Gen Con Live 2023

Posted a day early with some pictures

Great music. The alchemists bit was fantastic. And I am certain this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Inversiverse Matthew.

But mostly and unsurprisingly I am just really excited hearing that Trial of Baron Blade is still on their list.

Re: the question about the longest a fleshchild confronting its original has lasted, we clearly need a Proletariat (or other duplicator) fleshchild to take the record. How would most people even know that’s not just another “regular” copy? Even Proletatiat himself would probably get confused if there were enough of him out at once.

Released a day early? Madness! Chaos in the streets!

These pictures are fantastic. C&A really know how to ham and cheese it up.

Oh my god, the opening remix!

Adam’s reaction to the tie.

We really, really need to get the soundtrack to this episode.

Revenant and Apostate? Okay, but which was which?

This question about Seraph… Oh my god… XD I love Mark.

Wow, Adam actually wanting to talk about a cover!

My instant mental image was Tachyon in a side-scroller picking up a jillion coins.

Seriously strong 90s energy from all the music!

For those who aren’t aware, the music was a mix of the Sentinels video game OST and the precious Lazer Ryderz music:

Also if anyone here who is a Contributor on the Patreon could either confirm or deny they got access to the audio files, that would be much appreciated - the description says Patreons would be able to access them but I don’t seem to be able to do so with my Collector tier account. At this moment I am not sure if this is due to being on the lower tier or because the episode was posted early and maybe there’s more stuff coming? Hopefully?

The episode got released a day early and we got told on discord to expect something today on Patreon. If it’s like 2018 then I suspect we will get audio files for music used but will know for sure later today regardless of what level of support you have.

Patreon supporters should see a post now with audio files. https://www.patreon.com/posts/audio-files-from-87630954

I was about to ask… Well, more reason for me to join, I guess… hmmmm…

I don’t think that ruse would last long, 'cause the real Proletariat would simply try to re-absorb the dupe and it wouldn’t work, tipping him off to something being fishy—unless the fake is somehow separated from the real Alexsandr.

Y’know, Biomancer could make a whole bunch of identical Proletariat fleshchildren (assuming he can’t have them just duplicate his duplication) and use the mob to pretend to be the real deal in a different geographical location - possibly leading to a great deal of confusion and even Proletariat wondering if some of his copies have gained free will. The guy doesn’t seem to be super-stable at the best of times and his cognitive abilities take a dive when his powers are pushed too far (like in the one adventure with Fanatic) so the possibility of that happening might seem pretty plausible to him. “Did I forget one of me somehow?” Add in cunning fleshchildren programmed to claim they’re the originals and he’s the rogue duplicate and I could see him breaking down pretty badly. “If you were the original, you could absorb us, couldn’t you? But you can’t…” Cue screaming in Russian…

Seems like a very Biomancer thing to do as some part of cunning scheme that will inevitably fall apart completely…

Ah yes, but it would only seem like it was falling apart, as that was also part of his plan all along…

“Everything is going according to plan!”

“What plan?”

“Ah…I’ve forgotten, honestly. Let me check my notes.”

I can’t believe A&C overlooked the obvious choices for their fill-ins at GTG/The Letters Page! Christopher’s new avatar as creator/storyteller is basically Grimm, who seems a better fit than Citizen Anvil anyway. (This is assuming we overlook the intended irony of Anvil/Christopher being the quiet one.)

The new laborer for the art mines is the Argent Artist, possibly consulting with Mr. Hideous (eye of the beholder and all that).

And yeah, Anthony Drake would be good to cover the music… Until you consider that (Diamond) Diva is objectively better in every way!

Great episode overall!

I would expect an inversiverse story about Seraph’s boyfriend phase to actually be about “Millie”, the bad girl that he swears has a heart of gold but who turns out to actually be Inversiverse Harpy, OMG, What A Shock!! Can he redeem her? (No.)

