous

One thing I very much appreciate about this comic (and something that Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves nailed) is that our heroes don’t start off with epic quests to save the world. They’re usually muddling about in their own harebrained antics when adventure finds them…not unlike most D&D sessions I’ve played in.

Take, for example, this story, where the inciting action is Luna getting upset at Onyx for running up a huge bar tab.

Onyx’s attempt at blackmail goes poorly, however.

Enter Timoth with the news that he’s found employment in Waterdeep. Onyx, however, is less than thrilled with the prospect of actually working for a living.

And thus the stage is set. The adventure begins with one protagonist moping at the bar and the other off to do a simple fetch quest…or so it seems.

Timoth’s Job

While Onyx sulks over the loss of his bar privileges, Timoth meets his employer. The man wears a cloak with its hood pulled up. As anyone familiar with fantasy tropes knows, that makes it impossible to see the person’s true identity.

Onyx, meanwhile, learns from a frightened noble that the package is the Moonpenguin of Boof, a statue of a penguin whose eyes glow when danger approaches Waterdeep. By holding the package, Timoth becomes the target of nefarious villains who seek to steal the statue. Onyx storms off to save his friend, not bothering to note that the noble he’s teaming with isn’t exactly capable.

As always, I love Onyx and could run a game endlessly for someone who played up his impulsive, never-look-before-you-leap nature.

More Trouble than Anticipated, Like Always

Timoth finds himself ambushed several times during what should be a routine package delivery. Onyx rushes in to save him with the bumbling noble Tertius at his side. But some drow poison combined with a portable hole provides results that the adventurers couldn’t have prepared for.

While Onyx dispatches his foes, he and Tertius are left unprepared against a new opponent…

I still don’t understand the logic that connects squids to psionic brain-eaters, but I appreciate the fact that mind flayers have been present in many of the best D&D stories ever told.

Prisoner of the Jinxikins

Onyx manages to hold his own against the mind flayer until the city watch shows up and forces the creature to retreat. Tertius, unfortunately, takes a mind blast that scrambles his senses until Onyx “helps” him.

The humor in this series is a little on the slapstick side, but still well-delivered.

Timoth, meanwhile, awakens to find himself surrounded by jermlaine gremlins, although Timoth initially refers to them as “jinxikins” for some reason.

The gremlins work for the mind flayer, who in turn works for an as-yet unseen crime boss known as Xanathar. folks familiar with 5th edition D&D probably recognize the name as belonging to the beholder who adorns the cover of Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, but as of the time of this comic he was less well-known unless you happened to own the supplement Waterdeep and the North, which presented one of my favorite D&D images ever.

Xanathar would go on to serve as the villain of Eye of the Beholder, one of the first really popular D&D video games. The heroes of that game killed him, but another beholder (the one in the aforementioned Xanathar’s Guide to Everything) took his name and crime lord status. D&D has a bad tendency to do that sort of stuff, either replacing dead characters with identical namesakes or just bringing them back because they’re too marketable to stay gone. (See also Vecna, who is yet again the edition-closing bad guy who your PCs won’t be able to actually kill.)

Mirt the Moneylender

Onyx notices a tail following him…not hard to catch, considering that it’s a giant. He makes quick work of the creature and gets some information about where Timoth has disappeared to.

What Onyx doesn’t know is that Harshnag threw the fight so he could feed the information to the dwarf. None the wiser, Onyx goes to seek information from Mirt the Moneylender, a former adventurer and a guy I wish I hadn’t learned more about.

Like Khelben, Mirt is a notable NPC in the Forgotten Realms setting, albeit one with much less magical might. He’s a former adventurer who retired to get fat and happy as a moneylender in Waterdeep–but who naturally keeps getting involved in adventures now and then.

The thing that makes me cringe about Mirt is his relationship to Asper his adopted daughter and wife. Yes, you read that correctly. He took her in as a child, then became her lover when she was old enough, and then married her. D&D used to forbid same-sex relationships, but they were okay with grooming as early as the 1980s. Luckily, that little detail doesn’t get brought up in this comic.

Mirt uses a magic item to help Onyx find Timoth. As soon as the dwarf leaves to get his companion, the moneylender storms off to confront Khelben about manipulating these adventurers into danger. Thus, Khelben reveals why he has set this elaborate ruse in motion:

Unfortunately, Khelben’s plan runs into a snag because he didn’t expect someone of noble blood, which Tertius is despite his incompetence, to get involved. That makes it a political matter, so the wizard needs to assemble a rescue team.

Ways of Making You Talk

After two issues of lurking off-panel, Xanathar reveals himself to Timoth and interrogates him using a charm monster spell. Meanwhile, his mind flayer ally becomes concerned about the beholder’s eccentricities and starts to plot against him.

