Elf Only Inn

Lord Elf Lord Elf is the host of Elf Only Inn, a responsibility given to him for his level-headed disposition and his ability to inspire friendship and community in all those he interacts with. BWA HAHAHAHAHA!!! Lord Elf claims to have been roleplaying online since Al Gore invented the internet. Because he was unhappy with every room he ever visited, he decided to make his OWN room and his OWN rules, and thus Elf Only Inn was born. Unfortunately, he's still unhappy with everything. This is probably because he is a twisted, evil little troll of a man with no humanity within his shriveled, blacked lump of a heart. Occasionally, Lord Elf tries to disguise himself as the "Blue Wizard of Forestdale" by putting on a pointy cap and beard. This is so he can "set an example" for how everyone else should conduct themselves in his room... or perhaps just so he can spy on the others in order to punish them later. The only joy he takes from life the joy he takes away from others. Lord Elf is relentlessly negative about everything. He has no friends, and he doesn't want them. He will bestow favors on anyone who satisfies his ego, though. The only time he's ever good for anything is when he happens to be faced with something or someone worse than himself, in which case he might end up attacking someone who deserves it. But more often than not, if something actually presents a threat to the Elf Only Inn community, Lord Elf will end up encouraging it. Lord Elf hardly moves at all, a reflection of the fact that he isn't particularly interesting or very good at this roleplaying thing. He has all the creative potential of a soggy cardboard box. An empty, soggy cardboard box.
Lady Sunset Autumn Honey Purity Sunflower Rainbow Lady Sunset Autumn Honey Purity Sunflower Rainbow (hereafter referred to as "m'lady") is a star elf vampire, but only half, which means she can still act like a normal person and only drinks blood if there are other vampires around and she wants to fit in. She can also still have babies and go out in the day time, oh, and did I mention she can still have babies? She's borne a child for every character in Elf Only Inn, male and female alike. Even with people she hasn't "interacted" with. No one knows what she's really like because she doesn't talk very much, or very well. But that does not take away m'lady's charm, and neither does the fact that her name is excruciatingly long and forgettable. She uses a hot picture of some fantasy chick in her underwear, and that's all that really matters. M'Lady is one of the few people who can stand to be around Lord Elf. It's either because she's too dim to realize he takes advantage of her, or she's just too nice to hold it against him. Lady Sunset Autumn Honey Purity Sunflower Rainbow is visually based off the character Dawn. Images of this large-breasted comic book goddess are often used in chatrooms because... Dawn has large breasts and wears outfits that don't hide it.
Nimoy Nimoy is a Trekkie playing a Vulcan character. But he isn't actually a very good Trekkie, though. He can't go to the Star Trek chat rooms because he can't keep up with their lingo, and hot naked Klingon women scare him. The other Vulcans think he doesn't behave properly. In fact, deep down he is afraid that he really isn't a Vulcan at all. . . because he likes girls. Keeping this terrible secret to himself he came to Elf Only Inn, where Lord Elf mistook him for another elf and greeted him with open arms. It didn't take long before Nimoy failed to live up to Lord Elf's expectations, but the stoic and sarcastic Vulcan hung around after befriending the less intellectual but equally out of place Duke Commando. Nimoy continues to pass himself off as an elf, barely, because he wears robes instead of a Star Fleet uniform.
!Duke Commando! Ever since Duke stumbled in to Elf Only Inn, he has been a constant pain in Lord Elf's side. Basing his character off of a popular shoot 'em up computer game, his mere existence violates every single one of the many rules governing EOI. But every time Lord Elf bans his handle, he returns under a new one or goes running to SysOp to complain. All Duke wants to do is have fun, and he has a lot of it. He's a cigar chomping, tail chasing, gun toting, magnificent *******, and even though he's not the brightest apple in the basket most everyone enjoys being around him more than Lord Elf. In Duke's early days he was nearly as incomprehensible as Goku666, but he finally grew weary of being confined to senseless conversations with the spiky haired kid and M'Lady and learned to type properly in order to fit in with Nimoy and Megan. The early Duke was an obvious parody of Duke Nukem, but since his behavior did little to separate him from the original Duke Commando now dresses in a black shirt and has a slightly modified haircut (described by one reader as looking like a "duck's arse", heh heh!).
