Nodwick

"Yeagar: Oh, what do you know? You're only a henchman. Nodwick: Yeah, I was overqualified for an adventuring job."

"The story of Nodwick is a classic tale of boy meets party, boy hires on with party, boy becomes injured, crushed, punctured, smelted, flattened, stapled, eaten, and occasionally used to carry stuff."

- Nodwick's Rogues Gallery

Nodwick is Print-and-webcomic by Aaron Williams, the same author as PS238 and Full Frontal Nerdity. Focuses on what can only be called a misadventuring group in a fantasy world based loosely on Dungeons and Dragons settings. The party consists of a less than worldly cleric named Piffany; a completely expendable henchman, the titular Nodwick; a power-hungry wizard named Artax; and a brawler named Yeagar. The print comic followed a story arc concerning the party's battle with an evil god called Baphuma'al, while at the same time the online variant and its apperances in Dragon Magazine provided shorter a-gag-a-week stories that were unrelated to the goings-on of the print story.

After having completed its print run in 2008, the comic is currently on hiatus as Mr. Williams focuses on PS238 and Full Frontal Nerdity. The author has instead begun to upload the story from the print comic into the website for free in lieu of new strips, at a rate of three pages per week.

Here's old issues, from Dragon and Dungeon.

Here's the new site.

"Powers What Is: Leave the cleric alone. If you do anything that keeps her from doing her nice-thoughts-and-fluffy-kittens work, we'll bust you so far down that an army of theological scholars won't be able to find mention of you in a million years! You got that?"
 * Abnormal Ammo: Henchmen. Yeagar also develops a stone thrower that requires the discs to be saucer-shaped. One strip features a crank-powered sword-shooting gun.
 * Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Justified
 * Action Girl: Rowen in the print comic.
 * All Just a Dream: One strip featured the characters as ordinary people who happened to be playing a game of D&D with Aaron Williams as the DM. Nodwick's player wanted a new character, but Williams insisted that despite being a Butt Monkey, his role was vital to the party's success. Cue Nodwick waking up and looking confused.
 * Exclusively Evil: Subverted. They encounter a Kobold accountant.
 * "You'd be surprised..."
 * And a down-on-her-luck Drow squatting in the party's basement due to a housing crisis.
 * Amusing Injuries: Verbally. Half the fun of Nodwick suffering a severe injury comes from statements such as "I can't feel my kneecaps...oh wait, yes I can, they're in my shoes."
 * An Arc: The print comic.
 * Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: A certain Sword in the Stone, which if pulled out too early, will curse the land with fire raining from the sky. It adds additional curses if someone is dumb enough to put it back in... And additional ones if you pull it out again, and so on and so on. These curses get increasingly silly, such as every firstborn child becoming a lawyer, demons building mini-malls, incontinent pelicans, "reagonomics", and market-researched sit-coms.
 * Curiously, for such an extensively planned curse, it doesn't have any dispensation for what happens when someone gets fed up with the bullshit and breaks the sword.
 * None that we see. The guys with the book listing the curses are still searching when the party leaves.
 * Art Evolution: The artwork and character designs have gradually become more streamlined and exaggerated since the beginning. Given a Lampshade Hanging in one strip, where Artax observes that Nodwick's nose is much larger than it used to be, and Nodwick offers the hypothesis that it's developed as a counterweight for all the treasure he's made to lug around.
 * Artifact of Doom: Half the group's income derives from hunting for these. Usually with some lying spin doctoring to make them more palatable to Piffany.
 * Back From the Dead: Nodwick. And he's required by law to fill out a new birth certificate every time. On a busy week it's rather inconvenient.
 * Badass Adorable: Piffany. For all her childlike mannerisms, she's ultimately the lynchpin keeping Baphuma'al from taking over the world. Major demons and Infernal lawyers fear her.
 * Badly-Battered Babysitter: When Piffany is recalled to her abbey, she's deliberately given the "difficult" class by the Alpha Bitch, populated with demons, children of villains and the possessed.
 * Basement Dweller
 * Berserk Button: Curse enough around Piffany, and she can apparently kick her way through prison bars to deliver an indignant scolding.
 * If you hurt Piffany in any way or damage her happy optimistic outlook on life, expect Artax, Yeagar, Nodwick and the Powers What Is themselves to get pissed off with you. This tends to have rather unpleasant outcomes.

