If you’ve run any of the published adventures, I would love a review of them! What would you rate them out of ten? What’s strong in it? Any part that didn’t work out well and needs some more planning on the DM side?
I’m also wondering how the adventure from the starter prerelease set hold up. Are they “out of date”, or still great to run/model other adventures on?
Thanks all!
Go over here:
That thread goes through everything except the 2.0 Starter Kit adventures, which just shipped last week. Knowing FrivYeti, he’ll probably get to them eventually - maybe after he’s done with his History of Venture Comics project.
Thanks, Rich!
Although I should note that I haven’t actually run any of those adventures! The games that I’ve run have been house games for people who didn’t know much about the Sentinel Comics setting and wanted to play their own characters, and I haven’t been able to run much of anything in the past couple years.
I would be curious for reviews from folks who have tried the games out in real play, because it’s not always obvious which games are easily adjustable on the fly and which aren’t.
Didn’t some of the commenters on the thread actually run a few of them? I thought there were a few.
The only one I’ve run was Terrorforms as a demo game at a store, which I basically tweaked all to blazes. Rewrote the villain motivations to make some sense (I took the thread idea about Necrosis semi-zombifying his allies so they’d play along and played up his horror aspect a lot), made a bunch of alterations so the later scenes were less swingy, and used custom pregen heroes to fit the scenario better (not that GTG gave us any in the module anyway). Even at that I’d rate it at best a 4/10 or so. The Witherform concept and the Revokers themselves are kind of cool, but with three unavoidable mechanically complex action scenes it’s not going to fit most folks’ idea of a one-shot single-session game unless there’s massive swing in the heroes’ favor, and that just makes the later fights anticlimactic. Only reason I used it at the store was because the group looking for a demo was willing to commit to two four-hour sessions with a meal break, and even streamlining some of it I still used almost seven hours. Some of that’s on me though, I stuck in a social scene so the players could get a better grasp on who the villains were and what they were like normally so the Necrosis-zombie thing was more apparent.
Honestly, I’m not a big fan of most of the published adventures. The Starter Kit is by far the best, although the issue from Tome of the Bizarre is not so great. But all the others, I’ve either tried and immediately ran into major weaknesses, or have glaring problems right on the face of them. They almost all have pacing issues, and several of them railroad players onto a path that isn’t necessarily the most obvious thing they would think to do.
Besides, the game works better as a collaborative storytelling experience. Published adventures are hard to fit into that model.
Can’t argue with that, especially with supers games where there are so many things to try to account for. Pregens can help with that, but I’m reasonably sure the vast majority of people want to play their own heroes, not ready-made ones.
Out of curiosity, have you tried the 2.0 Starter Kit stories yet? I’m wondering what changed and how it improved things, assuming it did so.
I have actually thought that rather than laying out a ‘traditional’ adventure module, a Sentinel Comics RPG published adventure might do better to format itself as:
OVERVIEW: What the villain is trying to accomplish, and how it will affect the world.
POSSIBLE AVENUES: Ways that the players can encounter the villain, and short branching discussions of where their investigations or battles are likely to take them, built as a tree with a couple of paragraphs for each scene.
MECHANICS: A writeup of the villains, lieutenants, minions, and a couple of environments that are likely to be involved depending on when things go down.
Essentially, set it up like a buffet, and the GM goes to it to develop scenes based on their own group.
I don’t think anyone has it in the wild, yet. Although I might have missed it!
Backers got it a couple of months ago, and it’s just popped up on the storefront this week. PDFs should be available soon.
I’ve heard a couple people obliquely discuss changes based on the backer release, but I haven’t seen a detailed review yet. It is on my to-do list once it’s possible, although as noted, History of Venture Comics eats a lot of my goof-off time.
Agreed overall, but having at least one and maybe two action scenes laid out in full would be good. They’re by far the most complex bit of prep you actually need (which still isn’t exactly onerous) and published modules are supposed to minimize prep. Not everyone’s good at improv scenes building with just a list of elements to work with, either. These things are meant to sell, and I think most customers would be pretty unhappy without at least a climactic set piece written up, with allowance for adjustments if things went well or poorly earlier in the session.
Also, include some challenges in that mechanics list. Having a stand-alone challenge as a proper scene element adds flavor, lets you define key ones as part of the player “win condition” (instead of just trouncing the villains), and for really tough ones feels more fair than “buying” them as a discount bundle deal through the environment.
Ditto. Been keeping an eye out but unless reviews or play reports popped on the discord or some other platform I don’t use (Facebook group?) I haven’t seen anything but a few cryptic comments.
This reminds me I ran my players through the Biomancer adventure included in the rulebook, and it felt very railroad-y.
It got them to a cool staredown atop a skyscraper in Dubai, though! Allowed me to reboot one of the player characters (at their request) and fit in more hints at another’s backstory. 
Yeah, it’s pretty linear. Maybe not a terrible thing in a core book starter adventure, but not the best way to grab people.
I’ve run both the core adventures as demos in the past, and I think the rock-off is actually better for the purpose if you shove in a social scene or two to establish a connection with Hellfyre before they get on stage. I usually put in a social where the bandmembers and PCs get to talk (and insult) each other a bit before the show starts, run the heroes’ performance, then a montage where the heroes Recover if they need to or Boost themselves if they can justify it, the Helfyre comes out and things turn into a Big Dumb Fight. Lets newbies experience all three scene types meaningfully and the story winds up feeling more like the start of a rivalry than just a brawl with musical accompaniment.
We just got a preview, though, right? 
I’m digging through my files, and I only have the preview, but I really might have just missed it. Been a long year… 
Going by this post here it was the whole thing, but (despite my fondness for the game) I won’t back crowdfunding efforts so I can’t personally vouch for that:
Also worth noting that “drkrash” over there ran the longest continuous campaign of the game I’m aware of from my polling around various places looking for actual play feedback.