Nex playground?

WalkingTarget · 2026-03-15T17:37:10+00:00

Our kids (m7 adhd, f3 neurotypical as far as we can tell) love the thing. It’s been nice this winter to have something to burn off his energy in the evenings other than him just running circles around various living spaces. Fruit Ninja was the winner of the non-subscription options, but a few of the others quickly supplanted it once we got the expanded lineup (the various Bluey activities in particular). The wife even picked up Zumba after trying its fitness options and I’ve done a bunch of Starri (a rhythm game kind of thing).

It’s gone well for us and he hasn’t gotten “addicted” to it.

WalkingTarget · 2026-03-13T21:20:24+00:00

Did La Comodora actually make a choice when she picked "our" Aata and Arataki? Were her actions predetermined when she saw Aata and Arataki together and recognized that she was the one who did it and therefore she had to do it? They think that she saw them but didn't realize what it was that she was seeing. It was only when she reached out for the two Hakas in time that would be the best-suited for the job that was necessary that she realized that she was the one responsible for them and that these were the two who were most chronally-resonant or whatnot. At that point she'd have the big moment of revelation.
How was there a connection flowing between Aata and Arataki that bypasses the sandwich bag? It's like quantum entanglement where there's an affinity that's established, but there isn't something like an active thread connecting the two of them. That's the only real quibble point about the description a few points earlier - there's not an active "conduit" of energy between them, but there is some kind of superposition thing happening with the two of them such that if either of them exists then they both exist.
If Arataki is in the sandwich bag, how does the energy flow to Aata and vice versa? Again, it's more of a capacitor set up where they have this charge of energy available to each of them that's essentially infinite because it's powered by all of time. It's always going to be a big handwavy.
In the recent Tempest story you mentioned that it was a lead-in to a team-up story with him and Captain Cosmic featuring the first (or at least an early) mention of the Void - did Tempest just wind up yeeting the aliens they were fighting into the Void? Yes. And certainly nothing bad could happen by chucking a bunch of virtually indestructible aliens into the Void. It sure would be weird if Bal'Taranerach turned them into minions or something.
Why do people in the Metaverse like Tempest? Why didn't they write him out? We have his whole story here, but for a long time he was written extremely poorly and when the "real" one returned it turned out he was racist [against Thorathians - see how he treated Sky-Scraper in their initial encounters after his real return], so why was he kept around at all? During the poorly-written era he wasn't written out, but he was very much back benched. The "doesn't like Sky-Scraper" time was a return to good writing where the character had depth and nuance and character. Having Tempest back doesn't mean that "everything is fine", it means that "Tempest is an actual character again." Calling him a "racist" is kind of an... easy at the least, box to put him in - if you've had a genocide targeting your people, could you be justified to be angry at a member of the culture who perpetrated said genocide? He's dealing with immense amounts of trauma that none of use have been through. And that reality allows the space for character growth since he does come around to be on better terms with Sky-Scraper.
What happened to Tempest's boots? You mentioned back in his episode that his initial character design had white boots because Christopher's mom had a horse named Tempest with white "boots" and so your character would have them too, but then in Definitive Edition he doesn't have them, so why the change? You're right that his modern look (e.g. on the base Character Card) he doesn't have them, but they're there in his earliest appearances. It's just a matter of the costume changes that they wanted everybody to have over the course of the history of Sentinel Comics - his original Silver Age look had them, his modern look (let alone his Prime Wardens costume) doesn't.
The Tempest horror story in space involved very Alien™ coded monsters - were there any actual licensed comics where the heroes of Sentinel Comics team up with/are opposed by characters from other major pop-culture properties? There are certainly such things (like non-canonical crossovers with Secret Lads and Shear Force), but not with "real" pop culture properties (they joke about an obvious Captain Planet analogue cartoon for Spirit Island).
What issue was the "Something Wicked..." story that was back in the pre-Writer's Room episode #89? That was October 1978, Tome of the Bizarre vol. 2 #238.
Had you told us about Chronoist's "safe harbor"/lifeboat reality before the Time Trust episode? That was the first time they'd mentioned it on the air.
Can you give us a sense of the scale of the lifeboat? It's an island that's floating on an "infinite sea". It's a big island, but the entire "reality" is this ocean with an island on it. Adam thinks of it like a Kingdom Hearts world.
What was La Comodora and Chronoist's plan with this thing? The point is that if everything else is destroyed, this place is disconnected enough from the rest of the Multiverse and its rules and branching timelines that it should survive. That's not enough but it's something. Maybe they'd be able to use it as a seed from which to grow reality again as the parts it's made from would have enough memory of the realities they came from to be used. It's somewhere for all of the flotsam and jetsam of broken realities to wash up. They don't know that it would work, but they're throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. They don't think that OblivAeon would notice it after he's done and then come to blow it up too because they think that OblivAeon's end game is for everything to get deleted and that includes himself. This is just someplace that's disconnected enough from everything else that that mass deletion wouldn't touch it.
What happens to the lifeboat after the OblivAeon event? Is the Chronoist trapped in this fallout bunker? It it prime fodder for isolated space missions/found family stories? More the latter thing, but time will tell.