"It was Yeagar who pioneered many of the techniques in henchman use that adventuring parties use today. Far from relying on hirelings as mere human shields, he demonstrated their employ as projectiles, bait, door-jammers, and flotation devices."
 * Big Bad: Baphuma'al in the print comics, Count Repugsive in many of the shorter strips.
 * Boisterous Bruiser: Yeagar, when he's being nice.
 * Jerkass, when he's not. Case in point.
 * Broke the Rating Scale: Once, when Yeagar gave up the seven deadly sins, he invented an eighth. Suffice to say, they don't make him try to give them up any more.
 * Brotherhood of Evil: The Brotherhood of Evil Henchmen
 * Butt Monkey: Nodwick, whose job description involves carrying extreme weights, suffering abuse, and being completely expendable.
 * To put this in perspective, Nodwick is hired ostensibly to provide someone who can carry things. However, the less morally constrained members of his party put him to other use:

"Nodwick: I guess the "Lawful Good" in your want ad was a typo, right? Yeagar: Our cleric placed the ad; she's a bit of an idealist."
 * ... not to count battering ram, trap disarmer (as Artax at one point puts it, "In the same way stick disarms a bear trap.") and an all purpose tool, with the only person with any moral decency at all in the party being too clueless to stop this. Said uses, more often than not, result in his death, only to Piffany to conveniently patch him up with Duct Tape, so that said abuses can be heaped upon him all over again. And all of this takes place on top of the fact that he is frequently expected by his employers to haul several metric tons of "loot." To make matters worse, his guild is manipulated by the Adventurers Guild so that the president is a hamster and his health plan consists of a bottle of poison (The exact type of poison changes periodically). His contract is utterly impossible to get out of and at one point, he finds out that it is cosmically infeasible that he would ever get out of his current situation. This is so bad that when he dies, he is reduced to begging the powers that be to let him stay dead, only to find that he was due for resurrection yet again.
 * A representative of "The Powers What Is" offered just that. Nodwick tried to turn it down immediately.
 * The reason for that is every time they tried to help him it either made matters worse for him or somebody else. If he died permanently Piffany would have a nervous breakdown and that goes against all of reality for her to angst.
 * The Cameo: Nodwick makes a few brief appearances in the live-action independent film The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising.
 * Open the official D&D supplement, Book of Vile Darkness to the Monsters chapter. Look very carefully at the party of adventurers those two skeleton monsters are about to attack. Familiar?
 * Nodwick and the party also appears in an issue of PS238 as part of an elaborate time-travelling/dimension-hopping plot.
 * Can Not Tell a Lie: Piffany not only lacks the ability to lie, she can't even keep her mouth shut while others do so.
 * Captain Ersatz: The god Tharizduuhm is a pretty obvious ersatz Tharizdun, himself something of an ersatz Lovecraftian Old One. However, Lolth, Spider-Man, and Count Strahd, among others, all appear as themselves.
 * Cataclysm Backstory: The world used to be a technological paradise right up until a scientist destroyed everything when his Time Machine spectacularly misfired.
 * Actually he brought the equivalent of a high tech palm pilor with him and that was enough to cause the Cataclysm.
 * Cerebus Syndrome: in the print comic; with Baphuma'al as Knight of Cerebus.
 * Character Alignment: Not surprisingly, since it's inspired by D&D. They actually have official character sheets (for 2nd Edition) that were published in Dragon (magazine) and then later added to the online archive. Then again, the dissonance between their sheets and how they act is a deliberate part of the humor.
 * For those interested, Piffany and Nodwick are Lawful Good (to no-one's surprise), Yeagar is apparently Chaotic Good, and Artax is Neutral Good (though gods know how, considering how they treat most of their fellow beings—and Nodwick). Or, as the first strip says:

