So my son, who is a big Sentinels of the Multiverse fan, asked if he could invite two of his friends over for Labor Day weekend to play some Sentinel Comics RPG, and if I would GM. I said yes, and so we had a small group of players over.
Since my son is in an ongoing campaign playing the adventures from the Starter Kit, I downloaded the new one-shot adventure, Stolen Legacy, and ran that.
Note: Spoilers ahead! If you want to play in the game, might not want to read any further.
The kids selected Muerto, Unity, and RockStar to play. I ended up changing the story of the adventure a bit to try to streamline things, so I started the game at an unveiling ceremony for the new Legacy statue. There were crowds of people there to witness the event. The mayor was there, as was Legacy and Young Legacy as honorees.
As the cover was pulled off of the statue, it suddenly fizzled, sparked, and vanished in a shower of purple streamers of arcane energy. To people’s horror, they saw Legacy fall to the ground, convulsing, his face growing older and older by the moment. Young Legacy ran to her father’s side, trying to shield him from the arcane energies coruscating around him.
More screams from the confused crowds drew the heroes’ attention. Spinning around, the heroes saw non-corporeal ghosts gliding through the air and attacking people in the streets, blowing sticky spiderwebs on them. Further down the street, shambling skeletons and zombies could be seen approaching. Instantly, the crowds began bolting, stampeding in all directions.
The heroes stepped up to the plate, and did everything they could to keep civilians safe, but the sheer chaos of the situation caused many problems, especially once the terrifying monsters began swarming into the park and attacking people. (In game terms, the players found themselves rolling very low to overcome often. Rather than accepting failure, they decided to suffer the major twists.) RockStar accidentally clipped someone while running, knocking them flat and breaking their arm. Unity shorted out the PA system on the stage while trying to calm the people down, lighting the stage on fire. And later, Rockstar, rushing headlong down the street to attack Frankenstein’s monster, plowed into a tanker truck, which rolled over onto its side and started leaking gasoline…right towards the blazing stage!
Regrouping to figure out what to do, they decided that since magic was clearly involved, Young Legacy should take her father and seek out NightMist - if anyone could advise them, it would be her, the master of the mystical world. As she sped off into the sky with Legacy, that left the player’s heroes to try to bring the situation at Legacy Park under control. They put out the fire on the stage, and ushered the last of the crowds out of the plaza, and then turned their attention to the creatures.
Some evil magic was sending terrifying monsters up Fillmore street towards the park, but whenever the heroes would knock one out, it would fall to the ground and suddenly look like junky Halloween props instead of the very real-looking monstrosities they were moments before. This led the heroes down the street, where Edgar’s Shoppe of Curiosities was churning out ghosts, zombies, skeletons, werewolves, etc. RockStar coalesced some crystal shards out of the air to try to seal up the store, but when a Sumerian sorcerer ghost came phasing through the crystal, they decided to barrel in and try to stop the invasion at the source.
They found three glowing green sigils on the floor inside, clearly growing in power, and soon to explode…or worse. With a heroic last effort, they hammered the ground where the sigils had been etched and broke them. The sigils vanished in an eerie whisper, and all the monsters collapsed into piles of cheap fabric and blown plastic.
In game terms, they ran right up to the last turn of the environment track. It took a lot of hint dropping to get them to the idea that they needed to do more than just stand around fighting the monsters as they came, but eventually they got the idea. They pulled it out in the end, though, and managed to do a lot of heroics and creative power uses along the way.
We had gone through more than half of our allotted time, so I had to improvise a second half of the adventure. They got a call from Young Legacy telling them that they should check out a disappearance of an arcane book from the library. NightMist had heard of the theft, and said that if they could identify the book that was stolen, it would give her a clue as to what evil had befallen Legacy.
So the heroes went to the Megalopolis Public Library, and met with the head librarian, who showed them the footage of the thieves in the rare books room. Instantly, Unity recognized them as citizens Blood, Sweat, and Tears, having fought them when they were part of Citizen Dawn’s army. (My son recognized them instantly from the description, without any real hints from me. I guess he’s played against Citizen Dawn more than I realized, because their identities were going to be a dramatic reveal later, but that’s okay - just made them all feel like they were on the ball!) Just as they were piecing it all together, more screams erupted from the park out in front of the library.