Also (and this may be an outsider perspective and also I’m very aware that actually unpacking it would indeed need a whole creative process) I was sort of fascinated by how, when given a prompt about what differing canon backgrounds we might get for the Freedom Five, Unity, or Baron Blade, the answers were “maybe they have different personalities”, “it’s about her being an intern”, and “they gloss over it”. Those are all still basically just the comics canon, and I’m curious that they didn’t have any immediate thoughts about differences the way that most modern comics movies can get really weird.

The Freedom Five are all created at the same when Meredith’s Tachyon Emitter overloads and bombards them with cosmic rays! Unity is a brand-new intern at this funny place, Revocorp, working for Dr. Ray Manta on the new BENCHMARK program - is something suspicious going on behind the scenes, and who’s the lady with the eyepatch trying to shoot up the place? Baron Blade’s father is being forced to make weapons for the Russian mob, but gets gunned down by the American superhero Bunker, and Blade declares war on the mob and the heroes at the same time!

This here is a really, really interesting observation to me because this isn’t even hypothetical, it is what superhero comics have evolved to be.

Since the metaverse is so similar to our own world, it means that this is a process that most likely would happen there as well - which then would have consequences for the RPG era at the very least. The transition from comic book to movie theater screen specifically is something that would have a huge effect. Reboots of character arcs seem to happen all the time (I think - this is with my very limited knowledge of RL superhero popular culture), so what does that mean for Sentinels?
I feel like there is a lot to talk about here.

Edited for actually including the quote. >_>

Neither my wife nor I were really comics readers a few years ago. She got into it shortly after the first Wonder Woman movie came out. She picked up a bundle of 10 issues of WW to start, and we read them together. What was fascinating to us was that they were ALL Wonder Woman origin retellings. We’ve since learned that DC is apparently notorious for this, but didn’t know at the time. The differences between the versions were pretty striking. Sometimes she’s a god. Sometimes she’s Zeus’ daughter. Sometimes she’s the only child on the island; sometimes she’s in a crowd of them. Sometimes Ares is involved. Sometimes Steve Trevor is around right at the very start, and sometimes she doesn’t meet him till moving off Themiscyra.

It really made me wonder, like, every time there’s a new war, does Bunker release a new issue with Vance as a new recruit for that war? Do Sentinel Comics writers have an utter fascination with showing the Wraith get beat up and resolving to train? Whose origin is different absolutely every time it’s shown?

But every time, the answer is that Sentinel Comics weren’t created organically, they were planned out by people who knew the one true origin for everybody and don’t want/need to revisit that part of the story. They’ve said that the comics companies we know are around in the Metaverse, so just like we know DC for constantly revisiting origins, I figure this is just a thing SC is known for in the Metaverse: not retelling origins, or if they do, staying consistent.

Yeah, I think that is the core issue. Usually, you get these different backstories because a new creator wants to put their own spin on the character, taking the pieces that they consider iconic and playing around with everything else. C&A don’t have that, because they’re ultimately two people who already have an iconic story, and it’s the one that they told.

But they make such amazing Disparations for these characters that I guess I just assumed that when given that question, they’d explain a handful of things that were “iconic” for the characters in the Sentinels metaverse which they were already using in their alternative realities, and maybe give an example or two of things that aren’t.

In that respect, the history of Sentinel Comics bears a lot more similarities to manga than Western comics despite taking a traditionally Western approach to superheroes.

Western supers books are (at this point) defined by an endless churn of rewrites, re-imaginings, reboots and retcons inflicted upon readers by an endless succession of creative teams trying to put their own stamp on other peoples’ characters. Very few modern creators stay on a book for even a couple of years at this point, and the cycle has gotten noticeable shorter within my lifetime. And now, of course, there’s an editorial imperative to make comics mesh with movies, including making radical changes to existing characters solely so that any hypothetical crossover readers who came in through the films won’t be as confused. The tail isn’t just wagging the dog these days, the dog’s being trained to walk ass-backward.