"Narrator: Once Upon a Time, there was a beautiful princess. Her beauty was so that it outshone the queen. The queen grew jealous, and exiled the princess to the forest, in the hopes that she would be felled by the beasts living there. The princess was found by a kindly troupe of seven dwarves, five of which were on vacation and one of which had a hyperactive thyroid condition... Yeagar (as Snow White): This is really starting to get old. Nodwick (as dwarf): Wow. If the queen exiled you for being pretty... Yeagar: Can it, Dopey. Artax (as dwarf): Ugly jokes and men in dresses. Two dead horses that can't avoid being beaten..."
 * Presumably it's a joke at the expense of those roleplayers who end up playing good alignments as neutral—certainly Artax acts True Neutral and Yeager is textbook Chaotic Neutral.
 * Chekhov's Gun: In one of the first Nodwick strips, Yeagar remarks that the party really needs a thief; Artax reminds him that their last one is still in therapy.
 * In the print comic,
 * Chekhov's Gunman: at the end of Last Son of Xenon. No mention is made of them again until the final confrontation with Baphuma'al.
 * Chew Toy, The: once again, Nodwick.
 * Cloning Blues: More than once, Artax has tried out his clone spell on Nodwick. The results have ranged from simple leftover heads to legions of Nodwick zombies.
 * Cloudcuckoolander: In the print comics, this is the fate of after overspending her power. A rather dark example altogether,.
 * Cluster K Bomb: KRUTZ!
 * Cosmic Plaything: "The Powers What Is" have stated that Nodwick is a "destiny sponge". If he doesn't suffer, the rest of the world suffers instead. Which makes Nodwick something of a martyr...who comes back to life...I'm gonna stop right there.
 * Crapsack World: Society has devolved to a feudal system, none of the sentient races get along, the gods argue all the time, and there are far too many carnivorous monsters for Nodwick's tastes.
 * Then their attempts to help the creation of a perfect world turn out even worse with the creation of a world occupied entirely by absurdly muscular fairies who talk like Piffany, do all-night magic research sessions, and then have to cope with 200 proof water. Granted, this may be your idea of heaven.
 * It's still a picnic compared to the parallel world in A World Without Piffany. Baphuma'al runs the place.
 * Crossover: Several with Full Frontal Nerdity, the author's other D&D-based comic.
 * A World Without Piffany includes a sequence where Nodwick is rapidly zapped into various other universes, which include PvP, What's New with Phil and Dixie, and Dork Tower (the last just as one of the characters is ranting about gratuitous crossovers in comic books).
 * And speaking of Phil...
 * As well as Expies of their characters in the "Q4orce" side stories, set in the City of Heroes universe.
 * Atlas makes an appearance in Q4orce as well, and issue 39 of PS238 is a cross-over with Nodwick.
 * An annual issue of Dragon magazine featured a three-way crossover between the magazine's three comic strips, with each cartoonist taking over another's strip (John Kovalic did Nodwick, Phil Foglio did Dork Tower, and Aaron Williams did What's New?) and inserting in-jokes from his own comic.
 * Cyanide Pill: The Henchman union's health plan is a vial of poison, the first month it was literally cyanide, another time it was hemlock.
 * Deadpan Snarker: Nodwick. Arthax takes over the role if Nodwick isn't around, and his Evil Counterpart Ildomir in the print comics gets rather sarcastic when things aren't going his way.
 * Death Is Cheap: Nodwick has to file a new birth certificate with his union every time he dies. His file holds eight trees worth of paper.
 * In one issue of the comic book, he dies 10 times on one page, and many many more times in the rest of the issue. He dies so often that the compilations have a "Rest Index Peace," an index of which pages he dies on, and in what manner.
 * Which itself was discontinued after the second book or so because it just became TOO MUCH to keep track of.
 * Disproportionate Retribution: In A World Without Piffany, someone was left to rot in a dungeon for littering.
 * The Ditz: The Evil Henchman Beobor from the print comic. Nodwick's constant bamboozling of him makes Yeagar look smart by comparison.
 * Doppelganger: Though not a very in-character one.
 * Duct Tape for Everything: The favoured healing method of our partys cleric. He has a holy Humongous Mecha that shoots duct tape to ressurect Nodwick.
 * Dumb Is Good: Both played straight with Piffany (good, but naive and either very selectively oblivious or has a real problem with failing spot checks) and Artax (smart, but utterly amoral), and subverted with Yeagar (dumb as a stump and not very nice) and Nodwick (smart and good, making it a wonder he ever became a henchman in the first place).
 * It should be noted that Piffany is usually very perceptive when it comes to everything except Arthax and Yeagar's antics.
 * One of the earlier comics showed that Piffany is intentionally ignoring it.
 * Dragon (magazine): One of its longest-running comics, going unbroken once introduced all the way to the final print issue.
 * Early-Bird Cameo: Baphuma'al gets introduced pretty early on. However no one would suspect that it is
 * End of the World Special: of all people get the opportunity for this near the end of the print comic.
 * Evil Counterpart: In the print comic Utharr, Ildomir and Elonan are this for Yeagar, Artax and Piffany respectively.
 * Evil Sorcerer: The party faces these on a regular basis in the webcomic. Ildomir from the print comic is perhaps the most pronounced example, although he's technically a wizard.
 * Evil Twin: Inverted, ends up developing a good twin in the print comic after enough smacks to the head with the clue-by-four.
 * Eldritch Abomination: So very many.
 * Elves vs. Dwarves: A brief war ended because A) the Artifact of Doom both sides were looking for would have killed both sides if it was used, and B) they decided the humans needed careful watching, since the stuff in their tavern cellar is clearly an explosive siege weapon - it can't possibly be drinkable (see Gargle Blaster below).
 * Even Henchmen Love Their Mamas: Nodwick's helmet is a gift from his mother, and he demands to know which is the original when he gets cloned.
 * Failed a Spot Check: Piffany repeatedly fails to spot Athax and Yeagar's more egregious abuses of Nodwick. It's implied it may be more Selective Obliviousness.
 * Fairy Tale: One stand-alone story in the print comic has Nodwick and crew reenacting several classic fairy tales.
 * Fractured Fairy Tale: Hilarity Ensues as the characters start rebelling against their roles and act like themselves instead of the characters they're supposed to be, which epically messes up the fairy tales.
 * Fractured Fairy Tale: Hilarity Ensues as the characters start rebelling against their roles and act like themselves instead of the characters they're supposed to be, which epically messes up the fairy tales.

