Here's a recap of the latest session of my Sentinels RPG campaign "The Alternates"! As per usual, there's a narrative recap (written as if it was in-metaverse) and then I go over the actual running of the game, and any lessons I learned as the GM.
If you're lost, you can catch up with the previous Game Recaps! You can find links to the first "Season" (the first 12 episodes) in the Recap for Game 12. "Season 2" will encompass Episodes #13 through #30. Here is the Recap for Episode 13, Episode 14, Episode 15, Episode 16, Episode 17, Episode 18, Episode 19, Episode 20, and Episode 21.
Brief Description of the Game: In the meta-verse (where Sentinel comics is a published comic book multimedia empire), there is a premium cable animated television series (in a style similar to “Into the Spider-Verse”), which itself is based on a comic series called "The Alternates." This RPG campaign represents that show, with each game session (ideally) representing one hour-long Episode of the show. The recap below is written in-metaverse as if it was an article on a popular website that posts recaps of episodes.
Player Characters/Protagonists:
- Cytoblast: Dr. Douglas Hemlocke can control plants, including transforming himself into a plant form, all thanks to his mystical knowledge and his ancient magical staff.
- Dr. Comet: Possessed by a demon that travelled to earth inside a comet, Dr. Diana Aster can magically control fire and ice, though her powers often go often out of control when her emotions flare up.
- Jersey Devil: A barely human cryptid of mysterious origins, "Mr. Leeds" is both man and monster, able to teleport by way of a parallel dimension.
- Kid Radical: A highly skilled autodidact with a strict code of behavior, Kid Radical has a superhuman ability for following trends and learning new skills, although it often seems like he can't quite connect with modern society.
- Quasar Kid: A superhero teen from the far future, Quasar Kid has a cosmic metabolism, super strength, and the power of flight, but he hasn't yet adjusted to being in "the past."
Recurring allied NPCs/Supporting characters:
- Starshadow: A retired intergalactic adventurer, Starshadow wields mighty cosmic powers, but he is now reluctant to use them.
- Bouncer: An invulnerable action movie star, Bouncer is also super-strong and capable of mighty leaps (hence the name "Bouncer"), but he hasn't been the same since the Oblivaeon Crisis.
- Night Knight: A costumed, armored vigilante who has taken over the protection of Rook City, despite the country legislating against super vigilantism. With a gravelly voice and endless gadgets, Night Knight has sort of picked up where the Wraith left off.
A Very Quick Story Synopsis: In an alternate timeline where Baron Blade was killed decades earlier (causing countless changes to the world of Sentinel Comics), the heroes of the Multiverse are almost all killed in the "Oblivaeon Crisis." The few remaining heroes, especially the Alternates, are left to deal with the villains and interstellar threats that still endanger the Earth!
Also, some important villain stuff going on - Unbeknownst to the heroes, Baron Blade has reappeared (after being presumed dead), and was secretly striking at the heroes during the last season. He has assembled a Vengeful Seven team, which is being lead by Hippocampus (the Hippo, except now he's super-smart). They are working behind the scenes on some sort of revenge plot.
I've also done some very amateur sketches for the game! You can see them in this Google Photos album.
And now, an imaginary recap of an imaginary episode of an imaginary television show about an imaginary superhero team!
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The Alternates Episode #22 Recap:
“Ice in Your Veins”
By Eddie Jaczerkowski
This week, we have another fun cross-dimensional adventure with the Alternates! Let’s jump right into the Recap of Episode #22.
Episode Recap
The episode begins with a scene of Baron Blade and his Vengeful Seven.
This scene occurs after the scene in the previous episode (the attack on the mobile defense platform). The Vengeful Seven are all gathered in the same control room we’ve seen them in before, with the giant screen where they communicate with Baron Blade. As expected, Baron Blade is once again on the screen, speaking with his minions.
“I await your update,” the Baron says.
