Ep 41 of The Letters Page discussion- Wager Master

I bet you've missed me posting these announcements over the last few weeks.

No?

Is that your final answer?

Oh dear, I'm afraid that's wrong the wrong answer, let's take a look at what you could have won.

Have a consolation prize of a podcast.

Those are some meager winnings.  

Those are great prizes! What do you really know?

I have a burning sense of failure.  

That's what you get for breaking the rules.

I expect everyone else was bored of this 3 posts ago

That’s the new deal I make the rules. 

So either I agree to your new rules or I leave the thread? Why give me an impossible quandry?

Sometimes in life you run into an unanswerable question.   Maybe you’ll have a lucky guess 

But if I guess rather than thinking it through logically there's a better chance of me losing to the odds.

It seems like an unwise wager to have such a defeatist outlook.  

My posts are not the whole of me, you may think you know me but really I'm not all he seems.

Maybe you should just pick a card pick a fate already and decide whether you want to continue this.  

Are you threatening me? This is totally bizarre to me, you know nothing about me, you are playing dice with the cosmos!

I think you’ve misplaced your anger.  Who are you fighting?  It might be yourself.  

It's you Powerhound_2000.

Yep, that's all I was ever leading up to, getting that question asked and answering it.

So...this is what happens when the episode is late to air...

You messed it all up as you were supposed to finish on Wagelings somehow.  

I just stumbled into a rather odd situation.

I think everyone wins?

After reading that, I want to hear no complaints about the meta narrative stuff in the episode. >:V Which I found quite amusing this time around. Though I'm curious as to whether the Cult of Bloom is from the Plantverse or some kind of weird botanical Biomancer shenanigans. Or did Biomancer create the Plantverse, or rather, craft plant beings that would make us think there was another 'verse out there made of plant people? @_@ The possibilities are endless.

Anyway, I feel like someone referenced my fanfic, and that's just great. :D The new universe names are... Well, slightly confusing on the one hand and completely baffling on the other. What's a "Mist Storm"? c.c I probably forgot something.

Oh, and I loved the Cosmonaut's letter. Kudos to Adam for reading the Russian! :D

This was a fun episode, though entirely not what I was expecting. Moreover, I think there's an Editor's Note letter to be had, as they seemed to have glossed over something rather important regarding Wager Master's origins...

I asked that question and haven’t gotten through all the questions so I had assumed they covered it later

For you it was the day that Powerhound_2000 and Matchstickman ruined a thread, but for us it was Tuesday.

Also, Guise! Huzzahs for cameos You did not see that typo

And then the Wagelings attacked Matchstickman

It occurs to me that when all the Senators attacked Legacy his wife would be among the crowd, I wonder how that ended up?

It’s been awhile since we had a pun-based thread derailment.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned the lack of Wager Master voices from Christopher.

For this episode I felt C and A went out of their way not to explain Wager Master's origin. This leads me to infer that it's spoilery in some way

I kind of like the fact that they're apparently working together with… Biodancer (oh man the hilarious mental images from that one).

Like I wonder if our Cult of Gloom and Biomancer ever considered working together. Surely they could cause double the misery and mayhem that way?

In the Uprising scenario book there's a brief moment with a tropical island being taken over by some weird mist storm that's draining the life out of everything it touches that the heroes have to rescue the inhabitants from.

I totally love how AZ won a poetry contest. AZ kinda just gets more awesome the more we hear about him.

Conversely… look, I still love you Anthony, but I feel like I have to revise your WIS score downwards a few notches. An all-powerful being clearly throws a match and you're not even the slightest bit suspicious about the prize?

Also, how dare someone be so mean to my precious Sky person.

Not sure what this is in reference to , did I miss a reference to Tempest in the episode ?

Wager Master trapped poor Sky-Scraper in a hallucination of some sort that she was trapped back in the Bloodsworn Colosseum.

Oh yeah , Skyscraper is my absolute favourite so I must have blocked that from my memory or perhaps I was distracted by the image of Bunker/Wraith being lovey dovey that I wasn't listening properly.

Or I was trying to think of an unanswerable question that has an answer.

Also, I was gonna throw Misguided Fool in as my guess for the last Scion, but I couldn't remember its name, and it doesn't fit in the alphabet order, and it disappeared after the heroes beat it anyway. :B Oh well.

This was overall great, and before they started explaining the singular entitiy stuff I had a brief moment of thinking Wager Master was the last Scion, but then they clarified what they meant and I realized that was not the case.

Still, good to know that Wager Master and a few others are in Oblivaeon's weight class, they just didn't do as much cram school as he did.

Also, not mentioning the Wager is huge, got to be something there, but they also didn't mention something that I just remembered I wanted to ask about. How do the Reader's know about the Wager? Does Wager Master tell us, or someone else?