"Nodwick:"
 * Fighter, Mage, Thief: Subverted, as the group mirrors the classic D&D party - a cleric, a wizard, a fighter, and a thief—but they don't have a thief rouge rogue. Instead, Nodwick disarms traps... the way a stick disarms a bear trap.
 * They used to have a rogue. They fired him for stealing from them.
 * Only after Nodwick caught him (see Crowning Moment of Awesome); the first time they had to force a cursed helmet on him that drove him insane for a few years.
 * Fluffy the Terrible: "Naughty furry thing with slimy tentacles, death ray eyes and cute, fluffy tail! "
 * Foreshadowing: The later Gauntlet of Supremacy and Orb of Omniscience storylines were hinted at during "It's a Wonderful Afterlife."
 * The items themselves were also used by Yeager and Artax respectively in A World Without Piffany.
 * "It's a Wonderful Afterlife" also introduced the Powers What Is, who would later prove instrumental in the final fight against Baphuma'al.
 * Fourth Wall Mail Slot: Though it just doesn't end well.
 * Oh yes it does.
 * Friend to All Living Things: Piffany, whose most terrible crime is that she once smooshed a bug. And she did a week's penance just for that!!!
 * Fusion Fic: Not quite, but: Twin Peaks + Expedition to the Barrier Peaks = ??? or "The temple of Elemental Evil. Hommlet"
 * Future Badass: Nodwick, thanks to the power of Save Points. To elaborate, Nodwick touched an artifact that basically engineered a Stable Time Loop - a good thing, as the group was caught up in a quest for the fate of reality shortly afterward. Nodwick's companions being their usual competent selves meant that Nodwick had to go back to the start of the loop repeatedly, eventually deciding to apply himself to the same skills so he could cover for their ineptitude, ending up a Fighter/Mage/Cleric of greater power than any of them.
 * Both Artax and Yeagar get a very negative version of this in some of their alternate futures. In A world without Piffany and It's A wonderful afterlife, we find out that without Piffany or Nodwick around, Yeagar and Artax get ensnared by (respectively) The Gauntlet of Supremacy and the Orb of Omniscience. In A World Without Piffany they also end up as dual Dragons to Big Bad Baphuma'al.
 * Gambit Pileup: Played with in this strip and the following ones, in which LITERALLY everyone in the country is trying to take the throne for themselves.
 * Garage Sale: The party has to hold a yard sale to sell off the excess junk they'd been looting from dungeons when they learn that Nodwick had been forced to build an extension to their house out of looted junk to store the rest of their looted junk.
 * Gargle Blaster: Skullwhomper Ale. Apparently the stuff is so volatile that the elves and dwarves thought that it was some kind of high explosive (Which can potentially cause a fireball 15 miles across)..