Running outside, they saw people fleeing the Megalopolis Art and Culture Museum next door. Rushing in, they found crowds of people fighting to escape the atrium area. More crowd-control heroics ensued until RockStar headed into the security offices to access the cameras, only to find Citizen Tears, the bone-skinned, predatory brawler, crouched over a terrified security guard. They fought, their battle rolling back out into the atrium, but just as RockStar was getting the upper hand on Citizen Tears, hammering her into the walls with mighty blows, she felt a searing, burning sensation that knocked her to her knees. The other heroes searched for the source of this attack, and finally found Citizen Sweat attacking them from behind some pillars with her heat induction powers.
As the battle intensified, things started looking dicey for the heroes, but they quickly found their groove. Muerto pulled some of the heat off of the staggering RockStar, and together, they were able to pummel Citizen Tears almost into submission, as Citizen Sweat tangled with her old nemesis Unity nearby. Soon Citizen Tears had fallen, but Citizen Sweat was making her escape, protecting herself with mystical armor she was conjuring. But Unity used her brainstorm to conjure up a massive lighting attack that crackled all over Sweat’s arcane armor, but that was just a distraction. The electrical surge supercharged Muerto’s metallic form, causing his glowing sugar-skull symbols to pulse with power, and he struck! It shattered through the mystical shielding and gripped Sweat with great arcs of sparking electricity! She went down.
The heroes had foiled two of the three citizens, but the third was nowhere to be seen. It appears that the two vandals were attempting to steal an artifact from the museum…the original Legacy lantern. But why? And where was Citizen Blood? Those questions would have to wait for another issue.
For this battle, the kids performed better. They kept things under control, accepted a few failures instead of bringing some major twists down on their head, and they worked together to hammer their enemies and protect each other. They’re getting the hang of fighting as a team.
Thoughts on the System
From the GM’s perspective, I’m finding this system to be quite fun to adjudicate. It’s really easy to run, and it’s super flexible. There’s enough grit to give the mechanics some teeth, but it’s open enough that I can add things like gasoline tanker trucks crashing into the scene without any problems, giving it a solid comic book feel. The overcome mechanism lets you throw challenges of just about any sort at the players, and it forces them to think creatively to come up with ways to address them with their powers, which is a lot of fun.
Having run some issues before this, I had spent some time prepping the game table more than usual. I came up with a few things that made things work a little better:
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I printed up a reference card on card stock with the Overcome / Boost / Hinder rolls. Since both Overcome and Boost/Hinder use the same numerical values, you can collapse these into a single table, which was very handy to have nearby.
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Before playing, I bought a pack of 3"x5" colored index cards and used a paper cutter to cut them up for use during play. I cut yellow and green index cards into 3"x1" strips which I could write mods on ("-2 Spiderwebs" or “+4 Supercharge” or whatever) and hand them out - yellow for boosts and green for hinders. Much nicer than trying to remember them or writing them down and erasing them. I cut red cards into 1.5"x2.5" cards that I’d write the names of scene actors on (“Unity” or “Zombie” or “Bystander”) to move around between areas, and I cut the blue cards into 3"x2.5" cards which I’d write location names on. This was enough to set the scene, have nice, colorful cards for everything, and have enough blanks handy to add interesting things on the fly.
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I have a bunch of “table scatter” acrylic gemstones from previous projects, so rather than keep track of the environment track countdown on a sheet of paper, I instead got two green, four yellow, and two red gemstones and put them on the table. Every environment turn, I’d reach over and remove one. This yielded some nice drama, and served as a fun, visual reminder for the players what stage we were in and how close they were to the end of the scene.
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I took the time to type up a reference sheet that has all of the different heroes’ principles on them. This made it really quick and painless to come up with twists on the fly. For instance, when RockStar incurred a major twist when chasing after a skeleton, I didn’t have to ask the player to refer to his character sheet; I could just ask, “Your strength has caused a problem - Who did you break?” without breaking the flow.
Overall, the system does a good job of evoking the narrative structure of a comic book. It’s got that feel. The countdown track on the environment challenges feels heavy handed sometimes, but I suppose it ramps up the tension nicely. If I hadn’t dropped a lot of hints, there’s no way they would have gotten through that first scene, though. I also wonder whether the rate at which twists come out is a little high; more often than not, players were just responding to twists rather than moving the plot of the scene forward unless I was careful to sprinkle in twists that wouldn’t need any further involvement (like just delivering damage). Not sure how I feel about that, but it works well enough in practice that it’s still fun. And I’ll get better at balancing those over time.
The kids seemed to enjoy it, and the game ran quickly and smoothly. Two of the three kids had never played the game before, and were unfamiliar with the Sentinel Comics heroes and lore, but it wasn’t a problem at all. They learned the mechanics almost immediately, they breezed through the game, and my son had a fun time with his friends. Thanks to the GTG crew for a nice Labor Day afternoon!