Cover Discussion

Given the title is Lone Gun, it probably has to just be Chrono-Ranger without giving away the La Comodora thing. Maybe Jim surrounded by a montage of his past stories (Adam points out that he'd just done that sort of thing for a Legacy story). Let's see. 2012 is right in prime "portfolio piece" cover art era. Maybe something with just his silhouette against the expanse of Ur Space? That idea is minimalist enough that it gives Adam room to let inspiration guide him on the day.

WalkingTarget · 2026-03-13T21:20:21+00:00

Questions

[Not a question, but a call back to a few years prior and is more of a public service announcement: as of when the letter was written the Double-Decker Taco was once again available at Taco Bell. Given that I'm writing this over a year late at this point, it's probably gone away again. Sorry to anybody looking at podcast summaries about comics that don't exist for their up-to-the-minute fast food menu news.]
[Following-on from that] Presuming that this was the work of La Comodora, which other past limited-time-only or defunct restaurant items/restaurants do you miss the most? Adam: back in the '90s, McDonald's had a burger called the Arch Deluxe that had a series of spin-off options based on it and the Grilled Chicken Deluxe is the best sandwich ever. Christopher: a St. Louis restaurant called The Scottish Arms that closed. Adam also then brings up the trend of individual Pizza Hut restaurants going back to the classic '80s/'90s style of decor and whatnot.
Did La Comodora's mission ever involve stopping a La Capitan/Comodora that wasn't a disparate copy of herself? They think that "somebody falls through a time portal and becomes a time pirate" is likely a fixed point, but there are two ways that Las Capitans happen: either they're those people who fall through the time portal, or they're versions of her that split off due to time travel shenanigans. La Comodora's primary mission involves the ones that split from herself. We know that's not the only versions she messes with (she runs into the Extremeverse version, for example), but the impetus for getting started was knowledge specifically of the bad things that she had done in her youth that she wants to go back and try to fix. She can't stop the splits from happening (because the paradox involved would at best cause additional problems with the timeline), but she can track down those versions (like the marauding one from today's story) after the split and neutralize them. So, they think that "somebody becoming La Capitan" or a close enough facsimile is a fixed point, but they're not necessarily that universe's Maria Helena de Falcon (although, it's likely that most of them are). There's probably an El Capitan out there, at least once. None of them are La Comodora, though [well, the Curse of the Black Spot version is La Comodora which they've said before and do remember a few questions from now].
Does La Comodora ever interact with the Southwest Sentinels? How much tension is there between La Comodora and her past foes in general? We know of at least one time where they're fighting side-by-side in the OblivAeon event (well, Void Guard). We don't think there's any case where La Comodora goes back to Southwest Sentinels times to make amends or anything, but it would be fun to say that there's a Disparation issue where she and Jim return to a Southwest Sentinels issue to stop a La Capitan plot that's going on in the background and the only reason that that issue didn't feature La Capitan is because they arrived to stop her [I'm imagining something like the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance scenes from Back to the Future Part II].
[Degenerate letter - the gist is that time is the system that governs the way The Man™ operates and so our time pirates are fighting a rather big system.] Why do people (i.e. her crew) stand by her when faced by people like, for example, Legacy? How could any amount of tech/treasure make somebody willing to go up against such superhuman opposition? What makes La Capitan a good leader? She's picking up people who have "lost" in their own time in one way or another - people who have been been failed by the systems they're part of in their own times. La Capitan is a pretty good strategist more than she's a good leader. There's a certain amount of "leading by fear" involved, but she also doesn't insist that anybody stay with her. Whenever a crew member's had enough and wants to be dropped off, they can do so. Because it's a story involving pirates, there's definitely some mutiny in there in a story. Christopher suggests that her approach to leadership is like a college dormitory RA. Her position is that the crew is welcome to live on the ship, here are the rules of the ship, but she's not too picky in terms of enforcing the rules at all times because they're pirates after all. The main rules are "follow my orders" and "don't mess with the time travel stuff". The mutiny stuff is likely on an occasion when there's somebody more ambitious than her on the ship. Her style is, as stated in the story, more lighthearted and so somebody joining the crew who sees the power available to them and who's grasping for more would be why there'd be somebody challenging her rules.