""It makes your clothes grow, too?" "This version does. There were some major problems with the first version when-" "THANK YOU! That's enough information.""
 * Genre Blind: Most adventurers, villains and non-henchmen.
 * Genre Savvy: Quite a lot of the characters. Often at the same time as being Genre Blind about a lot of other stuff.
 * Ghostly Goals: Parodied. Nodwick stays around in ghost form whenever he's killed (until Piffany inevitably resurrects him) because his henchman contract makes him contractually obliged to not pass on as long as there's even a chance of revival at some point.
 * The party also ends up assisting ghosts with their final requests a few times. One of them needed to return his neighbor's rake.
 * Glowing Eyes of Doom: Baphuma'al and Ildomir in the print comic.
 * Glurge Addict
 * God of Evil: Baphuma'al.
 * Good News, Bad News: "I've got some bad news and some good news and some bad news..."
 * Goofy Print Underwear: Artax wears blue boxers with gold stars and moons on them. It's an occupational obligation, apparently.
 * The Hecate Sisters: Here.
 * Heroism Incentive: If Nodwick ever gets too tired to lug around all the junk the party loots, they give him Hench Snax, H-shaped biscuits with "enough amphetamines to make a dead mule do warp seven."
 * Humans Are the Real Monsters: Played pretty straight most of the time, with the exceptions of Piffany and Nodwick. Artax at one point explains the origins of all the world's ruins as being a result of a human quest for experience points; while.
 * Humiliation Conga: The final fate of in the print comic.
 * Humongous Mecha: At one point, Piffany.
 * I Can See My House From Here
 * Impossible Thief: The party's ex-thief, Bezzler, who apparently once stole all the tips from a bunch of strippers while they were in the middle of a striptease. During his brief re-stint in the party, he makes off with most of the party's loot and Nodwick's pants.
 * Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Someone on that page has suggested that that trope could be renamed The Piffany.
 * Informed Attribute: The power of This One Ring. It didn't do anything for the dark sorcerer who made it, it didn't do anything for the king who killed the maker for it, and it didn't provably do anything to the halfling who found it later. Despite this (And Nodwick's attempts to point this out), the party insists that it is an incredibly evil and powerful artifact that must be destroyed.
 * It even causes a Distant Finale. Nodwick claims that This One Rock (A randomly selected stone from the volcano where This One Ring was made) had just as much power as This One Ring - meaning none at all. A hundred years later, an adventuring party that bears a considerably resemblance to Nodwick's party finds This One Rock, believing that since it is just as powerful as This One Ring, it must also be an incredibly potent evil artifact, and seeking to destroy it.
 * It's a Wonderful Plot: Deeply subverted to the point that The Powers What Is have to intervene.
 * Jerkass: Yeagar, frequently. Artax gets in on it too frequently.
 * Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Both of them get shown rather more sympathetically in the print comic's storyline; mostly because they've got some genuine evil to thwart and inter-party Comedic Sociopathy really kills the 'team spirit'. Especially Yeagar, who gets genuine Character Development and a Journey to the Center of the Mind to explain some of his inner demons.
 * Joker Jury: The Council of Three and a Half.
 * Just Think of the Potential: everyone wishes that Artax would stop doing this.
 * Kill It with Water: Piffany's answer to sneaky undead: "H2oly Sacred Soaker".
 * After Nodwick's idea of related siege machine wasn't implemented.
 * One time they eliminated a giant demon by getting Piffany to bless an entire lake and splashing the demon with it.
 * Kleptomaniac Hero: The absurd amount of worthless junk that the party loots during quests and forces Nodwick to carry home has to be seen to be believed.
 * Knight in Sour Armor: 'Knight' is pushing it, but Nodwick is an altogether nice and loyal person (almost overly so) while at the same time being extremely cynical and resigned to a life of pain as a henchman.
 * Ladette: Rowen. She's basically a gender-flipped (and saner) Yeagar.
 * Lampshade Hanging:

