A few weeks ago I took a look into the character building rules for the Greater Than Games Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game (hereafter just referred to as Sentinel Comics) that was finally released last year, promising a more detailed look at the game and the rules that drive it. Well, today is that day.
If you’re unfamiliar, Sentinels of the Multiverse is a cooperative superhero themed card game released by Greater Than Games. And as the card game continued to grow, so did the world that these heroes were a part of and the setting that everything took place in. The setting really is a love letter to the Silver Age of comics with colorful heroes doing battle against dangerous villains with any number of harebrained schemes in motion to advance their evil plots, and the rules of the roleplaying really support emulating that type of story.
Sentinel Comics was developed in tandem by Greater Than Games and Critical-Hit Studios. Greater Than Games of course is the license holder for the Sentinels of the Multiverse IP. Critical-Hit Studios started in 2012 by Dave Chalker, Cam Banks, and Philippe-Antoine Menard, all three of whom are very prominent voices within the tabletop RPG online space and their influences definitely show in the rules of the game as well as the general flow of the game. Above everything else, this game is meant to emulate a comic book with vivid, frantic action scenes interspersed with social scenes to develop the story and a sprinkling of montage scenes to make the narrative flow and to get characters from the next important location or scene.
Sentinel Comics uses a relatively simple dice pool system. If you’re familiar with the Cortex System by Cam Banks you’ll recognize his fingerprints immediately. Drawing from a list of Powers and Qualities on your sheet based on the situation and what you’re trying to do (punching a villain may utilize your super strength while recalling an ancient ritual could draw on something like magical lore), these are then combined with your status die and all three are rolled. These dice typically range from a d6 to a d12, though if your character is attempting to do something completely out of their wheelhouse, you might roll a d4. Once they hit the table, they are arranged in numerical order. The number that rolled the lowest if the “Min” die. The middle number is the “Mid” die. And the highest number is the “Max” die. Only the numbers rolled on the dice matter at this point, not what size of dice it was. Your Mid die is the result of that action, though certain situations and abilities can change that.
Characters can do a couple of different things on their turn. They can attack a target in an attempt to take it out of the action or at least decrease its effectiveness. They can attempt to Overcome an obstacle, which is them attempting to accomplish an action that carries risk – such as jumping onto a speeding getaway car, rescuing innocent bystanders, or defusing a bomb. They can choose to try and Boost their allies or Hinder their opponents by giving them bonuses or penalties that are then applied to the results of applicable dice rolls. Finally, they can Defend in which case they are attempting to reduce incoming damage from enemy or environmental attacks. There is a sixth action called Recover which tends to take place only in certain scenes or with certain types of powers.
The Overcome action is the most complex and has a heavy focus on “failing forward.” As long as your final result die after any penalties is at least a 1, you have a chance to succeed – but it’s potentially going to cost you something. These twists can be really severe or more minor hindrances based on just how low your final result is. In order to achieve a no strings attached success, you need a result of at least an 8. And since you typically only take one of the dice from your pool of three, you can see where providing your allies with bonuses through the Boost action is actually a very helpful tactic.
Power and Quality dice are determined through character creation and rarely change. The Status Die, however depends on what “GYRO” zone the character is currently it. This concept is quite honestly the breakout star of the game for me, and I want to find a way to include it in every other game I run or write. In the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game, the environment is as much a character as the heroes and the villains, and it gets its own deck and its own turn, playing cards that sometimes help and sometimes hinder. This concept is represented in the roleplaying game by the scene tracker. Just like in the card game, the environment or scene gets a turn of its own in initiative and you tick off a space on the scene tracker. It goes through four zones – Green, Yellow, Red, and Out, and is referenced to as GYRO. The scene starts in the Green zone, eventually moves into the Yellow zone, and then the Red zone. If the final space on the scene tracker is ticked before the heroes accomplish their goals and end the threat, the scene ends, typically in a way that does not favor the heroes. So this “ticking clock” is useful for helping to drive the action forward constantly and encourages teamwork and collaborative play.
Each character also has their own GYRO status based on their health or hit points. As they take more damage, they too move from Green to Yellow to Red before being taken Out of the scene. The heroes Status Die can change depending on what zone they’re currently in – they always take the more severe zone. If the scene tracker is in Yellow, but their personal status is Green, they use the Yellow zone status die. If the scene is in the Yellow zone but they take a beating and their personal status is in the Red zone, they use the Red Status die. As they move through the zones they gain access to more abilities, representing mounting desperation leading them to more and deeper reserves of power. It’s fantastic, it’s elegant, and I love everything about it.
The rules for character creation (and villain creation for the GM later in the book) are substantial (nearly 170 pages in a 438 page book) and contain enough meat that a detailed explanation would merit an article of its own but there are step by step instructions on how to create your character by choosing from various backgrounds, archetypes, and power sources that help you determine your Powers, your Qualities, and your Status Dice as well as giving you a number of abilities that let you bend and break certain rules. There’s a lot to really like in the character creation section.
The rest of the book contains a lot of GM advice on how to run an engaging session as well as advice and rules for more complex challenges that could be approached a number of different ways or that require more than just a simple Overcome action to take care of. It also includes advice on things to include within a scene and ways that characters can interact with it and vice versa.
And finally, the back third of the book contains character sheets and information on many of the major heroes and villains of the Sentinels Multiverse, letting you play as your favorite heroes from the card game if you don’t want to create your own and allowing a GM to run an adventure against a villain that their players may already know from the setting.
All in all, this is a fabulous book and I cannot wait to see how the line continues to develop from here with the additional books that were unlocked during the Kickstarter campaign.
Ben Erickson
