Episode 266 of the Letters Page: Writers’ Room: Arcane Tales Vol. 2 #506

The Realm of Discord vs Aeternus. How much more chaotic can you get?

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Okay, what is with flesh-sword Fanatic, 2-halves Visionary, and green-fire Ra?

Also Argent accidentally summoning Gloomweaver’s drum instead of Akpunku’s.

Also also watching Adam draw this cover made me realize we need more Amazon Muscles Fanatic.

Ooh, skeleton Adam? Just in time for the spookiest month!

Everything is made of Adams, thinking emoji?

So if, by attempting to spread gloom across reality, GLoomweaver is just succeeding in making himself miserable, is that irony, or good for him?

Fanatic’s intro for Ra XD

Wow, I had not expected the heroes making a deal with Gloomweaver for this one! I figured that cover was just them getting corrupted somehow!

So they are distinctly naming hero variants right now, right? Am I the only one hearing that? I was totally right about that being the Drum of Despair, by the way! XD

Reeeeally wish they would remind us who the individual princes are still, I sure cannot keep most of them straight.

Ahh, Asmodial’s one weakness: an asexual!

Man, I am really enjoying this frenemy tension between Argent Adept and Dark Visionary.

What a finish! I love how high-risk this Grey gambit is, that Ra and Fanatic deal the final blow since they were kind of out for the final fight, and oh man, the Skinwalker setup! This episode was way cooler than I expected!

Gee, the entire Cult of Gloom only has two thumbs between them, huh?

Demon Soothsayer! Do it do it! I will so vote for that!

Never thought of Apostate as a “girls just wanna have fun” kinda guy before.

When everyone’s dead, no one will be! thinking emoji :V

We would get an episode of NightMist and Argent Adept yelling at Soothsayer for doing it wrong. This may legit be the funnest idea ever.

Apostate is the dude who was like “hey, one of my kin got stuck in a human body and doesn’t know who she is, I’m going to create a whole ‘Satanic pretty boy tempter’ persona expressly just to eff with her for kicks and giggles”, so I mean…

Idle thought: Is General Geist winning a perfect excuse for the Sentinels version of Marvel Zombies?

This is a storyline in which Gloomweaver gives power to these four superheroes to fight Aeturnus with!

Every one of these better be a variant by the end of DE.

Minor aside that the opening of the story also makes me want a story which is 100% Argent Adept trying to have a “being a normal person” day but he just keeps running into various serious but purely mundane-level situations that he solves with magic in morbidly hilariously overpowered ways. (Not even like, “stopping a bank robber” level things of actual crimes, but more like the whole “blowing the horn to stop a bar fight” except this time it actually works properly.)

Lusithar - Pride, pretty boy fiery hair
Seviathall - Envy, freaky tongue with helmet over eyes
These two we’ve seen cards for in Disparation update.

Abbados - Wrath, mean red guy who likes using axe to separate people from their heads
Pictured on one-shot in Ruler of Æternus deck.

Rest of spellings came from Darkstrife & Painstake Foes, and most are phonetically similar to Binsfeld’s classification of demons, with exception of Abbados & Greezigrax. Now watch C&A do something where they don’t align with those sins at all…

Ismodial - Lust, she’s got a bone whip per this episode
Mannock - Greed
Belagorr - Sloth
Greezigrax - Gluttony, scrawny with spindly hands but also prone to stomach aches so maybe fits. I guess you can get the name from Beelzebub if you try hard enough and pronounce it with a non-human tongue.

Abbados is probably riffing on Abaddon which is sometimes conflated with Satan, I wager.

Yeah, he was also in the Wikipedia article but the name is a departure from the list that fits so well otherwise.

Gee, hard to believe a publishing company in the Metaverse would choose to avoid using the name Satan for a character. I’m sure they dealt with their own Panic when the Witchcraft & Wyverns RPG was released.

woot

Now I realize I was thinking of Seviathall the entire time. c_c I can hardly be blamed, these characters are so new.

Hmm, there’s an angle I hadn’t considered.

I admit had simply thought that if you name a being “Satan” in Western media, people are going to assume that being is in charge versus just one of a bunch of equally striving lackeys.

Though yeah, in our universe such concerns were more wrapped up in the Comics Code in general and it was RPGs that got hit with the full-blown dedicated activism.

(Also pff at “Witchcraft & Wyverns”. )

They had a formal name for Ra and Fanatic’s variants, so I think that’s a given.

Ooooh yeah. The “Satanic Panic” was all sorts of nonsense.

On the other hand, the break with the Christian imagery when it came to monsters was something that was a net positive for the settings of D&D and related RPGs, giving us the various interdimensional factions that we know today. Side note: was anyone else thinking of Planescape’s Blood War when Adam and Christopher were describing the conflict?

Yeah… like, nowadays looking back on it is almost funny, especially with things like Dark Dungeons where we’re all “boy those people were stupid they actually thought this”, but back then it was actually genuinely alarming to the hobby with politicians actually seriously considering going after the industry.

And it still crops up as a zombie belief now and then. I remember having to tell one of my mom’s friends that no, Magic: the Gathering is not actually Satanic. Had to dig out my Kaladesh stuff (the most bright and shiny Magic set I could think of that I owned), and that dissuaded her and got her actually thinking it was fun to look at.

(Aside this is a same mom friend where I showed her Sentinels RPG stuff and she was like “Oooh you think [Argent Adept] is cute? I think he’s kinda scary, his eyes are glowing!” which I still find hilarious.)

I can see it, now that you mention it.

Although I’ve been into Pathfinder as of late, and where that is concerned while Aeternus is based on Hell as a general concept it arguably more resembles the Abyss in the actual character dynamics (as Hell itself in PF is extremely orderly and the power shift dynamics are much more structured).