Hippocampus reports that there’s bad news about the mobile defense platform, but good news about the “robot shipments.” The Baron ask him to start with the good news, and Hippocampus proceeds to talk about the logistical details of shipments of robot parts to various locations in Southern California, Megalopolis, and some other indistinct locales. (We can safely assume this all happens before Episode 7 in Season 1, when the various robot attacks began.)
As Hippocampus rattles off rather irrelevant details, our view pans past all the members of the Vengeful Seven until it settles on the last in line - Recursor.
Recursor is twitching the fingers on his left hand in a steady rhythm. The camera pans down to the fingers as they move in rapid succession, then it swings around to the other side of Recursor’s forearm. We can see a small screen on the armored cuff, where it becomes clear that Recursor is typing words out with his fingers, recording details about the robot shipments. With another few more twitches of the fingers, the screen reads:
“port 22 opened: OMNITRON.10 communication protocol engaged... Sending packets…”
The conversation continues between Hippocampus and Baron Blade. The Baron says, “That’s all in order. Now, let’s talk about the mobile defense platform.”
“Ah, yes…” Hippocampus says. “The mobile defense platform. Well... here’s what happened. We were flying in the new hovercopter, and we found the mobile defense platform that the Citizens of the Sun had eh… acquired. So we approached..."
While Hippocampus talks, slowly spinning out a yarn before getting to the bad parts, we see Recursor’s screen.
“Transmission successful.”
Recursor makes a fist, and the screen goes blank.
The opening scene ends, we are treated to the Alternates title screen and intro music. The show continues by rejoining the Alternates, floating on a rocky platform in the Realm of Discord.
The team is trying to figure out how to get out of the discordant dimension. As Cytoblast points out, “It’s much easier to find a way into the Realm of Discord than to find a way out.”
Dr. Comet talks about how she’s certain there’s a way, scientifically, to find the exit, but she lacks the experimental equipment and the time. (It’s worth noting she sounds like she has a new perspective compared to the Dr. Comet we’re used to. She doesn’t seem as frustrated or put-out by her circumstances - instead she seems confident that there’s a reasonable solution, and she seems to accept that she can’t fix the problem easily.)
As the team talks, two people dressed in Victorian clothing float through the Realm of Discord towards them - a woman and a man. Their clothing is somewhat threadbare, but it still seems very formal and aristocratic.
“Who are they, Mr. Quockerwodger?” the woman asks her companion.
“I don’t rightly know, Ms. Collywobbles,” the man replies.
Both of these strangers speak with a Cockney (East London) accent, and they speak quite loudly, as if they assume the Alternates cannot hear them. But our heroes definitely hear them, and they all turn to see the flying Victorian duo staring back at them.
“Ooo!” says Ms. Collywobbles as she sees the faces of the Alternates. “They look like they’re from Earth, Mr. Quockerwodger!”
“Maybe,” her companion replies. “I think that’s what Earthlings look like. I don’t rightly remember.”
“Hello!” says Kid Radical. “Are you from Earth?”
The duo look at each other, seemingly surprised that someone is talking to them. “I don’t remember,” Ms. Collywobbles says. “Do you?” she asks Mr. Quockerwodger.
“I think we are from Earth,” he says. “That seems right. But I don’t rightly remember.”
“These two are from the past, right?” Quasar Kid asks his teammates. “Are they from the 60s?”
“They are from the 60s,” Kid Radical. “And like they always say, if you remember the 1860s, you weren’t really there.” Quasar Kid nods in understanding.
“Do you know how to get back to Earth?” Quasar Kid asks them.
The two look at each other for a long moment, then look back at the team. “Why would you want to go there?”
Jersey Devil steps up and asks them, in an accent from the same century (but not from East London), “Excuse me, friends. Can you direct us to the nearest dirigible to Earth?”
Mr. Quockerwodger shakes his head. “No, I’m sorry, friend. I don’t rightly remember where that is.”
“What have you two been eating?” Quasar Kid asks, guessing the couple is under the influence of a narcotic.
Ms. Collywobbles stares at her partner for a long moment, then shrugs. Mr. Quockerwodger says, “What have we been eating? I don’t rightly remember.”
