Yeah, DM had to taste the chalice of humiliation* to the dregs, as the final verse of the chant of summoning needs to be accompanied by dancing Gangnam-style**. I mean, he’s got the right age for it, but he’s still feeling deeply embarrassed.
But, at the end of it, he really feels it’s all been worth it, after all. Hah! Now the laughter is on the other foot! …uh, I mean, the other laughter is about to drop. Uh…the laughters have been turned? The ones who laughed last will be the first ones to laugh again? I just can’t seem to find a suitable phrase, right now. >_> But the effect is obvious – the heroes, who’ve been laughing for all of the last strip and most of today’s, have gradually stopped laughing by the end. And DM, in turn, has started laughing, and is laughing louder and louder, and more and more evily. As does something on the other side of that magical portal he’s successfully activated.
It was that last aspect that awakened our heroes to the realization that something was not quite that risible any longer. Evil laughter in general is something that tends to raise a certain amount of alarm with seasoned adventurers, but of course there are situations where it’s quite harmless and normal. (Think, for example, of a mission of infiltrating an evil tavern where evildoers are having an evil party and amusing themselves evily. That would be evil laughter, but light-hearted one. I mean, the hearts in question would be black, of course, but still light.) But disembodied evil laughter coming from a mysteriously glowing portal to an unknown place/realm/plane of existence/dimension…yeah, that’s definitely something that doesn’t really invite you to laugh along heartily.
Naturally, Snuka is the first to notice, since he’s quite sensitive to the subtle differences between normal laughter and evil laughter, having been on either side of that divide. And, yeah, I’ve based the reaction shots of the heroes on the game-journalists-reacting meme…that’s why the heroes have a higher BMI than they usually do. They’ll be back to normal in the next strip. This was not intended as an allusion to the old proverb “laugh and grow fat”, although I guess it could work as that.
More (evil laughter, likely, and heroic silence) on Mon…uh, Thursday.
* A metaphorical chalice of humilation, not the random magical item chalice of humiliation described on page 385 of the Stockades and Skeletons Game-master Manual. Always cast a detection spell on any random chalice you find lying around…believe me, you don’t want to taste from the chalice of humiliation.
** No idea how Psy learned these moves, I guess he must read a lot of ancient grimoires and tomes of dark knowledge and such.
Those Playstation 1 era graphics/special effects are as glorious as they are cost-effective. Reminds me of a cutscene where the console chugs away at 8 FPS because the exploding effect has too many moving pixels at once to process.
Fun fact: while the backgrounds are rendered, the sparks effect in this strip was actually done in “post-production” (i.e. my graphics software) – partly because it would have taken so long to render something like that. XD