Tommy's Take on Sentinel Comics The Roleplaying Game Starter Kit

Last year, we started playing the Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game Starter Kit, and got through all but one of the adventures, before real life derailed things pretty significantly.

So this is one part review, one part post-mortem from the two previous articles: First Impressions. Second Impressions.
DISCLAIMER: This review was not comped, and it is based on actual play (see the links above). I am including an affiliate link for the PDF version, which may provide me with a percentage of store credit at DriveThruRPG.

ESSENTIAL INFO:

• Kit includes a Gameplay Guide (the rules), 6 character booklets, a GM screen and 6 adventures. In the digital version, this is all included in one zip file.
• Full color.
• No bookmarks or index, but none of the files even reach 50 pages.
• PDF is $9.95, print is $19.95 at Greater Than Games' website.
• Based on the popular Sentinels of the Multiverse card game by Greater Than Games.

SENTINEL COMICS GAMEPLAY GUIDE

• Gameplay guide is 24 pages and full color.
• It does not included character creation, as you are expected to use pregens from the Sentinels universe.
• System uses d4s, d6s, d8s, d10s and d12s. Standard dice, nothing proprietary.
• GYRO is the buzzword of the game. Most things in the game, including the heroes, can be tracked on a scale of Green, Yellow, Red and Out. This can affect how heroes can act, what's available to them at a given scene, or even events in the game.
• Dice rolls are a pool: Pick a Power (your special gifts), a Quality (skills, talents and other traits) and a Status (your reaction to a circumstance based on remaining health or the scene's GYRO tracker). Generally, you will take the Mid result, occasionally you will take the Min or the Max, or maybe even combine two, depending on certain abilities you may have.
• Everything falls under a core action: Attack (hurt someone), Overcome (remove an obstacle), Boost (assist an ally or bolster yourself), Hinder (make things more difficult without directly inflicting damage), Defend (stop someone from getting hurt), Recover (healing).
• Most actions have a range of results, like Overcome allowing for complete failure, or success with (major or minor) twist, with Boost/Hinder providing/inflicting a flat bonus/failure, and Attack/Defend either inflicting or blocking damage.
• Abilities let you do things outside of these limitations, such as Legacy using Flying Smash to attack multiple targets with his Flight, but having to take the Min die, or Absolute Zero Defending with Cold, getting his Max die AND Boosting the target of that defense with his Min die.
• Initiative is just handed off from one character to the next, with each hero and villain getting a turn, as well as the environment (which is very much a character of its own in the card game).
• Abilities are keyed to the GYRO scale, with more abilities being unlocked the more dire a situation becomes, whether it's due to the amount of damage a character has sustained, or the situation worsening (hitting Yellow or Red on the GYRO scale).
• Heroes even have an Out Ability, which they can use to aid their friends if they are defeated (much like the card game).
• Heroes get Hero Points, which can provide floating bonuses that they can use to boost die rolls as needed.
• Attacks are automatically successful, as you only roll to inflict damage (and any effect based on abilities). Characters with Health scores lose Health based on damage inflicted minus Defense, while minions have to make a save to see if they are knocked out.
• Minions and Lieutenants are represented by die types, which are rolled for their saves (if you inflict 4 damage, then d6 Thugs have to roll a 4 or better or be knocked out, but a d10 Alien Ship would only be dropped to d8 if it failed.Villains have full Health scores and, indeed, full character sheets with Abilities and the like.
• Environments roll their die pool and only apply twists as noted in their description. Sometimes these twists apply to all characters, sometimes to heroes, and sometimes to villains. Fighting at a villain's base may lead to force field generators Defending his minions, but battling on the streets may lead to police reinforcements who Attack the foes for you.

THE HEROES

• Six character booklets are provided. These are not just character sheets, but almost "training wheels" designed to walk you through not only the gameplay, but how each individual hero plays.
• At 8 pages apiece, each has a cover, a bio of the hero, a breakdown of what is on the sheet, a two page Hero Reference that reminds you of how the game plays and actions you can take, and a three page sheet that covers all the vital stats of the heroes, their Principles (each hero has two, based off of who they are and what they do, and these are used as Abilities in Gameplay), their Powers, their Qualities and their Abilities, with explanations of each Power, Quality and Ability, both as a game mechanic and a fiction element.
•  Legacy is a part-Superman, part-Captain America Big Damn Hero who is fueled by Principle of the Hero and Principle of the Mentor. He gets stronger and more capable the more dire the situation gets (his Status die rises from a d6 at Green to a d12 at Red,and his available Abilities expand from defensive and supplementary abilities to ones that inflict damage on multiple enemies or use his Max die).
•  Absolute Zero is like a heroic Mr. Freeze, encased in a life support suit. His powers can work against him early on, but later he can use the same attacks that he's harming foes with to heal himself.
• Bunker is a walking tank who actually plays completely different from the rest: he doesn't have a normal suite of Powers, he has Modes which become available (6 in all), each with either their own Powers or maybe the same Powers at different levels based on the Mode.
• Tachyon is a super speedster and scientist who can be anywhere on the battlefield she needs to be (movement is pretty abstract in this game), and uses a mix of her speed powers, some tech, and some brain power (her Yellow Ability called Margin of Error allows her to take 1 damage to reroll her dice, for instance).
• Unity makes Golems with her powers, ranging from d4 to d12, with a list of Upgrades she can grant by discarding Bonuses. While non of her iconic Golems from the card game are present, pretty much everything you need to recreate them is.
• Wraith is a rich, stealthy, ninja crime fighter ala Batman - just female, relying on powers like Deduction and Qualities like Wealthy CEO the same way others rely on Flight, Speed and Electricity.
• Fans of the card game will 100% see powers and abilities they are used to from playing with these characters in those games.

