Episode 208 of the Letters Page: Creative Process: Æternus Connected Hero

A brand new hero. Let’s see if maybe they become one in DE. Could be one big joke since this was recorded on 4/1

I feel like they’re talking about a deck with two character cards… Which would be AWESOME!

Also makes me think Tomb of the Bizarre is about as likely as Cosmic Tales for an expansion.

At least in my opinion, Tome of the Bizarre is a great expansion box name that can bring in anything remaining prior to the OblivAeon.

Like these characters. Has nothing to do with my tendency to play tiefling paladins in D&D/Pathfinder. Nothing to see here…

The folks working on the History of Sentinels Comics book have to be loving this…

I’m sure each TLP episode has them doing some amount of reworks. But there is no way at this point they didn’t know what they’ve gotten themselves into.

Top-quality bit at the top of the show. They’re really on fire today. On-brand for an episode about the realm of torment!

Hey, surprisingly wealthy furries are an internet phenomenon, they keep artists employed!

If this hero isn’t a Judo Christian, I’m gonna riot. XD

A toddler that just talks in death metal, great concept.

I’m really liking how different this story is from any other Sentinels hero.

Darn! I was going for lovers. :V

Looking forward to the two-character hero deck and Aeternus nemesis villain.

I really need to know how these names are spelled.

Okay, so the axe and stone make sense, but I’m confused about the string cheese. Is it also in the sandwich bag? Is this an entire bagged lunch we’re talking about? :V

Oh my GOD what was that ending XD

I really like the vibe of these characters, I feel like their stories could be a lot of fun. In particular, I like how their morality shifts as they spend more time together/get closer. It’d be fun to see a story (like the Expat/Setback one they covered a while ago) where one of them is going for the pragmatic but evil option, while the other brings the moral objections - but flipping those roles partway through, as the ensouled guy who grew up with demon’s can’t bring himself to actually do whatever, while Ms. Soulless is just like “I should probably feel bad about this, huh?”

On a related note…I can kind of see why these heroes are obscure enough that we haven’t heard of them before - one of them is an actual demon (with the moral, uh, freedom one might assume would go with that nature), and one of them is doing explicitly demonic sorcery. The people who didn’t like Spawn or Lucifer would have absolutely frothed about this one!

(Also, if their second or third story didn’t include a fight with other heroes, probably Nightmist or Fanatic, I’ll be stunned)

Yeah, at this point i feel like I can safely conclude that C&A have officially chosen to never answer any of my letters ever again. I wrote an amazing Avernus letter for the shipping episode, and they didn’t read it for either that episode or this one, so they must have just decided that they don’t like my face anymore, and are going to studiously ignore any questions I ask from now on.

That disappointment aside, this was a great episode, with a lot of really interesting stuff to key off of. The creative process that C&A does is a good example of raw chaos, like a child with a lump of Play-Doh; they go down a lot of rabbit trails that end up not being good, but they also generate lots of amazing story seeds that we can riff off of for our own purposes. I’m a little sad about the naming convention they settled upon, since it’s kind of intentionally bad in the 90s edgelord way, and that’s not a style that I’m a huge fan of, but it is fitting enough that I can’t argue at all.

Mechanically, I’m envisioning these guys as resembling a mix of two Cauldron heroes, Drift and the Wasteland promo versions of the Knight, where a deck built for one hero is instead used for two character cards (in that case the result isn’t amazing, but then the promo was an afterthought long after the original character came along). Since Drift is one of my low-key favorite Cauldron heroes, I very much look forward to a canonical hero who will function somewhat similarly. And the whole Critical Event mechanic feels like it was absolutely made to represent Aeternus, where there are so many different Lords of Hell who can take over temporarily, but the Critical Event might have the sentience of Aeturnus itself revealed. I think they could make two or three double-sided character cards with flip mechanics, where the game can either flip the current character or exchange it with a different one, so that various card effects can shuffle the current-ruler position in all sorts of weird ways. Maybe the normal game has only one continuous ruler, but the advanced version represents a power struggle where the characters continually flip or switch in a largely random order. If this isn’t how the DE version turns out, then I will almost certainly homebrew a villain deck around this concept, assuming I have time to do so.

