Tag Archives: superheroes

Collection 3 – Kaiju World Tour

Our third collection of the Sentinels RPG with our Aussie family of Kaiju hunters went swimmingly. I (The Yowie) got bone cursed and had to go to the Dreamtime to fix that up, that was fun.

Follow along with our exploits!

Thirteenth Session – “New Charleston Incursion”
The Abyssal is now The Umbral, sinking even deeper into dark magic depravity. We go pub crawling until we are interrupted with a call for help fighting kaiju off from New Charleston Island. If the Samoans can’t handle it, it must be bad! Sure enough, it’s basically Starship Troopers except most of us don’t have guns, or look good naked. And Yowie gets a death curse put on him for appropriating Aboriginal magic. Fair enough.

Fourteenth Session – “The Beginning of the Endlings”
We get to meet the Endlings, which is some Jack Kirby on crack shit. Yowie likes the Terminarch, Jansa Vi Dero, because she’s huge! We then go to catch a kaiju for her, but of course way more dangerous than a giant monster is some rich one percenter bastard.

Fifteenth Session – “The Dreamtime”
The Aboriginal sorcerer Merricumana refuses to lift the bone curse from Yowie, which means we have to venture into the Dreamtime to try to fix the problem! We go to Ayers Rock and smoke it up and sure enough we end up in the Dreamtime. We then have to intervene in various Very Symbolic Activities, hoping that we are intervening in a way that will help and not hurt. And then we get to fight dark versions of ourselves! Except for Umbral, who fights a jolly shining elf version of himself (I’m kidding).

Sixteenth Session – “Fear the Bunyip”
After enjoying some finger limes, we have to fight some weirdo carrying a giant black rock and protect a giant white rock who has two cute lil’ whale and koala pals. We are traumatized by having to fight the cute guys. We fight the Bunyip, the Yowie dies but is brought back to life by the Rainbow Serpent, and defeats the Bunyip with the help of his friends… We return successful to the waking world, to be confronted with a plague of spore-bearing pterodactyls.

Seventeenth Session – “What To Expect When You’re Expecting”
First we have to save Sydney from a rampaging Kangasaurus Rex (or, as we like to call it, “Tuesday”) when Golden Key’s daughter from the future comes back! She tells us we must fight the future and so we go to Zurich and fight a Tatzylwyrm and eat Strudel and look for magical instruments.

Eighteenth Session – “Sleepless in Seattle”
We have to join up with the Argent Adept, who Umbral hates, to fight Heretic, who we all hate, in Seattle, which we all also hate. A random environment generated dude, Stan the Battalion Mechanic, a gruff blue-collar maintenance man who keeps fixing the battle platform we’re trying to invate, becomes a favorite of ours during the fight so we recruit him once we win.

Collection 2 – Atlantean Memories

Our second collection of six issues (game sessions) of the Sentinel Comics RPG hits newsstands! In a desperate bid from alliteration, we go from Australia to Argentina to Atlantis over the course of the arc. We ally with El Genio, fight The Heretic, and then alternately ally with and fight the Luminary/Baron Blade.

You don’t really “level up” in Sentinels RPG, you just can do anything from swap little things to rebuild at the end of a collection. I (The Yowie) don’t change much but others do.

We’ve gotten used to the rules and the “ticking clock” of each combat. I do wish there was a little more texture to the rules – you really need to min-max those dice to get successes, and there’s not much to do with them if you don’t have a power other than the basic moves, so we have started doing the same moves a lot.

Follow along with our exploits!

Seventh Session – “We Come From A Land Down Under”
We travel from Australia to Argentina to earn our “international Kaiju hunter” certification from GLOBAL. There a giant hydra is molesting both the livestock and the gauchos. We fend it off with the help of El Genio (think El Santo), who is laid low in the process.

Eighth Session – “The Serpent and the Rainbow”
The heroes take on an Argentinian black site with a super-scientist in residence. Then things get really weird and we go deal with a bunch of gods of the Guarani people, including a set of challenges from Jasy Jatere and a wrestling match with Teju Jagua to get some juice from the infinita fruit to heal El Genio.

Ninth Session – “American Serpent”
The Heretic demands 300 billion pesos or else he’ll destroy the Los Caracoles Dam and flood a lot of San Juan. We defeat the hydra and head out to find the Heretic, who has taken refuge in a vineyard and winery. Little does he realize that we are Australian and drinking plonk is one of our superpowers!