"Utharr: (To the tune of "Enter Sandman") We're all right/with copyright!/Parody!/Keeps the lawsuits far from me!"
 * Laser-Guided Amnesia: The Clergy In Black have a ring that induces this. For some reason it has no effect on Piffany, so she went for years wondering why they make a point of showing her that ring every time they meet.
 * Lethal Chef: Yeagar, whose idea of a special treat involves ingredients a month past their use-by date.
 * Let's Get Dangerous: What happens whenever Piffany cries to any males in the area. At one point the very possibility of her crying caused an army of mercenaries that been hired by a Orc Lord to destroy the Orc Army, retake their home lands and rebuild all the destroy villages.... in a week.
 * Long Runner: Lasted 10 years. Still isn't 'finished' so much as 'on hiatus' while PS238 gets the limelight.
 * Love Potion: Gets slipped into Piffany's lemonade.
 * Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: The party. Implied to be repeat offenders in this regard.
 * Monster Protection Racket: The editors. Three thousand and we won't let them near your products for a full year.
 * Morality Chain: Piffany and Nodwick, albeit unintentionally, turned out to be the only thing able to save Arthax and Yeagar from a life of evil in the print comics.
 * Morality Pet: Piffany. What's more, she can take on this role for anyone but the most abjectly evil people and gods, not just her own friends. Her cookies are so good that gods will threaten (and then back down from) holy wars over them, and legions of amoral mercenaries will fight evil monsters for free because she might cry if they took the side of evil.
 * Musical Episode: The print comic story "Phantom of the Way, Way Off-Broadway Musical" (now uploaded). Artax casts a "spell of thespia" on Yeagar without checking its spell description, which turns out to be to turn the adventure into one "until end of production or until first tomato is thrown". The entire rest of the story is spend with both villains and heroes belting out Musical Pastiches of 80ies rock and pop with new lyrics.

"Yeagar: You don't understand! He's a ninja and a pirate! Artax: That's a level of awesome you just can't beat without high explosives, maybe."
 * My God, What Have I Done?: Yeager and Artax have this moment when they
 * Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom: Oriental Adventures episode, naturally.
 * Nerd Glasses: Piffany.
 * Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Like so.