Lady Megan Arywyn Megan came to Elf Only Inn expecting to find a room dedicated to serious fantasy roleplaying. As she was the only actual full-blooded elvish character to ever come into the room besides Lord Elf, she was instantly declared to be the co-host. At first she took her new role as a chatroom moderator seriously... she dedicated hours of her life each day to being humorless and aloof, relentlessly crushing the souls of everyone around her and helping to inflame the tiniest conflicts into full blown riots, but eventually she began to actually enjoy hanging out with Nimoy, Duke and Lord Woot. A great deal of Megan's real life persona is invested in her character. She really is a self-righteous, pagan, skinny, leaf-eating blonde vegan and consequently she often finds herself at odds with little things like reality. But somehow, trying to be a elvish version of herself in a chatroom caused her to lighten up a little bit, and the others were quick to accept her after she stopped trying to sue big companies out of existence when she discovered that her diet of McDonald's french fries was neither healthy nor vegan at all. While her character does not have M'Lady's cleavage, the guys gravitate to her because she has a vocabulary wider than "LOL". Megan was visually based off of the fair-haired pretty boy Legolas from the LOTR movies.
Lord Wootsayediditagyn Lord Woot is a powerful demongod, one of the ancient and omnipotent "Eternal Sweepers" from the "Ryftwyrld RPG" (page 60 of the first edition... later editions corrected a certain typo). He started out in the Daemon Citadel chatroom, where he was dismissed and ignored by the powerful Eternal Sleepers and given the task of keeping the floors clean to prevent him from irritating such intellectual giants as Cthulu69 and Lucifer_123. When Duke and Nimoy attempted to recruit their own demon to combat the increasingly irritating Lord of Dorkness, they got Woot--"The guy who has that REALLY creepy Britney Spears fan page/tentacle hentai shrine" Woot prevailed over Dorkness because his character had documented stats in the Ryftwyrld book, and Lord Elf was too anal to argue with something in writing. In fact, since Woot seemed to irritate Lady Megan, Lord Elf proclaimed him to be the official janitor for Elf Only Inn. However, Woot and Megan proved to get along better than anyone could have imagined. Wootsayediditagyn is the only EOI character that was directly converted from an actual roleplaying character--for a short time I had played a ridiculously powerful one-eyed tentacle demon, intended solely to make other ridiculously powerful characters look even worse. The original Woot was a Splugorth from the RIFTS RPG, and he did indeed wave his overpowered statistics around as a holy decree of his awesomeness. When he made the transition to the comic, I had to downsize his body a bit to allow him to fit in one panel, which is why Woot now looks like a cross between Marvel's Shuma Gorath and... uh... Celine Dion.
goku666 He's like that cool guy from that Toonami TV show, but he's different and has more powers and he's cooler and he could punch you 699 times in one second. But no one ever believes him when he says he has punched them. They should be flying through mountains and stuff, but they don't. Someday people will take him seriously, so he tries his best to impress everyone by being a total pain in the ass. He even lets Duke Commando beat him up so that Duke Commando will like him even though he could punch Duke Commando to the moon with a karate kick because he has trained very hard. He also wants Lord Elf to like him and tell everyone else what a great gamer he is, which will never happen so long as he does not have pointy ears. But he keeps trying, bless his heart. When goku isn't mashing his keyboard online and being generally ignored by everyone else, he creates sprite comics that are generally ignored by everyone else. Goku was visually based off of a dumbbell. Which is what you are if you still like Dragonball Z.