Tenth Session – “Armenian Vodka”
We get our own rooms back at Kaiju Defence Inc. headquarters until we are interrupted by a host of giant tentacles. Then we go sit down for a lovely Mordengradian lunch with what turns out to be the deposed Baron Blade aka the Luminary aka Ivan Romanat! Well obviously we have to team up with him to go to Atlantis…

Eleventh Session – “The Inevitable Betrayal”
Baron Blade turns on us and sics Cthulhu on us. We try to look surprised. He bails after we grind his forces to cornmeal and smack Space Cthulhu around. Piece of piss.

Twelfth Session – “Reality Discontinuity”
The Abyssal freaks out and goes dark magic crazy. But we need to go to a super hero convention, Freedom Con! More chaos than usual ensues.

Collection 1 – Kaiju Defenders: Next Gen

We’ve finished our first collection of six issues (game sessions) of the Sentinel Comics RPG, as our brave Aussies fend off all kinds of kaiju from the Australian shores. You can read all the individual session summaries in depth on our session summaries page (including some kaiju pics!).

Paul’s doing a great job running the game. I’m playing a Magnum P.I. inspired PI who can grow into a giant Australian yeti monster (the Yowie). Bruce is playing the arcane weirdo The Abyssal, Chris is playing speedster X-Celerate, Patrick is playing the gyrocopter-flying Overwatch, and Tim the killer robot Dynamo Joe.

One of my favorite parts has been researching Australian slang terms and phrases and inflicting them on the group. I worked with some Aussies at a startup once so I have some bonus ones to pull out on them. I enjoy the reaction when we pulled up to a trailer park being ravaged by a kaiju and I get to say “Well let’s get started, we didn’t just come here to fuck spiders!” (Do it in a strong Australian accent for best results.)

We’re playing semi-remote. Bruce is in Dallas and the rest of us are in Austin, so we’re using Google Meet and Roll20, though Chris, Patrick, and I have taken to getting together for fellowship and booze.

Follow along with our exploits!

First Session – “Fire on the Deep”
Giant sea serpents and pretty darn big fleas attack an oil rig of the Australian coast and need fending off! It’s hard yakka!

Second Session – “Scared Heart Hospital”
The fleas have infected everyone with chest-bursting fleas and we have to go flea stomping yet again, and end up fighting a giant mutated dog in a trailer park with many bogans looking on.

Third Session – “Between the Tasmanian Devil and the Deep Blue Sea”
The heroes have to go defend a supervillain transport barge from the attack of a giant mutated kaiju. You’d think the yobbos would be grateful, but of course not.

Fourth Session – “Melbourne Nights”
The Vegemite factory in Melbourne is at risk from not one but two kaiju! The heroes must overcome their greatest hurdle yet – getting to Melbourne from Sydney.

Fifth Session – “Basic Cthulhus and Catwomen”
The Dijkstra Museum of History in Sydney is threatened both by a giant sea kaiju called “Squidface” from without and from Ermine and the Gentleman (think Catwoman/Black Cat and Gentleman Ghost before he dies and becomes a ghost) inside. And our emo bro Nightwalker gets sucked into some bad dimension.

Sixth Session – “Advanced Cthulhus and Catwomen”
X-Celerate hooks up with villainess Ermine and gets to know her intimately and impregnates her. At the same time, the Nexus of the Void gets to know Nightwalker intimately and impregnates him. We rescue one of the two of them. Finally we go to a big spooky mansion to have it out with Cthulhu (aka the Herald of xxtz’Hulissh).

Kaiju Defenders, a Sentinel Comics Campaign

A new campaign begins! We have played a lot of the Sentinels of the Multiverse co-op card game, and they came out with a RPG version, Sentinel Comics.

So Paul decided to run a campaign of it! We ran some one-shots of it when we were short players for Reavers. I played a succubus cop and Patrick played a “The Question” type character.

For this campaign, Kaiju Defenders, we’re all playing a “family” (for a version of family that includes killbots) whose family business is defending Australia against the depredations of kaiju! (That’s “giant monsters” for the untutored.)

Character generation for Sentinels is guided randomness. I like this as it is a fun challenge to come up with a concept that fits the mechanics. In fact, check out this totally random Sentinels character generator – I love making a completely random character and then spinning a story that makes it all make sense!