I wouldn’t take it too personally. I’ve had my share of letters never read.

well personal or not, it seems pointless to try and write any more in, when the ones I already think are the best haven’t been getting through.

Fanatic. I can see an interesting story where the two of them are going through a slightly more antagonistic phase, and Fantatic comes into the picture having to help the demon stop the sorcerer’s plan.

Yeah, I’m very curious about whether we’re going to see them as a deck, or whether the new hero decks for the next few years have already been nailed down and we won’t see them until the faraway days of a magic-based RPG book. I’d be up for a second hero deck that’s multiple people, to go with the Sentinels.

Neat pair, and I think they deserve some more screen time!

I’m also in the camp of “the decks are locked in for all expansions (minus playtest tweaks).” Likely RPG filler, possible deck art cameos, at best I can see them as an Environment Deck card(s).

I’d agree they have it planned out who is in each box. So if this character was planned for one of them, then they already had been slotted in before this episode.

It seems like typically if something would have no chance of showing up in the card game, they go out of their way to answer, 'Why isn’t this in the card game?" They didn’t really do that for these two, but rather “Why haven’t they interacted much with the other heroes?”

I’ll note that as a playtester I was aware Alpha would be a character months before we got the creative process episode that introduced her.

Interesting, but counter example that Adam seemed genuinely in the dark as to what their powers would be. If they had already planned to make a deck(s), that seems unlikely.

Adam has in the past forgotten prior discussions. So it’s not out of the realm of possibility similar happened here or this was the first time they decided yo flesh it out further. Last week we got more background on Tantrum than either one of them had really done until that point despite her being in the EE Vengeance box.

It may not happen but I can’t discount it as a possibility just yet.

At this point, I’m just assuming any new character introduced in the LP will show up in the card game in some fashion (heh), with or without their own deck.

I think there’s a high chance of them showing up on various cards, but a low chance of them showing up as their own deck. Would be pretty neat, though. Maybe we should flood the Patreon with questions about them to try and express interest. ;p

Well if they aren’t a deck, they definitely should be.

Listened to the episode once and had a lot of comments I wanted to make, and then listened a second time and couldn’t find any of the prompts that I wanted to respond to. So her goes with attempt three:

I think the word that Adam was groping for to describe Christopher is “hyperactive”. “Manic” also works, but is a little less on-the-dot as an antonym for “tired”.

As to the question of whether people are constantly giving birth in both realms all the time, I feel like there probably aren’t so many humans in AEternus at any one time that there would be a lot of pregnant women there, let alone women that are just about to give birth. So I’m not sure that the extra bit about a spell destroying the spawning demon was necessary.

Since they eventually decided that the spawn-demon was in Japan when it died, that demon may have been in the form of an Oni or Yokai of some sort, but because it’s actually a shapeshifter, it adopts whatever form is present in the local culture, the better to integrate itself into the folktale schemas of the area. So, at the same moment, an Indian woman was carried off to “Naraka” (AEternus), and a shapeshifting AEternal that was marauding in Japan as a Yokai created a spawn which it failed to bring back to AEturnus with it. The younger shapeshifter adopts the form of a Japanese baby girl, and the two grow up as seemingly near-identical twins (eventually becoming less identical, when the spawnling notices that the parents are weirded out by having a strange baby, which they found in the bushes or whatever, look too much like the one which the mother gave birth to). Meanwhile, the son of the pregnant Indian lady grows up in “Naraka” as the servant of a self-proclaimed “Lord of the Asuras” or whatever.

The “odd” and “unusual” word that C&A were looking into at around the 24-minute mark, the word they wanted was “eerie”. This story of demons and torment isn’t a horror story, it’s a “weird fiction” tale, designed not to scare the audience but rather to unsettle them slightly. AEturnus feeds upon torment because torment is an energy of conflict and change; it is fundamentally contrary to any form of comfort or stability, but it doesn’t always manifest as the ultimate agony of sustained torture; that’s the torment-energy equivalent of a hydroelectric dam, and sometimes all you need is a car battery, or even just a couple of D-cells. So sometimes the “torment” is just a mild degree of unhappiness, which might manifest as soap-opera drama rather than absolute horrible suffering. AEturnus at its worst can indeed be a place of complete monstrosity, but it is also empowered to a small degree by basically any discomfort that any person ever experiences, at least if there’s a “demon” nearby to harvest that emotional energy before it can dissipate.