SysOp, Generic Users and NPCs SysOp is the mysterious person responsible for creating and maintaining the chat service that hosts Elf Only Inn. Little is known about him, other than that he is higher up the chain of command than Lord Elf is and he could care less about EOI or its demanding and obnoxious host. Fortunately for the denziens of the Inn, SysOp is far more likely to undermine Lord Elf's authority by reinstating any handles that Lord Elf bans. The Generic Users are the populace of the mundane chatrooms that SysOp runs. They tend to keep to themselves, discussing pressing issues like Anna Nicole Smith and Macaroni and Cheese, but occasionally they wander into EOI and call everyone a bunch of D&D nerds pretending to be elves and monsters. After that, they run back to their giggling friends and resume pretending to be people who are far more important, intelligent and attractive than they really are. Then they might watch American Idol. NPCs, the Non-Player Characters, are the greatest inexhaustible natural resource of any fantasy community. Why, if it wasn't for the invisible NPCs, who would vampires, demons and wannabe bad guys have to eat, maim and/or kill? They are the background extras, the faceless milling crowd, called upon occasionally to play minor roles or serve drinks. The Lord of Dorkness is so incredibly powerful that he has to prey exclusively on NPCs because he's just too tough for real characters. Because these characters either lack the intelligence or inclination to describe themselves or upload pictures, they are all displayed as generic male and female icons.
The Lord of Dorkness When the Lord of Dorkness signed up and created his profile, he accidentally typed "Dorkness" instead of "Darkness". This is the only reason that he was able to register his profile, due to the fact that every other possible way to refer to the devil had already been taken by his predecessors. On any given chat system, at any given time, in any given room, there are at least 4.6 users who have a handle that proclaims themselves to be The Devil His Own Self. Until Dorkness can find a new way to spell his name that someone else has not already taken, he's stuck with what he's got. Have sympathy for the prince of dorkness, not even SysOp could help him. Dorkness still schemes for great acts of villainy and evil within the Inn, but when his attempts to destroy and enslave all life (after a little browning to gain Lord Elf's blessing) where de-railed by the arrival of the rival demon Lord Wootsayediditagyn, LoD returned to his more subtle acts of cruelty: Killing imaginary non-player characters, playing out terrible "romances" with M'Lady, giving terrible advice and kissing up to the host. Although he is intelligent, he is held back by his dedication to be so good at being so bad, which only impresses adolescent girls and goths.
King Herman of the Humans Herman was a friend of Megan's who followed her to the Inn, also thinking he was going to find some intelligent roleplaying. Instead, he found Lord Elf, who was intent on accusing him of all the evils in the world because he played a human character. After being accused of such crimes against elvenkind such as cutting down trees, eating meat, raising the standard of living for humankind and keeping the One Ring instead of giving it to a hobbit, King Herman finally snapped and decided to play the role. At least, he decided to keep the awesome power of the One Ring. Which he uses solely to blast Lord Elf to kingdom come whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Darth Vader(s) Another famous villain reduced to silliness by being played in vain by all manner of silly fanboys. The Vaders fill up the Star Wars chatroom, each jockeying for position and claiming to be the first person who thought of being Darth Vader. If the Lord of Dorkness tried, he might have been able to find an open Darth Vader handle, but only just barely. The Vaders roam the chatrooms, wrecking havoc and sowing chaos and misery while tightening the grip of the Empire upon the galaxy. Then Ben shows up, and ruins everything. You can't have two Darth Vaders in the same place, man! It's time for Highlander-Jedi combat action! THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!! Aside from the Vaders, the Star Wars chatroom neighboring Elf Only Inn hosts (a few) other characters, mostly the beleaguered fellow who still tries to play the only Luke in a room full of Vaders. Mace Windu and Yoda show up every now and again, too.
Hambonetaru-Chan Hambonetaru-Chan is played by an evil American marketing executive testing the hypnotic effect of big shiny-eyed anime cute and fluffy things on America's youth. His current project is a twisted mix of Hamtaro and Pikachu. At one point he agreed to sponsor Elf Only Inn to cover the rising server costs and his company forced everyone to change their character images into proper anime ones. That was before he realized that the 90's were over, and there was no money to be made off of free Internet chatrooms. Currently, he has returned to working on more terrible anime knock-offs and writing those gosh-darn clever Truth.com anti-smoking ads.