My character’s normal identity is Hugh Sullivan Marston. Hugh was in the Royal Australian Navy and become an Australian Defence Force Investigative Service officer. He was shot and tossed off a sea cliff by Spite in the midst of an investigation, washed up in a sea cave, and found an ancient dead aboriginal shaman with a magical spear that gave him the power of the Yowie! 

He then left the Navy and joined the family business to live a carefree Magnum P.I. style life.

Although since he’s Australian maybe it’s more of a Quigley Down Under kind of thing. I’m feeling it out with the help of various Australian slang dictionaries.

The Yowie is an Australian bigfoot type of creature. I can grow really large, have a mystical spear, can control plants a little… All kinds of fun. And of course has investigation abilities to fall back on.

We’re running the game via Roll20 so our out of town compatriots can still play, so we have 5 players, at least for now! Stay tuned and follow along on our campaign page for session summaries (two are already posted)!

P.S. This new WordPress editor is trash, I have no idea why everyone feels compelled to make their editors worse over time.

Geek Movie Review: Iron Man 3

Iron Man 3 was an impressive movie, in my opinion possibly the best of the Iron Man franchise – and that’s high praise, because Iron Man is the best of Marvel superhero franchise films going. This picture sums up the movie.iron-man-3-tony-stark-robert-downey-jrAs we begin, Tony Stark is suffering from some kind of anxiety disorder stemming from the events of the Avengers movie.  Aliens, gods, destruction of Manhattan – he has retreated to his home and holed up, neurotically building Iron Man suit after Iron Man suit and having panic attacks. It’s a good riff off the Tony Stark of the comics, who would have drunk himself into a coma – I guess they decided that wasn’t good for the kids or something but this works.

A terrorist called The Mandarin, who looks all bristly and ringed and scary, not green and quite so Yellow Peril-y as in the comics but threatening as he releases his oddly paternal press releases upon commission of various bombings and other acts of terror.

As you already know from the trailers, Stark tries to stay out of that for a while, then gives the Mandarin some stick, and gets his house blown up good with him and Pepper in it.  And thus it begins!

The movie is a lot more about Stark’s journey than about Iron Man, so it gets to leverage Robert Downy Jr’s acting skills heavily – one of its key advantages over the otherwise puddin’-faced  Marvel lead actors (Captain America and Thor, I’m looking at you). There’s a great set of scenes where Stark is interacting with a precocious 10 year old kid, and it’s hilarious because he doesn’t know how to talk to a kid so he just treats him like Tony treats an adult. Like after he shares his little moppet story about his dad leaving, Stark replies, “Dads leave. No need to be such a pussy about it.”

I was wondering how they were going to avoid “jumping the shark” with the introduction of the Mandarin. Sure, the overall Marvel universe has every kind of weirdness in it, but they rightly try to usually keep it down to 1 or 2 even in a given comic, and Joe Sixpack is going to bail out if the Marvel movies ladle it on too thick.  I’m not going to spoil the big plot twist here, but I absolutely love and approve of what they did with the Mandarin in this movie. I will note that Ben Kingsley is unexpectedly hilarious.

They kept Tony out of the armor for a lot of the time, and that worked very well. There was one armor-holocaust fight scene, and that was nice, but they made a much stronger movie by not just “amping it up” for a third movie.  In fact, I’m even more impressed as I wonder how they got that to fly at all.  I can imagine the discussion with the Hollywood exec.  “Iron Man 3!  So we’re going to have like 4 story tall Iron Man right? And bigger explosions, we upped the effects budget by 250%!” “Uh, no, we were thinking Tony would be out of the armor and dealing with psychological stuff and talking to kids and stuff.”  The level of blackmail and extortion that must be required to make an actual good movie as the third in a blockbuster series is dizzying.

Anyway, we get to see A.I.M. in action (no MODOK, sadly) and their creation of Extremis, a bio-nanotech superjuice that isn’t all that unrealistic really. They don’t wear the cute little yellow suits though.

AIMI’m not saying any of the main actors should get an Oscar, but for a blockbuster/superhero movie, Iron Man 3 is remarkably well written, directed, and acted.  I give it 4 out of 5 M.O.D.O.K.s.

Redeemers Campaign Summaries Posted

I finally got around to posting all the summaries and my commentary on my Mutants & Masterminds 1e campaign set in Freedom City, The Redeemers.  It went 8 sessions and collapsed.  Why?  You’ll just have to go read about it!