Editor’s Note #54

All about those team ups for Adam’s Birthmonth

Upcoming schedule:

  • Tuesday, May 3rd: Episode #211: Creative Process: Mechanics of Definitive Edition
  • Tuesday, May 10th: Episode #212: Writers’ Room: Harpy, Young Legacy, Unity team-up
  • Tuesday, May 17th: Episode #213: Writers’ Room: Absolute Zero and Muerto team-up
  • Tuesday, May 24th: Editor’s Note #55
  • Tuesday, May 31st: Episode #214: Writers’ Room: Setback & Unity team-up

Recording schedule:

  • Friday, April 29th: Episode #211: Creative Process: Mechanics of Definitive Edition
  • Friday, May 6th: Episode #212: Writers’ Room: Harpy, Young Legacy, Unity team-up
  • Friday, May 13th: Episode #213: Writers’ Room: Absolute Zero and Muerto team-up
  • Tuesday, May 17th: Editor’s Note #55
  • Friday, May 27th: Episode #214: Writers’ Room: Setback & Unity team-up
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“That sounds like a supremely bad idea.”
So it’s definitely something PCs WILL DO in a game. Got it.

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Okay, would not have expected C&A to know DDR to this degree. :open_mouth: Always impressed by these boys!

Never heard it referred to as “ramen hair” before. How evocative!

I don’t care what anyone says, antimatter fondue is the best solution.

And then Omni-Dawn shipping became a thing. Assuming it wasn’t already.

I nominate the Plague Rat fleshchild be called Vague Rat.

Check out this one weird trick that never happens across any universe! (Soothsayer Carmichael hates it!)

Oh boy, the visuals of Tempest’s hair reacting to his moods is going to keep me in stitches for days. XD

Gosh, what evils might Christopher have unleashed upon the world? :open_mouth:

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So there was mention of two dangerous factions in the Realm of Discord, to which I must say: huh what? Which factions are these? Is Gloomweaver heading one of them, or is he still stuck in Medico’s chest? I remember retaking the Realm from the Master was gonna be his plot in Tactics, is that what’s going on here?

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If I remember right, it’s the Master (from Nightmist) and someone else that are fighting for Gloomweaver’s realm/power/influence. I think Spite is also involved, since he got yoinked into the Realm of Discord when Gloomy tried his rotting god thing.

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I believe they said Spite was put in Gloomweaver’s old body (or the seat of his power?) in the Realm of Discord, though I think the only time this has been brought up was the future section of the Spite episode.

Gloomweaver himself is still stuck in Medico. In Tactics he eventually takes over Medico’s body and wrecks havoc, while we don’t know what’s happening in the RPG yet.

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Gloomy’s RPG Future section says that The Master freed him from Medico’s shard. My guess is that it’s GW and the Master vs. Spite.

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I’ve got a LOT to say about this week’s episode, but I’ll have to give it another listen first. Meanwhile, a random thought to go with these random questions. I just lost to OblivAeon again, and Nixious the Chosen was the last Scion to show up, barely doing anything before the end. It made me realize that Nixious feels a lot like the characters that have been invented through the podcast in the last five years, like Chaos Witch Rose Griggs and Skateblade and Pool Shark and Antimoxx and Xxx’Hulish and even the Terrorform.

These are all (debatable exception for Xxx’Hulish) characters that seem not to have existed in the original SOTM universe for the first five or so years of it unfolding story; we saw characters from a set or two in the future having interactions with our core heroes, and these created an ever expanding universe with tons of connectivity, but now a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies are being added in, who claim to have had roles in the setting’s history, but we’ve never seen them before. Why is there suddenly a Cult of OblivAeon out in space, with zero hint in the decks of Captain Cosmic or Greazer years before? Might as well ask why Rose Griggs wasn’t a part of Unity’s story before the podcast came along.

The effect is similar to seeing SOTM characters in the decks of the Cauldron fan expansion; there’s this one parallel in the Multiverse where Absolute Zero has interacted with Starlight and the Magnificent Mara, but they aren’t allowed to be central parts in each other’s stories, because each one is essentially a guest in a universe revolving around the other. Nixious has that kind of energy to him, I feel, as does the Fey Court, and there are doubtless other examples. We’re supposed to believe they were always lurking in the shadows, but those shadows aren’t actually large enough or dark enough for them to have plausibly been hidden in. It’s the opposite of the effect that it should have had; instead of a missing piece of the puzzle, it’s a jigsaw piece that seemingly doesn’t really fit anywhere.

I don’t want to seem like I’m complaining about all the extra lore we get through the podcast… I just feel like, instead of gradually revealing their universe as C&A originally did, they’ve seemingly started revising it. Things with fairly central positions are being shoved aside to make room for more new additions, and Nixious feels like the harbinger of that process, rather than of destruction and OblivAeon. More is not always better, and the wider the universe spreads, the less tightly woven it seems to get. I don’t necessarily have a point here, it’s just an observation I had.