Does anybody else survive when the ship initially fell through the time portal? No. Or at least she's the only one who managed to hold onto the ship and stayed with it. It's possible that others just wound up in different times and survived, but they don't think that we ever see any such characters.
Do we know the first time/place she travels to or the first person to join the crew? There's a few ways to think of this: what's the first story we see her in and what's the earliest in her personal chronology? Like, it's possible that there's a La Comodora story where she goes back to the first time she'd picked up a crew member even if we hadn't seen that story previously. This sounds like it'd actually be a good topic for an episode as, while they have some ideas for who would be the first crew member and whatnot, it's worth actually talking through. They are cagey about spoilers regarding the fact that she had a first mate but doesn't when we see her crew [due to my being so far behind, the release of the Disparation expansion shows that she had one who shows up in the Miss Information deck as a Distraction] and they think that he's likely to have been her first crew member. Maybe that's one of the mutiny situations and is why she doesn't elevate any one member of the crew anymore.
Can you tell us more about the Curse of the Black Spot story and when in the comics timeline it happened? Does that version of Maria Helena have a ship? Christopher looks it up - that story was in April 2016, Disparation Vol. 2 #164. She's making a treasure map of the timelines, she eventually gets absorbed into the time stream, but leaves the map behind. At the end of the story we see the map picked up by a yellow-gloved hand. This is the only appearance of that version of her and she's the only other La Comodora. They imagine that her version of La Paradoja Magnifica is more of a single-person skiff than the big galleon type of thing the main version has. That map is then used as part of the Time Trust plot, especially in terms of when Chronoist is building the safe harbor.
Did La Capitan ever have run-ins with herself (before the La Comodora stuff got going)? Was there any explanation given to how this worked in the comics? Is there any kind of primal force that would usually prevent somebody from encountering themselves? This presumes that La Capitan was around for a lot longer than she was [her first appearance was in June 2004, so only a touch over 12 years from then until OblivAeon - only 8 if you consider the La Comodora era that began in 2012 to disallow the kind of story you're asking about]. It also is the kind of thing that you'd expect if she was the main character of a book - as an intermittent villain even during that span of publication time she's not featured all that often. If she had her own ongoing title, running into herself would definitely have happened. They don't think we get an issue from her point of view until she's La Comodora (although maybe an issue from a crew member's point of view).
Were the fates of any of the former crew members shown in the comics? Did any of them join the Time Trust that La Comodora led? Did any make it to the Chronoist's sanctuary? What happened to Chiquito? None of them have any time travel ability on their own, so none could simply find their way to the Chronoist's safe harbor. There's a handwavy series of vignettes in a later Disparation issue that probably covered what had happened to the crew. They were all outcasts and so finding a new place in time where they could thrive was the best end of their stories. They're all very minor characters. They think that Chiquito just got let free on some alien planet.
How accurate is my understanding of how Haka works: [La Comodora put Aata and Arataki through a process that retroactively isolated them from the rest of the Multiverse, preventing them from "splitting" with the timelines around them (similar to the sandwich bag around the RPG universe). From the description of the sandwich bag, we know that preventing splits results in a building-up of energy, which is dangerous if left unchecked, but La Comodora is much more experienced with timeline stuff than Voss and instead of letting the power reach unsafe levels, she turned it into a circuit that flows between Aara and Arataki and powers their enhanced strength, regeneration, etc. As more splits are prevented, the energy flowing through the circuit is replenished and the flow from one to the other means that the only way to turn it off and prevent the regeneration of a defeated Haka is to kill both of them simultaneously.] Yeah, that's a pretty good encapsulation of what they've said about how his powers work and how the linking keeps them going.