Manga, by comparison, is usually the product of a single writer, sometimes supported by an art team, sometimes doing it all alone, and when there is a turnover on artists the replacements are trained to stick to the established style, not to innovate - something you rarely see in modern Western books outside of Archie Comics, and even they’ve loosed up a lot at this point. If the original creator of a series quits or dies, that’s usually the end of the series. Highly unlikely that anyone is going to be taking over One Piece if Oda is run over by truck-kun, whereas Batman will outlive any number of writers and artists, changing with each new creator. Many mangaka have at least an outline of their book’s entire story in mind before they even start, which just isn’t possible in Western books.

Similarly, Sentinels has an enormous amount of faux-history built, running into the “future” of the RPG, and that history has been created by two people with some inspiration from fans. If truck-kun flattened Christopher and Adam (or, arguably, either of them) I suspect that would be the end of the faux-publishing company they’ve built, although it might limp along with fan-created doujinshi much the same way some manga does.

Can’t honestly see an IRL gaming publisher insisting on continuing with the conceit when they could just use what they have already, or ditch it entirely and just sell the rules by themselves - perhaps with licensing for 3PP supplements, which would likely do wonders to signal boost the RPG engine itself. That can’t happen with things as they stand though - it’s C&A’s sandbox, and there doesn’t seem to be any interest in letting others apply the game engine to other settings.

Fascinating.

A big part of Sentinel Comics’s original schtick is that it’s C&A’s imagining of what comic book companies should have done, if they’d done things right. They changed that later on by introducing intentional mistakes that are consistent with real-world companies, but it still doesn’t include the worst bits, like repeated retcons and “crises.”

Note that I’m not saying either approach is inherently superior to the other, but they do lead to different styles of stories getting told, as well as very different approaches to multimedia franchises. A successful anime adaptation doesn’t change the trajectory of its parent manga the way the MCU has irrevocably altered the face of Marvel comics, and going by past sales figures most Western comics directly adapting films don’t do as well as manga that are adapting original anime. Text fiction in the form of light novels is also a bigger deal (financially speaking) with anime/manga than similar adaptations and spin-offs have generally been in the West, although that is starting to change.

Sentinels doesn’t really do much with that aspect of things, but my headcanon insists that there were Freedom Five and Prime Wardens Big Little books back in the day. And a Guise vinyl album, done in purple of course.

Don’t know about that. Oblivaeon is very much a Crisis On Infinite Earths line reset, complete with isolating the main setting from the multiverse and “big name” character deaths that may or may not stick. They’ve already hinted at how the shards might lead to a return of the problem in some form and the “sandwich bag” getting popped, setting up to emulate DC’s descent into the madness of countless line-wide “event” stories, each with diminishing returns.

Yeah, but it’s the only one, and it took until 2016. Marvel and DC had had multiple “resets” each by then.

Marvel would adamantly deny ever having done a true reset, and with some justification. They’ve fallen into doing endless line-wide events whose effects frequently seem to be minimal the moment the story ends, but I can’t think of anything that’s mangled continuity as broadly as what DC has over the years, starting with Crisis On Infinite Earths in 1984-ish. Closest Marvel has come is the explicit differentiation and numbering of multiple universes, which is more akin to DC’s original Earth 1, 2, etc. concept or establishing other 'verses via Disparation stories than anything. Individual characters have been retconned willy-nilly (and even Bucky won’t have the decency to stay dead) but those are small-scale changes compared to the paroxysms of DC’s multiversal restructuring.

DC is definitely much, much worse, but Marvel did try to do a true reset in the '90s, which was canned and reverted after only a few months due to how horribly it was received.

Marvel certainly does like to spin out its alternate universe stories, though. Ultimates was ridiculous. Not much like Disparation, which is largely one-and-done, very rarely even short arcs.

What, Heroes Reborn? That never affected more than a few characters, even if they were immensely important characters at the time. Most of the Marvel line went on with hardly a bump aside from the “reborn” heroes stuck in the Franklinverse being believed to be dead.

