Knights of the Dinner Table

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Knights of the Dinner Table (KoDT) is a comic book/strip created by Jolly R. Blackburn and is published by Kenzer & Company. It primarily focuses on a group of Role Playing Gamers and their actions at the gaming table, which often result in unfortunate, but humorous consequences in the game. The name is a misappropriation of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table.

1 The Comic
2 Characters
- 2.1 Other characters
3 See also
4 External link

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The Comic

Many of the stories presented in KoDT are based on actual in-game experiences of the developers or readers, who are encouraged to submit story ideas. Part of the comic's popularity stems from the reader's ability to relate to the characters and their experiences to their own.

As Blackburn has no formal art training, the characters are drawn in simple caricatures which are scanned by a PC and are continuously reused. This has not hurt the series and has added to its appeal among fans.

KoDT first started in the second issue of Shadis magazine in March of 1990 when then editor Jolly R. Blackburn, still awaiting comics to place on the last page, decided to draw a simple strip of his own to put on the last page, which he called Knights of the Dinner Table and first featured B.A. and Bob. As the third issue came to print, he still did not have comics and continued to make his own, adding in Dave and Brian. By the sixth issue, Blackburn had finally had other comics and replaced KoDT with them, however readers demanded the return of the strip and it did in the eighth issue and continued to until the 21st issue when the strip moved to Dragon Magazine in 1996 with issue #226. In 1996, the comic also began to be published in monthly comic books, which are still in publication.

The popularity of the comic has manifested itself in a number of ways. At conventions that Kenzer Co. attends, live readings of various strips are a popular activity where attendees and even the strip developers take the roles of the various characters and read off the dialog of the strips before an audience. KoDT has also won the Origins Awards for Best Professional Game Magazine of 1998 and 1999.

Also, Kenzer has published an actual version of the fictional Hackmaster role playing game featured in the comic, which is based on the original version of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and uses the same system under license. Hackmaster has become popular on its own, and has even won the Origins Game of the Year 2001 Award in 2002.

And the four main characters -- Brian's Teflon Billy, Dave's El Ravager, Bob's Knuckles the WallClimber, King of Thieves and Sara's Thorina have also been turned into gamebooks under the Lost Worlds system, published by Flying Buffalo.

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Characters

The main group of characters are the members of a gaming group known as "The Knights of the Dinner Table" among local gamers in a fictionalised version of their home city of Muncie, Indiana. They are (in their seating order from left to right):

B.A.(Boris Alphonzo) Felton - The Game Master and founder of the group. In his 30's, he still lives with his mother after a failed attempt at game design and now works at Pizza-A-Go-Go and his father's dry cleaning shop. He often finds his games thwarted or sabotaged by the antics of the other players, much to his dismay. He is also a sucker for the local game-shop owner, Weird Pete, who constantly finds ways to sell him new (or over-stocked) product, on the basis that it's just what B.A. needs to spice up his campaigns. B.A. was supposedly based on Jolly Blackburn himself. B.A. is currently (late 2005) on a furlough from GMing, having seen too many of his hard-worked campaigns reduced to rubble (and a difficult situation revolving around two self-aware swords): his place behind the GM screen has been taken by Brian VanHoose(qv).

Bob (Robert Samuel) Herzog - A member of the "Old School" style of playing which revolves around killing people and breaking things. He has a short temper, which has led him into trouble on numerous occasions. He tends to react to most encounters with the quote, "I waste him/her/it with my crossbow!". Bob keeps a large dice collection which he is extremely protective of. He currently is attempting to live on his own after a falling out with his father, who does not approve of his hobby. Bob's favourite character (in fantasy campaigns, at least) is a dwarf named Knuckles (ranging from Knuckles, King of the Wall-climbers to Knuckles the Eighth), who rides a mule he believes to be a "Dwarven Warhorse." At the moment, Bob is in a fledgling relationship with Sheila Horowitz, a member of the Dorm Troopers who once got in a fistfight with B.A.(B.A. accused her of in-game cheating).

Dave Bozwell - The youngest member of the group and a 'professional student' at Ball State University where he studies Cultural Anthropology and Dance Theory(it is rumored he took the latter course to meet girls). He is a typical "Hack-N-Slash" style player who becomes bored easily. Often he'd rather fight through a situation then think it through, at which he is not very proficient. His most famous character is named El Ravager, and used to wield a [[Hackmaster + 12]]. He simultaneously lusts to own a god-level Magic Sword (as he puts it, a big-ass sword) and dreads the (relatively high) possibility that such a sword will have its Own Ideas of what it wants to be used for.

Sara Felton - B.A.'s cousin, Sara is the only female member of the group and prefers games with a stronger focus on role playing rather than the pure action preferred by the other players. Often, she attempts to solve issues in-game through negotiation while the others prefer to use violence. Exactly how she (playing a 'good' character) came to unleash upon the game-world a blood-thirsty pack of pit-bulls who attack and devour anything alive they come across (and quite a few not-alive things as well) is an entirely different story, and one Sara would like the world to forget about (even if she never will). While usually the voice of reason, Sara has reflexes that would scare a striking cobra and has been known to have a hair-trigger temper on certain subjects (sexist remarks being perhaps the foremost); Bob, Dave and Brian have all had their shirt collars wrenched by a fuming Sara at least once. Sara's trademark characters are generally (fully-clothed) female barbarians, the most noteworthy of which are probably Zayre and Thorina. Sara was supposedly based on Jolly Blackburn's wife, Barbara Blackburn.

