Order of the Stick

The Order of the Stick
Principal characters, from left to right: Belkar Bitterleaf, Vaarsuvius, Elan, Haley Starshine, Durkon Thundershield, and Roy Greenhilt
Author(s)	Rich Burlew
Website	http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.html
Current status / schedule	Active (no standard update schedule)
Launch date	September 29, 2003
Publisher(s)	Giant in the Playground
Genre(s)	Fantasy, comedy, parody

The Order of the Stick (OOTS) is a comedic webcomic that satirizes tabletop role-playing games and medieval fantasy. The comic is written and drawn by Rich Burlew, who illustrates the comic in a stick figure style.

Taking place in a magical world that loosely operates by the rules of the 3.5 edition of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), the comic follows the sometimes farcical exploits of six adventurers as they strive to save the world from an evil lich sorcerer. Much of the comic's humor stems from the characters' awareness of the game rules that affect their lives or from having anachronistic knowledge of modern culture. This in turn is often used by the author to parody various aspects of role-playing games and fantasy fiction. While primarily comedic in nature, The Order of the Stick features a continuing storyline serialized in one-to four-page episodes, with over 1000 such episodes released so far.

Although it is principally distributed online through the website Giant in the Playground, seven book collections have been published, including several print-only stories (On the Origin of PCs and Start of Darkness). An alternate version of the strip appeared monthly in Dragon magazine for 22 issues; these strips, among others, are collected in Snips, Snails and Dragon Tales.

The Order of the Stick began its run on September 29, 2003, on what was Rich Burlew's personal site for gaming articles at the time. Burlew initially intended the strip to feature no plot whatsoever—depicting an endless series of gags drawn from the D&D rules instead—but Burlew quickly changed his mind, and began laying down hints of a storyline as early as strip #13. The strip was originally produced to entertain people who came to his website to read articles, but it quickly became the most popular feature, leading Burlew to eventually abandon writing articles almost entirely.