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, Episode 21, Episode 22, Episode 23, Episode 24, Episode 25, Episode 26, Episode 27, and Episode 28.
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 #29 Recap:
“Less Is Moore’s Law”
By Eddie Jaczerkowski
As Season 2 of The Alternates draws to a close, the Alternates face off against Hippocampus once again (kind of) and finally track down Baron Blade (sort of)!
The title of this episode refers to “Moore’s Law,” which is, roughly speaking, the idea that computer chips get more powerful every few years while continuing to get smaller. The actual technical details of Moore’s Law are more complicated than that, but that’s not important. But the contents of the episode are enhanced by the meaning of the title, so keep that in mind!
Episode Recap
The cold open of this episode features the origins of Hippocampus. It all starts with this universe’s version of the Slaughterhouse Six - Ray Manta, Re-Volt, Desert Eagle, Cursor (this “Cursor” is a guy in a Revenant-lke power suit, possibly the… ahem... precursor to Recursor), Mudraker (this universe’s version of Magman, whose elemental nature has been transformed to mud instead of magma), and Hippo.
The scene opens with a scientist injecting a yellow luminescent liquid into a rat, who is then placed in a maze. Suddenly, the door to the laboratory explodes open and the members of the Slaughterhouse Six pour inside. First into the room is Hippo, who charges right into one of the scientists. Defensively, she jabs him right in the face with a full syringe of the yellow liquid, (bypassing his Hippo suit) and he shouts in pain, crashing to the ground.
Hippo is disoriented by whatever chemical has been injected into him, but as he looks up at the white boards in the room, the scientific notations of the chemical reactions written there make sense to him. (This is shown on-screen as a blurry bunch of letters and symbols rearranging themselves and becoming clear.) He blinks a few times as he hears Ray Manta say, “We got what we came for! Let’s get outta here!”
Ray Manta rushes towards the fallen Hippo. “Are you alright?” he says, eyeing the Hippo suspiciously.
“Uh, yeah,” Hippo responds. “I’m alright. Let’s go.”
What follows is a montage scene set to the song “Hippopotamus” by Sparks.
Hippo reads books about calculus, physics, chemistry. At a whiteboard, he draws out complex equations and diagrams. He works on the delicate wiring of a circuit board with a large pair of tweezers. Finally, he tests a teleportation device that moves a watermelon across his laboratory.
After the watermelon materializes on the far side of the room, Hippo rubs his eyes and holds his head. When he looks at the white board in his lab, the calculations start to blur and rearrange themselves into nonsense.
Suddenly, the music stops and Ray Manta bursts through the door of his laboratory and a scowl. “What is going on with you?” Ray Manta asks.
“I think I may be getting less intelligent,” Hippo responds.
“No! That’s exactly the opposite of what I mean! All of a sudden you’re super-smart and you’re making watermelons teleport? How are you doing this?”
“Well, it’s been an unusually productive week,” Hippo starts to explain.
“Is it that stuff that you got injected with at that lab?” Ray Manta demands.
“Well, yes, of course that’s part of it. But I really feel like it’s just unlocked something that was always inside of me,” Hippo responds.
“Do you even know what kind of side-effects that stuff could have?” Ray Manta yells. “They could be tracking you with nanites that they put in there! Maybe none of this was an accident! Maybe they did it on purpose so they could find us and spy on us!”
“Who?” asks Hippo.
Ray Manta’s eyes get very wide and he inspects Hippo suspiciously. “Nobody,” he says finally. Then, as casually as he can manage, he walks backwards back out of the lab.
The song “Hippopotamus” picks back up, and there’s another montage of Hippo building a specialized helmet and placing it on his head. Once he starts wearing the helmet, he is back to doing complex equations on his white board. At night, he takes off the helmet (although he still sleeps in his hippopotamus suit).
Finally, between scenes of Hippocampus working on his helmet and scenes of him testing his own “Intelligence Quotient Equivalent,” we see that he is getting smarter and smarter and smarter... exponentially.
The episode rejoins the Alternates where we left them last time - in the old Freedom Five island base, with Hippocampus holding a vial of green liquid and asking them to talk.
Hippocampus explains that the vial contains Quasar Kid’s blood, weaponized in a way that will kill the Alternates (but spare Hippocampus) if he detonates it. Quasar Kid verifies that such a thing is possible, and Hippocampus assures them he has no desire to actually do that.
Outside the ruined base, Cytoblast is slowing growing a wall of thick vines to make sure Hippocampus cannot easily escape.
At this point, Hippocampus enters into a villainous monologue. Rehashing what Kid Radical said to DJ Doctor Dancefloor in the first season - “If you’re the smartest man in the world, why bother to do villainy?” Hippocampus promises that his villainy is at an end, and that he was merely using Baron Blade to get a few last things he needed before “retiring”.
Hippocampus goes on to describe himself as “the human singularity” - because is now smart enough to invent devices that make him smarter, he will soon be one of the smartest beings in the universe.