Two things: first, I love it when comics do things like having Timoth’s exposition run behind other panels. It’s something that other mediums simply cannot do. Secondly, I can understand why D&D chose to replace Xanathar with a successor after Eye of the Beholder; a slightly-insane beholder crime boss is a great NPC to have. However, just having another beholder with basically the same personality is a waste; they should have instead simply used a different foe for Eye of the Beholder, since the monster there lacks Xanathar’s general panache.

The mind flayer may be plotting against Xanathar, but the beholder is wise to his tricks and has his “friend” Timoth punch him for a while before going outside to stand guard.

D&D‘s charm spells are hard to get right in a game because they require a lot of adjudication as to what someone who views a person as their best friend would actually do for them. However, they work pretty smoothly in fiction like this where you can get some zany mind control antics without the total control of a dominate spell.

Frenemies Forever

Onyx and Tertius, meanwhile, trek through the sewers in search of the missing Timoth. Along the way, Onyx relates the tale of how he and Timoth met. They were each after the same gemstone, Timoth because he was duped by halflings and Onyx because he took a bet, and wound up at each other’s throats.

Onyx and Tertius find Timoth guardian the door to Xanathar’s lair. Under a charm effect but not brainwashed, Timoth greets Onyx warmly but tells him he can’t enter. This leads to one of Onyx’s more clever moments.

Of course, being clever has its limits. Onyx doesn’t notice Tertius pocket a golden ring lying in the sewers, and he barges in on an argument between a beholder and a mind flayer–two creatures definitely beyond his normal capabilities.

Onyx runs back to Timoth with the newly-united monsters hot on his heels. And if that’s not enough, the ring Tertius picked up unleashes a vengeful genie at the same time.

Plan B

As the final issue of the story opens, our heroes face a beholder, a mind flayer, a drow henchwoman, and a genie. Onyx and Timoth resort to a backup plan that many adventurers know well.

Xanathar sends the mind flayer and the drow after Tertius, with orders to let the genie kill the fop if possible and to intervene otherwise. Meanwhile, he goes after Onyx and Timoth himself, relishing the hunt.

Tertius, meanwhile, learns that it’s very important to let people finish their sentences. When the genie came out of the ring shouting “Death!” he really meanth “Death to him who killed my master!” This allows the silly wizard to make a quick and formidable ally.

Similarly, Onyx and Timoth manage to tilt the odds in their favor by hiding around a corner and hitting Xanathar in the face before running off again.

Xanathar’s minions have similarly poor luck. Tertius has the genie give him some gear to make him look like a powerful warrior. The equipment dissolves quickly, but the ruse is enough for the genie to shake answers out of the mind flayer, throw him into the drow, and then set off to find the person who killed his master: Xanathar, naturally.

The characters here are practically shrugging to the fourth wall and saying, “It’s a living,” but the comic wisely keeps things grounded in the fictional world by having a woozy mind flayer for the drow to insult.

The Chaotic Finale

The allies of Khelben and Mirt sneak into Xanathar’s lair to recover the Moonpenguin statue, which itself is a decoy copy of the original made so Khelben can locate Xanathar’s lair. Yes, Khelben intended Timoth to fall into peril, because he’s a lawful neutral master manipulator who doesn’t mind breaking some eggs to make an omelette. Of course, when the eggs are his own, that becomes a bigger issue…

A massive fracas breaks out as Xanathar, the drow, the mind flayer, Onyx, Timoth, Tertius, and Khelben’s associates all collide. It gets so bad that Khelben joins in the battle…

…or does he? As our clever drow vixen deduced, Khelben is just an illusion summoned by the genie. This means that Xanathar’s eye ray and the mind flayer’s psionic blast pass right through it, hitting the individuals on the other side.

The drow is still at large, however, and she tries to use Tertius as a hostage. But Tertius has been on an adventure now and gained some XP of his own, so he’s no longer the young idiot that he was earlier this evening.

There are alligators in the sewers of Faerûn, too, but instead of being mutated reptiles flushed down the toilet, they’re probably put their by Gatorus, the god of alligators and sanitation, or something.

And what of the Moonpenguin? Tertius gives it to Onyx, who uses it to repay his debt to Luna, thus returning us to the status quo. No repercussions or anything…after all, that statue was definitely a copy and not the original, right?

Thus ends a romp that is at times hilarious, exciting, touching, and ridiculous. To recap, the inciting incident for this adventure was Onyx running up a huge bar tab and Timoth getting a job. From there, it turned out that Timoth’s job was part of a multi-faceted ploy set up by Khelben to get a traceable magic item into Xanathar the beholder’s lair. From there we delved into sewers, genies, mind flayers, and more.

In other words, it was a pretty typical night in the city of Waterdeep.