The Goths Gothboi is the leader, because he acts like he is the smartest one. Gothgrrl is the cute one, who uses her charms to lure people into her web, where she sucks all the life out of them by whining and reading bad poetry and complaining about her parents. Slave is... well... we don't know what the **** Slave is, but he likes Japanese pop music. When the goths aren't talking about vampires and having gay "Ricean" vampire sex, they roam the chatrooms flopping and sighing and complaining about how much their lives suck in small font. . . if anyone is foolish enough to talk to these emotional vampires, they will bear the responsibility of talking them out of suicide because their parents told them to wash the dishes, or something.
The Artist For those of you who haven't been exposed to very many sprite comics (webcomics created pretty much exclusively out of stolen video game sprites), count yourselves lucky. I'll sum up 99% of them: Kid sees a sprite comic. Kid makes his own sprite comic of lower quality, no matter how bad the original comic already was. Kid writes jokes about how he's doing a sprite comic and introduces himself as a character to make fun of how lazy he is for doing it, appearing from the sky as the almighty artist. Kid gets absolutely no acclaim or attention for this riveting material, which he did truthfully write on his own without realizing that same joke has already been written by the 10,000 kids who came before him. Kid's self esteem crumbles and he quits. Five other kids read his comic, and decide to start their own. And they will, without realizing it, write jokes about how they are doing a sprite comic and become one of their own characters. On an unrelated note, wouldn't the world be a nicer place if artists were subject to being mistaken for pinatas? The public art projects in Tucson Arizona certainly make me want to blindfold myself and hit something with a bat. Somebody get Ted Rall on the phone and ask him to fill his pockets with candy and hang from a tree branch.
Other characters, spoofs and rejects: In order of appearance in the above image: Anubis, Egyptian god of embalming. Edgar Cayce, dead psychic who claimed that Atlanteans built the Pyramids at Giza. Anubis made Edgar cry on Sept 19th, 2002. Yoda, cranky. Mace Windu, one bad motha. Yoda and Mace contemplate how the Star Wars legacy would have been remembered more kindly if Lucas stopped while he was ahead, on July 13th, 2002. Yoda and Windu have also appeared separately in two different strips for the Roland's newsletter. Fluffy, furry werewolf with eight nipples. Fluffy and his lifepartner disco danced their way into the tiny black hearts of the Goths on July 9th, 2002. I haven't thought of any reason to bring them back. Buffy, the slayer who never made it into the comic. Buffy made a short apperance in one of the strips I made for Roland's Cavern, but nothing more. She was the typically terrible vampire hunter who never slew a vampire. She was either going to be a romantic interest for Duke as they tried to hunt the vampires (setting off a ridiculous firestorm of vampire civil rights controversy), or she was going to fall in love with a vampire. Never got around to the story. Token Dwarf, because every party needs a token dwarf. He was destined to follow Lord Elf and Megan around, looking back and forth as they spoke but never adding to the conversation himself. Because he was just the token dwarf, after all. I created him the same time as I created Megan, but I never found any good place to stick him. Littlefoot, baby dinosaur with a thousand picture contract. One of the very first EOI storylines I've ever written featured the Land Before Time dinosaurs. I wrote this story back when I was drawing stick figure EOI in the late 90's. But everytime I've tried to schedule this story into the comic, I get distracted or I get a better idea. Petri says "Straight to video!" Superman, man of steel. A certain alien from another planet that's been destroyed who came to earth as a baby and was found to have incredible super powers got a well deserved shiner from Superman in one of the strips I made for Roland's. Fun fact: the fist Duke waved in the earlier strips was actually from Superman's picture, not Duke's. Unfun fact: Wizard magazine predicted that DBZ's Goku would win a fight with Superman. While I am not a particular fan of the man of steel, I find it hard to believe that Goku could even show up to a fight on time, let alone win a coin toss.