Quasar Kid turns to his teammates and says, “We’ve gotta get out of here.”
Cytoblast tells his teammates that he’s been working on an idea. He points down at the strange leafy purple plants lining the “ground” below them, and tells his team that he can use those to connect them to plant magic that could get them back to Earth. “We need to get closer to those plants.”
“I’ll push the rock down,” Quasar Kid says.
“How does that work?” Cytoblast asks. “What will you be pushing against?”
“...the rock?” Quasar Kid replies.
(This is a “comic book physics” joke. It’s a reference to that whole “equal and opposite reaction” thing. But Quasar Kid just flies up and pushes the rock down, because physics don’t make any sense in comic book stories, and especially not in the Realm of Discord.)
As the rock goes down, Mr. Quockerwodger and Ms. Collywobbles don’t go with it - they simply remain floating in mid-air.
“Oh. Uh. Goodbye, then!” Mr. Quockerwodger says to the Alternates. The team all nod and wave, seemingly glad to be rid of the two strangers.
As the rock gets closer to the strange cabbage-like plants, tendrils begin to grow upward and reach toward them. “That’s close enough!” says Cytoblast.
Jersey Devil points down at the undulating plants. “Are those plants edible?” he asks.
“They are both poisonous and venomous,” replies Cytoblast.
“I’m not hearing a ‘no’,” Jersey Devil replies.
Cytoblast changes topics. “I have a friend back on Earth who I think can help us out here,” he says. “Have you ever seen Lord of the Rings?”
“Your friend is Elijah Wood?” Kid Radical asks.
“Well, you’re half right,” Cytoblast says. “My friend is named Pando. You can think of him like Treebeard. Except he’s more than one tree. And he’s the largest living organism on Earth. So he’s pretty easy to find… but we have to enter the Green Path.”
Explaining that the Green Path is a dimension of plant magic, and that the ride through it might be pretty rough, Cytoblast casts a ritual which pulls the team out of the Realm of Discord through the Green Path.
As promised, the Green Path is a tunnel of strange roots, branches, leaves, shoots, ferns, and any other sort of plant you can think of. The Alternates are bumped and dragged through this twisting tunnel of plant matter, where they are scratched by thorns and bark left and right.
But they are finally deposited in the midst of an aspen forest. They look pretty beat up, with scratches all over them. Kid Radical chokes a bit and spits out an acorn.
They have a quick conversation with Pando (who they can all hear in their heads), who is the aspen forest itself (more on Pando later). But Quasar Kid mentions that something feels wrong. Kid Radical turns on his wrist communicator to try and reach Omnitron or Unity, but he notices something.
“It’s currently about 12 hours ago,” Kid Radical says.
“What?” Dr. Comet asks.
“We came back from the Realm of Discord about 12 hours before we left,” Quasar Kid explains. “That’s what feels wrong. The past versions of us are still in Rook City, about to fight vampires.”
Quasar Kid insists that they quarantine themselves so they don’t wreck the space-time continuum. But some of the team think that the accidental time travel is something they can take advantage of.
“Do any of you have an advanced degree in chronokinetics?” Quasar Kid asks them. He doubles down on his argument that they quarantine themselves, and the team mostly agrees.
Jersey Devil protests, however, mumbling, “I’m myself from three days ago anyway.” But even he agrees to quarantine. They ask Pando for a good place to sleep, and he provides them with shelter.
Early the next day (after waiting until their other selves leave for the Realm of Discord), the team call in a hoverjet, and whisk themselves off to Rook City.
On the flight, Quasar Kid offers to teach Kid Radical 31st Century English, explaining, “You learn fast, and it would be nice to talk to someone in my first language.” The team also calls Night Knight, saying they are on their way to meet him.
“That was fast,” he says over the voice line. “It wasn’t even an hour ago that you told me you were starting the ritual to go to the Realm of Discord.”
They arrive in Rook City and meet up with Night Knight in the M.A.V.E.R.I.K.