I think someone has asked before, but has “The Devil” appeared in Sentinel Comics? That is, red guy with goatee, horns, pointed tail, and pitchfork? I can imagine this being Apostate, Grimm, or Wager Master.

If the latter, then would he be blue instead of red, a la the “Cupid” cherubim we’ve seen? In that case you would almost certainly need Guise as the UNC Tarheels ram mascot to take him on.

https://sentinelswiki.com/index.php?title=Podcasts/Episode_195

• Okay, so we’ve got this “hell” place that gets used occasionally, but who’s in charge? Where’s “Satan”? We probably see some “demon ruler” guy who looks exactly how you’d expect, but every writer that touches this place adds their own detail to how it works that’s promptly forgotten when the next writer uses it, so any given appearance of a “ruler” doesn’t necessarily match previous issues. It’s handwaved as just being a different guy as that one was an imposter or the old ruler was defeated or something. This is generally a Fanatic story element where she gets to fight “the ruler of Hell”.
• That being said, after they codify Æternus as its own thing, they should also have the actual big boss. They don’t want it to be Lucifer/Satan/Beelzebub/etc. (although those could be names he’s used occasionally and/or were useful pretenders that he’s gotten to do things for him in the past). All of the various names, categorizations, rankings, etc. that people have used to define “demons” over the centuries are “true” in that the denizens of Æternus just run with whatever ideas people come up with.

Sounds kind of similar to the “Blood Countess Bathory vs Dracula” situation.

Yeah, the whole “sins” bits that each demon type is based on. Pathfinder’s going even further afield with their “Refresh” to get further away from the D&D IP. It’ll be interesting to see where they go.

Yeah. So this brings me around to how my reaction was basically, “Did this feel like the Blood War to me? Kinda, although in D&D that war is Order vs Chaos, while this is more like Chaos vs a Different Type of Chaos”.

Or like… I’d argue that Gloomweaver’s influence notwithstanding the Realm of Discord is probably really inherently Chaotic Neutral, while Aeternus is Chaotic Evil and the Grey is True Neutral.

Hmmmm, honestly, not really. The Blood War seems more like a literally eternal conflict to me whereas RoD vs. Æternus was limited in how long it went on. Still a lot of potential there storytelling wise, of course.

Also, unpopular opinion time.
I’ve said it before, Nazis suck and I don’t want more of them in Sentinels, especially these days.
I realize I am part of a minority here and kinda wish they hadn’t done such a good job with the General Geist stories (because they did) so that fewer people would ask for more.

I don’t know if I’d call it unpopular, so much as for me there’s a difference between something like Nazis being in a story as presented with having a valid viewpoint or sympathetic, and Nazis being in a story presented as the bad guy and as something you can punch precisely without feeling bad about it.

Yes! 100% agreed on the difference. I also get the “punch without feeling bad” sentiment.

It’s just a personal opinion because for me - again, personally - too much of it is too close to actual history (which is still showing its effects today, and recently, too). So this takes away some of my enjoyment of my favorite fake comic book series. Other people are probably better at dealing with this, less sensitive to the topic, or not as easily turned off by it. And most seem to enjoy it, which is good for them!

That’s why I wrote “unpopular”, because apparently the episode has been received pretty favorably and people were asking for more General Geist content.

Hope that makes sense.

Yeah, I admit I just can understand C&A’s motivation that the list of bad guys you can get away with having heroes punch without remorse is getting smaller in a world where everybody wants to make a villain sympathetic or do the whole “[x] was right” deal.

But more I want to try to be reassuring that I doubt people like Geist because they agree with him, it’s more precisely because of the way too many people are whitewashing Nazis today it’s probably cathartic for people to have a story where “nah it’s OK to punch Nazis” is the state of things.

So I think you’re actually in strong company that people are equally as turned off by Nazis as you are, it’s more they personally react by liking seeing heroes punch them.

Agreed and well put. Just to make clear, I definitely wasn’t trying to say that people liked the story because they agree with Geist – as you say, quite the opposite.

Actually, the discussion and thinking about the topic more has given me some insight into why I am not in the “catharsis” camp (although, again, I totally get it, and am certainly not blaming or judging people for feeling this way), but those are matters that are maybe too personal and not relevant enough to the topic at hand to discuss them here.

And they say internet discussions can’t teach you anything

If I helped you figure anything out for yourself, I’m genuinely glad to have done so.

And I want to make it clear I was not trying to invalidate your own opinion in any way or think you were being judgmental about others. Just the opposite honestly: To validate you that I actually think people mostly feel the exact same way you do and it just manifests in different outward reactions.

It’s Gloomweaver’s throne, not the Realm of Discord’s throne. Whereas the Throne of Aeturnus is always that of Aeturnus, regardless of exactly who sits in it. You can take the position, but it’s not yours.

A part of the lore they’re not talking about at all, but which seems obviously important, is that Le Rheaume d’Iscorde is connected enough to all human minds that some people just go there during a nightmare. If Aeturnus took it over, they could much more directly access people in their sleep; they wouldn’t just experience random disorienting imagery that disturbs them after they wake up but is ultimately inconsequential. They’d probably have direct access to the human soul, and that could quickly result in Aeturnus taking the Central Plane. A similar problem exists with the Graey. Uniquely, Discord is the only realm that can have that dream connection without it being a huge problem, because humans have adapted to it. Chaos and madness don’t destroy us the way torment and apathy can.

Biomancer himself hasn’t been to Aeternus, but “Biomancer” certainly has. He’s definitely sent several fleshchildren there, some being of himself. The question is, if Aeturnus torments a fleshchild, are they actually suffering, or do they just think they are?