Lord Elf
Lord Elf is the host of Elf Only Inn, a responsibility given to him for his level-headed disposition and his ability to inspire friendship and community in all those he interacts with. BWA HAHAHAHAHA!!!

Lord Elf claims to have been roleplaying online since Al Gore invented the internet. Because he was unhappy with every room he ever visited, he decided to make his OWN room and his OWN rules, and thus Elf Only Inn was born. Unfortunately, he's still unhappy with everything. This is probably because he is a twisted, evil little troll of a man with no humanity within his shriveled, blacked lump of a heart.

Occasionally, Lord Elf tries to disguise himself as the "Blue Wizard of Forestdale" by putting on a pointy cap and beard. This is so he can "set an example" for how everyone else should conduct themselves in his room... or perhaps just so he can spy on the others in order to punish them later. The only joy he takes from life the joy he takes away from others.

Lord Elf is relentlessly negative about everything. He has no friends, and he doesn't want them. He will bestow favors on anyone who satisfies his ego, though. The only time he's ever good for anything is when he happens to be faced with something or someone worse than himself, in which case he might end up attacking someone who deserves it. But more often than not, if something actually presents a threat to the Elf Only Inn community, Lord Elf will end up encouraging it.

Lord Elf hardly moves at all, a reflection of the fact that he isn't particularly interesting or very good at this roleplaying thing. He has all the creative potential of a soggy cardboard box. An empty, soggy cardboard box.

Lady Sunset Autumn Honey Purity Sunflower Rainbow
Lady Sunset Autumn Honey Purity Sunflower Rainbow (hereafter referred to as "m'lady") is a star elf vampire, but only half, which means she can still act like a normal person and only drinks blood if there are other vampires around and she wants to fit in. She can also still have babies and go out in the day time, oh, and did I mention she can still have babies? She's borne a child for every character in Elf Only Inn, male and female alike. Even with people she hasn't "interacted" with. No one knows what she's really like because she doesn't talk very much, or very well. But that does not take away m'lady's charm, and neither does the fact that her name is excruciatingly long and forgettable. She uses a hot picture of some fantasy chick in her underwear, and that's all that really matters.

M'Lady is one of the few people who can stand to be around Lord Elf. It's either because she's too dim to realize he takes advantage of her, or she's just too nice to hold it against him.

Lady Sunset Autumn Honey Purity Sunflower Rainbow is visually based off the character Dawn. Images of this large-breasted comic book goddess are often used in chatrooms because... Dawn has large breasts and wears outfits that don't hide it.

Nimoy
Nimoy is a Trekkie playing a Vulcan character. But he isn't actually a very good Trekkie, though. He can't go to the Star Trek chat rooms because he can't keep up with their lingo, and hot naked Klingon women scare him. The other Vulcans think he doesn't behave properly. In fact, deep down he is afraid that he really isn't a Vulcan at all. . . because he likes girls. Keeping this terrible secret to himself he came to Elf Only Inn, where Lord Elf mistook him for another elf and greeted him with open arms. It didn't take long before Nimoy failed to live up to Lord Elf's expectations, but the stoic and sarcastic Vulcan hung around after befriending the less intellectual but equally out of place Duke Commando.

Nimoy continues to pass himself off as an elf, barely, because he wears robes instead of a Star Fleet uniform.

!Duke Commando!
Ever since Duke stumbled in to Elf Only Inn, he has been a constant pain in Lord Elf's side. Basing his character off of a popular shoot 'em up computer game, his mere existence violates every single one of the many rules governing EOI. But every time Lord Elf bans his handle, he returns under a new one or goes running to SysOp to complain.

All Duke wants to do is have fun, and he has a lot of it. He's a cigar chomping, tail chasing, gun toting, magnificent *******, and even though he's not the brightest apple in the basket most everyone enjoys being around him more than Lord Elf.

In Duke's early days he was nearly as incomprehensible as Goku666, but he finally grew weary of being confined to senseless conversations with the spiky haired kid and M'Lady and learned to type properly in order to fit in with Nimoy and Megan.