“Welcome back,” Night Knight says in his deep, gravelly voice. “How are things?”
“Have you ever been to the Realm of Discord?” Kid Radical asks him.
“No,” Night Knight replies.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Kid Radical quips.
Night Knight is watching surveillance footage of the Guardians of Freedom fighting vampires. “I called in some help,” he says. Night Knight explains he anonymously tipped off the Guardians of Freedom about the vampire problem. Since he is technically in violation of the U.S.’s new “anti-vigilante laws,” he couldn’t exactly contact them directly.
On the screen, we can see the members of the Guardians that we’ve seen before - Ms. Rushmore, Freedom Train, Captain Constitution, and the Arithmetist. But they are joined by a new member - a woman with feathered wings who wields magical light that seems to greatly harm the vampires. Night Knight points out the new member, saying he does not recognize her.
“That’s Isis,” Cytoblast says. “A new Isis, for certain, but the sun disc she’s carrying is unmistakable. Those vampires don’t stand a chance.”
“Good,” Night Knight says. He explains that he has also talked to some local experts on the occult and mysticism, and they pointed him to a house at the edge of town that he wants to check out. His sources tell him that some strong blood magic has been used, and they traced it to that location.
The team, plus Night Knight, go off in the M.A.V.E.R.I.K. to the location, which turns out to be a “McMansion” - a large, mass-produced and very new house (not exactly where anyone expected the master of the vampires to be hiding out).
Cytoblast confirms that there is an aura of blood magic in the house, so the team breaks in and looks around. They quickly move to the basement, where they surprise the house’s owner - the Hermetic! He’s in the midst of some ritual involving a woman strapped to a table and lots of red liquid in flasks and tubes.
“Hermetic! What have I told you about making friends?” Cytoblast mocks.
“Do I know you?” Hermetic asks. Cytoblast scowls angrily and transforms into a plant monster.
The team springs into action, and the Hermetic orders two nearby minions - hulking flesh-golem monsters - to defend him.
“Dr. Comet! Give him the cold shoulder!” Quasar Kid says. Dr. Comet takes the pun in stride and summons forth ice to attack the dark alchemist.
The fight scene is pretty short. At one point, Cytoblast tries to manipulate the wooden furniture into the room, only to find it’s cheap flat-packed stuff made out of particle board.
“Is this shelf from IKAYA?” Cytoblast asks Hermetic. “You don’t even have real wooden furniture? Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”
Kid Radical manages to get the Hermetic’s large Bloodstone away from him by doing some sick stunts with his devil sticks. “Do not touch that stone under any circumstances!” Cytoblast tells him. Kid Radical juggles the Bloodstone with those devil sticks while the team takes down Hermetic.
Cytoblast casts a binding spell on Hermetic and says, “You’ve been hermetically sealed!”
The Hermetic furrows his brow. “Now I remember you,” he says.
Night Knight recommends calling the Guardians of Freedom to take Hermetic away, and he takes off before they get there (since he’s an unlicensed vigilante).
The episode ends as the Alternates ask Unity (or at least the Unity hologram, via Kid Radical’s wrist communicator) to get them a direct line to the Guardians of Freedom.
The end credits play under the song “You Can Do Magic” by America.
Final Thoughts
A lot happened in this episode, including several new characters who are likely to come back around, and a kind of new leaf for Dr. Comet. Let’s go point by point!
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What’s Recursor up to? Is the “OMNITRON.10” a note that Recursor was passing information to Omnitron-X/Unity? We know that the strange calls from Season 1 were actually from “Unity-X” (the entity which seemed to combine both Unity and Omnitron-X, who now seem separated again), but we don’t quite know how Unity-X got the information in the first place…
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Mr. Quockerwodger and Ms. Collywobbles were also featured in the Alternates comic series, but in a different way. I hope we see more of them - they were great characters in the comic series.
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Pando is a real guy! Well, tree. Well, bunch of trees. Pando is a series of clones of a male quaking aspen tree covering 100 acres in Utah, sharing a single root system. Pando is somewhere between 80,000 and a million years old. I don’t know for sure if the real Pando can project himself into people’s minds, but it seems likely.