ADVENTURES (er, ISSUES)

• Each "issue" is based on a fictional title in the Sentinel Comics universe, as though this were a multiissue crossover, and numbered for play (with issues 1 and 2 intended to be played in sequence, concluded with issue 6, with 3, 4 and 5 played in the order of your choosing).
• Issue 1 (Freedom Five #801) is a battle against spider-robots in the city of Megalopolis. It does not include the Environment as a "character", but provides a slew of interesting objectives for the heroes to encounter alongside the enemies. As noted in my first impressions, this was a great introduction to the game, as it allowed all of their selected heroes to shine: Legacy became a beast as the situation grew dire, Absolute Zero provided such crazy penalties to the enemies that it essentially gave the group a couple of free turns, and Unity's Tech powers were the only reason they survived, because there were otherwise too many enemies to fight.
• Issue 2 (Freedom Five #802) introduced an Environment for the first time, as well as showed off the breadth of the Sentinel Comics universe by going from robotic alien spiders to mystic realms and psychic powers.
• The next three issues can be played in any order. I mostly just gave them the hooks and they ran with them.
• The first (Justice Comics #740) deals with a malfunctioning nuclear power plant and preventing its explosion, while battling the communist warrior Proletariat, who makes duplicates of himself.
• Prime Wardens #86 is a trip to the Savage Land-like Insula Primalis, a battle with dinosaurs (of the normal and cybernetic variety) and convincing an alternate reality version of a hero you thought lost to help you.
• Tome of the Bizarre #86 is a trek through an Egyptian themed labyrinth to rescue another hero.
• Issue 6 (Freedom Force #803) builds off all the previous clues dropped in the previous adventures, and builds to a confrontation with a nemesis once thought dead. It's also the only adventure we never played. I'll get into that below.

GM SCREEN

• This appears to be the cover of the physical kit.
• Very useful, referencing the few charts the game requires.

ON GAMEPLAY

• I loved how the game played. I don't mind abstract. Neither does my group.
• The heroes my players used (Legacy, Absolute Zero and Unity) felt, to me, like the heroes from the card game. Even better, in fact, as the heroes in the card game rarely "build" to anything, as it's more about getting the right card at the right time...heroes here keep digging into the bag of tricks to solve the situation. Feels very heroic.
• That said, there were a few times where the group struggled on trying to find a Quality that fit a certain action, and that led to lots of shrugging and just going with something (though we probably should have applied the Unskilled d4 in those cases).
• There's no mechanical support for much outside of combat in the Starter Kit, for better or for worse. It's unclear from the Starter Kit how much mechanical support for non-combat will be present (and I can see players running into the same problem as above, except with Powers "Which Power am I supposed to use to convince the Police Chief to help us out? Flight?"

ON ADVENTURES

• The game played well, and the 6 adventures tried to provide a variety of situations and activities, with tons of nods to the Sentinels universe for fans of it (with guest appearances from Argent Adept, Visionary, a version of Haka, Fanatic and new hero with ties to Ra, as well as several notable villains from the card game), which was really neat for me and utterly lost on my players (who have maybe played the card game a couple of times, while I soloed it quite a bit).
• The quality of the adventures themselves are...uneven. We loved the first two adventures. Issue 1 was a fantastic introduction to the system, and issue 2 was awesome for taking everything to a completely different place (in every respect).
• The three middle issues kinda killed our enthusiasm. The Power Plant scenario against Proletariat was good, but the trip to Insula Primalis was more unsatisfying, and not a single one of us enjoyed the Egyptian Themed Labyrinth, which was just a series of Overcome actions to try to interpret hieroglyphics on a timer.
• The Egyptian scenario being such a slog, combined with some real life interruptions last year, kept us from playing the final scenario, which is a shame because it seems like it would have been a nice rebound, with not only a ton of varied objectives like the first adventure, but an interesting write-up for the villain, and a few ways that the adventure was altered (actually, made easier) by the various successes the group had in the first five adventures, a nice payoff for playing through all the previous adventures (and trying to meet the objectives).

FINAL THOUGHTS: I dig the system. Feels like it has a few gaps in it, like when you juuuust can't make a Quality or Power fit the action, but they did a great job of capturing the feel of the card game in an RPG rule system, even the "one against many" "boss fight" feel of Sentinels, which has proven pretty hard for a lot of games (including Savage Worlds) to truly nail. So thumbs up for the game system. I'll buy the rulebook when it gets released, because I really wanna see for myself how they handled character creation, as well as anything that might be missing from the Starter Kit system-wise. That said, the adventures are of an uneven quality, with issues 1 and 2 being very strong points and issue 6 reading well...but that's not an indictment of the game, because those adventures clearly show what the system is capable of. If you're a Sentinels fan, check this out, even if you're planning to buy the full book, because the scenarios can serve as a nice "what to do/what not to do" when making your own.