Brian Montgomery VanHoose - A web designer and miniature painter, Brian is the rules lawyer and powergamer of the group. He lives alone in the house he inherited from his parents (who died in a car crash some years ago). He is able to quote rules and supplements down to page and paragraph numbers and bend and abuse this knowledge to his own advantage, at times at the expense of the other players. He meticulously hands down notes of earlier adventures to his characters' descendants (thereby giving them in-game access to knowledge that they otherwise would not possess), and has been known to use fellow party-members as tattooed, walking grimoires. Brian is another person said to keep a grudge so long he has a regular account at the taxidermists' shop. In addition, when he does get pushed too far(either by a carefully constructed plot falling apart or a bout of in-game backstabbing), he has been known to flip the table in a moment of rage- something the others have learned to be wary of, though he does appear to have calmed down a bit recently. His weaknesses include a miserly streak that makes him charge other characters fifteen cents apiece for character sheets (and non-KoDT affiliated gamers 25 cents), and a love for dogs that can lead to B.A. leading him by the nose towards traps and misfortunes. His trademark characters are wizards, all bearing the name Lotus; his most well-known character is known as Teflon Billy, but it is revealed in a later strip that this was a nickname given by the group to a character originally named Black Lotus. Formerly a renowned Game-Master, he abandoned the GM's Screen after an unspecified incident at a convention, but had recently taken it up again (after B.A. was burned out by repeated trashings of his best efforts in GMing), to run a complex Cattlepunk campaign. After this campaign terminated (by the sudden reversal of Brian's meticulous plans, at the hands of an alliance between B.A. and Sara, and an unexpected role-reversal, (from cringing dupe to back-shooting plotter) on the part of Bob's character), he abruptly threw the reins back to B.A. with little warning, returning to the role of player, saying that he had only GM'd in order to keep his HMPA-GM credentials fully valid.

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Other characters

As well as the "Knights of the Dinner Table", at least two other gaming groups are also regularly represented in the game. One of these is "The Black Hand Gaming Society", usually represented as the "evil" crossover to the Knights, as most of their games revolve around the PCs finding reasons to kill each other before completing the intended adventure. Their membership roster is made up of players who have been rejected from all other local groups, and hence they remain together simply out of the fact that each of them have nowhere else to go. They are far more results-oriented than the Knights, enforcing demerit policies (often worked off by unpaid labour behind Weird Pete's counter), and holding extensive post-mortems on their game sessions, to see where things could have been done better (usually by the members of the group not slaughtering one another's characters for minor infractions of local "rules", to vent a real-life grudge, or to gain experience points needed to advance their own character a level (or two)). They are especially prone to do this to "new" characters -- most all of them have a psychological "button" which triggers a desire to execute a character based solely on race, attitude or type of clothing (e.g. looking like the character might be an assassin).

Pete Ashton - also known as Weird Pete; owner of the local game shop, the "Games Pit" (originally called the "Games Pit Stop"). A player in the Black Hands, although he has occasionally acted as GM for both them and other groups in the comic, usually running his trademark "never-completed" adventure The Temple Of Horrendous Doom (a reference to a real D&D module named Tomb Of Horrors) which "no-one has ever completed without dying". (In fact, the majority of the adventure requires players to take control of disembodied spirits; thus "dying" and being reborn is part and parcel of completing the adventure. Weird Pete generally forces players to sign a non-disclosure contract before playing as he enjoys the mystique evolved around the adventure.) Weird Pete also devised a "demerit" system for penalising players when he is GMing.

More recently (March 06) Pete has been arrested after becoming involved in the planning of a video heist (which he thought was part of a Contemporary Crime Caper scenario), and his attempts to get bail money, through Squirrelly, his hyper-evolved monkey shop assistant, have been short-circuited by a freebie pizza.

Victor "Nitro" Fergueson - the current GM of the Black Hands. Resorts to increasingly contrived methods to keep the group in order, including using demerits, using incentives, and forcing players to wear "hubcaps of shame" if warranted. Supposedly earned his name after an incident taking part in the steam tunnels under the local University where Nitro attempted to run a "live action" session. Nitro was supposedly based on a real person who Jolly met at a gaming club, who really was nicknamed Nitro.

Newt Forager - a small and rather whiny and tricky player who invariably plays evil, mysterious loners with hidden agendas, all of whom are blood related so that he can share in-game information between them. He has gravitated to the Black Hands because no other group will let him in, but since joining them he has acquired an ongoing hatred of Stevil, mostly due to in-game interpersonal warfare and vendettas.

Gordo Sheckberry - a more roleplay focused player who is oddly obsessed with playing female characters, most notably female fairies who are dramatically underpowered compared to the other characters in the campaign. Gordo is wheelchair-bound but considers this a bonus as it enables him to game almost daily with different groups.

