Episode 186 of the Letters Page: Writers' Room: NightMist #49

Everyone’s favorite classy noir occult detective and everyone’s other favorite nerdy magic researcher with anger management issues team up!

Interesting how the forum puts the link in the thread title now. That’s actually kind of handy.

Have to say, even more info on him makes me like Soothsayer Carmichael more.

Can’t remember any more specifics because I was out walking again. Oh well, good episode!

Huh, when Soothsayer Cedric Carmichael was first described, I imagined him wearing arcane robes, not that scholarly outfit.

Same, Fjur. I think having him be the overly formal stuffy academic in aesthetic works tho. He looks like the sort of guy you’d go to Miskatonic to get help on the occult.

As I do really love the fact that you have Soothsayer looking like a mild-mannered academic when he is so very very very not mild-mannered at all.

I honestly hate so much how significantly I relate to Soothsayer, lol. Like my life is made up of seeing people who have more money/social power/talent than I do, and because my own innate talent is research, passing around knowledge, and problem-solving, I am forever like “Grrrrraaaaaahhhhh these people waste what they have, if I had that I know exactly how to solve all these problems but I myself don’t have any of the resources.”

And I often spend my time complaining to everyone about this at length.

And especially the Scholar bit, I tend to calm down from Ranty Bitch Lady to Reasonable Lady significantly any time I actually feel listened to for once, and I was again like “Dammit”.

I hate this, lol.

On things I don’t hate, I honestly shipped Nightmist and Soothsayer ever since we got the bit that they actually get along pretty well. And after listening to this episode I feel like it would be that trope where the superpowered girlfriend is always having to save her “useless” muggle boyfriend from something.

Soothsayer and Argent being very begrudging friends is also a hilarious find.

And I legit laughed out loud at the revelation that Soothsayer would be mad at Tachyon for doing science wrong. So hysterical.

I am so happy I suggested this episode, lol. I rarely get my suggestions voted on, but the times it has happened I’ve always enjoyed.

Yes! Especially since it’s more begrudging on Carmichael’s side.

Soothsayer is basically a weapons-grade tsundere, lol.

Adept and Soothsayer, best antagonistic friendship since the Fanatic/Ra “frenemies with benefits” bit.

Odd idea… So the bit about Baron Blade and Citizen Dawn switching bodies and Dawn being intrigued makes me think. If I remember right, when talking about Madame Mittermeier’s Fantastical Festival of Conundrums & Curiosities, Adam and Christopher remarked that the Young Legacy alter ego of Baron Blade’s daughter was something more than just the Festival messing with Legacy’s head, that an heir might be in Baron Blade’s future. Perhaps this is why Dawn has been flying under the radar since Oblivaeon, as she needs to keep a certain something under wraps, lest she be associated with another powerless child. Better to wait, until the child has been proven to have powers…

Okay, my old crack fic crossover writer brain is still coming out to play.

I am laughing at this analogy over here in shipper land, tbh.

WalkingTarget and I have a shared theory in this regard (that we both reached independently, which I find amusing) based on a number of little snippets across the podcast, RPG core rulebook, and Sentinels of Freedom, that Baron Blade has an heir and

is the mother.

A disappointing episode. Soothsayer Carmichael is a more impressive character than I expected, and the cover looks cool, but overall not much of interest to me was discussed in this episode. The story is vague and underwhelming, more like a skeleton than a full plot concept, and as usual Christopher seems to fixate on terrible words. First it was “Disparation” and similar stumbles; now, the latest example is “analect”. I know it’s hard to avoid duplicating what the industry has already done, but surely this could be improved on.

I admit I sometimes wonder if you and I are listening to the same episodes, Justifier.

I will say I actively like Christopher’s tendency to use Genius Bonus words for everything, though.

Follow up post on a different topic: I would note that Cedric is a name created by a Scottish author and Carmichael specifically started out as a Scottish surname, so one could make an entirely credible thought that Soothsayer is Scottish and basically the Violent Glaswegian stereotype trapped in the body of a stuffy skinny academic.

(I personally think he’s more potentially the English-coded variety of British, but, still, one could make this thought.)

Have yet to listen to the episode, but based on your description I’m now convinced I play RPGs with Soothsayer Carmichael. My friend’s from Glasgow and sounds like he fits the bill! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

I like five-dollar words if they’re good, but not for their own sake. To use a salient example (apart from “salient”), in Argent Adept’s deck we have cards with words like “Polyphoric” and “Sarabande”, which are excellently poetic, but we also have things like “Alacritous”, which is an unnecessarily elaborate way of simply saying “fast”, and “Cedistic”, which is just a word Christopher made up. Those cards could just as well have been given names such as “Accelerating Crescendo” or “Dissonant Refrain”. That’s just a very quick off-the-cuff example, and far from the worst example of Christopher picking the wrong hill to die on with regard to his vocabulary choices. Probably the single worst naming choice he’s ever made was “The Organization”. I cringe so hard when I see that cover from the Sentinel Tactics expansion, where they’re trying to make that incredibly bland and generic name seem intimidating.

Honestly, this just seems simply like a matter of taste.

Yeah I was admittedly going to say “Accelerating Crescendo and Dissonant Refrain are both much less interesting-sounding, though".

Like, they’re more clear, sure, just like yes there could be more clear words than Disparation or Analect.

But Disparation is catchy, and Analect made me grab for the dictionary in a good way. It was a nice play on words, because the definition refers as much to Soothsayer as it did the cult so the cover is tricksy that way, same as how real life comic covers are often tricksy.

Likewise Alacritous Subdominant is both catchy and right in line with Argent’s own often pompous speech, as is Cedistic Dissonant.

We’re trucking in superhero comics; “unnecessarily elaborate” is often precisely what one should be shooting for in tone.

Then on the flipside, The Organization is deliberately a low-key name. Chairman’s entire shtick is that he secretly has all of Rook City under his thumb. A big flashy intimidating name would be entirely opposite to his methodology.

There are sometimes aspects of the lore building I find a little problematic or not to my tastes, but Christopher’s wordsmith and wordplay tendencies I love.

I mean, “the Mafia” was known as Cosa Nostra - literally “our thing”.

This is one of the weaker stories they ever crafted; it’s like a skeleton without skin, it needed more meat on its bones. And I think I know what the missing flesh needs to be: this is a Cult of Oblivion. These dummies who Christopher named The Factors (bad name), who are creating the Analect (worse name), are unknowingly drawing on the same magic that Nixious later uses, first to eat the rest of his species’s CoA and then to eat all other CoA members from all other planets…one of those would have been a human if this ritual had worked. Thusly, instead of the generic “gain this power to do some terrible thing”, we get very consistent visual presentation of a style of magic never seen before, and never seen again until the appearance of Nixious.

I do think the cover is decent, and it’s neat to see Carmichael for the first time, but this episode really changed the persona that had previously been described for this character. He started out as a “magical doomsday prepper”, and instead he becomes this weird odd couple tsundere of the Adept, who’s trying to lie to Nightmist and is characterized as a borderline nihilist. I always mourn for the loss of original versions of characters, like the pre-bot Unity, and this is a case where I definitely think I liked the original better, since the later version wasn’t developed into something vastly better.