Despite these bold claims, the Alternates look unimpressed. Jersey Devil is incredibly impatient with the lengthy speech given by Hippocampus, and he attempts to sneak up on the villain using his reality distortion field. But Hippocampus has planned for this, too, and Jersey Devil’s power fritzes out as he approaches Hippocampus.
“Not so fast!” Hippocampus tells Jersey Devil.
“Then please talk faster,” Jersey Devil says.
Hippocampus agrees, and begins explaining how he was contacted by “Baron Blade” for help forming the “Vengeful Seven.” He explains that Baron Blade is, indeed, not “the” Baron Blade. “The Baron” (as Hippocampus calls him, with air quotes and everything) is the identity program that the original Baron Blade used in his Blade-bot duplicates, but given access to a great deal of computer power.
However, this identity program was developed some time ago, so it runs on massive tape drives and other decades-old computer technology. The process at the “heart” of this massive Baron Blade simulation program is housed in a robotic unit that is currently on a secret island base of the Baron’s. (He doesn’t reveal the exact location, though.)
The Vengeful Seven’s base, which the Alternates found, was actually an enormous repository of data being used by “The Baron” simulation, which explains the giant heat sinks and the racks of electronic appliances in the place.
Hippocampus then explains how he got a team together for the Vengeful Seven knowing the recruits he picked would not quite be able to get the job done. Hippocampus had always planned for “The Baron” to fail in his endgame, which the super-genius reveals is the untimely destruction of the Earth using the moon (of course). A part of this plot is the capture of Starshadow, whose powers will allow “The Baron” to finally realize his dream of pulling the Moon into the Earth. Hippocampus still likes the Earth, and doesn’t want the Moon to collide with it.
Hippocampus then asks the team, “Why has Recursor been helping you?” The audience has been seeing hints of this, but the team is clearly unaware of any of that, and they say as much to Hippocampus.
Jersey Devil, fed up with all the monologuing and incredibly impatient (due to his odd situation with regards to time and space), yells, “Can you just speed up the monologue so we can get to the damned island?”
“Fine,” Hippocampus relents. He offers the heroes a truce - if they simply leave him be, he will tell them where Baron Blade’s secret island base is located.
Hippocampus continues, “I will even make a $1,000,000 donation in your names to the charity of your choice. Money is of no object to someone such as me - I can easily use my vast genius to make large sums of money effortlessly and legally. With the competitive markets of supply and demand, I can bankrupt whole nations and cause vast devastation completely within the law, in this country and others. You see, my friends, the real villain is capitalism.”
“To paraphrase Karl Marx,” Hippocampus says, “We are oppressed by a host of inherited evils. And now, a century after Marx, we can see that the continued disbelief in commodity fetishism has not only failed to dismiss-”
“Hippocampus, we accept!” Quasar Kid interrupts loudly.
Cytoblast sighs with resignation, and outside of the ruined base, the vine wall which had been growing begins to contract and disappear.
Disappointed, Hippocampus nonetheless takes the opportunity to thank the Alternates and take his leave. Before he does, Quasar Kid asks for his blood back, and the oversized villain accepts and hands it over. On his way out the door, Kid Radical tosses a “tracking pog” on Hippocampus’s back.
Quasar Kid has the other Alternates leave the base, and he uses his powers to neutralize the weaponized vial of blood. This leaves him feeling very nauseated.
The Alternates jump aboard the Alterna-jet and fly off.
Back at Alternates headquarters, Grosshak (Starshadow’s alien lizard-man friend) and Gommesh (Starshadow’s alien fish-man friend) are speaking with holographs of Unity and Omnitron-X.
“Where is Lord Blackmoore?” Grosshak asks.
“You mean Starshadow?” Unity asks. She explains that Starshadow is still missing, and the Alternates are currently tracking down his location. Grosshak is frustrated, but Unity offers that he and Gommesh can stay in the guest quarters until the Alternates return. She shows them where to go, and the two aliens head off.
“Defragmentation is complete, Unity,” Omnitron-X tells the holograph of his friend once the aliens are out of sight.
The holographic Unity sighs. “Then it’s time for Phase III, I guess,” she says. “Are you ready for this, Omni? It could go real bad from here.”
“Affirmative,” the holographic Omnitron-X replies. “Let us proceed.”
The holographic Unity nods, and them both of them dim and fade away.
Elsewhere, the Alternates arrive at the island of Baron Blade.
“Is it me or does that island look like a skull with a banana hat?” Kid Radical asks his compatriots.
Bouncer replies, “Uhm, well, that’s better than what I was gonna say it looked like.”
The Alternates land their jet on a helipad on the island and enter the base through an enormous cavern with industrial doors set into it.
Just inside, they see Baron Blade! He stands with his hands on his hips, smiling and staring at them.
The team leaps into action! Cytoblast turns into his plant monster form and launches an arboreal slam! Dr. Comet flies into the air and fires an ice blast! Quasar Kid takes a boxing stance and throws a heavy right hook! Jersey Devil poofs across the room, his strange form looking completely monstrous! Kid Radical jumps on his Tech Deck skateboard and swings his combat devil sticks!
...and they utterly destroy the deactivated Blade-bot. Pieces of robotic Baron flies in all directions.
“That still felt pretty good,” says Kid Radical.