Stevil Van Hostle - also known as Stevil Van Hostile, Evil Stevil or Bitter Stevil, Stevil is a tech-support worker who commutes from another city to game sessions and is quick and vicious to jump on any grudge in the game. On occasions, he has been known to deliberately trash entire parties and campaigns simply because another player's character won over on him. He has an ongoing grudge against Newt which started when Newt first joined the group; Stevil's character challenged Newt's to "swing at him with a stick" to test his combat prowess. Newt's character KO'd Stevil's with his first blow and it was discovered that Stevil had assumed that a "stick" would be a small twig or similar, whereas the "stick" Newt's character had actually used was a full-length pole resembling a log.

The Dorm Troopers, Slacker's Hackers and Patty's Perps are a few of the other local gaming groups across whom the Knights come at intervals, most notably in the incident of the Player Exchange Program (and resulting intergroup grudge match). In this, certain GameMasters conspired to arrange for the annihilation of competing groups' characters (so that their bodies could be looted for plunder) by switching players into other groups' games where, separated from their regular comrades, they could be killed off. Notable characters from these groups include Patty Gauzweiller, a primary-school teacher who now GM's (and therefore is known for putting players in the "time-out corner" and stamping their character sheets with smiley and frowny faces); Bridget Keating, a beautiful woman who wears skimpy costumes at conventions and delights in using her appearance to manipulate the "geeks" (not least by involving them in the LARP "Vampyres: Lords of Darkness" and then using them as manual labour); Earl Slackmozer, an occasional freelancer for Hard Eight Enterprises and a one-time rival of B.A.(B.A. didn't care for one of his modules and the two butted heads for a while, but have since learned to respect each other more or less); and Crutch, a hardened criminal who got into roleplaying after overhearing the Black Hands playing a wild-west game in a public bar and thinking they were genuinely planning a bank robbery. After finding out what was actually happening, Crutch decided he had enjoyed the game and wanted to carry on playing, to the surprise of everyone present.

The Knights themselves also have several running side characters in their (various) campaigns. Along these are (or have been):

Knobby Foot, their one-time loyal torch-bearer, currently leading a revolt against their characters.
Lord Gilead, formerly a Knights' hireling who became a charismatic noble lord after the unknown potentially-dangerous magical helmet which the Knights insisted that he should be the one to try out turned out to be a legendary Helm of Lordship. He now rules the land of Faengerie and looks down on the propensity of Teflon Billy, Knuckles and El Ravager to burn and slaughter their way through whatever kingdom they happen to be in.

Chelsie the Magic Cow: once owned by El Ravager and subsequently eaten by a rogue hireling. The result of a tantrum by B.A. after El Ravager (Dave's character) insisted on investigating a cow grazing by the side of the road which was originally intended to be part of the background color. After attempts to dissuade them from investigating it were met with more fervour ("there must be something really special about that cow that he's trying to keep us away from it"), Dave attempted a Detect Magic spell on the cow, and B.A. sarcastically declared that it radiated a blinding magical aura. There is a similar story regarding Knuckles and a mule, which he insisted was actually a dwarven warhorse.

'Red' Gurdy Pickens: bar-owner and nemesis of the Knights' Cattle-Punk characters.
Alexis Marie (aka Lexie): supposedly Brian's girlfriend, but had never been seen by any of the others in the flesh. After a long drawn-out discussion, Brian was forced to admit that Alexis was not real, in a dramatic emotional outburst in which he confessed he had created his own RPG, "Brian's Life", in order that he could feel loved. Alexis is now a touchy subject among all the Knights, and any mention of her at the table tends to result in Brian unleashing a furious beatdown on the person who mentioned her.
Jonid Coincrawler, a thief and illusionist, who devises elaborate schemes to separate the Knights from their gold. In many cases, these schemes would not have worked as well as they did if it were not for the Knights simultaneously attempting an equally elaborate scheme to profit from a situation.
Sergeant Barringer, the leader of a group of hirelings that the Knights placed inside a magical bag of holding in order to transport them with them more easily. After Teflon Billy, who was in charge of the bag, forgot to feed the hirelings or let them out of the bag for several months, he was shocked to discover that - rather than dying - they had created a fortress and society within the bag, living off the other resources that the Knights had stored there. This led to a conflict and eventually to several full-scale "Bag Wars" in which the Knights attempted to reclaim their items.
"Carvin' Marvin", an intelligent talking sword who is, unfortunately, completely insane and delights in having his wielder kill and maim anyone nearby and/or themselves. On occasion, however, he can be persuaded to pursue a more useful goal, and on those occasions serves as a very powerful and effective weapon.
Pit bulls -- the Knights discovered that the "Hackmaster" rules (as tweaked by Brian) allowed pit bulls to be a cheap but effective weapon en masse. Unfortunately, when one of Sara's characters purchased a small group, to run off guards taking the other three to justice, the dogs were feral and started gathering up every other pit bull in the country until a vast pack of the dogs were killing everyone and every living thing across which they came.

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