The early Duke was an obvious parody of Duke Nukem, but since his behavior did little to separate him from the original Duke Commando now dresses in a black shirt and has a slightly modified haircut (described by one reader as looking like a "duck's arse", heh heh!).

Lady Megan Arywyn
Megan came to Elf Only Inn expecting to find a room dedicated to serious fantasy roleplaying. As she was the only actual full-blooded elvish character to ever come into the room besides Lord Elf, she was instantly declared to be the co-host. At first she took her new role as a chatroom moderator seriously... she dedicated hours of her life each day to being humorless and aloof, relentlessly crushing the souls of everyone around her and helping to inflame the tiniest conflicts into full blown riots, but eventually she began to actually enjoy hanging out with Nimoy, Duke and Lord Woot.

A great deal of Megan's real life persona is invested in her character. She really is a self-righteous, pagan, skinny, leaf-eating blonde vegan and consequently she often finds herself at odds with little things like reality. But somehow, trying to be a elvish version of herself in a chatroom caused her to lighten up a little bit, and the others were quick to accept her after she stopped trying to sue big companies out of existence when she discovered that her diet of McDonald's french fries was neither healthy nor vegan at all.

While her character does not have M'Lady's cleavage, the guys gravitate to her because she has a vocabulary wider than "LOL".

Megan was visually based off of the fair-haired pretty boy Legolas from the LOTR movies.

Lord Wootsayediditagyn
Lord Woot is a powerful demongod, one of the ancient and omnipotent "Eternal Sweepers" from the "Ryftwyrld RPG" (page 60 of the first edition... later editions corrected a certain typo). He started out in the Daemon Citadel chatroom, where he was dismissed and ignored by the powerful Eternal Sleepers and given the task of keeping the floors clean to prevent him from irritating such intellectual giants as Cthulu69 and Lucifer_123. When Duke and Nimoy attempted to recruit their own demon to combat the increasingly irritating Lord of Dorkness, they got Woot--"The guy who has that REALLY creepy Britney Spears fan page/tentacle hentai shrine"

Woot prevailed over Dorkness because his character had documented stats in the Ryftwyrld book, and Lord Elf was too anal to argue with something in writing. In fact, since Woot seemed to irritate Lady Megan, Lord Elf proclaimed him to be the official janitor for Elf Only Inn. However, Woot and Megan proved to get along better than anyone could have imagined.

Wootsayediditagyn is the only EOI character that was directly converted from an actual roleplaying character--for a short time I had played a ridiculously powerful one-eyed tentacle demon, intended solely to make other ridiculously powerful characters look even worse. The original Woot was a Splugorth from the RIFTS RPG, and he did indeed wave his overpowered statistics around as a holy decree of his awesomeness. When he made the transition to the comic, I had to downsize his body a bit to allow him to fit in one panel, which is why Woot now looks like a cross between Marvel's Shuma Gorath and... uh... Celine Dion.

goku666
He's like that cool guy from that Toonami TV show, but he's different and has more powers and he's cooler and he could punch you 699 times in one second. But no one ever believes him when he says he has punched them. They should be flying through mountains and stuff, but they don't. Someday people will take him seriously, so he tries his best to impress everyone by being a total pain in the ass. He even lets Duke Commando beat him up so that Duke Commando will like him even though he could punch Duke Commando to the moon with a karate kick because he has trained very hard. He also wants Lord Elf to like him and tell everyone else what a great gamer he is, which will never happen so long as he does not have pointy ears. But he keeps trying, bless his heart.

When goku isn't mashing his keyboard online and being generally ignored by everyone else, he creates sprite comics that are generally ignored by everyone else.

Goku was visually based off of a dumbbell. Which is what you are if you still like Dragonball Z.

SysOp, Generic Users and NPCs
SysOp is the mysterious person responsible for creating and maintaining the chat service that hosts Elf Only Inn. Little is known about him, other than that he is higher up the chain of command than Lord Elf is and he could care less about EOI or its demanding and obnoxious host. Fortunately for the denziens of the Inn, SysOp is far more likely to undermine Lord Elf's authority by reinstating any handles that Lord Elf bans.

