Help with Where the Undead Lie (Spoilers)

So, I've read thru all the various adventures and this one confuses me pretty signifgantly. I think only the final issue has more confusion for me.

So, the heroes go to the hotel in Rook City (which I'm not sure how they heard about, but I can add connective tissue) and Scene 1 is them entering the Tomb and making their way thru it.

Now, we've got 9 chambers, and moving between chambers takes an overcome action to successfully get to the next. But what exactly are they overcoming?

For example, the entry has some heiroglyphs to read and ends with the line "A set of stone stairs leads up into a cramped corridor"

The next paragraph talks about the Front Antechamber which is a big empty room covered in heiroglyphs about Anubis, and ends with "An open stone doorway leads to a dark corridor"

So... getting to the next chamber takes an overcome, but each chamber is relatively empty of challenges or threats and has an obvious exit... so, are the halls shifting and twisting and that is what we are overcoming? And the "Long Featurelss Hallway" leads ot the "Secret Passage" even though the hall talks about a doorway on the far end. Is the secret passage actually after than room or is it meant to skip rooms?

And finally, once a hero overcomes and finds the next room, do all other heroes just automatically make the journey? If Legacy is punching skeletons in the Antechamber and Tachyon finds the Burial chamber after two turns of searching, does Legacy just automatically move to the burial chamber when he leaves the Antechamber?

This entire scene is really cool, but I don't understand yet how it is supposed to work and I'd like some advice.

Also, I won't be running any of the Starter Kit til January at the earliest, so if anyone gets a recording of them running it and posts it, please let me know so I can see or hear how to run the sections beyond the First Issue.

Alright. More stuff.

Maybe the tacky Vegas Casino has always been a portal to the Tomb of Anubis and Baron Blade just altered it? I'm just confused why Visionary thought Anubis's energy was trapped in the Tomb of Anubis when he was very clearly in a warehouse in the middle of Rook City. But, y'know. Comics.

From what I can tell, the 9 chambers aren't right next to each other. The heroes are working their way through a difficult to navigate tomb with labrynthine passageways and deadly traps blocking their progress. Succeeding the overcome means the hero has successfully found their way from one chamber to the next, but succeeding with a twist means they get caught up in some environmental trap on the way there. The exits described in each of the milestone chambers's description leads into the next dangerous part of the tomb.

The milestone chambers themselves are devoid of threats, but the spaces in between them aren't. And environment threats that aren't defeated are presumably chasing the heroes, so "devoid of threats" probably isn't quite true. I don't believe the Secret Passage is a way to skip rooms. It's probably just one of the nine milestone rooms. Presumably, the GM has to describe how the overcoming hero found it.

The section of the booklet explaining the challenge mentions that it assumes that the heroes are all moving together, so yup! The heroes are moving together! If Legacy is punching skeletons on his way from the Antechamber to the Burial Chamber and Tachyon succeeds the overcome, the heroes find their way into the Antechamber and the skeletons chase them inside.

I think the main thing that's confusing you is that these rooms aren't directly connected to each other. There's a large amount of space seperating them, and that space is pretty dang dangerous.The heroes are actively on the move as they are fighting the environment threats, dodging traps and other such obstacles that seperate them from their next milestone room.

I hope that answers at least some of your confusion.

Somewhat, but then how does a character Overcome this challenge?

Most of my players are very used to DnD style dungeons, where the halls would be labeled on a map I as the DM have and they end up picking a direction, but here it is them deciding on a course of action to "overcome" the challenge of being lost, how are we supposed to keep that interesting for 9 or more continous rounds?

And, why wouldn't everyone just roll overcome checks, leading to 6 rooms defeated in the first turn?

I think this scenario could have been far more interesting if the halls weren't the challenge, but each room presented a challenge for the players to overcome, then at least I could have something to tell them other than "find the next chamber".

I think that's my only misgiving with this system, that skill-based stuff is basically given deliberate short thrift as something you're either supposed to just quickly skip over to get back to the combat stuff, or it's something you have to wholesale freeform.

Think of it more like you're mapping it but the map isn't defined in advance. (You can even draw maps as you go if it would help.)