Without getting too much into stuff that shouldn’t be discussed here, some of the writers of this story would have presented them as like separated-at-birth siblings, and others like a destined romance…and some as BOTH. But this is definitely one of those X-Files kinds of cases, where the will-they-won’t-they dynamic between them is crucial to the way the characters play off each other, and even ignoring the sorta-step-sibling angle, it would ruin that tension between them if they ever actually became a couple. They need to have a very intimate yet professional connection, enabling them to deal with all of the situations they get themselves into during an adventuring career.

Before they came up with the “fear stare” idea, everything they’d previously said indicated that the demon girl was basically a Doppelganger, who not only shapeshifts but also reads people’s minds, enabling her to appear as exactly what other people expect her to be. (Also, I’m very curious as to what Christopher thought he was saying when he mentioned “doing a Baphomet thing”. Don’t look that word up if you’re below 18 or at work.)

I’m very much picturing Darkstryfe as an Elric-type character, who would be built as a Warlock/Hexblade in D&D terms. He’d be incredibly over-the-top and a massive edgelord, while Akare tries to pretend she’s a totally normal Japanese teenager (I really want her to live in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, just for Demon City reasons). I totally agree with Adam that the dynamic between these two is flat-out amazing, that Darkstryfe feels human aversion to murder but also believes intellectually that it’s totally okay, whereas Akare’s nonhuman origin has effectively made her a sociopath, who could murder a hundred people and never feel the slightest discomfort, but knows intellectually that human society condemns murder as wrong and has all sorts of reasons for it, so she adheres to that moral principle despite feeling no attachment to it.

I totally disagree that a sword exists solely as a killing war weapon; if you’re going to say that a spear is useful for hunting and a knife is useful for craft purposes, then a sword is in that same wheelhouse. If any weapon exists solely for combat, it’d be something like a flail or a halberd, which is totally impractical except for its use in specific battlefield maneuvers that are specific to the armor and weapons that your opponents are expected to have.

I like that these are two Asian characters with unusual skin tones for their area; Darkstryfe would probably be genetically Dravidian, while Akare’s appearance would be well within the Japanese average, but intentionally leaning toward light skin, since this is viewed as more attractive by the cultural mainstream over there. The fact that AEternus was almost certainly designed by American Christian-raised writers to be literally the Judeo-Christian Hell, and yet it fits so perfectly with these two Asiatic cultures. I definitely think these are two of the best characters C&A have ever made, right up there with Naturalist and Kaargra Warfang and Void Guard Mainstay and Greazer Clutch (and possibly Morrigan and some of the other Fey, though I can’t be sure on those until we see more of them).

They never answered when the readers learn that AEternus itself is alive. I can certainly picture a lot of very appropriate entities which the Dread Will of AEternus could appear as, such as the Black Man of witch folklore (who may or may not be a Mask of Nyarlathotep, and Nyarlathotep itself could be equated to AEternus), or the main character of the song “Red Right Hand”, with its extreme Southern Gothic vibes (probably also applicable to the Dark Tower novels, but I’m not familiar with those).

The big difference between Torment and Gloom is what I said earlier about Torment being a dynamic force; Gloom is relatively static. If you cut yourself and you’re feeling pain from the wound, you’re being Torment by that wound; when the cut heals and leaves just a spot on your skin where some of the nerves are dead and you don’t have much feeling anymore, that’s Gloom instead. If you never felt any pain at all, then you’d definitely be experiencing a degree of Gloom; even if you could still feel pleasure, you’d probably still be in Gloom’s thrall, because any time you weren’t feeling pleasure, it would feel like a nagging absence and you’d be depressed about it. In time, even the pleasure wouldn’t do much for you anymore. Ultimately, Gloomweaver has more in common with The Graey than he does with AEternus.