The Generic Users are the populace of the mundane chatrooms that SysOp runs. They tend to keep to themselves, discussing pressing issues like Anna Nicole Smith and Macaroni and Cheese, but occasionally they wander into EOI and call everyone a bunch of D&D nerds pretending to be elves and monsters. After that, they run back to their giggling friends and resume pretending to be people who are far more important, intelligent and attractive than they really are. Then they might watch American Idol.

NPCs, the Non-Player Characters, are the greatest inexhaustible natural resource of any fantasy community. Why, if it wasn't for the invisible NPCs, who would vampires, demons and wannabe bad guys have to eat, maim and/or kill? They are the background extras, the faceless milling crowd, called upon occasionally to play minor roles or serve drinks. The Lord of Dorkness is so incredibly powerful that he has to prey exclusively on NPCs because he's just too tough for real characters.

Because these characters either lack the intelligence or inclination to describe themselves or upload pictures, they are all displayed as generic male and female icons.

The Lord of Dorkness
When the Lord of Dorkness signed up and created his profile, he accidentally typed "Dorkness" instead of "Darkness". This is the only reason that he was able to register his profile, due to the fact that every other possible way to refer to the devil had already been taken by his predecessors. On any given chat system, at any given time, in any given room, there are at least 4.6 users who have a handle that proclaims themselves to be The Devil His Own Self. Until Dorkness can find a new way to spell his name that someone else has not already taken, he's stuck with what he's got. Have sympathy for the prince of dorkness, not even SysOp could help him.

Dorkness still schemes for great acts of villainy and evil within the Inn, but when his attempts to destroy and enslave all life (after a little browning to gain Lord Elf's blessing) where de-railed by the arrival of the rival demon Lord Wootsayediditagyn, LoD returned to his more subtle acts of cruelty: Killing imaginary non-player characters, playing out terrible "romances" with M'Lady, giving terrible advice and kissing up to the host.

Although he is intelligent, he is held back by his dedication to be so good at being so bad, which only impresses adolescent girls and goths.

King Herman of the Humans
Herman was a friend of Megan's who followed her to the Inn, also thinking he was going to find some intelligent roleplaying. Instead, he found Lord Elf, who was intent on accusing him of all the evils in the world because he played a human character. After being accused of such crimes against elvenkind such as cutting down trees, eating meat, raising the standard of living for humankind and keeping the One Ring instead of giving it to a hobbit, King Herman finally snapped and decided to play the role.

At least, he decided to keep the awesome power of the One Ring. Which he uses solely to blast Lord Elf to kingdom come whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Darth Vader(s)
Another famous villain reduced to silliness by being played in vain by all manner of silly fanboys. The Vaders fill up the Star Wars chatroom, each jockeying for position and claiming to be the first person who thought of being Darth Vader. If the Lord of Dorkness tried, he might have been able to find an open Darth Vader handle, but only just barely. The Vaders roam the chatrooms, wrecking havoc and sowing chaos and misery while tightening the grip of the Empire upon the galaxy. Then Ben shows up, and ruins everything. You can't have two Darth Vaders in the same place, man! It's time for Highlander-Jedi combat action! THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!

Aside from the Vaders, the Star Wars chatroom neighboring Elf Only Inn hosts (a few) other characters, mostly the beleaguered fellow who still tries to play the only Luke in a room full of Vaders. Mace Windu and Yoda show up every now and again, too.

Hambonetaru-Chan
Hambonetaru-Chan is played by an evil American marketing executive testing the hypnotic effect of big shiny-eyed anime cute and fluffy things on America's youth. His current project is a twisted mix of Hamtaro and Pikachu. At one point he agreed to sponsor Elf Only Inn to cover the rising server costs and his company forced everyone to change their character images into proper anime ones. That was before he realized that the 90's were over, and there was no money to be made off of free Internet chatrooms. Currently, he has returned to working on more terrible anime knock-offs and writing those gosh-darn clever Truth.com anti-smoking ads.

