Episode 309 of the Letters Page: Writers’ Room: Disparation Vol. 2 #17

Back to the golden age for this hero

image2640×4093 6.64 MB

Okay, wow, that cover is going right on the fridge!

Imagine not getting emotionally attached to items. c_c; Why, that kid might just grow up to not apologize to his kitchen utensils before throwing them out!

Doctor Wonder? O:O Is that a name we’ve heard before???

Oh, I love the sound of his shtick.

This sounds like the exact same method I’ve been using to construct my fake comic universe.

I love how it’s very obvious that’s Nazi Dark Vis on the cover, but she’s also reminiscent of Highbrow.

I’m pretty sure the Dunkler was a cookie snack from the 90’s. :V

Ooh, multiverse-spanning Visionary fight! :D:D This is so cool!

That is an awesome ending! God, I love this so much, it’s everything I want to get from an episode.

Hmm, I recall them saying they weren’t going to be talking about Freedom Squadron right now, and yet Christopher just name-dropped them…

Ray Talbot is another character we need more stories for.

Knowing that Grandpa Legacy got to go back to his time with the knowledge of what his son and grandchild become is just hitting me right in the feels. ;_;

Oh yeah, I think there’s an author or something named Poul Anderson?

P-O-5-L! XD I’m dying!

Yeah, I’d definitely put Prophecies with Xtremiverse and Inversiverse. This is a good letter, I was low-key wondering about the Maerynians.

Along with everyone being the child of someone you know, I also hate when they’re just doing a similar thing to their parents. Not every kid is gonna go into the family business.

Prophecies being used to launch Alpha 2000 makes me love it even more.

How is ‘cosmic’ different from ‘alien’? O_o

Focal linchpin of magic? My guess is something something Atlantis.

You could say that. The man won seven Hugos and three Nebula awards during his ~50 years of writing scifi and fantasy, and could reasonably be called a major figure in 20th century literature within those genres. Many gamers will know him because of his novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, which Gygax cribbed from for part of D&D’s alignment system and several monsters. If you’ve ever cursed at regenerating trolls refusing to stay dead, thank Poul Anderson for that.

On the metaphysics of magic being dead: they mentioned that in the Prophecies universe, The Void is just gone, but I think it would have to be merely cut off rather than destroyed, because (if I remember right) there is only one Void, connected to all universes across the multiverse.

This also sounds like the sort of thing it would be bad to be cut off from! Might gradually destroy the universe!

for the conversations about Prophec1es and the death of magic and if we need magic there is a classic quote from Sir Terry Pratchett
Death’s speech in Hogfather (Discworld)

Also the whole concept of paladins as used in d&d (as opposed to the historical royal guards of Charlemagne) is based on the main character of 3 Hearts & 3 Lions.

Cosmic and alien power sources are distinct in that alien is related to a specific other species while cosmic comes from the forces and nature of the universe.

Alien is the power source if your powers are just the nature of your biology or offworld tech that’s so advanced it may as well be magic. Groot, Blue Beetle (Jaime Reyes), Venom, Ben 10, Skyscraper, Tempest

Cosmic is the power source for more like vague space energy powers. Captain Marvel, Silver Surfer, Gravity Kid, Jedi, Captain Cosmic

Green Lantern is arguable either way. It feels to me more like cosmic power with alien tech as an intermediary. The emotional energies are innate to the universe, the lantern batteries and rings just make it available and controllable for individuals.

Peter Quill (Star Lord) in the MCU is a mixed bag, mostly he’s a gadgeteer with alien tech, but the 2nd movie focuses on him having cosmic powers thanks to his dad, which he ultimately rejects.

Every time they bring up Crisis Man’s real name, Mason Gault, I think he sounds like the main character of an Ayn Rand novel…

Yeah, they’re much closer to the ones in 3H+3L, or Moorcock’s small-c champions of law than the historical ideal. Although I don’t think plain old D&D had paladins as a class, pretty sure they were unique to AD&D in the TSR era.

Might be wrong though, Basic/BECMI/B/X was never much my thing past the first few games. Kid Me regarded AD&D as the “cool grown up” version and jumped over to it ASAP.

Eh, I make no claim there, I think Pallies first appeared in AD&D 1e but I haven’t checked. It’s well documented that they’re almost entirely based on Holger, including the close association with powerful magic swords (the Holy Avenger or Cortana)

I admit I have always assumed that was the entire point of his name. It seems like the sort of reference Christopher would make.

They were definitely in the first-ever PHB. That’s where that famous “A Paladin In Hell” art came from. Full splash page and everything. By the standards of the time it was very impressive.

Should’ve been Jean or something instead of Mason. The gag works better when the names are close to one another, as demonstrated in Blazing Saddles.

“You Hedy Lamarr?”
“The name is Hedley. Hedley!”

Of course, Hedy also sued Brooks over it, so not everyone appreciated the joke.

Caught up with the episode. And I think with the “kids from the future” question, what got lost in translation is the fact that there specifically needs to be entertainingly awkward shipping character dynamics involved.

If you don’t have everyone getting to go “wait I had a kid with you” and/or “wait those two had kids together?!” then it’s just a sad wasted opportunity IMHO.

Except no one from the main timeline even sees this future timeline. Zero … and me typing “zero chance” reminded me that Absolute Zero is there, but let’s be real, he would have zero care about who had kids with who that far in the future.

Oh, I know. That’s why I said on the discussion for that episode that I regret you can’t have a proper story like that in Sentinels, because you need “true” time travel for it which Sentinels doesn’t have.

I was more responding to C&A complaining about the “listicle” take on it, as I agree the “babies ever after” version of the trope is pretty boring.

It’s only when you get to do it the embarrassing shippy way that it’s proper fun in my book.

I don’t believe so. It wasn’t in the mega-list of villains. Well, it is now!

Yeah, I was really hoping they’d accidentally drop something about Tommy Atkins or La Louve.

No, there are multiple Voids, but one Ur-Space. But you’re right, it doesn’t make any sense for the entire Void (and the Realm of Discord, and the Host Realm, and Æternus, and the Egyptian Underworld…) to have been destroyed.

Basic D&D did not, but that was the one where “elf” and “dwarf” were classes. But that came after AD&D (1st edition), but even further after the original 1974 Dungeons & Dragons box, in which the only classes were Fighting-Man, Magic-User, and Cleric. AD&D PHB was, I believe, the first appearance of the Paladin. (Edit: No, I’m wrong, it appeared in an OD&D Greyhawk supplement as a subclass of Fighting-Man.)

Yeah, you need to save that for a Disparation story where Universe One heroes actually visit.

Oh yeah, I even had that booklet way back when. Was that the one that added thieves as a class as well?

Yep! The whole book is on the Internet Archive. It’s fascinating how bad Gygax was back than at making understandable rules.

It doesn’t surprise me. As a geeky secretary, one of my long-standing affectionate gripes is “geeks are bad at documentation”. >_>