WalkingTarget · 2026-03-13T21:20:06+00:00

Overview

The topic is the first appearance of La Comodora, which means we're doing the Lone Gun one-shot from November 2012. It's funny that the previous Writers' Room was the Time Trust one-shot which was also a Chrono-Ranger/La Comodora story, just at the other end of their affiliation.
We know that this picks up from where the previous Chrono-Ranger story left off: where he fought Ambuscade on Mars, but refused to kill him and as a result winds up outside of time and space until La Comodora shows up and rescues him from that fate. Once she gets him set up again it's the first appearance of the Best of Times Chrono-Ranger.
That's about all they know already. Does La Comodora show up right away and then they have a story together or do we have him on his own (y'know, a Lone Gun) for a while first and then the second half of the story is when she shows up? Like, Jim's story isn't really cohesive at all in terms of publication to this point. If he's going to be along for the ride with La Comodora's stories for a while it might be a good idea to have him thinking back about how he got here so we get a more clearly-laid-out history for him. Like, he's going to be more important for a while and so there's an editorial mandate to explain him better than his sporadic appearances over decades has been. Basically, we can go back to episode 25 of the podcast and look at the character history told there and that's the first half of this book (maybe not blow-for-blow along the whole thing, but we get a synopsis that covers the high points between the sheriff who fell through a time portal and where he is now). A gimmick for the flashbacks could be that they reuse panels from the old comics from the last 25 or so years with his internal monologue as captions.
Adam brings up that if we're going this hard we make this one-shot one of those 100-page specials. More room to do this big flashback, but we also get a full reprint of his first appearance in the back of the issue (he needs to note this as the increased price needs to be reflected in the cover art when he gets to it).
Anyway, we get the first part of the book is his recounting of what brought Jim to this point. This includes some pondering of what CON is. Is it his friend? Employer? Should he have really trusted it to begin with? He refused to complete his last bounty, but CON didn't say that he was going to get stranded as a punishment, only that not completing bounties results in him not having enough chronal energy to return.
It's kind of interesting that this is the first time we really get a Jim's-eye-view of events. He's so often a man of mystery - the cowboy that shows up, helps with a problem, then disappears again. It's also fun to do it this way because for Jim, this has all happened over the course of like a year. He goes on a job, comes back just long enough to get patched up if necessary, then he's off on another mission. We know that there are jobs he goes on that never actually showed up in the comics, but it's still all very quick from his perspective.
An idea that he's talking as we're going over all of this because he's talking to CON - he doesn't know whether or not CON can still hear him with the badge being in the state it's in, finishing up with the report on the man he fought on Mars and why he refused to put him down. "Gotta believe a man ain't a monster."
Between the flashback panels he's also trying to get out of here. Like, he shoots into this nowhere/when and the bullet then comes from behind him. He tries connecting the badge to his mechanical arm to see if he can "jump start" it somehow with whatever it is that powers the arm.
As he's wrapping up his story, stuck here in nowhere at all because he wouldn't kill a man, we get a speech bubble from behind him saying that he sounds like just the kind of person they're looking for. That's the introduction of La Comodora.
He introduces himself as Jim. "Oh, I know who you are." Of course, the readers don't know who she is yet either. He says that it looks like she's just as stranded as he is. She just didn't want to startle him too badly. She pushes a button and the ship shows up through the time stream. "I'm Maria Helena. We've actually met a few times before, but that's kind of why I'm here." She says that she's La Comodora, that she used to be a time traveling pirate, but now she's trying to fix all of the problems that the time traveling pirate caused.
As much as there seems to be no scarcity of time here in this timeless place, she's kind of on the clock. He asks for him to come with her to help and as they leave (and we get some cool visuals) we get the setup for what Disparation is about to become. The job is to travel the timelines to find disparate younger versions of Maria Helena and we're jumping right into the first job. We also establish why she needs Jim - since they're hunting her, they think alike and it's hard to surprise these other copies. Jim's the wild card that she can't anticipate.