Also, can't wait to see Meager Winnings and wanting to punch the blue imp in the face, I just feel like it is going to be appropriate.

My take on the Cult of Bloom (and subsequent Whatever of Joy letter) was that Wager Master had used his power to change them and what they were all about. The Bloom letter even asked whether Wager Master had the power to permanently change a Cult and its object(s) of worship, which was the hint for me. Having Gloomweaver “pop in” to the Joy letter sounding very annoyed at whatever Wager Master had done was hilarious, and something I appreciated very much. Whether it was intentional on the part of the original Cult of Gloom, or if there was an imposter borrowing their persona I’m not sure (though I’m leaning towards the former), I was quite amused at the prospect of Wager Master messing around with Gloomweaver and his cult, while a frustrated Gloomy can’t figure out what to do with this annoying little imp or how to stop him…

WM: Hey Gloomy, why so sad? Did the heroes stop you again?
GW: What? Who are you and how did you get here? Nevermind, with my Eldritch pow-
WM: Maybe you should try lightening things up. Try for some flower power instead.
WM snaps his fingers. Gloomweaver finds himself in a sunny meadow, wearing a floral print summer dress.
GW: How did you–?
WM: Okay Bloomy, let’s make a wager…

Kinda makes me wish we had some stories where Wager Master messes with a villain or two for a change. There are some seriously funny possibilities in there.

So...this is what happens when the episode is late to air...

My ability to release a final expansion for a game that has been my life’s work for the better part of the last decade is another matter.

Hey Christopher, were there any scorch marks in the recording room after the last session? That one letter seemed to go crazy there for a few seconds...

I posted this out to Reddit right at 10AM and started listening so I can confirm as well it was not late.  I just decided to engage in some silliness with Matchstickman.  

I think there might have been an issue with the website serving up a cached version* of the main page?  I checked several times over the course of the morning on Tuesday, but the episode didn't show until after I visited the page on a different device.  I assumed that it was simply a problem with my phone (since a cached version* of the main page would be stored locally), but maybe it was something else if it appeared "late" for others as well?  Or it could simply be a coincidence that two of us had the same problem that had nothing to do with the site.

(*Yes, I know that cached webpages are stored locally, and so IF there was a problem with the website and not my device, it wasn't specifically what I've described.  But, dammit Jim, I'm an accountant, not an IT specialist… maybe the website itself didn't update when the episode was posted?)

I was refreshing the Letters Page main page and didn't get it till noon est. Not a big deal. Started to listen to it on my lunch break. might have been a Hic-up on the internet.

So the cosmic beings are multi-dimensional? Does this mean that Wager Master can Save the time lost Maira Helena? Also, what is this Mist storm you guys are talking about. I missed out a lot on tactics. What does the elder gods have to do with this? 

So the reason why Guise and WagerMaster are Nemesis is that they use to live together? I can relate. Still, hate Johny for never washing his dishes.

Try hitting Shift+F5 (or Ctrl+Shift+R); that forces it to do a full refresh and reload everything. Regular refresh sometimes relies on cookies and cached items, so might not be a full update all the time.

Unfortunately I couldn't find the "Shift+F5" button on my phone.  So I checked the website on my work computer to see that the episode had posted, and tried again on my phone but hit the "request desktop version" option, which seemed to allow my phone to display the updated page.

Edit to add: I know that Guise is normally the one who breaks the 4th wall, and that Wager Master specifically can't, but I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe the little blue cosmic imp had something to do it…

Google Play definitely did something weird. It showed the notification that it was ready for listening but I didn't have time right then to do so, then someone in Reddit said they noticed the blip so I checked my tablet again and the notification/episode had vanished… and then later went back up again.

Mysterious Indeed, my usually very reliable app was very late in being updated (like 6 o clock GMT) I blame the Sidhe , those guys love causing trouble

I'd second a request of stories about Wager Master messing with villains... but I have a sneaking suspicion that falls under "I'm sure it happened, but we never see it in the pages of sentinel comics because the stories are about the heroes"

I also enjoy silliness with Matchstickman.

And yeah, while I write the crappy OPs hours ahead of time I wait until I can see the podcast on http://theletterspage.libsyn.com/ before I post the thread, so it was up there, if only by seconds, before I hit the post button here.

The RSS feed was late to update–I was checking and refreshing it manually in a web browser–so any podcast service or app that relies on RSS (which is most of them) was unable to see it.  It was definitely an issue on libsyn's side.

I'd like to observe that Podbean is TERRIBLE about this.

Not that it's happened recently, but I've had episodes that weren't available until the following business day.

I imagine that approximately 4,876 people would have submitted the questions “What was The Wager,” “Who else participated in The Wager,” and “What was at stake in The Wager?”

Christopher and Adam must be hanging on to something.

I can only guess it involves OblivAeon. 

Can confirm, am one of 4,876.