I share Adam’s disgust and frustration (disgustration?) with April Fool’s Day, assuming that he isn’t fooling about disliking it. (We can be fairly sure that he’s kind of into Christopher’s terrible puns, or they wouldn’t keep doing the bit where the latest terrible joke makes Adam quit the podcast. But at the same time, “stupid lying day” sounded like genuine annoyance on his part, and if so, then I’m definitely 100% with him on that. I’ve hated April Fools with a passion at least since 2004 or so, when I was working on a project on the (now long-vanished) Magic the Gathering forums. It actually got me hired as a freelance writer for the game for a couple of years, but I didn’t know that would end up happening; back then it was just something that I did to make my time passed, and I was intensely frustrated on April Fool’s Day, when the forum was rendered unusable for an entire day, just for a stupid joke. I’ve always hated the general concept of pranks, since they’re usually not 100% consensual, and a day devoted specifically to pranks is really a day that makes me want to lock myself in a small room and wait for it to be over, having no interaction with the outside world until this insanity has passed.

One more small disappointment: if they got a letter from a user calling themself Dr. Fate, they should have done the Nabu voice.

If OblivAeon got his way, I feel like it wouldn’t so much be “no universe exists”, and more like “an entire universe of absolutely nothing is now everything which exists”. So Wager Master’s “backup copy” would probably have come into existence therein, after OblivAeon looked around at the universe of nothing and went, “welp, a job well done” and then effectively switched himself off. So after that, Wags would be the only entity which existed, and could recreate a universe in his own image, but given that his entire personality is “hey you, caper for my amusement”, I don’t think he’d be very satisfied with being the only being in existence. If he could entertain himself adequately with his own clones, then he’d have no need to go to the bother of bugging our heroes; he needs beings other than himself to exist, in order to be able to enjoy annoying those beings. I for one could be perfectly happy as the only being that existed in a universe of nothing, so long as I had the power to create objects that I could amuse myself with…but I’m not Wager Master, and in fact he’s pretty much the exact opposite of me in almost every way. So it absolutely makes sense that he would want to help the heroes thwart OblivAeon; his backup copy might not even have been meant for OblivAeon winning, but rather OblivAeon noticing that he meddled and destroying him for it.

And my favorite reveal from the kickstarter was the Fey Court; they were absolutely the most interesting thing to me, since they’re so different from any other villain we have.

Whew, what an episode!

People always forget the hyphen, and that just – it bothers me…

I have no idea why they would even put the hyphen in there; it makes as much sense as calling your green car “my green-car”. Fey is an adjective and a noun; the Fey Court is a court of feys, or it is a court which is fey. Neither of these requires a hyphen to properly denote it.

While the two should never have been in a true romance there is another story complication… She has a little sister. The sister might have been interested in the edgy bad boy hanging out with her sister. He might have allowed his mixed up “what are you doing step bro?” feelings for his soul bonded partner to refocus on someone that looks a lot like her.

Hypothetical deck I think would look something like EE Harpy.
Not card, double sided soul tokens that could be flipped to show how “human” each of the pair are.
Low humanity for her is demon body war form
High humanity for her is doppelgänger infiltrator possibly healing as she feels compassion
Low humanity for him is forbidden magics attacks
High humanity for him would be regret and penance probably card draw and damage blocking

My biggest guess is legal reasons. And to allow for people to point out that there is a hyphen. Fey court can be any ol’ court of fey in any story. The Fey-Court is Sentinel Comic’s very own fey court, with characters owned by Sentinel Comics.

I would be quite surprised if they removed tokens for two decks, just to add them to a new one.

Finished listening. This whole episode was on point. Loving these heroes.

I think you mean “en point”.

The problem there is that as written, drawing on the soul and drawing on Aeternus isn’t actually contradictory; one person could be drawing on both. If I wanted to do it quickly and easily, I’d have four total cards, like the Sentinels, but the four are Darkstrife, Painstake, The Soul, and The Power.