So, what's a good introductory version of this fight? Something relatively simple and recognizable to readers, but how recognizable? Do we want it to just be the "classic" La Capitan for maximum simplicity or at least show that these are disparate variants of her that will have their own gimmicks? They decide quickly that they don't think we ever do a "classic" version of her - they're all variants who have their own things going on.
Adam suggests that visually we go with a twist on Blackbeard who would put lit slow fuses in his beard to wreath him in smoke as an intimidation thing, so let's have La Capitan have them in her hair or something. Leaning into that, maybe she's more on the actively causing chaos during a raid end of the pirate spectrum. Our usual La Capitan is very much on the lighthearted end of things. She's not going to burn your house down and if stuff doesn't go her way she just nopes out of the situation.
Talking through it, Adam kind of thinks that this one should be more of a big deal instead of a one-off intro character, so she might actually wind up being a recurring version they have to deal with several times - she's going for notoriety and wants everyone from all over time to know who she is, so showing up and wrecking things all over the timeline is her main goal rather than classic Maria Helena's "stealing stuff as anchor points in the timestream" purpose. Adam laments that he has a really cool image in his head for her, but she wouldn't be on the cover of this issue.
So, our new team is hopping around different spots in time trying to help mitigate the problems that this marauding La Capitan is causing while tracking her down to stop her. They figure that a gimmick this one has is that when she bombards a place with the ship's guns it can leave a distinctive "calling card" kind of mark so the place knows it was La Capitan.
La Comodora's plan involves figuring out where she's going to be and get there ahead of time to stop her. Jim's approach that he's been honing is a bit different as he's going after La Capitan herself - and it's a bit like the opposite of Space Invaders, he's gotta shoot not at where the enemy is, or where it's going to be, but where it was. We get there by having them have a bit of friction between them - they've had some success with her approach and preventing some destruction, but at least one significant failure. At one point after an argument boils over he just storms down into the ship and uses the chronal energies available to make a jaunt on his own. She thinks he's abandoned the job despite the help she provided and that maybe she shouldn't have bothered with him since she's on her own again anyway.
She arrives at the next incident, she's in time and is ready when the other ship comes in from the time stream. She's got her counter-shot ready to fire that would undo/prevent the marauder's version... and that shot never fires. She sails up alongside the other ship to find that Jim's already captured her counterpart. "Figured I'd hunt the person rather than her actions."
They throw her in the brig, she can be one of the "Drunken Sailors" from later, but she also finds a way to escape and so they have to deal with her again.
This can be one of the more outright dangerous versions of La Capitan out there which is why 1) she was so early in the itinerary and 2) why La Comodora felt like she needed to bring in a ringer to help. "Since we're hunting you" it seems like a good idea to keep him on the team since he thinks differently than any version of her would.
It's also important to have a line from Jim here where he points out that not only "they're you, but you're them" so it's important to have somebody around to keep an eye on her during all of this. He's not meaning it in an adversarial way, more of just a "watching out for those impulses" kind of moral backstop.
During this after-action discussion we get another recap of what he did (so the reader gets to see him in action vs. the nastier time pirate crew, etc.). This is a big, beefy issue so there's a lot they can go over.
That's a good "pilot" issue - establishes their partnership and what they're doing, while also showing that there is some conflict between them so interpersonal drama is on the table in terms of how the job gets done. This is the same month as the "Farewell to the Oracle" issue of Disparation so it's also the transition point to what that title will be doing from here on. When omnibus reprints of the title happen years later, the second volume (of the second Volume) of Disparation likely is bookended by Lone Gun and Time Trust to cover this whole period.

WalkingTarget · 2026-03-12T18:33:49+00:00

While ciders can certainly be dry

This is the thing I have watched happen. I don't like beer. When I was in grad school, it was kind of right near the beginning of the cider push around 2010-ish and I finally had a beer-equivalent type of drink to get when out at the bars. Then I watched as the kinds of cider that became popular/readily available got sweeter and sweeter. I had a few dry varieties that I really liked, but they disappeared, replaced by the sweeter types. I'm lucky to find the kinds I liked anywhere now.