The origin of SotM involves Christopher and Adam sitting down at an iHOP putting it together over one night. With the original set they had no idea how much of their stuff they would even be able to accomplish. Between being able to put out the EE OblivAeon expansion and the Letters Page podcast they’ve been able to put together more of an actual fictional history for Sentinel Comics. They’ve put together enough through all of this that we actually will get a book specifically about the history of this fictional comic publisher. Overall, some characters/stories aren’t going to fit together well but that’s true of existing comics.

As for Nixious specifically we don’t have many stories pre OblivAeon involving them and maybe Captain Cosmic did or didn’t encounter them. Greazer feels like a stretch to encounter as I don’t see any reason for bounty hunters to care much about a Space Cult unless it got in his way for a job.

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To be fair, Nixy was created specifically for the OblivAeon Event, it didn’t exist in the Sentinel Comics Universe, the Metaverse, or the Meta-Metaverse before then. Similarly, Pool Shark (and the rest of Guise’s Neighborhood Watch {and for that matter, most of Daybreak}) and Xxt’Hulish debuted in the RPG Era in all three universes. And Antimox was only a fairly minor villain who never really did anything, so it makes sense that he’s not super prominent. As for Sk8-Blayde, he . . . had a very brief career.

However, hopefully DE will remedy some of this. I already know that one of the characters in the above paragraph is pictured in RCR. (Aside from the Terrorform, obviously.)

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It’s also that there’s never been a point in time in which the universe wasn’t being revised and created and expanded. Kismet was created as part of a reader contest and didn’t have any references prior to her appearances. Doctor Medico was a forum joke until the Southwest Sentinels were designed. The original Rook City expansion implied that Wraith killed Spite; it was later revealed to have been Parse, a character who is not shown in either Wraith or Spite’s decks because she hadn’t been invented.

Sentinels is a messy setting, because it’s deliberately emulating the messy publishing process of a big comics company. If it was all tight and pat, it would be a substantially worse product.

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Well, also because it as its own product family also evolved and grew, as you described.

I don’t feel the additions are pushing anything out; the Freedom Five are still there at the heart of things, Baron Blade is still concocting schemes, and so on. The fact that we now have an actual example of a RevoCorp plot, and another magic enemy for Nightmist to fight besides just Gloomweaver again, seem to slot right in to existing material for me.

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I’m just going to say that creators in general tend to wish they could go back and revise their old work to bring it up to their current level of skills, or add to their old work with new ideas they recently thought of that makes the old work cooler.

C&A just have the benefit that a podcast is a medium that makes it much easier for them to do that compared to most other forms of creation.

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I guess I’m just feeling like the old version of the setting is the one I’m familiar with and fond of, and the new one feels like it’s fixing what wasn’t broken. Warlord Voss’s gene-bound army was horrifying enough without us having to meet Gene-Doctor Kronz, and while a deck for Revenant would be nice, a deck for one specific Revocorp project seems odd, and the fact that the project in question then came back seems odder. I’m okay with the Terrorform mostly because it seems like it’s more a mechanically interesting design idea rather than a character, and the Fey Court is both of those things, even if it’s weird they were never visible before. I don’t have a huge problem with any of the new things we’ve seen so far, but I’m concerned about whether the divergence between the universe I know and love and this new one is just going to keep widening. At some point they may do something along the lines of saying “Insula Primalis is actually home to a god-spirit of tropical heat which is more powerful and dangerous than Akash’Bhuta!!!” and suddenly the story that we used to have is now somewhat ruined by these flash-in-the-pan new ideas which C&A are obsessed with (see “Secret Lads” or “Shear Force”).

In general you seem to have issues with the setting “old” or not to the point that I honestly wonder why you’re invested in it.

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I wouldn’t complain about the setting if I didn’t love it, @Powerhound_2000. My definition of love is to help someone become the best that they can possibly be, and that means pointing out all of the things about them which could be improved. At best, this means my mom asks me to critique her cooking, because she knows that if I say it’s good, then I’m not just saying it to be nice, it actually IS good, and she can be tremendously proud of her accomplishment in satisfying me. At worst, I criticize her in similar fashion, and she gets upset, but only because she’s controlled by her emotional state and can’t be objective about her own flaws, as she can about flaws in her cooking technique. If she could learn how to distance herself from those reactions, and improve every aspect of her life with the same assiduous detachment that she devotes to improving a cookie recipe, then she’d probably be a world-famous chef by now. Nobody becomes Michaelangelo if they can’t handle criticism.

Anyway, to the episode!

“but it turns out that, like, everyone did it” - Dude, spoilers! XD

“Ramen hair?” WTF?

