Mad Bomber Blade is on the loose in this week’s Sentinels of the Multiverse weekly one-shot. Two-thirds of the Freedom Six happen to be on hand in Insula Primalis to thwart Blade’s scheme to trigger a super volcano eruption. Hit play and find out what happens!
As an aside, this might be the first or second time I’ve had both occasion and opportunity to use Bunker: Engine of War’s Locomotion power.
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After the Gotta Catch Em All one-shot ended so abruptly, I decided to go back for a playthrough where Haka got every available target in the match-up under Savage Mana. It took a couple playthroughs to get it right. First, Unforgiving Wasteland took a minion out of the game before Haka could. On the second playthrough, I forgot that Haka needed to deal non-melee damage to eat Voss’ two starships. Thanks to Captain Cosmic passing out energy weapons, the third play was the charm. Naturally, the coup de grace was delivered with Haka using Savage Mana. Could it end any other way?
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We have what you might call a “target rich environment” this week on Decked!: Grand Warlord menaces Earth with marauding minions. Captain Cosmic commands a cadre of constructs. Unity brandishes a battalion of bots. The Final Wasteland harbors a horde of horrible cryptids. That is, by most accounts, a grand total of 71 targets in the mix. Can we get them all safely tucked away under Haka’s Savage Mana? Find out!
I haven’t any new OBS or post-production cleverness to report this week. My idle tinkering time has gone to incorporating the YouTube Gaming chat box into a livestream. I’m not sure I have the time capacity or breadth of interesting games to cultivate a streaming audience, but it entertains me to go through the steps and figure out how to implement these things.
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Decked! welcomes back Matt to the show, whose voice astute viewers may recognize from Learn to Play Penny Press, where he and his co-designer Robert explained how to play their board game of newspaper publishing magnates in turn of the century New York City. This week, however, we are making news, instead of reporting it, in Sentinels of the Multiverse‘s weekly one-shot. Akash’buta has awoken from slumber and an elementally-themed team of heroes has stepped up to save the world.
This was the first time I got to bring a friend in to play Sentinels on Decked!, and I think it worked out pretty well. I settled on a routing diagram that let me record Matt, myself and the game’s audio on separate tracks, allowing for more sophisticated editing in post-production — namely automatically ducking the game audio when someone is speaking. It’s a little thing, but I think I’ve got the technique down now, thanks to practicing on this and Rifftrax commentaries.
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It’s a core set classic this week with Sentinels of the Multiverse‘s one-shot. Haka, Absolute Zero, Bunker, Redeemer Fanatic and the Wraith team up against Omnitron to save Wagner Mars Base from being overrun by drones.
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We’re serving up an extra helping of cheese with Decked! this week. The recent weekly one-shot of Sentinels of the Multiverse pits the heroes against Wager Master this week, a villain with a deck full of rule-bending effects and alternate victory and defeat conditions. When word got around there is the possibility of a one turn win for the heroes, a possibility that some people said they stumbled onto inadvertently, I decided to see if I could find it myself.
Mea culpa: while playing the game, I got pretty turned around trying to describe and then play appropriately to take advantage of Wager Master’s Losing to the Odds, namely the timing of when that victory condition is checked among all the other things happening on Wager Master’s turn. I also made a poor tactical decision during one of the hero turns that could potentially have ruined everything. See if you can spot it!
This episode was another opportunity to refine my recording techniques with OBS, namely mixing vocal audio with the background music and sound effects from the game. I’d still prefer to be able to keep audio tracks separate until the post-production stage, but I’m not quite there yet in figuring out how to make the best use of the resources I have available.
Also of concern to me that OBS doesn’t have an option to monitor recording levels, beyond a simple visual meter. I prefer to monitor audio live with a pair of headphones, which in this case means listening to the outboard mixer’s output, which OBS captures via USB. Best practice is to monitor the last link in the recording chain, but in this case, that last link is OBS and the software doesn’t currently have a way to allow the user to hear the audio being recorded or sent out to a stream.
Decked! does something new this week, as we play through Sentinels of the Multiverse: The Video Game‘s weekly one-shot, titled “Res/u/rre/x/ion: Reborn,” pitting Unity, the Wraith and Haka against advanced Ambuscade. Weekly one-shots are a sort of challenge with a predetermined match-up between team of heroes and a villain. Sometimes the opening hands and decks are stacked, other times everything is randomized, as in this case. Depending on how one does, the player(s) can win a copy of the issue of varying quality, graded good up to mint.
“Res/u/rre/x/ion: Reborn” is the third in a series of “Res/u/rre/x/ion” one-shots, seemingly playing out a series of encounters that may lead to the unlocking of the Omnitron-U variant. No one’s quite figured out the full condition for unlocking Omnitron-U at this point, but the variant was made available for immediate play by the Season 2 kickstarter reaching a stretch goal.
On the technical side, this episode of Decked! was spurred on a rainy afternoon making me want to do more with OBS, and figuring out how to take advantage of the software’s internal audio mixer. Due to weirdness glitches with OBS’s mixer, I wound up falling back on tried and true techniques, bringing the game audio to an outboard mixer, feeding a mic into the same mixer for vocals, and then sending the mixed output back to OBS for recording. I basically did the same thing back with the 100 subscriber special, but forewent the precautionary back-up audio track.
Ideally, future let’s play episodes of Sentinels would be recorded in a way to let me edit audio tracks independently afterwards, if necessary. That means figuring out what’s going on with OBS’ own mixer, or using an external recorder to put the vocals on one channel and game audio on the other of a stereo track.
This week, we wrap up Black Moon Games‘ Call of Cthulhu draft with Rod’s Agency and Syndicate deck Cops & Robbers and Tyler’s college of sorcerers from Miskatonic University, the Order of the Silver Twilight and Yog-Sothoth. Check out the side bar of this post for both their deck lists.
Subscribe to Decked! on YouTube to catch the whole series of games from Black Moon Games, and more live-on-tape card game fun.
Black Moon Games‘ Call of Cthulhu draft continues with a match-up between Rod’s Agency and Syndicate alliance dubbed Cops & Robbers and Ray’s Cthulhu / Shub-Niggurath / Silver Twilight deck — the drafting of which has been detailed exhaustively — christened Crimson Serpents. Check out the side bar of this post for both their deck lists.
Subscribe to Decked! on YouTube to catch the whole series of games from Black Moon Games, and more live-on-tape card game fun.
Held Action 