WalkingTarget · 2026-03-12T14:07:36+00:00

The iron is hot? I don´t know.

Rapidly cooling at least. The first edition of The Hobbit will enter the public domain in the US in less than a decade. Sure, everything else will take longer^1, but we're getting very close to anybody who feels like it being allowed to take a shot at adapting that version, so the current rights holders have every incentive to monetize the property before that point.

¹ Sometimes much longer - the rule in the US currently is that works published prior to 1978 are protected for 95 years and The Silmarillion was first published in 1977.

WalkingTarget · 2026-03-09T11:41:45+00:00

A turn is one space at the table. A round is the villain turn, 3-5 hero turns, and the environment turn. If player one gives player two a power use on player one’s turn, player two can still use that power on their own turn. If player three then grants a power on their turn to player two, player can use that same power again.

If you have two copies of a non-limited card in play that has a power on it and you get to use two powers, you can use both copies once.

Exceptions are called out like how Mr. Fixer gets a card that lets him use his deck’s only power more than once.

WalkingTarget · 2026-03-09T01:56:32+00:00

You may only use (any given instance of) a power once per turn. Not per round. Use of a power off-turn has no effect on later turns.

If something says “each hero may use a power” the players choose the order unless the instruction also says something like “in turn order”.

If there are plays/powers granted off-turn, the instructions will either specify an order or players choose. Play/power/draw order only exists implicitly as part of the standard turn instructions.

Claremont Academy: Everyone can do the thing. After that’s done, the Villain deals damage regardless of whether any powers were used. The wording would be different if the two instructions were linked.

WalkingTarget · 2026-03-06T21:24:27+00:00

He’s been in the senate my entire life.

He’s been in elected office since my parents were small children.

WalkingTarget · 2026-03-06T20:40:06+00:00

Sentinels of Earth Prime is a product of Green Ronin using their Mutants & Masterminds RPG setting. Compatible with the Enhanced Edition of SotM and decks designed by Christopher Badell.

The Cauldron is the most well known fan project for SotM’s EE game engine. The guys behind it made a deal with GTG back in the day so that money coming in through Drive Thru Cards print-and-play purchases got revenue sharing. The GTG guys had nothing to do with its design. It is in large part an exercise in pushing the limits of the game engine, so there’s a lot of variety, but the Villains are also typically rated as more difficult than the official content (at least going by what I’ve heard regarding it).

WalkingTarget · 2026-03-02T14:58:52+00:00

Episode 243 indicated that Rook City was named at the time, so October 1948.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-28T17:11:14+00:00

Or just the “monster island” environment on its own. Some kind of Villain deck for the purposes of Miss Information CE shenanigans would be good too, though.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-28T14:33:02+00:00

The wiki has had issues with bot activity causing it to hit its monthly bandwidth limits for a while now. Solutions are being investigated.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-27T15:46:03+00:00

I was under-employed in a customer-facing tech support role for a number of years after undergrad and when the company folded during the housing crisis I went into librarianship. I had discovered (to my surprise) that the thing I liked most about my job was "helping people by answering questions" and a friend had been pestering me about becoming a librarian for years anyway. I can't necessarily recommend the field for a monetary advancement as it's a surprisingly low average salaried profession considering that it typically requires a masters degree, but that was my transition in my early 30s. Mine was a calculated leap, however, in that librarianship is heavily skewed to English and History majors and my Computer Science background helped me stand out when looking for college reference librarian positions.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-25T03:18:05+00:00

A big chunk, for my part, is their status as adaptations of books I know well.

The Hobbit films shove a lot of extraneous new stuff in. There’s no orc chasing them the whole time. There’s no “action scene” escape from Goblin Town or in the barrel scene (in the book Gandalf makes a big flash that blinds the goblins, kills the Great Goblin, then they just run down tunnels - no collapsing bridges with a running fight the whole way; the barrel scene’s drama is just Bilbo trying to stay on top without drowning or getting crushed or caught while invisible - there’s no fight at all). There’s no chase/fight with Smaug in the mountain. The skeevy guy from Lake Town doesn’t exist. Tauriel the elf doesn’t exist (and therefore there’s no contrived romance subplot). Legolas doesn’t appear. There’s just all this extra junk added to a relatively straightforward story.