It's one big action scene, with the scene tracker running the whole time. Twists that come up - as well as the environment's turn- are the traps, bad guys, and other turns that take while exploring the tomb. A hero might spend their turn making an Overcome to explore (and encourage them to be creative with the way they explore, not just generic "spot checks") or they might have to deal with a horde of mummies following behind them. In play, heroes won't just explore from room to room to room and ignore everything along the way.

Also, consider it less like the halls being the challenge, but the twists from exploring being the challenge, and whatever the environment introduces. 

As GM, there’s nothing stopping you from creating/making up a challenge for each of the the rooms.

Perhaps the planets in the astronomy chamber aren’t properly aligned (the Egyptians wouldn’t have known that the Sun is at the center of the solar system) or there are too many planets and the excess one needs to be removed? Perhaps upon entering the larder, the door closes behind the heroes and one of the vats begins emitting noxious fumes, requiring the heroes to open the correct vat and find a chemical to counteract the fume-emitting one? Maybe the long featureless hall continues endlessly in both directions no matter how far the heroes walk or run?

The only problem you’d need to avoid/balance against is doubling up on the number of overcomes the heroes need to pass in order to advance, since there is a timer on this… It looks like it should take 8 sucessful ‘advance to next room’ overcomes to get to the Hall of Mysteries, and if you make your heroes overcome to find the solution to your challenge and then again to implement it, you’ll have doubled that number to 16. But you could solve this by having the heroes use their ‘advance to next room’ overcome to find the solution to the puzzle, and let them perform the solution as a free action. Or better yet, have all the heroes roll a free awareness overcome and give the player who rolled highest the hints they need to figure out what the problem is. This would give the heroes a chance to discuss together and figure out the solution, using their overcome action to implement the solution…

Wraith: I’m pretty sure the planets don’t line up right! dodges skeleton grabbing at her Earth should be at the center and the sun should be the 2nd planet! throws razors at the next two skeletons, damaging one and destroyng the other
Legacy: I’ll hold them off. Bunker, think your suit is strong enough to lift those planets? They looks pretty heavy. flys fists-first into a group of zombies
Bunker: Yeah, I got this. But for the record, Legacy, this is nothing like Battle of the Bulge!

I've thought about that, it mostly works if you get rid of the twists involving getting lost, but that ends up being a major part of the scenario to change. And, man, without a move action type system, how is the failure of ending up a room behind where they started more than just a flavorful way of saying no? It doesn't end up mattering, because they can move multiple rooms a turn.

This is the kind of stuff that frustrates me because I know it is me. I'm making a big mental deal out of this because I'm so used to systems and scenarios with very set structures, and this is not that style of game or that style of scenario. All the pieces I'm used to looking at for guidance or ideas are not there, and it is perfectly fine but I'm panicking because I'm looking at a completely blank piece of paper with no clue how to get some vague descriptions to turn into a game plan on that sheet of paper, especially since I need to and am expected to rewrite those descriptions as I go but keep them similiar enough that the scenario still works.

That’s totally fair. In the first session I ran one of my friends had a moment where he was looking through his character sheet to find an ability for when he wanted to do, be sure he wasn’t used to simply just saying “I want to do X”.

I think I’m also helped by the fact that my limited RPG experience was with a GM who played it relatively loose with most details. So I’m used to playing games where “yeah, that’s ish close enough that you can run it and also take an unaimed shot”. But if you are used to your RPGs being much more, specific, I can definitely see how Sentinels’ very open system would be difficult to work with.

This still seems like the number of players will dramatically change how the session plays out.  With six heroes, if they don't roll any twists, they can indeed pass through six chambers before the environment gets a chance to slow them down.  With three heroes, they'll get half as far and then have to deal with a d8 lieutenant or about 4 "Mummies!" (or 1-2 Skeletrons, the easiest threat--and when it says "1 for every 2 heroes" do we round up or down?).  3 heroes probably won't deal with either threat in one round, which means an additional twist, which will only make that threat harder.  Then they'll probably only get through another one or two rooms at most before this all happens again.  Action conservation will be extremely critical, which means no examining any setpieces (like the orrery or the robots) that don't directly lead to advancement.