Okay, example of me genuinely and unironically loving something. The question of an antimatter generator in the Realm of Discord is absolutely fascinating. I’m not sure I agree with the answers that C&A came up with, because some of their lore seems like it’s intentionally designed to not make sense, and I feel like when I look at it, it does make sense. Which either means that they failed at making it intentionally nonsensical, or that I’m smarter than they expected anyone could be; guess which of those I prefer to believe. :stuck_out_tongue: But that aside, even if the answer they come up with isn’t the same as my answer, we can all agree that the question is really really cool to think about. The fact that Adam said “it isn’t X but it also isn’t Not X” just seems absolutely perfect for the RoD; my take is that the RoD is a specific subset of the realm of dreams, or maybe not a subset so much as an intersection, but in either case it makes perfect sense that it wouldn’t obey the laws of physics, but would interact with science in a way that might actually be worse than a matter/antimatter annihilation reaction.

(pausing at the next letter, about Gloomweaver and Technology more generally, to take a bathroom break and maybe play a game, before continuing to the rest of the episode.)

Nah, a tighter product would just be a sub-set of the mess. In my first letter, I asked about them doing a novelization of their storyline. Personally, I think their Oblivaeon episodes and the “animated universe” overviews are practically outlines of novels, as is. But they’re having more fun telling stories as they are. So more power to them. (Or maybe I should revise my question as a pitch for me to do it… nah, I gave up fanfic a while back…)

And I don’t think I’m alone in saying this is a strange, hurtful view of love. And if not hurtful, annoying and unnecessary. If your mom didn’t do a perfect job cooking, but she really enjoyed herself while doing it, it is rude and unloving to say point blank that it was bad. Complaining about your mom’s cooking everyday isn’t showing love, being grateful for the work that was put into it (it’s a free podcast!) is showing love.

Not to say there can’t be valid critiques, but it’s silly to be doing it on something that’s supposed to be fun and enjoyable. This isn’t high art here.

Edit: I’m sorry, I’m really not trying to be rude, but some days I would like to be able to come to these forums and just enjoy the content with other people that like what I like. It’s fine to point out flaws in the stuff you enjoy, but when it begins to outweigh the expression of enjoyment it becomes a bit much.

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What you often level is not straight criticism. You’re listing how you would do things. It’s hard reading your posts because it’s often a killjoy whether you intend it or not.

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Well if you have the time and energy to do it, you definitely should write more.

Anyway, back to the episode!

The description of La Capitan’s ship navigating via fixed points is possibly the first thing they’ve said about how the ship functions that actually makes sense. Their efforts to define how the “sailing through time” and “getting objects from a universe to connect to that universe” all work have been very vague and handwavey, but now it feels like they’re actually getting somewhere in defining how this is a sensible sci-fi technology. The phrase “it’s not the possibility, but the viability” is definitely a great line.

I think we can definitely count “Bill’s Mandolin” as a Virtuoso instrument which Anthony never managed to find.

Okay, probably the biggest and most important thing I wanted to say about this episode is from their one brief mention of last week’s new character, Free Radical. The description they gave about him last week didn’t make any sense to me, but everything clicked from this one mentioned, because it made me realize that he probably works exactly the same way as Billy Pilgrim, from “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut. Having “memories” of the future, and feeling like you live your whole life out of order, makes a lot more sense than having “part of his body made out of time”, or whatever they said last week.

Oh, and for anyone who’s been following my answers on the Question of the Day thread, it probably goes without saying that I largely approve of most of Dark Visionary’s actions. Not so much murdering scientists to cover her tracks, but most of what they call “abusing” the powers, I would just characterize as taking firm and decisive action. I disagree with almost all of what C&A (most specifically Adam, though Christopher only varies a bit by degree) say about how mind-controlling a person out of destructive actions is somehow evil. I think this perspective is just sentimental nonsense, probably the result of religious or ideological brainwashing at a formative age. I wouldn’t even hesitate to take most of the utilitarian “evil” acts described in this section. Charles Xavier’s love and compassion for humanity makes him a good character, despite having “villain powers”; Visionary isn’t that, and Dark Visionary is certainly not that, but my attitude on the whole thing is probably closer to Dark Visionary than to Professor X.

In conclusion of the whole section, I strongly disagree that anyone can’t or shouldn’t “play god”; the example of accidentally killing someone while trying to save them from a possibly-nonlethal car crash is just an example of someone not having enough power, skill, or carefulness in their action, and a tragedy resulting from those limitations. i strongly disagree that mind control is always a villain power; I haven’t seen Jessica Jones, but from everything I’ve heard, no version of Purple Man has ever been an even remotely idealistic character. He’s not some well-intentioned extremist who just got lazy with his powers; being an abuser whose abilities are used for selfish power-trip reasons is basically the entire point of that character. I firmly believe that, given the same powers, I could use them for good - and that’s not because I’m special, because if anything, someone who lacks my various mental problems would do a better job.

Man, those cargo container prices are mind-blowing. I’m astonished that anybody can stay even remotely profitable if their overhead costs have quadrupled.

Very baffled to learn that there’s apparently a restaurant called Schlafly somewhere around where the >G warehouse is. It seems unlikely that the restaurant is actually named after Phyllis Shclafly, but it’s an amusing thought.

Hm. Well I thought there was more, but that’s probably everything. Just in time to still be current for the week. See you next time everyone.