"banner: Innovation through overwhelming intimidation!"
 * Cool Versus Awesome: They eventually settle on "Cannibal Vikings".
 * No Kill Like Overkill: Defied on at least one occasion, played straight myriad other times.
 * Noodle Incident: A lot all around: There are many references to (mis)adventures the group have been on (and their aftereffects on Nodwick) scattered around the pages. A Running Gag and recurring source of fear for Yeagar in his backstory is something "Suzie Klopman" (we never learn who it is) did to him on his fifth birthday.
 * "... so unspeakable, it is merely referred to as 'The Cheese Incident'."
 * And with some incidents it would be best to leave them un-narrated.
 * Yeager once took holy orders (He was drunk at the time). He was kicked out after an incident involving a sheriff, a cow, two tavern wenches and a chandelier.
 * One attempt to rescue a Damsel in Distress resulted them accidentally turning the kidnapper's entire family into wereferrets.
 * Oh Krutz: Things often go to Yeah That Place in a handbasket.
 * Only Sane Man: Nodwick. Henchmen in general, actually, but especially Nodwick.
 * Our Dwarves Are All the Same / Our Gnomes Are Weirder: According to an old Dragon strip, both races are just halflings wearing fake beards and platform shoes. They get more money from Sourcebook royalties that way.
 * Paper-Thin Disguise: Arthax's Illithid disguise. At least he keeps his acting (relatively) believable.
 * A Running Gag is how Piffany's order uses a painfully fake moustache and nothing else as a valid disguise... And it always works.
 * Phosphor Essence: We never actually see it (possibly because the Powers What Is hide just how good she is), but as a child Piffany apparently kept her parents awake with her halo of purity.
 * Powered Armor: When Piffany messes with an old spell meant to summon angels, she gets this. She is also shown in a Power Loader in the Metal Dungeon story arc.
 * The July 31st 2001 strip has a dwarf engineer who was "trying to invent a way to have hot tea on the battlefield, and it kinda snowballed". He is shown in a steam engine-assisted suit of superheavy platemail.
 * Powers That Be: The Powers What Is
 * Powers Via Possession: Falling one check vs. sentient item's Ego usually sucks. On the other hand, having one's wits run over by three artifacts at once may work wonders on some meek henchman.
 * Power Trio: Yeagar (id), Artax (ego), Piffany (superego). Nodwick is a henchman and gets no say in the matters, but is a superego.
 * Amongst their evil counterparts in the print version, Utharr (id), Elonan (ego), and Ildomir (superego). Elonan and Utharr end up switching places
 * Pull a Rabbit Out of My Hat: Here
 * Punch Clock Hero: This party definitely is.
 * Reality Warper: They once got an artifact that allowed them to have something happen intantiously while remember what happened. The problem is that is when someone used it to attempt something that would never happen causes damage to reality. They wound up causing all of reality to break.
 * Refusal of the Call: This strip right here is pretty much the trope's platonic ideal.
 * Reluctant Mad Scientist: Artax. He has a very bad habit of thinking of all the Potential Applications and wanting to try them out, often without fully thinking about the consequences. Generally he's not too bad - apart from repeatedly blowing himself and Nodwick up. However, he can veer very close to Mad Scientist on occasion, and there's an implication that if Piffany and the gang weren't around to stop him from concentrating on ways to blow up his lab, he'd probably end up Jumping Off the Slippery Slope.
 * Reluctant Warrior: Piffany.
 * Riddling Sphinx: Fortunately, the Sphinx is flexible about the form in which it will accept the answer.
 * Ring of Power: Parodied by This One Ring.
 * Robe and Wizard Hat: Artax
 * Sacred First Kiss: Piffany, literally. Her first kiss will bestow a major blessing upon whoever she kisses, so she has made a conscious effort to avoid giving away her first kiss until such time as that blessing is needed, onto a person worthy of that blessing.
 * Sarcasm Failure: It takes a lot to make Nodwick drop the snark. When he does, it's usually a sign that things have gotten really serious.
 * Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Yeagar starts talking like this after some exposure to the Clue-By-Four. After a few wallops more, he stops (having either evolved beyond 'language' or just realized smart people don't need to use big words to explain things).
 * Shoulders of Doom: Yeagar's shoulderpads are huge, (and their Spikes of Doom are actually practical!), but even he can be cowed by shoulder pads with blades.
 * Shout-Out: Regularly. Even not counting the "Adventure spoofs".
 * The password is "Klaatu Barada Nikto".
 * The four ancient magic-users who created the Orb of Omniscience are the Third, Fourth and Fifth Doctors, plus Romana.
 * In the Lord of the Rings parody, the Gollum character is Smeagor, who bears a striking resemblence to Dork Tower's Igor "It must be MINE!" Olman.
 * "Get away from him, you birch!"
 * Issue 35: "The Gazebo"
 * Spontaneous Choreography: Yeager asks Artax to cast a spell to make him more charming. The resulting spell makes Yeager (And anyone around him) spontaneously go into song and dance routines.
 * Strong as They Need to Be: Due to Rule of Funny, the party's power level fluctuates wildly in the stand-alone strips, with the party going hunting for ancient dragons one week and doing interplanar travel and in the next are right back to being chased by a band of goblins. The print comic's Myth Arc makes them (slightly) more consistent, but the comic never directly involves the ruleset in its canon and their exact character levels are unknown outside some (now outdated) character sheets published in Dragon.
 * Supreme Chef: Piffany, whose cooking skills are so incredible that Nodwick was able to use her brownies and punch as part of a scheme to convince a mercenary army to fight off an orc horde and rebuild every single town destroyed by said horde (this having beaten the orc chief's offer to the mercenaries of allowing them a portion of the loot and their pick of the women of the conquered territory for not trying to stop them). Piffany's cooking was also at one point used to buy off an entire pantheon of deities who were jockeying to get Piffany to sign on as the avatar of one of them. She successfully dissuades them by giving up her COOKIE RECIPE. Heck, her cooking is so good, it's practically an in-universe Meme.
 * Nodwick's being allowed to be lick the bowl whenever she bakes may be the only perk he gets from his job.
 * Take Over the World: Baphuma'al wants to do this, of course.
 * Take That: Strahd von Zarovich vs. Anne Rice (he's so not a vampire). The good side of certain Doorstopper. D&D Movie.
 * Certain sorts of gamers. Even Nodwick carries all this stuff with his Strength 8.
 * The whole MacroscoffTM arc.