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Time travel! The Realm of Discord is weird with time, but I don’t know of another instance where anyone traveled through time using the Realm of Discord. It seems like the Alternates came back to their own timeline, but we have to wonder if they actually travelled to another timeline entirely, as often happens with time travel in Sentinel Comics. As it is, it seems like whatever timeline they’re in is identical to the one they left, so I guess it doesn’t matter.
Jersey Devil is also kind of “unstuck in time,” which he mentions in this episode. His whole ability to travel to another dimension has to do with all time being simultaneous in that dimension, which, as a matter of comic book metaphysics, makes it very unclear when he left or when he returns… or even which Jersey Devil returns to what time.
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Dr. Comet seems to have chilled out a bit. (Get it?) I guess that’s what exorcising a space demon will do for you.
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Cytoblast and Hermetic have met before in comics, so it’s funny that Hermetic doesn’t remember him (since the conceit of the Alternates is a collection of heroes that very few comic book fans remember).
- I think we’re left to assume that, with the Hermetic beaten, the vampire problem in Rook City is solved. That subplot felt a bit rushed and forced - the vampires were a scary threat to the Alternates, but the new Isis is able to beat them down easily with her sun magic. It’s mentioned that Hermetic was creating these vampires with blood magic, and he’s been defeated... so I guess the vampires are defeated, right? From what I’ve seen, the next episode isn’t about vampires, so I guess the problem is considered fixed. I would love to know what happened to those poor people who apparently were unwillingly turned into vampires, though. It might just be me, but I felt pretty unsatisfied with the end of the vampire subplot.
That’s all for this week! Join me next week when I recap Episode #23, titled “Revenge of Ghost Cop” (the title of one of Bouncer’s movies, which he mentioned to the barista at Morebuck’s Coffee in Episode #14 earlier this season). See you then!
Eddie Jaczerkowski is a staff writer who loves comic books and writes about television.
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Running the Game!
First, Cytoblast's player insisted I include this in this post. As we were starting the game and he fired up his video, he mentioned his "fivehead" (a large forehead). I pulled my hair back to show my widow's peak and told him that I had a "Two plus two equals forehead." He told me that I had to include this so that forum readers know about the bad jokes that don't make their way into the recaps.
ANYWAY... this game was pretty standard, and Cytoblast's player and I had talked about how the team might get out of the Realm of Discord before we got to this game. A few weeks ago, I sent him the wikipedia article about Pando and told him that he might want to call on Pando some time. And that all came together this week. The fight against the Hermetic was pretty standard - he and the two flesh golems were all Villains, but without much synergy, and there was a challlenge to end the ritual he was performing.
And yes, I am not 100% pleased with how the vampire subplot came and went, but I just didn't have the time for it with what I have left to do this Season. So originally I thought it would take a little while to resolve, but when it came time to decide how things were going to go, I opted to change things around and have the Guardians (and Isis) come in and take care of the problem. Thus, my own displeasure is expressed by the deliberate-but-indirect reflection-of-self meta character that is TV critic Eddie Jaczerkowski.
Sure, there is some irony in "Isis" fighting to defend America, but I'm just ignoring that homonym for sanity's sake.
Mr. Quockerwodger and Ms. Collywobbles! Let's talk about them, because I love them. I have a whole backstory for them which could be its own interesting Sentinels Comics RPG campaign set in a different time and place with totally different themes, but I will have to get by with them as NPCs in this game. This isn't the last we've seen of them, so if you like their nonsense at all, there will be more!
There are some not-so-subtle things going on in the background with regards to the world of the Alternates, as Night Knight suggests when talking about "anti-vigilante" laws and such, but those aren't main plot points yet. Depending on how the game goes, that whole thing may or may not be a plot in Season... 4? Let's say we could possibly see more of that in Season 4.
That's it for this week! Next week, the sled ride down to the end of Season 2 really starts!
Thanks for reading!