Darkstrife and Painstake are normal hero cards. Darkstrife’s inherent Power says “Flip the Power” and Painstake’s inherent Power says “Flip the Soul”. The Power and The Soul also have powers written on them, based on who has it at the moment. Then you have cards that do extra effects if someone has The Power, or extra effects if someone has The Soul.

For variants, you could mess with how things flip - maybe there’s a variant where Darkstrife flips The Power and The Soul, and Painstake flips one, uses its power, and then flips it back. Or a variant where Darkstrife does something big and then puts one of the cards under his card, and Painstake returns a hidden card to play with either side showing.

Well, if any hero is going to have a card called The Power, it should be The Babe. (What babe?)

So less extra character cards and more like indestructible ongoings?

Actually… what if “soul” and “power” cards are more like Tempest’s “weather” cards? And then they have powers like destroying or burying a soul card for one effect, or them having persistent support effects (like… a soul card that has a minor HP regen, or a power card that deals 1 damage to the non-hero target with the lowest health).

Coming back around to pure lore, I think this episode crystallized a thing that I hadn’t thought of too much directly, which is one of the ways in which Sentinel Comics is the least like the modern comics industry.

Old-school comics had a lot of anthologies: things like “Detective Comics”, or “Weird Fantasy”, or “Journey into Mystery”. They often had more than one story per issue, or served as a place for recurring adventures of minor characters.

These anthology comics started fading in the 60s, and were pretty much all gone by the early 80s; there were a few “semi-anthologies” that were “The Main Superhero And A Rotating Cast Of Minor Superheroes”, like the Defenders reboot, but in general the system was over. If Marvel or DC wanted to introduce a new hero, they’d either do it as a guest in another hero’s book, or they’d just launch a 6 or 12 issue limited run and see how it did.

This occurred to me because in the world of Sentinel Comics, the anthology comic never went away. “Tome of the Bizarre” and “Cosmic Tales” never transformed into a specific character’s story, even if various characters took them over for short blocks of time. If Darkstrife and Painstake were Marvel characters, they wouldn’t have popped up in Tome of the Bizarre. They either would have been introduced in a story like Nightmist or Fanatic, and then given their own backstory, or the editors would have planned a full arc for them from minute one.

Just wanted to note the name as provided by Christopher is Darkstrife with an i not Darkstryfe with a y.

Geez and here I thought he was a 90s edgelord. Lame!

(For some reason the system automatically removed my quote, but I was able to put it back in. Weird.)

Thanks! Fixed it in my post.

When they first described the demon-powers bursting out of the hero, the main image that came to my mind was Mogget from Sabriel.

You mean it’s not DarXtryffe? I feel like this is a typo :V

Gotta leave something to the imagination for the XTREMIVERSE version!

Anyway, I feel like we’re not discussing the most important part here. Who do we ship them with?

I mean, as the episode was in progress, I was already shipping them with each other. I’m glad C&A tackled that point in the process. I’d definitely be one of the fans going “one soul, two bodies, they are already bound to each other. It’s not incest, they aren’t related. It’s just a really complicated masturbation.”

I think it’d be a safe bet to say Akari would end up with a nice, shy Japanese boy. Or at the very least, there would be someone with a crush on her that she would be oblivious to.

I’m really glad C&A addressed their connection in the episode; sibling dynamics don’t show up enough in media, but it can be done really well and makes for much more interesting interactions.

Okay, this quote actually kind of made my day and it’s only 7:18.

Also, I too approve of having more sibling dynamics in media.

(is an only child)

One of the top five episodes of the podcast for sure. I love how it begins, the April fools thing is classic C&A, and then we get into an incredible creation process for THE most exciting new hero ever to join the Definitive Edition, assuming it actually will soonish.

“Oh no, oh well, princeling, of hell” - I think that’s far more lyrical than “ice up the whole rat”.

Thinking about the publication history, my explanation of why this aeturnus story disappeared is not that the readership didn’t like this incredibly cool story, but rather it was shut down by editorial mandate because of controversy.

On DrakeWillow’s question, I’d say the problem with Wager Master came from the power of Wager Master, that he was choosing to stay and thereby degrading, and it wasn’t her power doing that. After all, he makes himself lose all the time by following his own rules, and this was another version of that.