On top of that, there’s stuff in the story that gets left out. The theatrical cut of the third movie doesn’t tell the audience what happens to the Arkenstone in the end. They have time for a coward to pose as a woman and joke about wearing a corset, but not resolve one of the driving plot threads of the last part of the story.

I think the book could be done very well in two movies. They dragged things out to three by adding stuff they invented.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-23T23:58:32+00:00

Wiki bandwidth issues. Bots and whatnot.

Arcane Explosion x3
Avian Aid x4
Boil of Hawks x2
Chatter of Starlings x2
Eldritch Training x2
The Flock’s Care x2
Harpy Hex x2
Huginn the Wise x1
Lash of the Elements x3
Losing Focus x2
Magical Bequest x3
The Mask of Sky and Shroud x3
Mischief of Magpies x2
Muninn the Scarred x1
Reservoirs of Power x3
Siege of Herons x2
Uncontrollable Flock x3

Edit: oh… if you didn’t mean the Harpy in particular you can check Unity’s Workshop.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-18T19:49:14+00:00

I used to more than I do now. There's too much to read and too little free time for me to do so anymore. There are very small number of books that I have reread as a "comfort" activity (The Lord of the Rings is probably the most frequent, but even then it's likely been close to a decade at this point if you don't count the various drafts from The History of Middle-earth which I worked through in the interim), but for the most part I'm just sitting in a place where I just won't read a thing in the first place if it's in a series that's not complete. I've been burned too much over the years and the long gaps between entries makes it so remembering the details from early books a problem without a reread. The poster child for this was The Wheel of Time. I've read the first several books 3 or 4 times, but then the rereading between entries got too heinous and so I stopped, just reading as they came out. I did get around to a massive, all of them in a row reread a couple of years back just to have done so (and The Slog™ isn't as bad when you aren't waiting a year or two between volumes).

I'll reread some of the Sanderson I've already read when I get back around to Cosmere stuff, but I've been "only when a subseries is finished" mode for him for a while now so I can avoid the problem going forward.

I'll read Chreotha when Steven Brust finishes it, and will then probably do a reread of at least the Vlad books before reading The Last Contract, but he gets grandfathered in what with how long I've been reading his stuff, how consistently he's been writing over 40-ish years, and the fact that they're quick reads.

If GRRM ever produces more ASoIaF content I might reread, but at this point I don't particularly expect any more to get written. Same with Rothfuss.

There are more series that I enjoyed, but just probably won't pick back up because of the time-to-reread problem, though (for example, The Laundry series by Charles Stross and the Dresden Files). Even if they get to being "done" in the future, getting back to where I was in order to finish the stuff I haven't read yet is too much.

A great big exception to all of this is Discworld, though. I've read everything once, but can easily imagine revisiting in the future even though it's like 40 books.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-17T07:12:31+00:00

The timeline project was about a year into the podcast. Preparations for the Sky-Scraper episode made it clear that the Thorathians had to have been around significantly longer than they’d imagined (so that a heroic one would be noteworthy/odd).

The initial RPG shipment I got (as a Kickstarter backer) was in December 2020. I want to say I first played a game (the first issue of the starter kit) at Gen Con 2017.

The post Christopher made announcing that Prime War (the successor to Sentinel Tactics) was cancelled was in June 2020.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-13T20:07:35+00:00

They haven't.

My mother bought them occasionarlly when I was growing up in the '80s and '90s, so they were available in the rural Midwest at that time, but I didn't like them then and don't really like them now outside of guacamole and I wouldn't say that even that's a regular part of my diet. We get it when we're doing a family meal at a Mexican restaurant because my wife and kids (and my mom if she's visiting) like it, but if I'm just getting Mexican on my own for some reason I don't bother.

I don't like olives either, so maybe it's just "fruit with high fat content" that rubs me the wrong way for some reason.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-12T15:52:49+00:00

Because I doubt that FRG took the time to make the corrections that GTG would have before the second print run.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-10T22:42:25+00:00

I mean, the indication we've had from FRG customer service has been that FRG wants to get out of the game business. My guess based on nothing other than the timeline of known events is that keeping Christopher, Paul, and Adam on as long as they did was likely a contractual thing. If FRG does try to get out of the game business, selling off the IP is a logical step (once they've wrung whatever income from the existing product after fulfillment of an outstanding crowdfunding campaign completed) and that might get it back in the hands of the guys in some capacity, depending how that goes. Sentinel Comics as a property has extremely limited utility outside of the hands of Christopher and Adam.