The Goths

Gothboi is the leader, because he acts like he is the smartest one. Gothgrrl is the cute one, who uses her charms to lure people into her web, where she sucks all the life out of them by whining and reading bad poetry and complaining about her parents. Slave is... well... we don't know what the **** Slave is, but he likes Japanese pop music. When the goths aren't talking about vampires and having gay "Ricean" vampire sex, they roam the chatrooms flopping and sighing and complaining about how much their lives suck in small font. . . if anyone is foolish enough to talk to these emotional vampires, they will bear the responsibility of talking them out of suicide because their parents told them to wash the dishes, or something.

The Artist
For those of you who haven't been exposed to very many sprite comics (webcomics created pretty much exclusively out of stolen video game sprites), count yourselves lucky. I'll sum up 99% of them: Kid sees a sprite comic. Kid makes his own sprite comic of lower quality, no matter how bad the original comic already was. Kid writes jokes about how he's doing a sprite comic and introduces himself as a character to make fun of how lazy he is for doing it, appearing from the sky as the almighty artist. Kid gets absolutely no acclaim or attention for this riveting material, which he did truthfully write on his own without realizing that same joke has already been written by the 10,000 kids who came before him. Kid's self esteem crumbles and he quits. Five other kids read his comic, and decide to start their own. And they will, without realizing it, write jokes about how they are doing a sprite comic and become one of their own characters.

On an unrelated note, wouldn't the world be a nicer place if artists were subject to being mistaken for pinatas? The public art projects in Tucson Arizona certainly make me want to blindfold myself and hit something with a bat. Somebody get Ted Rall on the phone and ask him to fill his pockets with candy and hang from a tree branch.

Other characters, spoofs and rejects:

In order of appearance in the above image:
Anubis, Egyptian god of embalming.
Edgar Cayce, dead psychic who claimed that Atlanteans built the Pyramids at Giza.
Anubis made Edgar cry on Sept 19th, 2002.
Yoda, cranky.
Mace Windu, one bad motha.
Yoda and Mace contemplate how the Star Wars legacy would have been remembered more kindly if Lucas stopped while he was ahead, on July 13th, 2002. Yoda and Windu have also appeared separately in two different strips for the Roland's newsletter.
Fluffy, furry werewolf with eight nipples.
Fluffy and his lifepartner disco danced their way into the tiny black hearts of the Goths on July 9th, 2002. I haven't thought of any reason to bring them back.
Buffy, the slayer who never made it into the comic.
Buffy made a short apperance in one of the strips I made for Roland's Cavern, but nothing more. She was the typically terrible vampire hunter who never slew a vampire. She was either going to be a romantic interest for Duke as they tried to hunt the vampires (setting off a ridiculous firestorm of vampire civil rights controversy), or she was going to fall in love with a vampire. Never got around to the story.
Token Dwarf, because every party needs a token dwarf.
He was destined to follow Lord Elf and Megan around, looking back and forth as they spoke but never adding to the conversation himself. Because he was just the token dwarf, after all. I created him the same time as I created Megan, but I never found any good place to stick him.
Littlefoot, baby dinosaur with a thousand picture contract.
One of the very first EOI storylines I've ever written featured the Land Before Time dinosaurs. I wrote this story back when I was drawing stick figure EOI in the late 90's. But everytime I've tried to schedule this story into the comic, I get distracted or I get a better idea. Petri says "Straight to video!"
Superman, man of steel.
A certain alien from another planet that's been destroyed who came to earth as a baby and was found to have incredible super powers got a well deserved shiner from Superman in one of the strips I made for Roland's. Fun fact: the fist Duke waved in the earlier strips was actually from Superman's picture, not Duke's. Unfun fact: Wizard magazine predicted that DBZ's Goku would win a fight with Superman. While I am not a particular fan of the man of steel, I find it hard to believe that Goku could even show up to a fight on time, let alone win a coin toss.