The event lasted about a year, not a few months, although Rob Liefeld had his contract cancelled after six months owing to “poor sales” (partly resulting from his traditional inability to meet deadlines, although his godawful artwork didn’t help any - that’s where the “impossible pecs” Captain America image came from) and his books shifted over to Jim Lee’s company. While the change certainly wasn’t universally well received, Marvel made a mint on the fool things (mostly to speculators, I suspect - it was well into that boom) and actually offered to continue the setting ad infinitum, but only if Jim Lee agreed to do at least one of the books. Much more successful gimmick overall than the slightly earlier Clone Saga in the Spider-Man titles, and I’d argue it acted as a direct inspiration for Ultimates - which briefly saw similar success before flopping.

Disparation is a lot more akin to Marvel’s old What If? title, or DC’s many Elseworlds - at least before they both became “real” through Marvel’s numbered-universe thing and DC’s Omniverse concept.

I’m pretty sure Mist Storm / Vertex was their version of Ultimates.

Speaking of Ultimate universe, it is supposed to be coming back.

With a dash of DC’s more superheroic Vertigo titles thrown in as well, yeah. I can also see some similarities to the aforementioned Heroes Reborn - but of course that’s true of Ultimates as well. They all fall into the broad “Bold Imaginings!” trope to some degree.

Huh, I never realized that Heroes Reborn lasted a whole year. Probably because it took 12 issues of Fantastic Four vol. 2 to cover less than Fantastic Four #1 did.

Heh. Too right.

Might actually have been a bit more than a year, Marvel was very bad at meeting deadlines in that era and the stuff licensed out was even worse - hence Rob Liefeld getting his contract yanked. The poor sales came partly from being late. I was working in a comic shop during that whole run and apologizing to subscribers and off-the-shelf buyers for overdue issues was an everyday thing - as if it was our fault.

That was the same stretch where TSR started showing undeniable signs of collapse. I remember going eight months with the core AD&D 2nd ed books out of stock because they had none to sell us and no money to pay the printers for more.

In case anyone is interested, here’s the FRG Wrap-up video: Flat River Games on Instagram: "Okay, okay, we know @gen_con is officially over (😭), but we couldn’t move on without thanking all of our publisher partners, demo team, and - last but not least - YOU, our fans!! 🤩 It was our biggest show ever, but that’s just the beginning. Buckle up because we’ve already started brainstorming for #GenCon 2024! 💪 Stay tuned for bigger, better fun and even more #boardgames! 😍"

And here’s the Spirit Island Mega Game Recap video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWTqNCd0ALI

State of GtG video https://youtu.be/HkXVN_L-brE

That was a lot more games I didn’t recognize than I expected.

We demoed a lot of non-GTG games.

Really loving the Mega-Man-esque remixes of the SOTM theme in this and the previous “talented Trevor-sode”, despite my not really being a MegaMan fan.

I’m probably stealing this name from somewhere, but unless they ever gave us the story of what happened alongside the Cosmic Conflict to very surgically keep the new DE heroes out of it, I propose calling that story arc “The Six From Sorrow”, and it features Grimm (who obviously doesn’t belong in CC, not even if the alternative is Bugbear) basically just torturing these heroes, all of which except maybe Fashion have an extremely serious dark side, and Grimm would love to make them wallow in the misery of their own tragic tales.

The so-called Slimverse seems like it ought to be a “prequel” to SOTM, featuring hero decks for Shrieker and Cold-Guns AZ alongside HR Slim (who’s Black Fist the Boxer), with a villain deck for Orthrus.

The IHOP story of proto- Hermetic and the apparently equally super villainous proto-Scholar, besides being hilarious, also really illustrated why you should always treat service workers better than is strictly necessary.

I feel like Ambuscade would be a good answer to a villain showing up for a holiday. He’s rich, he wants to be the center of attention, and he can be trusted to be more or less honest. Like if Baron Blade gives you food, it might be poison, if Hermetic does it’s definitely poison, Ambuscade will probably only poison you if he tells you in advance that he intends to do that, because otherwise it wouldn’t be a sporting hunt that proves how courageous he is.

I had not thought about Grimm, but my personal theory was a crossover event in Tome of the Bizarre and the line editor refusing to let “his/her” characters be used in any other event