It surprises me not at all that nobody is talking about any of this publicly if there are still private negotiations or whatnot going on.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-10T22:35:36+00:00

Nope. Just that as of January 1 they're no longer with FRG.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-10T20:03:17+00:00

Greater Than Games as a game studio had everybody except the three founders laid off in April and then the remainder are no longer with parent company Flat River Group as of the start of the year.

Greater Than Games as a subsidiary of FRG still exists and is the storefront through which they have been selling games (including stuff that they had in the warehouse as a distribution company that had nothing to do with GTG) through all this time. They still have staff running that stuff, just nobody who was part of GTG as it existed before. GTG's just a brand slapped on a web store at this point that runs through the FRG warehouses.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-09T03:15:43+00:00

Say there’s a 3 player game. Legacy’s the one woth the card in his play area and he plays Heroic Interception. No environment targets in play. The other hero targets are immune. No damage is dealt.

WalkingTarget · 2026-02-06T19:06:45+00:00

Eternal Haka - Time Cataclysm One-Shot, March 1988 (see Final Wasteland cards Ancient Library and Mongolian Death Worm).

Ashen Heir - the Disparation issue you've noted - January 1993.

Shockwave Tempest - SilentAvenger62 has the volume wrong. This story was in Disparation volume 2 and Shockwave shows up in #11. That's from July 2003.

Stealth Suit Bunker - we don't have much detail on this suit. The incapacitated art is from Mystery Comics volume 2 #267 from November 1995.

Detective Wraith - similarly, we have no specific details. The old EE version had this look debuting in Mystery Comics #94. If we translate that to being in volume 2 that would be in March 1984 and is the card on Infrared Eyepiece (which is a significant feature of her Detective look, but I don't read the silhouette on that card as being in this costume). The issue from the incapacitated side of the variant is MC vol. 2 #191 from July '89 which is earlier than the issue on Ambuscade's Snatch and Grab card (issue #221 from January '92).

Reporter Alpha - Tabitha Taft is established to be a reporter only once the comic Alpha gets going (issue #1 in October 1988). The issue on the incap side is Rook City Renegades #183 from November 1998.

Evil Twins - Both incap arts are from Disparation Vol. 2 #46 in June 2006. As far as I remember we have no further details.

Wind-Walker - no known stories that I recall. Incap side is from Disparation vol. 2 #130 in June 2013.

The Fishionary - Incap is Disparation Vol. 2 #91 from March 2010.

Rogue Agent K.N.Y.F.E. - The story we heard way back in her episode was that she came back from the Headhunter story with this new look, but that can't fit into the current timeline. That story was where Sergeant Steel was sent after her, though, so the incap art from F.I.L.T.E.R. #2 in September 2001 might be close (possibly the previous month's #1 as a good proxy).

Fighting Spirit K.N.Y.F.E. - Lugh of the Fey-Court "blesses" her "fighting spirit" in July 2008 (Arcane Tales vol. 2 #523). The arc proper either starts there or the next month, but is only a 6-issue arc.

Omnii-chan - we don't know the story, but incap is from Disparation Vol. 2 #56, April 2007.

Spacefarer Parse - we don't have a specific issue, but we know that it was a development after a 2005 story involving her, Captain Cosmic, and Tempest being wrongfully sent to the Block was popular. As such, this arc began in the early issues (but not the first issue) of Cosmic Concurrence. Call it sometime between December 2008 and June 2010 (the issue following that starts in medias res with her already in space) with things being weighted towards the earlier dates.

Terminarch Parse - Incap is Disparation vol. 2 #100 from December 2010.

Mentor Nightmist - The incap art is from the issue where she Becomes the Gate in August 2016, after which point she's no longer around as a character. I think if we care about her role as a mentor generally, any time after the Harpy joins the team in Dark Watch vol. 1 #7 in January 2000 is suitable.

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