"jumping nut with a sword There will be only me!!"
 * "A kind of tragic" arc


 * "The Last Son of Xenon. Complete with infamous "Super Weaving Speedy Stitchery".
 * Talk to the Fist: The party are naturals at this.
 * Theme Naming: All henchmen have "wick" at the end of their names.
 * The Merch: one example here
 * These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Overlapping a hair with No Man of Woman Born.
 * They Killed Nodwick: Multiple times per issue.
 * This Is Gonna Suck: Nodwick has long since grown too abused and cynical for mere 'Oh Crap' moments. Ildomir also gets into the spirit at times after a few run-ins with the party.
 * Token Good Teammate: Piffany was this before they hired Nodwick, caught between Yeagar, Arthax and their kleptomaniac rogue team-mate.
 * Too Much Information: Here.
 * Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Piffany.
 * Unsound Effect: Wallop! Ka-Dimensional-Rift!
 * Unusual Euphemism: "KRUTZ!"
 * In reality, not so much a euphemism as a
 * "...you "
 * Weird Trade Union: There's the thieves' guild and adventurers' guild, of course, which are pretty standard fare. The henchmen union, however, really takes the cake. The employment contract is so draconian it prevents the henchmen from passing on.
 * When All You Have Is a Hammer/Poor Predictable Rock: The flame sorceress and her ilk. Beaten with a parody Otiluke's themed spell, too.
 * Your Vampires Suck