Otherwise, the Baron’s island base looks very empty. The Alternates find nearby computer terminal and start looking for information. They find surveillance video of Starshadow’s energy bubble prison being loaded into a rocket. The rocket then flies out of the end of the “banana hat” shaped mountain on the island.
Bouncer looks at the other Alternates with a stupid grin on his face, but says nothing.
The team deduces that the rocket is heading to the Wagner Mars Base, and Bouncer confirms that he can get the Alterna-jet ready for space travel in under an hour. The rest of the team looks around the base for anything of use, but only finds loads of half-finished devices and robot parts.
Suddenly, from a moonpool on one side of the large interior main room of the base, the robotic sea serpent (from Episode 7) emerges! It hisses and growls menacingly at the Alternates.
“Oh, hey guys!” says Jersey Devil excitedly. “It’s the robotic sea serpent! Remember the robotic sea serpent?”
The sea serpent roars and thrashes about in the moonpool.
“It can’t reach us,” Kid Radical says.
“So… we can just go?” asks Cytoblast.
“Let’s just walk around it,” says Quasar Kid. “I still feel sick.”
“Yeah, we’ve got a timetable. Places to go, people-simulations to see,” Kid Radical adds.
So, the Alternates carefully exit the base, walking out of reach of the robotic sea serpent. Dr. Comet blasts it once with an icy beam just as the team exits the base, and the robot howls in frustration. It lashes out in anger, knocking out several beams that seem to be structurally important to the base.
As the Alternates reach the Alterna-jet, the base collapses behind them. They look at one another and shrug. The jet blasts off into the sky.
The credits roll under the Pet Shop Boys’ song, “Opportunities.”
Final Thoughts
It’s interesting to watch as this series of big fights against this team of villains goes in weird directions. Highwire surrendered, Safe Bet ran away as soon as he got hit, Atomic Dawn was kidnapped, and it turns out Hippocampus wasn’t really on board in the first place. By the end of this episode, I was left wondering what Hippocampus’s long-term plans are after apparently giving up villainy. Maybe we’ll find out in the future!
There’s only one episode left after this one, and it seems like the true nature of Baron Blade has been revealed! According to Hippocampus, it looks like the Baron who has been hunting Starshadow and the Alternates for two seasons of the show is actually a runaway artificial intelligence that was originally used to program Blade-Bots. Hippocampus seems not to know how this occurred - he hints that someone must be behind it, but he does not know who.
I left one small exchange between the Alternates and Hippocampus out of the recap because I wanted to focus on it a bit more here - the Alternates ask Hippocampus about Dr. Vitruvius, but Hippocampus insists he doesn’t know who he is and he hasn’t investigated. Kid Radical presses him on this, but Hippocampus responds only that Dr. Vitruvius seemed to be an intelligent and curious type, and considering that Hippocampus was plotting his own betrayal of Baron Blade, he didn’t want to get closer to Vitruvius on the chance that he might figure it out.
I wanted to call this out specifically because it almost seems like Hippocampus is afraid of Dr. Vitruvius. It seems more and more like Dr. Vitruvius (who did not appear in the Alternates comics, so I have no idea who he is) is a bigger threat, and I’m sure he’s someone we’ll see again, possibly in Season 3.
I can’t say I know what Omnitron-X and Unity (or their holographic remnants) are up to. What’s Phase III? This is the first time we’re seeing them having their own motivations and goals, and it seems like they might be secretly working together on something? Let’s not forget that when we first met this new entity, it was one being - Unity-X. At some point, it seemed to split into a Unity personality and an Omnitron-X personality... and now those two personalities are talking to each other. I’m sure we’ll see more about this next season.
That’s all for this week. Be sure to come back next week for a Recap of the Season 2 finale, “Supermassive.”
Eddie Jaczerkowski is a staff writer who loves comic books and writes about television.
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Running the Game
Back to the real world!
"OMG WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?"
Yeah, sorry, I've not been able to keep up with the Recaps! But this weekend, I should actually catch up to where we are! (We took a week off after Episode 30, and then I got sick and we skipped a week, so we haven't actually done Episode #31 yet.)
This game was mostly the dialog with Hippocampus, and me constantly trying to monologue while the players kept interrupting. ;-) You just can't get a good monologue going when the players keep trying to tell you they're doing sneaky things! But they eventually relented that Hippocampus was, in fact, smart enough to get away if he wanted to, or maybe they just realized he could be useful to them (and he wasn't as annoying as DJ Doctor Dancefloor, who they HATE).
The fight this Episode was supposed to be against the robotic sea monster! But then a player (I think it was Kid Radical's player) asked, "Wait, can he not reach us from the water?" And when I said, "No, he really can't," they decided they just wanted to leave. I thought that was hilarious, so we went with it, and it went as I wrote above. Pretty great!
So I still owe everyone a Recap of Episode #30, and the "ComicCon Q&A Panel" write-up (which actually has important meta and universe information in it, so I really have to get it done). Hopefully, by tomorrow night, you will be able to read both of those! We'll see! No Man's Sky is pretty fun right now...
Thanks for reading!