I think the Cult of Gruum letters are my single favorite thing the letters section ever did.
This episode is bittersweet to look back on, because the two were pretty confident at this point that OblivAeon was the end, that the multiverse timeline had concluded and they’d exclusively do other things going forward. That was a ballsy thing to think, because they’d already begun working on Prime War, so Tactics was a confirmed flop and they presumably invented the Mist Storm to explain why. But they spent all that time saying Sentinels was their baby, and they’d never sell it off unless it was for more money than imaginable. Instead of sticking to the integrity of that vision, they made DE, and I’m not exactly sorry they did so…Darkstryfe and Painstake is super exciting, and I want to play against the Fey Court real bad. But ultimately, to make DE happen, Christopher signed control of his and Adam’s baby away to a big logistics corporation, and then they pulled the plug. Now, instead of just struggling to fund future SCU products, he’s left with a legal hassle at best to try and get ownership of his creation back. (Forgive me if I’m mistaken in thinking it was just Christopher doing that, with tacit approval from an Adam who was busy with art stuff, rather than both of them, or hell maybe it was all Paul’s idea, I’m just blaming Christopher as my best guess, mostly because it’s his byline on the announcements.)
Don’t mean to be negative, even if only partly, so here’s another song of praise to end on. …crap, can’t think of one. The wiki is down, so I can’t look up a topic review, I’ll have to listen to the episode again later.
Oh, that was it, right, Blood Countess! That’s definitely A Positive! Badumtish. Okay so my theory here is that the ancient bone shaman who later became Gloomweaver had literally forgotten more blood magic than Blood Countess will ever know; he decided that death voodoo and nightmare sorcery and infernal green fire etc was all better than blood magic for what he wanted to do, so he and Ophidia went down that route instead. But early on he’d either taught blood magic to some student or learned it from some teacher, and that other person carried on with what was at the time and oral tradition, as writing wasn’t invented yet, but eventually some follower of this old tradition wrote the book that speculated on a potential link between the blood magic and the apotheosis that Gloomweaver-to-Be had achieved, without remembering that he specifically moved away from flesh and blood and life-within-death to focus on “just death, actually”. Only after his centuries-proven dominance of the nightmare world suddenly fell apart during the late 20th century, having been damaged by Joe Diamond and destroyed by his granddaughter, did Gloomy think back and go “oh yeah, blood magic kinda got me started way back when, maybe that’ll fix this problem I’m now having.”. And since Rotting God is described as a very tough fight for the heroes, it must have almost worked.
